Popular Culture Review Vol. 3, No. 2, August 1992 | Page 13

The Limits of Narcissism

to be a Master of the Universe-and take the insane chances that he'd
been taking?" (236) Ultimately he will divorce himself from Wall
Street, from the "madness," from narcissistic infatuation with the
self, but he must first empty the vessel of the self, and this process
demonstrates Wolfe's keen understanding and deft manipulaton of
character.
Like the ethical and legal problems that ensnare him, the
process of remaking the self shows the workings of both external and
internal forces, the former being the more interesting to those who are
content to read the novel merely as a well-contrived "page-turner."
These external forces are numerous. First there is his rejection of and
by Wall Street, suggesting the tenuousness of his status as a "Master
of the Universe." In a discussion with his daughter, Campbell, who
asks what her father actually does for a living, Sherman resents his
wife's figurative characterization of his work as keeping the
"crumbs" from a slice of cake that you didn't bake (239).^ And yet,
when he begins to sense that the people at his firm care nothing for
his plight, only for his ability to make them more rich and powerful
than they already are, Sherman turns to precisely this metaphor to
describe his feelings about his erstwhile professional activity:
"Ahhhh, the golden crumbs . . . How pointless it seemed" (438). This
is merely one of the many attitudinal changes wrought by external
pressure, and such pressure is formidable—placing his fate in the
hands of criminal attorneys; facing rejection by business associates,
acquaintances, and former friends; finding himself in the middle of a
political storm as the "Great White Defendant"; being hounded by
the press^; being asked to leave his building because of his notoriety;
causing his wife and daughter to suffer emotionally; being p rey ^
upon by an unscrupulous real-estate salesperson—these and other
external forces will serve to shatter the narcissistic shell in which he
lives at the beginning of the novel.
Much more important, however, are the internal changes that
occur once that shell has been shattered, the realizations about self
and society that he failed to make when he was still infatuated with
himself. Ironically, the force that pierces this shell is one that
Lasch considers a favorite of narcissists—the mass media. Having
created a "cult of celebrity," he argues, the media "give substance to
and thus intensify narcissistic dreams of fame and glory . . ." (21),
even if that glory rests more on notoriety than fame. He cites, for