Introductory note:  This paper was presented as part of the Creative Submissions panel and was introduced twice, first with a poem by Ted Berrigan from his series called The Sonnets read by Frances Ruprecht (panel moderator) and second by a reading of an original poem by the author called "§ 3," a version of which can be seen on the web’zine www.strucklit.com. Both poems are included herein as appendices immediately following the paper proper.

Also, the presentation of this paper made use of loops culled from both music and film soundtracks referenced within and from a loop library constructed by the author, and as well was accompanied by live electric guitar playing, and so, obviously, all of this is impossible to depict lexigraphically.  The work cited list includes entries for all materials used in the performance, and the text of the paper includes all cues used by the author to advance from loop to loop (presented cap locked).  An appendix at paper’s end lists the loops with annotations.  The reading commenced with the first loop, "Steps."

The Aesthetization of Violence in Postmodern Texts: Disturbing by Necessity

Violence in the postmodern serves in a number of ways to anesthetize and desensitize the reader away from any moral objections whatever and uses this process as an avenue to express the horror of postmodern existence by inflicting it on the reader first hand.  Bret Easton Ellis and Allen Ginsberg are of course attempting to shock the reader, but also the pair attempts in their work a mediation of the violence that they see as omnipresent and constitutive of the postmodern condition.  Similarly, Frances Ford Coppola and Thomas Pynchon seek to disturb.  Violations of the body are the primary means of such desensitizing reportage,

"SEX AND CHAIN SAW"

but the violence of advertising, the assaultive properties of pop music and culture, and the devastation wreaked by consumption of all kinds–from mass-market consumerism to abusive drug-taking–stand in as various forms of violence of disturbing consequence, being far and a way more detrimental than the simple act of reading the books ever could be.  The postmodern as seen by both Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson shares with American Psycho and Indian Journals, as well as Apocalypse Now and The Crying of Lot 49, distinct properties of emotional vacancy and desperately real depictions of brutality, but the texts approach these extremes with different motives–with Ginsberg’s work there is an attempt at transcending mores to access a deeper consciousness, while with the work of Ellis there is an attempt to obliterate consciousness entirely–and these differences play out broadly and powerfully in the different ways that readers tend to receive these texts.

With Ellis, the reader is forced to consider the psychopathic mindset in first-person narration and in the present tense, and as with the insidious first-person shoot-‘em-up video games in obnoxious proliferation amongst our game-boy-trampled youth, thus the reader is the psychopath.  The only breaks from this onslaught are several episodes of recording artist annotated discographies/reviews and some fleeting moments of third-person narration during the chase scene.  These breaks are indications of the other types of violence beyond the overt, and will be dealt with later, but for now, why the overt in the first place?  Because nothing else will do, simply put. 

Violence in the society at large, its devaluation of the human and privileging of the manufactured, in turn manufactured Patrick Bateman as surely as it has any consumable, from soda pop to CDs.  Patrick Bateman is what has transformed him.  How better can one show that commodification produces psychopathy than to commodify violence,

"‘WE MUST END APARTHEID’"

thereby implicating the reader in the acts depicted simply by being witness to it?  The reader gets the feeling of being disturbed at the reading of just the sort of acts Ellis would have it that the society produces of its excesses.  As Bateman is reformatted into a killer, so too is the reader one of his victims, and the pair–killer and reader cum accomplice–orbit dangerously around each other, each as much consumer as killer, victim and victimizer at the same impossible moment of destructive impulse.  And it is similarly so with Ginsberg.

Indian Journals has some scenes of disturbing verisimilitude, the excesses of which generate an involuntary reaction just as visceral as any of the work of Ellis.  Chief among these is the funeral pyre scene, in which are seen:

Many corpses in the noontime flame, one with head all burnt black down to the skull & teeth showing & eyes popped & white–Golgotha resting in place at the head of the woodpile–later, another face all exploded and dripping with fat […] the brain suddenly revealed […] a flow of Conscious mud.  (67)

Here, the attempt is one of identification

"DOGS"

not obliteration.  The reader sees the wheel of samsara turning, a body becoming dust before the eyes makes the transmigration more real to the reader, and this is an effort to identify with a moment transcendent to normal consciousness, but not beyond the pale, as with so much of American Psycho.

With Ellis, the identification is only in the negative.  Violence serves not to get the reader to explore a consciousness not tied to experiencing the body, but rather the aesthetization of violence mirrors the violent operations of vulgarity transformed into art that pass for cultural acumen throughout eighties American society.  In his musical discographies/career reviews, Ellis points up the depthlessness cited by Fredric Jameson (6) by trying to keep a straight face as he seriously ponders the lasting impact of Genesis, Whitney Houston, and Huey Lewis and the News, and he is particularly strained in his passage on Houston (252).

"‘SONG SO CATCHY’"

With Genesis, Ellis is only really complimentary to the band about their post-Gabriel material–whom he disses irretrievably by saying that his solo albums are all crap, not even noting the work on So–of which he is supportive only because it so easily fits the mold of the trash eighties band.  In a flip-flop of what most progressive rock aficionados would utter at the drop of a doobie, Ellis lauds the efforts of the band to curry favor with pop audiences and lampoons their more theatrical and experimental side as both wasteful and boastful.  It is not until they become trite and cliché that he accepts them as being fit for eighties art.  Huey Lewis and the News get the softball treatment on this score, as they never had a good period, so no trick reversals of what constitutes an aesthetic there, but Whitney gets prime treatment (though the Huey review is one of the funniest moments in the film version of Ellis’s novel). 

Ellis transforms Whitney Houston into the great black hope of–can one take any of this seriously?  –Jazz.  This is more laughable than saying that the dark side of Genesis is the light side, or that Huey has any talent at all, as Houston never uttered a note of Jazz in any of her work, barely even working with anyone even related to the field.  The one person she did work with was Narada Michael Walden,

"SOPHIE"

of ex Jeff Beck, Mahavishnu Orchestra, and John McLaughlin solo-album fame, and actually quite esteemed and famous in rather closed Jazz-fusion circles as a composer and drummer.  But here, what is esteemed about him is different, as Ellis puts it:

"For the Love of You" shows off Narada’s brilliant drum programming capabilities and its jazzy modern feel harks back not only to purveyors of modern jazz like Michael Jackson and Sade but also to other artists, like Miles Davis, Paul Butterfield and Bobby McFerrin.  (255)

Purveyors of modern jazz like whom?  To even mention these two as any representation of modern jazz vocals when Betty Carter was still singing is tantamount to complete heresy to any real jazz listener–and this is what Ellis intends and exactly what is made implicit. 

The distortion of what is valued aesthetically–even the co-opting of terms like modern jazz–is a violence practiced against jazz fans, saying, "look, your music is dead, and the only way it lives is in the shallow and vacant music of a wanna-be pop whore like Whitney Houston."  Narada, a killer player at the top of his form around this time,

is represented in the light of programming greatness alone, showing that the eighties aesthetic is finding value only in production values and not in things crucial to a good record like performance.  Privileging production over performance has a clear parallel to the violence of Bateman. 

Bateman presents a clean surface,

"‘CHEER UP, SOLDIER’"

a perfect production (as does Kurtz in Apocalypse Now), but his performance, his internal worth, is horrendous and artificial.  At his worst moments of psychotic action–the chase scene or the girl chapters–he is an automaton, merely playing out an action that he has no investment in, and adding to that, in the chase scene the narrative point of view switches from first to third person, presenting him as complete surface, nothing below to grapple with, depthless.  Eighties culture so values the surface that when he even tries to utter that he is a maniac, no one responds or they comment on how witty he is with his crazy non sequiturs, never even for a moment taking him seriously, because his surface and his knowledge of clothing and the other accoutrements of high life in New York all assure his peers that he is the epitome of stability, as he is just like them.  His consistent appearance rescues him from any number of close calls–at the Laundromat, at the apartment with the real estate agent, with his many girlfriends (not the girls, but even the blond prostitute comes back to his apartment [and her doom] after a very close call)–precisely because of the postmodern value-free, appearances-are-all attitude.

This emptying-out of culture has been commented on by many, but perhaps the most widely read at the time of the publication of American Psycho was French semiologist Jean Baudrillard.  He says, in his book Cool Memories, of the nineties:

As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter.  Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning.  They give themselves one last wash and brush-up, their ocellated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains.

To Baudrillard, even the flies are concerned only with appearances–"a last wash and brush-up"–up until the very moment of death.  His simile has it that we are doing the same in terms of our culture–his version of Jameson’s depthlessness, only better said.  A look at his Selected Writings reveals his concern with the real becoming hyper-real (143), his concept of the simulacrum as the habitation of man and aesthetic (137), perfectly dovetail with the work of Ellis and Ginsberg, but to different degrees.

Baudrillard suggests that violence itself has become a viable theory, and that "the only strategy is catastrophic" (123 [emphasis in original]).  This supports the extended notion that Ellis and Ginsberg are both utilizing the only available technique to express the effect of the culture on art production: violence is the art.  It is not enough to simply cry out that the killing must stop, we must get our hands wet with the blood of innocents, we must all become accomplices in such brutality, moreover, we must continence it in a way by our continued reading, thereby owning some of the violence of commodification and saleable lives, in order to see it from a new and more informative perspective. 

Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 preserves the notions of closure and accountability formerly held as integral to storytelling only in the negative.  We are presented with a lot in which Mucho Maas cries, a car lot (6), "lots in the heart of downtown L.A. for 63¢ apiece" (37), a "lot of 37 longs" (123) at the government surplus store selling Nazi uniforms as back-to-school-wear, and then finally the crying of lot 49 at auction, the event for which the novel is named, and an event which does not occur at any time within it.  The significance of this fact, that the novel should be named for something which ultimately never happens, is in the way these various lots all figure as surfaces which propel the plot along in an impish aping of linearity.  The reader is in the end simply happy to see that there even is a lot 49, and the issue of its not being cried and all of the other diversions play out as whimsical reminders of how hard one has worked at getting the meaning out of the book that it ultimately denies.  And this causes one to question the need for closure and to place new value on the act of self-exploration reading such an interrogative work provokes.  What is really accomplished is a closure of wonder into self-wonderment.

Intensities and intense moments bounce around the book in revelatory splashes and deep gouges, such as the anarchic dance scene where "there would have to be collisions" (107), after which anarchist miracle Oedipa Mass flees.  These collisions play at being in the real world, with all of its dangerous collisions of aesthetic and politic fall in as so much ballroom garishness. 

Some moments of intensity serve to display and preserve an accurate account of cultural violence, like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, with its competing logics–the enemy as ordered and calm, and rendered with complete verisimilitude, verses the US as rapacious and chaotic, rendered in absolute absurdity–while others

"ENDANGERED SPECIES"

serve only to be an avowal of that violence, like Baraka’s "T. T. Jackson Sings," where the register is pure street and the message is crystal clear: it must be this foul to get the profundity of oppression across.  Take this difficult and dangerous excerpt:

I fucked your mother

On top of a house

When I got through

She thought she was

Mickey Mouse

            (216)

This type of abuse has a cultural analogue in the capping and dozens, some calling it signifying, and as seen in Bad Language, by Lars-Gunnar Andersson and Peter Trudgill, the ritualized nature of the swearing carries more insult than outright moral offence.  The violence of language has an aural and musical analogue–the plaintive cry of hornmen Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler. 

Colman’s musical philosophy, Harmelodics, depends upon an improvisationally derived recombinant structure involving simultaneous mutual interpretation of the melody and the harmony of a given tune, almost a violent confrontation between the musicians in the studio, on the contested turf of the music. 

"THE END"

In Apocalypse Now, Coppola uses The Door’s "The End" to key the audience’s response, letting the music stand in as witness to the event of the battle depicted.  This account and avowal of violence signals a deep investment in unreason.  The period of the sixties can in some ways be seen as an attempt to make rationality out of irrational times, but the means of making rational what is so chaotic on its face–the war–differ from artist to artist, but often unreason is seen as offering more ideas, or as being more operationally available, than adhering to a system so bound down by its reason that genocide has come to be seen as rational.  

One of the symptoms of the postmodern malaise as identified by Jameson is the disintegration of the lyric subject into fragments of language (28).  Now, while it is true that lyrically held moments like those found in poetry can resist closure more effectively than Apocalypse Now, the personal collapse of Lieutenant Willard at the top of the film is linked directly to the pressure of living amongst the destruction of the war, and is completely analogous to the unraveling of plot that occurs when one applies any pressure whatsoever to a work like The Crying of Lot 49.

Denise Levertov’s Poems 1968-1972 contains a work called "An Interim" which talks about how fragmentation has taken hold in language as well as in the subject, and how the two can reflexively report on and distort each other.

O language, mother of thought,

are you rejecting us as we reject you?

Language, coral island

accrued from human comprehensions,

human dreams,

you are eroded as war erodes us.

(21)

This speaks directly to the interconnectivity and sympathies that contributed to the erosion seen in postmodern language by contact with the emotionally, spiritually, and physically erosive war.  

The complete lack of motivation and total irrationality seen in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, where characters exchange roles with no logic to govern such reversals, where assault after assault inexplicably occur in random and incommensurate succession, was foreseen by Charles Olson in 1949 when he coined the term postmodern.  Birthed in the atom bomb, could the postmodern ever expect to have the same notions of depth as before?  Was that just a comforting lie?  Perhaps now we need an aesthetic that challenges these needs, that asks why we must have plots of such finality in an incomplete and often untamable world.  Just before her death, Gertrude Stein reported in Reflection on the Atom Bomb, "They asked me what I thought of the atomic bomb.  I said I had not been able to take any interest in it."  While quite flippant–Stein was in her period of celebrity–the response gets right to the difference between the modern and the postmodern.  The modern impulse was to investigate all and report with intimate detail, while the postmodern impulse is to be too busy trying to pick up the pieces of shattered lives to care–rather not an impulse but a defense mechanism. 

A scatterbrained grope at formlessness, freedom, which made the ground, tills it, tilts at it; it ripples just enough to elicit change.

Making the violent art has properties of immediacy and contiguity that other forms of aesthetic representation do not.  The aesthetization of violence serves these works, allowing them to put the reader into a point of view that is impossible to back away from, that indicts the reader as abetting and aiding the evils of killing or the excesses of drug-taking, the steady drag of war or the dogmatic demands of closure, all to the end of pointing up a glaring omission among the worlds that spawned them, a present absence of soul.

Appendix I: "Sonnet L," by Ted Berrigan, as read by moderator Frances Ruprecht in her introduction.

I like to beat people up

Absence of passion, principles, love.  She murmurs

What just popped into my eye was a fiend’s umbrella

and if you should come and pinch me now

as I go out for coffee

. . . as I was saying winter of 18 lumps

Days produce life locations to banish 7 up

Nomads, my babies, where are you?  Life’s

My dream which is gunfire in my poem

Orange cavities of dreams stir inside "The Poems"

Whatever is going to happen is already happening

Some people prefer "the interior monologue"

I like to beat people up

                                                            (47)

Appendix II: "§ 3," a poem written and read by the author to introduce the paper.

Chimeras

                        Tuning fork, "A"

            Unwitting paranymph

                                    Our carrick bend, a promise

                 Being three heads

440 cyclespersecondreal                        of dragon, of lion, of ram

            A seeming lonely fragment rendered

                        in Old Provençal

                                                            yield versions

                                    erotogenic trail, egesta

            ineludable stomy

fuck so pretty                        a mind(edly)

trouble so pretty

Empty Glass

Morality’s not measured in a room he wreaked, havoc

Movements

                                                Bi            bi-colored bill 

Appendix III: List of loops with annotations.

1.      "Steps," a loop composed by the author incorporating overdubbed guitar tracks.  This was improvised over at the start of the reading of the paper.

2.      "Sex and Chainsaw" is a loop from American Psycho.  It begins as a normal lovemaking scene and progresses to the heights of technological terror with a chase scene through the apartment and a fight in the bathroom.

3.      "‘We Must End Apartheid’" is a loop where Bateman panders to the ultra liberal pretence so in vogue among the ultra rich.

4.      "Dogs" is another original loop by the author incorporating the singing of a pair of greyhounds.  This perpetrates another violence altogether upon the audience–violence against the sensibilities.

5.      "‘Song So Catchy’" is another Bateman scene where he is about to decapitate a business rival with a fireman’s axe, listening and critiquing the Huey Lewis and the News hit, "Hip To Be Square."  The music was improvised over by the author on guitar as with the above loops.

6.      "Sophie" is a loop taken from Jeff Beck’s album Wired, and was written by Narada Michael Walden.  The loop is from the front part of the song and was improvised over by the author on guitar.

7.      "‘Cheer Up, Soldier,’" is taken from Apocalypse Now at a moment where Kurtz is touring a devastated Viet Cong village and attempting to console a dejected fighter.

8.      "Endangered Species" is a loop taken from the song of the same name on Ornette Coleman and Pat Metheny’s album Song X.  This section is after the guitar solo during a restating of the head.  Improvisations where short and sporadic over this one.

9.      "The End," taken from the song of the same name by the Doors, is taken from Apocalypse Now and includes the helicopter sounds and the various sound effects from the film at this point.

10.    The sound of a bomb exploding closed the reading of this paper.

Note:  All loops were constructed using a Boss Loop Station and an Apex DVD/CD player, as well as several guitars and two dogs. 

Works Cited

American Psycho.  Dir.  Mary Harron.  Perf.  Christian Bale.  Universal Studios, 2000.

Andersson, Lars-Gunnar, and Peter Trudgill.  Bad Language.  New York: Penguin, 1992.

Apocalypse Now: Redux.  Dir.  Frances Ford Coppola.  Perf.  Robert Duvall.  Paramount, 2001.  

Baraka, Amiri.  "T. T. Jackson Sings."  The Le Roi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader.  New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000.

Baudrillard, Jean.  Cool Memories as quoted in The Colombia Dictionary of Quotations.  New York: Colombia UP, 1995.

---.  Selected Writings.  Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988.    

Berrigan, Ted.  The Sonnets.  New York: Penguin, 2000.

Coleman, Ornette, and Pat Metheny.  "Endangered Species."  Song X.  Geffen, 1986.

Ellis, Bret Easton.  American Psycho.  New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1991.

Ginsberg, Allen.  Indian Journals.  New York; Grove Press, 1996.

Jameson, Fredric.  Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.  Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.

Levertov, Denise.  Poems: 1968-1972.  New York: New Directions Books, 1987.

Levise, Joel.  "§ 3 [Paragraph Three]."  5/18/02. http://www.strucklit.com.

Mulholland Drive.  Dir.  David Lynch.  Universal Studios, 2001.

Pynchon, Thomas.  The Crying of Lot 49.  New York: Harper Collins, 1999.

Stein, Gertrude.  "Reflections on the Atom Bomb."  Penn U.  5/17/02. http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stein-atom-bomb.html.

Walden, Narada Michael.  "Sophie."  Wired.  Jeff Beck.  Epic, 1976.