Browsing in the Rag-and-Bone Shop
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn’t sex but death.
SUSAN SONTAG
ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON, some time ago, a friend dropped by to see me and said I looked horribly sick. I told her I felt horribly sick. As far as I could remember, I had only felt like this once before, after seeing a dog hit by a car. My friend asked me what had happened. I told her I had just finished reading Bret Easton Ellis’s book, American Psycho.
The circumstances leading to this book’s publication are well known. Ellis had published two novels, of which one at least, Less Than Zero, became a sizeable best-seller. The American publisher Simon & Schuster bought American Psycho for an advance of $300,000, typeset it and, at the eleventh hour (due, some say, to protests within the company by several of its editors), decided not to publish it. It was immediately picked up by Sonny Mehta of the Random House Group of Publishers, and included in the prestigious Vintage Contemporaries, a series that boasts, among many others, writers of the stature of Don DeLillo and Richard Ford. The National Organization of Women in America threatened to boycott all of Random House’s books—except those by feminist authors. As a prank, Spy magazine sent out sections of American Psycho to porn magazines such as Hustler and Penthouse, all of whom turned it down on the grounds that the scenes depicted were too violent. Canada Customs tried to prevent the book from crossing the border: fortunately, they were unsuccessful. I would march in the streets for Ellis’s right to have his book on the market. I would also march in the streets for my right to argue against its literary pretensions.
American Psycho follows the daily routine of one Patrick Bateman, New York businessman, young, rich and psychotic. For endless pages, Bateman sits and talks to his acquaintances (he has no friends) about brand names—of food, of clothes, of gadgets, of anything consumable—after which, without ever changing from Bateman to Mr. Hyde, he takes up murder. Though he also murders dogs, vagrants and children, Bateman’s victims are usually women, whom he slowly tortures and then dismembers and devours, in scenes written by Ellis in clumsy detail.
Of course, American Psycho is not an isolated example. Books of this kind exist—usually under the graphic label of “splatter punk” (in the axe-murder tradition) or “hardcore thrillers” (heirs of Mickey Spillane)—but most of the time they are presented to the public in lurid covers that make no attempt to conceal the sort of story they are offering.
The packaging of American Psycho is a curious affair. The cover of the first edition shows a photo from Vogue, the face of a Robert Redford lookalike. The epigraphs quote Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground) regarding the need to portray in fiction certain characters who “exist in our society,” Miss Manners on restraint (“If we followed every impulse, we’d be killing one another”), and the rock group Talking Heads (“And as things fell apart/ Nobody paid much attention”). The first line in the book is Dante’s motto for the gates of Hell: “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.” In fact everything is set up in such a way as to make the reader believe that the story that follows is indeed of a literary nature: contemporary and ironic (cover and Miss Manners quote), hip (Talking Heads), serious and philosophical (Dostoevsky and Dante).
The next 128 pages (the first brutal scene begins on page 129) are agonizing for anyone not accustomed to reading fashion advertising: “He’s wearing a linen suit by Canali Milano, a cotton shirt by Ike Behar, a silk tie by Bill Blass and cap-toed leather lace-ups from Brooks Brothers. I’m wearing a lightweight linen suit with pleated trousers, a cotton shirt, a dotted silk tie, all by Valentino Couture, and perforated cap-toe leather shoes by Allen-Edmonds.” This might be meant to read as social satire; it cannot be read as such because Ellis’s prose does nothing except copy the model it is supposed to denounce. It is not writing; it is a stringing together of words for the purpose of compiling a catalogue.
When the gruesome scenes do occur, Ellis uses the brand-name-dropping to remind the reader that the “satiric mode” has not been abandoned. The stomach of a slaughtered woman is compared to “the eggplant and goat cheese lasagna at II Marlibro”; the screams of a tortured woman are drowned in a Ralph Lauren camel-hair coat; the horrors are filmed with a “Sony palm-sized Handycam.” Women, the main target of Bateman’s frenzies, are treated much like the brand-name goods that make up his life and his language. But the point is lost in the grotesquerie of the accounts and in Ellis’s awkward, flat prose. I cannot conceive how anyone is able to call this sort of writing “witty,” although that is how the publishers’ catalogue describes it. “American Psycho” reads the blurb, “is an explosive novel which brilliantly exposes American culture today in a witty but dangerously alarming way” “Alarming”? Indeed, but this quality comes not from the writing but from the fact that publishers of literary works have chosen to include a sampling of violent pornography in their lists and dressed it up as literature. Because, in however many ways I have tried to read this book, the feebleness of its style, its meagre vocabulary, and the poor craft with which the author constructs both dialogue and description disallow any approach except that of a pornographer. By this I mean that unless you, as a reader, are titillated by the scenes of violence in this book, the only other reaction you can expect is horror: not intellectual terror that would compel you to question the universe, but a merely physical horror—a revulsion not of the senses but of the gut, like that produced by shoving one’s fingers down one’s throat. Ann Radcliffe, author of one of the earliest Gothic novels, cleverly distinguished between terror, which dilates the soul and excites an intense activity in all our senses, and horror, which contracts them, freezes them, somehow destroys them. American Psycho is a novel of pornographic horror.
Of course, the literatures of terror and horror are as old as our imagination. We, as a species, don’t want contentment, we shy from appeasement, we are less interested in the bud than in the worm. Death and the suffering unto death are among our most treasured readings since the first babblings of literature. It is as if, confident in the magical powers of the word, we have always expected a writer to bring to life on the page our worst nightmares, to be the geographer of an undiscovered country, to allow us through rhyme and reason vicariously to experience that which we thought unthinkable. For centuries, the writer has been, like Virgil to Dante, a guide through the foulest corners of our human imagination.
In the Western world, this guiding took place at different times under different guises. Voyages to the underworld in the literature of Greece and Rome, illustrated with frightful portraits of Hell’s ghostly inhabitants; hagiography in the Middle Ages, full of detailed accounts of the tortures suffered by the martyred saints; tragedies in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, in which infanticide, cannibalism and rape are commonplace; the Gothic novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with its vampirism and necrophilia—there is no doubt that horror has been part of our literary tradition. But it wasn’t until 1773, with two essays published in London by J. and A. L. Aikin, that literary terror received academic recognition in its own right. “On the Pleasure derived from Objects of Terror” and “Enquiry into those kinds of Distress which excite agreeable sensations” sought to explain and affirm the proliferation of ruins, corpses, dark shadows and foul creatures that had invaded the fiction and poetry of Romantic Europe, but in fact lent aesthetic validity to all its illustrious predecessors. And about the same time a German, Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known as Novalis, made a bold discovery about the cruel appeal of terror: “It is startling,” he wrote, “that the veritable source of cruelty should be desire.” But desire for what?
Another contemporary, Donatien Alphonse Francois Marquis de Sade, provided a possible answer: desire to refuse civilization, to become a “child of nature,” to embrace the natural order. “Cruelty,” wrote Sade, “far from being a vice, is the earliest sentiment wrought in us by Nature; the infant breaks his rattle, bites his nurse’s teat, strangles his pet bird,
long before he has attained the age of reason.” A son of the French Revolution, Sade replaced the God of Abraham (“the idea of God is the only mistake I cannot forgive my fellow men”) not with the Goddess Reason but with Nature—another, more savage deity. Human passions are, for Sade, nothing but “the means employed by Nature to fulfil its designs.” Nature hurls us blindly in a vertiginous progress from birth to death, establishing an order in which we are but parts of an atrocious machine that ultimately destroys us; consequently, Sade’s monstrous sexual inventions appear as mechanical and unemotional devices, meticulously described less for titillation than for clinical instruction. Roland Barthes, in a controversial essay, denies that Sade is erotic because “eroticism can only be defined by a language that is perpetually allusive,” and suggests that this quest for the explicit natural order, even within the debauchery, dominates the entire Sadean oeuvre.
Sade’s protagonists seek the terrors of cruelty through a desire for natural order. Others, such as Poe, Kafka, the surrealists, sought disorder, taking things apart in the hope of revealing universal mysteries, like children dissecting a clockwork toy. Cruelty—for instance, the eye sliced with a razor in the archetypical surrealist film, Un Chien Andalou—is born from the voluptuous desire for anarchy.
These frameworks, these contexts, these notions that allow us to read depictions of horrific acts as illustrations of aesthetic or philosophical theories, are absent in Ellis’s book. In Sade, in Poe, in hundreds of other writers, there are sections which, read on their own (the equivalent of what, in school, we used to call “the dirty bits”) can be either titillating or revolting, or both, depending on our inclinations, but which as part of a whole acquire a different meaning. When Ovid’s Marsyas is flayed alive in the Metamorphoses, when Lucan’s witch in The Civil Wars bites the tongue of the corpse she has been kissing, when Lady Macbeth speaks of plucking her nipple from her baby’s boneless gums and dashing its brains out, when Kafka’s prisoner in “The Penal Colony” is slowly tortured to death by a needle that engraves on his body the unuttered nature of his crime, when Winston in Orwell’s 1984 is threatened with rats that will attack his eyes and shouts, “Do it to Julia! Tear her face off, strip her to the bones!” when Dr. Noyes rapes his daughter-in-law with a unicorn’s horn in Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage—even though it may be possible for a reader to find pornography in the description by ignoring the context, that context does exist: it colours the violence, gives it meaning, allows for redemption, helps understanding. Violence, and the glimpse it gives us of Hell, is the starting point Yeats perhaps had in mind when he wrote in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” his poem on the sources of inspiration:
I must lie down where all the ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
The rag-and-bone shop is a reality, and different writers have visited it with more or less talent. Many fail, but lack of talent is not a criminal offence and badly written books will always be with us to test our charity. As regards publishers and false advertising, the peddling of one book under the cover of another is nothing but an ethical crime, and it is for such occasions that we are lumbered with a conscience. It is we, the readers, who have the final responsibility. The most astounding aspect of language is its versatility: it can be babble, it can be invective, it can be prayer, it can be joke, it can be fable. It can be revelation and exalt us, or it can be pornography and immure us. And it can’t hurt to remember that every time we choose a book for bedtime, we’re also picking our way through intimations of Heaven and promises of Hell.
V
WORDPLAY
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can
make words mean so many different things”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty,
“which is to be master—that’s all.”
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter VI
The Blind Photographer
“Can you keep from crying by considering things?” she asked.
“That’s the way it’s done,” the Queen said with great decision: “nobody can do two things at once, you know.”
Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter V
IN SEPTEMBER OF 1963, Seix-Barral in Barcelona published a short novel, La ciudad y los perros (translated into English as The Time of the Hero), by a young, unknown Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa. The novel reached us in Buenos Aires before the end of term. My Spanish high-school teacher said privately that it was a masterpiece and publicly that it should never be taught to a class of panting adolescents: too much rebellious violence, too much sexual darkness, too much questioning of authority. There had been nothing like it in Spanish-language fiction before. A fierce indictment of Peru’s military system, incandescent with rage against the hypocrisy of the established order as mirrored in Lima’s most prestigious military academy (which the author had attended), it was also the chronicle of an adolescent rite of passage into the ranks of the commanding patriarchy. The book so incensed the authorities that, in the tradition of the city’s founding fathers, they ordered an auto-da-fé and had dozens of copies burned in the academy’s courtyard. At the beginning of what was to be called, by clever cultural advertisers, the “boom” of Latin-American literature, The Time of the Hero was quickly recognized as a modern classic, a novel that managed to voice, in superb prose, a contagious protest while at the same time remaining wisely ambiguous, both in style and structure, through the shifting voices of its characters and the author’s refusal to give the story over to the thriller genre, which it seemed to be courting.
Until then, the so-called “novel of protest” in the literatures of Latin America had held Zola as its model. Under the large shadow of the author of La Terre and Germinal, the Ecuadoran Jorge Icaza had written Huasipungo, the Peruvian Ciro Alegría, El mundo es ancho y ajeno—novels concerned with the plight of the exploited Indians, but novels whose craft, unfortunately, wasn’t matched by their unquestionably humane intentions. There were others, more successful, by the great Juan Rulfo in Mexico, by the great José María Arguedas in Peru, and through them we learned of the existence of people our European culture had taught us to deny, people whose history was restricted to stories of murderous hordes, savage customs and long-lost civilizations trampled to dust under the victorious hooves of the conquistadores. The copper faces we passed every day on the street, which became more numerous the further we travelled from the capital, were invisible until, page after page, literature reminded us of their presence.
Vargas Llosa didn’t follow the blood and thunder of Zola and Zola’s disciples, but rather chose Flaubert as his guide. For Vargas Llosa, Flaubert (on whom he later wrote a splendid essay, The Perpetual Orgy) initiated the modern novel by establishing an “objective” narrator at the cost of remaining invisible, a narrator who, because he refused to preach, gave the illusion of telling a story that was true. Zola’s literature seemed, to Vargas Llosa, uncomfortably close to journalism. Flaubert instead proposed the creation of a fictional reality whose facts every reader could experience and from whose fabrications every reader might learn the truth. Vargas Llosa asked, years later, in 1989:
What is the difference between fiction and a newspaper article or a history book? Are they not all composed of words? Do they not imprison within the artificial time of the tale the boundless torrent that is real time? My answer is that they are opposing systems for approximating reality. While the novel rebels and transgresses life, those other genres can only be its slave.
Reading The Time of the Hero at the time of its first publication, we had no image of the author except as the eloquent, accusing narrator. He remained, as Flaubert had proposed, invisible; we felt utterly convinced that he spoke the truth, and that his fiction was staunchly objective. Throughout his following novels—The Green House, Conversation in “The Cathedral”—for which we waited with greedy expectation, the question of who this “Vargas Llosa” was kept teasing us. Then, sometime in the eighties, I gr
adually became conscious of his political persona. I began reading his political pronouncements about Latin America and its attendant sorrows, in which he offered suggestions to explain or mend society’s ways, pronouncements that led up to his campaign for the presidency of Peru in 1990. And I was struck by the opposition between the views in his fiction and his views in the press—as if, like a sightless photographer, he were blind to the human reality that his lens had so powerfully captured.
I came to the conclusion that there are two Vargas Llosas. The first is the great novelist, the storyteller, the man so sensitive to the Other that he can recreate stories out of the Other’s own experience, translating reality into fiction through a common (or commonly imagined) experience. “To create is to hold a dialogue, to write is to have always in mind the ‘hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère’ that Baudelaire speaks of. Adam and Robinson Crusoe could not have been poets, narrators,” wrote this first Vargas Llosa. The second Vargas Llosa is, however, incapable of dialogue, because he is as blind as Crusoe to the Other, cannot imagine him except as a caricature of everything Vargas Llosa does not want to be. He rejects feminist and indigenist arguments because they are “politically correct,” which is like rejecting “Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt not steal” because they are Judeo-Christian. Like Dickens’ Mr. Podsnap, this second Vargas Llosa wants to clear the world of “disagreeables” who can be swept away “with a flourish of the arm, and a flush of the face.” Mr. Podsnap’s “Not English!” is translated for this second Vargas Llosa into “Not white! Not Western! Not modern!”
Into the Looking-Glass Wood Page 9
