History and Refusal: The Resistance to Consumer Culture in Contemporary American Fiction

Director: Elizabeth Fifer
Readers: Alexander Doty, Scott Paul Gordon, Robert Rosenwein
 

CONTENTS:

Introduction
Theory, Fiction, and the Opposition to Late-Capitalist Consumer Culture

Chapter One
"The Devil's Visions": Postmodernism Homeopathic and Accidental in John Gardner's October Light and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho

Chapter Two
History, Refusal, and the Strategic-Essentialist Politics of Thomas Pynchon's Vineland

Chapter Three
Bombs from Coke Cans: Appropriating Mass Culture in Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country and Mark Leyner's Et Tu, Babe

Chapter Four
Subjects, Objects, and the Postmodern Differend in Don DeLillo's White Noise

Notes

Works Cited

Acknowledgements
 
 
 

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION

Theory, Fiction, and the Opposition to Late-Capitalist Consumer Culture

In 1906, the socialist writer Upton Sinclair was able to conclude The Jungle, his exposé of the hell of working-class life in turn-of-the-century Chicago, with this remarkably optimistic forecast, delivered by an orator at a socialist workers’ meeting who "seem[s] the very spirit of the revolution" (Sinclair 340):

"We shall have the sham reformers self-stultified and self-convicted; we shall have the radical Democracy left without a lie with which to cover its nakedness! And then will begin the rush that will never be checked, the tide that will never turn till it has reached its flood–that will be irresistible, overwhelming–the rallying of the outraged workingmen of Chicago to our standard! And we shall organize them, we shall drill them, we shall marshal them for the victory! We shall bear down the opposition, we shall sweep it before us–and Chicago will be ours! Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!" (341)

"For all the hysteria drummed up by the commies, their fellow travelers, and their dupes, the Isaacsons received a fair trial.... Who but the very ideologues committed to overthrowing our democratic way of life can dare claim in view of the defendants' use of every legal dodge available under due process, that justice was not done?" –Margolis. "History records with shame the persecution and infamous putting to death in the United States of America of two American citizens, husband and wife, the father and mother of two young children, who were guilty of not so much as jaywalking, for their proudly held left wing views." –Krieger. (276-77)

No small number of events has conspired to transform America from a nation where, as in Sinclair’s optimistic formulation, revolution and socialism seemed imaginable or even imminent to one where, as in Doctorow’s more disheartened one, contentious political convictions often seem irrelevant or even strangely indiscernible from right-wing discourses. The co-optation of the sixties New Left into mainstream consumer culture, the rise of multinational corporatism, the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, the continuing reign of conservative politics dating from the Reagan years, the proliferation of a mammoth "Culture Trust" that, as Tom Frank says, "[has opened] vast uncharted regions of private life . . . to corporate colonization" (Frank 16): All of these have contributed in the last several decades to a demoralization of the left, a belief in the unassailability of capital, and what Richard Rorty has called a mood of "rueful acquiescence in the end of [leftist] American hopes" (Rorty 6). Resistance, to state it baldly, can often appear futile at an historical moment when every act of defiance is transformed into a salable product, or when, as Gerald Graff observes, "what passes conventionally for transgression or rebellion against power . . . turns out to be only another . . . means by which power reproduces, distributes, and extends itself" (Graff 169). Even rock musicians, once our most naïvely and determinedly counter-cultural artists, can be heard proclaiming that "rebellion is packaged," that "rock and roll is entertainment" (DeCurtis 53), and that "capitalism won out" (50) [1].

However demoralized the left may be, though, it is not deceased, and this dissertation examines the efforts of a number of contemporary American novelists to carry on a tradition of political dissent and critique despite the mood of "rueful acquiescence" Rorty describes. At least one of these novelists, Bret Easton Ellis, propagates a return to the defiant, traditional Marxist leftism of the past, with its unambiguous position on capital's alienating and murderous propensities. Others, however, in keeping with the efforts of a number of postmodern and poststructuralist cultural theorists, advance newer, more sophisticated modes of dissent better suited to the increasingly monolithic and seemingly irresistible capitalist economy they remain, on some level, opposed to. Whatever disparate theoretical frameworks they advance, though, these novels share one important trait: They all take American consumer culture (Tom Frank's "Culture Trust," itself a more developed version of what Theodor Adorno once called the "culture industry") as the primary emblem of a late-capitalist power structure that, by infiltrating every facet of our public and private lives, demonstrates its seeming unopposability. Cable TV, the multiplex theater, pop music, advertising, the shopping mall, the grocery store, the internet, the tabloid press–these institutions have rendered "the [capitalist] system in which [we] move about . . . too constraining for [us] ever to be able to escape from it and go into exile elsewhere" (de Certeau 40). They also provide the coordinates for our novelists’ entry into the fray, or the spaces where they attempt, against terrific odds, their own acts of dissent and defiance.

One supposition of this study is that critical theory, used properly, can be an effective aid to contentious political interests. In this respect my work differs from that of such cultural critics as Richard Rorty (whose ideas are considered in a later chapter) or Paul Smith, who, in Discerning the Subject (1986), proclaims that prominent "theories in the human sciences," such as Marxism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, are all invested in "cerned notion[s] of subjectivity" (Smith xxxi). This means they conceive of individual subjects as nothing more than the playthings of larger historical, linguistic, and/or psychical forces, a formulation that leaves every subject "cerned," as Smith says, or walled in, and so "tend[s] to foreclose upon the possibility of resistance" (xxxi). As Smith himself, though, looks to newer, more sophisticated theoretical constructions of subjectivity not holding the individual’s "interpellation" by larger forces to be "monolithic" (152), [2] so this study celebrates fiction writers who advance new theoretical perspectives better suited to contemporary contentious politics than the more simplistically "revolutionary" ones indigenous to the early years of the twentieth century.

The purpose of this introduction is to name and describe several different theoretical modes advanced by such writers. To sufficiently illuminate those modes, it will survey the work of a number of contemporary cultural critics who describe in terms more explicit than our novelists’ the struggle to keep dissent alive and pertinent. As those critics’ theories often do, in fact, mirror or echo our novelists’, though, our considerations of them will not end here but will continue into subsequent chapters, where their (and other theorists’) works will continue shedding light on those of their more imaginative counterparts.
 

Late Capitalism Necessitates Old Marxism: Frederic Jameson’s "Cognitive Maps"

One option in the face of an increasingly monolithic capitalism is, predictably, a return to the hard-line Marxism of the past. Only a vigorous reassertion of the terror of class conflict can dispel the capitalist Culture Trust's hypnotic charm, this argument goes, and deliver the saner, less fascistic world past dissenters were once bold enough to envision. If this argument has a chief proponent, it is certainly Frederic Jameson, America's most prominent Marxist cultural critic and author of, among other works, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1990).

In Jameson's vocabulary, "postmodernism" is simply the condition of uncertainty and disorientation inflicted on us by what he, after Ernest Mandel, calls "late capitalism," a super-developed global capitalism evolved since the 1970s, marked by the evolution of multinational corporations, a "vertiginous new dynamic in international banking," "new forms of media interrelationship," and a "crisis of traditional labor" (xix). This late capitalism uses its "global" and "decentered communicational networks" (the World-Wide Web being only the latest and maybe best example) to bury its subjects in endless, unmanageable streams of information and ahistorical simulacra that prevent them from achieving any effective political consciousness (44). The individual living in such a late-capitalist, postmodern culture, then, is disoriented in ways analogous to what postmodernist architecture does to its occupants. Just as a building like John Portman's Westin Bonaventure hotel "transcend[s] the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world," so the new postmodern cultural landscape inaugurates an "incapacity of our minds," Jameson says, "at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual[s]" (44).

This situation, not surprisingly, makes things intensely difficult for the contemporary Marxist, who must work within this culturescape as surely as the capitalists who created it. Hedged in by so many disorienting images, so much information, so many diversions, today's would-be revolutionaries face myriad obstacles. Not the least of these is that the very individual (or "subject") they traditionally sought to liberate from the strictures of an exploitative labor market is no longer so much "alienated" as bewilderingly "fragmented" (14), shattered into multiple personalities, leaving no authentic or "core" subject left to liberate. Also, the parodic mode revolutionaries once relied on as an effective political weapon has been replaced by "pastiche," or a hollow imitation of others' "styles" or "languages" that is "amputated of the satiric impulse" and stripped of parody's "ulterior motives" (17). Their important historical sensibility has been decimated by a disturbing new trend toward "historicism," or the ruthless reduction of historical events to empty images and simulacra that strip them of any moral or teleological weight (18). And, maybe most significantly, the type of "critical distance" they once so deeply depended upon has been effectively "abolished" by the "new space of postmodernism," a staggering blow, since, as Jameson explains, "no theory of cultural politics current on the Left today has been able to do without one notion or another of a certain minimal aesthetic distance, of the possibility of the positioning of the cultural act outside the massive Being of capital, from which to assault this last" (48). This loss of distance results from capital's radical infiltration of every facet of our personal, professional, and political lives–a condition making it almost impossible to find any uncorrupted cultural space that might serve as a leftist "foothold" or "enclave." "For this reason," Jameson says,

the shorthand language of co-optation . . . omnipresent on the left . . . would now seem to offer a most inadequate theoretical basis for understanding a situation in which we all . . . dimly feel that not only punctual and local countercultural forms of cultural resistance and guerilla warfare but also even overtly political interventions . . . are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it. (49)

That capitalism tolerates such expressions, though, is not proof of its benevolence: "this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture," Jameson insists, simply represents "a whole new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense," he continues, "as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror" (5). Despite his assertions that the concept of "co-optation" may now seem irrelevant and that we need, if we are to keep Marxism vital, to "somehow . . . lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand . . . capitalism [as] at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst" (47), he remains deeply invested in notions of dissent and cultural transformation. Instead of coming at these by way of a now-impossible "critical distance," he simply approaches them by way of "cognitive mapping," the cure he proposes for that crippling "incapacity of our minds . . . to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network" we have heard him describe.

When Jameson says we need "cognitive maps," he means we need to reorient ourselves to our social and political circumstances via, specifically, capitalism's own machinations. The first step toward cutting through our present disorientation, or our inability to discern truth from falsity, simulation from reality, cause from effect, part from whole, is recognizing that capitalism itself has inflicted this confusion on us. Stating that late-capitalist postmodernism is the "cultural dominant" of our time, Jameson insists that we abandon postmodernist philosophers (Michel Foucault seems particularly implicated) who deny our ability to discern a "dominant," having us believe history is "sheer heterogeneity" (6), or nothing but a conglomeration of perpetually competing discourses. "If we do not achieve some sense of a cultural dominant," Jameson warns, "we will fall back into a view of present history as . . . random difference" (6), a climate in which he believes no substantive political action can be mounted. Unsurprisingly, he is quick to insist that he is not simply reasserting some old-fashioned Marxist orthodoxy: "this is not . . . a call for a return to some older kind of machinery, some older and more transparent national space," he says (54), informing us also, albeit vaguely, that the "mapping" he has in mind "is not exactly mimetic in the older sense" because it would "[pose] theoretical issues" and "allow us to renew the analysis of representation on a higher and much more complex level" (51) than classical Marxism affords.

What he has in mind, however, is still a distinctly totalizing and essentialist schema that would, much to any postmodernist or poststructuralist's chagrin, posit an absolute foundation or metaphysical first principle for every theorization about contemporary society. That foundation or first principle is, of course, capitalist economy itself, for "every position on postmodernism in culture," Jameson tells us with a distinctively unpostmodern decisiveness, "is also . . . and necessarily an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today" (3). Once we have re-learned our "relationship to the totality" (52) by making capitalism the raison d'etre girding our maps, we "may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion" (54). Besides having first cousins in such theorists as Jürgen Habermas, who proclaims postmodernists and poststructuralists like Foucault and Derrida to be "neoconservatives" who "[do] not uncover the economic . . . causes" for the sorts of "altered attitudes towards work, consumption, achievement and leisure" postmodernism entails (Habermas 102), Jameson agrees implicitly with novelists Bret Easton Ellis, whose AmericanPsycho (1990) I will examine, and, more peculiarly, John Gardner, whose October Light (1977) provides an ideologically inverted version of Ellis's book.

Ellis's Psycho is a furious indictment of consumerism and a thunderous proclamation, á la Jameson, of capital's absolute centrality to any remotely worthwhile critique of the postmodern condition. Depicting a culturescape as unnavigable, at present, as the one Jameson describes–a place resembling "a desert landscape . . . so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level" (Ellis 374)–American Psycho insists that our late-capitalist consumer marketplace breeds nothing but the "blood, torture, death, and terror" Jameson describes and announces that nothing short of a full acknowledgment of this can begin to provide the "exit" still conspicuously missing in the novel's closing sentence. Gardner's October Light, the only glaringly non-leftist work considered in this study, adopts a similar moral stance against consumerism, finding in the world of "soap and mattresses, . . . Coca-Cola, strip mines, snowmobiles [and] underarm deodorants" (Gardner, October 9) the stuff of "the Devil's visions," which are "all dazzle and no lift, mere counterfeit escape, the lightness of a puffball–flesh without nutrients–the lightness of a fart, a tale without substance, escape from the world of hard troubles" (12). As it slips into its decidedly conservative trajectory, though, pining for an America less troubled by feminists, gays, blacks, and the mass media that have promoted their agendas, October Light, like American Psycho, indicates the naïvete of any cultural critique, right- or left-wing, hoping for an unproblematic reversal of current cultural trends or a return to a simpler, more Thorouean America.

"Whenever the right and the left agree," Susan Willis has written, "on some proposition about culture, I know it's time to grab my raincoat; and so it is with the incessant demonizing of popular culture and media" (Willis 19). Echoing her sentiment, my reading of Ellis and Gardner, two relentlessly essentialist thinkers who, like Jameson, cast contemporary capitalism in terms too reductive, often sympathizes with their assertions about the violence done to us by corporate consumerism but ultimately looks ahead to other authors who offer more temperate modes of dissent better suited to their cultural era.
 

Obliterating the Rationality of Capital: The Postmodernist Critiques of Baudrillard and Lyotard

Standing in sharp opposition to Jameson's call for a reinvigoration of the traditional left is "the Post," as Dick Hebdige slyly calls it, or the conglomeration of theoretical strategies falling under the rubric of "postmodernism" (Hebdige, Hiding 209). I want to draw a distinction here between such postmodernist strategies and the poststructuralist ones we will consider later, and I would refer to Niall Lucy's useful and concise explanation of the difference. "For poststructuralism," Lucy says,

the concept of structure always already contains sufficient ‘give’ (or ‘tolerance’) to provide a little room for manouevre, while for postmodernism a concept of structure as fully closed and present to itself is an essential requirement for the concept of a playfully open and unruly (or ‘structureless’) structure. (Lucy 102)

Such poststructuralist notions we can examine later. Right now we should examine some postmodernist ones, i.e. those aiming to obliterate structured, rational ways of thinking. We can start with those of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard.  The "structured" mode of thought Baudrillard is most interested in indicting and dismantling is Marxism, though not because he is unsympathetic to its progressive social agenda. Rather, he intuits that it is not radical enough, simply reinforcing as it does the same "political economy" that feeds the capitalist power structure it would hope to overturn. In his first watershed work, "For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign" (1972), Baudrillard suggests that the philosophical precepts governing capitalism are essentially (and damningly) the same as those governing Marxism, though he makes a brief foray into structuralist terminology to make this point. His belief is expressed most succinctly in this diagram:

     EV           Sr
     -----   =   -----
     UV          Sd   (Baudrillard, "Critique" 70)

It indicates that two concepts culled from Marxist thought–those of exchange value (EV) and use value (UV)–have the exact same relationship to each other as two other concepts from structuralist thought: the signifier (Sr) and signified (Sd).

Though he is ultimately a postmodernist, Baudrillard accepts the poststructuralist hypothesis that the connection between the signifier (a word or symbol) and the signified (the thing or concept it names) is not natural or a priori but only arbitrary and conventional. Any belief, then, that the signifier "boat," for instance, could refer unproblematically to a "real" thing floating in the water, or could be its meaningful equivalent, is symptomatic of a philosophical naïvete Baudrillard refers to disdainfully as "magic" (79). For a poststructuralist, there is no "real" boat existing beyond the language that names it, thus there is no such thing, really, as a "signified." There is simply an endless parade of totally ungrounded signifiers that possess the illusion of meaningfulness only by virtue, again, of their difference from one another. Any assertion of the existence of "real" signifieds that language simply points to is mere hocus-pocus, or "magic."

The problem, Baudrillard insists, is that Marxism itself subscribes to just this sort of magical thinking. What old-fashioned, Saussurean structuralists once sought in the signified (stability, meaning, and insurance against the threat of indeterminance), Marxists have always sought in the notion of use value, or the innate, ostensibly recoverable usefulness of a thing before its reification by capitalism. As structuralists use their concept to wage war on the signifier, which is by nature slippery, evasive, and dangerously relativistic, so Marxists deploy use value to combat an opposing exchange value, the diabolical system instituted by capitalism to render, by the intercession of money, wholly dissimilar goods equivalent (a car becomes the same as a year of college tuition, which becomes, insidiously, the same as a certain number of hours of human labor). Since capitalism itself, though, is no less dependent on use value as an "alibi" (76) than Marxism (capitalist subjects must believe a car has intrinsic usefulness if they will want to exchange their labor for it), the latter, by advocating a recovery of use value, is only bolstering the same philosophical system it purports to disrupt: "the two scriptures" of Marxism and bourgeois capitalism, Baudrillard insists, "rejoin in the same magical thinking" (77-78). Both modes of thought, he argues, are fallaciously invested in notions of the real, or in metaphysical absolutes that, while purporting to supply fundamental, anchoring truths for various philosophies, really just "reduce and abstract" wholly "symbolic material into a form" (77). This belief in the real, he says, is the pervasive "ideology" (77) against which political radicals ought to be struggling, not some Marxist notion of ideology as a perversion of reality, the same reality capitalism itself posits.

Whatever affinities with poststructuralism Baudrillard may have end here, though, for rather than advocating strategic or self-conscious practices within Marxist or capitalist systems of thought, Baudrillard instead proposes their obliteration and replacement by new, postmodern ways of thinking that entirely eschew the ideological poison of the real. Two important works from the mid-1980s, "Fatal Strategies" (1983) and "The Masses" (1985), illustrate this. They also offer up a startling new mode of dissent in which no revolutionary Marxist could ever find solace, proposing as they do that the best type of resistance is actually total compliance.

This strange turn is announced in "Fatal Strategies," where Baudrillard proclaims his distaste for all "banal" theories, or those in which "the subject always believes itself to be more clever than the object" (Baudrillard, "Fatal" 198). Any time a rational "subject" presumes its ability to know or master the object it studies, it depends on notions of the real, the true, or the absolute, since its goal is to discern these things in the object it examines. What Baudrillard champions instead, then, are "fatal" strategies, or those in which "the object is always taken to be more clever, more cynical, more ingenious than the subject, which it awaits at every turn" (198). Once we recognize that the "object" of any inquiry is endlessly slippery and fundamentally unmasterable because it exists only in discourse, never in an unproblematic, blithely signified "reality," all notions of the real Baudrillard deplores as dangerous ideology are rendered untenable. It is, then, the real itself for which "fatal" strategies, those disdainful of the subject's ability to know, are fatal.

Baudrillard's advocacy of object-centered strategies is cast in slightly more practical terms in "The Masses," where he refutes Adornean Marxism’s take on the "forced silence of the masses in the mass media" as "a sign of passivity and of alienation," seeing it instead as "an original strategy" on the part of those masses, or "an original response in the form of a challenge" (Baudrillard, "Masses" 208). When, for instance, in the case of opinion polls, those questioned (the "objects" of the study) mindlessly say what they are supposed to say, following the trends, letting the terms of the poll dictate their responses for them, they are actually waging war against the ideology of the real. Insofar as their responses are ingenuine and inauthentic, the opposite of real, the masses are sabotaging the "banal" theories and institutions that presume to study them, know them, and disclose to them the "truth" about themselves. Such strategies of the object are "evil," Baudrillard says (though this is hardly a pejorative term in his vocabulary), because they involve an "abduction, rape, concealment and ironic corruption of [a] symbolic order" predicated on truth and reality ("Fatal" 199). Such long-overlooked strategies are indigenous to "mass" culture, where the modern proletariat have innumerable opportunities to refuse subjectivity by immersing themselves in images and simulacra that are themselves sites of the real's obliteration, or harbingers of the "hyperreal" (Baudrillard, "Simulacra" 167). By exercising their drive toward "unconsciousness," as Baudrillard calls it, or the "expulsion of all powers, of all wills, of all knowledge, of all meaning" ("Masses" 217), the masses "turn themselves into an impenetrable and meaningless surface" (213) that loses all connection to the real.

What is important is that such strategies of the object represent a "fatal" endgame for Western rationality, which is predicated upon a subject/object dichotomy wrecked whenever subject positions are refused. Louis Althusser wrote in 1972 that "there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects" (Althusser 244), a proposition Baudrillard essentially accepts, insisting that the oppressive "real" from which all ideology springs cannot be sustained without knowing "subjects" to identify and study it. The intellectual space we enter by refusing subjectivity is "postmodern" because, again, it does not continue, revise, or appropriate Enlightenment-era modes of rationality so much as obliterate and replace them with a new philosophy not even entirely conceivable in those older terms.

This same desire for a new, anti-rational philosophy disruptive of both traditional Marxism and the power structure it indicts also informs the work of Jean-François Lyotard, another French theorist. While Baudrillard advances a politics of super-complicit "objectness," though, Lyotard proposes (perhaps more encouragingly) a rigorous and active mode of thought that simply refuses the many injunctions to conclusiveness and judiciousness he believes poison Western rationality, always giving it a fascistic bent. Power, he says in The Postmodern Condition (1979), has always advanced itself by the imposition of "consensus" (60), or the forcing of one standard or rule of procedure upon disparate phenomena only made, in this way, to seem reconcilable and unified. Wherever we look, "the decision makers," as he calls those in power in every cultural field, are "following a logic which implies that [the culture's] elements are commensurable and that the whole is determinable": They inflict order and deny heterogeneity in all matters so they can "optimiz[e] the system's performance-efficiency" and so legitimate their own hegemony (Lyotard, Condition xxiv). On a practical level, this means the ideas and values of some cultures, races, or political parties are devalued, ignored, or eradicated in the interests of more powerful or dominant ones. Rather than respecting "differends," as Lyotard calls them, or "case[s] of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments" (Lyotard, Differend xi), power always aims to resolve them, absorbing and defanging what is intrinsically different that could otherwise constitute a threat to its own efficiency.

Acquiring indecisiveness and inefficiency, then, is the remedy for fascistic thought Lyotard advocates. This solution may not be as radical as Baudrillard's: Lyotard, after all, is not as interested in decimating the mechanisms of Western philosophy as he is in "sav[ing] the honor of thinking" (Differend xii, emphasis mine). It does, though, still strike at the heart of all those scientistic, Enlightenment-derived philosophical systems that aim to apprehend, taxonomize, and ultimately know the truth. "Reflection," or the type of thinking Lyotard champions, which can occur only when "you don't already know what's happening" (xv), is precisely what Western institutions of power cannot tolerate. Thus Lyotard offers his own book, The Differend (1983), as a "reflective" work (xiv) , or a non-sequential, non-goal-oriented "pile of phrases" he readily admits is "too voluminous, too long, and too difficult" (xv). The many "decision makers" in the industrial and economic world will find his project "'good for nothing,'" he warns, because it will not help them to "gain time" (xv). Offering no salable conclusions, no judicious resolutions to any pressing debates, the book constitutes an "ultimate resistance" to the "accountable or countable use of time" upon which power always depends (xvi). Preserving the sanctity of differends, his philosophy is postmodernist in its disregard for the traditional goals of rationality–answers, mastery, and consensus. And the "reflective" knowledge it substitutes for these "is not simply a tool of the authorities," he insists, because "it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable" (Condition xxv).

Like Jameson, Baudrillard and Lyotard have philosophical compatriots, most notably the psychoanalytic revisionists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Their advocacy of "schizoanalysis," which combats an oppressively structured and institutionalized psychoanalysis, is instrumental to my reading of Mark Leyner's Et Tu, Babe, which, like Deleuze and Guattari's own Anti-Oedipus, celebrates the evolution of a new, unruly, "unorganized" subject no longer susceptible to the effects of rationalized power. Despite the Deleuzean, postmodernist quality of his vision, though, Leyner ultimately belongs in a poststructuralist camp, for reasons I will explore later. It falls to my analysis of Don DeLillo's White Noise (1985), which concludes this study, to show how Baudrillard and Lyotard's postmodernist dissent can be realized in fictive form. While both of these theorists' ideas are useful to understanding White Noise, though, DeLillo finally emerges as a more Lyotardian thinker. Obsessed as his novel is with the implications of Baudrillard's strategies of the object, with their potential for helping us evade the death inherent in technology and consumer culture, what fascinates DeLillo most is the absolute difference (or "differend") between "object-" and "subjectness", as I call them. Meditating at length on the merits of the subject's desire to know and master its environs, as well as on the object's expulsion of every will to knowledge and power, White Noise ultimately refuses to choose between their unreconcilable strategies, declining to tell us which offers the better or wiser mode of dissent in a late-capitalist culture. Like Lyotard, DeLillo is interested only in reflective philosophy, the sort that never ends, that reaches no marketable conclusions, and so opposes the workings of power contained in economic rationality.
 

Capital as Untranscendable Metaphysics: The Poststructuralist Resistance of Spivak and de Certeau

there is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We have no language – no syntax and no lexicon – which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest. (Derrida, "Structure" 280-81)

Again, though, admitting the metaphysical enclosure's untranscendability is not tantamount to complying with the fascism it can engender. It only means effective critiques will have to be mounted from within that enclosure, using the vocabulary it provides, which, while susceptible to use by fascistic or domineering social institutions, can never be their sole property. "The practitioner of [poststructuralism]," Jonathan Culler writes, "works within the terms of the system but in order to breach it" (Culler 86), and this is precisely the understanding of dissent inhered in the next two cultural critics we can briefly consider, Gayatri Spivak and Michel de Certeau.

Spivak, a dedicated student and advocate of "subaltern" cultures, has made plain her own distaste for postmodernist thought, or "anti-universalism," as she calls it in one notable interview.  The "great custodians of the anti-universal," she says, who constantly chase after some impossible "theoretical purity," are always "obliged . . . simply to act in the interest of a great narrative, the narrative of exploitation, while they keep themselves clean by not committing themselves to anything" (Spivak 12).  Here is another indictment of Lyotard, Baudrillard, and their ilk, who only perpetuate violence and "exploitation" in the world, Spivak would argue, by refusing to "judge" anything, or, worse still, by advocating passivity and compliance in the name of some abstract, philosophical subversion.  Asked in the same interview "how [one] can use" such concepts as "universalism, essentialism, etc., strategically, without necessarily making an overall commitment" to them, Spivak responds in good poststructuralist fashion, saying "you are committed to these concepts, whether you acknowledge it or not" (11).  The trick, as it were, is to always bear in mind that any essentialist "truth" (the violence of patriarchy, for instance, or the oppressiveness of consumer culture) is necessarily contextual and constructed, not fundamentally true, and may thus, in certain situations, become counter-productive or worthy of abandonment.

This does not mean, however, that we should ever shy away from invoking truths or making judgments, as Baudrillard or Lyotard would have us do. It only indicates we should use essentialist truths "strategically," as Spivak says, "situat[ing] [them] at the moment," always being "vigilant about our own practice and use of [them] as much as we can rather than mak[ing] the totally counter-productive gesture of repudiating [them]" (11). This does not mean either, though, that Spivak would necessarily condone Jameson's brand of essentialism, since his insistence that "every position on postmodernism in culture is . . . necessarily a . . . stance on the nature of multinational capitalism" is certainly too monolithic, too unbending, requiring that every cultural phenomenon be understood in terms of one (and only one) panacean truth.

Michel de Certeau, another French philosopher, also demonstrates a poststructuralist, work-from-within sensibility as he theorizes "the practice of everyday life," the title of his 1984 volume examining how consumers "poach in countless ways on the property of others" to defy social institutions that might otherwise seem unbearably constraining (de Certeau xii). What he is reacting against is an overly reductive (or overly essentialist) assessment of mass culture popularized by the Frankfurt School earlier in the century, which holds the "culture industry's" products to be nothing but an "efficient weapon of cultural conditioning, whereby capitalists are able to regiment mass consciousness toward a society of compliant citizens, workers and consumers" (Lazere 7). Surveying the consumer marketplace some thirty years after the likes of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, de Certeau finds such grim, Orwellian proclamations unwarranted. Though corporations, governments, and capitalist social institutions may indeed want to condition us to be good, productive, uncritical consumers, their ponderous and officious "strategies," as de Certeau calls them (36), are never entirely immune to consumer "tactics" (37), or less systematic, more spontaneous acts of defiance that "mak[e] use of the elements of the [strategic] terrain" (34) and exist as "maneuver[s] ‘within the enemy’s field of vision’ . . . and within enemy territory" (37). We need only look to the punk or hip-hop movements for examples of such tactics, both of which are highly adept at pilfering commodities from mainstream consumer culture and "‘tearing’ or disfigur[ing]" them, as John Fiske would put it (Fiske 15), to make them reflect new, sometimes intensely critical sensibilities.

What must be noted is that de Certeau does not celebrate appropriational consumer tactics only because capitalist culture is not as evil as older, hard-line Marxists imagined. Rather, he celebrates them because there are no longer reasonable alternatives to the consumer capitalism within which they operate. The type of tactic he describes may be "an art of the weak" (37) and a tool of the "marginalized" (xvii), but that marginalization, defined by the all-but inescapable activity of consumption (even those in the culture industry consume their own products), is so "massive and pervasive" that it is "becoming universal" (xvii). In a moment of insight echoing Jameson's realization that all "critical distance" is abolished by late capitalism, de Certeau tells us the consumer culture we live in is "too constraining for [us] ever to be able to escape from it and go into exile elsewhere"; in fact "there is no longer an elsewhere" (40, emphasis mine). Consumerism has become, in short, just as inescapable and untranscendable as the "metaphysics of presence" we have heard Landry and Maclean, Derrida, and Spivak describe. It becomes analogous to language itself – something that cannot be critiqued without being employed.  In being so transformed, though, capitalism also loses its capacity for singularity of intent, since any "closed" system, returning to Niall Lucy's words, "always already contains sufficient ‘give’ (or ‘tolerance’) to provide a little room for manouevre." The upbeat inverse, then, of de Certeau's proclamation that capitalism is "too constraining" for escape is that it is also, as he says, "too vast to be able to fix [us] in one space" (de Certeau 40), a fact to which our daily tactical appropriations of its "vocabulary" attest.

Two chapters in this study examine novels pursuing just such "poststructuralist" modes of dissent. The first is on Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (1990), which meditates on the collapse of the 1960s New Left and its surviving members' persecution, in the 1980s, by right-wing forces associated with Reaganism. While it insists on one hand that all contemporary political discourses, radical or conservative, are caught up in a swirl of media images that only demonstrate how removed from any sort of fundamental "reality" they are, Vineland also tells us the loss of the real is no excuse for indecisiveness or apathy, since reality’s effects, at least, continue unabated, with "real" people (even if that word must now be set in quotes) suffering the "real" consequences of "real" political policies. In this it accords, I argue, with the "strategic essentialism" of Gayatri Spivak, who insists, we know, that contentious practices must continue despite their problematic "essentialist" underpinnings, since nothing transpires in the world that does not depend on them anyway.

The second chapter, on Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country (1985) and Mark Leyner's Et Tu, Babe (1992), charts these novels' assertions of the potential subversiveness of consumer appropriations. Like de Certeau, Mason and Leyner indicate that consumer capitalism is "too constraining for [us] ever to be able to escape from it and go into exile elsewhere." Also like him, though, they find that dissent is not contingent upon escape and that contentious political consciousnesses can be forged within the consumer marketplace, using the very goods it provides. Mason's protagonist, the eighteen year-old Sam Hughes, uses such media offerings as MTV videos, Bruce Springsteen records, and the sitcom M*A*S*H to sharpen her own understanding of Vietnam, which culminates in her realization that it "‘was a stupid war'" in which "‘fifty-eight thousand guys . . . all died for nothing’" (Mason 197). Leyner's protagonist -- a comedically egomaniacal, hypertrophied version of the author himself -- uses the corporate media that hound and adore him to become what Deleuze and Guattari would call a "body without organs," that is, an unorganized self so nomadic, so dispersed through the networks and channels of consumerism, that it becomes wildly insusceptible to policing or control of any sort. It is, then, the fictional (and real) Leyner's appropriation of television, advertising, and publishing, plus his willingness to immerse himself in the system of consumer capitalism, that prompts me to put Et Tu, Babe in a poststructuralist camp, rather than including it, for its fascination with an anti-rational subjectivity with no respect for space, time, or bourgeois decorum, in a postmodernist one. Proving that consumerism's technological trappings can be used as easily for liberation and disappearance from power as for indoctrination and control, Leyner provides us a model for escape within, rather than from, the "metaphysical enclosure" of late capitalism.
 

Opposing Views and Reservations

"resolve" the problem of being trapped in the televisual aura the same way French poststructuralists "resolve" their being enmeshed in the logos. We can solve the problem by celebrating it. Transcend feelings of mass-defined angst by genuflecting to them. We can be reverently ironic. (Wallace 189-90).

If Wallace lambasts such poststructuralist, trapped-with-the-logos "irony," Richard Rorty, in his 1998 volume Achieving Our Country, is no less sparing of postmodernist pursuits of non-essentialism and radical alterity. "Paradoxically," he notes, "the leftists who are most concerned not to 'totalize,' and who insist that everything be seen as the play of discursive differences rather than in the old metaphysics-of-presence way, are also the most eager to theorize, to become spectators rather than agents" (Rorty 36, emphasis mine). If, as he fears, a "contemporary American student may well emerge from college less convinced that her country has a future than when she entered" (10-11), or if a "spirit of detached spectatorship, and [an] inability to think of American citizenship as an opportunity for action, . . . enter[s] such a student's soul" (11), it will surely, Rorty believes, owe in large part to the spirit of capitulation and indecisiveness promulgated by such postmodernist philosophers as Baudrillard and Lyotard, and by the artists and professors who have popularized their thinking. For him, postmodernist thought is the fast track to "an America haunted by ubiquitous specters, the most frightening of which is called 'power.'  This is the name of what [Mark] Edmundson calls Foucault's 'haunting agency, which is everywhere and nowhere, as evanescent and insistent as a resourceful spook.'" (94)

The only political left possible in such a "spook-infested" world, Rorty believes, is a "spectatorial, disgusted, mocking Left rather than a Left which dreams of achieving our country" (35). If in the past, he says, an "intellectual stepped back from his or her country's history and looked at it through skeptical eyes," it surely meant "he or she was about to propose a new political initiative" (9). For postmodernists, though, there can be no new initiatives, since these would necessitate more of the power-infected rationality they can observe, denounce, and "mock" but never effectively replace.

These are formidable complaints Wallace and Rorty lodge, and it is not difficult to see their relevance to the authors this study generally lauds. Thomas Pynchon and Mark Leyner seem particularly vulnerable to Wallace's accusations of impotent ironicism (Leyner, in fact, becomes a whipping boy for Wallace), [3] as both their novels nod and wink their way through countless pop-culture allusions in a way wholly familiar from such mainstream corporate fare as, say, The Late Show with David Letterman. Wallace, however, makes what is essentially a category mistake by denouncing such techniques, for Pynchon and Leyner, unlike him, are clearly not interested in "constructing [some]thing to replace the hypocrisies [they] debunk." Their ambition is only to make more tolerable, more humane and liveable, the consumerized, image-laden culture they (as Wallace rightly asserts) hold to be untranscendable. That they share an ironic posture they believe can help them do this with many "Culture Trust" products is not proof of that posture's ineffectiveness. As a rhetorical device, or a general mode of expression, Wallace's "irony" is clearly far too general – too much a part of the basic structure of language's "metaphysical enclosure" – to be indentured to any one ideology. No doubt it can be used, as Wallace insists, to "norm" corporate interests, or to engender in TV viewers "a pose of passive reception to escape, comfort, [and] reassurance" via a "cycle [that] is self-nourishing" (Wallace 165). That this student's critical abilities, though, have only been strengthened for exposure to Pynchon and Leyner – that their novels have made this writer warier of consumerism's machinations, if less inclined to fantasize "escape" from them – testifies that irony can be just as adept at indicting power as insulating it.

As Wallace's grievances seem tailored to Pynchon and Leyner, so Rorty's seem aimed directly at DeLillo. White Noise, after all, appears content to chart the creeping terrors of technological consumerism without offering any remotely practical means for resisting them, becoming distracted instead by the unresolvability of the debate between the strategies of the subject and object that could oppose them. It thus seems guilty of just the sort of hopeless "spectatorship" Rorty abhors in the postmodernist left. In fact my own sympathies with his misgivings lead me to make a rather lukewarm endorsement of DeLillo's Lyotardian epistemology, limiting its usefulness to its inclusion in a broader arsenal of oppositional strategies permitting the more decisive interventions of, for instance, Pynchon or Mason. While these latter authors may posit the inescapability of capitalist consumerism, they still let us know in no uncertain terms that some wars it wages and some political factions it harbors are unjust, cruel, and must be moved against. DeLillo's reflectional indecisiveness, or his respect for "differends," can deliver no such aid to the oppressed. This does not mean, however, that it cannot represent an honorable final goal for leftist politics, promising as it does to defuse the impetus toward mastery and control that engenders all fascism in the first place, and it is a final goal that deserves to be kept in view at all times. But in the meantime, it is true, we cannot afford to be done with writers and thinkers who still encourage the cautiously "essentialist" judgements between right and wrong, truth and falsity, that are our only means to a more humane world.

While I do not, then, share Rorty's disdain for the postmodernist left, believing we can subscribe to more than one modus operandi at a time, I do agree with him entirely when he says "the Left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy" as was its "business . . . during the first two-thirds of the century" (Rorty 105, emphasis mine). If, as in Pynchon, Mason, Leyner, and de Certeau's estimation, consumer capitalism is now so pervasive that it is conflated with the "metaphysical enclosure" itself, and if, as poststructuralists teach us, that untranscendable enclosure is open to a whole array of positions, convictions, and agendas, then the project of dismantling capitalism is not only potentially impossible but wholly unnecessary. Late capitalism is injurious to many of its subjects not because it is, as in an orthodox Marxist formulation, intrinsically exploitative or inhumane, an ideological perversion, via the intervention of "exchange value," of the realm of authentic "use value" to which we must struggle to return. It is injurious, rather, because the political left that would oppose its wrongdoings has too long been reluctant to speak within capitalism's own venue, or to appropriate for its own interests the resources capitalism itself offers.

And the need for such opposition, as Rorty himself so forcefully argues, is not diminished by capitalism's increasingly thorough triumph over the planet, or by the often remarkable blessings it bestows. With the stock market, at the time of this writing, setting record highs, unemployment at record lows, and consumer confidence soaring, we are easily distracted from the fact that one half of one percent of Americans, in 1986, owned 35.1 percent of the nation's wealth (Mantsios 335), that  black Americans are still three times more likely to live in poverty than white Americans (347), and that the U.S.'s middle class, thanks to the efforts of "lobbyists, special-interest groups, executives of multi-national corporations, bankers, economists, think-tank strategists and the wheelers and dealers of Wall Street," is shrinking at an alarming rate, leaving us ready "to enter the 21st century much the same way [we] left the 19th century: with a two-class society" (Barlett and Steele 357). Clearly all is not as well with America as anyone judging by the bliss of sitcom families, the pervasiveness of shopping malls, or the speed and ease with which we buy gasoline might be inclined to believe. If this study focuses on writers more interested in mass culture than in the class issues that may seem central to contemporary America's problems, it is not just because there is a relative paucity of contemporary literature dealing with that all-but taboo subject. [4] It is also because it adheres, albeit provisionally, to Theodor Adorno's supposition that mass culture is what sells and normalizes capitalist ideology, "mummifying the world" with its "priestly hieroglyphic script" "address[ed] . . . to those who have been subjugated" (Adorno, "Schema" 80). As late capitalism's most proficient agent – the force preventing our recognition of class issues, reassuring us ceaselessly that all is well, that we are blessed with technologies and goods that are the envy of the world – mass culture deserves special attention. In the novels examined here, it receives it. And in the best of these, it is addressed with a sophistication far outstripping the more naïve, less compromising dissent of the past.

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CHAPTER ONE

"The Devil’s Visions": Postmodernism Homeopathic and Accidental in John Gardner’s October Light and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho

Everything decent, James Page believed, supported the struggle upward, gave strength to the battle against gravity. And all things foul gave support not to gravity–there was nothing inherently evil in stone or a holstein bull–but to the illusion of freedom and ascent. The devil’s visions were all dazzle and no lift, mere counterfeit escape, the lightness of a puffball–flesh without nutrients–the lightness of a fart, a tale without substance, escape from the world of hard troubles and grief in a spaceship.

–October Light (12)

...where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. . . . This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, or receiving another person’s love or kindness. . . . Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in...this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged...

        –American Psycho (374-75)

in fact generate two very different ways of conceptualizing the phenomenon as a whole: on the one hand, moral judgments (about which it is indifferent whether they are positive or negative), and, on the other, a genuinely dialectical attempt to think our present of time in History. (46)

Clearly the authors we will consider later in this study – Pynchon, Mason, Leyner, and DeLillo – share Jameson’s understanding of postmodernism as a "cultural dominant" rather than a simple aesthetic "option." Pynchon’s tainting of "real" history with the conventions of television and cinema; Leyner’s fleecing of literary realism to create a new, "schizophrenic" subjectivity; Mason’s purposefully shallow, superficial, "televisual" prose; DeLillo’s self-conscious drifting into and out of various genres: These all accept and use postmodern stylistic techniques that entail a renunciation of "any transcendental or absolute perspective on reality" Paul Maltby tells us is a hallmark of postmodern artistry (Maltby 5). One senses, though, that Pynchon and company have been as much chosen by this style as they have chosen it, as their formal techniques do not imply blithely accepting or rejecting the irrelevant moral positions Jameson describes. Instead, as we will see, they are enlisted in assessments of postmodern culture both celebratory and condemnatory. For them, postmodernism is a complex issue that must be dealt with in the "dialectical" fashion Jameson describes. Their prose styles reflect his hope that we might "somehow . . . lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand . . . capitalism [as] at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst" (47). [1]

I would like to examine here two novels–John Gardner’s October Light (1976) and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991)–that differ from those other works by committing precisely the "category mistake" Jameson describes. Of course my pairing of these books may suggest I have made a fairly wild "category mistake" of my own: October Light, after all, is a deeply and purposefully "wholesome" novel embodying the criteria for responsible art Gardner would later spell out in On Moral Fiction (1978). Conversely, the controversial and gruesome American Psycho has been denounced as "base, mysogynistic and dangerous" (Plagens 58) and as "exploitative, sensationalistic junk" (Kennedy 426). Not even a less impetuous reading of Ellis’s book – one discerning the deeply moral message under all the gore – will bridge the gap between the novels, since Ellis’s emerges in this case as conventionally leftist, a hate letter addressed to American corporate culture, while Gardner’s remains faithful to a fundamentally conservative vision, upholding many of the common-sense "Truths" American corporatism has always propogated. [2]  What does bridge the gap between them (and what, from a Jamesonean perspective, brands them both "sinful") is their mutual dismissal of cultural and aesthetic postmodernism as a deliberate and immoral choice by those who endorse it. Several other traits they share include 1) a targeting of late-capitalist mass culture as a primary instigator of the postmodern attitudes they deplore, 2) a tendency toward a distinctively American mode of morality with roots in the Puritan tradition, and 3) a "homeopathic" use of postmodern aesthetic conventions. These traits provide, respectively, a cause of postmodernism (mass culture), an ethics for attacking it (old-fashioned American morality), and a strategy for exposing it as a morally subversive force (the ironic enactment of its diseased aesthetic).

Gardner and Ellis’s preoccupation with mass culture (their "cause" of postmodern attitudes) is what links them most directly to the other authors in this study. Like Pynchon, Mason, Leyner, and DeLillo, they find in mass culture proof of our now-total immersion in postmodern late capitalism. They simply devise very different ways of critiquing and defying that power structure. Pynchon and the others find in the subject of mass culture a chance to wrestle with the dilemma John McGowan tells us all postmodernists confront: the "simultaneous fear that a monolithic social order shapes contemporary life and [the] hope that a strategy for preserving pluralism (difference) can be found" (McGowan x). For Pynchon, Mason, and Leyner, at least, [3] consumer images and simulations offer both the "monolithic social order" – "capitalism itself," in this case, which is "utterly triumphant in the West" (McGowan 13) – and the raw material for such new methods of "preserv[ing] pluralism" as a philosophical "strategic essentialism" (Pynchon), a pitting of consumer "tactics" against corporate "strategies" (Mason), and the construction of a schizophrenic, "molecular" subjectivity that can defy rational, "molar" institutions (Leyner).  These new methods, to borrow some words from Linda Hutcheon, all share an awareness that they "cannot escape implication in the economic (late capitalist) and ideological . . . dominants of [their] time. . . . All [they] can do is question from within" (Hutcheon xiii, emphasis mine).

Gardner and Ellis’s very different strategy is to simply renounce mass culture – an inadequate course of action, I argue, not only because it fails to deal with McGowan’s "monolith" but because it makes Jameson’s "category mistake" of understanding postmodernism as one "style among many others available" rather than as a "cultural dominant" to be dealt with from "within." They conceive mass culture very differently from Pynchon, Mason, Leyner, and DeLillo, who are all content to work from within its spaces because they hold its images and simulacra to be, ultimately, ungrounded, or non-referential, and thus able to be manipulated and reconfigured in politically constructive ways. Gardner and Ellis, who are both essentialist thinkers, see this ungroundedness as precisely the problem. While they fully recognize mass culture to be postmodern, postmodernism is for them immoral. For the same reason Jean Baudrillard, who champions it, calls it "Evil" (it refuses ontological and epistemological groundings, making a perversion of the Real and True [4]), Gardner and Ellis counter it with an essentialist, fundamental, moral Truth with affinities to the American Puritan tradition Sacvan Bercovitch describes in The American Jeremiad (1978).

The jeremiad, or the Puritan "political sermon" (10) developed in America by the likes of John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, and Samuel Danforth, was intended to foster in the Puritans both a sense of dread regarding their own moral laxity and reassurance that they were God’s chosen people, their mission into the American wilderness sanctioned by Him and predestined for glorious success. It was, Bercovitch explains,

the ritual of a culture on an errand–which is to say, a culture based on a faith in process. Substituting teleology for hierarchy, it discarded the Old World ideal of stasis for a New World vision of the future. . . . Crisis was the social norm it sought to inculcate. The very concept of errand, after all, implied a state of unfulfillment. The future, though divinely assured, was never quite there, and New England’s Jeremiahs set out to provide the sense of insecurity that would ensure the outcome. (23)

Now part of the American myth, the jeremiad still works to "[reaffirm] America’s mission" (11), and its influence is writ large on both October Light and American Psycho. These novels strive, like the Puritan sermons of old, to "inculcate crisis" as a "social norm" and to reaffirm our American "teleological" sensibility, our belief in an imminent, better, and holier future. When he insists that "we have paid dearly for our nostalgia for the all and the one, for a reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, for a transparent and communicable experience," theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard indicates the postmodernist’s distaste for such visions, which all mask, in his estimation, some horrible collective "desire to reinstitute terror" (Lyotard, Explained 16), or to inflict on the world an orderliness that must eventually turn destructive. Yet Gardner and Ellis both pine for just this sort of "transparent and communicable experience." Under moral pretenses, they push us to believe we either can or should at least try to return to an American Eden free of mass culture’s perversions of the good and fundamentally Real. Thoreau, their distant American relative (along with the Puritans), enjoins us to "front only the essential facts of life" (Thoreau 1542). His paranoid conviction that "wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions" (1583) echoes clearly in the fictions of Gardner and Ellis.

We might expect these two, as antagonists of the postmodern, to adopt conventionally "realistic" styles, the sort based in a "faith in absolute mathematical time and space, in causality, in objectivity and certainty" (Strehle 15). Curiously, they do not. While October Light and American Psycho are not postmodern in the deeper historical and "dialectical" sense Jameson advocates, they are thoroughly postmodern in the simpler stylistic sense he downplays–as much so, in fact, as any of the other novels to be considered in this study. Gardner and Ellis employ the same postmodern metatextual techniques other contemporary authors (Barth, Coover, Atwood, and Barthelme, in addition to those in this study) generally use to "[renounce] claims to any transcendental or absolute perspective on reality," as Maltby explains. "In a postmodern culture," he continues, "art is no longer privileged as a source of truth; like all discourses, it is understood to constitute its object of study" (Maltby 5). The self-referential metatext, drawing attention to its own discursiveness, denies the possibility of any essential reality pre-existing language and radically disrupts notions of fundamental, natural Truth.

Such beliefs cannot sit easily with Gardner and Ellis. And indeed their postmodern formal techniques are homeopathic by design, intended to expose postmodernism’s immorality by enacting it. I have borrowed the term "homeopathic" from Marcel Cornis-Pope, who, in an explication of literary modernism, points out two major tactics that movement’s authors employed for critiquing their own increasingly mechanized, rationalized, alienating culture. The "utopian" one "[sought] spiritual enlightenment and wholeness against the fragmentation and divisiveness of modern life," while the "homeopathic" one "combated middle-class philistinism and dehumanization through deliberate adoption of alienated and artificial artistic forms" (Cornis-Pope 722). William Carlos Williams’s imagist poems, which aimed to instantiate "wholeness" by obliterating the difference between language and its referent, illustrate the utopian tendency. The "Newsreel" and "Camera Eye" segments of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A., conversely, which adopt the disorienting, fragmentary techniques of the new mass media in order to expose their capacity for disorientation, might demonstrate the homeopathic one.

Cornis-Pope’s utopian mode does not translate easily to the postmodern era; thus I would not suggest that Pynchon, Mason, Leyner, and DeLillo, despite the opposition I have set up between them and Gardner and Ellis, are "utopian" postmodernists. Dick Hebdige points out that essentialist notions of "utopia" are, like those of "totalization" and "teleology," anathema to postmodernists (Hebdige, Hiding 196), and William Carlos Williams’s urge to close the fissure between reality and representation has little to do with postmodern attempts to bracket off reality entirely. Homeopathy, however, or the "deliberate adoption" of what Gardner and Ellis, at least, take to be an "alienated and artificial artistic form," describes October Light and American Psycho’s appropriation of postmodern stylistics as perfectly as it does Dos Passos’s use of media techniques. These novels intend to demonstrate the poverty of the postmodern aesthetic, as well as its potentially grave consequences for our culture, by enacting it. Their techniques differ, though. While Ellis posits a simple, almost causal relation between the degenerate consumer culture he surveys and the metatextual techniques he uses, Gardner uses a more complex novel-within-the-novel format that, while intended to satirize postmodern aesthetics (the framed novel is instrumental), winds up exposing its own ostensibly unreproachable moral convictions as mere "constructions."

Gardner and Ellis both reject postmodernism as a misguided style, or as an irresponsible habit of thought we might simply train ourselves out of. Their homeopathic use of that style, however, leaves them defining themselves in its terms. In this way their own implication in the "other" postmodernism they refuse to acknowledge–the morally neutral "cultural dominant" that shapes every discourse forged within it–is "accidentally" exposed, along with the inadequacy of their method. This ineluctable, historical postmodernism haunts their novels like the return of the repressed in a psychoanalytic schema or the "trace" of the subordinated term in a deconstructive one. Christopher Norris tells us that "there is no language so vigilant or self-aware that it can effectively escape the conditions placed upon thought by its own prehistory and ruling metaphysic" (Norris 22), and this Gardner and Ellis demonstrate with their own unsuccessful attempts to disregard the postmodern "ruling metaphysic." This "category mistake," though, is interesting and informative, deserving attention because a) it is prevalent, for the term "postmodern" is often used to describe nothing more than the way a text looks or sounds; b) it helps us appreciate more authentically postmodern and "dialectical" works such as those we will examine later; and c) it strengthens a theoretical position of this study: that traditional, essentialist politics inadequately address the complexities of power relations in late-capitalist cultures. That Gardner and Ellis, despite standing on opposite sides of the Left/Right divide, should both demand a return to the Real lends credence to Jean Baudrillard’s now familiar conviction that Left and Right make the same "ideological" mistake by positing a fundamental "use value," or a transcendental "signified," and that "all [their] hypotheses of manipulation" therefore become "reversible in an endless whirligig." Left and Right, he suggests, wind up doing each other’s work "very well, and spontaneously" (Baudrillard, "Simulacra" 174).

Before turning to the novels themselves, I would briefly point out that my criticisms of their failures (or "mistakes") do not extend beyond their philosophical and political agendas. October Light and American Psycho are both sophisticated, well-written novels, chosen for scrutiny here not because they are dismissible as works of art, or because I would warn away their future readers, but only for theoretical purposes. Gardner’s reputation as a fiction writer is not in dispute, and October Light, which has received its share both of scholarly attention and popular acclaim, bears it out. American Psycho, on the other hand, has yet to be given a fair hearing–a situation I would do my part to rectify. Though not likely to ascend to the canon on its literary merits alone, it is remarkable in its brave, if intemperate, indictment of supposedly sacrosanct American values, and the almost unprecedented ire with which it was met reflects how close to its mark the novel actually hits. Also, both novels, with their unsettling moral clarity and implicit belief in a culture whose "errand" must end in either righteous glory or hideous damnation, participate (as Ellis’s title makes plain) in an American moralist tradition that, however revised in recent decades, is still with us. They are thus essential reading for all critics and students of that tradition. Rejecting what R.W.B. Lewis referred to over forty years ago as a rising "cult of original sin," with its "mordant skepticism," its "antagonism to nature," and its "hostility to human nature as self-wounded and self-wounding beyond repair" (Lewis 196), Gardner and Ellis aim, like him, to "[recall] the moral and artistic adventurousness of [over] a century ago" and to resuscitate whatever "traces of the hopeful or Adamic tradition" they can still piece together (196). Their efforts make them the most characteristically (or at least stereotypically) American novelists in this study.
 

"As in the Bible": John Gardner’s October Light

Gardner’s agenda, as I have said, is ultimately conservative, or right-leaning, though he, not surprisingly, would prefer we not view it as such. In fact he paints himself, in at least one essay, as neither conservative nor liberal but as distinctly apolitical, equally critical of the tripe perpetuated on both sides: "One is a movement," he wrote shortly before publishing October Light, "to celebrate and canonize without mercy or thought all that’s foul and mindless in the American heritage. (The serpent on the Right.) The other is a movement to ‘demythologize’ those eighteenth-century heroes who’ve been foully, mindlessly adored, and supplant their myth with a new myth, America as trash. (The serpent on the Left.)" (Gardner, "Amber" M-41). Still, despite vacillating between disgust with and sympathy for both siblings’ politics at individual moments, October Light finally sides much more solidly with James’s New England Republican morality than Sally’s Democratic, largely media-induced moral relativism, with its cynical insistence that (as she says) "‘it’s a free country to die in, that’s all!’" (126). While James, we are told from the start, "had, off and on, real, first-class opinions" (10), no such flourishes introduce Sally’s convictions, which are tied largely to the influence of a bad, postmodern-ish novel she reads in her seclusion, which is finally revealed to be, literally, garbage. And neither James’s horror at television’s indulgence in "sober conversation bout how a man that’s homosexual is just as nahmal as you or me" (193) nor his "mistrust" of Mexicans, with "their looks, their smell, the sound of their voices" (286), are ever wholly apologized for. Indeed his dislike of Rafe Hernandez, a Mexican priest visiting Bennington, is softened by novel’s end not by any new tolerance on James’s part for non-whites, but by the courage the priest shows when James, at the fateful party designed to lure Sally out of her room, threatens to blow him away with his shotgun: "Any ordinary man would have clim the wall" (419).

Sally and James’s liberal-conservative fray, however, is only one of two wars being waged these four days in Bennington. The other is the one that they, as Left and Right American siblings, significantly, must wage together (though Sally is reluctant) against the onslaught of a trashy popular culture polluting both their lives with Muzak and Coca-Cola, TV dinners and store-bought ice cream, foam rubber and mechanical Santas (13). Their America is occupied by what James calls "the devil’s visions," which, with all "the lightness of a puffball" or "a fart," provide "counterfeit escape" and "tale[s] without substance" to those hoping to escape "the world of hard troubles" he prides himself on having survived (12). His believes his adopted grandson’s Snoopy doll is "there to undo him, both him and his ghosts" (13), these being, primarily, those of America’s founding fathers, whose legends James holds dear, though he occasionally deflates them with some unflattering reality: "‘Benjamin Franklin,’" he lectures his terrified grandson Dickey, "‘was a nudist’"; "‘Sam Adams,’" similarly, "‘was a liar,’" and "‘Ethan Allen was a drunkahd’" (8). But while "‘them glorious foundling fathers’" (8), he continues, may have been "‘a rough, ill-bred lot–‘filthy rabble,’ as General Geahge Washington called ’em,’" they also had "‘things they believed in, a sma’ bit, ennaway: a vision, you might say, as in the Bible. It was that they lied for and fought for and, some of ’em, croaked for’" (9). James’s disgust with the corporatized America that perverts his heroes’ visions comes through again as he contemplates what people will compromise themselves for these days: "‘Soap and mattresses, that’s what they’ll lie for! Coca-Cola, strip mines, snowmobiles, underarm deodorants! Crimus!’" (9).

Though this is early in the novel, the Ebenezer Scrooge template is obviously out, and anyone can guess that October Light will be the story of "the unlocking of [James’s] heart" (432), a task complicated by his having to face up to his bullied son’s suicide years earlier as well as his unreasonable political codgerliness. The latter, though, which concerns us more, is softened only in the most conventional and essentialist of ways, as becomes clear near the novel’s end when James goes to the hospital to visit his friend Ed Thomas, who has suffered a heart attack before James’s wildly waving shotgun at the aforementioned lure-Sally-out party. Ed, a folk philosopher who knows the role television has played in the siblings’ ongoing dispute, gently prods James to see that TV actually has its place, especially where politics are concerned. While earlier in the century, he observes, "‘the whole country could be swayed by a tame white bear, or one time three hosses that supposably could talk,’" all that, thankfully, is "‘over; the world’s grown up. People are thinkin and ahguin like they never did previous to this present age, and it’s the idiot-box more’n ennathin else that made it happen’" (415). Interestingly, his defense of television blends into a general consideration of the place and purpose of all artifice and representation. Having told James that after he dies he will miss the splendor of New England’s nature more than anything else, like the February snow flurry that "‘stops in ten minutes or so, leavin maybe two inches of good snowball snow, big feathery flakes,’" he astutely hypothesizes that "‘the mahnin after such a snow as that is what gave rise to picture postcards in the first place’" (416, emphasis mine).

Here, the images and simulations of mass culture, which begin with such innocent fare as "picture postcards," are put in their proper place: they are to be simple representations of a fundamental and real nature. As long as this relationship is honored, representations can bless us, educate us, and even make us better people, as Ed hints when he tells James that the "‘first time [he] ever understood what was really goin on at’" a national political convention was when he saw it on TV and had "‘Walter Cronkite explainin what was happenin’" (414). Significantly, this relationship carries over to literature, as Ed brings up the folk poems his wife Ruth loves to recite: "‘She’s got good poems and bad poems,’" he says, "‘and she’ll swear on the Bible she can’t tell which is which. I explain to her only the good poems are exactly true’" (418, emphasis mine). Catching the tune, James brings things back to the Real again, to solid and empirical facts: "‘Like a good window-thash,’" he offers, lisping after losing his dentures, "‘or horth’" (418).

Ed’s leap to literary theory is important because it hints, as do other passages, at the didactic purpose behind October Light’s most curious feature: its "framed" novel, The Smugglers of Lost Souls’ Rock, which, except for the "great chunks" of it that have "fallen away" from its binding (15), is presented to us complete, making up roughly a third of October Light’s total mass. The story of a disillusioned, nihilistic young man named Peter Wagner and his adventures on the Pacific with a motley gang of equally disenchanted, philosophy-spewing marijuana runners, Smugglers illustrates the shortcomings of a mode of fiction with which Gardner sees himself competing. That rival is "fiction as pure language," he writes in On Moral Fiction (1978), and it

is in. It is one common manifestation of what is being called "post-modernism." At bottom the mistake is a matter of morality, at least in the sense that it shows, on the writer’s part, a lack of concern. To people who care about events and ideas and thus, necessarily, about the clear and efficient statement of both, linguistic opacity suggests indifference to the needs and wishes of the reader and to whatever ideas may be buried under all that brush. And since one reason we read fiction is our hope that we will be moved by it, finding characters we can enjoy and sympathize with, an academic striving for opacity suggests, if not misanthropy, a perversity or shallowness . . . . Where language is of primary concern, communication is necessarily secondary. (69)

Smugglers shows up in October Light when Sally, by a convenient twist of fate, finds the book (minus its missing pages) on her bedroom floor after locking herself in against James. We read the novel over her shoulder, breaking from it whenever she does to sleep, eat an apple, or reflect on what she has taken in. We are forced to read with her this way, Robert Morace observes, because Gardner wants us to witness first-hand "what influence fiction can exert and what effects it can have" (Morace 141). Not surprisingly, Smugglers' influence is remarkably unhealthy, the cynicism and anger it breeds in Sally illustrating the peril to the human spirit Gardner believes lies in all the efforts of the postmodern "maker of trash" (Moral 105). While she is at first wary of the "torn half to pieces" paperback (it has been picked from the garbage by Dickey), with its blurbs from the New York Times and others calling it "‘Hilarious!,’" "‘Deeply disturbing!,’" "‘A Black-comic blockbuster,’" and "‘A sick book, as sick and evil as life in America’" (15), she slowly succumbs to it, disregarding her initial realization that "it was base, unwholesome" (19) and that "Horace, her [late] husband of thirty-five years," who had "read only the finest literature, authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Dos Passos, and Thomas Wolfe," would "never have read such a book" (51).

It does not take her long, either, to recognize the effect the novel is having on her. Though she at first excuses its "paltr[iness]" (34) because "it wasn’t as if [it] was in earnest" (20), she soon realizes, after catching herself contemplating how the "natural exuberance of young people in love" is just "an artifice" and "an illusion" (37), that Smugglers is changing her: "She’d always been an optimist," she thinks, "a person who enjoyed life. . . . Why these doubts of the obvious, this ugly cynicism? It was an effect of the novel, she had to suppose. An unhealthy effect, no question about it!" (38).

The novel’s dire consequences are not consigned to the private realm of Sally’s self, either. What begins in her as an unfamiliar sense of "irritation" (37)–a "sadness" she realizes she is "savoring" (38)–blossoms into a full-blown political animosity directed outward not only at James but at an entire society she suspects has conspired to force her into her room. By the end of its third chapter, she finds she is wholly enjoying the book because of the "delicate way the writer mocked all those foolish things her brother James, among others, set such store by" (75): "to all that would tyrannize," she sees–"the flag and religion and the domination of men–[it] smiled sweetly, like a loving wife, . . . and let a little fart" (78). Having read Captain Fist’s furious denunciation in Smugglers of the crew of a rival ship, the Militant ("‘Parasites! Scavengers!" he screams. "People that want the whole world for themselves, and refuse to work for it!’" (145)), she suddenly realizes, in a flash of insight, that "the novel was about Capitalism–about those pious, self-righteous and violent True Americans who’d staked out their claim and, for all their talk about ‘Send me your poor’ . . . , would let nobody else in on the pickings. Captain Fist was exactly like her brother James" (146). From here, it is only a short leap to the bad idea that her quarrel with her sibling is a synecdoche for the battle between exploiters and exploited all over America. After she tells her friend Estelle through the bedroom door that she will not come out because "too many people in this country have been [throwing up their hands and leaving it to the bees] too long," Estelle asks, "Sally dear, what’s the country got to do with it?" Her answer: "Don’t fool yourself, Estelle. The country’s got everything to do with it. It’s the haves and have-nots, that’s what it is. James was here in the house first–that’s his whole argument–so when I move in, I’ve got to do exactly as he says, and no matter if it kills me" (208). Giving in to James, she reminds herself later, hearing her friends enjoying themselves at the party downstairs, would mean "accepting the age-old slavery of women and children" (229).

To the liberal/leftist reader, Sally’s insights seem reasonable enough, of course, and James will, in fact, have to overcome just the sort of right-wing inflexibility Sally accuses him of in these passages. But neither the connection she draws between her book and the "fart" James tells us mass culture emulates, nor the blow Smugglers strikes at such sacrosanct institutions as "religion" (which will ultimately be both James and Sally’s saving grace), bode well for the postmodern potboiler’s chances at redemption. The framed novel’s true colors come clearer still when Sally, dizzied by its unapologetic orgy scenes, begins to regret her own relative sexual inexperience and life-long fidelity. That her own "once lovely body was withered away to pure horror now, and virtually unused, unexploited" suddenly seems to her part of the "cruel mechanics of the universe, as her novel would say" (316). It leads her to posit that "those ‘good old days’ she’d grown up in," the same ones October Light ultimately celebrates, "had been a ghastly time" (317). And again, what might seem private and personal is given a larger cultural context as Gardner connects (albeit cautiously, subtly) Sally’s new misgivings about her moral steadfastness to the dubious aims of liberal feminism and the counter-culture. She finds herself wishing, he tells us, that she could "be growing up now, when a girl might go anywhere she pleased and do anything she like liked!" (316), things like be "a prostitute in New Orleans," as she gleefully realizes she might have (318). "Why not? why not?," she wonders, for "the young people," like those she has been reading about, "were right!" (318). Dancing only half-comically at the edge of the moral gutter, imagining some bogus affinity with the "hundreds of people" out there who "smoked pot every day" and "had sex orgies" (316), she unwittingly delivers Gardner’s message that the free-wheeling lifestyle and moral relativism espoused by Smugglers and works like it poisons not only the individual soul but the nation's, too.

The framed novel’s fundamental immorality, however, does not spring wholly from its lewd or base subject matter. Gardner himself, as if to prove he is no prude, uses plenty of sexual and scatological details in his own morally upright framing story. Smugglers’s chief sin, rather, is that it makes the characteristic postmodern "mistake," as he calls it, of putting language before Reality, thus compromising and devaluing "communication," or the sharing of whatever Real ideas and truths might be "buried" under all the "brush" of its "linguistic opacity." In this way, Smugglers violates the fundamental rule James’s friend Ed has given us for all representation, televisual, literary, or otherwise: It fails to place the medium of representation (language, in this case) in the service of the Real, making it instead, in typical postmodern fashion, the be-all and end-all, or the hollow, arbitrary marker of an absent and unavailable "reality." Whatever perversions Smugglers’s characters commit in their sex and drug habits is simply a result of their having abandoned fundamentally Real truths and values, opting foolishly for a swirl of empty signifiers no longer serving a natural representational function. It is, as Gardner says, a moral mistake, a conviction reaffirmed by Sally’s eventual realization that any author committing it is necessarily "cynical and dishonest," "tyrannical," and acting from "pure meanness" (169).

This misguided exaltation of the empty signifier over the Real signified links Smugglers to the schlocky mass culture James deplores, and that he and Sally, remembering a less corrupt, more Natural America, must teach us to keep in check. While the framed novel, with its "drugstore" paperback format (15) and popular-press blurbs, is clearly already "mass culture" in its own right, Gardner still links it continuously to the TV shows, movies, and rock songs that make James grind his dentures. Sally meditates on how "a good deal in her paperback remind[s] her more of movies than of life" (169), and James, who originally bought the book in a Greyhound station, then "[threw] it in the garbage for the pigs," remembers it as "pure hogslop, same as TV" (297). What most explicitly links the book’s cult of the signifier, though, to television and film is its characters’ often-voiced feeling that they are living on screen: Jane supposes her posture at a certain moment to be "radiantly beautiful, . . . exactly like a thing she’d seen on the Wednesday Night Movie" (73), while Peter, after barking out an order that sounds like "a line from a movie," perceives he is becoming "increasingly glassed in by the minute, mere shadow in a film" (143). If such media images were themselves referential–if they were windows on Nature–our smugglers’ disappearance into them would be no matter for concern. As it stands, though, Gardner presents television, advertising, pop music, and all other commerce-driven media as equally complicit in a "plot against the world’s survival," as James puts it (297), or in a secret conspiracy to devalue, ignore, or even eradicate the Real, in which his essentialist morality is necessarily grounded.

Once Sally recognizes Smugglers to be more movie-esque than novelesque, she sees that her beloved television, which is the "root of all the rest" of her problems with James, as he readily admits (192), really "[is]n’t true to life" (169, emphasis mine). As she "[runs] through, in her mind, the programs she [knows] best–Maude, Mary Tyler Moore, and Upstairs, Downstairs," she realizes that "none of those programs ever touched real life at all," that they instead depicted "stage people, glittering and amusing exactly as characters [are] glittering and amusing in a Broadway play" (169). Before long, she extends this same realization to Smugglers itself, and so finally breaks the spell it has cast over her. At the first appearance of the spaceship, she throws the book disgustedly across her bedroom and begins a long reverie in which she "tr[ies] to imagine what debauched, sick people would believe such foolishness amusing" (390). As she contemplates the matter, a "picture [comes] to her, clearer," significantly, "than a picture on television, of people on a bus," riding in a "dull rain" past the "lights of a city" (392). Examining the people one by one–a "large, middle-aged black woman" (392), a "light-skinned black girl," a "rabbi with a tangled beard," a "countrified girl with bad skin" (395), a "Jewish girl with a bad cold" (396)–she slowly realizes that none of these normal or Real people would ever actually read Smugglers. Not even those well-known "young people" whose "whole purpose was to call attention to social injustices and destroy what they saw as the System" would bother with it: They had "better things to do–self-pity to revel in and plots to hatch"; thus "the book," she sees, "would bore them, even though they might well agree with its sour opinions" (391-92).

For Gardner, the postmodernist’s rejection of Reality as a philosophical mistake demonstrates his disdain for another, less nebulous version of the same thing: the practical reality most middle-class, working Americans like James and Sally (or the people on Sally’s bus) must cope with every day. Smugglers attacks the notion that the Real might serve as some epistemological or ontological foundation, replacing it instead with a profundity of hollow, stultifying, over-analytic discourse. Its cousin, television, by its very nature launches a similar, if less deliberate, attack. James, looking disdainfully at a TV in a local bar, sees how two policemen "suddenly" turn into a "white-toothed, smiling woman with a yellow box of soap" (301), how a woman in a shower "suddenly" transforms into a bottle, and then how some exploding cars "suddenly" become a "woman in a nightclub, singing to a microphone with nothing on but a stocking-like thing" (302). Any medium that morphs such solidly familiar things as policemen, boxes of detergent and night club singers "suddenly" into one another clearly has little investment in reality as most people understand it.

Exposing the great philosophical lie of the Real, though, such postmodern works, whether they intend it or not, also arrogantly devalue that other work-a-day, practical reality their now-abandoned audiences must live in without them. It is here that their authors become truly "immoral," depriving readers and viewers of "characters [they] can enjoy and sympathize with" or who can teach them how to live sanely and correctly in a complicated Real world. Gardner’s framing novel, with its depictions of emotionally complex, "three-dimensional" people who must learn to tolerate and even love each other despite profound differences, tries to fill this role, and its glaring contrast to Smugglers’s flat, media-esque cruelty illustrates the enormous difference between moral and immoral artists' agendas. Nowhere does Gardner make this imperative for rejecting the latter more explicit, interestingly, than in Captain Fist’s impassioned anti-pedantic speech from within the framed novel:

‘Believe me, my fellow Americans and guests, philosophy will not save us! Intelligence will not save us! Art will not save us! We must find our way back to authentic emotion, back to the Spirit that carried our forefathers through Valley Forge, and the Battle of the Marne, and Okinawa! It is our hearts that must save us, our pure and uncomplicated Yankee emotion–Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, Norman Rockwell!’ (386)

Not unlike a traditional liberal leftist (as we will see with Ellis), the conservative Gardner is forced to invoke absolute, essential Reality to distract us from the fact that his own moral convictions are themselves constructs that enjoy no existence outside language. This assertion derives, of course, from the very postmodern perspective he deplores, whose dangerous belief that, as Saussure once put it, "there are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language" (Saussure 112) he is forced to spend so much energy denouncing. His disdain for such thinking makes him akin to E.D. Hirsch, another American anti-postmodernist who also believes we have been pushed to the edge of a dangerous moral precipice by recent anti-essentialist art and philosophy. Gardner’s choice between (postmodern) "fiction as pure language" and (Real) representational fiction is doubled in Hirsch’s dichotomy between two modes of literary criticism: the autocratic, which includes all those poststructuralist-inflected modes of "theory" denying objective truth, holding that "language" always "predetermine[s] the forms and limits of our ideas" (Hirsch 237), and the allocratic, in which the critic reintroduces the possibility of truth and falsity, right and wrong, not by applying some pre-deterministic "theory" that is always simply "right," but by "reconstruct[ing]" the "historical act" of whatever "person or community" created the text being examined (241). Because, Hirsch says, "historical question[s]" about the "conventions" dictating the creation of a text can indeed be "answered correctly," or objectively, the allocratic mode he offers has the advantage of being, possibly, right, or truthful, for the simple reason that it also carries the "possibility of being wrong" (244).

Hirsch’s ideas are so similar to Gardner’s that they can be heard echoing throughout October Light. When Sally, deep under Smugglers’s spell, tells her friend Estelle that "‘we’re all characters in some book,’" that "‘our whole lives are plotted from start to finish, so that even if the end should be happy it’s poisoned when we get to it’" (215), she is showing the sinister influence of her paperback’s characters’ pre-deterministic, nothing-beyond-language, "autocratic" thinking. When James, on the other hand, discerns both the good and bad in America’s forefathers, readily admitting (for instance) that John Adams told a "‘damn lie’" to the Boston militia when he said "‘the port of New York had fallen’" (8), he is being allocratic, sticking to the hard facts, letting historical circumstance provide the "cypher key," as Hirsch calls it (240), by which things should be understood. He beats Sally to this more "moral" option because he understands from the start the godly Realness of the same language she suspects will only always "poison the ending." He knows, for instance, that "words" are "objects to be turned in the hand like stones for a wall" (11); thus he can demand rhetorically of his sister, "‘Did God give the world His Holy Word in television pictures? . . . No sir, . . . used print!" (4-5).

Hirsch is also just as clear as Gardner about the heavy moral and political consequences of the choice he presents, telling us that "in the end, the debate between autocratic and allocratic interpretation is a political, not an epistemological, issue. And the political issue is: What sort of culture do we want to foster?" (244). An upright and godly one, as becomes clear when he compares his rationale for choosing allocratic over autocratic thinking to Pascal’s for betting on the existence of God: "‘Let us estimate the two chances. If you win, you win everything. If you lose, you lose nothing. Do not hesitate then, gamble on His existence’" (243).

In fact, though, we do lose something when we gamble on His (or Truth’s, or the Real’s) existence, namely the stories, experiences, and insights of all those whose lives or sensibilities do not accord with His (or Its) own. The only intellectuals, the only politically-minded black people, and the only "liberated" woman in October Light are all lassoed into its despicable framed novel, which, for its antagonism to Reality, is rejected with every other type of irresponsible mass culture. These people’s stories and ideas are not welcome; they do not ring True. The "post-modernism" with which Gardner associates them must be combated not only because it refuses the transcendental Real that cloaks his and Hirsch’s essentialist politics, but because by refusing it, it stands to legitimize all previously inadmissable, "immoral" perspectives. What Gardner and Hirsch are in fact reacting to is the democratizing thrust of postmodernism, which entails, as Dick Hebdige says, "putting the Word in its place" and "opening up to critical discourse [those] lines of enquiry which were formerly prohibited, evidence which was previously inadmissable so that new and different questions can be asked and new and other voices can begin asking them" (Hebdige, Hiding 226, emphasis mine). Insofar as postmodernism conducts, as Ihab Hassan says, a "massive ‘delegitimation’ of the mastercodes in society," "decanonizing" "all conventions of authority" (Hassan 505), it poses a massive threat to Gardner, whose white, middle-class, heterosexual Christian Realism comprises the most "conventional" sort of authority there is.

Smugglers’ homeopathic attack on postmodern stylistics might be considered successful as simple moral or political propaganda. Though not nearly as sophisticated as much of the fiction it satirizes (to make it so would defeat the purpose), the framed novel makes Gardner’s complaint sufficiently clear and will probably succeed, as it is made to injure two people as likeable as James and Sally, in winning over the bulk of his audience. His more wary or theoretically-inclined readers, though, will observe that the postmodernism he denounces as a certain un-Real style is not as neatly contained as the framed novel: it "leaks out" and infects the framing novel as well, testifying to the unexcisability of that other postmodernism, Jameson’s unrefusable, "unmoralizable" cultural dominant or zeitgeist. Whether he intends it or not, Gardner does several things that effectively turn the whole of October Light into the sort of metafiction he uses Smugglers to denounce. His anachronistic, "elaborate use of titles and epigraphs for the chapters," for instance, "[has] the effect of reminding us of the conventionality of literature and of the fact that we are reading a fiction," as Dean McWilliams has noted (McWilliams 83). The strange intermixing of the numbers introducing Smugglers’ chapters with those announcing the framing novel’s subchapters has a similar effect. Most truly "postmodernizing" of all, though, is that the framed novel arrives to us through Sally’s eyes, for by "read[ing] [the novel] over her shoulder," McWilliams astutely observes, "we inevitably confront our own status as readers of a fiction" (83). Breaking the stream of Smugglers’ narrative to consider some "discovery tingling at the back of her brain" (145), or even, sometimes, to re-read a sentence that has tantalized her, causing it to appear a second time on the page before us, Sally forcefully reminds us that we too are reading, and that October Light manipulates and influences us the same way Smugglers does her. Needless to say, this leads Gardner into dangerous territory, threatening to defrock both the Real art of his framing story and the morality he espouses as no less contrived or formulated than the postmodern, non-representational art Smugglers mimics.

And from a philosophical perspective, these mistakes do indeed prove fatal. Gardner no doubt figures that letting the framed novel’s postmodern pranks leak out into the framing story will sharpen his homeopathic lampoon, or will let him out-postmodern the postmodernists by forcing their tricks to serve his agenda (consider even James and Sally’s shared name: "Page"). What he might be read as doing instead is knocking the capital R off of his own supposedly irrefutable Reality, showing us that all truth, all nature, all morality is discursive, constructed, and better fitted with lower-case letters. He also proves, maybe most damagingly, that postmodern art need not be as contemptuous of its audience or as oblivious to the real world as the ill-conceived Smugglers. To what would have to be his chagrin, October Light earns a place not beside such great "realistic" novels as Twain’s Huck Finn or Updike’s Rabbit, Run, but beside a very different work: Pynchon’s Mason &Dixon, another Chinese-box text about two complex, fascinating, and "deep" characters whose "reality," we are made to understand, never extends beyond the borders of the page describing it. The difference is that while Pynchon celebrates the idea that "‘we only think we occupy a solid, Brick-and-Timber City,– in Reality, we live upon a Map’" (Pynchon, Mason 482), Gardner struggles against it, doing what he can to preserve the fundamental humanist precept that language only describes, and never constitutes, the Real. When God arrives ponderously at the end of October Light, first in the Reverend Lane Walker’s decree that "religion" is all about "civility" (421), then in James’s "first prayer in years" for his apple crate-injured daughter (422), it is Gardner’s last-ditch effort to save his novel from its own postmodern impetus, invoking the one entity Jean Baudrillard tells us ought to be able to insure the Real. Invoking Him, however, in a text that tricks itself into exposing its own constructedness places Gardner in uneasy agreement with Baudrillard, who tells us "God himself has only ever been his own simulacrum" (Baudrillard, "Simulacra" 169).

True to Jameson’s hypothesis, Gardner’s denunciation of postmodernism as an immoral artistic style does little to reverse its status as a cultural dominant, or as a set of issues, concerns, and ideas cutting across "every cultural discipline from architecture to zoology," as Thomas Docherty observes (Docherty 1). October Light only attests to postmodernism’s undismissability by showing us that even rejections or denials of it must be made on its terms, addressing the issues and problems it dictates. The critique of "fundamental depth models" Gardner rails against is, Jameson tells us, one of historical postmodernism’s hallmarks (Jameson 12); as such, it cannot be attributed to a few irresponsible artists like Barth, Pynchon, or Heller, or even to the rise of the mass culture industry Gardner clearly despises. That "critique," indicting every essentialist schema from the Freudians’ of "latent and manifest" to the structuralists’ of "signifier and signified" (Jameson 12), necessarily results from a confluence of diverse forces–everything from the rise of quantum physics to the staggering proliferation of media images that, as James Page seems to understand while looking at the TV, renders the Real increasingly obscure. While Gardner may desperately want out of his own historical moment, his absorption in the issues it foregrounds only demonstrates his total involvement in it.

October Light actually comes very close to positing a distinctly postmodern conservatism (if such a thing is possible) much more appropriate to its times than the sort of "realist" conservatism it attempts to revive. Were it simply to confess the constructedness or "simulatedness" of its middle-class morals and values, refraining from invoking God himself to bless them, it might still proceed to argue the case for their benevolence and "rightness" for our culture. This would be a move much like Pynchon’s in Vineland, where traditional leftist values, despite having their essentialist suppositions about power and human nature pulled out from under them, are still upheld as applicable under certain circumstances. It may be, though, that in a post-Watergate, post-Stonewall, post-Vietnam world, caution and provisionality are qualities Gardner’s social conservatism cannot afford. That he is finally compelled to invoke God, Nature, and the Real in hopes of rendering his vision unassailable must give any careful reader pause.
 

"Surface, Surface, Surface": Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho

Appealing no less emphatically to the axiomatic Truths that should correct consumer capitalism’s excesses is Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Where Gardner, though, mounts his attack from the Right, indicting the "America as Trash" vision he associates with post-sixties liberalism, Ellis does his wailing from the Left, denouncing the crass materialism and arrogant social Darwinism of the corporatized 1980s. His goal is to shock us into recognizing the contempt for humanity lurking at the core of American consumer culture, a sermon whose eminent unpopularity (Americans may want it even less now than when Steinbeck, Norris, and Sinclair preached it) might help explain why many of its initial reviewers should have all but willfully misunderstood it. The novel is made no more palatable by its reluctance to provide the sorts of reassurances we expect from political sermons. While his naturalist predecessors could offer the prospect, at least, of a brighter socialist tomorrow, making it clear even to those who despised their politics that they still had a hopeful vision of a forward-marching America, Ellis knows that in 1990 such optimism would be a farce. The novel’s first words, which are "scrawled in blood red lettering on," significantly, "the side of the Chemical Bank," set the dismal tone: "ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE" (3). Its final words, lifted from a sign in a posh Manhattan bar where its still uncaptured, still unrepentant protagonist is lounging, hammers it home again: "THIS IS NOT AN EXIT." Though implicitly insisting that there must be a humane and moral Reality somewhere to counter the always weirdly simulated nightmare he presents (there could be no such Hell without a Heaven), Ellis refuses, unlike Gardner, to reveal it, reminding us instead with those last words that the lost Real is still nowhere in sight. While clearly demanding a wholesale rejection of the sick-unto-death consumer culture he depicts, what is to replace it is left totally, and maybe discouragingly, to our own imaginations.

Ellis’s furious critique centers around Pat