Blood/lust: The Shards by Bret Easton Ellis
storytelling, empire, Joan Didion, patriarchy, narratives
“I knew that Susan and Debbie would take me to task for what they saw as my tendency to embellish. Susan had always been fond of chiding me about additional details I’d lace a story with, as well as what I concealed, and she’d often interrupt and explain to the listeners that it didn’t really happen quite that way, Bret’s exaggerating. But I was a storyteller and I liked decorating an otherwise mundane incident that maybe contained one or two facts that made it initially interesting to be retold in the first place but not really, by adding a detail or two that elevated the story into something legitimately interesting to the listener and gave it humor or surprise or shock, and this came naturally to me. These weren’t lies exactly—I just preferred the exaggerated version.”
—Ellis, Bret Easton. The Shards. Ch. 4, p. 87
If we accept Eco’s definition of a novel as a “machine to generate interpretations,”1 then The Shards is a perfectly oiled one. There might be as many different conclusions as to the events of The Shards as there are readers of the novel; perhaps even as there are readings of it. This has been my experience thus far: I have talked to different people about it, and while we can agree on some aspects, seeing things from the other’s perspective, we never fully agree on the whole, fragmented picture.
The Shards is, superficially, a novel about a society that thrives on aesthetics, not untouched by a nostalgia for the lost youth of the author; more deeply, a novel about the consequences of patriarchal constraints; deeper still, it is a novel about storytelling.
When Bret-the-narrator (as opposed to Bret-the-author and Bret-the-character) pauses the narrative to reveal that he is an unreliable narrator, he justifies his actions by calling himself a storyteller: the action of telling a story implies some decorating, some elevation of the mundane. In doing so, he takes a risk: some readers are appeased, lured in, while others are alerted. The word “narrative” (which appears 70 times within the novel; the word “story” or “stories” 74 times) is often used by Ellis to refer to his own constructed mental story where he and his friends are players on a stage; “I was self-imprisoned in my own world, creating a new narrative for myself” (118), he says, and he often expresses a sentiment similar to,
I didn’t want to complicate the year because everything had been set up, the narrative was in play, we were already enacting our roles; there was nowhere else to go—and I wanted to keep hiding the real Bret. (126)
The real Bret is found in some glimpses—the Bret who simultaneously wishes to get away from his group of friends, and is desperate for their approval; the Bret who lies and the Bret who admits he cannot wait to go away to college so that he can reinvent himself, “escape from the pantomime”. The realest of all of them is the Bret who says “I was a writer” (117). Evidence that he is manipulating the narrative, of his desire to have other people play according to his script is carefully woven through the text. After his first meeting with Robert Mallory, Bret says, “I even included a version of him in a short story I was working on that summer where he became a character I controlled” (33). A character he controlled: only in stories does Bret have the power he seeks, a power he feels partially cheated out of because of his homosexuality. As a young, rich, white man in “the deep span of empire” (19, 584), he could have anything, if not for the homophobia which forces him to constantly play a part, faking interest towards a girlfriend he only keeps for appearances, to “enact his role”. Robbed of the freedom to be the real Bret, he feels robbed of all power, except of that he exercises on the page and in bed.
Lust plays a great part in this novel; Bret’s sexual encounters are narrated often, and explicitly detailed, as are his fantasies. The focus is on sex rather than sexuality; there are only brief passages of introspection about Bret’s feeling of otherness, and at the same time his need to camouflage in heterosexual society—anytime he believes he’s being found out, his first reaction is an almost blinding panic. Sex is Bret’s only escape from his role in the narrative already in place; at all other times, he is mentally delaying his life until Bennigton college, in order to keep enacting his role. In one scene, he almost tells Debbie Schaffer, his girlfriend, that “…I was as lost as anyone she knew and this was fucking me up and that she deserved so much better than this seventeen-year-old zombie who was pretending to be someone he wasn’t” (344). The “zombie” is the opposite of the “tangible participant” he tries and often fails to keep playing. Sex with men he is attracted to keeps him tethered to his real self, his real needs, his real desires.
Simple lust for flesh is but one of the primal forces driving the story: the other, of course, is bloodlust. The presence of the Trawler2, the serial killer breaking into the homes of Los Angeles’ wealthiest and abducting young women, who are later found dead and disfigured, is the shadow-centre of Bret’s obsession. He is terribly preoccupied with the presence of this killer, reads every detail about his deeds in the newspaper, and eventually starts his own investigation. Yet nobody else among his peers seems similarly preoccupied with this killer; a dangerous killer, who has been targeting people just like them.
Stop reading here if you haven’t read or finished the book!
And please come back later to let me know if you agree with my theory.
Bret-the-narrator focuses the readers’ attention on Robert Mallory, calling him out from before he even appears on scene as a dark figure, responsible for the evil that befell him and his friends, certainly connected to the murders. And yet, while the narrator keeps warning of a sudden dark turn in the narrative for all involved characters, this announced darkness fails to settle around Robert—but Bret starts spiralling. Obsessed with Robert, whom he cannot stop lusting after, as he antagonises and villainises him, Bret becomes detached from reality. His friend Susan and his girlfriend Debbie confront him about his behaviour; even his lover Ryan engages him in a brief conversation about it:
“You want to turn everything into a drama.”
“I don’t, I really don’t,” I stressed. “Have I been doing that? Have I been turning everything into a drama?”
“I think it’s something you can’t help,” he said. “Look, I don’t want to talk about this here.”
“You’ve been avoiding me, and I’m… okay with that, I guess,” I said. “But I kind of want to know why.”
“See. This is the problem,” he said. “I haven’t been avoiding you.” (336)
It’s something Bret can’t help. He cannot help his flair for the dramatic, or his lust, or his preference for “the exaggerated version” of events. He ultimately cannot help his bloodlust, either. By the end of the book, it is confirmed that he has killed Robert Mallory; confirmed that he has attacked, and failed to kill, Susan and Thom; I would argue that he has, at the very least, also killed Matt Kellner, the personification of his lust, who had just rejected him. The narrator says, “I didn’t quite believe in the surface narrative of this particular story that was being offered to us—something started gnawing at me, something was off” (233). He redirects this immediately towards Robert, but it could be one of the many clues containing the word “narrative” that indicates how easily manipulated facts are—especially in a book, and especially in a book written by a narrator who is a storyteller and decorates one possible fact with two lies (refer to the opening quote). Words and objects are chosen very carefully in this story: one cannot fail to notice how Matt Kellner was found near a bloodstained backpack, which was never before mentioned as belonging to him, and immediately afterwards Bret starts carrying a new Gucci backpack—the narrator had not specified his manner of bringing textbooks to school before. The omission itself, linked to the sudden appearance of the new backpack, is enough to raise suspicion. The new backpack is remarked upon often during the remaining course of the novel, and never divorced from the qualifier “Gucci”. The brand is mentioned sixteen times in total, twelve of which in reference to the backpack3. It is not my objective here to list all events and circumstances which led me to believe that Bret killed Matt Kellner; whether or not he has, I am more interested in the reasons why he would do so.
The patriarchy is never mentioned, as such, in the novel, but it is the oppressive force keeping Bret from his own authentic self—and it is, at the same time, his greatest desire. He longs to be not only part of the “empire”, but at the top of it. The class signifiers he displays proudly—the cars, the clothes, the school uniform, the connections—place him among the elite, but his sexuality places him outside of it. He revels in his lust, and yet it fills him with paranoia. So to reach for the status of patriarch, he sublimates from victim to oppressor—the ultimate oppressor—the murderer. Violence is Bret’s last resort in his grasp for power: over himself, over others, over his role in society.
It makes sense then to kill Matt Kellner (“I still find Matt’s body the most erotic and beautiful I’ve ever seen and been privy to,” (63), emphasis mine); it makes sense to pin all the murders on Robert Mallory, and to later murder him, (“this boy, this god” (31), emphasis mine4), possibly the pinnacle of Bret’s lust exactly because it was lust inexpressed. Being forced to hide his sexuality is a societal violence which calls Bret to other violence; his lust calls for anger which calls for blood; he becomes less and less sane as the novel progresses. Bret looks for Robert after first seeing him in the theatre, but doesn’t find him:
And yet I was glad that I didn’t see him: it would’ve been too overwhelming and ultimately tinged with disappointment, because I could never be for him what he ended up being for me. I even included a version of him in a short story I was working on that summer where he became a character I controlled. (33)
“What he ended up being for me”—the muse of his murders, perhaps; certainly the muse of his novel. The murders are, essentially, a metaphor for the ultimate power the writer has over his characters; however, all that work is done in the shadows. What is visible is the end result: the corpse, or the novel. But Ellis, here, is pointing towards the signs, the hidden labour, the inner workings of the novel: the unreliable narrator, the framing device, the clues, everything works together to lift the veil. The novel becomes a machine again, and the author the great clockmaker behind each and every wheel, spring and hand. In chapter five, Bret-the-narrator says that in 1981 he was “in a major Joan Didion phase…” (106); Joan Didion wrote, in Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021)5:
In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.
With its mix of evasions and claims, allusions and statements, while placing himself in three roles—author, narrator, and main character—The Shards is Ellis’ act of saying I in a most pronounced way.
Eco, Umberto. Postille a Il Nome della Rosa, 1984, Bompiani. Translation mine.
What follows will be, unfortunately, in the fashion of the “this was once revealed to me in a dream” legendary footnote. I recall the “fishers of men” verse from the Gospels (Matthew 4:19, Mark 1:17) being used as tongue-in-cheek code for “homosexual”—I believe in some film, but I cannot recall which nor find the origin of the expression, that I would not discount having been used in the real world. However, since “trawler” means “a boat that is used for catching fish with a large net” according to the Britannica Dictionary, I would like to point out this semantic link for later.
In comparison, Ralph Lauren is mentioned four times, Calvin Klein three, Armani seven; only Wayfarers and Topsiders are both mentioned a comparable thirteen times.
It should be noted that the “cult” in the novel worships a “god” who is later identified as Robert Mallory, and that this word is first used in the novel during Bret’s first encounter with Robert, here.
Didion, Joan. “Why I Write”. Let Me Tell You What I Mean, 2021. Lithub, https://lithub.com/joan-didion-why-i-write/