(this is the third part of my series looking at the life and times and motivations of famous "contemporary" novelists.)
there are a lot of famous writers at the moment who are "hardcore". by "hardcore", i mean, writers who include more acts of violence, sexual imagery, coarse language, and drug use in their novels than is really necessary to tell the story. also (and this is important), the promiscuoussexviolencecoarselanguageanddrugs are not included in sarcastic or humorous ways – like writing about a heroin-addicted antelope with tourette’s syndrome going on a killing rampage could be humorous – but are included as completely ”serious” and “truthful” elements of the stories.
some novelists and their novels in this category: “american psycho” by bret easton-ellis, “fight club” by chuck palahniuk, and “trainspotting” by
you can choose the read these books if you want, and i am not judging the content of the books – that is for you to do in your own brain with your own subjective values. i just want to make some observations about these novelists, and why i think that they write these sorts of “hardcore” novels.
firstly, “hardcore” novelists almost always think that they are writing novels that offer “intensely biting social commentary”. they say that they portray excessive violence, sexual promiscuity, and drug use as a way to “satirize” the excesses of western culture.
for instance, bret easton-ellis has said, “my work is really about a culture that pisses me off, and a world that we live in that values all the wrong things. i mean, that’s what satirists write about.”
now, i am just going to take a stab here (no pun intended) and propose that bret easton-ellis was actually lying when he said that. my proposition is that bret easton-ellis actually writes about promiscuoussexviolencecoarselanguageanddrugs because he thinks that it is “cool” to write about those topics. bret easton-ellis writes about promiscuous sex because he thinks it will make him seem “cool”, because people who have promiscuous sex can then read his novels to re-affirm their existing worldview, which is that “promiscuous sex is what normal ‘cool’ people do”. they read his novels and then think “if i have more promiscuous and unemotional sex then i can be more like the people in this book, which would validate my existence even more than before.”
i have nothing against promiscuous sex if that’s what makes your existence feel more validated. but i am just saying that bret easton-ellis is not a satirist, he is a “glamorist” – he says that our culture “values all the wrong things”, but instead of writing about other topics, he values the wrong things as well. i am guessing that he already realises this, but thinks he is being “ironic”. what he (possibly) doesn’t realise is that everybody else also thinks they are being “ironic” by being obsessed with promiscuoussexviolencecoarselanguageanddrugs, which is exactly why our culture values these things.
just a bit more about satire: “american psycho”, for instance, is clearly not satire. it is about one person killing a lot of other people, what is satirical about that? the process of killing another person in highly original ways is not funny, i don’t think, unless the process of the death is extremely absurd and unrealistic – for instance, in seinfeld, where george’s fiancé dies from licking envelopes (although that was not murder). but reading about somebody being decapitated with a chainsaw (i think that is in the film version of “american psycho”) is not funny, it is just sad and disturbing. for instance, when i read the newspaper and see an article about a baby being suffocated to death in a suitcase, i do not start laughing and think, “this journalist is a great satirist of our culture” – i just feel sad for a little while, or try to ignore the story and read the comics page. but if i read about someone being killed by a creative zen mp3 player (don’t ask me how) i would probably find that funny because it is absurd.
what i would like is if “hardcore” novelists were actually honest, and told people the real reason why they write “hardcore” novels. the real reason would be (probably) because the novelists want to feel as though they have experienced these things (even though most “hardcore” novelists are not actually “hardcore” in real life) by writing about them, but are too scared to actually do those things in real life. for instance, chuck palahniuk probably wants to hurt a lot of people through physical violence, but is afraid that he might be hurt in real life, or might be punished, which is why he writes about hurting people through physical violence. this is not a “bad” thing, because people need to express their urges somehow, but it does seem “bad” that chuck palahniuk is trying to tell himself and other people that he is writing about violence because he is against violence. that seems like a lie, if chuck plahniuk was against violence, he would not write a book about violence, he would just live a non-violent life and not be obsessed with violence. for example, if i did not particularly like koala bears, i would not write a 600-page non-fiction book about koala bears.
another thing is that the “hardcore” novelists seem to think that our society is fully based around promiscuoussexviolencecoarselanguageanddrugs, which is why it is “bad”. in a review of the film version of “fight club”, somebody said: “the purpose of showing all this bloody pummeling is to make a telling point about… what can happen when the numbing effects of day-to-day drudgery cause people to go a little crazy.”
this doesn’t make sense to me. if people do go “crazy” because “capitalist consumer society is so monotonous and alienating,” that craziness is not normally manifested in people having promiscuous, unemotional sex, while simultaneously injecting heroin, stabbing a man in the face, and swearing. if anything, the craziness is manifested in people feeling lonely, talking to their cats and non-sentient objects, feeling depressed, feeling quietly unfulfilled, bored, watching too much television, going shopping to momentarily numb their existential anguish, mistakenly believing that “if i date this girl/boy i will feel completely fulfilled forever”, becoming a born-again christian etc. in other words, for most people, promiscuoussexviolencecoarselanguageanddrugs might be a small part of their lives, but it is not the main part.
“hardcore” novelists are writing about the world in which they think they would like to live, i think. they want to live in a world where they can stab and kill people, have sex with a lot of people at the same time, swear a lot, and take a lot of drugs. they are writing for 15 to 30 year old males who would also like to live in this sort of world, but do not really think that it is possible to live in such a world, because such a world would be extremely frightening. “hardcore” novelists do not write satire, and they are not writing truthfully about Western capitalist culture. they already know this, but if they tell anybody this, they will not be respectable “novelists” any longer.
10 comments:
I'm not sure if I agree or disagree with you on this -- I'll probably think about it and come back. But one thing that did come to mind was that the satire in "American Psycho" comes not from the fact that Patrick Bateman is a murderer, but from the portrayal of the other characters as so consumed by self-obsession and their own shallow social status that despite his thinly-veiled references to his hobby, damning evidence, and several complete confessions, none of them can focus long enough on anything other than their self-interest to realize that Patrick, their "friend", fiance or peer, is quite obviously a depraved lunatic.
candice,
my problem with "american psycho" is that it seems as though bret easton-ellis just wanted to write a book where he could describe gruesome murders (perhaps because he thinks murders are "cool") but there was no way that he could get a book just about pointless graphic murders published, so he tacked-on a plotline about the "consumerism and vacuousness of upper-middle-class america" in order to make his book about graphic murders seem like socially-relevant "serious literature".
"they already know this, but if they tell anybody this, they will not be respectable “novelists” any longer."
haha
where is the first part of this series?
tao,
the first part is the one about writers who don't blog and the second part (more of an interlude actually) is the bit about ian mcewan.
Interesting, I was especially swayed by your koala bear argument.
Of course there is also the worrying trend (I say trend even though it is a singular occurance because I hope to oneday be the host of Today Tonight) is where Mexican Horror novelists take everything too far and, for example, eat people
interesting. but i think you're wrong. and irvine welsh (who you mentioned at the start but then you wrote more about b. e.e.) actually wrote a pretty realistic account of life among the council estates in edinburgh in the 80's. and he was in the scene ( a heroin user) so he knew what he was talking about. the film definatly was glamorous (for a start they set it to a nice soundtrack and made everything look ce and not grimy) but the book didnt do this.
what are the books that you think disprove your point? there has to be exceptions to any thesis. or do you think you can never write about extreme behaviour in any other way than a kind of wish fulfilment / violent-pornogrpahic way?
also i think that if b.e.e. wanted to just write a book about fucking and killing, he could easily have got it published after the success of less than zero. to this reader, the stirical elements were absolutly integral to the plot. the film did suck though. and american physcho really devops a lot of themes he begun in less than zero.
i like your blog. just found it via tao's. but i question this entry...
ps - i am not bret easton ellis agent.
i don't know. i think you are right in the sense that alot of people value these books because it reaffirms their glamorisation of violence etc. but i think maybe some of these writers choose to focus on it because a) they are, as you say, glamourising violence and grime, but also b) because they question their own/other people's fascination with gruesome shit and whether that fascination grows out of some kind of social sickness in which we do spend all our time being mundane and depressed and therefore wish to be extremely aggresive.
i don't know.
tony,
when you asked "what are the books that you think disprove your point?", i actually typed "tony o'neill's writing is good". i was about to post that, and then i looked at your username and laughed.
your writing (what i have read of it so far) is sort of objective, and seems truthful, whereas bret easton-ellis’ writing does not seem truthful, and his characters do not seem at all realistic. in “rules of attraction”, bret easton-ellis seemed to be saying two things: 1“college is so kick-ass” and 2”society has fucked up the morals of young people.” so instead of trying to understand why individual people take drugs, have unemotional sex, or kill people, bret easton-ellis just treats us all as “victims of society”. in other words, there are no actual human beings in bret easton-ellis’ stories, but there are actual human beings in your stories, i think.
yes, people can write about extreme behaviour in a “non-hardcore” way. what makes a novelist “hardcore” (in my definition) is when they are self-conscious about including sex, drugs, and violence in their novels. in other words, “hardcore” novelists think “i am going to include this scene involving date-rape because it is cutting-edge and will make me seem cooler”, whereas “non-hardcore” novelist would think “i am going to include this scene about date-rape because i am interested in why people date-rape other people, and by including this scene, i am helping other people to understand and empathise with people, which is a good thing.” do you agree with this distinction?
also, another book i like that disproves my thesis: in australia, there is a popular novel (also now a movie) about heroin addiction which is written in a truthful way, which does not try to make heroin use seem “cool” or “uncool”, but is objective and just shows different lives being played out. it is called “candy”, by luke davies.
haha, conn, thank you.
i read candy and liked it a lot. i actually read it while i was in the back of a car being driven from LA to the nappa valley so my g/f at the time could be a bridesmaid at her sisters wedding. we were both strung out, and trying to space out shots of heroin so that we didnt run out during the wedding. we were sick, and were trying to hide it from my g/fr's parents who werre driving the car.
the scenes in candy where they were going through withdrawal were so descriptive, that they started making me feel dopesick even though i probably shouldnt have been. the end result, we ran out of dope a day early, i vomited in a gas station, but i still have fond memories of the book. i saw the film on tv the other night and didnt like it though.
i hear what youre saying. but i still like b.e.e.'s stuff (one of my faves is 'the informers'). I just feel like there is a very conservative mood in literature right now, and the face of censorship has changed a little. instead of saying 'dont say this its terrible' they now say 'dont say this, theres no artistic meaning behind it' or 'dont say this, its been said before'.
i do i guess agree with the distinction. however, i think the real distinction is in how well it is written. date rape, murder, drugs etc are all simple facts of society, just like love, children, politics, money are. i think you can write about anything so long as you do it well. a clumsily written book about drugs is as much of a clunker about a clumsily written book on politics. i just find that if someone writes about politics they dont face the same shit that someone who writes about drugs or murder do. nobody says 'why are you writing about this?' to someone who writes about the middle classes. but if someone writes about the underclass, the first question is 'thats nice. when are you going to write about something else though?' (not that b.e.e. was writing about the underclass, but i'm off of him as a subject and onto myself now).
i was a heroin addict. a lot of my friends were. they were real, 4 dimensional (is it 4? 3?) people. i want to write about them. they seem more real to me, more interesting to me than rich people with rich people problems.
i suppose i dont think of a lot of the things you mentioned as 'hardcore'. maybe im desensitised to them. the most hardcore thing i ever did was raise a child. compared to that, keeping up a dope habit was a breeze.
these thoughts are very disconnected, but i hope they make some sense.
tony,
that completely makes sense. i liked what you wrote about your experience while reading "candy", that was interesting.
the problem i have about novelists who write about the "underclass" is if those writers are, in fact, "privileged"... and most writers are priveleged, i guess there are various reasons why this is.
i mean, it seems very easy for a priveleged person to think "it must be cool to live in a housing estate with all the violence, drugs etc", but people who actually live in housing estates do not live there because it is "cool". so these sorts of priveleged writers seem to be glamourising the "underclass" in a condescending way. it is like privileged white kids who listen to gangsta rap, that just seems condescending somehow.
so it is one thing to sit back in a large house in a wealthy suburb and write a novel about how "cool" violence is, it is another to actually have grown in a violent community and write about violence in a realistic way. so yeah, when i read the things you have written about addiction, i like them, because they just seem to be true and not trying to glamourise anything.
so yeah, i think i've repeated myself a few times over.
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