Sensation, Perception, Mediation 2012 Szeged

1. Sensation, Perception, Mediation 2012 Szeged László B. Sári: Transgression & Intermediality in Contemporary American Minimalist Fiction

2. 1. Minimalist fiction & Intermediality - McGurl's definition of minimalism as "lower-middle-class modernism", gravitating towards the aesthetic maxim of "show, don't tell", as preached in/by creative writing programs [vs. technomodernism ("write what you know) & high cultural pluralism ("find your voice")] - contradictory relationship between lower-middle-class cultural consumption (sentimental literature, genre fiction, television, Hollywood film, etc.) and the "modernist" agenda: themes and techniques of representation appropriated from popular culture in order, at least partly, to address (the anxieties of) a lower middle class audience, at the same time condemning their habits of cultural consumption

3. - the resulting ambiguous intermediality of fiction as evidenced by minimalists in the mainstream "Just as bourgeois modernism was an anti-bourgeois enterprise, lower-middle-class modernism defines itself largely against the cultural forms actually consumed by the lower middle class from whom it struggles to separate itself..." (McGurl 2009, 67)

4. "'ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE IS SCRAWLED IN BLOOD' - American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis's controversial novel of 1991, opens with this image of words (the quote is from Dante's Inferno) written in blood. For a novel notorious for extensive descriptions of racism, sexism, rape, torture, murder, mutilation and cannibalism this image is especially apt. But as the reader's eyes move to the second line of the text, "red letters on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner', this blood is revealed as a literal and literary trompe l'oeil: the words are written in blood-red letters, not actual blood. This split-section confusion, too, is apt, as the extent to which much of the violence in the novel actually happens or is merely hallucinated is never entirely clear. In this moment - significant enough to merit translation into Mary Harron's film adaptation of American Psycho (2000), where the ominous red drops of the opening credits resolve into raspberry sauce - the literal constitution of the blood in which the opening tetxt seems to be 'scrawled' forces us to consider the distinction between fact and fiction, literal and literary, the world and how it is represented in art. Further, it forces us to question how violence, that notoriously elusive entity, informs these distinctions and our relations to them." (Mandel 2006, 9)

5. You're a projectionist and you're tired and angry, but mostly you're bored so you start by taking a single frame of pornography collected by some other projectionist that you find stashed away in the booth, and you splice this frame of a lunging red penis or a yawning wet vagina close-up into another feature movie. This is one of those pet adventures, when the dog and cat are left behind by a traveling family and must find their way home. In reel three, just after the dog and cat, who have human voices and talk to each other, have eaten out of a garbage can, there's a flash of an erection. Tyler does this. A single frame in a movie is on the screen for one-sixtieth of a second. Divide a second into sixty equal parts. That's how long the erection is. Towering four stories tall over the popcorn auditorium, slippery red and terrible, and no one sees it. (Palahniuk 2007, 29-30)

6. 2. The Advent of the Transgressive Novel - literature going extreme from the 1980s in subverting media messages by presenting them dangerously and disruptively in excess "If American Psycho demands a different approach to violence's critique, it may be because the novel posits violence as critique, as adjudicating agent and not just the object of discussion. Born in violence, formed by the text, reforming the real by de-forming it, American Psycho's critique of violence offers violence as critique, confronting sadism with masochism, discourse with practice, literal with literary, word with violent world." (Mandel 2006, 18) - transgression thus understood is critical and, at the same time, complicit with the media messages it circulates, and it fails to demonstrate the possibility of political alternatives

7. - scandal as (a way to) success, often by way of a detour into the non-literary realm "In a move similar to that of Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse, which transcribes the pornographic passages that it then denounces, NOW's hotline phone message included a recording - in a woman's voice - of one of the passages of rape and dismemberment from American Psycho (as the New Republic put it, "the phone number is sure to fall into the wrong lonely hands"). NOW seems to acknowledge the citationality of the novel's violence, though not its own, when it follows the recording with a statement that crimes of rape and violence against women are epidemic and on the rise. The hotline tape concludes by calling for a boycott. "'We are not telling them not to publish,"' says Tammy Bruce, president of the Los Angeles Chapter, in an interview with the New York Times; rather, NOW hopes the publisher "will learn [that] violence against women in any form is no longer socially acceptable" [see McDowell]. One might be tempted to ridicule this exercise first for the patent falsity of the statement that somehow violence against women is not socially acceptable, and second for refusing the possibility that, just as its own gesture of citation is not to be construed as a misogynist act of violence, so too perhaps the passage quoted may bear a complicated-and willfully citational-relation to the violence it depicts. But it is worth noting that NOW's response is not atypical of public culture's responses to popular cultural artifacts: representation is construed as advocacy, and figuration is construed as performativity. Furthermore, the emotionald enunciations uttered in horror and disgust, inevitably cite - obsessively and in detail - the target of their denunciation, thus betraying the perverse or pornographic investments of the censors themselves." (Freccero 1997, 50)

8. 3. Tansgression & Intermediality: Historical Conjunctions - closely related and reinforcing one another in the carreers of BEE and ChP up to 9/11 - later, "terrorist aesthetics" (Milletti) is labelled as itself potentially terrorist: by antiterrorist law and the publishing industry (legal protection not offered for authors) "Fight Club shows how the evacuation and gendering of the citizen effected by the capitalist nation at 'war' can give rise to unexpected doppelgangers: unlawful combatants, intimate aliens within the hearts and minds of the Xeroxed citizens imagined and produced by the law." (Quiney 2007, 350) "While 9/11 revealed an uneasy connection between the goals of terrorists and subversive writers, Lullaby ultimately affirms the need for the transgressive artist lest we tacitly authorize political forces and social groups - from official states or terrorists - to impose discurive models which allow no room for self examination or dissenting expression." (Rubin 2008, 177)

9. - individual reactions to the "war on terror": retreat into genre (ChP) Fight Club (1997) Survivor (1999) Invisible Monsters (1999) Choke (2001) --- Lullaby (2002, horror) Diary (2003, Künstlerroman) Haunted (2005, horror story collection) Rant (2007, time-travel sci-fi) Snuff (2008, ?) Pygmy (2009, YA fiction) Tell-All (2010, celebrity biography) Damned (2011, satire) Invisible Monsters REMIX (2012, a new edition with deleted scenes)

10. - individual reaction to the „war on terror”: fictional autobiography & rewriting (BEE) Less than Zero (1985) Rules of Attraction (1987) American Psycho (1991) The Informers (1996) Glamorama (1999) ----- Lunar Park (2006, horror-celebrity author biography) Imperial Bedrooms (2010, sequel to Less than Zero)

11. - transition marked by a heightened authorial presence within/outside fiction: „There was a book?” Yes. Before there was a movie... Before 4-H clubs in Virginia were usted for running fight clubs... Before Donatella Versace sewed razor blades nto mn's clothing and called it the 'fight club look.' Before Gucci fashion models walked the runway, shirtless with black eyes, bruised and bloodied and bandaged. Before houses like Dolce and Gabbana launched their new men's look - satiny 1970s shirts in photo-mural patterns, camouflage-print pants and tight, low-slung leather pants - in Milan's dirty concrete basements... Before young men started scarring kisses into their hands with lye or Superglue. Before young men around the world ook legal action to change their names to 'Tyler Durden'... Before the band Limp Bizkit bannered their Web site with 'Dr. Tyler Durden recommends a healthy dose of Limp Bizkit...' (Palahniuk 2006, 210-1)

12. "Lunar Park clearly wants to blur the boundary between truth and fiction, a point made clear on the novelist's website at Random House. The site offers readers two versions of Bret Easton Ellis, illustrated by headshot of the author split by a jagged line. The page has two clloumns; each provides biographical facts about and an interview with 'Bret Easton Ellis.' One coloumn matches the facts of Ellis's life and one matches the information in Lunar Park. Both were born on March 7, 1964, and both are 6' tall. But one Ellis is 185 pounds and graduated from Bennington College in 1986, and one is 220 pounds and graduated from Camden College in 1986. The interviews, each of which purports to be an interview with Bret Easton Ellis, confuse matters further. In one, Ellis says 'It's up to the reader to decide how much of Lunar Park actually occured.' In the other, he says 'It's up to each reader to take a leap of faith and understand that everything in Lunar Park actually occured.'" (Karnicky 2011, 118-9)

13. "They had made a movie about us. The movie was based on a book written by someone we knew. [...] because the writer resented that she [Blair] had returned to me [Clay, the narrator] I became the handsome and dazed narrator, incapable of love and kindness. [...] He [the "author"] was simply someone who floated through our lives and didn't seem to care how flatly he perceived everyone or that he'd shared our secret failures with the world, showcasing the youthful indifference, the gleaming nihilism, glamorizing the horror of it all. [...] The movie was very different from the book in that there was nothing from the book in the movie. [...] In the book everything about me had happened. The book was something I simply couldn't diavow. The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie. [...] The audience - the book's actual cast - quickly realized what had happenned. The reason the movie dropped everything that made the novel real was becasue there was no way the parents who ran the studio would ever expose their children in the same black light the book did. The movie was begging for our sympathy whereas the book didn't give a shit. [...] in the book Julian Wells lived but in the movie's new scenario he had to die. He had to be punished for all his sins. That's what the movie demanded. (Later, as a screenwriter, I learned it's what all movies demanded.)" (Ellis 2010)