Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero

When a real murderer accuses the society he has brutalized, we are shocked, but we are thrilled by the same accusations when they are mouthed by a fictional rebel, outlaw or monster. In "Bitter Carnival", Michael Andre Bernstein explores this contradiction and defines a new figure: the abject hero. Standing at the junction of contestation and conformity, the abject hero occupies the logically impossible space created by the intersection of the satanic and the servile. Bernstein shows that we heroicize the abject hero because he represents a convention that has become a staple of our common mythology, as seductive in mass culture as it is in high art. Moving from an examination of classical Latin satire, through analyses of Diderot, Dostoevsky and Celine, and culminating in the courtroom testimony of Charles Manson, "Bitter Carnival" offers a revisionist rereading of the entire tradition of the "Saturnalian dialogue" between masters and slaves, monarchs and fools, philosophers and madmen, citizens and malcontents. It contests the supposedly regenerative power of the carnivalesque and challenges the pieties of utopian radicalism fashionable in contemporary academic thinking.