Transgressional (also transgressive) literature has been described as "a literary genre that graphically explores such topics as... aberrant sexual practices... urban violence and violence against women, drug use, and highly dysfunctional family relationships, and that is based on the premise that knowledge is to be found at the edge of experience."1 Indeed, a defining feature of transgressional literature is that the protagonist always engages in some form of deviant behaviour.
However, to understand the nature of "knowledge... found at the edge of experience", we must look at the philosophy that informs transgressional writing. Transgressional literature is typically studied in the context of postmodernism, so we shall begin with the philosophical underpinnings of postmodern critical theory. Of the many people whose writings have influenced postmodernist theory, one name stands out as the intellectual and chronological starting point: Søren Kierkegaard.2
In "Two Ages", Kierkegaard identified the societal phenomenon known as levelling3, a process by which individuals lose their individualities and become objectified in the creation of an abstract, monolithic mass. He traces this phenomenon to the desire of money: "A young man today would... envy [another] his money"4, leading to the "[degradation of excellence] until it is... no longer excellence"5 and the emergence of a phantom public.6 This phantom public has several characteristics: it is an abstract mass, not concrete - under no circumstances can one identify the mass as a concrete object; it is an object - it cannot act, only be acted upon by agents of levelling. The phantom public seeks to objectify everything by assigning everyone and everything a value. In this way, no particular individual is allowed to stand out on his own terms and is only allowed to exist on the terms of the phantom public.
It is against the backdrop of such a massified7 society that the three novels that I will be analysing in this study, American Psycho8 by Bret Easton Ellis, Fight Club9 by Chuck Palahniuk, and Requiem for a Dream10 by Hubert Selby Jr., are set. In these depictions of transgression, the agent of levelling is the American Dream as depicted by the mass media: to be financially successful.
Kierkegaard defines the individual as the expression of the relationship between two opposing entities11, in particular, between the self and the entity that creates or defines the self.12 In the context of transgressional texts, the entity that creates the self is the massified society: all the characters in the texts, regardless of whether they transgress, identify themselves only in relation to the American Dream. Patrick Bateman of American Psycho, for example, is superficially the very embodiment of the American Dream, whereas Tyler Durden of Fight Club identifies himself in direct opposition to the Dream.
However, we run into a problem here. The individual is subjective and exists on his own terms. His existence must be objectively uncertain13: if he does not exist only in relation to another entity (that is, his existence is objectively certain), then his existence is of no consequence. This subjectivity is expressed in all three texts through the nature of the narrative: all the narratives are highly subjective14, and in the cases of American Psycho and Fight Club, also distinctly unreliable in objective terms. For instance, the narrating Bateman claims that the park bench and automated teller machine spoke to him15, which would appear to be an objective impossibility. Thus, we can be sure that the narrators of the texts are subjective individuals.
On the other hand, the massified society and the American Dream are objective and continually objectified. The expression and definition of the achievement of the American Dream in all three texts is the ownership of desirable objects. The Narrator16 of Fight Club, almost having achieved the Dream at the chronological beginning of the novel, identifies himself initially with his furniture, thereby objectifying his identity. He describes the process of his own objectification thus: "The things you own, now they own you".17 Harry, at the point in the novel when he is closest to achieving his American Dream, describes his pride at buying a television set for his mother as he "[takes] care of business just like a real people"18, again emphasising the conspicuous consumption that comes with achieving the American Dream. Bateman also sees virtually everything he owns in terms of his achievement of the American Dream: his apartment and décor, his gym club membership, and even his business card.
The basic conflict of the characters in the texts, therefore, is that they must reconcile their subjective selves with the objectification of their identities. We can frame their internal conflict this way: "If I am defined by what I own, how am I different from everyone else who owns the same thing?" Their search for identity is directed at trying to reconcile the two polarities of the subjective individual and the objective mass. This attempted reconciliation manifests itself in the texts as transgression.
By transgressing, the characters seek to reassert their individuality: they have acted against the social expectations of the mass and are therefore "different" and individual. However, none of the characters, save one, succeed in truly escaping from the social expectations of society: they find, instead, it is impossible to exempt their definition of their own identities from the expectations of the mass. This is the result of the ironic fact that a transgressor against society is defined only by his relationship to society: the transgressor's disregard of social rules affirms not only his transgression but also the presence of social rules and boundaries to break. It is this fact that enforces the abstraction of levelling and highlights the inevitability of massification.
Let us now look to the texts for examples. In American Psycho, Bateman refers extensively to various forms of media: to the Patty Winters Show and Late Night with David Letterman, to Les Misérables and advertisements for it, to the Zagat Survey and the Times, and to Body Double and his videotapes, as well as other films. The characters in American Psycho consistently surrender their individual judgement to the Zagat Survey in deciding whether a restaurant is worth going to, and in one instance, to Bruce Boyer's Elegance19 in matters of taste. In doing so, they identify themselves with the abstraction of the mass and allow themselves to be objectified rather than retaining their individual subjectivity. From there it is a matter of course for their concrete selves to become of no consequence. This is the reason why Bateman can kill such characters without guilt: none of the massified characters are individuals and their objective existence is of no consequence to Bateman.20
Bateman himself, however, both "want[s] to fit in"21 and stand out. He takes great care to carry himself in public like everyone else; in fact, he notes that he and Marcus Halberstam have virtually identical taste and job descriptions.22 In the objectified world of American Psycho, that means that as far as other characters - particularly Paul Owen - is concerned, they are as good as identical. At the same time this is precisely what causes Bateman so much panic and despair: if he and Halberstam are objectively the same person, how can Bateman identify himself from Halberstam?
At the same time, Bateman wants to be put on an elevated social plane, above everyone else. Bateman's constant battles of one-upmanship with everyone around him are a means of asserting his social superiority. His increasingly desperate hints to people that he is a social deviant is his way of asserting his individual identity. Yet the mass relentlessly levels him each time he tries to make himself stand out. He is aware that serial killers, such as Ed Gein and Ted Bundy, achieve cultural immortality through their transgressions and seeks to follow in their footsteps, but the same media that Bateman is subject to has also desensitised the very people he tries to break away from to his constant references to famous serial killers. Ultimately, Bateman's despair is derived from the fact that he can neither reconcile the two extremes nor approach either extreme, and is thus trapped in a Sisyphean endeavour: "this is not an exit".23
Bateman finally and decisively falls victim to massification when his final attempt at separating himself from the mass is thwarted by his very adherence to the opinions of the mass: Harold Carnes describes Bateman as "such a bloody ass-kisser"24 for his attempts at fitting in, while failing to recognise Bateman as an individual at all. Bateman, unlike Sara of Requiem for a Dream, does not need to be institutionalised to condemn him to massification; his own involvement in the corporate and social rat race already makes him a massified character.
In Requiem for a Dream, the character that most directly transgresses against the American Dream is Marion. She has rejected her middle-class, Jewish background, wanting instead to become an artist, the archetypal subjective individual. However, she is still subject to the influence of her heritage: she cannot reject her relatives completely because she still needs their money, and it is her family name and Jewish lineage that gains her Sara's acceptance as Harry's girlfriend.
Arnold, her psychiatrist, analyses the basic conflicts of Mahler's life in terms that also apply to Marion: as "a compromise with his jewish heritage", and mentions "his constant conflict as a conductor when he wanted to compose, but needing the money to live".25 The circumstances of Arnold's and Marion's relationship are telling in this respect: Marion sees her meetings with Arnold as an obligation to her family and a means to her family's money rather than as having value in itself26, thus unwittingly objectifying Arnold and, by extension, her Jewish heritage.
Of the four characters in Requiem for a Dream, Marion is the only one whose dream necessitates a drop in social status. However, all the characters face the problem of reconciling their perceptions of themselves with their objectified perceptions of who they should be, as portrayed by the culture they identify themselves with.
Consider Harry and Tyrone. The two men identify themselves with the Bronx drug culture27, but at the same time want to break away from it by procuring a "pound of pure"28, which will allow them to retire from drug dealing on the profits. They acknowledge, or are forced to acknowledge, that the city and the drug culture have deeply influenced their conception of themselves, yet it is this very culture that they despise and seek to break away from. Their situation can be summed up as: they engage in it to escape from it, but by rejecting their relation to the drug culture they also implicitly acknowledge their history with it, and therefore they can never really escape from it at all.
This is particularly clear in the incident where Harry visits Sara and discovers that she has been prescribed amphetamines. Prior to this incident, Harry perceives himself as almost having broken out of the drug culture: when buying the television, Harry takes pride in his "taking care of business just like a real people"29 as part of his rejection of his drug business as one not undertaken by "real people". The grinding of Sara's teeth bothers Harry because to acknowledge his recognition of the sound as a side effect of amphetamine consumption would also be to reestablish and reinforce his association with the drug culture, but not to acknowledge it would displace his sense of self because he is only identified by his relation to the drug culture.30
Tyrone faces a similar crisis when he is held in jail and meets the old prisoner. He is "aware of a sense of identification"31 among those in the cell with him, but refuses to acknowledge his own identification with them "because he knew he was different than the old man"32 who is telling stories about surviving the drug culture. The "knots in his gut"33 result as he tries to convince himself of the possibility of separating himself from the drug culture once he procures the mythical "pound of pure". (Note here that Tyrone objectifies the "pound of pure" in terms of the money it will bring him.) Tyrone's paradox is clear here: the pinnacle of his achievement within the Bronx drug culture will also be his exit. However, because he has objectified the "pound of pure", he also finds himself objectified by it - he identifies himself as the person who will escape the streets through it, and the "pound of pure" becomes his raison d'etre. It is in his pursuit of the "pound of pure" that he and Harry head for Florida, where Tyrone is finally decisively objectified: he is recruited into a Southern work gang where he is no longer a subjective individual, but an object acted upon by the impersonal taskmasters of the work gang, who function as agents of levelling in his situation.
Sara's case is more intriguing, because Sara does not transgress knowingly, unlike the other three characters in Requiem for a Dream, or the narrating protagonists of the other two texts. However, she faces the same dilemma between being herself as an individual, and trying to be who she believes she should be. After being told that she will go on television, Sara Goldfarb begins to conflate her conception of herself as she is in the present with her conception of herself as she will be on television. Eventually, for her, the two become one and the same34, and she completely neglects her physical self subjectively, measuring her physical self in terms of whether she will fit in the red dress or how red her hair is. In this way, the individual Sara stops making choices on her own terms, choosing instead based on what the media has led her to believe her conception of herself should be, and therefore becomes massified. Her institutionalisation at the end of the novel is merely the physical realisation of her existential value.
Thus, we have seen that the failed reconciliation of the protagonists' subjective identities and the objectification of their perceptions of themselves is a key reason for their eventual massification. We have also seen that in all of the above cases, the protagonists cannot escape the culture they identify themselves against because they still engage in it. Bateman wants an elevated status among his colleagues, so he cannot alienate them but he cannot be like them. Similarly, Harry and Tyrone want to escape the drug culture of the Bronx by reaching the apex of a drug dealing career, by procuring the "pound of pure".
However, the Narrator of Fight Club is a unique case among the protagonists of the three texts because of the manifestation of Tyler Durden. Tyler would appear to escape from levelling because he rejects the very terms of the American Dream, and unlike Bateman, Harry, Tyrone, Marion and Sara, does not also engage in the culture he identifies himself against, therefore having no need to escape it. What we must bear in mind is that Tyler and the Narrator are the same person, which causes problems in the context of the discussion of identity.
Let us first establish a few facts from the text: Firstly, Tyler's existence is objectively uncertain. Tyler appears to the Narrator as a separate person, but to everyone else in the text they appear as the same person.35 This alone prevents Tyler from becoming objectified, because his existence is relative only to the characters that perceive him, and therefore Tyler can exist as a highly subjective individual.
Secondly, Tyler is the manifestation of transgression in the Narrator. Consider how the Narrator cures his insomnia early in the novel by going to support groups; the support groups give the Narrator his individuality because he finds that, there, "people listened instead of just waiting for their turn to speak"36 - and also because his socially unacceptable, though minor, transgression gives him a sense of self: he is not like the average white-collar worker, and he is not like the typical support group member. Once he meets Marla, however, he immediately loses the unique transgressive element in his sense of self. The result is the manifestation of Tyler Durden while the Narrator is asleep.
Thirdly, Tyler is the model that the Narrator aspires to. Throughout the novel, the Narrator consistently associates himself with Tyler, with the implication that he is Tyler's apostle.37 While unaware that he and Tyler are the same person, he acts on Tyler's behalf: "This is what Tyler wants me to do. These are Tyler's words coming out of my mouth. I am Tyler's mouth. I am Tyler's hands."38 He declares, "I love everything about Tyler Durden... Tyler is capable and free, and I am not."
Where Fight Club differs from the other two texts is that, where the protagonists of American Psycho and Requiem for a Dream clearly do not manage to escape massification and levelling, the Narrator's case is less straightforward. We have established that the massification of the other protagonists is due to the objectification of their perception of who they want to be, but we also know that Tyler is a subjective individual.
Here another Kierkegaardian concept must be introduced: despair. We are told that "despair is the sickness unto death"40, but it is to a more specific version of despair that we must look to understand the nature of the relationship between the Narrator and Tyler Durden.
"An individual in despair despairs over something... In despairing over something, he really despaired over himself, and now he wants to be rid of himself. For example, when the ambitious man whose slogan is 'Either Caesar or nothing' does not get to be Caesar, he despairs over it. But this also means something else: precisely because he did not get to be Caesar, he now cannot bear to be himself."41
Applying the above to all the protagonists being studied in this essay, we find that this despair is manifested in all of them in precisely this manner. Bateman perceives that serial murderers like Ed Gein and Ted Bundy have a social recognition that Bateman himself lacks, and his failure to gain similar notoriety causes him, again, to despair over himself. Sara's situation is similar: the celebrity Sara is everything Sara is not but wants to be, and her inability to go on television to be the celebrity Sara is the source of immense despair over herself. Both characters would rather not be themselves than not be able to be someone they are not, an inescapable paradox. Note, then, that it is massification that prevents these characters from achieving the recognition that they so seek.
The Narrator's case, then, is unique because he does not only become Tyler, but he is Tyler. (The process of the Narrator becoming Tyler is that of his gaining awareness of him being Tyler.) Nothing less would permit the Narrator to escape the despair that plagues the other characters and the accompanying massification.
At the end of the novel, however, the Narrator is institutionalised. How do we account for this, if the Narrator is not subject to massification? Having emphatically established his individuality through Tyler, the Narrator paradoxically immortalises this individuality by killing Tyler. The Narrator expresses his awareness of this situation when he says "the fight goes on because I want to be dead. Because only in death do we have names" (p. 192). In other words, in order to gain cultural immortality, the character must first die. By killing Tyler, the Narrator therefore emphasises Tyler's individuality while committing himself to an institution. As we can see, the nature of the Narrator's institutionalisation is different from Sara's: Sara's institutionalisation is the culmination of her objectification, the Narrator's institutionalisation is the ultimate act of defiance against the massified society.
We return now to the idea of knowledge found at the "edge of experience". Recall the conflict of identity faced by all transgressive characters, imagine an abstract geometric shape representative of the phantom public, and consider where the transgressors would place themselves in such a representation of society. They would place themselves on the edge, such that they would be separate from the abstraction and yet a part of it. Only by separating themselves from the mass can they regain their individuality, yet only by being part of the mass can they hope to be recognised by the mass for that individuality.
The themes covered in this essay are but a small proportion of all the Kierkegaardian themes that can be found in transgressional literature. However, the theme of massification and how it shapes characters' identities is the most fundamental, and it is only with an understanding of it that we can fully appreciate how Kierkegaard's ideas feature in transgressional literature.
The original scope of my essay was far too broad. I had intended to discuss themes relating chiefly to the self and largely restricted to Kierkegaard's first, pseudonymous authorship, such as the aesthetic and ethical ways of life, faith, irony, and despair, and how they impacted the themes and the style of transgressional literature. However, because of the dialectic nature of the texts, I found that it became necessary to address also the more fundamental issues that were discussed in the second authorship, the direct communication. Partly because there is little prior scholarship on transgressional literature, and especially little with regards to its existentialist roots, I could not assume a conceptual foundation from which to discuss the more complex themes of the first authorship, incorporating, among other things, a study of his dialecticism.
The proposal also emphasised Kierkegaard's influence on transgressional writing. While I found a very strong thematic and stylistic link between Kierkegaard's writing and transgressional literature, it was difficult to prove that transgressional writers were directly influenced by, or even aware of, Kierkegaard. In the fairly limited collection of studies on or interviews with these writers, there is no mention of Kierkegaard whatsoever. I concluded that it was more likely that these strong Kierkegaardian themes were inherited by the writers through Sartre, or possibly due to the thematic similarities between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
The fact that I had few academic sources to rely on meant that I had to develop my own framework for interpreting transgressional texts in the context of Kierkegaard's ideas. This was both an advantage and a disadvantage: with no solid secondary sources other than Kierkegaard's translated texts to inform this framework, and little scholarship on transgressional literature in the first place, my readings of the texts were occasionally based entirely on wild conjecture that turned out to have little basis, such as attempting to evaluate the passing of the seasons in Requiem in terms of the three stages of existence or the non-destruction of the Parker-Morris building in Fight Club in terms of Abraham's non-sacrifice of Isaac. At the same time, it meant that as long as a reading could correspond rigorously with Kierkegaard's ideas as explained in his works, it was an acceptable one and need not also deal with existing criticism.
On the other hand, precisely because there are few academic sources that connect Kierkegaard to postmodernist and specifically transgressional literature, the few sources I came across in my research that did so were invaluable in determining the direction of my essay. In particular, The Postmodern Turn, from which I adopted the term "massification" (this term, to my best knowledge, does not appear in Kierkegaard's body of work), was instrumental in making clear to me what the fundamental concept in transgressional literature was: that of the relation between the individual and the phantom public. It also pointed me to Two Ages, a relatively unknown work by Kierkegaard, which became a mine of ideas about massification and the individual in transgressional literature.
Guided by this research, I eschewed discussion of themes that did not originate from the fundamental theme of massification. There is very little other scholarship that links Kierkegaard to postmodernist literature, and I wanted to be sure that my analysis of transgressional literature within a Kierkegaardian framework could be rooted in existing scholarship, since most of my analysis would not have any academic precedent to be backed up with. In addition, while there are certainly links between Kierkegaard and transgressional literature, massification and levelling are the most fundamental themes, and needed to be addressed in depth first.
All of the above conspired to make me choose a much more specific focus than I originally intended. Kierkegaard's concepts are very closely linked to each other, and this made it difficult to shear away themes and ideas that were not fundamental to transgression. As a guideline, any themes that did not directly deal with the relationship between the individual and the massified society were removed. Even so, 3500 words are insufficient to give anything more than a brief outline of the possible analyses inherent in such a field of study. The interrelation between Kierkegaard's ideas also meant that many key points had to be left unconsolidated: for instance, studying the subjectivity of the third-person narrative in Requiem in the context of Concluding Unscientific Postscript would have made clear the reasons for my claim that the narrative in Requiem is subjective, whereas at present the reader has only the bare bones to go on and must make the connections himself. This is an unfortunate, but necessary side result of having to quickly lay a conceptual foundation for the discussion of transgression proper.
One aspect of the texts, addressed in earlier drafts of the essay but not in the final incarnation, is the nature of the dialectic narrative. Kierkegaard deals with the idea of the dialectic narrative at length in On My Work as an Author: The Point of View and dialecticism via a subjective narrative is an important feature of all three texts, as well as in postmodernist theory to some extent. However, I only had space to discuss either the dialectic nature of the narratives or the concept of massification in detail, but not both. Therefore, I made the decision to focus on massification and its consequences, because of the two ideas, massification deals with transgression much more directly than dialecticism. Dialecticism and the subjective narrative are, after all, not unique to transgressional literature, even though they are key to understanding the transgressional genre.
The conclusion of the essay underwent a continual process of refinement, changing based on the scope of the essay. It was not difficult to arrive at a conclusion, but it was certainly difficult to determine what the scope of the essay could be. Once the scope was determined, the development of a conclusion came naturally. At the same time, it was the strength of the conclusion that allowed me to decide if the scope of the essay was appropriate. Early drafts attempted to cover as many themes as possible, with the result that there could not be a solid conclusion since none of the themes were covered in enough depth. As the scope narrowed, the conclusion began to consolidate itself and underscore the through-line of the study, eventually arriving at its final form.