Reading Chuck Palahniuk

American Monsters and Literary Mayhem

Cynthia Kuhn, Lance Rubin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415634243
• eBook ISBN: 9781135254674
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Reading Chuck Palahniuk examines how the author pushes through a variety of boundaries to shape fiction and to question American identity in powerful and important ways. Palahniuk's innovative stylistic accomplishments and notoriously disturbing subject matters invite close analysis, and the new essays in this collection offer fascinating insights about Palahniuk's texts, contexts, contributions, and controversies. Addressing novels from Fight Club through Snuff, as well as his nonfiction, this volume will be valuable to anyone with a serious interest in contemporary literature.

Part I
Genres, Structures, and Modes

1 Chuck Palahniuk and the Semiotics of Personal Doom

The Novelist as Escape Artist

Sidney L. Sondergard

“All you have to do is pay attention to the patterns,” Fertility says.

“After you see all the patterns, you can extrapolate the future.”

(Survivor 119)

Anybody makes a livelihood selling cars will tell you: Repetition is the mother of all skills.

(Rant 2)

Like his literary forebear Antonin Artaud, whose Theatre of Cruelty seeks to make audience engagement with aesthetically unpleasant or painful subject matter unavoidable, and like his own Buster Casey, who plants rotten Piranski egg stink bombs in his yard for his father to run over with the lawnmower and “explode,” Chuck Palahniuk conceives and implements strategies that force his readers to encounter a wide range of uncomfortable subjects. Recreating the visceral impact of cinematic images in the pages of his novels, his narratives are often reminiscent of director David Cronenberg’s treatment of illicit and perverse sexualities, or of Peter Greenaway’s treatment of disease and decay. Reading Palahniuk’s novels becomes the real world correlative of encountering the Nightmare Box, art-as-trap: “What’s inside the box is some fact you can’t unlearn. Some new ideas you can’t undiscover” (H 220). What makes the encounter both unsettling and intellectually stimulating is the nature of the fiction itself—its foundation of experiential verisimilitude, where the characters and situations “are isomorphic with facts which have taken place or which are possible” (Segre 184)—and its reiteration of specific elements from novel to novel¹ to form patterns like “a software code that operates in the hardware of your mind. Stringing together separate macros that, combined, will create a reaction” (Palahniuk, SF 145). Robert Scholes argues that the benefit of reading any semiotic system, of recognizing patterns and assessing their significance, is that the experience can cause readers imaginatively to “feel the consequences” of actions not yet taken, to “feel them in our hearts and viscera” (200).

Read as the components of such a system, Palahniuk’s novels published since Fight Club (1996) collectively constitute a semiotics of escalating anxiety² that addresses the burdens of artistic reputation, acclaim, and expectations, unified by the author’s apprehension that the “worst part of writing fiction is the fear of wasting your life behind a keyboard. The idea that, dying, you’ll realize you only ever lived on paper” (SF 56; cf. D 168). He goes so far as to develop the metaphor of artist-as-whore into a central plot: whether the ultimate motive of aging porn star Cassie Wright is to provide a financial legacy for her illegitimate daughter or to secure a place of notoriety in film history, she makes herself the object of a marathon gang-bang that is calculated to kill her. And when that doesn’t happen, she proves so determined to die for her art that she mounts her former leading man while paramedics pump 450 joules’ worth of cardiac defibrillation into him (SN 194–5). Thus, to signify these and related professional anxieties, refracted through the manifold suffering and failures of his characters (many of whom are themselves writers and artists), the novelist balances his characters’ perceptions of impending personal doom with the illusion of control they entertain as narrators of their own stories. While Palahniuk’s narratives contain undeniably apocalyptic elements, they are ultimately their narrators’ personal accounts of suffering, all encoded with the same catalyst for individual self-destruction: when writers and readers “fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind,” the result is that “[w]e trap ourselves” (H 380).

Palahniuk shapes his narrators’ stories initially as self-denying narratives which have to be recognized and acknowledged as such if the narrator is to achieve a degree of personal authenticity and hence to escape succumbing to unconscious self-entrapment, the very mechanism that preys on an author who is torn between doing what he loves (“Maybe people have to really suffer before they can risk doing what they love” [D 64]) and responding to the pressures and fears of writing what is not a story worth telling, but a “story worth selling” (H 85). His solution to the authorial anxiety of meeting reader and market expectations is to insert what seem to be narrative-defeating elements into each of his novels and then, like an escape artist, to elude them through misdirection of the reader under the cover of the personal catastrophes of his protagonists. This chapter will articulate Palahniuk’s semiotics of personal doom in order to interrogate the tactics he employs to address the anxieties of the creative artist.

There’s a dual fear embedded in Ida Mancini’s assertion to her son, Victor, that he needs to construct new maps of the world because “the only frontier left is the world of intangibles, ideas, stories, music, art” (C 285): the first is a creative inversion, the implication that the tangible facets of the world exist as evidence of the depletion of prior concepts and actions. Around her, Ida sees the physical evidence of a devolving or entropic culture that suppresses the expression of individual vision. She tells her son that the only escape from it is through the generation of “ideas, stories, music, art,” yet this begs the question of whether an individual creator can continually discover new routes to “the only frontier left” and always find something to bring back, or whether the creative act involves a kind of strip mining of the imagination that will ultimately leave the individual devoid of anything but the illusion of “building this lovely world where you control, control, control everything” (SF xvi). The companion fear existing as subtext to Ida’s comment is that the only authentic assertion of self comes through creative expression, although every such expression is necessarily derivative of others like it. As Shannon McFarland writes in one of her postcards-to-no-one, “Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everybody I’ve ever known” (IM 104). Both of these fears operate on Victor, whose monotonous sex addiction and abandonment of medical study index his desire to escape the pressures of thinking and acting creatively, mirroring the artistic pressures Palahniuk has faced following the success of Fight Club. Exacerbating any author’s worries related to creative substance and process is the ruthlessly capricious literary marketplace; while an author may fantasize about the glamour associated with success (e.g., SF 201, 205), the reality is that “Your book has about a hundred days on the bookstore shelf before it’s an official failure” (SF 202; cf. Comrade Snarky: “At least Anne Frank … never had to tour with her book” [H 8]). Articulating the position shared by all of Palahniuk’s artist/writer protagonists, Ida tells young Victor, “Art never comes from happiness” (C 5).

The personal failures of Palahniuk’s characters, most often manifested as guilt associated with others’ destruction, function nevertheless as testimony of the imaginative power of art: Shannon McFarland refuses to let her brother, Shane, back into the house, setting in motion his supposed death and his actual transgender reinvention as Brandy Alexander; Tender Branson, refusing to confess his role in persuading Fertility Hollis’ brother to commit suicide, initiates a radical redefinition of his own life as a media star; Carl Streator unwittingly kills his family by reciting a children’s poem, which subsequently makes possible a postmodern Adam and Eve scenario; by becoming a “superspreader” of rabies and consequently authoring a modern plague, Buster Casey also may have made himself a god; and Branch Bacardi drugs a naïve Cassie Wright, sealing her fate as a porn starlet whose career subsequently eclipses his own. Even among the misfits and criminals populating Mr. Whittier’s hermetically-sealed writer’s retreat, there’s a direct correlation between the power to destroy and the power to create, most dramatically enacted by the writers’ collective desire to make their shared story more violently compelling (and more lucrative, with fewer splits in the projected profits from the film version) by preying upon each other. Palahniuk has expressed both surprise and dismay at the phenomenon of encountering people who enthusiastically recount their real world “experiences” with various facets of Fight Club’s fictitious world: but “[a]s Kierkegaard would say, every time we see what’s possible, we make it happen” (SF 214). The problem for the artist is that success is a doom as well as a boon, an incarceration as well as a liberation. Like Jack Torrance, from Stephen King’s The Shining and Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of it, who has “always been” the caretaker of the damned Overlook Hotel, we learn that painter Misty Tracy Wilmot “has always been an artist. She will always be an artist” (Palahniuk, D 242)—and she is poisoned, lied to, and physically restrained to ensure that she remains an artist. The work resulting from her suffering has the power to trigger Stendhal syndrome, where “a painting, or any work of art, is so beautiful it overwhelms the viewer,” although it can also “bring on depression and physical exhaustion. Amnesia. Panic. Heart attack. Collapse” (D 104).³

This juxtaposition of art’s beauty with its potential to destroy both audience and artist is actualized by what Roland Barthes calls a “teratological,” or monstrous, exercise of language, where the systemic plane (including paradigms, literary genres, etc.: potentialities of articulation) “overlaps” the syntagmatic plane (where the ordering/sequencing of elements is what gives them meaning) of communication and “the mode of articulation of the two axes is sometimes ‘perverted’” (86). Conceptualization blurs into construction (resulting in a simultaneity, or synchronicity, of both, rather than a continuity, or diachronicity, of process and meaning), distorting—or even masking—the message subsequently received by an audience. Palahniuk’s preferred term for novels employing paradox and aggressive self-negation to provoke reader response is “transgressional” fiction (Dunn 49), and indeed, his literary tactics have often provoked the kinds of shocked or disgusted reactions from reviewers that connote “perverted.”⁴ One consistent effect of his “teratological” or “transgressional” narratives is the disorientation of his protagonists, which allows them in their narration of events to retain the illusion of autonomy and control in situations where their pending doom seems probable, or even unavoidable, to the reader.

Palahniuk has acknowledged that Fight Club is “less a novel than an anthology of my friends’ lives. I do have insomnia and wander with no sleep for weeks” (SF 228; my emphasis). The consistency of this perspective throughout his novels suggests that it constitutes a personal semiotic and that the grotesque doom/control dynamic may function as a metaphor for some of the author’s own creative anxieties.⁵ Tender Branson, having repudiated the Creedish cult’s social philosophy and theology and having been tricked into serving as murdering Cain to his brother Adam’s Abel (S 29), sentences himself to death by plane crash, believing a form of resurrection awaits him: “after the plane wrecks, people will hunt down the flight recorder. And my story will survive. And I will live on, forever” (S 1). Refusing to see herself as a serial killer, Helen Hoover Boyle justifies using the culling song to “kill strangers deliberately so you don’t accidentally kill the people you love” (L 148), failing to see that her application of this “Constructive destruction” (L 184) rationale makes her a desirable target for anyone else with access to the song. Acting on a thinly-disguised death wish, Victor Mancini allows himself the illusion of control when he chooses to place himself at the mercy of strangers with his choking-for-profit scam, justifying that “you had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved” (C 3).⁶ Peter Wilmot, simply another pawn in the Waytansea Island ritual of profiting from the suffering and demise of a local artist, believes he can assert his will to thwart tradition by committing suicide—yet his unsuccessful attempt provokes Misty’s “coma diary” (D 39) to him, and her anger over his solipsistic act unintentionally initiates her own artistic renaissance. The doom/control dynamic is explicitly connected to the act of storytelling when Chester Casey takes control of the legend of his “son,” Rant (whom Chester insists on calling by his full name, Buster Landru Casey), in his conversation with car salesman Wallace Boyer. But the price/doom of this control is transparent disclosure of the plot of the entire novel (R 4), though the reader lacks the contexts in the novel’s first chapter to understand the significance of Chester’s words.⁷ Another avatar of Rant, Green Taylor Simms, is more concerned about avoiding the “doom” of being recognized as another incarnation and hence is ready to sacrifice control of the Buster Casey story in exchange for remaining an indeterminate component of it: “I sometimes wonder if we didn’t invent Rant Casey…. If, perhaps, we didn’t need some wild, mythic character to represent our own vanishing lives” (R 227).⁸

Palahniuk maintains that writing is what keeps his personal life from disintegrating (“Until I started writing, every Friday was about going out for that big act of denial where you drink so much that you forget the fact that you have to go to work on Monday morning” [Valby 66]), so the observation that his plots are all composed of contingent crises, detailing personal alienation and suffering that threatens to spiral into self-destruction and possibly even into wide-scale violence, signals another essential element of his writings’ semiotics. Michael Riffaterre reminds us that “Repetition is in itself a sign: depending as it does upon the meaning of the words involved, it may symbolize heightened emotional tension” (49). Stability and calm are fleeting or nonexistent in Palahniuk’s novels, but even in the midst of his characters’ “heightened emotional tension” their observations remain trenchant and potentially transformative. Carl Streator converts the paranoiac fear of an Orwellian Big Brother watching us into a twenty-first century cultural critique: instead of monitoring, “Big Brother’s busy holding your attention” with infomercials, fantasy body image projections and useless consumer goods, “making sure you’re always distracted” till “everyone’s imagination [becomes] atrophied” (L 18–19). He tries to deal with the madness in his life through a symbolic act of control and transgression: he builds intricate scale models of buildings and then stomps them to pieces (L 20–22), even though the bits of broken plastic embedded in his foot later become infected (L 153), a typical Palahniuk pattern of exhibiting the personal costs of resistance and initiative. Oyster’s attempts at stirring up chaos through phony class action suit ads are more explicit in their subversiveness: “It’s just my generation trying to destroy the existing culture by spreading our own contagion” (L 116). Carl wants to save the world from being destroyed—and from people becoming universally isolated, since for protection they’d “have to wear earplugs the way they wear condoms and rubber gloves” (L 41)—by the culling song; though cynically acknowledging the practical value of slaves, Oyster wants to destroy the world-as-marketplace in order to force human beings to think and act for themselves. Ironically, their opposed visions comprise a mutual check-and-balance dynamic; and albeit with significant changes, the world survives.

If the actions of Palahniuk’s characters “preserve the ultimate capacity of the human race for change and diversity by fending off totalizing order” (Sartain 35), it’s also the case that his people come to see suffering and tribulation as the necessary preconditions for life-affirming changes, and their painfully recurrent presence in his novels indicates they are equally central to his own creative vision. The Jain Buddhists attained their magical talents, for example, “because they tortured themselves. They starved ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Permissions
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Genres, Structures, and Modes
• PART II Politics, Cultures, and Philosophies
• Selected Bibliography
• Contributors