"The impetus to write the first four books [American Psycho was the third] came from a satirical place; the character(s), … even Patrick Bateman, were [was] summations of everything I didn't like about whatever I was satirizing at the time, whether it was youth culture, the college experience, the eighties, the nineties…Those books came from a place of anger and frustration. I was disgusted with society and I was going to share my disgust." … "I thought his [Bateman's] anger was justified; his misery was justified; I thought the implied criticism of the society he was around was valid … likeability is not an issue," said Bret Easton Ellis in an interview.

American Psycho -- a "One-book moral panic" -- is perhaps the only novel that educed a massively violent response "only rivaled by the kinds of violence found in the book's own descriptions." No book, since, has been subjected to as much scrutiny and still claimed to be misunderstood. What's more, none of the contemporary fictional narrative has been so grossly misrepresented in the public sphere, nor predated by this much media hype -- with feminist group NOW establishing special phone service for concerned callers to listen to the 'leaked' passages from the text, which were deemed offensive.

The novel was publicly vilified to the point that Simon & Schuster decided not to publish it, forfeiting the $300,000 advance. Both subtle and unabashed 'Bret-Bashing' ensued in various circles – some quite reputable like Vanity Fair and Time. While the feeding frenzy continued, Ellis's previous publisher Sonny Mehta bought the manuscript and published it with no significant alterations.

Much of the embittered criticism aimed at American Psycho is about round the issue of reductionist 'reading practices', which writer Peter Hutchings says, "perpetuates an understanding of the relationship between art and actuality, and of texts themselves that is at least as dangerous as any acts of violence depicted in the text." In an interview to Powells.com, Ellis also lamented this fact. The interviewer said, "Some readers don't make a distinction between the characters or events and the authorial perspective. Parts of American Psycho are hilarious." Ellis replied, "a lot of people don't read books that way, I found out, and there's really nothing you can do about it. You can't stand over every reader, saying, 'See this part here? That's supposed to be funny. You're not supposed to be so grossed out or so offended by it."

Evidently, it was from such reductionist readings that a myriad of stances emerged and statements were made. From a how-to manual of femicide, to advocacy of 'taking care' of Ellis, many of the responses were understandably reactionary. So garishly explicit is the putative misogyny in its description that an employee of Simon & Schuster remarked: "The most unfortunate thing about this whole controversy is that the book is a piece of s***. It's hard when something like this becomes the issue of censorship, because you want to rush to its defense, but you can't."

Ellis did not make the task any easier. In an interview to the Rolling Stone, he commented himself free of the authorial responsibility to create morally responsible and socially 'likeable' characters:

"I don't feel any responsibility to write what they consider a socially acceptable book. People should have the choice of whether to read it or not to read it, to buy it or not to buy it, to like it or not to like it. I'm not going to sit at my typewriter and compose something only so it will not offend a woman's sensibility, and any writer who does that is a whimp."

Ellis-bashing was so prevalent in fact, that most of the critique that followed in the subsequent years was a defense of the novel from with an apologist's slant. Only with temporal distance came any significant scrutiny of the novel, exploring some important thematic underpinnings. It becomes evident then, that the world of Patrick Bateman, (the protagonist-narrator) is skewed to the point of being moronic. It is riddled with the clichés that marked the 80s -- with its "rampant self-serving greed, relentless aggression and one upmanship; the manic consumer overdrive, exhaustion, wipe-out and terror." Ellis satirises the 80s through the increasingly insane rants of Patrick Bateman, whose addled mind conjures up a chimerical miasma. Bateman inhabits a world where reality is constructed through its reflection, and the normative misogyny sublimates in the discursive formation of the identity. By creating a character, whose total world-view is (in)formed by consumerism, to the point where his language is "adspeak," his look a catalogue page, and his vernacular only masculine-posturing, Ellis parodies the prevalent inanity of the Bateman-world.

Bateman seems unable to make any original comment and still "sound" smart. He repeatedly takes the help of pop-culture references to make his decisions. What's more, there seems to be no desire to be original. This is evident in at least two different places, one where he tries to remember the New York magazine quote to critique a painting by David Onica, and another where he does quote from the magazine to describe the dish Patricia ordered. Novelist John Barth alludes to this postmodernist strain in Bateman, by saying that this self-referentiality shouldn't be seen as a denial of language and literature's connection to the world but as their self-consciously pointing to themselves trying to point to the world. Quoting Umberto Eco, he writes:

"The post-modern attitude [is] that of a man who loves a very sophisticated woman and knows he cannot say to her, 'I love you madly,' because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, 'As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.' At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence."

In the 1950s it appeared that the Modernism was over, and that the novel was now returning toward a more traditional and realistic view of fiction. In France rose the existential novel; in Britain an attempt to return to the line of 18th and 19th fiction; in Germany the work of writers like Böll attempted to give a more honest record of recent events; in America the moral-realism of Jewish-American fiction. In the 1960s, the movement seemed to be away from realism and toward what came to be called "metafiction" -- a kind of novel that emphasized its own fictionality and its self-begetting character. There was the impact of French nouveau roman as it had developed during the 50s, emphasising the lexical nature of the text, and forgetting certain elements in it, states of mind, objects of description. There was the impact of the Nabokovian view of fictional process as a parody of form, a game-like construct in which the very relationship of author to text, character to language, book to reader becomes volatile, so that the novel become the instrument whereby any one of its elements can be teased, given or not given significance, created or de-created -- reality as Nabokov said, was in "in quotes." By the 70s there was a sophisticated reversion back to a concern with the onerous pressure of history and the real, and a reconciliation was found in "magic realism." It had its chief origins in South American fiction and interwove the legendary with the historical in a way that begun to appeal to writers at large. By the 80s, there was much talk of "dirty realism," a self-conscious, hyper-detailed form of writing especially associated with America.

By the 90s, many writers seemed impatient with the inherited codes both of realism and of modernism. "The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities," writes Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). "That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond the border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become." Kundera explains that his own novels are not born, like a child, out of life, but out of "a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about." His books then are born out of experience and language, and they are endeavours to create a portrait of reality that is human and has not been finalised, in a history that is not a finished picture. They are both, fictional and true, fantastic and realistic, and they relate to the many fictions that surround us while becoming a discovering fiction of their own.

This is where the postmodern novel comes in -- corroding instead of conforming to the "commodity formulae toward which latter-day modernist fiction tends." For authors like Ellis, the fictional realism with its "unreal" and illogical strategies was inapt to represent what French theorist Baudrillard calls "hyper-reality: the heightened Disneyfied illusions of the modern city." What was needed was a direct opposition to the "great cultural machine." The sort of writing that challenged truths about reality formed of the flow of images of the "capitalist spectacle," and its representation (in fiction and narrative), while self-reflexively examining the way that representation reflects back on the reality. This is called the "high postmodernism," and Ellis tried to achieve, just that.

In an insightful argument, literary critic Elizabeth Young, remarks that in Ellis that mode of writing ultimately reaches "a point where it has only the most minimal and self-conscious relation to anything that might be called 'reality'. It is so deeply involved in irony, pastiche, plays of fictional traditions and author games that, ultimately, it becomes mired in what has been termed 'post-modern paralysis'. The text becomes dull and boring as a result, "as if the reader has been trapped by some hopelessly self-obsessed pub bore intent on relating the details of all of his dreams."

In American Psycho, Ellis has us trapped in the meta-fictional trope of Dantesque hell, announcing "in a very self-conscious manner, that a spiral of violence and death is to follow". It describes a superficial world devoid of interiority, where the only reality is the surface or the explicit. The descriptions of the superficial are obvious in Bateman's incessant detailing of things inhabiting his world. These descriptions "as a linguistic register" Hutching says, "involves the itemising and anatomising of things. It is the register, which may express the desire for possession, and the potential to possess. Moreover, it is this "disciplinary obscenity of itemising description, an individuation which eventually does itself through its own excess." Ultimately, Hutching argues, description loses its value as a mode, becoming "systematically unstable through its excess and it is excess that is the real violence of this text in which descriptions of clothing, stereo equipment, food and restaurant are of the same obsessive order as any of its description of physical violence."

Ellis juxtaposes the banal with the serious in an attempt to denounce violence by the use of violence. For this technique to work, the violence has to become excessive -- to be noticeable. His "self-conscious portrayal of violence and his overuse of mass culture, work as means of denouncing the violence that is received through different channels every day,".writes Sonia Baelo-Allué. The results, as Allué suggests, can be ambiguous. The images obviously repulse, they are supposed to, but they are so obviously self-referential, they become the simulacrum of violence that marks the hyper-reality of the acts. In examining the "consumption" culture prevalent within and without American Psycho, Ellis explores the discourse of hyper-reality influent within the "high postmodernity" of the novel -- providing a metaphor of the existing society.

The epilogue in the novel is meant to be explicatory of the authorial intent. One of American Psycho's is from a Talking Heads song: "And as things fell apart / Nobody paid much attention." It seems clear to that Ellis is trying to convey the difficulty of male identity formation at the turn of the century. Postmodernism brought with it, more than anything else, a restructuring of the gender and sexuality. This destabilisation of the old hegemonic order, (of base and super-structure), threatened to undo the normative masculinity -- the reified subject of patriarchal society. It is this "crisis of masculinity," that Ellis tackles in the American Psycho. In exploring the creation of a masculine identity in a postmodern world, where the very concept of identity has radically altered, Ellis shows us the monstrous heart of masculinity at the outer limits. This frenzied pomophobia, ( an irrational fear of postmodernism) instead of re-establishing Bateman's identity and sense of order, serves to draw him further into the realm of chaotic unreality.

The masculine subject, Thomas B Byers states, "is in the throes of an identity crisis. Moreover, this crisis is a particularly radical one. It is not simply a matter of discovering or choosing for oneself a single, unified, coherent identity from a range of cultural possibilities. Rather, the current crisis threatens to transform or even overthrow the whole concept of identity. This is the point of convergence of fears of late capitalism, fears of feminism, fears of any swerving from the path of 'straight' sexuality: the fears that, together, constitute what I want to call "pomophobia."

The novel explores this dilemma of Bateman's identity through the use of language -- the medium through which normative masculinity has located and perpetuated itself -- by creating a male protagonist who exists only as an exemplar of traditionally male language systems (violence, pornography, the media, fashion, commerce) taken to their extremes. "Patrick Bateman" is not a single subjectivity, but an artificial "construct," formed of his surrounding culture of normative masculinity. Academic E Young notes that the novel "is written largely in brochure-speak, ad-speak, in the mindless, soporific commentary of the catwalk or the soapy soft-sell of the market place."

By using this mode of patriarchal language, Bateman epitomises the clichéd masculinity of 1980s: perfect in form, affluent in life, popular with women, and having all the luxuries life imaginable. He boasts an overarching masculine life-style. From his purchasing instincts, his body-building, his friends, his fantasies and his sexual experimentations down to the violence he perpetrates -- told through a male vernacular -- Ellis seem to be reinforcing that the generic masculinity of Patrick Bateman.

And here is the interesting twist; our only insight into the world of American Psycho is thorough the eyes of Bateman. However, Bateman is a chimera: a fictional world encased in the language of the society that created it and told through the voice of a man who in real terms is not actually there. Elizabeth Young recognizes this impossibility of analysing Bateman, as a representation of representations in which he is in the center as the negative space:

"Patrick is a cipher; a sign in language and it is in language that he disintegrates, slips out of our grasp. He is a textual impossibility, written out, elided until there is no 'Patrick' other than the sign or signifier that sets in motion the process that must destroy him and thus at the end of the book must go back to its beginnings and start again. Patrick becomes, in effect, feminised, excluded from 'existing' in language."

Ellis offers us flashes, where Bateman is aware of the impossibility of his existence: "[T]here is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I am simply not there." What is there is a persona; a clichéd "construct," formed of a particular masculine vernacular to expose and satirise possibly, pomophobia. Bateman sees a world in which his identity is under irrevocable threat. To pre-emptively salvage his masculinity from subjugation he enacts violence on "others," which constitute that threat. By Byers's definition then, that would contain women, homosexuals, blacks, and all the marginalised others who have been privileged in a postmodern society. Basically everyone, who directly or indirectly challenges his patriarchal supremacy -- in case of homosexuals, by deviating "from the path of 'straight' sexuality"-- becomes a victim of Bateman's frenzied imagination.

Women present by far the greatest threat to his normative masculinity. Hence, Bateman's reaction towards them is the unmatched in its garishness. He objectifies them, believing that they all are instantly attracted to him, and reacts abusively when someone isn't. He is riddled so much with insecurities, that he reads all instances of him being ignored, either a threat to his identity and retaliates, or being pushed into a "compromisingly" feminine position and brays back.

By spelling death for them, the most coveted female anatomical unit, becomes masculinity's worst nightmare: the harbinger of their downfall. More than the "subject" de-centering, women's body could mean masculine extinction. For Patrick, this more than legitimises a violent destruction of women, it necessitates their obliteration. Moreover, in so doing, he finally achieves in turning them in "MEAT." In a moment of heightened clarity, he announces his predicament:

"Where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one's taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person's love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term "generosity of spirit" applied to nothing, was a cliché, was some kind of bad joke. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire --meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in… this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged."

Sure the novel is sexist. It is sexist in that it locates the discursive formation of the normative masculinity in a postmodern world. In doing that, American Psycho becomes the site of contesting modalities. A world where myriads of forces -- the discursive others -- appear to undercut Patrick's privileged place in society. Seeing it as a threat to his authority and in turn his identity, he fights back. As the threats grow, and the perpetrators increase in number, so does his reactions and their severity. Bateman would have been worth commiserating, were he not so pitiful, and his actions abhorrent.

I have no idea who said, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing." Probably Dr, Johnson. It sounds like him. Whoever it was, we all nod sagely whenever somebody says this to us and feel good, inwardly, because we know our knowledge is not little. But what do we do when we hear a more sententious quotation: "Tis a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done?" (Such quotations are a familiar part of our conversational furniture). We still nod, wisely, as if we know what it means.

It is amazing how moderators and presenters on television and radio have changed the meaning of words by misuse. Jazz, for example, is no longer music characterised by its use of improvisation but music played by blacks and listened to by whites. The word "people" has come to mean "my friends" as in "People don't like women with short hair;" and "totally" does not imply (an intensive) utterly or entirely or completely, but moderately. Thus, when you hear a news analyst or say that the citizens are totally appalled with the political situation in Moscow, he is saying that they are moderately disturbed.

The New York Herald Tribune (when it was called by that name) once printed

answers Ronald Reagan gave in a press conference. Talking about whether a

global war was on the cards he said:

"I don't honestly know. I think again until some place all over the world this is being… research going on, to try and find the defensive weapon. There has never been a weapon that someone hasn't come up with a defence. But it could be -- and the only defence is, well you shoot yours and we'll shoot ours."

Priceless gobbledegook. Never has a passage been so short of logic or grammar. But you will agree with me that the entire passage has a far off, elusive quality that we associate with the poetry of e e Cummings.

* * * * *

The whole weight of our entertainment industry goes into the effort to repeat former successes rather than create new ones. Those who conduct lavish shows -- award, ceremonies, fashion parades -- take their cue from the Indian television channels that keep on providing more and more spectacular effects in their presentations and make a hash of it. To duplicate, not to originate, is all we can do.

In our theatrical presentations, comedy is treated as farce and tragedy as melodrama. Disorder reigns in our commercial theatre, which thrives on impurity. By impurity, I do not mean indecency --, which has had a place in the theatre since Aristophanes, and longer -- I mean, a mixture of elements. Our coarse comedies are ruined by a moralism, which has no place there. This is one reason why our dramatists have not shown any real creativity. We are a country, which, though at times, pretending to be a democracy, has always been an oligarchy. Conventional opinions rule our society; unconventional opinions rule our sitting rooms. We know only too well that we cannot air these opinions. When we do we put our neck on the block.

I become dismayed when I read our critics discussing a dramatic production or a book. They have developed a habit of meaningless eulogy and an ill-advised tendency towards pointless classification. When they dislike something, they shy away from it; when they like something they bubble over with joy and place the play (or book) in a general category of which, it seems, they only have a cursory knowledge.

More often than not, our critics, yield to the temptation to make of theatre something more than theatre; they attribute to the theatre far more power, far more political influence than it can possibly have. Marx wrote that the point was not to understand the world but to change it; but can the theatre substantially contribute to such a change? There are theatre groups in India and Pakistan who think they can. Our critics want a play to be more than a play. In my view, when we overestimate the theatre as something else, we underestimate it as itself. One of the by-products of the socially purposive theatre in our country is an abdication of taste and judgement on the part of people, capable of both.

The fact is that as playgoers, people demand a play and not "more than a play." Those who propagate that the theatre should be socially purposive make their dramas laden with messages and precepts. The concept of a play does not rule out any subject matter -- socialist, religious or whatever. I do not deny to anyone the right to use the theatre for extra-theatrical purposes. The propagators ought to realise, however, that the theatre has its identity and scope within which much but not everything is possible. What offers itself as theatre must submit to be judged as theatre and not appeal to a higher court. The playgoer goes to a play to observe, to watch, to identify with the actor, and to be moved. He may be ennobled or not, but he remains a spectator to an art which has traditionally been called contemplative. Attempts to modify the theatre beyond a certain point take us form observation into religious worship or political demonstration.

* * * * *

I cannot think of any creative person in our country who does not feel that his work is of no consequence unless it has won approbation outside our country -- especially in the West. The reason is not hard to find. Without receiving an international (mainly Western) approval our painters, designers, musicians, filmmakers etc., know they stand no chance of recognition at home. And yet the fraternity of creative people lambaste Western philosophy, Western thinking and Western opinions.

* * * * *

I can never forget an Osbert Lancaster cartoon I saw many years ago. Exquisitely drawn, it showed a blue-blooded woman, a would-be. Thatcherite, telling a demure, sari-clad, politically-conscious, high-heeled, Indian lady, "Of course dear, one does realise that in view of the grave threat from Goa, you naturally want to keep your hands on every bomb you've got."

The cartoon appeared at the time India exploded its nuclear bomb, in the wake of which we showed the world that we, too, possessed the bomb. Today we confront a ghastly situation in which the use of nuclear weapons is a real possibility.

Yesterday I travelled from Lahore to Karachi on the national airline and I saw that the slogan flashing in front of me on the airline screen, which normally shows only a computerised landscape of the world as the plane travels across it, was "Pakistan -- Heaven on Earth." In the background, we saw the beautiful hills and dales of our Northern areas. It sent a shiver down my spine. How quickly have we turned this heaven into hell.