Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

males 25 . Such interrogations only underline the many cultural biases and the excesses of
political correctness that are now prevalent in American culture amidst all the programs
of social revision and reform. What is ironic, however, is that these critics and advocate
groups succeeded in doing exactly the opposite of what they had set out to achieve. As in
any contemporary case of boycott and censorship, the protests and scandal only
contributed to creating more interest in the novel. Nevertheless the damage to the book’s
status and respectability had been done, and while some may still perceive Ellis’ novel as
indisputably vile and despicable, a worthless piece of sub-literary ‘junk’ (Murphet 69),
others considered it to be a satirical, postmodern masterpiece.
173
For instance, Alberto Manguel contemptuously argues that American Psycho is
not a novel of literary claims. His view is partly based on the fact that even if the text
had been meant to be read as a social satire, Ellis’ minimalist prose style and the novel’s
grotesqueness pre-empt the possibility of its being seriously considered as such. In
addition, he aligns himself with other critics in arguing that what is alarming about
American Psycho is that “Ellis’s prose does nothing except copy the model it is supposed
to denounce” (101), though it could be argued that this is precisely the style of much
postmodern pastiche. He also draws a parallel with Radcliffe’s distinction between
Horror and Terror as explained in the previous chapter, and argues that the novel is one
of “pornographic horror” (102), claiming that it literally made him feel sick (99). In
other words, according to Manguel, American Psycho does not offer any form of
distancing from its subject, a distance that would allow for a type of intellectual reflection
25 For example, why has Nathan McCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America, an
autobiography which relates real, actual accounts of both racial and sexual violence, not been received with
equal indignation as Ellis’ novel?