"You people put importance on your lives. Well, my life has never been important to anyone. I haven't got any guilt about anything," bragged the mass-murderer Charles Manson. "These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn't teach them. . . . They are running in the streets--and they are coming right at you!" When a real murderer accuses the society he has brutalized, we are shocked, but we are thrilled by the same accusations when they are mouthed by a fictional rebel, outlaw, or monster. In Bitter Carnival, Michael Andr Bernstein explores this contradiction and defines a new figure: the Abject Hero. Standing at the junction of contestation and conformity, the Abject Hero occupies the logically impossible space created by the intersection of the satanic and the servile. Bernstein shows that we heroicize the Abject Hero because he represents a convention that has become a staple of our common mythology, as seductive in mass culture as it is in high art. Moving from an examination of classical Latin satire; through radically new analyses of Diderot, Dostoevsky, and Cline; and culminating in the courtroom testimony of Charles Manson, Bitter Carnival offers a revisionist rereading of the entire tradition of the "Saturnalian dialogue" between masters and slaves, monarchs and fools, philosophers and madmen, citizens and malcontents. It contests the supposedly regenerative power of the carnivalesque and challenges the pieties of utopian radicalism fashionable in contemporary academic thinking. The clarity of its argument and literary style compel us to confront a powerful dilemma that engages some of the most central issues in literary studies, ethics, cultural history, and critical theory today.
The prevailing taste of our epoch, writes Italian semiotics professor Calabrese, is neo-baroque, a style marked by frantic rhythms, organized variations and a fondness for "instability, polydimensionality, and change." Using this broadly inclusive definition, he analyzes patterns of repetition and variation in TV serials like Dallas and Columbo ; explores the constant metamorphosis of characters in Italo Calvino's novels and Woody Allen's Zelig ; and unravels labyrinths and knots in video games and Umberto Eco's novel The Name of the Rose. Calabrese sees neo-baroque as a means of introducing minor variations to already familiar themes in order to pique the interest of a mass audience that thinks everything has already been said or done, whether in films, architecture, music videos or literature. However, his attempt to link current scientific ideas with artistic forms--as in a spurious connection drawn between a science fiction film about mutants and theories of fluctuation--too often makes this academic tome seem superficial and misleading.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Combining Kristeva's notion of abjection and Nietzsche's concept of ressentiment, Bernstein here offers a radical challenge to the ways that contemporary literary critics read Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque. Contrary to Bakhtin and others, Bernstein argues that the conventional Saturnalian dialog gives rise not to a comic hero but to an abject hero--a character who is both victim and murderer, fool and host, "servile and satanic"--the voice as well as the target of satire. In tracing the career of this hero in literature, the author performs provocative and insightful readings of Horace's satires, Diderot's Rameau's Nephew , Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground , and Celine's "war trilogy." A final chapter reads Charles Manson as the abject hero of the Saturnalian dialog of postmodern culture. This book is an important companion volume to M. Keith Booker's Techniques of Subversion in Modern Literature: Transgression, Abjection, and the Carnivalesque (Univ. of Florida Pr., 1992). A significant addition for academic and large public libraries.
- Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Westerville P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
