Berserk Style in American Culture

257 Pages·2011·1.867 MB·English

by  Kirby Farrell (auth.)

Berserk Style in
American Culture
Also by Kirby Farrell:
Cony-Catching (1971)
Shakespeare’s Creation: The Language of Magic and Play (1976)
Play-Death and Heroism in Shakespeare (1989)
The American Satan (1990)
Women in the Renaissance: Selections from English Literary Renaissance, ed. Kirby Farrell,
Elizabeth Hageman, and Arthur F. Kinney (1990)
Snuff (1991)
Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the 90s (1998)
Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Richard II, ed. Kirby Farrell (1999)
The Mysteries of Elizabeth I, ed. Kirby Farrell and K. Swaim (2003)
Berserk Style in
American Culture
Kirby Farrell
BERSERK STYLE IN AMERICAN CULTURE
Copyright © Kirby Farrell, 2011.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-11663-4
All rights reserved.
First published in 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States – a division of
St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the
world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers
Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above
companies and has companies and representatives throughout the
world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the
United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-29731-3 ISBN 978-0-230-33914-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230339149
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Farrell, Kirby, 1942–
Berserk style in American culture / Kirby Farrell.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-349-29731-3
1. American literature—20th century—History and criticism.
2. Psychoanalysis and literature—English-speaking countries.
3. Psychic trauma. 4. Suffering in literature. 5. Wounds and injuries
in literature. I. Title.
PS228.P74F36 2011
810.9'0054—dc22 2011002902
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by MPS Limited, A Macmillan Company
First edition: August 2011
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
List of Figures vi
Preface vii
Acknowledgments x
Introduction 1
1 Berserk Style 13
2 At War with Style 55
3 Making a Killing 93
4 Booty and the Beast 125
5 Rage for Order 147
6 The Living End 181
Conclusion 211
Notes 215
Index 241
List of Figures
0.1 A Pontiac 2000 Grand AM advertisement ix
1.1 A Lexus SUV advertisement 17
Preface
This book grew out of Post-Traumatic Culture (1998), which explores
the concept of trauma in the 1890s, when its modern form fi rst crystal-
lized, and in 1990s America, when the concerns of Vietnam veterans,
feminists, and many clinicians brought post-traumatic stress to public
awareness. Symptoms of traumatic stress cluster around depressive
and aggressive behaviors. One person may be immobilized, another
panicked, while a third may become furiously charged—berserk. As
the psychiatrists say, much depends on how you are wrapped.
Much depends, too, on how you conceive of your experience.
Traumatic stress is profoundly psychosomatic: the injury entails an
interpretation of the injury. How you understand what is happening
to you affects your susceptibility to particular symptoms. Your past
history, expectations, and convictions infl uence the effects of stress.
But the process can be turned inside out too. Under stress we may
turn to available narratives of trauma to account for disturbances.
Whatever the physiological contribution, even extreme behavior takes
shape through cultural infl uences.
For this reason Post-Traumatic Culture explored the way ideas about
traumatic injury and symptoms seeped out of the doctor’s offi ce and
into everyday life. In the fi nal decades of the twentieth century, trauma
became a supercharged buzzword even as symptoms proliferated. While
much suffering was undoubtedly real, the terminology and medicali-
zation of distress showed that trauma could function as an explanatory
tool that could be used to make a host of unrelated problems more
manageable. People and prosecutors thronged into court seeking justice
or compensation for traumatic injuries that in many cases proved to
be unverifi able. Appeals to medical authority promised to relieve suf-
fering and injured self-esteem. Some psychiatrists pursued preposterous
specters such as satanic ritual abuse. And societies as well as individuals
have used past traumas to explain today’s passions and distress.
Aggressive responses to traumatic stress make headlines as rampage
killing in a war zone, a workplace, or a school. The extreme violence
signifi es a do-or-die effort to remake reality: to obliterate all confl ict
viii Preface
and restore—or impose—a sense of order. For all its sensational
horror, the imaginative model has familiar variants all around us in
everyday life, from apocalyptic religion to the shootouts that climax
uncountable movies. Journalism uses the idea of running amok to
describe excesses or loss of control in all sorts of endeavors, from the
playing fi eld to Wall Street and the gaming table.
When we become aware of these models, berserk behavior becomes
berserk style. This book has two premises that will need periodic
reemphasis. As an idea, the berserk state is radically equivocal and
ambivalent: horrifi c in its potential for destruction but also alluring
as a promise that the overthrow of inhibitions can open up access to
extraordinary resources. In Hollywood thrillers, villains and heroes as
well accomplish amazing feats by throwing restraint to the wind, and
emerge unscathed.
The second premise is that as a style, berserk abandon can be used
for all sorts of ends. The idea of uncontrollable frenzy can be a tool,
a role, a means to manage morale or to infl uence others. It can be
personal, conscious or not, and it can be cultural, shared by a group,
even contagious.
These premises are tools that the present book uses to examine
particular expressions of American culture from the Vietnam War era
to the economic crisis that closed the fi rst decade of the new century.
As the world rebalanced following World War II, America’s dominance
came under increasing stress. In areas as far-fl ung as corporate fi nance,
the post-September 11 wars, the changing status of gambling, and
the assumptions of apocalyptic religion, this book traces ways in which
abandon shaped behavior.
The idea of berserk abandon is so capacious that any analysis has to
be frustratingly selective. The same ambiguities that make berserk style
seductively potent in the world outside your window also challenge a
tidy argumentative frame. What’s more, in the new century the pace
of change accelerated as I wrote, with events a moving target.
The book’s subject is emotionally charged, and its focus on extremes
means that it risks misinterpretation. An account of soldiers and policy
makers who have run amok in Iraq, for example, cannot do justice to
individuals or to the tragic complexities that may overtake them. Like-
wise, the premise that mafi a tropes are widespread in economic life is
not an indictment of all businessmen or a Spenglerian disquisition on
the decline and doom of American culture. The allure of abandon for
Americans has been ecstatic as well as sinister.
Berserk style takes a variety of historically particular forms in cultures
around the world. And given the urgent character of the core ideas,
Preface ix
Figure 0.1 A Pontiac 2000 Grand AM advertisement
those forms are volatile. In the go-go 1990s, for example, Detroit
sold thrilling themes. In a magazine advertisement a new Pontiac
tears across a no-man’s land spiked by giant saw blades, its windshield
and wheels jagged with saw-toothed refl ections, its caption defying
danger “When the Road Bites, Bite Back” (fi g. 0.1). As in action
comics, the daredevil motorist could be dashing through enemy lines
in a war movie, triumphantly invulnerable.
With terrorism and the Bush administration’s actual wars in the
news, marketers toned down the thrills. But by 2008, ads were pumping
adrenaline again, showing a slow-motion fi st punching a board, shat-
tering the wood, and turning into a new Acura sedan. But the long
post-Vietnam recovery and boom was about to crash. A year later,
not only was the death-defying Rambo-like Pontiac muscle car gone,
the whole Pontiac division had been liquidated by a bankrupt General
Motors reorganizing on the lip of a fi nancial precipice.
Still, berserk style does not vanish; it mutates.
It adapts.
It bites back.