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1 UNIVERSITÉ CHARLES-DE-GAULLE – LILLE III UFR ANGELLIER FICTIONALISATION AND I

1 UNIVERSITÉ CHARLES-DE-GAULLE – LILLE III UFR ANGELLIER FICTIONALISATION AND IDENTITY IN BRET EASTON ELLIS’S GLAMORAMA Note de recherche présentée en vue de l’obtention du diplôme de Maîtrise Frédéric AUBERT Directeur de recherche : Mme I. BOOF-WERMESSE Septembre 2003 2 3 UNIVERSITÉ CHARLES-DE-GAULLE – LILLE III UFR ANGELLIER FICTIONALISATION AND IDENTITY IN BRET EASTON ELLIS’S GLAMORAMA Note de recherche présentée en vue de l’obtention du diplôme de Maîtrise Frédéric AUBERT Directeur de recherche : Mme I. BOOF-WERMESSE Septembre 2003 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION.....................................................................................................6 PART I: THE HERMENEUTIC QUEST ................................................................11 1.1 Victor’s picaresque adventures ..................................................................................12 1.1.1The web of characters..............................................................................................13 1.1.1.1 Introduction of the two sets of characters........................................................13 1.1.1.2 Defamiliarization .............................................................................................14 1.1.1.3 The conspiracy.................................................................................................15 1.1.1.4 A three-layered conspiracy..............................................................................16 1.1.1.5 The actors of the conspiracy............................................................................16 1.1.2 Retroactive meaning and unstability.......................................................................18 1.1.3 Movies and camera teams.......................................................................................19 1.1.4 Places ......................................................................................................................20 1.1.4.1 Symbolic places...............................................................................................24 1.2 The narrative as a system in constant evolution.......................................................26 1.2.1 The question of the narrator: the search for meaning.............................................27 1.2.1.1 Language..........................................................................................................27 1.2.1.2. Beyond the “here and the now”(G 60): narratorial supplement .....................29 1.2.2 The two movies.......................................................................................................31 1.2.3 Noise and truth........................................................................................................33 1.2.3.1 Redundancy and noise .....................................................................................33 1.2.3.1.1 Chapters and sections................................................................................33 1.2.3.1.2 Language as source of noise.....................................................................35 1.2.3.1.3 The extradiegetic voice.............................................................................36 1.2.3.2 Entropy.............................................................................................................38 1.2.3.3 The role of the reader.......................................................................................40 PART II: FICTIONAL WORLDS INTERFERING..................................................45 2.1 The delimitation of the spheres and the crossing of borders...................................46 2.1.1 The intertext............................................................................................................46 2.1.1.1 Pop Culture ......................................................................................................46 2.1.1.1.1 Pop culture in the plot...............................................................................47 2.1.1.1.2 Musical intertext .......................................................................................48 2.1.1.1.3 Magazines and advertising........................................................................50 2.1.1.1.4 The “universal third person”.....................................................................53 2.1.1.2 The literary intertext ........................................................................................54 2.1.1.2.1 Self-references and auto-parody...............................................................54 2.1.1.2.2 Other literary references ...........................................................................56 2.1.1.3 Recycling characters........................................................................................57 2.1.1.3.1 Autochthones ............................................................................................58 5 2.1.1.3.2 Immigrants................................................................................................58 2.1.1.3.3 Auto-immigrants.......................................................................................59 2.1.1.3.4 Non-invested characters............................................................................60 2.1.1.3.5 Single and multi-facetted characters.........................................................61 2.1.1.4 Mixing literary genres......................................................................................62 2.1.1.4.1 A collection of styles ................................................................................62 2.1.1.4.2 Glamorama: a mock tragedy ...................................................................66 2.2The blurring of identities .............................................................................................69 2.2.1 Names and gender...................................................................................................69 2.2.2 Victor’s ready-made language................................................................................75 2.2.3 Mottos and lists: patterns of distinction..................................................................77 2.3 Confrontation of different levels of fiction in a hypersphere of fictional worlds...81 2.3.2 Glamorama as double fiction .................................................................................81 2.3.3 Demultiplication of the self through the media: “real TV” ....................................84 2.3.3.1 “Dramatic reconstructions”..............................................................................85 2.3.3.2 Multiple images: cinematographic devices......................................................87 2.3.4 Lost in fiction?........................................................................................................90 PART III: THE SATIRE OF FASHION AS TERRORISM .....................................93 3.1 The satire of the fashion industry...............................................................................94 3.1.1 The ultimate conspicuous consumption..................................................................95 3.1.2 Immaterial labor and immaterial characters ...........................................................97 3.1.2.1 Victor as an Ellis-ian antihero .........................................................................99 3.1.2.2 Interchangeability and identity ........................................................................99 3.1.3 The culture of images and the artificiality of desires............................................101 3.1.3.1 An ensemble of hyperrealities .......................................................................101 3.1.3.2 The artificiality of desire................................................................................102 3.2 The terrorism industry..............................................................................................105 3.2.1 Fashion as terrorism..............................................................................................105 3.2.2 Conspiracy and paranoia.......................................................................................109 3.2.2.1 Fate and the writer as terrorist .......................................................................109 3.2.2.2. Paranoia as a fictionalising device................................................................111 3.2.3 Motive and the self-defusing of the plot...............................................................113 3.2.3.1 The absurdity of moving through layers of fiction........................................114 3.2.3.2 The exclusion of the narrator from the diegesis and his redemption.............115 3.3 Celebrity and terrorism: the metaleptic dimension of Glamorama ......................118 3.3.1 Autobiographic irony............................................................................................118 3.3.2 Art as an exit.........................................................................................................120 CONCLUSION....................................................................................................123 Selected Bibliography....................................................................................................1237 Index..............................................................................................................................12331 6 INTRODUCTION 7 Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. ‘I’m just a – I’m just a whole lot of different simple people.’ F.S. Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night. Published in 1998, Glamorama is Bret Easton Ellis’s fifth and latest work. It took eight years to the author of the controversial American Psycho to publish this novel, mainly because of personal problems delaying his writing. In the wake of writers such as Denis Cooper or Jay Mc Inerney, Bret Easton Ellis is regarded as belonging to a literary movement born in the 1980s called by the media “the Brat-Pack”, due to the themes tackled in their novels: the indolent lives of rich, consumption-crazed young people considering life with apathy and distrust, spending their time watching television, shopping, taking drugs or sunbathing, in a postmodern, post-punk world where morality has been overcome by a total sense of loss. Glamorama has also been considered to be a kind of follow-up to Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction, written ten years before and staging several of the same characters in their student life at Camden University, a fictional equivalent for the author’s Bennington College, where he was a student when he published his first novel, Less Than Zero(1985). However, Glamorama stands in opposition with Ellis’s earlier novels in the sense that the text is organised around a strong plot and along a chronological line necessary to the development of a mysterious conspiracy that will end up swallowing the hero. The notion of plot was quite incidental in the author’s previous works, which tended to focus more on stylistic issues and general satirical themes, such as apathy, alienation and the disappearance of feelings and human contacts in favour of an extended mode of consumption. Here, the notion of plot is given a strong importance, since the satirical side of the novel springs from the treatment of the narration, its organization and its paradoxes. Plot is used in the two senses of the word, and features prominently in Glamorama: the plot of the story stages the hero as he becomes trapped into various layers of fiction, a victim of a mysterious conspiracy closing in on him. The plot against the main character 8 corresponds to the plot of the novel, thus erasing the limits between the narration and the diegesis: the two dimensions of the novel are intertwined, so much that it is impossible to summarize the plot of the novel without incorporating the narration itself, which is to say the way the story is told. The story is that of Victor Johnson, also known as Victor Ward, a self-proclaimed “quasi-famous” fashion model in search for a greater celebrity. At the beginning of the book he is involved in the opening of a night club with partner in business Damien Ross and assistants Beau, J.D and Peyton. During the preparations for the opening night, we learn about his lifestyle and the problems he has concerning an incriminating photograph of him and lover Alison Poole in a delicate situation. A love triangle is set up between Victor, Damien, Damien’s girlfriend Alison and his lover Lauren (who is also Victor’s lover, in addition to Alison and his girlfriend Chloe Byrnes.) Mysterious threats begin to appear when Victor is chased by two Jeeps in Manhattan, a chase followed by strange faxes announcing “I know who you are and I know what you’re doing.” In search for a DJ, Victor incidentally meets a man, F. Fred Palakon, who offers him 300 000 dollars to go to Europe and find an ex-girlfriend of his, Jamie Fields, to bring her back to the United States. Victor refuses at first, but when at the club opening night all his secrets and betrayals are uncovered he decides to leave and boards a ship to London. He finds Jamie Fields quite easily, and stays for a while in London. During this time he meets Jamie’s friends, Bentley Harrods, Bruce Rhinebeck, Tammy Devol and Jamie’s boyfriend Bobby Hughes, a former supermodel Victor admires. He lives with them in a big house, where he finds out that all of them are involved in murders and bombings. He is progressively trapped into the group, and moves with them to Paris. In France Victor experiences drug-induced difficulties to stay close to reality and loses touch with the world as camera teams start invading the narrative space, creating confusion by the different films they are supposed to shoot about Victor, the terrorists or anything else. He is given drugs by the terrorists who keep him with them, friendly at moments, but threatening at others. The terrorist cell starts dissolving, and its members die one after the other. Victor, after witnessing the death of his ex-girlfriend Chloe in a hotel room in Paris, goes on in search for Bobby to kill him, which he does after a brief fight. He is nonetheless still a captive to a mysterious conspiracy seemingly organised by Palakon himself, and is flown to Milan where he spends weeks in a hotel room with a “bodyguard” actually here to keep him indoors, called Davide. When the latter is killed in a moment of privacy with a supposed prostitute, Victor is left alone in Milan. He tries to contact his sister in New York only to talk to Victor Johnson, that is to say himself: the 9 narrator therefore finds out that he has been replaced in New York, and finishes his narration by losing himself in the picture of a tapestry hung in the hotel bar in Milan. This brief account is sufficient to show that the novel plays with its own fictionality, and many levels of fiction add up to create a maze in which the narrator gets lost. The main device used is the destruction of the boundary between the real and the fictional: the characters are involved in the shooting of several movies, and they are presented as actors playing their own part in a film uploads/Litterature/ memoireaubert-pdf.pdf