Blank Fiction. The Obsessive Consumerism of American Psycho
Keywords:
American literature, blank fiction, Ellis, Bret Easton, consumerism, consumer societyAbstract
The paper deals with a group of contemporary American novels, which appears in the 1980s and is today known mostly as blank fiction. First, it briefly presents the main characteristics of the phenomena and its temporal and spatial context; then it explores one of its most representative novels, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (1991). Within this framework the article focuses on the dimension of consumption and its manifestations which are apparent in the commercialization of the novel and the fame of the author, as well as in narrative, which puts the main hero Patrick Bateman in the role of the absolute consumer in content and in form. – Regarding the former, the article refers to the moral panic accompanying the publication of American Psycho, and as for the latter, it presents different forms of Bateman’s media consumption and shows his uncanny defective reflex of commodifying everything and everybody. As a basis for the theory of consumption the cyclic model of lust–purchase (consumption)–disappointment–(renewed) lust, established by Colin Campbell, is used and adopted with specific characteristics of postmodern consumption. – Referring to the examples of Ellis’s specific narrative devices which reduce the main character to a mere rhetorical instrument a thesis is developed that points to the total constructedness and, consequently, utter impossibility of even only the fictional existence of the central figure. As such, Patrick Bateman functions as a messenger of an inhumanly commercialized and increasingly materialistic society, and that indirectly explains and justifies the inconceivable evil of American Psycho.References
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