Bret Easton Ellis` Lunar Park: From Ashes To Ashes

Lunar Park is a semi-autobiography that tells the story of Brett Easton Ellis's fame and family, and takes place between memories of Los Angeles and his new home in a suburban town just outside New York City, which is under the threat of terrorist acts in a post-9/11 America. In his new home, Ellis is haunted by his daughter's doll, and by an ambiguous figure that often takes the shape of Patrick Bateman, the serial killer from Ellis's novel American Psycho, written in 1991. In Lunar Park, Ellis leaves the reader to question whether events are imaginary or real, and whether this distinction matters. I suggest that by emphasizing the inseparability between fact and fiction, Ellis gestures towards a current American culture that is predicated upon fictions that pose as fact. He paints a landscape of a 21st Century America that masks its trauma through ruptured, excessive, and surface fictions.

The novel begins by tracing Ellis's life as a famous writer, a culturally constructed identity that reflects that of a movie star; an identity that I suggest is intertwined with a postmodern America. To provide a little bit of context (though I know most are familiar with the notion) I turn to Frederic Jameson, who discusses how the postmodern condition can leave an individual unable to stabilize the meaningfulness of herself within the world around her. According to Jameson, the individual in this era ceases to be an individual and "reality, and our experience of it, are discontinuous with each other" (109). Ellis's descri ption of America as "becoming a place with no boundaries" (Ellis 10) magnifies this discontinuity, along with sardonic accounts of advertisements, celebrities, and drug use. To illustrate the point, Ellis begins the novel with a litany of names and places, loosely strung together by a semi-fictional narrative that describes his identity and history. Through exaggeration, irony, and lavishness, the writer playfully insinuates that these events, traits and contexts are illusory and prescribed. Following Baudrillard, Ellis points towards an American "world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning;" Ellis's America is "dreamed up and fractured and postmodern" (Ellis 74).

I suggest that this portrayal of America reflects its reaction to 9/11. The attack is described as having left cities as being "mournful places, where everyday life was suddenly interrupted by jagged mounds of steel and glass and stone, and the grief on an unimaginable scale was rising up over them, reinforced by the stained tattered photocopies of the missing posted everywhere, which were not only a constant reminder of what had been lost but also a warning of what was coming next" (Ellis 28). With exception to what precedes this statement, Lunar Park does not mention 9/11, yet continuously refers to the incident indirectly, which serves the purpose of dramatizing the way in which America, like the book, is repressing the disaster. (Just to refresh our memory, because I discuss it throughout this paper, repression is a psychoanalytic term that refers to an (ongoing) incident in which a traumatic or painful reality is hidden from the self because it is too painful to integrate. However, the trauma remains silently within the individual and shows up in distorted ways. Though the individual who refuses to acknowledge and deal with this pain may continue to cover it through various means, she still feels the internal trauma without knowing what causes her felt loss). The concept is seen in Ellis's insinuation that in the United States, media and celebrity culture continuously paper over the post-attack impending doom. Joan Dideon directly speaks of this reaction, explaining that after 9/11, the media proposed that it was "was 'not an appropriate time' to ask audiences 'to think critically about various aspects of American experience" (didion 177). This art of American repression, Ellis suggests, is also shaping its individuals, and has therefore shaped him. Dideon again is useful in supporting Ellis's allusions, telling us that after 9/11, "In the reflexive repetition of the word 'hero,' we began to hear what would become in the year that followed an entrenched preference for ignoring the meaning of the event in favor of an impenetrably flattening celebration of its victims, and a troubling belligerent idealization of historical ignorance.Images of the intact towers were already being removed from advertising, as if we might conveniently forget they had been there" (Dideon). This recalls Ellis's descri ption of his own externalized heroic identity and celebrity status: "I was on display," he states. "Everything I did was written about. The paparazzi followed me constantly" (Ellis 9). Here, he shows us how individuals were depicted as heroes, which, when linked to Dideon's statement, indicates an underpinning cultural-and thus individual- motion to conceal a ruptured core.

Ellis's (just previously quoted) statement that "Everything I did was written about," also shows how he has been lost in this cultural landscape, and how this has structured his own identity. Throughout the novel, the author continuously describes himself as being a drug addict who is unable to hold down meaningful relationships, and who is "a mystery, an enigma" (19). Implicit, is that America's denial of what had been lost (in the attack) is precisely what "sold the books. That's what made me even more famous" (19), and that's what (I suggest) also made him lost to himself.

Ellis's internal erasure is further signified by "lost boys" within the story, and Ellis's drive to find his son. Throughout the novel, he increasingly obsesses over how some boys have gone missing, and makes continual attempts to connect with his son, who also disappears at the novel's end. These lost children, I argue, allegorize Ellis's own lost childhood and identity: that internal disavowal which has been shaped through America's denial of its own trauma. Cementing this idea, is that Ellis's story also revolves around his attempt to escape his father's shadow, because Ellis is "slowly losing it, like my father had," (33) signifying that his internal loss has been formed through his father's conditioning. Thus, Ellis's book materializes his attempt to "go back into the past"(29), to find himself by looking at the way he has been formed. However, since this past has already been defined by its a traumatized country, Ellis must rearrange and fictionalize his life and world in order to fill those lost memories; he must reconstruct himself in order to repair his internal core and felt fragmentation. Or as Mortimer explains, the "novel Lunar Park, [is one] in which the individual, personal trauma of the narrator is intertwined with the cultural trauma of the postmodern condition."

Since Ellis was too immersed in his shattered context to understand the loss that continues to haunt him, he takes on the task of alleviating its resulting pain by rewriting his past to alter his identity. By using fragmented language, interrupting himself, and blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, Lunar Park also coerces the reader into breaking his or her own preconceived representations. Thus, he takes the reader on a passage of self-discovery through self- effacement, as he attempts to write his past by exposing its impossibility. Ellis seduces the reader into questioning the veracity of her own context, because the novel begins with an unquestionable coherency that begins to break down slowly, as events and the author's identity are revealed as mockingly fictitious. Rendered skeptical therefore, the reader is positioned to tease meaning out of sarcasm, which consistently eludes her. The writing also becomes increasingly fractured, as Ellis forms multiple characters that seem to represent his splintered and clashing self-perceptions. For instance, Ellis's prose is punctured by "the writer's" input: that side of Ellis assessing his life in order to create it for the book, and who is creating trouble in order for it to be written. The fiction, in this scenario, precedes the writer and Ellis's lived self, just as America's fictional heroes precede individual identities; Ellis again emphasizes how cultural narratives generate personal ones.

As the book approaches its ending, Ellis's sanity deteriorates. Consistently fighting the boundary between illusion and reality, he claims to believe that something is after him in the form of: his daughter's deranged doll, a college student posing as Patrick Bateman, and the ghost of his father's ashes. I propose that these events can be directly linked to Freud's concept of the Uncanny, which transcends the books boundaries to affect the reader, again causing the reader to in some way, acknowledge her fear of America's imminent disaster. Freud, in his 1919 essay "The Uncanny" explains that an uncanny feeling (a feeling of terror connected to a simultaneous homelike comfort and discomfort) stems from repressed fears: it is an unconscious haunting that takes different forms. Furthermore, the uncanny always relates to "childhood life," and can also specifically refer to living dolls. Since in Lunar Park, Ellis's daughter's doll comes to life and terrorizes him, we see Ellis's direct allusion to Freud's idea. Additionally, Ellis's fearing the loss his son (if seen as a metaphor for Ellis's own childhood), gestures towards the concept. His father's haunting may also be linked to Freud's essay, wherein Freud proposes that the fear of one's father is a particular kind of uncanny dread that relates to impotency. Finally, Freud's statement that literature and fiction can be uncanny if "the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality," cements the link between Freud's uncanny and Lunar Park.

In the novel, Ellis's internal voice-"The writer"- is posed as a conduit for this uncanny haunting, that unconscious part of himself that both destroys Ellis, and paradoxically grants him the life of being a writer. Thus, Ellis's other (the writer) also recalls Freud's concept of the uncanny self: those repeated "manifestations of the unconscious [that] confront the known and knowing self of everyday life with a strange internal other or double" (Cohen, "Roth's Doubles" 83). When Ellis states: "Yes, the writer was back. He did not want to be left out of this scene and was already whispering things to me" (243), he shows us that part of himself that interrupts everyday life and his shallow identity, in order to create his individuality as a writer, that internal other which refuses to be repressed. Freud's concept generally proposes that these uncanny fears must be acknowledged in order to keep them from taking over, which in some cases deters the haunted individual from going mad.

At stake, is that by acknowledging his repressed fears instead of masking them through another fictional character or through his own fictionalized, externalized, heroic identity, Ellis's internal self is shifted. In writing his torment, the author begins to restructure the past and the way it has defined him, in order to alleviate the physical and mental pain of his internal void. Or as he puts it: "the past was being erased, and a new beginning was replacing it" (226). Though this shift leaves him distanced from the context he was accustomed to (both literary and environmental), where there were "too many words I didn't understand the meaning of anymore," it caused him to "notic[e] the facial surgery [that] had rendered so many of the women and men.expressionless" (276). Though an uncomfortable realization, this perspective caused Ellis's "body to feel different. The regret that had been defining me had lifted off, and I became someone else" (285). By looking at himself in this way, he is able to begin seeing that "there was something beneath the surface of things" (172), and that by facing this something, this uncanny other, he is able to feel better.

Perhaps through Ellis's endeavor, the reader may begin to face her own uncanny other: by causing her to think differently, she may also see herself differently, and alter her internal dialog. For Mortimer, the reader's experience of "the text offers no origin to trace, the reader must create their own that shapes the way the text will be read but which the text itself will never - can never - either substantiate or challenge." Just as Ellis enters the unknown through his book, the reader is confronted with her own unknown through the prose's lack of answers and coherence.

This movement is solidified as the novel comes to a close, when Ellis finally lets go of, but does not forget, the past. By releasing his father's ashes into the air, he is able to "put him to rest" (306), however "as the ashes rose up into the salted air they opened themselves to the wind and began moving backwards, falling into the past and coating the faces that lingered there, dusting everything, and then the ashes ignited into a prism and began forming patterns and started reflecting the men and women who had created him and me and Robby (his son)" (306).

I suggest that this descri ption of ashes revealing a lost past, and those faces within it, gesture towards recognizing, though not dwelling upon, what American culture is repressing both generally, and specifically: 9/11. If Dideon states that "it's a long-term failure of the political leadership, the intelligentsia, and the media in this country that we didn't take the discussion that was forming in late September and try to move it forward in a constructive way" (183), I argue that Lunar Park embodies the attempt to discuss 9/11 in a constructive way. By looking at America's rupture, and how this has shaped individuals and Ellis's writing, he shows the reader how we can face the trauma and acknowledge its destruction through the media and language, instead of repressing it through a meaningless world where ¨publishing a shiny booklike object was simply an excuse for parties and glamour¨(9).

To conclude, I again turn to Dideon, who proposes that after 9/11, "Pathetic fallacy was everywhere. The presence of rain at a memorial for fallen firefighters was gravely reported as evidence that 'even the sky cried.' The presence of wind during a memorial at the site was interpreted as another such sign, the spirit of the dead rising up from the dust" (Dideon 180). Ellis reverses this shallow sentiment by gutting it, by describing and exposing the gore, haunting, and terror of what lies beneath this dust. Instead of stopping here, however, and submitting to this destruction, Ellis offers an alternative: a movement to repair the past by confronting it, writing it, and making something new without denying the terror. He writes, "The ashes were collapsing into everything and following echoes. They sifted over the graves of his parents and finally entered the cold, lit world of the dead where they wept across the children standing in the cemetery and then somewhere out at the end of the Pacific-after they rustled across the pages of this book, scattering themselves over words and creating new ones-they began exiting the text, losing themselves somewhere beyond my reach.the world swayed and then moved on, and though it was all over, something new was conceived" (308). Here, Ellis insinuates that his words may be integrated amongst those who read and share the ideas exposed within his novel, and may thus engender a shift towards reparation. Like the decimated towers themselves therefore, Lunar Park is a ruptured monument that represents an individual and cultural identity that can be continuously restructured.