Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 21

The Limits of Narcissism

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has pumped money into every class of the population on a scale without
parallel in any country in history. True, nothing has solved the plight of those
at the very bottom, the chronically unemployed of the slums" (136). These
observations still apply to the '80's, though, curiously, the lower classes do not
remain immune from narcissism in the "Purple D^ade," as reflected in this
n ov el.. An instance of this is seen when Roland Auburn, a drug dealer and
one of the young men involved in the assault in the Bronx, refuses to testify
before the Grand Jury, even at the risk of losing his immunity from
prosecution, if he must leave jail wearing leather shoes rather than his white
Reebok sneakers, thus incurring the scorn of his jailhouse peers (629). In
some ways, Wolfe suggests, the narcissism of the lower and upper classes are
comparable.
4. Oddly enough, Wolfe himself rejects the tag of satirist. "In my mind, I
was never satirizing anybody. My intention, my hope, was always to get
inside of these people, inside their central nervous systems, and present their
experiences in print from the inside. That can come out seeming like satire
in some cases where people are leading wacky enough lives" (Mewbom 218).
Neverthless, most commentators do find the work intentionally satirical.
Newsweek even goes so far as to call him "a caricaturist of the first order. .
.with a child's honesty and love of exaggeration," a "maestro of savage hilarity
and a moralist under the skin" (Lehman 84).
5. All pages references to The Bonfire of the Vanities are to the Bantam
edition.
6. Lasch suggests that the narcissist makes a successful living
manipulating others but lacks interest in craftsmanship (45). Wolfe here
uses Campbell McCoy's naive demands to know what her father "makes" or
"builds" to reveal these narcissistic traits in Sherman.
7. In fact, the media and politics are inextricably wedded in the culture
of narcissism, according to Lasch: "Success in our society has to be ratified
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