(the) American (Novel of)

128 Mark S. Roberts
have been part of the same mystique of sublime power.” 14 Any form of
resistance to societal norms then became an act of creative defiance—
an act by which De Quincey could assert his personal and artistic
peculiarity. As a consummate admirer of Milton’s Satan, he saw the odd,
the eccentric, sheer evil, and criminal activity as expressions of an inner
greatness, of a decisive nonconformity: “The greatest obstacles commonly
arise in the execution of nefarious designs; whence not
unfrequently in deeds of the greatest turpitude a deadly splendor has
shone forth from the mind striking terror into nations. . . . A great
action, therefore, is not necessarily a fine action.” 15
Another possible explanation for De Quincey’s singular penchant
for criminal activity lies in his notions of transgression and sublimity.
Like Sade before him, he saw transgression as a way of distinguishing
oneself from a society enslaved by arbitrary and mediocre rules, by an
obligation to rigidly conform to externally conceived societal standards.
In this respect, to be a criminal was to be a “hero,” at least insofar as
one appeared constantly in the police reports and daily newspapers. To
celebrate this criminality was to associate oneself with the kind of
behavior that contravenes societal norms, and which, ultimately, leads to
the discovery of glory and literary and personal transcendence. In De
Quincey’s mind, criminal transgression opened an entire domain of
sublime feelings, because the sublime, as he saw it, always belonged to
what is presumably ineffable, unutterable. 16 Hence, to enter the seamy,
obsessive, mad world of the mass murderer John Williams was to also
recreate the schema of sublimity, to, in effect, express an unqualified
empathy with what was commonly viewed as repulsive, unthinkable,
inhuman, inexpressible.
The above expressions of crime and the murderous act all presume
that they are extreme violations of societal norms. As such, crime
is represented as the outermost limits to which social, artistic and literary
categories can be extended. Horror, monstrosity, murder, wickedness,
repulsion, and gore are unlike any other subject matter; they
exceed social norms by the very fact that they are entirely other than
what is conventionally acceptable in any society, acts of the most extreme
disetiquette.
But, as I mentioned earlier, the structures common to earlier
forms of the representation of crime have largely disappeared in the
postmodern, information-centric era. Rather, the abovementioned