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Repetition and the Ethicsof Suspended Reading inAmerican PsychoC. Namwali Serpell Ph.D. aa Harvard University , Cambridge , MassachusettsPublished online: 08 Jul 2010.

To cite this article: C. Namwali Serpell Ph.D. (2010) Repetition and the Ethics ofSuspended Reading in American Psycho , Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction,51:1, 47-73, DOI: 10.1080/00111610903249864

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Critique, 51:4773, 2010

Copyright Heldref Publications

ISSN: 0011-1619 print/1939-9138 online

DOI: 10.1080/00111610903249864

Repetition and the Ethics of Suspended

Reading in American Psycho

C. NAMWALI SERPELL

ABSTRACT: American Psychos alternating rhythms of repetition incite intense

uncertainty, emptying its violence of meaning and culpability while compelling

nameless dread and desire. We read in suspense of epistemologically and

ethically suspended horror and thus, confront violence qua violence, unmitigated

and inexplicable. Reading this stark fiction reads us; it affords ethical self-

reflection in the play of dreadful desire for a flat, vivid violence that only signifies

as we each activate it.

Keywords: American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis, ethics of reading, stark fiction,

repetition

I Am Simply Not There: Uncertainty and Ethics

It has become almost impossible to discuss Bret Easton Elliss American

Psycho without first describing the melodramatic circumstances of its publi-

cation in March 1991. Noting first that the recirculation of this extra-textual

anecdote reiterates the ineluctable repetition of all things American Psycho, I

hereby (re)capitulate. The history is as follows: Simon and Schuster accepted

Elliss manuscript, gave him advance compensation, advertised the forthcoming

book, and provided a press packet for a publicity tour. But when excerpts from

prepublication proofs were published in Time and Spy magazines, the publisher

at Simon and Schuster withdrew the offer of publication. Random House quickly

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stepped in to buy the publishing rights and published the novel the following

year (Freccero 48).

Many of the early reactions to the novelranging from a bemused but

essentially conservative assessment by Norman Mailer to Roger Rosenblatts

New York Times review, hyperbolically titled Snuff this book!were from

outside academia. A contingent of cultural politicians were also quick to protest.

The Los Angeles Chapter of the National Organization of Women called for

a boycott of Random House and the novel; they also created a hotline with

a recording of a womans voice reading one of the more violent passages

of rape and murder in American Psycho. The New Republic opined quietly

that the hotline phone number was sure to fall into the wrong lonely hands

(Notebook 9).

It would be fair to say that the initial response to the novel sought to establish

that Patrick Bateman was a horrifying and malevolent human being, the embod-

iment of evil in its most unfathomable and debased form. The recent critical

response to the novel has countered that Patrick Bateman qua yuppie serial

killer does not exist. The Guardian Weekly online dryly describes this point

as the interesting critical proposition that the antihero doesnt actually rape

and mutilate, he merely thinks about it (Bret). Nevertheless, the uncertainty

about the reality of Patricks violence has become the chief critical debate on

American Psycho, and it serves as a convenient introduction to the entanglement

of epistemology and ethics in the novel.

On one hand, during the course of the novel, Patrick describes (in a con-

fessional mode to which he draws attention) the horrific and unjustified mur-

ders of countless victims, including homeless men, dogs, prostitutes, an ex-

girlfriend, and a work colleague named Paul Owen. The particularly gruesome

and garish acts of violence are reserved for Patricks female victims, and the

violence inflicted on them is specifically misogynistic and sexualized. It is

problematic to say that Patrick rapes them, partly because he often seduces

them into consensual or transactional sexual acts before attacking them, but also

because the sexual violence he later commits with their sometimes unconscious,

sometimes dismembered bodies is so extreme that the word rape would be a

gross understatement, if not an outright misnomer. These blatantly misogynistic

acts and their anatomically detailed descriptions naturally prompt scholars and

reviewers to assess Batemans moral character and judge him accordingly.

On the other hand, even early accounts of the novel noted inconsistencies,

discrepancies, and hitches in the narration; these create the slightest of gaps

between Ellis and his narrator Batemanenough of a gap to allow terms like

unreliability, satire, and allegory into the discussion.1 To treat the novel in this

manner necessitates rendering the violence in the novel as fictional as possible

to the end of emphasizing its rhetorical and satirical function over its signifying

and promotional one. Critics achieved this, not only by contextualizing Elliss

violent language within a literary canon including Dante, Sade, and postmodern

48 CRITIQUE

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writers and theorists, but also by arguing that Batemans murders are in fact

imagined and therefore doubly fictional. The notion that the novel might be a

long, increasingly insane rant, a malign chimera conjured by the disturbed mind

of Patrick Bateman (Storey 58) was the first step toward rehabilitating the novel

from its shrill decriers. If Batemans murders are simply hallucinationslike the

ATM machine that seems to talk to him or the park bench that appears to follow

him for blocksthen we can reassess the perhaps reactionary ethical judgments

pronounced on the character and the book. There have thus been several critical

interpretations that offer an insanity plea in Patricks defense; that his murders

are not real explains why he is never caught, why his confession has meant

nothing (American Psycho 377).

The possibility that his murders might not be real was compounded by the

critical epiphany that Patrick Bateman is a construct existing in a fictional

world, a fact that Ellis calls attention to in several ways. The first of these is the

epigraph he takes from Dostoevskys Notes from the Underground: Both the

author of these Notes and the Notes themselves are, of course, fictional (qtd. in

American Psycho 1). Batemans name and his life are also intertextual: his name

derives from Hitchcocks Norman Bates (Shaw 194); he appears in one earlier

and two subsequent Ellis novels;2 characters from Tom Wolfes The Bonfire of

the Vanities, Jay McInerneys Story of My Life, Tama Janowitzs Slaves of New

York, and Oliver Stones Wall Street make appearances in the novel (James 229;

Irmer 353).3 He models his speech on pre-existing discourses including the

language of fashion, business, music reviews, and stories about serial killers.

He models his behavior on visual simulacra like pornography, snuff films, and

magazines. His apartment, were it to exist, would be in the Impressionist gallery

of the Met (Sutherland 140).

The late Elizabeth Young, whose early work on American Psycho served

as a starting point for future critics, concluded, Patrick is a cipher; a sign

in language and it is in language that he disintegrates, slips out of our grasp.

[: : : ] He is a textual impossibility, written out, elided until there is no Patrick

other than the sign or signifier that sets in motion the process that must destroy

him and thus at the end the book must go back to its beginnings and start

again (Young 119). Subsequent critics have essentially repeated Youngs acute

analysis while attempting to parse out the consequences of such a claim. The

conclusion they have reached is that Patrick is a collocation of discourses of

masculinity, fictionality, and consumerism. In Mark Storeys exemplary analysis,

The narrative is life through the prism of Patrick Batemans psyche, but closer

inspection reveals his psyche is nonexistent. Instead, Ellis gives us a central

identity created by external forces, a fictional world encased in the language

of the society that created it and told through the voice of a man who in real

terms is not actually there (58). The implication is that as the product of

external forcesa nonexistent subjecthe is devoid of agency and thus cannot

really be evil; as such, we ought to equivocate or at least re-evaluate our ethical

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criteria in judging him. Somehow, in the rebuttal of the ethical argument against

Patrick Bateman, critics have moved from pleading his insanity to pleading his

nonexistence. We are left with two strange argumentative poles: Patrick is evil

versus Patrick doesnt exist.

As is often true in academic debates, these two absurd and absolutist argu-

ments do not actually function on the same level. Nor do they actually counter

each other, despite the fact that the first assumes what the second refutesthat

is, Patricks existence. That Patrick is evil does not make him more real; that he

is not real does not make him less evil. Nonexistence is a centuries-old definition

of evil: As nothing Patrick is dangerous (Young 119).

But the fact remains that these two arguments, despite the seeming contradic-

tion in their premises, are actually both accurate. They are also both obvious.

Consider the following passage from the novel:

: : : there is an idea of Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but thereis no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hidemy cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yoursand maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: Isimply am not there. It is hard for me to make sense on any given level.My self is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being.My personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and ispersistent. My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago(probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist. (37677; italics in original)

This oft-quoted passage is often the fulcrum around which the Patrick does not

exist argument turns, although most scholars elide everything after the italicized

paradox, which ostensibly proves their point emphatically and succinctly. The

grammatically uncertain I simply am not there is meant, like Odysseuss I

am Nohbdy, to be a conundrum (Patrick is a cipher). At the most basic level,

the slogan I simply am not there is an ontological impossibility: a speaking

I necessarily is somewhere.

But the passage is not merely a metafictional meditation on the boundaries

of existence; it also reads as a kind of existential moral analysis. When Patrick

says, [m]y personality is sketchy and unformed, my heartlessness goes deep and

is persistent, how are we to reconcile the notion of an amorphous personality

with a deep and persistent heartlessness? While it implies absence (the lack of

a heart), to be described as heartless is to be accused of being something,

specifically of being something bad. Is Patrick aberrant (an ontological error) or

is he abhorrent? The homonym, as will be demonstrated, is fitting; it suggests

two different levels on which Patrick might not make sensethe ontological

and the ethical. When representation is construed as advocacy, and figuration

is construed as performativity (Freccero 50), uncertainty about the existence of

Patrick and his actions is more than just a puzzle for epistemological inquiry;

its also a problem for ethical deliberation.

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Two casual phrases in this passage belie the idea that Patrick doesnt exist,

even as they undermine the portentous philosophizing going on: maybe you

can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable and (probably at Har-

vard). They are both quintessentially Batemanian references: flavored with his

rhetorical tendency towards parenthetical ambivalence (probably), phrased in

deadpan allusive consumer-speak, and prominently out of place in Elliss pseudo-

existentialist discourse, for which some critics have expressed distaste. While the

passage above may seem like a significant momenta revelationtwo phrases

in it are familiar symptoms of Patricks incessant preoccupation with his upper-

class lifestyle. The tone shifts when Bateman drops these typically tedious tidbits

into the narrative and Elliss satire gains traction in the contrast with the weighty

and literary concepts at hand.

Though recent critics are attuned to the way in which Elliss parodic tone and

subversive ironies undermine the serious tone of ethical responses to the novel,

they ignore the same qualities in those passages, like this one, that they use to

support their own arguments for Patricks insubstantiality. Ellis undermines the

idea that Patrick does not exist in exactly the same fashion that he complicates

the idea that Patricks violence is real and evil: with disconcertingly deadpan

humor. These two probable phrases also slyly reinforce the contradictions

at work in the passage. In the first instance, for example, the you to whom

Patricks confession is directed, if it is the reader, can compare lifestyles with

him; this simply highlights the fact that the reader cannot actually feel the flesh

of his hand.

Like Jamess ghosts in The Turn of the Screw, Bateman both does and does not

exist, a paradox that is perhaps only possible to enact in the reading of literature,

in the conjuring of character. Given this by no means sole literary precedent and

at least a centurys worth of critical attunement to unreliable narration, the irre-

sponsibility and futility of censorship, and the (post)modernist assertion of the

instability of the self, it is puzzling that there is a debate about Patricks existence

at all. Why were there readers who believed in Batemans existence enough

who experienced the accounts of the murders he commits as real enoughto

condemn Elliss book outright? Why did it take critics so long to realize that

the discrepancies in the music review chapters of the novel were not Elliss

mistakes but tiny signs pointing together at a large flashing sign reading SLOW.

UNRELIABLE NARRATOR AT WORK (Udovitch qtd. in Young 107)?

On the other hand, why didnt Elliss defenders stop at the author is ob-

viously a satirist? Or even, for that matter, at the protagonist is obviously

delusional? Why go so far as to defend Patrick Bateman into nonexistence? The

frequency and the rapidity with which Batemans unreliability gets transmuted

into a disappearing act, which then allows the subsequent exculpation, erasure,

or aestheticization of his violence, is almost eerie. For example, consider

Julian Murphets description of Paul Owens murder: Bateman is not so much

murdering him, as he is getting good syntactical mileage out of Owens highly

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imaginative, attentive destruction (45). Is Bateman getting syntactical mileage

or is Ellis?4 It is one thing to emphasize that Bateman is a fictional character;

it is another to claim that his murders are a matter of syntax.

There are manifest difficulties in making the argument for Batemans nonex-

istence hold. We find a symptomatic problem with Patricks agency: it becomes

difficult to talk sensibly about a nonexistent subject, especially when the text is

written from his perspective and in his voice. Critic Mark Storey tries to turn

this to the advantage of the argument, noting that the first-person present-tense

narration of violent actions is a literal impossibility (60).5 But Storey also has

to catch himself in the middle of his analysis of Bateman as a representation

of normative masculinity: In an essay that argues against the reification of

Bateman and sees him instead as a discursive formation, the argument must

rely on the mimetic language it is trying to repudiate (63). What eventually

results in the critical discourse is a kind of blank space, limned by the competing

discourses of whatever the critic has decided Bateman represents: consumerism,

banality, an all-pervasive postmodern dread. And yet this blank space acts. No

matter how nonexistent Bateman becomes, he nevertheless still retrospectively

signifies as a murderer, a killer, an evildoer, even in the critical accounts that

dismiss him as merely textual, discursive, and hyperreal.

The critical fuzziness about Patricks agency is crucial because what is at

stake in the debate is his capacity to affect others both within and outside the

novel. The general consensus is that he is disturbed rather than evilthe passive

recipient of psychic injury (usually postulated as family or social trauma)and

thus harmless. His lack of agency, translated as a lack of selfhood, makes him

not only incapable of hurting other characters but also incapable of harming the

reader. We are given the space and the privilege to distance ourselves from him,

to judge his actions as insane without being contaminated by him. If, on the

other hand, Patrick does kill people, even if he is compelled by the same kind of

psychic injury that might make him merely hallucinate about killing people, he

somehow also possesses the capacity to influence, to infiltrate the mind of the

reader. The logic behind these arguments is one of contagion: evil is infectious

only when it is enacted.

The reality of Patricks actions thus becomes an index of their capacity to

be realized outside the novel as well. If there is no evil action in the novel,

no evil person in the novel, the novel cannot infect the reader. The childrens

platitude Sticks and stones may break my bones applies here. The logic of

the debate overlooks two self-evident facts: first, that evil actions within a novel

are still words, and second, that words have effects on readers, even when they

are merely fictional. It is possible that the effect of violent words, especially

as filtered through a particular authors vision, is neither to promulgate real

violence, nor merely to revel in syntactical mileage or rhetorical scandal.

By eliding the suspension of Patricks actions in a fictional space, the Patrick

is evil critics lend too much power to him and too little to the reader. By

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negating Patrick or textualizing him into a self-erasing game, critics who claim

that there is no Patrick undermine the capacity of the text to function beyond

the aesthetic. Carla Freccero is too quick to correlate the novels uncertainty

with pedagogical inefficacy: the novel demonstrates that there is no truth to be

found beneath appearances, and the accumulation of Batemans unsuccessful,

unnoticed, and ultimately deeply unsatisfying torture-murders that do not teach

himor the rest of usanything, proves this point (52). This leap relies

on an overly simplistic mimetic interpretation of the novel (Patricks lessons

are the readers lessons). That Patrick remains unchanged by his confession

doesnt imply that those who read it do. Only by examining the formal ethics

of the novel, the ways its aesthetic manipulations affect the reader, can we

do justice to the fact that Elliss novel exists, profoundly, even if his narrator

does not.

In a sense, the hyperbolic rejection of the novel due to its violence has made

Patrick Bateman larger than life, allowing him to wield greater power in our

world than he commands in his own indifferent social circles. Only these extreme

responses to the novel could compel critics to make claims, apparently unironic,

such as: The critical realization: there is no violence in American Psycho. To

be fair, nothing not violent occurs either (Brusseau 44). Common to both the

outraged reviewers and the defensive critics, in fact, is a lack of real engagement

with the violent sceneshyperfictional fantasies though they arethat Ellis

conjures. For critics thus far, the violence in the novel has either done nothing

or done too much.

In what follows, this essay asks: what does it actually do?

Murders and Acquisitions: Banality and the Pun

In turning to American Psychos aesthetic and narrative principles, it is neces-

sary to begin with a question: Is literary violence more or less dangerous when

it is banal?6 Take that most banal of literary devices, the pun:

Ask me a question, I tell her, feeling suddenly, well, spontaneous.She inhales on the cigarette, then blows out. So what do you do?What do you think I do? And frisky too.A model? She shrugs. An actor?No, I say. Flattering, but no.Well?Im into, oh, murders and executions mostly. It depends. I shrug.Do you like it? she asks, unfazed.Um : : : It depends. Why? I take a bite of sorbet.Well, most guys I know who work in mergers and acquisitions dont

really like it, she says.Thats not what I said, I say, adding a forced smile, finishing my J&B.

Oh, forget it. (20506)

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This characteristic scene presents in miniature several of the novels repeated

motifs: Patrick Bateman is handsome and well groomed; he fluctuates be-

tween social enthusiasm and apathy; he engages in blas conversations that

lead nowhere; he confesses his murderous crimes to no avail. And within this

miniature portrait, we locate an even more compact synecdoche, a horrific pun

(in both senses of the qualifier) that essentially defines the two halves of Patrick

Batemans existence.

As Murphet has pointed out, Elliss prose generally eschews simile, metaphor,

symbol and allegory, as though such devices were ill-suited to a generation

reared on television and the spoils of overconsumption; rather, everything is

immediate, particular, and denied any sense of connection with anything else.

[: : : E]ven the sentences tend towards separation and parataxis (13). American

Psycho, however, often presents what Ellis has called the ongoing juxtaposition

of absurd triviality and extreme violence in the small but loaded pun, a minor

device which suits his investment in clich and farce (qtd. in Hoban 36).

Elliss puns rely on the juxtaposition of alternate meanings in both homo-

phones and homonyms. Thus, there is repeated confusion between the epithet

bitch and a restaurant called Bice; Bateman orders a decapitated coffee, then

corrects himself, I mean : : : decaffeinated (372); thrice, someone tells Timothy

Price Price? [: : : ] Youre priceless, a compliment that takes on greater reso-

nance when he actually disappears (32; 41; 57); someone is described as a pt

animal (398); Bateman works for Pierce & Pierce, which is frequently mistaken

for a shoe store (P & P), but also cuts both ways as a murderers workplace; even

his name could be interpreted as Bait-man, a bait to the reader (Shaw 19495).

His cameo in Elliss subsequent novel, Glamorama, is essentially comprised of

two gloriously bad puns. Patrick claims that he likes to keep abreast and that

he has a coat of arms (Glamorama, 44); the gruesomely literal meaning of

the puns does not register with his duly impressed interlocutors.

Ellis almost always embeds his puns in dialogue and only Patrick and the

reader are privy to their double meanings. They thus serve as an index for

the consistent communicative chasm between characters (the void is actually

widening, says one character during an endless three-way phone call about

dinner reservations [320]). By rendering them in speech, Ellis also splits the puns

into their alternate meanings or iterations, as exemplified by the conversation

quoted above. This suggests that Ellis is more concerned with juxtaposition than

combinationwhile the pun generally merges two meanings in a single sound,

Ellis dissects it for us. Often, this takes the form of a transcription of two phrases

that would sound similar if spoken aloud (Luis is a despicable twit/Is it a

receptacle tip? (103); murders and executions/mergers and acquisitions).

Sometimes, as in the coat of arms sequence in Glamorama, Ellis simply

repeats the same words, emphasizing them to make the reader look twice and

pick up on the double meaning at play; the effect is to convey one meaning

in the first reading, and then another in the repetition. Puns therefore allow

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him to loop more repetition into conversation, but unlike the usual redundant

blather (the exactitude of his transcription of speech facilitates a repetition of

phrases that might not be noticed in live conversation), Elliss dissected puns

are often amusing, if banal.7 Because their humor is generated by an actively

marked difference within sameness (the difference in meaning within the same

sounds or words) the puns provide comic and perhaps even literary relief from

the otherwise unrelenting rhythm of repetition in American Psycho.

The difference between the two meanings within the pun maps the difference

between alternate realities: Bateman dabbles in both murders and executions and

mergers and acquisitions, or so he says. The MASS MURDERER sign on his

Halloween costume (splattered with a mix of real and fake blood) makes him

a walking pun, an embodied joke. His most complete and detailed confession,

left on the answering machine of Harold Carnes, is perceived as a hoax; this is

the result of a discursive world in which referentiality has been demolished and

violence can only be made to mean in terms of humor. Batemans colleagues

constantly interpret his literal descriptions of violent past deeds and present

desires as jokes, usually phallocentric and misogynist ones: We all know

about your lead pipe, Bateman [: : : ] Stop bragging (325).8 On the other hand,

characters often casually fling violent epithets at Bateman, not realizing how true

they are: Youre a madman, Bateman. An animal. A total animal (384). The

gap that Ellis makes explicit, the widening breach between the two meanings

within violent language, is symptomatic of meaning-making within the novel.

Nothing and no one in American Psycho connects; everything and everyone

function in parallel, including the text and the reader. None of the puns is

explained: they are merely split, repeated, and the reader is responsible for

discerning the different meanings involved.

This paradigm of juxtaposition through repetition rather than combination is

true also for the large-scale divide between the two major modes of discourse

in the novel: consumer culture and violence. The novel is essentially comprised

of alternating and repetitive descriptions of purchased objects and mutilated

bodies. That the same language and the same tone can be employed for both

naturally suggests their concordance; occasionally, they dovetail sonically and a

fortuitous (though often unfortunate) pun emerges. Puns seem both accidental

and overdetermined, both trivial and meaningful: we laugh at Patricks corny pun

on mergers and acquisitions, but we shiver to imagine a literal coat of arms.

The difference between these two responses demarcates the power of satire:

distilled in our double response is an awareness of how steeped prestige and

money are in military power (arms).

Elliss puns render violence textual, allegorical, purely referential. But the

fact that they contribute to his satire suggests the obverse, that language it-

self can be made aggressive. As in Sade, violence is made banal so that it

can function as critique: most of American Psycho is a mind-numbing ex-

ercise in satirized banality, whose latent violence it was the function of the

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violent scenes to allegorize (Murphet 67). Violence has to be made flat to

function effectively as a rhetorical device or as a mode of allegory; at the

same time, it has to be explicit and extreme in order that its full signifying

power be released. By using puns, which emphasize sound over meaning, El-

lis drains signifiers of their violent impact and distracts the reader with the

humor and satiric revelation of their double meaning. We roll our eyes as we

chuckle at the pun, or we look beyond it as we interpret its satire; in both

processes, we lose sight of the actual scene of violencethe dismemberment

or decapitationit invokes. In this sense, the banality of Elliss representation

of violence through puns is rhetorically effective in terms of the larger satire of

the novel.

But Ellis does not merely flatten violence through puns; he also makes it into

a purely surface phenomenon through repetition. This is a familiar technique

but a far riskier strategy. Elliss puns can be viewed as a small-scale example

of his use of repetition. As we have seen, the repetition of Elliss puns activates

the readerly discernment of the different meanings at play, prompting a rare

moment of interpretation whose pleasure outweighs the banality of the device.

The pun as Ellis uses it is easy on the reader: it makes its point, its redundancy

is short-lived, it allows a modicum of readerly agency, and it lifts the novel

out of its endless alternation of blandness and gore, connecting the two briefly,

reassuring us that there is satire at work here.

But when violence is made banal through large-scale repetition, through

seemingly endless reiterations of gruesome scenes, the flattening of violence

begins to veer dangerously close to taking aesthetic pleasure in it, or perhaps

worsenumbing oneself to it. For some critics, this is justifiable in the name of

the philosophical or allegorical stakes of the novel: Pound pound pound. Murder

after murder after murder. And slowly but surely the orthodox expectation of

original meaning wears away. This is the work of the book and this is why it takes

just short of four hundred pages to do it. Every page is necessary (Brusseau

44). But while the repetition of violence in the novel may be necessary, we cant

escape the ethical vortex and emotional exhaustion of having to read it and read

it again. Several reviews of the novel conceded this, acknowledging the novels

achievement while implicitly telling potential readers You dont have to read

it. I did it for you.

There is clearly ethical import to the satirical juxtaposition of repeated acts

of violence and consumerism in the content of American Psycho. But what is

the ethical significance of the experience of reading it? In other words, is our

engagement with its form, in particular its reliance on repetition, ethically useful

to or even ethically compatible with its content? Can the effects of repeating

violence undo or overcome the horror of the violence itself? This essay argues

that it is in fact neither the emphasis on violence nor the obliteration of violence

through repetition but precisely the uncertainty about violence produced by

narrative repetition, that is at stake in the ethics of American Psycho.

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Everyone Is Interchangeable Anyway: Repetition and Uncertainty

As critic Marco Abel notes, among the effects that the critical judgment of

American Psychos violence has had, one of the most remarkable was to have

established the conditions of possibility for future responses to Elliss American

Psycho (141). Not only does the novel set up the parameters of the critical

response by using the language of mutual exclusion, but the development of

an antagonistic debate also leads to a taking of sides, which in turn leads

to repetition of the central arguments. In a further irony, the most repeated

condemnation of the novel is that it is mindlessly repetitive.

Repetition is not only the result of the argumentative split in the criticism: it

is also the cause of it. Repetition heightens the uncertainty produced by mutual

exclusion and the intensity of the dichotomy at work. It is repetition that makes

Patrick both real (evil) and fictional (nonexistent). Repeated habits (exercise

performed, fittingly in reps; watching The Patty Winters Show), repeated loca-

tions (the gym; the video store; restaurants), repeated actions (shopping; eating;

murder), repeated verbal tics (probably, I have to return some video tapes) all

beg the question: Who is repeating?, implying a self who is consistent through

narrative time. Our immersion in his mind-numbingly consistent drivel makes

Patrick seem human, despite his protestations to the contrary. It is precisely

Patricks citational quality (he is easy to imitate, his lines are memorable,

his trappings and actions predictable) that makes him seem so real. When he

describes himself as a noncontingent human being, the implication is that he

is unchangeable, resistant to the vicissitudes of life and of other people.

Patricks consistency accords with the regularity of the textit has been

accurately described as a perversely unified text (Murphet 24), and this is

attributable primarily to its use of repetition. First, the novel is structurally

repetitive: each chapter describes a scene, each scene has at least one corollary

scene, so that apart from one exception, no scene in the novel is singular. There

are various leitmotifs, some of which take place in every chapter: what was on

The Patty Winters Show that day; a reference to Les Misrables; what Patrick is

wearing that day. Others occur only intermittently, such as the three phrases Did

you know that cavemen got more fiber than we do?; life is a mystery, everyone

must stand alone; and Im filled with a nameless dread. There are also, as

I mentioned, frequent local repetitions within the dialogue. When his girlfriend

Evelyn subjects him to a monologue, Bateman says, her dialogue overlaps her

own dialogue; his reply to a plaintive Im hungry from a homeless man is

I know that, I know that [: : : : ] Jeez, youre like a broken record (123, 130).

In both cases, Ellis reinforces the redundancy being described by including

repetition in Batemans own language. These specific repeated phrases are small

waves in an otherwise flat sea of language, the repetitiousness of which is more

a matter of tone, syntax, and subject matter than exact diction.

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None of these forms of repetition in isolation is particularly innovative or

surprising in a work of literaturethey utilize the emphatic, pattern-making, and

rhythmic power of repetition as a form of rhetoric. On the other hand, repetition

is also the major mode via which Ellis undermines the reality of Batemans

existence and reinforces the discursivity and simulation of his world. Key to this

double effect of repetition is Elliss dexterous manipulation and juxtaposition of

various kinds of repetitions. One of the effects of the repetitions of consumer

culture in the novel is to render objects less real, despite what would seem

like an overinvestment in materiality. While the novel is filled with endless

lists of things, the use of brands and fashion designers and restaurant names

undermines the readers capacity to see any of them: the proper nouns, thrice

removed from the actual people they name, signify in terms of sound, rhythm,

and (if youre in the know) reputation, but not in any concrete waythe surface

of things is meant to be visual, but it is also strangely textual. In the same way,

the leitmotifs and refrains listed above all essentially lack content, a vacuation

of signification that is enacted through their repetition. The namelessness of

the dread Patrick repeatedly feels makes it as empty as the allusions to Les

Misrables, which make no reference to its actual story: we only read about

bills advertising the musical, someone humming an unnamed, undescribed tune

from it, and so on.

The repetition of people also undermines the stability of identity and leads us

to ethical questions of selfhood and otherness. Most of the chapters describing

Batemans murders are generically entitled Girls, and the interchangeability

of the women Bateman dates and kills has even led critics to mislabel them.9

The male characters too, are virtually indistinguishable: the descriptions of

their jobs, ages, clothing, tans, girlfriends, misogyny, racism, and cruelty to

the homeless are interchangeable. There are even hints that Patrick isnt the

only American psycho: he sees a Wall Street Guy writing Kill All Yuppies

above a urinal with a Mont Blanc pen (374); in the video store, he bumps

into a man holding Friday the 13th: Part 7 and a documentary on abortions

(112); Detective Kimball tells him about a young stockbroker [: : : ] recently

arrested and charged with murdering a young Chicano girl and performing

voodoo rituals with, well, various body parts (275). Because he is so painfully

generic, Patrick himself is frequently mistaken for other people (an error he uses

to his advantage when he murders Paul Owen). As Patrick eventually concedes

in trying to convince himself to end up with his secretary, Jean, everyone is

interchangeable anyway (379).

Ellis manipulates pronouns in such a way as to heighten this destabilized

identity. In the first chapter, Ellis introduces his central character neither in

the first nor in the third person but in a doubly removed mode: a second-

person pronoun in a quotation. Timothy Price, whom we might assume to be

our hero given his dominance over the first scene, says, I mean the fact remains

that no one gives a shit about their work, everybody hates their job, I hate

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my job, youve told me you hate yours (3). This first introduction establishes

the uncertainty of Patricks existence. He is made textual, a mere example in

another characters sentence and we dont meet him as an I (Patricks first

self-reference is, fittingly, I shiver [8]) until the novels fifth page. Patricks

selfhood is compromised not just by this narratorial vacuity (which corresponds

to his shallowness), but also by making it hard to distinguish him from Timothy.

This is the first example of the novels manic doubling, which satirizes Wall

Street but interrogates the stability and discreteness of the self.

The initial intentional deception of the reader through pronouns (the chapter is

called April Fools) forms a narrative chiasmus with the later chapter (Chase,

Manhattan) in which Patrick begins to refer to himself in the third person

mid-sentence: the cab swerves into a Korean deli, next to a karaoke restaurant

called Lotus Blossom Ive been to with Japanese clients, the cab rolling over

fruit stands, smashing through a wall of glass, the body of a cashier thudding

across the hood, Patrick tries to put the cab in reverse but nothing happens, he

staggers out of the cab, leaning against it, a nerve-racking silence follows, nice

going, Bateman, he mutters (349). While it invokes the pronoun confusion of

a Gothic precursor text, Stevensons Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Schonberger 37

44), this moment signals not the confusion of the reader but the disintegration

of Patrick. His integrity, in the sense of self-wholeness rather than of whatever

dubious moral integrity he may have once possessed, has been compromised.

The fact that Patrick does the same things over and over might seem to make

him more real. Habit builds character, so to speak. But the inane repetition of

Patricks acts actually makes the things he does less significantthe repetition

of all events, even the murders, ensures that they take place in a vacuum, without

consequence, without notice, and crucially, without any kind of memorializing

effect: Im sweating, dj vu, but why? Have I met these elves somewhere?

Forget about it (184). The events all begin to feel like reiterations of past events,

and also as though they could take place in any order; in this sense, they are

like Baudrillards simulacra.10 The sheer number of murders that Patrick claims

to have committed renders them less probable: I leave a message, admitting

everything, leaving nothing out, thirty, forty, a hundred murders (352). That

Patricks confession is done over the phone, that it is recorded on an answering

machine, that it is perceived as a joke, all undermine its reality as testimony.

Ellis pushes this idea of reality as already second orderas a repetition with-

out an originalmuch further in Glamorama, in which, for example, competing

camera crews follow the protagonist, Victor Ward. American Psycho, however,

prefigures the use of filmic language to instill a sense of unreality. Bateman

often describes events by saying as in a movie and transitions between scenes

with terms like jump-cut or smash cut. Notably, this language often appears

in conjunction with moments of intense uncertainty both for Patrick and for the

reader. We see it when Timothy Price disappears down a tunnel at the nightclub

Tunnel early in the book; at the end of the chapter in which he encounters the

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other possible American Psycho at the video store; in the wildly improbably

chapter in which Patrick murders several people in public and gets chased by

the police; and, tellingly, in several scenes where his murders go unnoticed or

unpunished.

For example, when he returns to Paul Owens apartment, where he believes

he has committed multiple murders, the erasure of his crimes is figured this

way: Ive gone so far as to ask peopledates, business acquaintancesover

dinners, in the halls of Pierce & Pierce, if anyone has heard about two mutilated

prostitutes found in Paul Owens apartment. But like in some movie, no one

has heard anything, has any idea of what Im talking about (367). The real

estate agent who is showing the newly clean, apartment to prospective tenants

(either complicit with the silencing of Patricks crime or evidence that he never

committed it) gives him a look that is familiar and filmic: Ive seen this look on

someones face before. Was it in a club? A victims expression? Had it appeared

on a movie screen recently? (369)

The effect of this filmic language, along with Elliss repetitions, is to convey

a reality that is inseparable from simulacra. In an interview, he explains: I was

writing about a society in which the surface became the only thing. Everything

was surfacefood, clothesthat is what defined people. So I wrote a book

that is all surface action; no narrative, no characters to latch onto, flat, endlessly

repetitive (Ellis qtd. in Cohen). The idea that the prose is surface is embedded

in Batemans own words: surface, surface, surface, a Rolls is a Rolls is a

Rolls (342). The invocation of Stein suggests a literary heritage of repetition,

but the shift from the poetic object being reified (the rose) to an expensive car

named by its brand (the Rolls Royce) marks Elliss divergence from modernist

uses of repetition. Elliss phrase is self-referential in a way Steins is not: what

is reading American Psycho but to roll along the surface of his language? A

prominent refrain in Glamorama is we are sliding down the surface of things.

The impossibility of differentiating reality from surface, people from each other,

crime from fantasy in the novel is contagious. The reader becomes as lost in a

world of similitude as Patrick is; Ellis achieves this uncertainty through narrative

repetition.

Surfacing Violence in American Psycho

American Psycho resists attentive or discerning reading because it is boring

and because it is shocking. More than one critic has attempted to analyze the

aesthetics of boredom in the noveland it is apparently intentional, given that

Elliss other novels do not manifest the flat drone of Batemans Wall Street

monotonebut the critical accounts of the consequences or motive of narrative

tedium differ. Marco Abel accounts for the boredom induced by the novel with

an analysis of the tempo of repetition in the novel:

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Elliss American Psycho creates its affect-overload through a careful juxta-position of slowness and speed, of endless repetition of items and repetitivescenes of gore. Both repetitions, however, deploy the same clinical flatnessof tone, which suggests not only their affective affinities but also that affectis not so much a result of depth (the often-evoked narrative voice) butof speed differentials, of the accumulating processes of narrative structures,itinerations [sic] of events, and encounters with the flow of the narrativeat large. [: : : O]n the very surface level of the chapters titles, both themundane repetitiveness and the singularity of the novels events are markedto the effect that the reading of the book moves at times painfully slowly.Slowness is the novels dominant mode of speed. Consequently, the readingprocess is violently interrupted [: : : ] when [: : : ] the reader is confrontedwith the first scene of graphic violence. (14445)

Abels analysis of the alternation of repetitions and the reliance of the novel

on speed differentials is acute, but his claim that slowness is the novels

dominant mode of speed doesnt quite hold over the course of the whole novel.

While the storyline frequently moves slowly, the reading of the book is anything

but. It may feel as though we are slogging through the initial descriptions of

consumer culture, the first few lists of items, but the readerly training to which

Elliss repetitions subject us soon allows us to accelerate, to skim, and for less

conscientious readers, even to skip.11 The speed and ease of reading Elliss

prose differentiate him from his modernist precursors like Stein and Beckett.

They also make the first violent scene in the novel incredibly shocking; the

effect is sliding down the surface of things only to slam into an aesthetic and

ethical wall.

The reader must then negotiate between the decelerated pace of the violent

episodes, a voyeuristically slow reading into which the reader is lured via

pornographic segues, and the faster pace warranted by the redundant scenes

of consumerism. The repetition of the violent scenes dictates their structure: the

initial scenes are longer, the later scenes less pornographic and more violent.

Once weve been seduced into reading one violent scene, there is less investment

in luring the reader into reading others. Eventually, Batemans narration even

acknowledges this with redundant qualifications like As usual, in an attempt to

understand these girls Im filming their deaths or Later, predictably, shes tied

to the floor, naked, on her back (304; 327, my emphasis). The metanarration

increasingly built into the violent scenes bleeds them of their reality and renders

them representationalmore and more, Bateman does not take us through every

step of the violence committed, instead jump-cutting to the final tableau, the

still and bloody aftermath. In sequence, the violent scenes follow the funneling

trajectory we see in Sades 120 Days of Sodomthe violence is more intense,

more graphic, but it is also more concise and more abstract.12

Sades emphatic repetitiveness, his dogged rearrangement of bodies and in-

struments of torture, often makes the scenes of violence in his novels blur

into each other. What emerges is less an erotic or a literary experience than a

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satirical upshot or a philosophical point. Critic James Brusseau applies this kind

of reasoning to the repetition of the violent scenes in American Psycho: We

need to change our strategy for evaluating Elliss book. The parameters should

not be literary but philosophic. [: : : ] What [the book] illustrates is that violence

doesnt exist because it can be said so easily (45). According to Brusseau, the

repetitions of the text enact this philosophical idea by imposing upon the reader

an adamant, unidealized nothing: Erased by our weariness and boredom with

the same thing again and again, the words diffuse from the paper. First you stop

caring about the descriptions and then you stop noticing them. Eyes skim along

the lines. Finally, only the blank page lingers (45).

Arguably, the experience of reading American Psycho is not to witness vi-

olence disappear, but to watch it erupt, horrifically, over and over, seemingly

even when the book has been closed. Despite critical protests to the contrary, the

scenes of violence do in fact change over the course of the novel in structure,

in accumulative effect, and in tone. This ensures that even if we get used to

Batemans murders, to their perversions and their graphic depiction, Ellis one-

ups each scene of violence with the next, an inescapable escalation that ensures

that the reader is continually shocked even if she is bored.

Sianne Ngai, in her analysis of the affective response to repetition in mod-

ernist writing, has coined the term stuplimity to capture the counterintuitive

compatibility of shock and boredom: the sudden excitation of shock, and

the desensitization we associate with boredom, though diametrically opposed

and seemingly mutually exclusive, are both responses that confront us with

the limitations of our capacity for responding in general (para. 10). Ngai is

particularly interested in how affective responses to literature can delineate what

cannot be represented: Like the Kantian sublime, the stuplime points to the

limits of our representational capabilities, not through the limitlessness or infinity

of concepts, but through a no less exhaustive confrontation with the discrete

and finite in repetition (para. 17). Her delineation of stuplimity, however, also

concentrates on how the fatigue and humor produced by repetition can push

the reader to constantly formulate and reformulate new tactics for reading

(para.17). In other words, stuplimity as a response to repetition demarcates what

we cannot know but it also inspires in us the desire to know it.

American Psycho, however, is not exactly stuplime. Much of what Ngai

associates with this statea tendency towards the horizontal or the prone;

descriptions that incline towards agglutination and flaccidity; a proclivity for

debris and for bits and pieces of languagedoesnt quite fit the novel. Yes,

American Psycho is flat: its blank narrative voice and the emphasis on sur-

face both connote the horizontal, but it does not suggest or induce collapse.

Rather, it is hard, shiny, brittle. Instead of softness and flaccidity, we are in a

world of hardbodies, sharp knives, and Patrick Batemans erect phallus. Further,

Elliss bits and pieces, snippets from various modes of discourse, are more

reminiscent of the ubiquitous confetti floating around Glamorama than of the

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small, finite objects that Stein fondles or the heaps of trash in which Beckett

rummages. The abundant objects in American Psycho are described with the

proper nouns of their manufacturers or designers, rendering them more textual

than concrete.

What distinguishes American Psychos effects most from stuplimity, however,

is not its tone, but its narrative mechanism, which is, as suggested in the analysis

of Elliss puns, one of alternation and juxtaposition rather than one of merging

and combination. As Abel puts it, Ellis insists that boredom works as boredom

only when disrupted by violence, and vice versa, that is, that the two series

exist parallel to, and yet affect, each other as well (146). In other words, while

the boredom of the repetition of consumerism and the shock of the repetition

of violence both constitute obstacles to attentive reading, the alternation of the

two produces uncertainty and puts the reader on edge. In this sense, American

Psycho may be closer to the aesthetics of terror than of horror as distinguished

by Ann Radcliffe in her 1826 On the Supernatural in Poetry (Radcliffe). Elliss

emphasis in this novel, as in his Lunar Park, is on suspense and dread, rather

than on shock and disgust.13 Not knowing whether the next chapter will be

awash in simulacra or blood, fills the reader, like Bateman, with a nameless

dread.

This creates a kind of frisson that heightens the vividness of the scenes of

violence. One effect of this juxtaposition is the observable aesthetic investment

in the violent scenes in contrast to the background of mindnumbing discourse.

Murphet explains:

[T]he violence is not simply a matter of content; it is very much a matterof form and style. Form, because we have to wait so long for any signsof literary distinction (the text otherwise being an object lesson in badwriting), that when they finally arrive we feed on them hungrily, even thoughthey occur in scenes of abomination; and style, because it is here that theoppressive paratactic narrative voice finally lets rip and tips over fromweightless indistinction into driven, compulsive syntactical constructions.(456; Murphets emphases)

Part of this effect is the relief the reader experiences that for once, language

in the novel is tied to physical realityno longer are we in a textual wash of

capitalized names and self-overlapping, incommunicative dialogue. The words

on the page finally signify a physical reality, albeit a grotesque one.

Murphets assertion above about the distribution of Elliss style is contestable;

there are non-violent passages in the book that have the flair of Elliss best

writing. But what cannot be denied is the aesthetic force of the violent passages,

the way they impress themselves upon the reader in all their gruesome detail.

They are unforgettable, even if the novel suggests that they never happened. To

make violence aesthetically potent, even if it is purely by virtue of being not

boring, is to make it flat but it is also to make it seductive. The alternation

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of repetitions in American Psycho, therefore, serves to make violence both

aesthetically compelling and unreal. Rather than the abstraction achieved by

Sade, the repeated violence in American Psycho achieves a representational

thinness, flatness, and vividness that can only be likened to the surface of

things.

We have seen that the reality of the acts of violence in Patricks world

is undermined, made uncertain through repetition. Repetition compounds this

ontological uncertainty with epistemological uncertaintythe violent acts are

divested of reality and meaning for the reader as well. This is partly a crux of

identification: there are no characters to latch onto. The repetition of people,

their generic sameness, prevents readerly identification with any of the victims

we see their pain through Patricks eyes and are therefore never privy to their

experience of pain or death. On the other hand, the repetitiousness that makes

Patrick seem blank and the textual allusions that undermine our sense of his

reality prevent identification with the perpetrator of violence too. While we get

descriptions of his mother, brother, and father, and he occasionally mentions

horrific acts he committed as an adolescent and in college, Patrick Bateman is

not really psychoanalyzable.14

The function of these uncertainties is to ensure that the violent acts in Ameri-

can Psycho have no reason, no cause, no consequence. Even Batemans confes-

sion of them seems to serve no purpose: there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper

knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling.

There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has

meant nothing (377; italics in original). The idea of understanding as a failed

extraction is telling: Batemans murders often enact the futile unfleshing or

gutting of the body. Critic Laura Tanner notes that his tendency is to open up

what is inside (100), bringing the interior to the surface, moving interior organs

and female genitalia outside of the body within which they are housed (101).

This might plausibly be analogized to the way Ellis vacuates the violent act of

any kind of meaning through repetition: violence is gutted of significance such

that we cannot read it within a coherent system of meaning, be it ontological,

epistemological, or ethical.

For Freccero, Patricks tendency to disembowel is contagiousjust as he

extracts organs from his victims, critics attempt to extract truth from the novel

(52). Abel, too, makes this move, brandishing the expression critical violence

to describe the refusal to conceptualize the violence in American Psycho:

Regardless of the outcome of the critics judgment [: : : ] the novels vi-olence itself is never conceptualized; it never constitutes the focus forresponse in and of itself. Indicative of the general difficulties surfacingwhen critical discourse encounters the issue of violence, the reception ofAmerican Psycho always configures the novels violence as allegorical ormetaphorical, as being about something other than violence itselfand thesuccess of the representational status of violence determines the critical

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judgment of it. In other words, the critical violence done to Elliss textitself further highlighted by the passionate, often vitriolic rhetoric deployedby the criticsmarks itself in terms of judgment, as being concerned withwhether violence is good or bad, rather than with what it does. (141)

For Abel, it is a form of critical aggression to make Patricks violence mean

anything, be it moral wrongness or a satire of capitalisms cannibalistic cruelty

(142). Abel is scathing about the desire of critics to tame the violence in the novel

by forcing it into the regime of representation and reassuring us by making

violence recognizable in a familiar critical and ethical register (142, 148).

In a sense, however, Abel himself ends up taking recourse himself to a

familiar critical and ethical register in his conclusion that violence is un-

knowable, incomprehensible, unfathomable, perceptible only as pure affect: the

novel invents a new, albeit horrifying, knowledge, one that doesnt make sense

of the frontier [of violence] but inhabits it without reducing it to something

other that what it is: the ultimate Other (148). To make the violence allegor-

ical or metaphorical clearly imposes a meaning on something that Ellis has

adamantly rendered meaningless; to make it into nothingness ( la Brusseau)

or into Otherness ( la Abel) seems to fall into the same interpretive trap.

The meanings being attributed to violence are perhaps less defined, but the

interpretive move is still to extrapolate or render the violence abstract. To

say that violence is nothing or that violence is Otherness can be true in a

purely philosophical sense. But to say that the American Psychos violence

registers as nothingness or as Otherness is to ignore the novels literary effects

completely.

Stark Fictions, Uncertain Fictions: The Ethics of Suspension

The question remains: what is left when everything around and within vio-

lence has been stripped away? Arguably, what remains when violence has been

rendered surface is not nothing or the Other, but exactly the readers encounter

with that surface. Through repetition, Ellis makes us confront violence qua

violence. It may be meaningless, fictional, vacuous violence, but it still signifies

and it signifies precisely in the readers response to it. Violence is not negated

by repetition, but rather it is made uncertain, hovering somewhere between the

representational and the experiential.15 We cannot know the violence in the

novel; it is too uncertain, too without consequence for that. But it is also, and

in more than one way, real. We experience it.

This is what gained through the novels use of repetition to produce uncer-

tainty: not a benumbed or scandalized reading, but rather what I call reading

in suspension, taking advantage of the various meanings coiled within the word

suspense. In reading American Psycho, we suspend not disbelief but belief in

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the reality of the violence. The uncertainty about the ontological and ethical

status of the repeated violence allows us to watch it without investment. At the

same time, Elliss alternation of repetition propels us to read expectantly, to

read in suspense of violence. Repetition gives us enough distance from violence

to contemplate it as violence; but our repeated but intermittent exposure to it

also creates an expectant fear, a nameless dread that infuses our experience

of violence with intensity.

It is not Patrick we dread; it is self-recognition. Ellis manipulates this fear

by making the alternating rhythm of the texts repetitions exacerbate our desire

for vividness. The experience of reading the violence as violence, without cause

or consequence, without reality, as pure surface, is in essence to look into a

mirror. Before this mirror, there is no recourse to blame or to justice. What most

readers have done, unable to stomach violence without the trappings of meaning,

is to turn aside, casting blame upon the author or spinning spurious arguments

about violence as nothing or as everything. But the repetition of violence in

American Psycho is not about violence as nothing, violence as consumer culture,

or violence as the ultimate Other. It is about the possibility of violence dwelling

within us, discernible in the play of desire and dread of reading a violence

that can have no other meaning, is literally nothing, except as activated by our

response to it.

When violence is made surface, we confront the possibility that, within us,

violence will be made to surface. The suspension of violence through repetition

affords us each with an opportunity for self-reflection, in both senses of the word.

This argument elucidates to a certain extent both the polarity and the diversity of

responses to the novel, which dont even divide along gender linesmale critics

have been among its most avid denouncers, while Elizabeth Young led the way

in constructing a defense based on its literary equivocation. Some critics claim it

is pornographic, others say it is frankly unerotic; some say it is grossly violent;

others, like Ellis himself, are shocked by the shock the book caused.16 There

is no interpretation of American Psycho that is not, in effect, an interpretation

of the critic, an account of the specific way the novels violence has inhabited

each reader for a space of time. Any response to the novel is therefore likelier

to tell to you more about the critics take on violence than about Elliss. This

concurs with his self-description of his intent: to let people find out about their

own limits as readers (qtd. in Hoban 36).

In this way, American Psycho turns the question of ethics back on the reader;

hence the propensity of early reviewers to proclaim their antipathy towards the

book in reflexive terms. Tanner argues that these responses (e.g., I felt disgusted

with myself for reading it; [I felt] thoroughly soiled by the experience) imply

a sense of powerlessness and complicity in the reading experience, a sense of

being at once subjected to and guilty of violence (103). Tanner suggests that we

resist the vulnerable and self-testing position that Ellis puts us in and actively

immunize ourselves against the contagion of the novels horror:

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Unless we assert our right to read representations of violation critically,skeptically, oppositionally, we become victims of a narrative force that ourown participation as readers helps to create. Oppositional reading, then,implies not just opposition to the actions occurring in a novel, to thecharacters that perpetrate them, or even to the narrator that describes them,but opposition to the very terms of readership implicit in the text. Only inlocating and defining those terms can we become oppositional readers aswell as readers of oppositional texts. (114)

In this reading, the best antidote to the contagion of violence is analysis of it

the comprehensiveness of Tanners critical probing of the details and mechanisms

of the novels violence testifies to her advocacy of interpretation as opposition.

However, this kind of sustained and, so to speak, engrossed attention to the

novels violence is not what Elliss repetitive and alternating narrative structure

encourages. The imposition of the violence upon the reader is qualified by

the uncertain terms in which it is depicted; because the violence exists in a

space of indeterminacy, it resists both identification and interpretation. We are

not completely the victims, nor should we be the full-throated censors, of the

novel. Rather, we are suspended somewhere between these two positions of

judgment and immersion. In this sense as well, suspension has ethical value: it

provides a way of experiencing violence without censorship, but also without

being overwhelmed.

Ultimately, the argument of this essay, too, is suspended somewhere between

resistance to interpretation and interpretation as resistance. Its view approximates

that professed by philosopher Bernard Williams in his essay on Sophocless The

Women of Trachis, which attempts to uncover some of the ethical workings

of stark fictions. Williams coins this term in contradistinction to the dense

fictions, epitomized by the realist novels of the nineteenth century, to which so

many ethical philosophers have turned. He describes the difference as follows:

It is not merely that [stark fictions] style and structure avoids [sic] the anecdotal

or incidental, but that these resources are typically directed in a concentrated

way to displaying the operations of chance and necessity (50). It is precisely

this attention to the inexplicability and inevitability of the horrors of human

existence that Williams wishes to reintroduce into moral philosophy, which to

his mind is both overly enamored of good news and prone to focusing on the

actions of a putative rational agent conducting a moral life as though independent

of chance and necessity.

For Williams, a stark fiction like The Women of Trachis provides an antidote

to this ebullient but shortsighted view of moral reality because its display of

undeserved and uncompensated suffering is so entirely unrelieved (50). In its

successive revelations and its display of hideous and destructive physical

agony, The Women of Trachis is similar to other Greek tragedies (50). Where

it differs, and where it resembles American Psycho, is in its emphasis on the

vulnerability and passivity of its victims and on leaving in the starkest relief

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its extreme, undeserved, and uncompensated suffering (Williams 51). Williams

takes the last words of The Women of Trachis, [t]here is nothing here that is

not Zeus, to represent the inexplicable necessity (51) of the horrors of human

existence. The gods neither explain nor take note of the suffering of humans; the

only moral knowledge attributable to those absent deities is a negative thing,

non-understanding (Williams 51).

What better phrases than inexplicable necessity and non-understanding

to encapsulate the uncertainty and violence of American Psycho? Consider the

following lines, which appear toward the end of Elliss novel:

[S]he is searching for a rational analysis of who I am which is, of course,an impossibility: there : : : is : : : no : : : key. (264)Im hoping she realizes that this would have happened to her no matter

what. That she would have ended up lying here [: : : ] no matter what otherchoice she might have made [: : : ] that this all would have happened anyway.I would have found her. This is the way the earth works. (328; italics inoriginal)I can already tell that its going to be a characteristically useless, senseless

death, but then Im used to the horror. (329)This confession has meant nothing: : : : (377)[O]n the sign in letters that match the drapes color are the words THIS

IS NOT AN EXIT. (399)

While the focalization is through the perpetrator rather than the victims of vio-

lence, the starkness of American Psycho, like the Greek tragedies, is dependent

on a horror that cannot be conceived or explained. And just as Greek tragedy

relied on pre-existing fictions for its plots, details from the worst murder scenes

in American Psycho were culled from Elliss factual research materials, including

books by and about serial killers and FBI criminology textbooks. Ellis himself

admits: I couldnt really have made this up.

The point of stark fictions like these is precisely to convey the inexplicable

necessity of horror that Williams locates in our moral reality, in the very fact

of violence in our world. But this necessity can only be conveyed through art,

which suspends violent realities in a space of nonreality and thereby enables

us to contemplate such things in honesty without being crushed by them

(Williams 52). Williamss Nietzschean argument17 here sustains this notion of

a suspension of violence that affords reflection. He calls the achievement of

stark fictions necessarily obscure (52); I would call the fictions themselves

necessarily uncertain. I would also argue that it is the absence of fixed meaning

in stark fiction that allows us to gaze upon the horrors in a manner that might

have ethical value. The suspension produced by American Psychos uncertainty

allows us not only to contemplate those horrors with unflinching honesty but

also to reflect upon our complicit imbrication with those very horrors.

This is not to imply that the suspension of reading American Psycho should

entail a suspension of legal or moral judgment over those who choose to commit

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real acts of violence. As Williams puts it, The point of tragedyor at least of

those tragedies that are stark fictionsmust lie rather in the fact that it lays its

fictional horrors before us in a way that elicits attitudes we cannot take towards

real horrors (52; my italics). We should not shy away from having opinions

about Elliss decision to incorporate acts of violence into his novel or about the

kind of violence he presents.

At the same time, it may be ethically useful to confront violence as violence

in uncertain art, without escape routes of meaning. It may be the safest way

to explore the darkest corners of the self. We may not be murderers; we may

not condone murders. But we can read novels about murders, and if we read

novels like American Psycho that suspend, flatten, and vacuate violence through

narrative mechanisms of uncertainty, we might just get a glimpse of our own

fears and desires. We might enter into more honest, intense, and conscientious

engagement with our own ethics. In involving ourselves in this strange and

terrifying relationship with unmeaning violence, we might even begin to ask

along with Patrick Bateman: Is evil something you are? Or is it something you

do? (377)

Postscript

Given that this essay has argued that reading American Psycho affords a

confrontation with violence as violence, readers might ask why it does not

directly quote any violent scenes from the novel; it may seem that a criti-

cal project should follow the novels lead in its representation of violence.18

Seemingly, such an essay should avoid any rhetorical device (like elision) that

might elevate violence to the status of a mysterious, unknowable Other. Neither

scholarly squeamishness nor feminist furor compels my omission. Rather, I hope

to emphasize how dangerous and reductive it is for critics and commentators to

quote violence out of context.

The reception to American Psycho speaks to a coherent and credible fear.

Violence is contagious; it is seductivetoo much so to be excerpted lightly.19

NOWs absurd sampling of Ellis on its phone line boycotting the book suggests

the extent to which isolating the violent passages from the novel is ethically

irresponsible.20 No matter how high-minded the indignation that accompanies

it, the tendency either to adopt the violent rhetoric of the novel or to quote

violent scenes in the midst of critical reflection neglects the crucial distinction

between creative and critical projects, between Elliss choices and ours.

Furthermore, it is as impossible to contextualize the scenes as it is to re-

enact the repetitions of the novel. My argument is that the form of narrative,

not just its content, be read for its ethical function. Mary Harrons film of

American Psycho, for example, is far less repetitiousand actually somewhat

didacticin its careful selection of satire and precise pruning of pain. It is quite

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simply a different ethical project. To repeat the violence of American Psycho

without repeating the repetition of American Psycho would undo the work of

asserting just how indispensable aesthetic analysis is to any consideration of

ethics. Brusseau claims that part of one sentence about one bloody episode

suffices to document them all (43). Documentation and literary representation

are distinct in too many ways to bother listing; their respective relationships

to ethics are clearly different. The chasm between reading an excerpted violent

scene from American Psycho and reading American Psycho as a whole is a

measure of the necessity of reading the ethics of form.

To wit: This essay does not make an argument for reading violence in fiction

per se but for the value of reading a particular kind of fiction that renders

violence uncertain, that suspends it. In choosing as my example one of the most

extreme depictions of violence in twentieth-century literature, I wish to suggest

that narrative uncertainty can give ethical value to novels with even the most

horrifying subject matter.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

NOTES

1. Martin Weinreich is characteristicin his reading of the novel as a cultural critique of thesocial conditions of postmodern consumer capitalism as outlined by Jean Baudrillard (Weinreich65). Thomas Irmer argues that the meaning of Elliss allegory needs to be contextualized both

historically and culturally and that the personification of the yuppie in the novel is meant to bea critique of 1960s American culture as represented by Patricks parents (Irmer 355). David W.Price places Ellis in a tradition of satirists, including Laurence Sterne, Gnter Grass, and Thomas

Pynchon, who incorporate aspects of the grotesque and the carnivalesque as part of their critique.American Psycho, for Price, is about how we are all absorbed into the maw of the market: the

acts of cannibalization that Bateman engages in at the end of the novel are really figurations of thegeneral anthropophagic economy of global free-market capitalism (Price 344).

2. He makes a cameo appearance in The Rules of Attraction (1987), when his father dies and

his younger brother Sean visits him in New York. He makes a brief and hilarious appearance inGlamorama (2000). He, or someone pretending to be him, has a major role in Elliss recent LunarPark (2005).

3. These characters are Sherman McCoy, Alison Poole, Stash, and Gordon Gekko, respectively.4. The confusion is symptomatic of a critical discourse that either attributes the authors fictional

enterprise to the character or consigns the characters murderous tendencies to the author. See

Freccero.5. This is something that Samuel Richardson managed somewhat awkwardly in Pamela by using

interruption and retrospection. Ellis wisely relies on both our familiarity with the contemporaryconversational (confessional) tendency to speak in the present tense about past events and ourinattention to such quibbles of narrative believability.

6. Ellis in interview on the banality of his antihero: Patrick Bateman is an example of whatHannah Arendt called the banality of evil (Clarke).

7. One might look to Freud, Sade, and before them, Shakespeare, to investigate (1) why puns

seem to gravitate toward the macabre; (2) why this appeals to authors and readers alike; and (3)whence the sharpness of wit and humor that accompanies puns about violence more, than say, punsabout bodily functions.

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8. Perhaps the most effective shift of emphasis in Mary Haddons film adaptation of American

Psycho is her decision to keep and heighten the absurdity and humor of the novel: Christian Baleshammy performance leavens the violence we are made to witness, which is already far less graphic.

9. Brusseau, for example, cites a moment in which the murderous protagonist eyes a prosti-

tute (Brusseau 43). In the scene alluded to, however, Daisy is in fact a model, not a prostitute. Sheis actually notable as one of the few victims Patrick allows to escape.

10. It is not too much of a stretch to conjecture, as some critics have, that Patricks imagined or

enacted murders are an attempt to reach reality, to push through the filmic simulacra of his world,including the made-up, fake-tanned, designer-clad, pornographic bodies of his female victims. But ifhe is trying to reach some kind of core of meaning inside his victims, his violent decipherment does

not escape the circle of simulacra: As usual, in an attempt to understand these girls Im filmingtheir deaths (304).

11. Several readers Ive spoken to use Elliss repetitions and explicitness to their advantage,skimming the third or fourth chapter entitled Girls or skipping the chapter entitled Tries to Cookand Eat Girl (343).

12. In Sade, this is partly because the latter half of the unfinished book remains only in outlineform; details and context disappear as Sade details what to him, was perhaps the most interestingcontent, the violence.

13. Schonberger argues that American Psycho incorporates aspects of both terror and horrorGothic, thereby collapsing Ann Radcliffes distinction between them and breaking down the verydualities that support the Gothic mode (29).

14. Critical attempts to figure out what is wrong with Patrick thus often feel overstated, e.g.His actual meaning represents social violence which returns as sexual aggression from deep-rooted

repressions that once were liberated during the 1960s (Irmer 355).15. It is appropriate that Ellis culled the scenes of violence, not from his own dark fantasies but

from factual records: These were sequences, four or five of them scattered throughout the book,

that I left blank and didnt work on until the book was completed; then I went back and filled thosescenes in. I didnt really want to write them, but I knew they had to be there. So I read a lot ofbooks about serial killers and picked up details from that and then I had a friend who introduced

me to someone who could get me criminology textbooks from the FBI that really went into graphicdetail about certain motifs in the actual murders committed by serial killers and detailed accountsof what serial killers did to bodies, what they did to people they murdered, especially sex killings.

Thats why I did the research, because I couldnt really have made this up (qtd. in Murphet 17).As Tanner notes, the text announces the violence as both material and as fictional.

16. I was totally, totally shocked. [: : : ] I thought maybe they would publish the book and maybe

people would be upset by it, I guess, but I never thought they would not publish the book [: : : ] orthe book would cause this kind of fury. [: : : ] I didnt think there was enough in the book to make

it that shocking (Clarke).17. [A]s Nietzsche already said in The Birth of Tragedy, this must lie, in part, in its enabling

us to contemplate such things in honesty without being crushed by them. When later he said that

we have art so that we do not perish from the truth, he did not mean that we use art in order toescape from the truth: he meant that we have art so that we can both grasp the truth