MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Since the National Organization for Women boycotted his violent serial killer novel American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis has been no stranger to literary controversy, and his novels have been called transgressive fiction for how their psychopathic first-person narrators violently break cultural norms and in so doing satirize the narcissistic consumer culture that created those mores … and those characters. Since he started a social media presence, controversy has moved from his novels to his Twitter feed. He recently suggested that a war movie—The Hurt Locker—only won the Oscar because its director was an attractive woman—Kathryn Bigelow. Ellis told the enraged Twitter universe, “Anyone Unfollowing me should have known better and never Followed me in the first place. Wise up: pussies and snowflakes. Get the F over It” (@BretEastonEllis, 6 Dec. 2012).

My essay interprets the evolution of Ellis’s literary voice through his novels, to traditional mass media interviews, and finally to his current Twitter feed; subsequently, it theorizes about the paradoxes of the voice of the author in social media (the blurry line between constructed, masked avatar and immediate, authentic voice) in general. It examines how Ellis’s novels are at first written in the first-person point of view of characters who substitute for the actual author in order to allow him to provoke satirical criticism of the culture and himself from a distance but eventually are written from the first-person point of view of Ellis himself, which constitutes a mixture of the real author and his fictionalized self. It then compares the Ellis character-narrator to the Ellis persona who writes the purposefully controversial Twitter feed. The comparison derived in single author literary criticism will theorize a more systematic relationship between narratology and social media, deconstructing the bounds of fiction and online self-representation.