Serial Masculinity:

Berthold Schoene

Psychopathology and Oedipal Violence in Bret Easton Elliss American Psycho

Abstract This essay carries out an expressly gender-specific analysis of Bret Easton Elliss American Psycho, showing how the novel pathologizes modern masculinity by identifying its most characteristic traits as symptoms of a variety of psychopathologies, mental disorders and cognitive impairments. Traditional masculinity is read as a residual, ideologically motivated gender construct that by endorsing and legitimizing the realization of certain, possibly genetic, male dispositions as a fixed set of behavioral norms and imperatives promotes the genesis a type of male subjectivity that displays conspicuous similarities particularly to Aspergers Syndrome and high-functioning autism. It wasnt a dreamwhich is what a novel should be. Bret Easton Ellis, Lunar Park Anchored in an expressly gender-specific analysis of American Psycho, Bret Easton Elliss most controversial novel, the present essay will strategically seek to pathologize modern masculinity in order to highlight and problematize the violent trauma it inflicts on both men and their others.1 Whereas traditionally the masculine gender has been defined as incontestably rooted in the faculty of reason, in recent years masculinity has come to be seen increasingly as anachronistic, intolerably volatile, and in crisis. Many characteristically male traits, which used to constitute the genders strength and thus legitimize its hegemonic status, tend now to be recognized as symptoms of a variety of psychopathologies, mental disorders and cognitive impairments, most notably Aspergers Syndrome or high-functioning autism. This essay will not suggest that all men are autistic2 or that there is a definitive biological link between maleness and autism,3 let alone [End Page 378] autism and violence.4 Unlike Simon Baron-Cohen, I will refrain from citing statistical averages in order to demonstrate that, in general, women are better at empathizing and less autistic than men, who are prone to emotional inarticulacy and self-withdrawal while excelling at systematizing, control, and organization (4). Neither will the essay suggest that all autistic individuals are mad;5 rather, its main interest lies in identifying traditional masculinity as an ideologically motivated gender construct that, by endorsing and legitimizing the realization of certain, possibly genetic, male dispositions as a fixed set of behavioral norms and imperatives, promotes a type of male subjectivity that displays conspicuous similarities to Aspergers Syndrome and high-functioning autism. This type of male subjectivity is shown to derive from rigidly interpellative processes of male individuation and to perpetuate itself through an endless series of coercive acts of psychic self-(de)formation. Following Hans Aspergers diagnosis of the then new mental disorder of autism in 1944, Lorna Wing describes sufferers from Aspergers Syndrome as socially odd [and] emotionally detached from others as well as markedly egocentric and highly sensitive to perceived criticism, while being oblivious of other peoples feelings. She goes on to observe that their speech [is] fluent but long-winded, literal and pedantic, used for monologues and not for reciprocal conversations, and, finally, that they have circumscribed interests in specific subjects, including collecting objects or facts connected with these interests (History 12). Intriguingly, Wings identikit of the Aspergers individual also perfectly adumbrates the figure of the unreconstructed, emotionally impaired male that has been haunting feminist writing since its inception. While it strikes me as politically unproductive to think of men as naturally inclined to develop autistic modes of being, it proves useful to apprehend the system of patriarchal masculinity as an ideological apparatus that, by recruiting men to identify against the feminine, molds them into emotionally and cognitively impaired monads. By thus pathologizing masculinity as an autism-inducing gender, it is possible to contest patriarchys prerogative on definitively opposing reason with insanity as well as validating and continually reinscribing this opposition by projecting madness invariably onto the other. As Joan Busfield has demonstrated, within changing cultural contexts certain forms of previously acceptable and supposedly normal behavior may gradually come to be perceived as aberrant. Citing the histories of domestic violence and child abuse as examples, Busfield argues that the pathway [of pathologization] is from the normal to the unacceptable

to the disturbed (57). Against this background it appears tempting to suggest that in our immediate present the formerly normative standard of [End Page 379] masculinity, especially with its propensity for oppressive and violent self-assertion, has come to look like social deviance and is currently undergoing radical cultural reevaluation as a pathological affliction or compulsive disorder requiring urgent therapeutic attention. My choice of autism as a metaphor to capture the psychopathological aspects of masculinity is motivated by the fact that cultural-historically, as well as in terms of gender-specificity, autism stands in binary opposition to hysteria as the classic female malady.6 If hysteria lends itself to identification as a feminine falling apart of the self, then autism provides a perfect metaphor for the masculine self pulling itself together. Notably also, at the same time as hysteria began to vanish from view as a valid clinical diagnosis in the early twentieth century, autism assumed ever greater visibility and, over the last ten years, its prominence in both clinical research and the popular imagination has peaked. Might it therefore be legitimate to propose that as the New Woman succeeded in liberating herself from the straitjacket of hysterical femininity, the traditional masculinitys intrinsically autistic self has come to stand out as a deviant oddity? Since the late nineteenth century andin a considerably accelerated mannersince the mid-1960s, feminists have brought about an ever closer alignment of the feminine with mainstream culture, whereas men of the traditional mold could not but experience the same paradigm shift as deeply traumatic, suddenly confronting their habitual ways of seeing and going about everyday life as increasingly out of sync with prevalent cultural trends. In our present era of mobility, change, and the dissolution of both physical and epistemological boundaries, modernthat is, masculine subjectivity, derived from a wholly male-dominated tradition of philosophical thought and defined in categorical opposition to the body and hysterical femininity, finds itself at risk of rigidifying into social ineptitude and culturally debilitating impairment. At the beginning of the new millennium masculinity is left with two options: either to sanction and actively engineer the imminent cracking up of its own inveterate modernity and thus convivially embrace a working coalition with women and other new postmodern selves-in-transition, or to persist in its paralytic state of paranoid crisis and invest what remains of its power in an autistic backlash against equality and diversification. Not without irony, however, such a backlashdue to its desperate hyperbolic vehemence and phobic irrationalitymust effectively appear as virtually indistinguishable from a bout of systemically orchestrated hysteria. In her essay on the critical controversy surrounding Bret Easton Elliss American Psycho, Carla Freccero explains that what so upset Elliss critics was that the author had omitted to provide a psychologized narrative of origins, a comforting etiology for his killers [End Page 380] illness; we do not hear that he was a sexually abused child or that he had a domineering mother (51). Indeed, the fleeting glimpse we catch of Patrick Batemans parentshis mother hospitalized possibly due to some kind of neurasthenic illness and a photograph of his father suggesting that theres something the matter with his eyes (366)only hints at profound familial estrangement while foreclosing any more detailed psychological or psychoanalytic profiling. Yet signally, there are other instances in the text that allow us to interpret Patricks ultraviolent outbursts, or fantasizing about such outbursts, as acts of manly self-assertion compensating for a perceived lack in masculine stature. Thus, in Yale Club he is bullied, albeit fairly good-naturedly, by his peers who refer to him as little buddy (156), and toward the close of the novel he is described as such a bloody ass-kisser, such a brown-nosing goody-goody [who] could barely pick up an escort girl, let alone . . . (38788). In order to grasp the ambitious psychological complexity of Elliss novel it is important to see it not as the portrayal of an individual person in extremis, but as a case study of the predicament of a particular type of man within a specific socio-historical context. Patrick is a specimen of the Young Urban Professional, or yuppie, the soon-tobe-extinct scion of modernity in an increasingly postmodern world. His is the world of Tim Price, which is really the world of most of us: big ideas, guy stuff, boy meets the world, boy gets it (384), but this putatively majoritarian, androcentric world is on the wane and so is the male that inhabits and compulsively reasserts it. In Nerves and Narratives Peter Logan argues that within each nervous body lies the story of the social conditions that created it, and having created it, compel it to act out its nervous fit (29). This is definitely the case in American Psycho where existential insecurity and nervous agitation, caused by a massive epistemological paradigm shift, result in the lethal death throes of a

formerly hegemonic order of gender-specific subjectivity. Patrick is a dangerous anachronism, the impersonation of an old order, and, in this respect, his name may in itself be a telling cipher: Patrick representing patriarchy. Patricks precarious selfhood is driven by both hysterical and autistic impulses, finding itself at the mercy of irreconcilable tensions that unleash themselves in hyperbolic acts of violence, both real and imagined. According to Juliet Mitchell, masculinity has always displayed symptoms of hysteria; however, male hysteria used to be so indelibly inscribed in modernitys psychopathologies of everyday life that it was regarded as so normal as to be invisible (246). By contrast, within postmodernity, the acculturation of the feminine has resulted in an unmasking of hysterical masculinity, which has become exposed as a way of overestablishing ones uniqueness in [End Page 381] the world where one both is and is not unique, a way of keeping control of others where one does and does not have such control (Mitchell 34445). Throughout the novel, we watch Patrick perform an impossible balancing act, warding off the threat of unmanly hysterical self-expenditure by investing in a desperate mental scramble for masculine self-composure. As unstoppably his panic and nameless dread (115) spiral out of control, self-composure becomes ever harder to achieve and gives way to a series of frantic, drugfuelled efforts at haphazard self-composition. In A Glimpse of a Thursday Afternoon (14852) or Shopping (17680) Patricks sense of self collapses, hurling him into an experiential maelstrom that leaves not a single intelligible reference point intact and causes his body to erupt in a riddle of hysterical symptoms: I dont know where, but Im sweaty and a pounding migraine thumps dully in my head and Im experiencing a major-league anxiety attack, searching my pockets for Valium, Xanax, a leftover Halcion, anything, and all I find are three faded Nuprin in a Gucci pillbox (148). More conventional strategies of masculinist self-composure, such as monologue (muttering over and over to no one [151]) or the assertion of social status and spending power (I head towards the Clinique counter where with my platinum American Express card I buy six tubes of shaving cream [179]), despite providing momentary relief, cannot reassemble his fragmented self into a coherent, viable identity. Albeit organized as a monologue and thus giving its protagonist absolute priority of place and exclusivity of expression, American Psychofails spectacularly to endow its hero with authority. As the novel jerks spasmodically from catastrophic instances of hysterical disintegration to increasingly vain attempts at autistic self-contraction, it loses all sense of a straight-forward trajectory, careening into a dementedly repetitious series of purely affective outbursts. Patrick finds himself incarcerated within the monotonous seriality of the novel, which resembles a Gothic tomb hermetically sealed off from all progress, development, or escape by its first and final sentences: Abandon all hope ye who enter here (3) and This is not an exit (399). American Psycho obsesses explicitly over a variety of mental disorders ranging from multiple personality disorder to autism and schizophrenia. With only a few exceptionsas, for example, Jean, his secretary, and Bethany, his first girlfriend at collegethere are no characters in American Psycho who are not primarily reflections or imaginary extensions of Patricks self. Tim Price, whom we encounter in the opening scene, is not Patricks friend or rival, but the first in a long series of doppelgngers. Evelyn and Courtney, the first two women we meet, are as identically dressed as the men and, like Patricia yet another girl dated by Patrick and, conspicuously, his [End Page 382] female twin by nameblur in and out of his story like overexposed emanations from the deepest recesses of his hypersensitive, claustrophobically crowded mind. Patricks autistic world of self-encapsulation is one of absolute uniformity and indifference. As embodiments of Patricks interior dramatis personae, the majority of characters in American Psychohave no distinctive features, no identity and virtually no otherness; instead of being themselves, they only look like themselves, but even appearances cannot save them from anonymous obliteration as they continue to confuseand be confused witheach other. Patricks posse of colleagues must be regarded as a pure fiction modeled after Patricks own image and representative of the various components of his ego. Therefore, when he eventually embarks on his killing spree, Patrick could in fact be described as frantically, albeit not entirely without logic, murdering off the parts of himself that he loathes the most. This becomes particularly evident in his excessively gory killing of Paul Owen, his insufferably career-driven and professionally successful alter ego, who is

exactly my age (215) and whose voice to someone hearing it over the phone [sounds] probably identical (218). It is now possible to contradict Frecceros proposition that Ellis does not provide an etiology for Patricks disturbed mind. Patrick epitomizes modernitys residual male self that, bombarded by postmodernitys self-splintering insecurities, evades hysterical self-loss by seeking refuge in the selfcontained shell of its ego, only to find that such self-protective autistic withdrawal from traumatic duress is impossible and that fragmentation is inevitable. As Patrick puts it himself, Im having a difficult time containing my disordered self (301). His formerly secure first-person identity has come unstuck and succumbed to postmodernitys third-person flux, which Patrick can only experience as self-erosion, causing him to transmogrify from the boy next door into a fucking evil psychopath (20). Patricks nervous condition seems aptly captured by Mitchells definition of autism as a state of self-enclosure, except that . . . there is no self to enclose. Life is lived in sensations and, perhaps, fantasies which have no apparent reference to external reality and no I to think them (306). As Philip Simpson demonstrates in his analysis of serial-killer fiction, this indeterminacy of self in relation to Other and environment is a standard of earlier Gothic fiction revisited, and relived, in contemporary neo-Gothic works in which, quite typically, individual identities reveal their fragile constitutions. Selves blur, conflate, and shift with aggravating fluidity (20). Accordingly, Patricks ultraviolent killing spree is a desperate battle for the self, a battle for the survival of the self-contained, authoritative, masculinist self of modernity. Pertinently, in Patricks view, it is not his murderous escapades that constitute his madness. Murder is Patricks tool to preempt madness, [End Page 383] a survival mechanism devised to reinscribe indisputably the sanity that masculinity has traditionally regarded as an inalienable attribute of its nature. Patricks psychosis is the result of his effort to reclaim masculinitys entitlement to determine the general order of things by serially reenacting its fortress-like resilience to what it perceives as weakness, subversion, and fragmentation. His killing of the little boy in the zoo, for example, seems in itself less satisfying to him than subsequently being able to slap the boys mother who is in hysterics, an act for which he is given no disapproving looks (300), thus confirming his own homicidal sanity over what Patrick presents to us as the females unreasonable emotional convulsions. Similarly, he encapsulates, and thereby conceals from himself, his own escalating hysteria by immersing himself in regular rituals and solid monologizing, as exhibited in chapters depicting his early-morning grooming routine or others which showcase his autistically retentive knowledge of the works of Genesis or Whitney Houston. His constant wearing of a personal stereo seems like yet another self-containment strategy, and so does his cherished ideal of hardbodiedness cultivated through expressly mind-numbing exertions at the gym: I worked out heavily at the gym after leaving the office today but the tension has returned, so I do ninety abdominal crunches, a hundred and fifty push-ups, and then run in place for twenty minutes while listening to the new Huey Lewis CD (76). In an era when masculinitys exceptional strength and integrity can no longer be taken for granted, it seems as if only a relentless hardening of mind and body can save the hysterical male from falling apart. Straitjacketed by masculine norms and ideals, Patrick cannot allow himself to yield to what is different, plural, hysterical, or unknowable. Were he able to succumb to a nervous breakdown instead of feeling compelled to keep up masculine appearances at any price, his existential terror might not necessarily translate into homicidal violence. According to Anne Campbell, Patricks aggressive response must be regarded as stereotypically gender-specific. Women see aggression as temporary loss of control caused by overwhelming pressure and resulting in guilt, Campbell writes, whereas men see aggression as a means of exerting control over other people when they feel the need to reclaim power and self-esteem (viii). Ironically, by losing it and lashing out against his others, Patrick seeks to maintain the ideal of infallible self-control that informs modernitys construction of the masculine self. InMasculinities, Violence, and Culture Suzanne Hatty characterizes this self as concerned with the preservation of autonomy not only as a personal goal, but also as a manifestation of the selfs allegiance to the order-imposing, self-determining spirit of modernity. Violence, in the service of the modern self, preserves individuality and forestalls the possibility of [End Page 384] fusion with the dangerous not-

self. Violence as a modern strategy guarantees both individual and social control, while maintaining and perpetuating hierarchy and inequality (10). Led by the question of why are some young men so angry? [And] why does this anger translate into lethal violence (2), Hatty connects violence to notions of the self, boundaries, relatedness, and dependency (33), inferring that violence, in its many forms, is installed within the machinery of the modern self (206). Arguing that for the modern self, the realization of the fragile and capricious nature of life is likely to be deeply disturbing, engendering feelings of fearfulness, insecurity, and pervasive anxiety (1213), Hatty provides us with a diagnosis of Patricks postmodern conditionhis terror, hysteria, and homicidal violence. In light of Hattys analysis, Patricks serial killing derives from a phobic psycho-territorialism directed against anybody and anything that, in his view, belongs to the dangerous territory beyond the confines of normalized masculine subjectivity (18). But why are men so much more susceptible than women to becoming perpetrators of violence? According to Richard Collier, men constitute between 80 and 90 per cent of all known offenders (33) and as a result the well-documented fear of crime is, in effect, a fear of men (2). Male violence finds its roots in masculinitys inherent anxiety over its precarious artifice and the unremitting revocability of this artifice. One is not born but becomes a man and, undoubtedly, the boy undergoes a highly conflicted process before he becomes the active, masculine, heterosexual male that society wants him to be (Bristow 72). According to Freudian theorizing, to achieve masculine status the boy must detach himself from his mother and counteridentify with the father, meaning that the inception of the masculine not only always coincides with, but in fact demands, an experience of loss and separation. To win recognition as a man, Oedipal boys must radically cut themselves off from the feminine, which is accomplished through repression and results in neurotic self-division. Effectively, they must split the world, as well as themselves, into a heroic manly me on the one hand and a despicable effeminate not-me on the other. In my view it is absolutely crucial not to misconstrue the Oedipus complex as a one-off event normally overcome in late infancy; rather, it ought to be regarded as generative of a life-long oedipal dynamic propagating a masculinity that is intrinsically serial. Riddled with feelings of inadequacy, masculinity depends on an ongoing serial process of testing, proving, and reasserting. Even after renouncing his female origin, the boy can never be sure that he has accomplished the set target of being man enough because, as a human being, he remains prone to subconscious yearning for the uncomplicated [End Page 385] union he experienced in the embrace of the maternal body. In fact, according to Liam Hudson and Bernadette Jacot, the more male the male, the greater the imaginative gulf separating him from his sources of primitive comfort; and the greater that gulf . . . the greater his underlying insecurity is bound to be (49). Similarly, in her writing on childhood autism, Frances Tustin suggests that the injurious severity of the child/mother separation has a direct impact on the degree of panic, rage and anguished feelings of weakness that well up as stressful situations in later life are encountered (19). In Patricks case, finding himself traumatically cut off from all infantile comforts not only considerably augments his feelings of insecurity but also heightens his propensity for horrific violence. Nearby a mother breast-feeds her baby, Patrick observes at one point in the novel, which awakens something awful in me (297). According to Susan Bordo and Jane Flax, the Oedipus complex does not simply affect the development of individual masculinities within patriarchy; rather, it is ingrained within the genesis of modern culture as a whole, which in The Flight to Objectivity, her collection of essays on Cartesianism and culture, Bordo designates pertinently as a drama of parturition (62). As individuals, Bordo posits, our true psychological birth comes when we begin to experience our separateness from the mother, when we begin toindividuate from her. Substituting world for mother (and . . . the world of the Renaissance and Middle Ages was a mother-world, symbolically, imagistically, and, perhaps, experientially), such a process of individuation did occur in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Or at least, the art, literature, and philosophy of the era tell such a story. (59)

Bordo views the Cartesian cogito as an oedipal gesture of defiance against mans dependence on the female, a masculinist declaration of independence that is at the same time compensation for a profound loss (106).7 In agreement with Bordo, Flax reminds us that western philosophy is primarily a reflection of the experience and actions of male human beings who were created in and through patriarchal social relations (247), encapsulating a view of the universe and conceptualization of human subjectivity that is oedipally biased and hence of necessity warped, both epistemologically and ontologically. Of particular interest in the present context, however, is not so much the Cartesian split per se as its absolutist nature, not so much the cultural-historical circumstance that, in the Renaissance, man began to apprehend himself as a decisively separate entity, no longer continuous with a universe which has now become decisively other [End Page 386] to [him] (Bordo 70) as the fact that, from then on, man was bound to be and remain so. Within modernity, lest his masculinity fail to attain patriarchal approval and remain culturally unintelligible, every male must extricate himself from the female. Tragically, however, no sooner has he successfully asserted his independence over woman, the world, and the body than he can no longer bear to be perceived as passively suffering his separation. Man has to show himself to be in command, either by purposelyand seemingly painlesslyreenacting the original traumatic incision or by preempting whatever moment of separation might be likely to occur in the future. Put differently, in order to keep up masculine appearances, it always has to look as if it were the male cutting the umbilical cord rather than having the traumatic incision performed on him. As Flax points out, this imperative male pretence at absolute autonomy remains ambivalently transfused by latently misogynous desire and disgust, that is, the wish to be cared for and totally fused with another person and the dangers which this wish poses to the distinctness of self (245). Within the male imaginary, the Oedipus complex undergoes a phantasmatic shift from a moment of passively endured infantile trauma to a moment of emancipatory violence inflicted on both the burgeoning self and the maternal body. Due to its fictitiousness and profound contestability, however, this masculinist appropriation of the oedipal crisis, which sits at the heart of masculinitys cultural hegemony, requires serial reenactment in order to sustain itself, thus supporting Lawrence Kramers proposition in After the Lovedeaththat the forms of selfhood mandated as normal in modern western culture both promote and rationalize violence against women (1). Arguing that, within modernity, all formations and positions of the subject are structurally feminine, Kramer defines masculinity as resting on an adamant disavowal of its own feminine subjection to an internalized authority. In terms of their lack of autonomy vis--vis the omnipotent control of the superego, there is no difference between men and women; only men have managed to disavow their powerlessness by projecting it onto women and successfully repressing all knowledge of this projection. As Kramer points out, the reward for maintaining this repression is the fiction of unambivalent selfpossession: the fiction of holding the absolutely masculine subject-position that in truth no-one can hold (6). Trauma occurs whenever masculinitys exemption from lack, systemic dependence, and existential exposure is revealed to be entirely fictitious. Consequently, sexual violence must be understood as a mans ostentatious, panic-induced reinscription of his masculinitys indisputable hegemony on the female, or feminized, body of the other. As Kramer explains, [End Page 387] a woman may be judged to deserve punishment whenever she steps beyond her paradigmatic position; her role as embodiment [of inferiority and abjection] is protected from injury by doing injury to her body. A woman may come to deserve such punishment either by affirming whatever features of femininity are stigmatized in her particular milieu or by unmasking the condition of stigma-free masculinity there as an illusion. Sometimes, however, she may seem to do one of these things merely by being alive. (2) In American Psycho Bethanywho Patrick describes as a girl I dated at Harvard and who I was subsequently dumped by (211)is such a woman who deserves punishment. Not only was it she who ended their relationship, she also laughs at Patricks upside-down Onica painting and, by producing a platinum American Express card identical to his, she repudiates womans supporting role in patriarchal

mans repression of his own implenitude. In addition, Bethany commits the crime of recognizing Patricks hysterical agitation, belittling him by voicing concern for his mental health, and for this he tortures her to death or, at least, most graphically fantasizes about it. At this stage Patricks panic and rage have already spiraled out of control to such an extent that a mere killing can no longer assuage his need for self-repossession; to bring about the desired effect, he must entirely annihilate the other by taunting, torturing, and dismembering her, finally dissolving her body parts in acid or resorting to cannibalism. But crucially Patrick gets it wrong, and continues to get it wrong. The oedipal myth of masculine power will never conclusively crystallize into fact, no matter how much female submission, misery, and death it effects, or how spectacularly the original umbilical incisionnow carried out by the male himselfis reenacted. As Kramer puts it, sexual violence always comes short of its goal, reinscribes the castration it spectacularly denies, requires its own repetition at another time, in another place, on another womans body (96). It should by now be clear why critics writing about serial-killer fiction and criminologists profiling reallife serial murderers eventually always return to modern masculinitys peculiar Cartesian oedipality. Philip Simpson describes the serial killer, whom he sees as embarked upon a quest . . . of self-recovery recovery of a lost metaphysical certitude (16), as a fitting metaphor for the modern man philosophically in extremis (12), while in The Lust to Kill Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer propose that in our culture murder has become a metaphor for freedom (177), reflecting the theme of mans transcendence, the struggle to free oneself, by a conscious act of will, from the material constraints which normally determine human destiny (168). Harking back to Flax and Bordos interventions, [End Page 388] the material in Cameron and Frazers statement is of course quite literally the mater-ial, that is, the maternal body from which masculinity seeks definitive physical and epistemic detachment. Correspondingly, in her poignant rereading of Sophocless Oedipus Rex Elisabeth Bronfen finds that Freuds psychoanalytic appropriation of the Oedipus myth, by focusing exclusively on patricide and motherson incest, erases from view another significant issue in the play, that of intended, yet thwarted matricide. When his morally unacceptable behavior is revealed to Oedipus, he is not immediately compelled to exert punishment on himself in an act of spectacular self-castration; rather, demented with fury, he embarks on a search for Jocasta, his wife-mother, apparently to avenge himself on her for what he has done, quite as if matricide might not only absolve him of his shame and momentary impotence, but also reassert his masculinity as essentially intact. In a subsequent analysis of Alfred Hitchcocks Psycho Bronfen concludes that the central character of Norman Bates,8 the original blueprint for Elliss Patrick Bateman, succeeds at the matricide that eluded his mythic forefather, only to displace his unappeased aggressive impulses by . . . killing young women who threaten to be not only rivals but moreover repetitions of Mother (21). Compelled by modernitys oedipal fantasy, serial killers assert themselves as men by serially reenacting their original separation from the female and, as a result, sexual murder begins to look like nothing but a psychotic literalization . . . of infantile fantasies (Seltzer 140). In light of this psychological dynamic, then, the mental disposition of serial killers must not be regarded as monstrously deviant, but as abnormally normal (9) or hyperconformist (163). As Seltzer insists, the only difference between the normal subject (the psychic killer) and the pathological one (the psycho killer) is the passage from fantasy to act (146), and this is why at the close ofAmerican Psycho it does not really matter if Patrick has only dreamt about murder. What does matter is that he does what he does and dreams what he dreams because, as he confesses to Bethany, I . . . want . . . to . . . fit . . . in (237). Serial killing is a typically male violence directed against anybody perceived as a threat to modernitys myth of masculine autonomy; in this respect, it can be seen as a vehicle of epistemological hygiene and psychic cleansing or, quite simply, a lethal, grossly sensual and ritualized (Simpson 17) manifestation of instance after instance of culturally propagated sexism. Although serial killing is often sexually motivated, the mere suggestion that there might be a link between the catastrophic encounter of killer and victim and the erotic union of two lovers must appear perverse. However, as indicated by Catherine Waldbys theorizing of[End Page 389] sexual pleasure, it is feasible to detect some pertinent correspondences between the act of killing and sexual intercourse:

Erotic pleasure arguably requires a kind of momentary annihilation or suspension of what normally counts as identity, the conscious, masterful, self-identical self, lost in the little death of orgasm. These momentary suspensions, when linked together in the context of a particular relationship, work towards a more profound kind of ego destruction. I do not mean that the ego in love relations is destroyed in an absolute sense. Rather each lover is refigured by the other, made to bear the mark of the other upon the self. But all such transformation involves the breaking down of resistance, of violence to an existing order of the ego. (266) Waldby problematizes the erotic pleasure of mutual orgasmic self-destruction, which in the case of sexual murder is substituted by the killers purely egocentric perpetration of the victims death. The killer is irresistibly fascinated by sex not only as an opportunity to reinvest himself with a powerfully destructive sense of self but also, contrarily, as a gateway to potential orgasmic self-dissolution promising to suspend, at least momentarily, his traumatic separation from the maternal body. Ultimately, however, the killer must perceive orgasm as a profoundly anxiety-inducing castrating experience, depriving him of his masculine autonomy by maneuvering him into too close a proximity with the female and thus threatening to cause an insufferable erasure of the oedipal-Cartesian split. As a result, the sex killers orgasm most typically takes the form of an ultraviolent matricidal black-out (Seltzer 139). Because they possess the capacity to draw [him] closer to the outer boundaries of masculine subjectivity, and may even entice [him] over the edge into the abyss of the irreal (Hatty 19), women, or whoever else serves as his object of desire, are blamed and punished by extinction for thus undermining the killers self-control. Sexual desire per se is experienced as an emasculating weakness only to be indulged if its postcoital upshot is the ego-bolstering assertion of masculine authority. Significantly, the compulsive seriality of sexual murder identifies the killer also as a hysteric, and nowhere does this become more evident than in Elliss portrayal of Patrick Bateman. According to Juliet Mitchell, the compulsive sexuality of hysteria . . . demonstrates a brinkmanship in which the person is driven to the edge of orgasm but never feels safe enough to allow his body to vanish. The giving up of the body in orgasm is too close [End Page 390] . . . to death and annihilation. The endless seductions, the repeated intercourse of hysteria can be likened to suicide attempts. Absolute loss cannot be experienced, although its possibility is always played with. . . . [Instead] the torturer tests out the annihilating pain on the body of the other. (211) The serial killers lethal frigidity is a typical symptom of modern male sexuality taken to its psychopathological extreme. As Calvin Thomas explains in Male Matters, the problem is not that sexuality is contaminated by power but that the hyperbolic self, the phallicized ego, cannot experience sexuality as anything but power. . . . It cannot exuberantly discard and shatter itself into sexuality and so can have contact with sexuality only as the shattering discard of the other (20). Mutually fulfilling sex is irreconcilable, even anathema, to modern masculinity since, from a strictly modern point of view, orgasm invariably equals an unmanly dissipation of the self. Where else, if not in mainstream pornography, does male sexuality receive its most typical and stereotyped representation? And, as Thomas observes, pornography never shows men as having pleasures that fall outside the margins of control. Arguably, men are not represented as having sex at all; rather, they are presented as having power (20). What is so shocking about Elliss novel is not so much Patricks attempt to inhabit the ultimate subject position of Death, or his warped interpretation of the Cartesian cogito as I kill therefore I am (Seltzer 234), simply because these impulses, albeit psychotic, still remain within the realm of the relatable. The most shocking aspect of American Psycho is the superlative, entirely redundant vehemence of Patricks violence, its boundless and unremitting atrocity. And yet, according to Seltzer, this hyperbolic violence only enhances the realism of Elliss novel: all serial killing, more or less by

definition, displays such a tendency toward over-kill . . . exceeding its function or purposeor, at least, exceeding the end of ending life (45). For Patrick, too, it evidently no longer suffices to ascertain the position and status of his others as mere objects to his superior self; rather, his victims are subjected to a process of utterly annihilative abjection. Patrick will not rest until he has reduced them to a pulp of nothingness. Pertinently translated by Thomas as the excrementalization of alterity (65), abjection describes the mode by which others become shit (64). Throughout the novel abjection looms large as a motive behind Patricks killing agenda. His first victim, a homeless tramp, is killed because, so Patrick tells him, you reek of . . . shit (130) and Im sorry. Its just that . . . I dont know. I dont have anything in common with you (131). On the death of one of his later victims Patrick reflects that though it does sporadically [End Page 391] penetrate how unacceptable some of what Im doing actually is, I just remind myself that this thing, this girl, this meat, is nothing, is shit (345). Abjection is most commonly understood to constitute an interior dynamic, only obliquely affecting the lives of others, and this is where it becomes significant that, according to Ellis, Patrick may in fact only be fantasizing about being a serial killer. If so, then the offensive smell emanating from his others is actually the putrid odor of his own self-loathing, and Patricks worldview proves yet again perfectly analogous to that of the modern self to whom the world is either abject other or mere autistic selfextension. Resulting in a curiously sympathetic reading of Patricks condition, Freccero portrays the killer as a sadist who both projects his ego onto the external world and, simultaneously, the external world becomes nothing but his ego (53). Unhelpfully, in my view, by eschewing an analysis of American Psychos expressly gender-specific violence, Freccero subsumes not only the victims, but all of us, within the psyche of the killer: a dog, a beggar, a child, some prostitutes, a gay man, some women, and a colleague all of them are him, all of them are us, and we are him (54). Echoing Freccero, Ruth Helyer too suggests that the serial killers psychopathological urges may in fact be lying dormant in all of us, and the only difference between us and Patrick is that he has indulged them (727). By thus ignoring the gender specificity of serial killing, Freccero and Helyer fail to address urgent questions concerning the role of sex and death in the masculine imaginary, questions tackled by Elliss novel and succinctly summarized by Cameron and Frazer: Why . . . is it usually men who are driven to kill women, and only very rarely that women kill men? Why are there no female sadistic sex-killers and why are there so many men of this type? What is the connection between murder and the erotic? What is the difference between normal men and killers? To ask these questions . . . is to ask something about menor more precisely, about the construction of masculine sexuality in our culture. (3031) The etiology of both supposedly normal and psychopathological male violenceif it is at all possible to make such a distinctionsprings from what, within modernity, is commonly deemed a healthy oedipal process of both specifically masculine individuation and the development of human selfhood in general. It is only within postmodernity that masculinity has become visible as a problematic gender prone to exerting a pathologically deformative impact on the male psyche. Many personality profiles of real-life serial killers and perpetrators of so-called spree killings characterize them as suffering from [End Page 392] mental disorders identifying them as hyperbolic representatives of what commonly passes for entirely normal in men. The British serial killer Dennis Nilsen attracted a (rather facile) diagnosis of False Self Syndrome (Hatty 199), while psychiatric testimony at the trial of the Tasmanian spree killer Martin Bryant suggested he suffered from Aspergers Syndrome (Hatty 44). A report based on interviews with Ted Bundy also hints at some kind of autistic disorder, characterizing his experience of personal relations as resembling an alien life form acquiring appropriate behaviors through mimicry and artifice (Seltzer 163), a characterization not very far removed from Patricks technique of trying to understand his victims by filming their deaths (304). Reminiscent of the anonymous uniformity of Patricks appearance, Seltzer also quotes a psychiatric consultant on the case of Jeffrey Dahmer as having commented: Dress him in a suit and he looks like ten other men (128). As a result, it appears crucial we heed Colliers criminological assessment of the loner Thomas Hamilton, who in early 1996 shot sixteen primary schoolchildren and their teacher in the Scottish town of Dunblane, in which he

demands we see Hamilton primarily not as a monster, pervert or personification of evil, but as man (104). As a fixed set of normative imperatives, masculinity as we know it proves capable of inculcating in men a latent propensity for a variety of violent psychopathological behaviors, behaviors that are more often than not the corollary of an impossibly pent-up mixture of fearful autistic self-encapsulation, on the one hand, and barely containable hysterical paranoia, on the other. Pertinently, in Male Matters Thomas describes masculinitys assumption of the ultimate subject position of being-death in quasi-autistic terms as the formation of a sort of fortified and spotless bunker from which the masculine subject . . . polices the boundaries and frontiers of his own masculinity and, when these are threatened, narrows his vision, sets his sights, and fires (29). Due to its emphasis on the gender-specificity of sexual violence in connection with expressly masculine psychopathologies, my argument opens itself up to accusations of essentialism. It is therefore necessary to explain that, throughout the present analysis, the chief focus has been on masculinity as it has traditionally been conceived and constructed as a gender rather than biological maleness in the raw. Originating in imperative processes of individuation and hence ineluctably reflecting the gender conventions of a given culture, cognition and mental disposition are more than purely neurophysiological phenomena. Likewise, the clinical emergence or disappearance of apparent or alleged deviations from cognitive and mental standards, such as hysteria and autism, can only fully be grasped in relation to a cultures understanding of what exactly constitutes a healthy mind [End Page 393] and normal man or woman. The premise of my position is supportively elucidated by Bordo, who argues that, although in our time, many women may be coming to think more and more like men, the conclusion is not . . . that any association of gender and cognitive style is a reactionary mythology with no explanatory value. For the sexual division of labor within the family in the modern era has indeed fairly consistently reproduced significant cognitive and emotional differences along sexual lines. . . . [B]oys have tended to grow up learning to experience the world like Cartesians, while girls do not, because of developmental asymmetries resulting from female-dominated infant care, rather than biology, anatomy, or nature. (113) Bret Easton Ellis is far too subtle and ambitious a writer to be cultivating a pose of fashionable postmodern pointlessness as implied by Frecceros suggestion that in American Psycho there is no truth to be found beneath appearances, and the accumulation of Batemans successful, unnoticed, and ultimately deeply unsatisfying torture-murders that do not teach himor the rest of usanything (52). Ellis provides us with a case study of postmodern male hysteria, intricately recording his protagonists increasing nervous implosion as he wards off imminent self-disintegration by violently pulling himself together and repeatedlythat is, seriallyasserting himself over and against the other. In conclusion it seems necessary to speculate whether there might be any conceivable way out of Patricks lethal, expressly no-exit, fiercely clenched-up self-encapsulation and whether Ellis makes any apparent effort at signposting such a curative or redemptive trajectory. Intriguingly, in The Knotted Subject, in which she tackles what is without doubt traditional psychoanalysiss most troublesome axiomaticthat is, its biologistic distinction between a masculine and a feminine subject of castration Elisabeth Bronfen attempts to release psychoanalysis from its central fixation on the Oedipus complex. Bronfen reconceives subjectivity as predicated not on the loss of the phallus, but the loss of the maternal body at birth as symbolized by the umbilical incision. Instead of the phallus, Bronfen identifies the navelor omphalos, as she terms itas the primary site of loss. The traumatic origin of human subjectivity is thus revealed to be non-gender-specific, marking the inherent fallibility, and serving as a reminder of the mortality and powerlessness, of both women and men. Bronfens psychoanalytic model establishes a fundamental existential equality between the sexes by effectively returning to the masculine subject those aspects of human existence that culture has projected [End Page 394] onto femininitylack, drives, deprivation, fallibility, implenitude (17). As a result, masculinity is afforded exemption from its highly anxiety- inducing task of asserting and identifying itself over and against the feminine, which is now recognized as constituting a natural and culturally acceptable part of its own

disposition. Instead of suffering crisis after crisis and feeling compelled to forge an alliance with violence and death, masculinity is free to embrace the knowledge of its own mortality and thereby enter into a coalition with the rest of humankind, who used to be but are no longer, its others. In American Psycho, when confronted with Jeans love for him which he feels might rearrange my life in a significant wayPatrick is shown to catch a glimpse of what strikes him as a new and unfamiliar landthe dreaded uncertainty of a totally different world (378). This is not to suggest that Elliss novel concludes on a positive note, let alone with the promise of a new omphalic order of gender, but, as Jean kisses him, Patrick realizes, at first distantly and then with greater clarity, that the havoc raging inside him is gradually subsiding (365). With Patrick appearing to emerge from his autistic shell, this is the only genuine intersubjective encounter in the novel and, enabled by Jeans self-effacing embrace, it releases in Patrick a momentary acceptance of his essential implenitude: There is nothing of value I can offer her. However, with things being as they are, Patrick knows that escape into omphalic bliss is not an option, as one day, sometime very soon, [Jean] too will be locked in the rhythm of my insanity (378). And yet, despite the autistic self-encapsulation of its narrative and the novels adamant denial of progress, American Psycho clearly appears to know where it is headed, almost as if, having reached his nadir after being assaulted by a taxi driver who calls him a yuppie scumbag (394), Patrick resolves to make a new, more appropriately postmodern start: Disintegration, we hear him mutter to himself at the very end of the novel, Im taking it in my stride (39596). Berthold Schoene Berthold Schoene <b.schoene@mmu.ac.uk> is Director of the English Research Institute at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is the author of Writing Men (2000), co-editor of Posting the Male (2003), and has recently edited The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (2007). His current work in progress includes an essay on gay men and romance and a study on the cosmopolitan novel.

Footnotes
1. The only other enquiry into Elliss representation of masculinity and its socio-political implications is by Mark Storey (2005); the majority of criticism on American Psycho as a cultural phenomenon is in fact dedicated to Mary Harrons cinematic rendition of the novel (2000). 2. Autistic disorders afflict more males than females; the statistic distribution most widely accepted is 4:1, as originally specified by Lorna Wing in her 1981 essay, Sex Ratios in Early Childhood Autism and [End Page 395] Related Conditions. In people diagnosed with high-functioning autism or Aspergers Syndromemilder cognitive impairments which do not entirely incapacitate the sufferer, but make them appear profoundly self-absorbed and behaviorally oddthis ratio increases to 10:1 (BaronCohen 137). 3. Provocatively, Simon Baron-Cohen, Director of the British Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, describes autism as a manifestation of what he designates as the extreme male brain, while in a newspaper article in The Observer in 2002 Robin McKie and Karen Gold propose excessive testosterone levels as a possible catalyst of the disorder. 4. Notably, however, the only available study into violent behavior and Aspergers Syndrome suggests that such a link may in fact be far more prevalent than hitherto recognized or acknowledged (Mawson, Grounds, and Tantam 569). 5. In Autism or the Crisis of Meaning Alexander Durig convincingly argues for the acknowledgement of autism not as a mental disorder or psychiatric condition, but as simply a different mode of perception. 6. Both Mitzi Waltz and Polly Morice have discussed the increasing metaphorical currency of autism.

7. Due to its status as an anti-Cartesian theory: that is, one in which there is no separation of mind and body (Mitchell 34), psychoanalysis makes a perfect tool to reveal and deconstruct this intrinsically masculinist bias of modern western philosophys most fundamentally flawed axiomatic. 8. Pertinently, a Freudian misprint in Bronfens chapter cites the name of Hitchcocks hero as Normal Bates (21).

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