EJAC 33 (3) pp. 209–222 Intellect Limited 2014
European Journal of American Culture Volume 33 Number 3 © 2014 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ejac.33.3.209_1
Monika Loewy Goldsmiths, University of London
Lunar Park: From ashes to ashes Abstract
Keywords
Lunar Park opens with a sentence repeated from a previous novel: he states, ‘You do an awfully good impression of yourself’, thus setting the satirical and deceptive tone of the text. In this article, I will focus on two themes implicit in this sentence: that Lunar Park tracks Bret Easton Ellis’s search for his true identity and past and that this is impossible. I suggest that it is this inability to know an author, text or oneself within the context of a nation founded upon illusory ideals and their underlying fragmentation on which this book is centred. Ellis’s semi-autobiography playfully describes America’s cultural and physical landscape as being ruptured and repressed, emphasizing the way this context has structured his own life. The novel chronicles the author’s fame and family and takes place in a suburban town outside New York City, which is under the threat of terrorist acts in a post-9/11 America. Here, the fictional character Patrick Bateman from Ellis’s previous novel American Psycho begins to haunt Ellis’s home. Since American Psycho is renowned for its critique of the American dream, in Lunar Park, Bateman can be seen as allegorizing a romanticized identity that disavows imperialism, a notion central to American Exceptionalism. It is this, I suggest, that haunts Ellis throughout the Lunar Park. In this article, I will discuss how Lunar Park embodies Ellis’s movement towards avowal, towards recognizing those fantasies that have structured Americans’ reactions to trauma, specifically 9/11. By fabricating the past, Ellis gestures towards the impossibility of ever remembering it, as based upon his identity and book having been formed through a meaningless world where ‘publishing a shiny booklike object was simply an
September 11 uncanny Bret Easton Ellis Lunar Park American Psycho American Exceptionalism
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excuse for parties and glamour’ (Ellis 2005: 9). In so doing, I suggest that the text also invites the reader to ‘enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction’ (Baudrillard 2010: 29) in order to break down their own illusions. Lunar Park thus materializes the falling monument it represents, exposing post-9/11 America as catastrophic while revealing its own erasure. This article will trace Ellis’s frustrated search to find and illuminate his identity as an American and author in an idea of the New World.
Lunar Park (2005) is a fictional work that is seemingly passing for memoir; it tells the story of Bret Easton Ellis’s fame and family, and takes place between memories of Los Angeles and his new home in a suburban town just outside of New York City, which is under the threat of terrorist acts in a post-9/11 America. Although the reader initially assumes the narrator Bret to be the author, it is soon revealed that he is in fact Ellis’s fictionalized version, a magnification of the author’s own imagined identity (who I will be referring to as ‘Bret’). The novel begins with a list of Ellis’s literary works, beginning with Less than Zero, written in 1985, and moving onto The Rules of Attraction (1987), American Psycho (1991), The Informers (1994) and Glamorama (1998), all of which are satires of American consumerism, celebrity culture and which make a statement about the desensitization to violence and human emotion. Central, is the way in which this depthless environment affects individuals; the characters (which recur throughout all of Ellis’s novels) are detached from one another, their families and their own desires and emotions. His writing is accordingly affectless, sarcastic, witty and dry, leaving the reader as distanced from the characters as the characters are from one another. While Lunar Park does not completely deviate from this pattern, it is set apart from the start because the author himself is (purportedly) the protagonist. Although we soon discover that Bret is only a parody of Ellis, by invoking his own name, Ellis creates a bridge between himself and the reader that brings her closer to the author. Adam Phillips also acknowledges the novel’s distinction stating that, ‘in Lunar Park many plain things are said plainly, with no jokes attached’ (Phillips 2005: 20). Moreover, towards the end of the novel, the writing takes on poetic prose that reinforces a sense of seriousness in this novel that is different from the others, which I will be returning to later in this article. However, for now, I note that this seriousness is partially related to the protagonist’s trauma, which is represented through ambiguous figures such as Bret’s daughter’s doll and Patrick Bateman (the serial killer from Ellis’s novel American Psycho). Here, the reader is placed in a mindset similar to Bret’s, thus identifying with his traumatic state of delusion. For instance, the reader is as perplexed as the protagonist when a man pretending to be a detective tells Bret that there is a Patrick Bateman impersonator, only to reveal that the detective himself is the murderer, who is mimicking the detective character in American Psycho. Thus, in Lunar Park the reader is left questioning whether events are imaginary or real, and whether this distinction matters. I suggest that by blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, Ellis gestures towards a current American culture that is predicated upon fabrications that pose as fact. He paints a landscape of a twenty-first-century America that masks its trauma through ruptured, excessive and surface fictions. Since this notion of narrative obscuring trauma is central to the concept of American Exceptionalism, I want to briefly provide a platform for this thought, turning to Donald Pease for clarification:
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The traumatizing images that insist within American exceptionalism’s transgenerational fantasy reach back to events that accompanied the nation’s founding – Indian massacres, the death worlds of the slave plantations, the lynchings and ethnic cleansing of migrant populations – and project themselves into the present as images that confront historical narratives with what violates their conditions of representation. (Pease 2009: 38)
1. For Pease, fantasy is ‘the dominant structure of desire out of which U.S. citizens imagined their national identity’ (2009: 1).
Here, Pease illuminates the origins of this fantasied nation, suggesting that the country was founded through a double or split – trauma and the strain for a better life – which exists and has manifested into today’s ideology. It is a fantasy, an unreachable ideal of an exceptional nation that accommodates the current denial of history. Pease continues, ‘Exceptionalism activated a twotiered process dividing the manifest organization of the U.S. role in the world with the latent fantasy whereby U.S. citizens imagined themselves as practicing nationalism through the disavowal of imperialism’ (Pease 2009: 23).1 America uses violence under the false pretence of bringing freedom and democracy; the American ideal is structured through a denial of its traumatic underbelly. As Deborah Madsen puts it, ‘Exceptionalism has always offered a mythological refuge from the chaos of history and the uncertainty of life’ (Madsen 1998: 166). At stake however, is that disavowal does not erase the past but glosses over it through a coating that continually cracks. The past cannot be forgotten, and both despite and because of this repression, it still bears profound affects. It is the events of September 11, 2001, that provide a recent and clear example of this disavowal or split, revealing not only its persistence, but also its importance: disavowing the trauma in a particular way has caused various detrimental results, such as the ‘legal use of global violence’ (Pease 2009: 182). In this article, I will look at how Ellis’s novel Lunar Park confronts the importance of American repression by hinting towards the underlying destruction caused by September 11 and dramatizing how this kind of disavowal plays out in American relationships, families, landscapes and his own personal identity. To begin, I shall briefly go back to American Psycho (which is present in Lunar Park), to suggest that it also, in different ways, represents that split: the unreachable American fictional ideal and the traumas behind it. The novel, about a ‘world we all recognize but do not wish to face [… which has] a head-on collision with America’s greatest dream- and its worst nightmare’ (Back Cover), I contend, is indicative of ‘American exceptionalism [… which] demanded that U.S. citizens perform the disavowal of American imperialism as the way to continue to feel good about their national identity’ (Pease 2009: 23). The novel chronicles the life of Patrick Bateman, who is haunted by both the desire to be the model American (the epitome of capitalism and attractiveness) and the desire to kill. Written through excessive descriptions of consumer products and murders, it is as though by layering meaningless details, the protagonist can further deny the roots of the problem. In so doing, Bateman’s violence, like that which America represses through the American dream, multiplies, only to be revealed in bloody outbursts. As Richard Godden writes of the novel: Ellis stumbles from a study of the fetish (as an affective and semi-secretive device for dealing with loss); through an attendant anxiety over what
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has been lost; and so, via immanent allegories, towards a critique of the workings of fictitious capital within the US economy during the 1980s. (Godden 2011: 863) It is Lunar Park, however, that revives this fetish in a less allegorical, more direct fashion. Opening, not closing, with a collapse between narrative and reality, the book is foregrounded by that which discreetly underlies the former. Furthermore, American Psycho depicts the fantasy upon which American capitalism has been structured only through Bateman and his workplace, whereas Lunar Park extends this to the protagonist’s social circle, family, the representation of media and through a fissured landscape, pointing towards the wider implications of this split and how it continues to haunt Bret. Furthermore, in Lunar Park, there are murders being carried out by a Patrick Bateman impersonator. Thus, the Bateman character in Lunar Park, I contend, stands for the disavowal – both personal and national – that haunts Ellis in the novel. In this way, Lunar Park exposes the inescapability of trauma: he, like America, cannot erase a painful history. Ellis’s fictionalized image as an individual, family member and author, through the figure of Bret, reveals a destructive self-identity predicated upon its surroundings – upon a nation structured through disavowal. In a Baudrillardian fashion, America is pictured as flat and illusory, as though the denial upon which it is founded has turned into a one-dimensional landscape that blurs the social and personal distinctions between screen and reality. America ‘was there before the screen was invented but everything about the way it is today suggests it was invented with the screen in mind, that it is the refraction of a giant screen’ (Baudrillard 2010: 57). Here, the nation functions through negation – images only reflect other images – calling forth that disavowal central to American Exceptionalism. However unlike Baudrillard, Ellis not only states this but also brings it life, emphasizing its affects, at how screen and life are interchangeable. When American Psycho was released, Bret confides, it was scorned and refused, and in the process, his identity was conflated with its protagonist: ‘I was vilified even though the book sold millions of copies and raised the fame quotient so high that my name became as recognizable as most movie stars or athletes. I was taken seriously. I was a joke’ (Ellis 2005: 12). Here, screen, text and reality collapse: Bret’s character is inseparable from his society (which paradoxically takes celebrities seriously, as a joke); and his writing is both comedic and to be taken seriously (which I will later develop). Additionally depicted here is how America’s split between trauma and the ideal plays out in the day-to-day: Bret is idolized precisely because he is a ‘villain’. America’s fictions, then, like Ellis’s, are necessarily fuelled by violence. It is Lunar Park that begins to unveil the kind of violence Pease discusses that is planted within Bret’s identity as an individual and writer. He writes: American Psycho ‘wanted to be written by someone else. It wrote itself, and didn’t care how I felt about it […] I was repulsed by this creation and wanted to take no credit for it – Patrick Bateman wanted the credit’ (Ellis 2005: 13). Bret’s other – the fictionalized American ideal – is painfully writing itself upon the narrator through his texts, leaving Bret lost in a shallow identity. This plays out from the novel’s opening, as Bret is figured as a culturally constructed star whose identity and writing is intertwined with a notably postmodern America. Bret, writes Ellis, became a member of what was called the literary Brat Pack (reflecting Ellis’s real life), which ‘was essentially a media-made
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package: all fake flesh and punk and menace. It consisted of a small, trendy group of successful writers and editors, all under thirty, who simply hung out together at night […] according to Le Monde, “American fiction had never been this young and sexy”’ (Ellis 2005: 8). Here the postmodern condition is actualized: literary depthlessness is enfolded into social surfaces. This echoes Fredric Jameson’s theory that the postmodern condition can leave an individual unable to stabilize the meaningfulness of herself within the world around her. According to Jameson, a sense of united individuality is fractured, as ‘reality, and our experience of it, are discontinuous with each other’ (Jameson 2008: 109). Ellis depicts this both in style and content, as his ruptured fictional books have seeped into the real. Less than Zero (which Bret states was primarily mistaken for an autobiography) concerns parties, drugs and empty sexual relationships, resembling the Brat Pack that followed its release, suggesting an entanglement between the book and social/individual realities. Thus, literary postmodernity has been actualized, as Bret’s authenticity is dictated and ruptured by his social reception. Bret is built through a culturally constructed illusion that obscures what lies beneath, that ‘state of fantasy’ to which Pease refers. This contextual fragmentation has also affected Bret’s personal relationships, including that with his son Robby (who I will later be suggesting signifies Bret’s own lost past). In one scene, Robby was staring at Nintendo Power Monthly while slipping on a pair of Puma socks and then he was tying his Nikes. The TV was turned to the WB channel and as I stood in the doorway I watched a raunchy cartoon zap into one of the many commercials pitched toward the kids – one in a series of ads that I hated. A scruffy, gorgeous youth, hands on his skinny-boy hips, stared defiantly into the camera and made the following statements in a blank voice, subtitled beneath him in a blood red cross: ‘Why haven’t you become a millionaire yet?’ (Ellis 2005: 89) This passage calls forth Jameson’s notion of schizophrenia: ‘an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence’ (Jameson 2008: 549). Aligned with this definition, the passage above depicts Robby and Bret as being disconnected through a ruptured context (a series of ‘blank voices’ ads and commercials) and in their relationship (communication between Bret and his son is mediated by the onslaught of screen images). However Ellis does more here than describe this postmodern condition: he points towards the importance of what is being repressed. Beneath the cartoon images rests a bloody truth; beneath the American fantasy lays destruction. Ellis’ descriptions here and throughout the novel portray this Jamesonian schizophrenia, wherein an ‘intensification of our normally humdrum and familiar surroundings’ is underlined by a ‘felt as loss’, an ‘unreality’ (Jameson 2008: 550), in a satirical, yet ominous tone. Bret explains that he lived in an environment, ‘that allowed the three-day smack binge with the upcoming supermodel in the four-star hotel. It was a world that was quickly becoming a place with no boundaries’ (Ellis 2005: 10): the intensification of everyday life is quickly becoming more shattered, emptied and erased. This sense is further expressed through the writing itself, as Ellis – through exaggeration, irony and lavishness – playfully insinuates that these contexts are illusory and prescribed. What the inextricability between his writing, identity and social media emphasizes
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is the power of textual affect. Bret’s book has written him (as he explained of American Psycho) while he is writing it; just as the American ‘fantasy state’ has written the individuals who are continuing to write it. However in Lunar Park, Bret begins to write himself out of this repetitive fantasy. Although primarily somewhat linear, the novel progressively ruptures itself in tune with Bret’s own fissured notion of self. By inflicting his own rupture through writing instead of passively letting it fracture him, is Bret distancing himself from the narrative, enabling him to loosely string together descriptions of landscapes and society, characterizing each person as a depthless cliché? Though Ellis’s America reflects Baudrillard’s account, Baudrillard takes a notably European perspective. Bret, while he has perspective enough to write this world, is simultaneously enmeshed within it, generating an uncanny doubling effect. Like Ellis, Baudrillard is interested in how culture and society are affected by technology, suggesting that social reality has been supplanted with signs and representations, concepts discussed through the term ‘simulacra’. According to Baudrillard, ‘(1) It is the reflection of a basic reality. (2) It masks and perverts a basic reality. (3) It masks the absence of a basic reality. (4) It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum’ (Baudrillard 2008: 423). ‘Simulacra’, then, like the ‘state fantasy’, is formed in relation to what it attempts to hide. For Baudrillard, experience has been dramatically altered and reconfigured, shorn of its supposed semantic grounding, existing within realms of simulation that are disconnected from what we call the real. Following Baudrillard, Ellis points towards an American ‘world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning’; Ellis’s America is ‘dreamed up and fractured and postmodern’ (Ellis 2005: 74). This fragile and flat facade outlined by Ellis and Baudrillard rests just atop an empty promise, a dormant void, which begins to slowly crack throughout Lunar Park, finally exploding into ashes towards the end, in what I suggest is a metaphor for the destruction of the Twin Towers. The attacks on the World Trade Center are only mentioned once in the novel: they are described as having left cities as being mournful places, where everyday life was suddenly interrupted by jagged mounds of steel and glass and stone, and the grief on an unimaginable scale was rising up over them, reinforced by the stained tattered photocopies of the missing posted everywhere, which were not only a constant reminder of what had been lost but also a warning of what was coming next. (Ellis 2005: 27) Though Ellis does not mention the incident otherwise, he continuously refers to it indirectly, which serves the purpose of dramatizing the way in which America, like the book, is perhaps repressing the disaster. The concept is seen in Ellis’s insinuation that, in the United States, media and celebrity culture continuously papered over the reality of what happened. He writes that ‘there were endless CNN montages of people wandering around in a slow-motion daze, some wrapped in American flag, while the soundtrack was Bruce Springsteen softly singing “We Shall Overcome”’ (Ellis 2005: 28). Ellis here dramatizes what Žižek describes: It was when we watched the two WTC towers collapsing on the TV screen, that it became possible to experience the falsity of ‘reality tv
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shows’: even if these shows are ‘for real’, people still act in them- they simply play. (Žižek 2002: 12) The reaction to September 11, in other words, was cinematic. It was repressed through media; the screen of American culture distanced its reality. Žižek continues, the openings of many ‘blockbuster’ movies with scenes which bear a resemblance to the WTC collapse (tall buildings on fire or under attack, terrorist acts […] were postponed (or the films were even shelved) should thus be read as the ‘repression’ of the fantasmatic background responsible for the impact of the WTC collapse. (Žižek 2002: 17) Joan Didion further elucidates the denial that followed the event, explaining that after 9/11 the media proposed that it was ‘“not an appropriate time” to ask audiences “to think critically about various aspects of American experience”’ (Didion 2004: 177). Thus, just as the reality that a lack exists within and between the narrator and his son is masked behind fearful advertisements on the screen (the ‘blood red cross’), in being advertised as a bloody and fearful event, critical thought regarding the attack was shut down. Just as the advertisement in Lunar Park obscures critical thought in order to sell, which, Ellis insinuates, has detrimental affects, so too does the public reaction to September 11. By the relegating the event to something like ‘a movie poster’ (Radstone 2003: 119), trauma cannot be worked through in the way, for example, Žižek suggests. He writes that as a reaction to the attack, America should learn humbly to accept its own vulnerability as part of this world, enacting the punishment of those responsible as a sad duty, not as an exhilarating retaliation – what we are getting instead is the forceful reassertion of the exceptional role of the USA as a global policeman, as if what causes resentment against the USA is not its excess of power, but its lack of it. (Žižek 2002: 49) It is due in part to the narrative of America as being the saviour, the hero, the exceptional nation that cannot be attacked, which permitted the country to repeat its violent origins. If the terrorist attacks magnify that ‘transgenerational fantasy’, that historical narrative allows the country to disavow the ‘ethnic cleansing of migrant populations’ (Pease 2009: 38). Lunar Park paints a picture of how this plays out. Here, Bret’s personality has been misshapen, similar to the September 11 events, as he (like the nation) is haunted by an ungraspable wound. This trauma, furthermore, is based in both Patrick Bateman and Bret’s own father, thus emphasizing the transgenerational nature of the American disavowal. I shall now look more carefully at how Bret becomes an image of a hero that reflects those of the American people after the attack. Didion contends the following after 9/11: In the reflexive repetition of the word ‘hero,’ we began to hear what would become in the year that followed an entrenched preference for ignoring the meaning of the event in favor of an impenetrably flattening
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celebration of its victims, and a troubling belligerent idealization of historical ignorance […] Images of the intact towers were already being removed from advertising, as if we might conveniently forget they had been there. (Didion 2004: 177) Didion, though her message is similar to Žižek’s, draws our attention closer to the individual, because she illuminates the way in which celebrating victims and heroes violates the seriousness of what occurred. Bret’s character brings this even closer to an individual reality, illustrating his own experience of false heroism. ‘I was on display’, he states ‘Everything I did was written about. The paparazzi followed me constantly’ (Ellis 2005: 9). When linked to Didion’s statement, Bret reveals this cultural – and thus individual – motion to conceal a ruptured core. ‘Everything I did was written about’, he continues, indicating that he has been violated by and lost behind this Hollywood context. Bret describes himself both as a drug addict who is unable to hold down meaningful relationships and as ‘a mystery, an enigma’ (Ellis 2005: 19). Again, this is indicative of the American split between trauma and fantasy that, I suggest, made him lost to himself. I now want to look at how Bret’s internal erasure is further represented by Bret’s concern with finding ‘lost boys’ in the story, including his son. Throughout the novel, Bret attempts to connect with his son and increasingly obsesses over how some boys in the suburb start disappearing. These lost children and Robby, I suggest, allegorize Bret’s own lost childhood and identity: that internal disavowed wound that America’s hidden trauma has left upon him. In other words, the societal context that has, as discussed, worked by denying its destructive origins through a false narrative has shaped Bret, and his concern with lost boys suggests a desire to go back into his own past to find it. However, it cannot be found because trauma, by definition, cannot be understood when it occurs. Bret must rewrite his past through the book at hand, only by keeping intact its traumatic centre. In so doing, Bret confronts how this ‘transgenerational trauma’ has affected him personally, thereby working away from that social system of which Pease speaks. While Pease asserts that the fantasy upon which American Exceptionalism hinges repeats itself throughout history, Ellis’s book embodies this by emphasizing how Bret is haunted and built through his father and son. At stake, the story suggests, is that if the past cannot be acknowledged and worked through, it will repeat itself. Throughout Lunar Park, the protagonist attempts to escape his father’s shadow, because he is ‘slowly losing it, like my father had’ (Ellis 2005: 33), signifying that his internal loss has been formed through his father’s conditioning, ‘the ghost [of his father] in the crypt indeed refuses to remain hidden’ (Peeren 2012: 313). In this way, Bret’s father and Patrick Bateman stand for the ‘War on Terror (with its extreme mediatization, elusive villains and the ghostly prisoners of Guántanamo Bay and extraordinary rendition), [which] is augmented by Ellis’s narrative, which sees 9/11 spawning an infinite series of ghosts’ (Peeren 2012: 305). Like those ambiguous traumas that haunt Bret throughout the text, America’s is also haunted by its violence. Pease writes, American exceptionalism, [which] is a transgenerational state of fantasy, and like a family secret it bears the traces of a transgenerational trauma. Reassembling an ongoing nightmare into which we occasionally awakened, this transgenerational trauma bore the psychic reality of
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the obscene underside to the victory culture that was structured in the fantasy of American exceptionalism. (2009: 38) The message is clear: the nightmarish past recurs whether or not it is denied or fictionalized. Lunar Park, then, like the field of American Exceptionalism outlined by Pease, traces a movement to acknowledge or ‘go back into the past’ (Ellis 2005: 29), to rupture the false identity that has been shaped through the screen of American repression. Bret, in other words, dramatizes a desire to find what rests beneath his fantasied identity by looking at the way his father and society have formed him. However, since this past has already been defined and structured through a traumatized and ‘fantasy’ context, Bret must rearrange and fictionalize his life and world in order to fill those lost memories. He must, as Baudrillard puts it, ‘enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction’ (Baudrillard 2010: 29) to reconstitute his identity through the novel, in order to begin writing, and thus repairing his felt fragmentation. I have sought to show how Bret (and thus Ellis) indicates that he was too immersed in his shattered context (America and his identity as represented in the novel) to understand the loss that continues to haunt him, and that Lunar Park traces Bret’s motion to begin alleviating its resulting pain by rewriting his past to alter his identity. I now want to focus on how, by using fragmented language, interrupting himself and blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, the writing in Lunar Park also coerces the reader into breaking her own preconceived representations. Thus, Ellis takes the reader on a passage of self-discovery through self-effacement, as he attempts to write his past by exposing its impossibility. He seduces the reader into questioning the veracity of her own context, because the novel begins with an unquestionable coherency that begins to break down slowly, as events and the author’s identity are revealed as mockingly fictitious. Rendered sceptical, therefore, the reader is positioned to tease meaning out of sarcasm, which consistently eludes her. In this way, Ellis not only states that America is composed of falsities but also shows the reader how these surfaces affect identities and thus exist in the same way that screens exist. The book is a facade seen by and influential to an objective public, thus creating while simultaneously hiding fragmentation. In a sense then, Ellis is bringing the reader’s attention to the affects of media (text) and, thus, his own novel. To dramatize this, the linguistic and narrative form becomes increasingly fractured, as Bret’s identity is incessantly multiplied, representing the author’s own splintered self-perceptions. For instance, Ellis’s prose is punctured by Bret’s internal voice (‘the writer’): that side of Bret (and Ellis) assessing his life in order to create it for the book, and who is creating trouble in order for it to be written. The fiction, in this scenario, precedes the writer and Bret’s lived self, just as America’s fictional heroes precede individual identities. Rand suggests that ‘the writer’s role is therapeutic, seeking “to reveal the crypt’s secret content in order to effect its reintegration into consciousness”’ (Abraham, Torok and Rand 1994: 22). We can see how this plays out as the novel unfolds, as Bret’s sanity deteriorates. Always fighting the boundary between illusion and reality, he believes that something is after him in the form of his daughter’s deranged doll, a college student posing as Patrick Bateman, and the ghost of his father’s ashes. I propose that these events can be directly linked to Freud’s concept of the uncanny, which transcends the book’s boundaries to affect the reader, again causing the reader to acknowledge in
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some way her fear of America’s imminent disaster. Freud, in his 1919 essay ‘The Uncanny’ explains that an uncanny feeling, a feeling of terror connected to a simultaneous homelike comfort and discomfort, stems from repressed fears: it is an unconscious haunting that takes different forms. Furthermore, the uncanny always relates to ‘childhood life’ and can also specifically refer to living dolls. Since in Lunar Park, Bret’s daughter’s doll comes to life and terrorizes him, we see Ellis’s direct allusion to Freud’s idea. Additionally, Bret’s fear of losing his son, if seen as a metaphor and double of Bret’s own childhood, gestures towards the concept of the uncanny. The loss of his son is also connected to his father’s death, alluding to the trauma that permeates between generations; how one’s recurring double is intrinsically linked to the past. Adam Phillips writes, Bret realises that the reason the son repudiates the father is that there is such an affinity between them: the one thing the son knows about the father, in some obscure way, is what the father has suffered, what he has been through. (Phillips 2005: 20) His father’s haunting may also be linked to Freud’s essay, wherein Freud proposes that the fear of one’s father is a particular kind of uncanny dread that relates to impotency. Additionally, as Adam Phillips writes: In one of the eeriest parts of the book, Bret discovers that his stalker has managed – by uncanny, inexplicable means – to make a video of his father in the last moments before his death. We watch the father drinking vodka in his Jacuzzi, going back into the house, looking at himself in the mirror and sobbing, and then staring into the camera. (Phillips 2005: 20) Again, personal relationships are mediated through screens, yet this one is particularly uncanny because his stalker confronts Bret with his father, his hidden other. This double, therefore, does not come only from within the character, but is formed beyond his control; his father is lost within him. He writes: ‘My father created me, criticised me, destroyed me’ (Ellis 2005: 8). Implied, is that facing the traumatic experience of looking at oneself (in a mirror or camera in this case) one may find ‘the writer’, the other, the trauma can be better understood. However, it can never be completely understood, due partially to its paradoxical nature. Freud writes that the uncanny ‘belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight’ (Freud 2003: 132). In the uncanny, two realities exist at once: something familiar and nostalgic and something scary and obscure. Bret writes of the video of his father that the camera was ‘bold and covert at the same time’ (Freud 2003: 234); a paradox that reminds us of the television images of the 9/11 attacks, which were both repeatedly shown on screen, while also remaining hidden behind American policies (such as the postponement of movies with scenes bearing a likeness to the Twin Tower attacks). The reader here is also put into a similarly uncanny position, as, Adam Phillips writes, Ellis ‘works hard to alienate the reader at the same time as drawing him in’ (Phillips 2005: 19); for the reader, two emotions exist at once.
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Thus, literature is itself uncanny here, which raises attention to the way words, screens and books can affect the individual. The way in which something is presented can have a real affect. Finally, Freud’s suggestion that literature and fiction can be uncanny if the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality, cements the link between Freud’s uncanny and Lunar Park. The book steps into the real, thus suggesting that just as Bret’s uncanny and inescapable other (that takes several forms and haunts him throughout the novel) was shaped by his environment, most definitely his father; the reader’s draw to and fear from the horror of the book (and therefore of those events in the world such as 9/11) cannot be repressed; they are within the individual. It is ‘the writer’ in Lunar Park who is posed as a conduit for this uncanny haunting, that unconscious part of himself that both destroys Bret and paradoxically grants him the life of being a writer. Thus, Bret’s (and thus Ellis’s) other (the writer) is also reminiscent of Freud’s concept of the uncanny self: those repeated ‘manifestations of the unconscious [that] confront the known and knowing self of everyday life with a strange internal other or double’ (Cohen 2007: 83). When Bret states, ‘Yes, the writer was back. He did not want to be left out of this scene and was already whispering things to me’ (Ellis 2005: 243), he shows us that part of himself that interrupts everyday life and his hollowed identity in order to create his individuality as a writer, that internal other which refuses to be repressed. Freud’s concept generally proposes that these uncanny fears must be acknowledged in order to keep them from taking over, which in some cases lessens the haunted individual’s pain. At stake is the fact that by acknowledging his repressed fears instead of masking them through another fictional character or through his own fantasized, externalized, heroic identity, Bret’s internal self is shifted. In writing his torment, the protagonist begins to restructure the past and the way it has defined him, in order to alleviate the physical and mental pain of his internal void. Or as he states: ‘the past was being erased, and a new beginning was replacing it’ (Ellis 2005: 226). Though this shift leaves him distanced from the context he was accustomed to (both literary and environmental), where there were ‘too many words I didn’t understand the meaning of anymore’, it caused him to ‘notic[e] the facial surgery [that] had rendered so many of the women and men […] expressionless’ (Ellis 2005: 276). Though an uncomfortable realization, this perspective caused Bret’s ‘body to feel different. The regret that had been defining me had lifted off, and I became someone else’ (Ellis 2005: 285). By looking at himself in this way, he is able to begin seeing that ‘there was something beneath the surface of things’ (Ellis 2005: 172) and that by facing this something, this uncanny other, he is able to feel better. This movement is solidified as the novel comes to a close, when Bret finally lets go of, but does not forget, the past. By releasing his father’s ashes into the air, he is able to ‘put him to rest’ (Ellis 2005: 306); however as the ashes rose up into the salted air they opened themselves to the wind and began moving backwards, falling into the past and coating the faces that lingered there, dusting everything, and then the ashes ignited into a prism and began forming patterns and started reflecting the men and women who had created him and me and Robby. (Ellis 2005: 306) Here, Ellis deliberately moves from that fragmented and shortened sentence structure common to horror novels to a more lush and poetic voice, gesturing
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2. Here, Godden is referring to the financial deficit.
towards the seriousness of his message. This change in style, I contend, alludes to the September 11 attacks, as fortified by the reference to his father’s ashes having ‘fallen’ into the past, precisely reminiscent of the Twin Tower ashes. As Godden puts it, ‘ashes cannot fall from a text written there in 2005 without making a barely occluded allusion to the falling towers’ (Godden 2013: 603). He continues, One might speculate that the inscribed ashes which fall from the vault, through the text, and onto Manhattan in 2005, fall, in some sense, from the burning towers. If so, I would suggest that for Ellis, the World Trade Center falls least interestingly to terrorist attack: rather, and in contradistinction, in Lunar Park the towers continue to fall as a structurally necessary and spectral emission from the disavowals.2 (Godden 2013: 604) Ellis’s book magnifies the weight of absence: as it repeatedly falls into itself and is further fragmented, it reflects that the Twin Towers– although they have fallen – have not been erased. That which has been disavowed, as Ellis and Godden point out, continue to bear affects: the fantasy used to mask the attack provided and opening for that ‘legal use of global violence’, those fantasies that fueled the War on Terror, Patriot Act and the (Godden argues) deficit. In poetically exposing a lost past and those faces within it, Ellis no longer ‘flatly celebrates’ victims, but acknowledges their ghosts. Here, we are reminded that though the victims have died, the trauma remains. If Didion states that ‘it’s a long-term failure of the political leadership, the intelligentsia, and the media in this country that we didn’t take the discussion that was forming in late September and try to move it forward in a constructive way’ (Didion 2004: 183), I argue that Lunar Park embodies the attempt to discuss 9/11 in a constructive way. By looking at America’s rupture, and how this has shaped individuals and writing, Ellis shows the reader how we can acknowledge its destruction through textual mediums and language, instead of obscuring it through a meaningless world where ‘publishing a shiny booklike object was simply an excuse for parties and glamour’ (Ellis 2005: 9). After 9/11, Pathetic fallacy was everywhere. The presence of rain at a memorial for fallen firefighters was gravely reported as evidence that ‘even the sky cried.’ The presence of wind during a memorial at the site was interpreted as another such sign, the spirit of the dead rising up from the dust. (Didion 2004: 180) Ellis reverses this shallow sentiment by gutting it, by describing and exposing the gore, haunting and terror of what lies beneath this dust. Instead of stopping here, however, and submitting to this destruction, Ellis offers an alternative: a movement to repair the past by writing it and making something new without denying the terror. He writes, The ashes were collapsing into everything and following echoes. They sifted over the graves of his parents and finally entered the cold, lit world of the dead where they wept across the children standing in the cemetery and then somewhere out at the end of the Pacific – after they
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rustled across the pages of this book, scattering themselves over words and creating new ones – they began exiting the text, losing themselves somewhere beyond my reach[…]the world swayed and then moved on, and though it was all over, something new was conceived. (Ellis 2005: 308) Here, Ellis insinuates that his words may be integrated amongst those who read and share the ideas exposed within his novel and may thus engender a shift towards reparation. Ellis insinuates that, by reading Lunar Park, the reader may become aware of ‘the presence of a wrying, force-filled absence […] which proves at once familial and economic’ (Godden 2013: 603), personal and national. Ellis’s semi-fictional text, which refers to both metaphorical and actual bodily ashes, attends to the ghost behind the American fantasy. By disturbing the reader with horrifying images that show how he, like the nation, is haunted by his past, Ellis urges the reader to feel the uncanny and disavowed past of self and nation, opening our eyes to the its danger. If the past cannot be erased (the American fantasy has been carried out transgenerationally), and September 11 shows the danger of this pattern, Ellis’s book embodies the possibility of writing out of and thus alerting a pre-constructed narrative. Pease writes, President George W. Bush turned 9/11 into the opportunity to reshape the configuration of global power relations. Bush associated America’s monopoly on the legal use of global violence with the intervention in human time of a higher law (what he called his “higher father”). (Pease 2009: 182) Just as the father who has painfully shaped Bret is ruptured through his text engendering real affects on the author, the text may also help fracture that falsified American ‘higher father’ that permits the legal use of violence. Like the decimated towers themselves, therefore, Lunar Park is a ruptured monument that represents an individual and cultural identity that can and must be endlessly restructured.
References Abraham, N., Torok, M. and Rand, N. (1994), The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis: v.1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Baudrillard, J. (2008), ‘Simulacra and simulations’, in D. Lodge and N. Wood (eds), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 3rd edn., London: Routledge. pp. 421–431. —— (2010), America, London: Verso Books Cohen, J. (2007), ‘Roth’s doubles’, in T. Parrish (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Phillip Roth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 82–94. Didion, J. (2004), Vintage Didion, United States: Vintage Books. Ellis, B. E. (2005), Lunar Park, London: Pan Macmillan. Freud, S. (2003), The Uncanny, London: Penguin Classics. Godden, R. (2011), ‘Fictions of fictitious capital: American Psycho and the poetics of deregulation’, Textual Practice, 25: 5, pp. 853–66. —— (2013), ‘Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park, and the exquisite corpse of deficit finance’, American Literary History, 25: 3, pp. 588–606.
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Jameson, F. (2008), ‘Postmodern and consumer society’, in D. Lodge and N. Wood (eds), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 3rd edn., London: Routledge, pp. 541–555. Madsen, D. L. (1998), American Exceptionalism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pease, D. (2009), The New American Exceptionalism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Peeren, E. (2012), ‘Ghostly generation games: Multidirectional hauntings and self-spectralization in B.E. Ellis’s Lunar Park’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 53: 4, pp. 305–21. Phillips, A. (2005), ‘Remember me’, London Reviews of Books, 27: 23, pp. 19–20. Radstone, S. (2003), ‘The war of the fathers: Trauma, fantasy, and September 11’, in J. Greenberg (ed.), Trauma at Home: After 9/11, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. pp. 117–23. Žižek, S. (2002), Welcome to the Desert of the Real, London: Verso Books.
Suggested citation Loewy, M. (2014), ‘Lunar Park: From ashes to ashes’, European Journal of American Culture, 33: 3, pp. 209–222, doi: 10.1386/ejac.33.3.209_1
Contributor details Monika Loewy is in the final year of her Ph.D. in the English and Comparative Literature department at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her thesis focuses on how film, fiction and post-structuralist literary theory can be linked to two physical syndromes: the phantom limb and body integrity identity disorder. She uses literary and psychoanalytic theorists such as Maurice Blanchot, D. W. Winnicott and Sigmund Freud. Her primary fictional sources include Georges Perec’s novel, W or the Memory of Childhood, and Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof. Monika also organizes a weekly literature seminar held at Goldsmiths called ‘GLITS’. She recently organized a conference through Goldsmiths called ‘Textual Embodiment: literature, the body and psychoanalysis’. Additionally, Monika teaches a class for adult students through Hackney Picturehouse, called ‘The Dream Screen: Psychoanalysis and Film’. She has taught first- and third-year undergraduate modules on psychoanalysis and modern/postmodern literature. She will be teaching modern literature at Goldsmiths in 2015. Contact: Goldsmiths, University of London, Lewisham Way, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW, UK. E-mail:
[email protected] Monika Loewy has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.
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