Chapter 10: Textual Terrors of the Self: Haunting and Hyperreality in Lunar Park

If any contemporary novel was to define the genre Gothic- postmodernism as it manifests itself today, none could do so more succinctly than Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park. A follow up to his sensationalist and highly controversial novel American Psycho, it unnervingly rediscovers the psychological aspects of terror through traditional Gothic tropes: the haunted house, the tyrannical father figure, the doppelgänger, the serial killer, the un-dead, the atmosphere of mystery and suspense, supernatural occurrences, and the dominating presence of the Gothic sublime. Interestingly, this is superimposed upon a strong postmodernist perspective on narrative self-consciousness and the confounding metafictional status of the novel often parodies the Gothic elements. This results in a text that hovers on the boundaries of the Gothic and of postmodernism, using anachronistic Gothic devices in a post-MTV generation context, fluctuating between the two genres, often occupying the liminal position of being ‘both / and’. This chapter will focus on identifying how postmodernist narrative devices function to reinforce a traditional Gothic aesthetic in Lunar Park, promoting the need to see the novel as a development of Gothic-postmodernism to its most climactic point to date, and clarifying grounds for its classification as an exemplary Gothic-postmodernist work. Lunar Park presents itself as the pseudo-biography of ‘the author’ Bret Easton Ellis and follows his mental deterioration, beginning with an account of his early fame as creator of best-selling novels Less than Zero, Glamorama, The Rules of Attraction and the infamous American Psycho. Fluctuating consistently between ‘reality’ and fiction, as it periodically accounts for Ellis’ marriage to actress Jayne Dennis, and his move toward suburban family life in post-9/11 New York, the novel develops into a postmodernist ghost-story, outlining the haunting of the main character and the return of his dead father to complete the destruction of his identity. 172 Gothic-postmodernism: Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity

The development of a Gothic aesthetic in the novel begins in the opening chapter, not with the establishment of standard Gothic literary devices and symbolism as one would expect, but when the narrator, Bret Easton Ellis, informs us that ‘my sisters and I discovered the dark side of life at an unusually early age’. The world lacked coherence and within this chaos we were ‘all doomed to failure’ (Easton Ellis 2005, 8). He continues: ‘My father created me, criticised me, destroyed me, and, then after I reinvented myself and lurched back into being, became a proud boastful dad’ (Easton Ellis 2005, 9). This perspective on the creation and destruction of subjectivity, establishes an age-old Gothic premise that harks back to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and the dark side of life and of identity is set as the focal point for what is to become an extremely egocentric and arguably megalomaniac narrative voice. Bret’s paranoia and edgy over-sensitivity creates an atmosphere of tension and suspense early on in the novel, explained away in his account of his father Robert Ellis, a typical Gothic patriarch, who, ‘locked in a demented fury’ (Easton Ellis 2005, 8), and obsessed by status, rage and his own loneliness (Easton Ellis 2005, 181), caused the real world to melt away for his son, opening up a path of self destruction through excess. In this sense, Bret is introduced to us as something of a hybrid character, bred from something akin to Frankenstein’s creature and Dorian Gray. His character is one that is, like Frankenstein’s hideous progeny, both monstrous, for his part in the horrifying and sadistically violent fantasies of Patrick Bateman, yet also deserving of sympathy for the hurt that his relationship with his father caused him. This is exemplified in his wife’s enraged comment: ‘Is there anything more pathetic than a monster who keeps asking please? please? Please?’ (Easton Ellis 2005, 291). Arguably, the fact that character Bret is conflated to a certain extent with the author Bret deconstructs the idea of authorship and furthers this idea of hybrid or blurred identity. It also effects an added hauntology, reinforcing the monstrous subject as a specific conceit of Gothic-postmodernism. But Bret’s character is also one that is defined by self indulgence, obsession, recklessness, and paranoia. His encounter with himself, in the figure of Clayton, which leads to the ultimate terror of the novel, is evocative of the crucial issues raised in Wilde’s illustration of his protagonist, Dorian. One might, subsequently, consider him as a typical Gothic- postmodernist anti-hero; trapped in a terrifying void of hyperreality