Bret Easton Ellis and the Catharsis of Desire: When the Shards Belong to the Conscience
- Francesca Rucco
- Dec 8, 2024
- 8 min read
Bret Easton Ellis and the Catharsis of Desire. This could serve as a summary of the work that marks his return to the literary scene. A novel steeped in the intoxication of the 1980s, set in an America populated by emotionally independent youth, almost alienated from the reality surrounding them. A dark and unhinged atmosphere comes to life through a group of Southern California students and a serial killer on the loose, known as “The Fisherman.” Drugs, sex, and strange, unsettling events serve as the backdrop to what Bret, the protagonist, considers a turning point in his life—the crossroads that changed his existence.
If the spring and summer of 1981 had been a dream, something paradisiacal, then September marked the end of that dream with the arrival of Robert Mallory.
It all begins when Robert Mallory, the new boy at school, befriends Bret’s tight-knit group: privileged members of high society, bored by anything that doesn’t revolve around wild parties and popularity. Robert belongs to the same category—young, at the peak of his beauty, a “god” according to Bret—but a god who hides something, who enjoys pulling the strings of everyone’s lives, deceiving and corrupting, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Convinced of his suspicions, Bret becomes obsessed with the idea that Robert is the Fisherman himself and that, as a skilled manipulator, he is keeping his true identity in the shadows.
Bret Easton Ellis as an Unreliable Narrator
Bret Easton Ellis writes this novel as an “unreliable narrator,” stepping into the shoes of the protagonist and giving him his name, his adolescent anxieties, and his passion for writing. The character Bret overlaps with the author Bret, becoming the same person who wrote Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, Glamorama, Lunar Park, and Imperial Bedrooms. The result is a semi-autobiographical novel where real events from Ellis’s life blend with a fictional world filled with murders and disturbing stories.
Like Ellis, the character “Bret” is a writer, a lover of well-crafted stories and narrative. Throughout the novel, he frequently admits to being accused by his friends of embellishing tales, exaggerating them, twisting them. He relentlessly seeks out stories, collecting fragments of life and pouring them into his typewriter—a life he both chases and flees from. This existence unfolds like an unsettling pendulum swinging between adolescence and detachment from a fairytale-like world belonging to years that are slipping away.
Bret Easton Ellis and the Catharsis of Desire: Shards of Boredom and Generational Abandonment.
The only one with any vitality is the protagonist—for the corpses
These are the final days of high school, of aimless drives with roaring engines that symbolize a quest for freedom—a utopian freedom reflected in the relationships these young elites have with their families. It is an ideological freedom, a deliberately sought emotional distance meant to overshadow the absence of parental figures who are little more than distant ghosts, busy enjoying luxurious vacations on exotic beaches halfway around the world.
Absence itself becomes both a sentiment and a stable condition, one that not only pervades human relationships but also transforms into a nihilistic and cynical worldview where insensitivity reigns and becomes the subconscious narrator for the characters. Everyone, that is, except Bret. Unlike the others, Bret doesn’t seem to drown in oblivion; instead, he is propelled by a powerful feeling that clings to his reality like a consuming disease. Bret is the one interested in the disappearances of people and the subsequent discovery of dismembered bodies. He is the one who grows paranoid, fearing that someone might enter his empty house on Mulholland Drive (a famous Los Angeles street where Bret’s home is located), the ultimate place of perdition, where he uses hard drugs to quell the paralyzing unease that consumes him.
Bret Easton Ellis and the Catharsis of Desire: Solitude, Sexuality, and Rage as a Spur and Nauseating Freedom
Beyond the serial killer on the loose—whom Bret is convinced is Robert—the strong, anguished emotions poisoning Bret’s character also stem from his inability to reconcile his social self (what he calls the “Bret who participates in life”) with his hidden self, the emanation of himself that belongs to the realm of the unspoken, the secret, the domain of guilt. Bret is a young homosexual pursued by a fierce sexual drive that leaves him constantly on edge when he looks at his friends’ bodies, male figures he compares to Greek statues for their beauty. Bret lives in a constant whirlwind of desire, a relentless rhythm that he must suppress to maintain appearances. He creates a relationship with one of the most popular girls at school, Debbie, pretending to be the perfect boyfriend, hiding his true inclinations from everyone, even his group of friends. These friends act as an emotional crutch, substitutes for absent parents, allies in keeping even a sliver of solitude from seeping through the closed curtains of his intoxicated room on Mulholland.
At the same time, it is Bret himself who draws those curtains shut, keeping the light out so he can write his novel, pop two or three pills, or spend hours familiarizing himself with the bodies of the boys who are the object of his sexual desire.
When the shards belong to the conscience - Bret becomes a regenerated essence of Freud’s Eros, where physical desire is not limited to the body but extends to the controversies of the psyche. He desires and possesses, desires and controls, desires and, as a result, acts; physicality becomes his vital force. The act of desiring—or even simply realizing that he wants to desire another person’s body—shakes Bret from his torpor and becomes a vehicle for action. Yet this action, which creates space around him and gives substance to his thoughts, does not shield him from the gnawing guilt or the depressing and absolute certainty that he is far removed from the Bret who participates, from Debbie’s boyfriend, from the popular hero, cheerful and willing to sacrifice his happiness for a higher purpose.
This certainty floods his being entirely, and the pleasure derived from encounters with other men—despite their tenderness, their gentle and loving touches, which feel more like those of lovers than strangers—plants a seed of aggression within Bret. His relationships with others become sharp blades, dark and dangerous territories where the serene Bret, intoxicated by the beauty of others, is supplanted by a somber Bret, a denizen of the realm of Night, a repudiator of life.
Everything was futile. There was no hope. The world paid no attention to your pain. That familiar wave of anger overwhelmed me—anger actually served as a spur—[…] From one perspective, I understood what he was trying to do—[…] to find another world, freedom, insensitivity as a feeling. From another perspective, it nauseated me.
Bret Easton Ellis and New Forms of Guilt.
A New Space for Psychoanalysis
Ellis’s novel thus emerges as fertile ground for psychoanalysis. Literature and psychology often intersect, as writing is frequently used as a remedy for trauma. The character Bret himself believes that the act of writing can bring him peace, soothe his wounds, and connect the dots.
[…] dovevo scrivere il libro perché avevo bisogno di chiarire cos’era successo – infine era giunto il momento.
The act of writing shakes the character Bret to his core, and the curtains of the Mulholland house are thrown open. There is a palpable tension, a defensive force that can be traced to Freud’s concept of “repression”:
“A psychic operation through which the individual pushes into the unconscious thoughts, images, memories, and fantasies associated with drives that are perceived as dangerous to their overall balance. Sexual or aggressive drives stemming from the Id naturally tend toward satisfaction and thus pleasure; however, they are experienced by the Ego as threatening because they are forbidden by the Superego, and therefore they provoke anxiety and guilt.” [1]
Standing on the edge of a precipice—where the boundary lies between the craving for pleasure that generates guilt and the desire for desire itself—Bret-Eros leaps into the darkness and the fall, engaging in a kind of feral dance between the two forces that drive human existence. At this moment, all his particles ignite with a celestial fire as cold as the darkest night.
Eros-Thanatos manipulates his sense of reality, leaving the character Bret at the mercy of his most savage identity: Thanatos, the personification of the destructive impulse, child of Night and brother of Sleep, the primordial agent of death. Thanatos stitches his limbs onto Bret’s body, giving life to the “shards”—the very fragments that the author chose as the title of the book.
I remember thinking that, for the first time in my life, I was so disoriented that I felt as though I were melting, dissolving into myself, becoming someone else, only to then disappear into nothingness, […]
Bret Easton Ellis and the Shards of Conscience: When Fiction Is More Real Than Reality
Bret’s conscience, torn apart by the battle between Eros and Thanatos—an inherent struggle in humanity since the dawn of time—splinters, shatters, and fractures into small pieces. Because, in the end, Bret is a seventeen-year-old boy consumed by guilt, convinced he will never be free and that his Eros will always remain hidden, with a broken, aching, screaming wing in a fictional paper world where no ears are willing to hear him.
The narrative gradually takes on an ambiguous tone. Ellis drags us into this exhausting, intricate story (where every detail feels significant, every song heard on the radio must be mentioned, every small event underlined), which somehow wears us down, distances us from certain emotions, and makes us feel the unease of seeing Robert approach Bret’s dearest friends, leaving suspicious clues. The vandalized homes become our homes; the whispered words in the night echo in our ears as though they were spoken in our own living rooms. Ellis keeps us engaged, fearful of what might happen on the next page, only to lull us into collapse, alongside Bret, his drugs, and his inability to cope with reality.
Bret begins to have suffocating dreams that leave him waking up dazed. He is no longer fully conscious of time passing; even his actions, always described from his perspective, appear jagged and undefined. His thoughts are fragmented, contradictions are evident here and there, yet this is Ellis’s power: making us believe Bret’s words, what he sees through his eyes, and his deductions.
The meaning of The Shards has been subject to much speculation, as have theories about who actually committed the murders. However, Ellis chooses not to lead us down a definitive path. The doubts, I regret to tell you, will remain. The author pushes the concept of the unreliable narrator to its limits, becoming at once a Pícaro, a Madman, and a Liar [2]. Much like in American Psycho, he leaves us in a void. Certainty is not truly certain; fiction feels more real than the world itself.
[1] Treccani, “Repression in Freud.”
[2] In 1981, William Riggan offered a categorization of the “unreliable narrator,” first identified by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction. Riggan described five types of unreliable narrators: the Pícaro, the Clown, the Madman, the Naïf, and the Liar. Excluding the Clown and the Naïf—less relevant to this novel—we can focus on the others, which align well with Bret’s personality. The Pícaro is a narrator inclined to embellish and exaggerate events; the Madman exhibits mental defense mechanisms, such as amnesia, paranoia, and dissociation; the Liar tells lies, even to themselves, to obscure an aspect of their life or personality.
Article published on January 1, 2024, in L’Altro Settimanale
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