Though I am not much of one for “trigger warnings,” I think a cautionary note to begin this post is in order. This is a reflection on the work (specifically one text) of Bret Easton Ellis, an author who is well known for including rather despicable content in his writing. This post will reference some of these graphic and disturbing moments to make a broader social point. If, however, you have personal aversions (or “triggers,” as popular discourse now has it) to physical and sexual violence, I would recommend that you not read through—despite the value I see in the argument I attempt to make here. Additionally, due to the gross nature of the content here described, I have also elected to not include a selection of paintings as I usually do—it seems to me that such an inclusion would be an abuse of beauty and I don’t know enough ugly paintings to here accompany my words.
In my view, we might broadly understand art, in its various mediums, as being a way of contemplating something in experience in its individuality. In something like painting, an artist may attempt to look more carefully at the way colour and light hit a given object such as a stack of hay; a poet may attempt to articulate a given emotion she feels such as betrayal or love; the writer of prose will tend toward generating an internally rich world which a reader enters through his writing like a dystopic empire. When I here say ‘contemplating,’ we must understand that an artistic achievement ought not be measured by some moral standard but by its capacity to encapsulate some aspect of experience in a profound way—a way that we can see through the art but have likely often missed in our busy lives and our proclivity to forget to look carefully.
A great example of this is Martin Scorsese’s 2013 film, The Wolf of Wall Street. I was just sixteen when it came to theatres, but I remember a wild buzz around the movie due to its rather grotesque depiction of the pinnacle of American-style hedonism. I only bring this up as there was one common reaction to the film that has stuck with me to this day: many people were upset that Scorsese did not include a condemnation of the activities engaged in by many of the movie’s characters within the confines of the film itself—in fact, it is instead shown in the movie that the man who largely inspired the story, Jordan Belfort, has gone on to lead a fairly successful and affluent life even after getting out of prison. People often took this to be some sort of celebration of this fact by Scorsese, though I believe any thinking person can appreciate how this is actually quite a leap in logic.
In my view, on the other hand, it is actually quite commendable what Scorsese was able to do (it is even said that Belfort himself was impressed with the accuracy of Scorsese’s film—though he said that the director toned things down a little from how they actually were). He took a historical event and made it into a piece of art for the audience to get inside and contemplate from within, insofar as this is possible. The purpose was never to condemn or celebrate what was being represented—the point was the representation. What we do with that representation is, as far as I am concerned, up to us after the fact; but Scorsese should not be criticized for his masterful capacity to pull off such a feat.
With this rather lengthy preamble given, I wish to turn my attention to the real object of my thought at the moment: the work of Bret Easton Ellis, specifically his 1985 novel Less Than Zero. Now, to begin, I am not inclined to say that I ‘enjoy’ reading Ellis—though I do not regard ‘enjoyment’ as being the sole reason for reading fiction. My hope is that the above introduction about art and the example of The Wolf of Wall Street has made this clear enough. What I appreciate about Ellis’s work is not the way in which, I suppose, it could be read as a glorification of the content he writes about, but I instead welcome his capacity to get his reader into the headspace of a given character. In both Less Than Zero and American Psycho, we are allowed to enter into the mind—via a first-person perspective on the story—of someone who is deranged and rather frightening in one way or another.
Now, even this claim that I have just made has been criticized by many whom I know personally. The most common variant of this I have encountered is: ‘Why do you want to think like someone who is so twisted? No one needs to engage in that sort of thinking.’ This, in my opinion, presents a rather odd point of view; it claims that the only reason I may want to consider how someone else is thinking is for my sake, whereas I would argue that we often try to understand how someone is thinking for their sake—an act surely recognisable to anyone who has made an effort to love someone and want what is best for that person (indeed, this is to be redundant as that is the very definition of love, à la Aquinas). Further, I imagine there are many other legitimate reasons that someone may wish to inhabit the mind of another—for instance, perhaps in a court of law. In the final analysis, I must merely present my argument here and hope that my reader understands why I see value in inhabiting the minds of characters as despicable as those of Ellis, namely Less Than Zero’s main character, Clay.
As pedantic as this process may be, I do think it best to first provide a very brief overview of the text (spoiler alert!) before explaining why I believe it is a worthwhile read for those who can stomach the content. For those who have not read the text, I hope that this will provide a sufficient backdrop for my argument here; for those who have already encountered the book, I intend for this to provide an understanding of how I interpret the book and what I take to be its main points. I would quite expect that someone who has already read the text or someone who may yet read the text will likely have different takeaways from my own. This brief exercise is merely meant to help provide my reader with the view from which I am working.
Less Than Zero is, at its simplest, a piece of stream-of-consciousness writing; we are given access to the internal life of the main character, Clay, during a brief four week period. It takes place during the Christmas break of his first year in university; he has returned home to affluent Los Angeles from his school in New Hampshire where he studied for the first semester of his post-secondary life. The narrative simply allows for events to unfold from Clay’s perspective during this time; it revolves around him spending time with his friends, from whom the semester away has somewhat estranged him, and his family, with whom he has little to no connection—he has divorced and distracted parents and two sisters of whom he does not even know their ages.
Also critical to the story is the fact that Clay, his family, and his friends are all incredibly wealthy. All of his friends are aged somewhere between their late teens to early twenties—Clay himself being eighteen years old. None of these young people have jobs or ever really have to think about money. It is vaguely explained, but never given in detail, that the parents of Clay and all his friends are broadly involved in the entertainment industry—one that was booming in the 80’s when the book is set and when it was also released. This leads, somewhat predictably, to several aspects of the lifestyle that Clay and his friends all maintain. In essence, they are all hedonists. They are constantly drinking, doing drugs, and having sex; in some sense, those three themes are the hinges upon which the lives of the characters swing. Clay is constantly getting a drink for someone else or having one given to him; he constantly gets anxious and needs another line of coke; he has sex with various characters throughout the text seemingly because they are merely also seeking sex.
As is predictable of such a lifestyle, the characters always seem to need to up the ante. They need a harder drug; they need to engage in more perverted sexual acts; soon the more morbid aspects of life—or rather its negation—are the only things that will grasp the attention of the various characters. Throughout the text, it is common for Clay to be asked if he wants to partake of any given activity as I have mentioned; his character is one of the more passive in the text with other characters often instigating some direction of action and him following. For much of the text, he responds to such offers and requests with responses such as: “I don’t know. Sure, why not?” The latter half of that phrase is a commonplace utterance for him, whether in light of a proposition for alcohol, drugs, or sex. It is also worthwhile to note that he responds in this manner even as the story goes on and the various offers become more deranged and disordered. Clay seemingly does not think about what he is being offered; he just impulsively follows, not for whatever reason, but likely for no reason.
This proclivity of Clay’s, however, begins to come to a head as the text becomes progressively darker in content. (To be clear—this is where the trigger warning comes in; and, despite the gruesomeness of this paragraph, I have actually toned down the content of the book quite a lot.) Just after the halfway point of the text, new events begin to emerge that are not like the simpler hedonism at the beginning of the text. On one occasion, Clay’s friends hear about a dead body that has been found behind a club; they go and mess around with it for a bit before getting bored—though no one ever attempts to alert an authority or try to help in any way. Another time, Clay is at a party where a group of people keep venturing off into a side room where several people are watching a hardcore form of pornography where ‘actors’ are, as far as the viewer can tell, being mutilated and tortured. Lastly (for my list—not what happens in the book), Clay goes to a friend’s apartment where he finds out that his friend has abducted a girl, tied her to a bed, and is inviting people to come in and rape her. The brutality of this part of the text cannot be overstated; the fallout of this occurrence, however, is worth quoting at length.
This excerpt picks up where Clay has just exited the room with the girl and discovered what is happening:
I leave the room.
Rip follows me.
“Why?” is all I ask Rip.
“What?”
“Why, Rip?”
Rip looks confused. “Why that? You mean in there?”
I try to nod.
“Why not? What the hell?”
“Oh God, Rip, come on…”
[…]
“Hey, don’t look at me like I’m some sort of scumbag or something. I’m not.”
“It’s…” my voice trails off.
“It’s what?” Rip wants to know.
“It’s…I don’t think it’s right.”
“What’s right? If you want something, you have the right to take it. If you want to do something, you have the right to do it.”
Clay has no response. For once, he has felt something at such a guttural level that to merely respond, “Sure, why not?” is simply impossible. But, as someone who has allowed himself to continue uttering that response to progressively more egregious acts, he has no capacity to reject this further stage of hedonistic control and use. He winds up just leaving and going back to his life, insofar as he can manage that. The book ends shortly thereafter with most of his relationships in LA having been even further strained than when he returned from college, only now to go back to school for the Winter semester.
The reason I have found Ellis’s book so compelling is this predominant theme of the book: a lack of capacity for moral reasoning despite a remaining moral intuition. He portrays this brilliantly, showing first a world that is debauched but nonetheless seems to be merely destructive to the person who chooses to engage in it. After all, who suffers from the use of cocaine except he who decides to cut another line? Who can criticize sexual engagement among two or more people so long as their consent is involved? You don’t really believe that people would be hurt when someone pokes at a dead body they’ve found or just watches some twisted porn? From within the hedonistic and borderline solipsistic worldview that these characters inhabit, it seems nearly impossible to genuinely object to much of the behaviour the characters in the text engage in. Thus, when Clay stumbles upon something he cannot possibly stomach despite it being a next possible step of the worldview he adheres to, he has no capacity to explain what he feels deeply within himself. The principles that Clay needs to rely upon to stand his ground in the final, catalytic moment are utterly beyond his intellectual reach because he has never stopped to consider them.
Yet, why dwell on this? Is this not just a piece of fiction? At one level, yes; at another, I am not so certain. Curiously, the Scottish philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, published a book of moral philosophy, After Virtue, in 1981, just four years prior to Less Than Zero. In the first chapter of the text, MacIntyre suggests—by way of a clever metaphor—that the world we live in, one we might call post-modern, has entirely lost its capacity to reason morally. He argues that the supposed “Enlightenment” period, roughly around the 17th-19th centuries, caused significant epistemic confusion around morality—the most prominent being an overarching ‘scientistic’ (in the sense of natural sciences, Naturwissenschaften) attitude toward life. In essence, science tends to require laws that are entirely stagnant and atemporal—gravity is always gravity, various substances have constant chemical make-ups; yet, this logic was then retroactively pushed upon the manner in which we are active participants in the cosmos and the various ways we have to reason about morals (be that in an Aristotelean or Christo-Thomistic manner in the Western world). This leads to various foolish attempts to naturalize humanity’s moral capacity and makes it into some sort of merely “instinctual” or “psychological” phenomenon. This results largely in what MacIntyre refers to as ‘Emotivism,’ which is roughly the view that morality is a subjective phenomenon that changes from person to person based on nothing transcending an individual’s personal will. Evidently, we do not reason this way in all things moral, but MacIntyre has a point in arguing that this does seem to be influential in several areas of life that have seen moral degradation over those same few centuries of scientific progress—be that in the realm of sexuality, economics, or warfare.
In my view, for those who do not care to travel the heavy road that MacIntyre paves to make his point, Bret Easton Ellis offers a fictious representation of the very concern the Scottish thinker was articulating in a more polemical fashion. Regardless of if this was his intention—and I am, truthfully, very doubtful that it was—Ellis has provided something of a warning to those who are unwilling to seriously engage with the reality of what it is they do and how they should reason morally. Should we ever say, “I don’t know. Sure, why not?” What kind of a justification could that be? Can we really not foresee that mere capriciousness entails a clear risk? Furthermore, how can someone who continually utters such a passive phrase come to defend himself when he finally comes to making a moral claim? More commonly today, we hear people say something like the following: “I wouldn’t do that, but it isn’t my life. They can do what they want.” To the person who utters such phrases, the proper response truly is: “If you want something, you have the right to take it. If you want to do something, you have the right to do it.”
Ellis’s fictious Clay and the emotivists who inspire MacIntyre’s ire both destroy their own capacity to say this or that is wrong. A person who is governed merely by impulse, base appetites, and whim has no way to stand their ground. To have such things as the basis of one’s moral reasoning, in fact, leaves one in no position to reason morally. The sole justification for anything in such a worldview is brute force; “If you want something, you have the right to take it. If you want to do something, you have the right to do it.” No doubt, this has been a problem of moral thinking for centuries—Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, and a plethora of others have for centuries been advocating for humanity to recognize the folly of merely advocating for one’s own will to be the way. It leads precisely to what Bret Easton Ellis writes about Clay and the people around him throughout Less Than Zero: violence, dissociation, emptiness, and—perhaps worst of all—an inability to love. For myself, Ellis provides a quite particularly and bizarrely postmodern image of the plight found in the lazy moral agnosticism that is so common today. Without attempting to be too grandiose or make more of Ellis’s text than it deserves, perhaps Less Than Zero is a literary equivalent for our time that will work as Moses’s serpent staff did for the Israelites or Christ on the Cross did for the Pharisees and Romans: it is a warning of what happens when you will not look honestly at the most venomous parts of your own soul despite them being right in front of you.
Hoping for Clarity 