Round II:
Nihilism is a train of thought that was just emerging during Dostoevsky’s day and that people have been grappling with all the way through Ellis’ time. Coming from the Latin word Nihil meaning “nothing,” it is an ethos that isn’t even an ethos. The pillars of nihilism are that there is no higher being, no absolute truth, no absolute morality - one way to look at is that it is the death of empathy. This didn’t sit well with Dostoevsky’s Eastern Orthodox Christian beliefs. He seemed to try and dismantle it the most in his work The Idiot through the use of a good-hearted prince named Myshkin. The prince comes to represent a wholesome, pure, innocence in a world filled with phonies, liars, and people obsessed with just the outward appearance of things – he constitutes a “holy/tragic fool” – one who doesn’t know any better than to be good. Dostoevsky used him to show how people aren’t – thoughtful, caring, Christ like. He demonstrated this through his inability to actually function in society and then his eventual decline into madness. A quote that best captured this feeling takes place at a dinner party in which Myshkin expresses his grand love for nature as one of God’s many creations. Though his words inspires those around him they still think of him as an outisider, “I don't understand how one can walk by a tree and not be happy at the sight of it! Or to speak with a man and not be happy in loving him? … There are so many things at every step so beautiful." (Dostoevsky, The Idiot, Part IV, Chapt. 7)
Ellis also addresses this theme in his book the Rules of Attraction (in which he also directly references Notes from Underground). This is his take on the lives of American college students, particularly the archetypal North Eastern Liberal Arts schools (he himself wrote his first book at nineteen at Bennington College in Vermont.). In the book, which takes place in the fictional Camden College in New Hampshire, he tackles romance in the late 20th century through a loosely tied series of vignettes describing the same events from each of the characters own, self indulgent perspectives - all but one. Ellis has cast his holy fool in the form of a true romantic, a girl who is in love with Sean Bateman (yes – he’s Patrick’s little brother) who leaves beautiful and articulate notes in his mailbox about her need to be with him. Ellis writes her passages in all italics and this is a cue to his readers that it is her. When Sean fails to realize who was putting the notes in his box, she cannot bear the pain and kills her self in a touching and difficult scene,
I’m lying, in warm water, in a bathtub, in Sawtewll. I’m doing this because I know I’ll never have Him. I drag the razor firmly across the hot skin underwater and the flesh peels back quickly, blood jetting out, literally jetting out, from the bottom of my arm. I drag it cross the other wrist jaggedly, up and down, and the water turns pink. When I lift my arm up above the water blood gushes powerfully high and I have to place my wrist back under so I’m not splattered with it. I sit up, only slash at one ankle because the weakness drenches me and I lay back, the water turning impossibly red and then I start to dream, and I keep dreaming and its then that I’m not sure if this is really the thing to do. I can hear music coming from another house someplace and maybe I try to sing along with it, but as usual I find myself getting to the ending before it actually happens. Maybe I should have tried another route. The one that little man at the gas station in Phoenix advised, or shall I say urged on to or oww- guess what? No time. God jesus christ your my nothing savior.
(Ellis, Rules of Attraction, p 173)
This anonymous girl is a victim of this age in which romance and empathy are dead. Neither Ellis or Dostoevsky chose to prove this without sacrificing some of their own better characters.
The functioning family unit is also a great canary in the mine as far as determining the over all health of a society’s ability to function with one another. These family ties are tackled head on in Dostoevsky’s final and classic novel The Brothers Karamazov. This book is the story of a parricide committed by one of four brothers (one is illegitimate and works as a servant.). This unique family situation plays out with violent consequences when the varied personalities of the brothers are brought to light. The analogy for the larger context of society seems to point at certain archetypes who’s roles play out in a new Russia without a Czar. Here is a key quote from the novel concerning one’s larger role in society/family, “Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end......but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature...And to found that edifice on its unavenged tears: would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell me the truth!”
Ellis deals with the family in a slightly different way where it has almost dissolved into the background of many of his character‘s lives. The privilege his characters seem to enjoy so much also leads to this empty feeling they get around their families. This is seen in almost all his works, including American Psycho, where Patrick Bateman, Ellis has said, is based on his take on his own father. (Needless to say, they didn’t have the best relationship.) Patrick and Sean from Rules of Attraction are also related and both have a shared hatred for their own father and one another – from a brief passage in Rules of Attraction written from Patrick Bateman’s perspective, “I try to remember when he started hating me, when I started reciprocating the feeling… He has nothing to say to me and I, in the end, have really nothing to talk about with him.“ (Ellis, Rules of Attraction, p. 239)
In Lunar Park, Ellis‘ fifth novel and first attempt at genre writing (it’s a horror story/fake memoir) he places a fictional version of himself as the title role, where he himself plays a father figure in the affluant suburbs outside of New York City. It is also Ellis‘ first time writing in a past tense narrative. Ellis directs his gaze at the suburban family and the secrets they all hide. He is also, through the magic of literature, able to connect with two of the characters he has also fathered – both Clay the protagonist from Less Than Zero and Patrick Bateman make their physical presence felt in the novel. This book takes a close look at Ellis’s own existential nausea and turns it into a ghost story about the post-9/11 world we live in.
Ellis also visits the topic of family relationships in his books Less Than Zero and Rules of Attraction. In Less Than Zero he makes the parents almost non-existent in their control over their children’s lives. They just sign checks and live out their own lives with their own affairs and drug problems. In Rules of Attraction this same dynamic is played out when one of the three main characters, Paul has to spend a weekend with his mother. She is shown as not much more than a pill popping ditz drowning away real life with martini after martini. This break down of the family unit is critical to understanding the way in which society is functioning.
To be concluded on Thursday. Stay tuned.
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