We talk with goblins, owls, and sprites.

I promised a Comedy of Errors review last week, but honestly I really don’t have much to say about the production I saw.  There is not much to say about Comedy of Errors at all, anyway, and so in one way this isn’t surprising.  Needlessly to say it was a good production, it succeeded as a farce, and the actors I met at the talk-back were nice.  It was a repertory company, incidentally, which is the first of those I believe I’ve ever seen.

This repertory business led to some strange decisions, mostly w/r/t blocking, that I’m not sure would carry to all traveling actors or what: but like, the characters would just line up during crowd scenes and step forward to speak.  I can understand if you’re on a different stage every week and can’t manage to keep your blocking consistent why this would happen, and really, in something as flimsy as Comedy you’re not going to break suspension of disbelief by lining up.  It makes me wonder what these guys do when they perform tragedies, though.

Now take a look at some other things!  Hayley Campbell, world-famous twitter enthusiast, has a blog up on fear (the best emotion) and The Woman in Black, a play I saw in London and reviewed here.  I imagine Campbell seeing it at what was probably not a matinee filled with shrieking schoolgirls helped her dig it slightly more than I did, and I admit that though my opinion of the play in that review is slightly critical, in retrospect I’ve grown rather fond of it.  Especially now that a film version with Harry Potter is in danger of destroying everything I find compelling about the original play.

On the front of Lovecraft news, I want to take a moment to point out Cthulhu Chick, who knits Cthulhus, but also has put together a version of HPL’s complete works for your ereader of choice.  And it’s  free!  I should point out that this isn’t technically complete, because it has only his short stories and novels but not his oodles and oodles of terrible poetry.  But that’s me being a pedant.  Something else of note Cthulhu Chick did was this list of Lovecraft’s favorite words, just in case reading them each a good couple dozen times in every story was too subtle for you to figure out how to write your next pastiche.

Young Hamlet

So now that A Serious Game has wrapped I find myself without my weekly guaranteed blog entry.  The upshot is that this semester I am nowhere near as busy as I was last semester, so in theory I should have more time to do write-ups about various things that occur to me.  The problem, then, becomes getting these things to occur to me.

I saw a production of Hamlet last Sunday that was billed as “Young Hamlet” — because it was based off the first quarto (Q1) text of the play, rather than the First Folio text we all are generally familiar with.  The thing about Q1 Hamlet is that it is very, very different from the Folio Hamlet.  To give you an idea: the character of Polonius is, in Q1, called Corambis, and two silly courtiers are Rosencroft and Guilderstone, and so on.  The play is half the length as well, with the production I saw running in at a brisk two hours — this isn’t just because whole speeches aren’t there, but that when they are they are, they’re often shortened or paraphrased versions of the speeches we know.  The most pertinent example here is “To be or not to be — ay, there’s the point!”

Anyway, there are two reasons why this version is called Young Hamlet.  One theory is that this text written by Shakespeare early in his London career — he would have been in his 20s — and it was revised later in life to make the more popular Folio version.  The second reason is that you can figure out Hamlet’s age from some things said by the gravedigger near the end of the play, and if you listen to him in the Folio, Hamlet is about 30 while in Q1 he’s 16-19.  Though I like the Folio text more, I actually prefer a younger Hamlet, because the play just makes more sense.  I mean, the guy is a college student, and even in Shakespeare’s day, if you’re 30 and in college and living at home (and dating a teenaged girl?) there is something wrong with you.

So there are some good things about the Q1 text despite its omissions, and seeing it in performance actually opened up the text for me more.  I don’t know if this speaks to the integrity of Hamlet as a piece of drama or to the obvious care and enthusiasm put forth by the production team, but it was really fun to watch.  There’s a delicious tension in Hamlet for me, at about the point right after he meets with the Ghost.  Here all of the machinery of the play seems to lock into place and I can only watch astounded from the sidelines as the play rockets toward its conclusion, when everything spectacularly goes to shit.

This production — and this text — had that same inertia, it seems.  It was really great to see this similar-but-different take on a story I know very well, and to see some very clever staging decisions the production made.  If there was one big disappointment, it was that the play’s pace in this earlier version was probably too fast — the ending came about very abruptly, and suddenly everyone was dead.  As I said, the feeling towards the end of the play — especially during the fencing scene — when every character’s plans suddenly go off-track is wonderfully complicated and chaotic in the Folio text.  Here everything was comparatively simple and very brief, and the abrupt entrance of Fortinbras (or Fortinbrasse) with little expository dialogue from either him or Horatio made the ending seem like a bit of a slump.

This might be something that could be fixed with staging decisions, since the text doesn’t seem to allow that sense of madcap tension, but at this point for me it’s all speculation.  In short, I’m glad I got the chance to see this production, and I was pleasantly surprised by how well it worked.  There’s been an academic move to reclaim Q1 in the past few years, but this is the first I’ve heard of steps being taken in actual performance, so it should be interesting to see how moves like this change our perception of Hamlet in the future.

This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine

I’ve written an autobiographical poem:

It is okay
to take a shot of whiskey
at 3 am
when you are awakened
by a false fire alarm.

So that’s me, channeling my inner Bukowski.  I’m sorry to say that I don’t have any choice historical literary criticism to dish this week, although I’ve been reading some Stephen Greenblatt and some Frank Kermode and there are bits in there I like.  They may find their way here for my future reference and your momentary enjoyment.

I’ve also got the Patrick Stewart Macbeth in my backlog — it aired on PBS’s Great Performances this week but I couldn’t catch it at the time.  Anyway, it ought to make a good addition to what seems to be Macbeth-a-Thon 2010 — and I have a friend haranguing me to watch Throne of Blood, so that may end up falling under the same banner.  Anyway, if this latest Macbeth raises any points for me, I’ll address them here, as is my wont.

In the meantime, though, let’s take a look at this:

More Macbeth (because why not)

So now I have seen four (4) productions of Macbeth this year.  This latest one was community theater, and about as good as you can expect from free community theater Shakespeare in a park, but it still managed to be more entertaining to watch than the Cheek by Jowl production I saw, even if it lacked the strange insights into the play CbJ (quite boringly) presented.

That’s not to say there wasn’t some thought there.  This production was set, rather vaguely, in Colonial America at about the time of the Revolutionary War.  The witches, for instance, were Native Americans, and there were lots of bayonets, and so on.  The fact that I watched this production on September 11 probably affected by reception of it a bit, too, but regardless of all of that, it put me into the state of mind in which I consider American (US) literature and what’s important about it.

I don’t talk about US lit a lot, mostly because I find it substantially less interesting than other things, but that doesn’t mean I have Opinions, by god, because if I ever manage to make a name for myself I’ll definitely be a part of the US literary tradition more than, well, whatever-the-hell-else.  So anyway, I think that if there is a Shakespeare play that comes close to being an “American” play, it probably really is Macbeth.

This sounds a bit nutty, I know, but Macbeth in my mind has always seemed like a deeply nuanced reworking of Marlowe’s Faust.  And if there’s any European myth that I think has some special claim on America, it’s Faust.  I am very cagey about people (including me) making sweeping statements about “American” literature or a great “American” novel, but if there is a recurring motif in what we seem to consider great US fiction, it’s this notion of a deal with a devil, a fascination with things that have the power to make us great or destroy us, and the choices we have in relationship to these forces.

Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” is the prototype for this in my mind, but I also see it in Moby Dick, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Great Gatsby, All the King’s Men, Beloved, and on and on.  My own Gothic predilections are obvious here, but I think there’s something worthwhile in the notion of our national myth, so to speak, being one of great power and ability bought at a terrible (usually bloody) cost.  I’m kind of a pessimist, too, so there’s that.

dark deeds, darkly answered

The Measure for Measure research project has begun and continues apace.  It’s shaping up to be interesting.  In my readings I’ve learned some interesting facts, like that outside of the great tragedies, M4M is Harold Bloom’s favorite Shakespeare play.  What.

I suppose I can afford to link a few things I’ve found that I think are cool or noteworthy.  First, Neil Gaiman has a wonderful piece on Ray Bradbury in the Times Online, one with which I agree wholeheartedly.  I tend to think of myself pretty strongly as a Midwestern writer — so in a more canonical sense my lineage would consist of people like Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson and their stories of small-town grotesqueries.  And while I’ve read those writers and they’re indeed good, none of them has affected me more than Bradbury — also their literary child, but in addition to petty rural politics, he also wrote about monsters and spaceships.

And with that, my second link.  Jeffrey Anderson, a blogger over at Cinematical, asks if sci-fi as a genre has surpassed horror.  Of particular interest is this bit:

At its best, horror is capable of — and even expert at — taking the temperature of a time and mood in very subtle ways. But, like comedies and erotic films, it will always be an embarrassment, something one enjoys inwardly but does not celebrate outwardly (at awards ceremonies). But there’s also no denying that science fiction has struck a chord with audiences.

Now, this is a film site talking about films and blah blah blah.  You know what I’m going to say: he’s wrong, at least partly.  Yes, horror does its best during times of social and economic duress (the sf/horror boom in the 50s, the satanic horror boom in the 70s leading to the general horror explosion in the 80s, the post 9-11 J-horror boom, and so on).  But to say that a piece of horror fiction is always going to be an embarrassment because it is the product of a certain time — well, absolutely not.

I’ll hedge my bets to begin with.  Let’s look at Dracula: now, this book absolutely takes “the temperature” of Victorian Britain.  Vampires operate entirely by means of metaphors for (repressed) sexual activity.  Quite titillating!  And is it dated?  Yes.  Do people seem to care?  Not particularly — the architecture Stoker established for his vampires is still in use today.  I mean, Twilight, goddamn.

I could also talk about a film that’s both sf and horror — Alien.  It’s a bit harder to make this one relate to its time-period — perhaps you could say it relates to fears of increasing corporate control of society at the end of the 70s.  Anderson seems to assume that a film cannot be tense and foreboding (horror) but also quiet and thoughtful (sf).  Well, Alien is both, and it’s damn good.

Now for straight horror fiction, I could talk about The Shining — the book and the movie.  The book is probably one of the best things King has written, and the film is Kubrick, so you know it’s good.  Unless you want to tie both of them to a particular social event (eg, an increasing number of divorces in the 70s) then they’re both very thoughtful (in their respective ways) and also very tense and frightening.  King’s novel is a meditation on fatherhood, family, abuse, and self-determination; Kubrick’s film is… well, take your pick.

But Anderson does raise a valid point in that horror is simply not as popular as sf (or even fantasy) these days.  Part of this is Peter Jackson’s LotR films being so damn good — fantasy is suddenly respectable, and sf is closer aesthetically to fantasy and therefore easier to digest.  Not to mention sf has a cultural pedigree already in Star Wars and similar things.  Horror’s cultural icons — the old Universal monsters, which aren’t so scary anymore, or Kubrick’s The Shining — are plenty respectable, too, but, as Anderson points out, the ‘modern classics’ of Shaun of the Dead and Let the Right One In haven’t had as great an impact on the culture as either of those.

Well, I guess two reasons as to why, the first being that those films weren’t American.  Before you call me xenophobic, understand: I loved them both.  But that’s because I’m a horror fan and I’m willing to search for good horror.  I’m willing to read the subtitles for LtROI.  The American films Anderson cites (Drag Me to Hell and The House of the Devil) are, mutually, absolutely goddamn terrible and uninteresting.  The second reason is that horror isn’t attuned to zeitgeist at the moment — we’re looking for feel-good escapism, which is what something like Avatar offers, and horror (usually at its best and even sometimes at its worst) is noble for not allowing that.  Horror can have a happy ending, but it exists only to remind us of the dangers and uncertainties of existence, and at the moment, we’d rather fawn over sparkling non-horrific vampires or pretend to be peaceful blue catpeople living on a planet with a ridiculously impractical and unbelievable ecosystem.  I’ll leave it to someone smarter than me to figure out why that is.

In other news: I might have exciting news about something or I might not.  It depends on when I get confirmation of details.  Watch this here space.

DO YOU REVERSE?

The summer lull begins.

I find myself wasting a remarkable amount of time in the hopes that I will feel relaxed once my summer obligations come to bear.  In a little over a week I’ll be back on campus, working on a small research project about Measure for Measure.  It’s common knowledge (more or less) that Shakes lifted the plot from Machiavelli, but I think it’s worth investigating exactly how he’s dealing with Machiavellian politics in the play.  (If I manage to get something useful out of this, I also suspect there are variations on this theme in Coriolanus and The Tempest, and maybe that will also be a profitable area for further research.)  Anyway, that’s boring.

After I finish that up I’ll be a teaching assistant for a two-week course for high school students, during which they’ll hopefully read Hamlet and come to like it.  I’ve taught high school kids before, but that was Anglo-Saxon lit, so they were understandably not very receptive.  Hamlet, at least, can be related to by most teens in ways of differing profundity; the riddles from the Book of Exeter, not so much.

There are a few other things I could talk about here.  For instance, how less than a week after I leave London the country is so lost without me that they just cocked things up royally.  But again, that’s boring.

Instead I’ll leave off with a delightful glimpse into the past, when a little girl named Mary O’Connor taught a chicken to walk backwards.  She also became one of the greatest American writers of the past century and probably my single favorite writer of all time (which is obviously saying something), but that all happened much later.

Dunsinane @ Hampstead Theatre

And now for something completely different.

Unlike the other plays I’ve talked about in this space, Dunsinane is a modern play that premiered near the beginning of February.  However, because I am completely monomaniacal in my interests, there is of course a Shakespeare connection: it’s billed as a sequel to Macbeth.  Which it is, sort of.

Obviously doing something like this has the potential to blow chunks of epic proportions, but I was pleasantly surprised by Dunsinane.  In fact it is… Not Bad At All.  Of the plays I’ve seen here, it’s number two — right behind that Measure for Measure production I didn’t really talk much about.  But anyway, I’m writing about Dunsinane now.  Let’s do this.

It should be noted that David Greig, a playwright of no little renown, makes a smart decision and does not choose to make Dunsinane a straight sequel to Shakespeare’s Macbeth; rather, he places his play more distinctly within historical reality.  Macbeth (who is never referred to by name and never appears on stage) is a well-regarded king who has ruled for fifteen years after seizing the throne from the weak and tyrannical Duncan; Duncan’s son, Malcolm, has meanwhile convinced the English that Macbeth rules against the wishes of the people of Scotland, and so a contingent of English soldiers led by Siward and Macduff (one of the handful of Scottish nobles to turn against Macbeth) storm the castle of Dunsinane and implement a bit of regime change.

That should sound kind of familiar, and it’s intentional.  The play mirrors the Iraq situation, with mixed results.  Much better is the way it blurs the line between actual history, Shakespeare’s play (Birnam Wood does indeed come to Dunsinane — it’s the opening scene), and Greig’s own imagination.  This mixture also allows Greig to bring Shakespeare’s most famous character, Lady Macbeth, back under her real name — Gruach.  She died for Shakespeare, she lived historically; she also had a son by her previous marriage, another detail preserved and one that invalidates Malcolm’s claim to the throne.

Malcolm, for his part, turns out to be a corrupt jackass who simply wanted the privileges of being king and not the responsibilities.  He’s also ruthless; he wants Gruach (who he’s captured) and her son (who has gone into hiding) killed to consolidate his power.  The Englishman Siward, the protagonist of the play, only wants wants stability and peace — as he calls it, justice — in the country he has invaded, and he’s willing to commit himself and the English forces indefinitely to enforcing a stable regime in Scotland.

I think it’s a great setup.  There are, in fact, a lot of really great things about this play.  It’s RSC-sponsored, so production values and set design are no problem; the actors are all generally strong, especially Gruach, who proves to be just as overwhelming a presence as a wronged mother and monarch as she does when she’s a batshit crazy regicide.  The structure of the play, though it’s four acts based on seasons, still manages to have some neat nods to Shakespeare, such as the mixture of Siward’s higher tragedy with the banter of his soldiers, vulgar young boys who discuss sex and homesickness before encountering with Heavy Stuff like death and warfare.

There’s actually a heavy dose of comedy; the opening scene of the march on Dunsinane is played mostly for laughs, underscoring how ridiculous it is to have soldiers pretending to be trees.  This is intercut with more serious scenes, as you may expect, but even Siward and Gruach have highly comedic lines.  Malcolm, for his part, is the worst; he’s played as a spineless, pseudo-Tony Blair parody, a leader who equivocates and lies but has no solid ideas for what he plans to do.  The humor written for his character is so brash and forthright, so damn modern, that it actually broke my suspension of disbelief, especially when thrown up against large, serious, questions of justice, warfare, and colonialism.

That is the play’s biggest fault: it doesn’t know what the hell it is, or wants to be.  It’s either a silly allegoric satire of the Iraq War in period dress, or it’s a serious treatment of the motivations for and effects of doing what you think is the right thing, and how far some people are willing to go for what they recognize as justice.  It’s either watching ill-equipped, unprepared young men die horribly while making sex and shit jokes, or it’s watching a committed idealist be slowly destroyed by the corrupt world around him.

All in all, the play actually has very little to do with Shakespeare’s Macbeth other than setting and a few revisionist takes on shared characters.  Thematically it’s in a different ballpark entirely.  I’ve talked before during the Psycho series about the concept (borrowed from a professor) of the “rewrite” — and in one sense Dunsinane is an attempt to rewrite Macbeth.  But that’s only skin-deep; Greig wants to call Shakespeare out on his historical inaccuracies, his limited understanding of Scottish culture, and rectify these mistakes.  But on a deeper, more profound level, Greig isn’t working with Macbeth at all.

This is clear enough in the last scene: Siward, with only a single foolish young soldier to keep him company, confronts Gruach in the midst of a bitter snowstorm.  We’ve been watching this man break down for the past two hours, we’ve seen his hopes shattered, we’ve seen him betrayed, and now we see him, hunched, obsessed, perhaps driven mad, crying out for revenge and justice in the midst of a storm.

No, Dunsinane isn’t Macbeth; it’s King Lear.

Which is interesting in and of itself, since by the time this entry is posted (remember, I’m writing a week in advance and autoupdating) I in theory will have seen the RSC’s new production of Lear running in Stratford-Upon-Avon.  And later this month, I hope to see the new RSC-sponsored play and counterpart to Dunsinane, The Gods Weep — which, when you read the plot synopsis, also happens to very obviously be a Lear rewrite.

Will something come of this?  Only time will tell!*

*Also assuming I haven’t met with some horrible accident during my week of being homeless.

Twelfth Night @ The Duke of York’s Theatre

This was a Royal Shakespeare Company production, and not just any RSC production, but an RSC production directed by Gregory Doran.  Doran is most recently famous for taking a huge risk in 2008 and casting Doctor Who‘s David Tennant in Hamlet, a move that apparently paid off in spades.  I obviously wasn’t here to see it, and I haven’t yet gotten my hands on a copy of the DVD, but I’ve heard good things (also, Patrick Stewart as Claudius? Daaaaamn).  Anyway, in addition to his Hamlet cred, in 2000-ish Doran put on a Macbeth that I think, despite its few faults, might be the closest thing to definitive we’ve got.  So I have a lot of respect for (and expectations of) Gregory Doran.

It really saddens me, then, to say that his Twelfth Night is not that good.

Which isn’t to say it is bad, really.  The word my professor used, and one that I think is most appropriate, is “patchy.”  The play stopped and started, came and went, and ended up feeling generally uneven.  Doran tried his hand at casting a TV actor in the meatiest role, this time famous (over here, anyway) grumpy old man Richard Wilson as the puritanical steward Malvolio.  Malvolio, as it happens, is not even a main role, but 12N is one of those plays where the subplot is more famous than the actual plot; Malvolio is the character people care about, and putting Wilson in the role was meant to draw more scrutiny, speculation, and (most importantly) audience members than any other aspect of the production.

Needless to say this is what most of the reviews focus on; in earlier stagings, apparently, Wilson wasn’t impressive.  This was his first turn on Shakespeare, but by the time I saw the play (it was very near the end of its run) I thought he was adequate.  A little stiff and hollow, perhaps, but that is probably the best way to describe the whole production.  During the first two acts, all I could say about it was that it was definitely Twelfth Night, with various actors playing various characters I know are in the play, all with the expected lavish RSC set design and high production values.  Aside from that, it was lifeless.

Things picked up in acts 3-5, following the interval, where it seemed like the entire cast had ducked into their dressing rooms and snorted cocaine before coming back on.  The actors weren’t any better, exactly — Viola/Cesario, Orsino, Olivia, and nearly everyone else was still pretty bland (Sebastian, by the bye, was bad and stayed bad) — but the smaller characters like Toby, Andrew, and Fabian seemed to really get into what they were doing, and everyone seemed more lively and happier to be on stage.

The two real bright spots of the production were Fabian, who is really a very small part but the actor had a good control of the character, and Feste, who was the only major character who seemed consistently on.  They really emphasized his songs (we’re talking entire dance numbers), which was odd, considering the actor didn’t seem to be a very strong singer to begin with.  But I give him points for getting out in front of people and singing, anyway, and I give him the benefit of a doubt since it’s cold season and he might have been losing his voice.

But aside from those two performances, the play was very flat.  “Oh look,” the actors seemed to be saying, “we are putting on a Shakespeare play.  What a thing to do!”  (The Olivia was especially guilty of this — also, they made her character a slut, which has its fun moments but overall is unengaging, especially when the player is Very Obviously Acting, as this one was.)

The sole moment of real almost-brilliance, in my opinion, was the ending, where Feste sings his famous bit about the rain.  Like the film version I just linked, it was played as a sort of montage of Feste singing while various scenes occurred on stage around him.  The key difference was that the song was much slower and the scenes were not of journeys ending in lovers meeting, but snapshots of all the characters who ended up on the losing side of things — Antonio the gay sailor, robbed of his bland, uninteresting boycrush Sebastian by an insane cougar, and Andrew Aguecheek, robbed of his insane cougar by a bland, uninteresting boy, and (this was kind of neat) Toby and Maria, who pantomimed a very bitter and angry domestic dispute.  Naturally this ended with Malvolio, the biggest loser in the play, and as Feste finished his song the two of them stood side by side on the stage, glaring at one another, the Fool and the Puritan — and the lights fell.

I actually got chills from that, man.  It suggests, I believe, a very powerful reading of 12N that could make a very, very fine production.

It’s too bad that Gregory Doran didn’t, you know, use it.

Richard III @ Riverside Studios

This was not a very good production.

The thing about R3 is that it works best when the title character is played as an over-the-top hilarious cartoon — a sort of evil ain’t-I-a-stinker Bugs Bunny.  What this means is that you need a Richard who is crazy, zany, hilarious, and carries the production on his hunched back.  Unfortunately, the folks at Riverside Studios decided to attempt deep emotional resonance, and while they actually achieved this to some degree — the Elizabeth was absolutely amazing, especially when Richard proposes marrying her daughter and she rips him to pieces, and the elderly Margaret (played by a man!) was quite convincing as a drunken, curse-spitting old woman fallen on hard times.  The guy playing Richard was actually good, spinning it as a kind of Crispin Glover thing.

Despite this, the play was just boring.  It was far too somber and therefore very grueling to sit through — the last third was nicely abridged, especially the procession of ghosts, but the first two-thirds were plodding.  Richard needs to be energetic and awesome in a love-to-hate-him way; the audience needs to know he’s unquestionably evil, yet at the same time really want to see him fuck people’s shit up.  It simply works better when it’s a crazy Marlovian spectacle.  My evidence: Ian McKellan’s Nazi-flavored 1995 adaptation, which plays hell with the source text (they all do, as R3 is ungodly long and sloppy) but it’s loads of fun and pretty damn stylish.

A more positive note about the Riverside production: Catesby was also very good.   The staging was a sort of modern multinational corporation boardroom setting and they chose to make Catesby a smartly dressed young female secretary with a clipboard and a constant uncertainty about what the hell was going on around her, and who slowly realized she was both in over her head and pretty much stuck in the plot for the long haul.  This worked.

On the other hand, both sides of the stage had this industrial scaffolding that, at various points in the play and for no specific reason, Richard would climb around on despite apparently suffering from palsy.  I think the idea was to make him sleek and dangerous, and the acrobaticsmaybe would recall the “bottled spider” remark Margaret makes about him.  A neat idea, kind of awkward in execution.  SPEAKING OF WHICH: the Battle of Bosworth Field was a dance party.  I am not kidding.  Both sides glowered at each other from across the stage, dancing slightly while techno music played and strobe lights went off.  Occasionally they staggered as if they’d been hit.  It was like watching a Final Fantasy battle screen, which again was pretty neat, but within the context of the play and production completely crack rock.

And that’s all I have to say on Richard III’s Jungle Gym and Rave from Hell.  On Wednesday keep an eye out for my thoughts on the RSC’s recent production of Twelfth Night. Here’s a preview: it’s also not very good!

American Psycho Part 4: THERE IS, IN FACT, AN EXIT

Hello to anyone who’s stumbled this way from Professor Brainworm’s blog!  I hope you’ll bear with me, since I can be pretty longwinded.  Anyway.

Our journey through the wonderful world of Bret Ellis’s novel American Psycho thus far could be summed up in the following way if it were a game of Clue:  Shakespeare’s Macbeth in Dante’s Inferno with Reagan’s Manhattan.  Today on the ominously dubbed Black Friday, I’ll finish up my little ramble.  I plan to for a rebuttal to the issue that, after the explicit pornography and violence, is the most challenged aspect of the novel: its nihilism.

n16779

I encountered something like this when I first read the book when I was 14.  You’ll recall I took it as a straight satire, and so in the end I didn’t feel like it had accomplished the actual goal of satire: I didn’t know what better lifestyle was possible, because in the novel if you are not Patrick Bateman then you are one of his shallow friends or a homeless person, and none of these options are very good.  But as I’ve said, Psycho is not a satire.  It has satiric elements, certainly, in a similar way the recent film version of New Moon inexplicably has a scene that satirizes modern Hollywood action films.  Bret Ellis’s satire is much more deft, of course, and much more regularly implemented; it’s not a one-off scene, but a large part of the text.  Yet it is not, as we may be tempted to think, the heart of the text.

The heart is salvation.

Rewritings of Dante are always about salvation in the same way sonnets are always about love.  A traditional if boring sonnet is one that lists, without irony, the traditional values that make a loved one, well, loved.  An exciting sonnet is one that talks about how love is impossible, a lie, fake, a delusion — but even when it tries to negate those things, it is still a poem about love.  Similarly, a traditional rewriting of Dante is going to be about a dude going through some hardship, suffering, and becoming a better person in the end.  An exciting rewriting of Dante, like American Psycho, is going to pull the same trick as the not-about-love sonnet: it will try say that salvation does not exist, is impossible.  But the idea of salvation is still there, lurking behind every venomous negation, and sometimes — sometimes — it manages to glitter through.

The pattern is pretty straightforward in Dante.  Dante and Virgil travel through Hell in Inferno, where they see the consequences of sin, and then move onward to the Mountain of Purgatory in Purgatorio.  Purgatory, of course, being the place where sins are purged from the soul prior to entering Heaven.  To enter Purgatory, however, they have to pass by a robed angel who guards the gate; Virgil urges Dante to beg the angel to let him enter, and the following transactions occur:

Devoutly prostrate at his holy feet,
I begged in mercy’s name to be let in,
but first three times upon my breast I beat.

Seven P‘s, the scars of sin,
his sword point cut into my brow.  He said:
“Scrub off these wounds when you have passed within.”

Canto IX, 109-114

Each of the seven P‘s on Dante’s forehead represents one of the seven cardinal sins that Purgatory is supposed to rid him of; after passing through each circle one disappears and Dante feels lighter.

miquel-barcelo-purgatorioIf you’re in any way religious — particularly if you are Catholic — this may have echos of Ash Wednesday.  If you’re a godless heathen, then the short of it is that Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, the period of penitence and fasting leading up to Easter.  On Ash Wednesday, the penitents are marked by the priest with a cross of ashes on the forehead, a reminder that human beings come from dust and, but for the grace of God, they’ll someday be to the dust returned.  In other words, it’s a humbling process, just as the journey through Dante’s Purgatory is meant to humble those souls that were sinful in life but not beyond hope.

Now that’s all well and good, you’re saying, but what in the hell does Ash Wednesday have to do with American Psycho?

Since there’s nothing I like more than tossing away conclusions I’ve already made, think back on our initial reading of the Inferno influence on Psycho in Part 2.  We mapped out a set of relationships between the characters to mirror that of the Comedy’s Dante-Virgil-Beatrice triad, and our best Virgil candidate was a sort-of-friend of Patrick Bateman’s named Timothy Price.  He’s like Virgil, I said, because he’s the most interesting person Bateman knows, someone he seems to admire in a really odd but genuine way, the closest thing Bateman has to a friend, and he leaves Patrick before the end of the novel.

But Tim Price is unlike Virgil in one very important way: he comes back.

….[F]or the sake of form, Tim Price resurfaces, or at least, I’m pretty sure he does.  While I’m at my desk simultaneously crossing out the days in my calendar that have already passed and reading a new best seller about office management called Why It Works to Be a Jerk, Jean buzzes in, announcing that Tim Price wants to talk, and I fearfully say, “Send him… in.”  Price strolls into the office wearing a wool suit by Canali Milano, a cotton shirt by Ike Behar, a silk tie by Bill Blass, cap-toed leather lace-ups from Brooks Brothers.  I’m pretending to be on the phone.  He sits down, across from me, on the other side of the Palazetti glass-top desk.  There’s a smudge on his forehead or at least that’s what I think I see.

“You’ve been gone, like, forever, Tim.  What’s the story?” I ask, again noticing the smudge on his forehead, though I get the feeling that if I asked someone else if it was truly there he (or she) would just say no.  (p.383-384)

Price disappears within the first 60 pages of the novel and returns in the last 20.  After he ran off into the fake train tunnel in the club, he has not been mentioned at all — but suddenly here he is, with a peculiar smudge on his forehead.  The chapter he reappears in is called Valentine’s Day, which is on February 14th, and it so happens that this part of the novel takes place in 1989, when Ash Wednesday fell on February 8th.

I’m sure you see what I’m driving at.ash

So Price, when he returns, comes in the form of someone penitent — or at least that’s how Bateman feels.  We know he’s prone to hallucinating, and here he openly questions whether or not he actually sees the smudge.  Nevertheless, we know that Price is someone Bateman admires — “I’m wondering and not wondering what happens in the world of Tim Price, which is really the world of most of us: big ideas, guy stuff, boy meets world, boy gets it” (384).  There is something about Price, some spirit or personality or agency, that Patrick sees as lacking in himself; suddenly it makes a whole lot of sense why the opening paragraph I quoted in Part 2 almost makes it seem like the novel is going to be a third-person narration about Tim Price, but is actually just Patrick thinking about Tim Price.

So what is it Price has that Bateman doesn’t?  In Part 3 I said Bateman’s chief sin is that of despair — he does not think the world can be made better, and his only attempts to even try are simply gross, violent parodies of the shallowness and greed he sees all around him.  Price, it would seem, is not a victim of this despair.  He’s just as rich and shallow as Patrick, just as obnoxious, but in the scene at Tunnel when he becomes fed up with the empty life he leads he doesn’t just lapse into a murderous frenzy (or fantasy) like Patrick seems to have done.  Instead, he actually tries to get out, something Patrick has never attempted — something that he is, in fact, probably afraid to do.

Is Price actually on his way to salvation?  After all, he left, but he came back.  His first conversation with Bateman may — just possibly may — imply that he is looking for girls to hook up with, since he asks Patrick for the number of a woman they both know who is in a relationship with a mutual acquaintance.  Like Patrick, we can’t be sure if Price is really penitent, and we don’t see much of him at all until the very last chapter, the one that ends with Patrick reading the NO EXIT sign.

Bateman and some of his friends, including Price, go out to a club.

On the [TV] screen now are scenes from President Bush’s inauguration early this year, then a speech from former President Reagan, while Patty [the talk show host] delivers commentary.  Soon a tiresome debate forms over whether he is lying or not, even though we don’t, can’t, hear the words.  The first and really only one to complain is Price, who, though I think he’s bothered by something else, uses the opportunity to vent his frustration, looks inappropriately stunned, and asks, “How can he lie like that?  How can he pull that shit?”

“Oh Christ,” I moan.  “What shit?  Now where do we have reservations at?  I mean I’m not really hungry but I’d like to have reservations somewhere.” (p. 396)

nancy-ronAnd from that, the conversation devolves into everyone arguing about where to eat, Price’s concerns left unaddressed.  Even if something else seems to be bothering Price, he does seem to have a bone to pick with Reagan — what was he lying about?  What sort of shit is he getting away with?  I wasn’t watching much TV back then, but one possibility is that Reagan is speaking about the 1989 IRS investigation of him and his wife Nancy for unpaid taxes on various gifts they received while in the White House.  It was eventually determined that the Reagans owed three million dollars on “fashion items” (to quote Wikipedia) that had been given to Nancy.

Reagan here represents the freewheeling economic attitude and casual greed that characterize Ellis’s portrait of the decade, the broad symbol of the lives that all of the horrible characters in the novel lead, and it is only Price who questions him.  And it’s Patrick, bored and uninterested, who changes the subject.

Price looks away from the television screen, then at Craig, and he tries to hide his displeasure by asking me, waving at the TV, “I don’t believe it.  He looks so… normal.  He seems so… out of it.  So… undangerous.”

“Bimbo, bimbo,” someone says.  “Bypass, bypass.”

“He is totally harmless, you geek.  Was totally harmless.  Just like you are totally harmless.  But he did do all that shit and you have failed to get us into 150, so, you know, what can I say?”  McDermott shrugs.

“I just don’t get how someone, anyone, can appear that way and yet be involved in such total shit,” Price says, ignoring Craig, averting his eyes from Farrell.  He takes out a cigar and studies it sadly.  To me it still looks like there’s a smudge on Price’s forehead.

“Because Nancy was right behind him?” Farrell guesses, looking up from the Quotrek.  “Because Nancy did it?”

“How can you be, I don’t know, so fucking cool about it?”  Price, to whom something really eerie has obviously happened, sounds genuinely perplexed.  Rumor has it he was in rehab.

“Oh brother.”  Price won’t let it die.  “Look,” he starts, trying for a rational appraisal of the situation.  “He presents himself as a harmless old codger.  But inside…” He stops.  My interest picks up, flickers briefly.  “But inside…”  Price can’t finish the sentence, can’t add the last two words he needs: doesn’t matter.  I’m both disappointed and relieved for him.  (p. 397)

Here we see that the sort of will Bateman perceives in Price is not a delusion — it’s real.  Price has the ability to change, he has the desire; only he is offended that a person in power lies, cheats, and steals.  Only he’s been to rehab, only he wears the phantasmagorical smudge of the penitent.  His description of Reagan as a harmless-looking man never seems to finish, perhaps because it frightens him: Reagan can look like an old movie star, an aw shucks nice guy, but within him dwells the capacity for cruel and casual evil.  Bateman is the same way: he looks normal, but there is something terrible inside of him, something he has decided to stop fighting, and that is why he finishes the sentence in a way Price probably wouldn’t agree with: he claims that what’s inside doesn’t matter.  Price’s gradual realization seems to be moving in the opposite direction, the idea that the inside does matter.  Success has a greater dimension than economics, than wealth and power and being physically attractive; it is a moral and spiritual matter.

Remember that the beginning of the story makes it seem like Price will be the main character — we are told what he is doing, who he is, we are told that he notices the words ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.  And now here we see him beginning to understand how life should be lived — with honesty and compassion.  Timothy Price is the Dante figure here, and he’s traveled through Hell and seen the results of a sinful life; now he’s penitent, the ash is on his brow, and it is his responsibility to cleanse himself, to work toward a more honest and compassionate life.

We don’t know for sure if he does — he’s a little afraid, as Patrick notes — but the fact that he can do this makes all the difference.  There is an exit, but it’s not easy to get to and even more difficult to pass through.  It’s a path Bateman doesn’t want to acknowledge, and thus he is damned.  He’s not Dante, and he’s not Virgil; he’s one of the screaming shades, tortured for eternity in Hell, punished in accordance to the decisions he’s made in life.

dantes-hell1

In a purely aesthetic sense, this is why I think American Psycho is a great novel: it is well written — extremely well written, in fact, and though Patrick Bateman’s endless recitation of brands and clothing lines may get grating, it’s also an inextricable part of his character, a fundamental element of his voice and his psychology.  The novel is also, I think, in meaningful dialogue with other works of literature that have come before it — it shows us how Macbeth may play out in the modern day, the unassuming madman, and it turns Dante on his head by showing us how one can so easily despair into Hell, or Hell on Earth.

In a more personal and moral sense, this is why I think American Psycho is a great novel:  It tells us something very profound and very important about human existence — not how to live in an obvious, satirical way, but more in the sense of what it is like to live.  We are surrounded on all sides by greed, cruelty, injustice, and horror; in such an environment it may seem like there’s nothing to do but give up, to become greedy and cruel and unjust and horrific in our own turn, and while that is always a possibility it is never the only choice.  There is a moral way to live, a good way to live, a better way to live; the trick is to remember that it exists, even when so many people around you don’t believe it.saturn

And this is why I think that American Psycho is a great horror novel:  Obviously the reasons above apply, horror should not be above the requirements for something to be a piece of literature, it should be well written and canonically articulate.  But it actually adds another criterion: a horror novel has to be scary.

There are two types of scary, as far as I am concerned.  One is the splatterpunk approach, graphic violence for violence’s sake, gallons of gore that gross you out, make you feel like barfing.  The thing about this type of horror is that it doesn’t last, it’s too physical, too visceral; it’s also, unfortunately, the more popularized part of American Psycho.  Yes, splatterpunk is here — loads of it, in fact, and yeah, it’s gross as hell and effective for what it is.  But there’s something more clever than that at work, too: the second type of horror, what you might call metaphysical horror or philosophical horror, the sense of fear and unease resulting from the sudden realization that the world does not function according to whatever rules you take for granted and the universe might be, in fact, a much more dangerous and inhospitable place than you believed.

Bret Ellis combines both splatterpunk and philosophical horror by making Patrick Bateman so unreliable.  Whether or not he commits the murders is unimportant in the splatterpunk sense, because the descriptions of them are just as graphic and gut-churning.  But the fact that these may all be fantasies — that Patrick is just some hopeless, repressed guy living out psychotic daydreams behind an ordinary exterior — takes it to another level.  Suddenly everything is thrown into question.  I’m thinking of a part near the end of the novel, where Patrick mentions his housekeeper coming into his apartment and cleaning bloodsplatter off the walls and floor — as if it didn’t matter, as if it weren’t a problem for her at all.  If the blood is really there, is the maid keeping her mouth shut just to save herself, or does she simply not care enough to report Bateman?  If Bateman is making it all up, how many people do you meet every day are just like him?  How many repressed psychotics walk among us?  If Patrick isn’t lying, if he does some or all of the things he claims to, then how believable is it?  Do we live in a society so disconnected, so unfeeling, that we would just allow this stuff to happen so long as we didn’t have to deal with it?

The cannibalism and rape make you queasy, and the implications make you uneasy.  You can forget about all of the murders in time, but can you get rid of the nagging question:  How does the world work?

To answer that is to overcome or make peace with the philosophical horror the novel instigates.  The easiest way to read the book is to say that yes, the world is cruel and senseless and evil and no one cares, the world is terrible and we are all trapped in it and THIS IS NOT AN EXIT.  But I hope that over the past few weeks I’ve shown that there is another answer.  Sure, it’s small and difficult to find, requiring a careful and thoughtful reading of the text, but it’s there.

There is hope; there is possibility; there is salvation; there is, in fact, an exit.

exit_lg