Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment & the Abject Hero

Princeton. 1992. Princeton University Press. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0691069395. 243 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration: Gerard Lapagesse, Un moment hors du temps. Inscribed by the Author. keywords: Literary Criticism. DESCRIPTION - I do not think like you people. 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. You say there are just a few? There are many, many more. 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 Andre Bernstein explores this contradiction and defines a new figure: the Abject Hero. More complex and subversive than the defiant nonconformist or the mad' artist working at the cutting edge' of the unthinkable, the Abject Hero stands at the junction of contestation and conformity: he speaks both for and against the powers he fantasizes as excluding him. Although he situates himself outside all normative values, his existence is possible only inside the same body of discourse that he rejects. Condemned to dialogue, his consciousness is an echo chamber of incompatible desires and prohibitions. Rather than functioning as a glamorous embodiment of the radically Other, he 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 CEline; 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. What emerges is an extraordinarily wide-ranging book, both in its actual critical scope and its broader intellectual implications. Bernstein's new understanding of the cognate terms abjection and ressentiment contests the supposedly regenerative power of the carnivalesque and challenges the pieties of utopian radicalism fashionable in contemporary academic thinking. At its center, this book questions the very foundation of our emotional identifications as readers, exposing the tensions between our theoretical judgments and the prosaic decisions on which our everyday existence depends. In BITTER CARNIVAL, the sweep and clarity of the author's argument and the lucidity of his prose 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. Michael Andre Bernstein, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of THE TALE OF THE TRIBE: EZRA POUND AND THE MODERN VERSE EPIC (Princeton) and PRIMA DELLA RIVOLUZIONE, a volume of poetry (National Poetry Foundation/University of Maine at Orono). inventory #34366.…