Sacred and Immoral : On the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk [1 ed.] 9781443804325, 9781443803281

Citation preview

Sacred and Immoral

Sacred and Immoral: On the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk

Edited by

Jeffrey A. Sartain

Sacred and Immoral: On the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk, Edited by Jeffrey A. Sartain This book first published 2009 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2009 by Jeffrey A. Sartain and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-0328-6, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0328-1

Sacred and Immoral is dedicated to Dennis Widmyer and everyone at Chuckpalahniuk.net who have volunteered their time building one of the best literature sites on the net. This book wouldn’t have been possible without everyone’s uncounted hours.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword .................................................................................................... xi Monica Drake Introduction ............................................................................................... xv Jeffrey A. Sartain Chapter One................................................................................................. 1 Chuck Palahniuk and the New Journalism Revolution Kenneth MacKendrick Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 22 “If we’re too Lazy to Learn History History, Maybe We Can Learn Plots”: History in the Fiction of Chuck Palahniuk Cammie Sublette Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 40 Tracking Conversion: A Structural Analysis of Survivor and Choke Tatyana Shumsky Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 61 Bullets and Blades: Narcissism and Violence in Invisible Monsters Andy Johnson Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 73 Going to the Body: The Tension of Freedom/Restraint in Palahniuk’s Novels Scott Ash Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 89 Brandy, Shannon, Tender, and the Middle Finger: Althusser and Foucault in Palahniuk’s Early Novels Ron Riekki

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 102 Behind the Queens’ Veils: Power Versus Powerlessness in C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters James Dolph Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 116 The Anchoress and the Graffiti: Diary and “The Yellow Wallpaper” Kathy Farquharson Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 124 Chuck Palahniuk's Diary: American Horror, Gothic, and Beyond Heidi Ashbaugh Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 146 “Paradigms Are Dissolving Left and Right”: Baudrillard’s Anti-Apocalypse and Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor Mary W. McCampbell Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 159 Invisible Carrots and Fainting Fans: Queer Humor and Abject Horror in “Guts” Jeffrey A. Sartain and Courtney Wennerstrom Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 178 Of Failed Romance, Writer’s Malpractice, and Prose for the Nose: A Conversation with Chuck Palahniuk Matt Kavanagh Appendix A ............................................................................................. 193 Primary Bibliography for Chuck Palahniuk Appendix B.............................................................................................. 200 Secondary Bibliography – Scholarly Works Appendix C.............................................................................................. 210 Secondary Bibliography – Select Book and Film Reviews Appendix D ............................................................................................. 220 Secondary Bibliography – Select Media Coverage

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Contributors............................................................................................. 228 Index........................................................................................................ 232

FOREWORD MONICA DRAKE

I have an MFA in creative writing, and sometimes people ask about my grad school experience. They’ll ask, was it good for you? Did you learn? Can writing really be taught? I have no idea. What I know is that in 1996, the year Fight Club came out, one year after I finished grad school and the year I moved back to my hometown of Portland, Oregon, a quiet night with Chuck Palahniuk undid almost everything the academic setting encouraged me to work toward. I read a story in front of Chuck that night. It was a reunion, of sorts. I’d been gone for so long, away at school, involved in workshops and literature seminars. I’d been off trying to learn and brought back new writing. Chuck had his first novel out. I was eager to swap stories—I’d show mine if he’d show his, and we did. His response? Rock solid disappointment. He squinted at my pages, shook his head. He couldn’t cover it up. I’d let Chuck down. He let me know. That was okay. His disappointment was like a chiropractic adjustment, realigning my spine, curing me of what I didn’t even realize had become a creeping ailment. I felt fabulous. I could breathe again for the first time in ages. In the fantasy of memory I see myself as though tossing a sheaf of papers over my shoulder, jumbled work raining down, my crafted narrative gamely destroyed. The moment Chuck frowned wasn’t just about one story or the particular paragraphs I’d actually read. When he shook his head, it was a silent critique of all the drafts and rough drafts and polished rough drafts I’d sweated over through six semesters. It was a refutation of strange discussions held under florescent lights in bleak rooms. I went to a big school with a small program run by writers I admire who were good teachers, too. The students worked hard, driven by aspirations. There’s a photo, taken back then, of one workshop. I can look at faces in that photo now and count the novels, essays and awards racked up since.

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If there was a flaw in my graduate experience, it seeped in through gaps between teachers and students. What recruiters didn’t mention when I signed on was that the program was under pressure of a department-wide sexual harassment investigation. There were heated questions involving students who left before I showed up and faculty still in charge. We didn’t know it, but those questions haunted our workshops. My third and final year in the program, the mystery was slightly illuminated; we all got the same anonymous, photocopied, hand-delivered letter in our school mailboxes. It was addressed to a professor, written by a former student, half accusation and half declaration of love. It was a confused note, heartfelt and burnt. Somebody tried to pull the letter, but as a piece of writing, it inspired rapid, impromptu mini-workshops because the clandestine, the illicit, this is what turns an audience on. We stood in clusters in the hall and tried to sort information out. Before that letter, all we knew was that the faculty stood an arm’slength off in conversation. They kept office doors open through conferences. We checked our breath. We leaned in. We waved heartfelt, confessional pages, and professors ducked farther away. Writing is about audience. The urge to write is a need to be heard. The heat in that anonymous letter held the tension we sought in workshop. For the most part, in the program I joined, faculty listened from an uneasy emotional distance. Our audience was hazy. My writing came to reflect the disconnect. It was Chuck Palahniuk, in collusion with author Tom Spanbauer and my own wild urges, who sent me running off to grad school to begin with. I went with the idea that writing, listening, reading aloud and taking big personal risks was some kind of pure, painful pleasure. Chuck and I met in 1991, in the earliest days of Tom Spanbauer’s now long-running “Dangerous Writing” workshop. The workshop was held in Tom’s house. The house was beyond disrepair. There was a dead dog under rotting floor boards, an orange condemned sticker on the rattling glass of the front door. We were a self-selecting group of students: the first risk we took, as we set off to become Dangerous Writers, involved pushing open a rusted gate and walking up crumbling cement stairs on a dark Oregon night to find our way into a stranger’s home. We needed to write. Tom would teach us. He’d listen. Any trade-off in personal safety was worth it. I had a job with the Visiting Nurse Association, typing up the health histories of people too ill to leave home, documenting ways a body can fail. Chuck worked for Freightliner. Everybody in Tom’s workshop had a

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day job. Some had kids. Nobody had time, but we all wrote every week. We wrote like we needed to write to live. Tom inspired that. After each night’s reading of pages was done, Tom would dim the lights and light candles and incense. We’d break out the booze. Inside that house, Tom Spanbauer showed us that writing was one big party. Nobody wanted to leave. Over months, Tom fixed up his house. He sanded floors. Textured, then painted the walls. He found collaborators, hired contractors, worked out trades. Every week when we showed up, the place would be a little better off than the week before, until the house was a work of art. What Tom taught us through words and actions was how to take something damaged, neglected, maybe ruined, and make it gorgeous, make it meaningful. We could take the stories of our lives and make them serve in our favor. “We are the stories we tell ourselves,” he said, and we stayed in his house all night long telling each other those stories, on the page and over drinks, in candlelight and incense. I loved the whole conversation. I wanted to go forward. I wanted to own a part of that terrain, the world of writing and ideas. In a counterintuitive move I thought going away, going to grad school, was the route. Chuck stayed in workshop. He kept his job. He wrote his pages. As a graduate teaching assistant, I was given a shared desk in a crowded office. There were names written on masking tape stuck to each desk, to show who could sit there. On my desk, when I moved in, there was the name of a poet. He was a poet with a book deal. His dictionary rested on the short shelf attached to the desk, with his name written in tall, thin letters across the top of all the pages. I put my books next to his books. I thought he might show up, might need the desk while I sat there grading papers. He never did though. Six months went by before I learned that this poet had killed himself back in 1990. The scary thing was, other than his suicide, that poet was one of the program’s most golden success stories. It didn’t bode well. In Tom’s workshop, Chuck wrote smart, fast stories about the saddest moments—moments of human need—turned comedy. They were the kind of stories that made me want to write, in that call-and-response way. I wrote a new story every week. I didn’t revise. I wrote to see who’d laugh at what I called jokes, and who’d jump on me when I let sentences knock against each other without the cushion of explanation in between. I wrote to see what Chuck would say. In grad school, stories circulated from one workshop to the next, reappearing again and again, sentences as worn as trammeled grass. It was

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like watching a friend gain weight; I saw good writing grow thick with clotted words, padded with details. There was a fear of pulling out the raw stuff, the vulnerable pages. I started writing more slowly. Fumbling. I tried to second guess a distracted audience. Writing lost its shine. Instead of self expression, it was more like explaining minor details, repeatedly, to a stranger. When I moved home, I brought grad school writing back to the Dangerous Writers circle, and Chuck’s flash of disappointment wasn’t condemnation. It was validating. It was like somebody whispering, You don’t need to fit in; I’d been let out of high school all over again. He brought me back to the fold. Reading Chuck’s pages, after being away, was a reminder of how cool writing can be, how thrilling, and how important. His work was alive. It took risks. It was all about diving into that pure, painful pleasure, smart words done well, revealing and reveling in humanity. Chuck makes it look easy, sure. He keeps it fun. The trick is, all the while he’s turning out serious work that matters.

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION JEFFREY A. SARTAIN

An initial glance at the academic publications discussing Chuck Palahniuk’s fiction suggests that he’s done very little publishing since his first novel, Fight Club, in 1996. Nothing could be further from the truth. Palahniuk has been prolific, now boasting nine novels and two books of non-fiction. Already a critically-successful author, Palahniuk’s work was finding readers in a local arena before David Fincher’s film adaptation of Fight Club in 1999. By the time it was a film, Fight Club had won the 1997 Pacific Northwest Bookseller’s Association Award and the 1997 Oregon Book Award for Best Novel. Chapters from the novel had been excerpted and published in a variety of locations, including several localinterest anthologies and Story magazine. After 1999, Palahniuk’s writing exploded onto the national scene. Fight Club was quickly re-released in paperback with a movie tie-in cover, and W.W. Norton immediately published Survivor and Invisible Monsters, manuscripts they had previously rejected. Since then, Palahniuk has gained vast popular success, with every new book of his being eagerly awaited by legions of fans. Despite his continued literary production and popularity, the academic criticism around his work still focuses largely on his first and best-known novel, Fight Club. This volume, Sacred and Immoral, is an effort by an international list of scholars and authors to shed some critical light on many of Palahniuk’s later works. With eleven new critical analyses of Palahniuk’s novels, Sacred and Immoral drastically expands the range and depth of academic inquiry into Palahniuk’s fiction commensurate with the prominent and exciting position Palahniuk’s work occupies in contemporary culture. The title of this volume comes from Invisible Monsters, and was suggested by contributor James Dolph, who felt the phrase “sacred and immoral” (14) reflects the paradoxical position that Palahniuk’s work often occupies in American culture. Now, over a decade into his literary career, Palahniuk’s literature has run the gamut of responses with critics and readers. For some, his work represent represents mere shock literature, deviant and transgressive with an adolescent sensibility. For others,

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Palahniuk’s fiction speaks great truths about the nature of their lives, and for still others, he’s a merely a ripping good read. This book is written for all those who want to explore the depths of Palahniuk’s fiction, and the ways that his fiction forms a continuing discourse with the culture. The book’s introduction by Monica Drake explores Palahniuk’s early roots in fiction, starting with Tom Spanbauer’s “Dangerous Writing” workshops in Portland, Oregon. Drake, a “Dangerous Writing” alum and author of Clown Girl, offers a unique perspective on why Palahniuk’s fiction remains fresh, compelling and unique. Of the book’s critical chapters, several situate Palahniuk’s work within existing generic conventions. In “Chuck Palahniuk and the New Journalism Revolution,” Kenneth MacKendrick traces the influence of mid-century literary journalism on Palahniuk’s fiction. Cammie Sublette’s chapter, “’If We’re Too Lazy to Learn History, History, Maybe We Can Learn Plots’: History in the Fiction of Chuck Palahniuk” looks at the ways popular history gets the real thing wrong, and what’s at stake when Chuck Palahniuk quotes well-known historical inaccuracies. In “Tracking Conversion: A Structural Analysis of Survivor and Choke,” Tatyana Shumsky details the ways that religious conversion narratives inform the secular conversion narratives of Palahniuk’s narrators. And finally, in “Chuck Palahniuk’s Diary: American Horror, Gothic, and Beyond,” Heidi Ashbaugh details the ways that Palahniuk’s sixth novel draws upon the various gothic literary traditions to form its new, unique vision of the gothic. Other chapters focus on the philosophical and theoretical underpinnings of Palahniuk’s fiction. In “Bullets and Blades: Narcissism and Violence in Invisible Monsters,” Andy Johnson examines Palahniuk’s second novel through theories of body image and beauty, revealing how deep Palahniuk’s social commentary actually cuts. Scott Ash examines how Michel Foucault’s theories of discipline inform Palahniuk’s fiction in “Going to the Body: The Tension of Freedom/Restraint in Palahniuk’s Novels.” Ash’s essay dovetails naturally into Ron Riekki’s “Brandy, Shannon, Tender and the Middle Finger: Althusser and Foucault in Palahniuk’s Early Novels,” which focuses on the social dimensions of repression. Mary McCampbell’s “’Paradigms are Dissolving Left and Right’: Baudrillard’s Anti-Apocalypse and Chuck Palahniuk’s Survivor” examines how the instability of the postmodern age gets reflected in Survivor’s narrative arc and trick ending. Still other chapters take a more comparative approach, looking at other literature and discourses to chart some of the deeper and more interesting implications of Palahniuk’s fiction. James Dolph mounts a unique and

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compelling comparison in “Behind the Queens’ Veils: Power Versus Powerlessness in C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters.” Kathy Farquharson traces a vital literary connection between Palahniuk and 19th century author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in “The Anchoress and the Graffiti: Diary and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” And in “Invisible Carrots and Fainting Fans: Queer Humor and Abject Horror in ‘Guts,’” Courtney Wennerstrom and I examine how the story and the phenomenon of fans fainting at Palahniuk’s readings of “Guts” offer challenges to traditional discourses of masculinity and heteronormativity. Finally, the volume wraps up with Matt Kavanagh’s previously-unpublished interview with Chuck Palahniuk. In addition, primary and secondary bibliographies of Palahniuk-related materials are included as appendices. No book is written in a vacuum, and Sacred and Immoral is no exception. I want to extend a special thanks to the following individuals, who lent their support, time and energies along the way: Charles B. Harris, Jason Vest, Stephen Criniti, Erik Grayson and Stirrings Still, Tom Spanbauer, and Monica Drake. For special help with the bibliographies, I would like to extend special thanks the following folks who were very generous with their time, helping me locate texts scattered far and wide across North America and Europe: Adam Wood, Jason Donnelly, Janet Medina, Mara Whitten, Dan Frazier, and Courtney Nance. Last, but certainly not least, thanks go to Chuck Palahniuk for telling great stories. Sacred and Immoral is not an attempt to have the last word on Chuck Palahniuk’s literature. Rather, this volume can serve as a springboard for other projects that relate to Palahniuk’s writings. This volume provides readers with essential tools to tackle Palahniuk’s work in their own research and pedagogy. So, whether you’re a scholar, a teacher, or a fan, I hope you find this volume interesting and thought-provoking.

Jeffrey A. Sartain December 17, 2008 Bloomington, Indiana

CHAPTER ONE CHUCK PALAHNIUK AND THE NEW JOURNALISM REVOLUTION1 KENNETH MACKENDRICK

“You know, it is really hard to call it my vision in the first place. Because what I do is so much more like journalism, where I am sort of conducting a field study or an enormous survey and I am depicting that in a narrative.” – Chuck Palahniuk (Raffensperger) “Journalism made me a good minimalist.” – Chuck Palahniuk (Castillo 20)

Outside of occasional references to individual journalists, such as Joan Didion or Hunter Thompson, to the best of my knowledge, Chuck Palahniuk has never specifically mentioned the influence of New Journalism on his fiction. Although it is likely that he was familiar with literary nonfiction before entering the University of Oregon’s journalism program, I argue that there is ample evidence to support the claim that Palahniuk’s work is thoroughly versed in the tone, style, and genre of the New Journalists. Making this connection explicit goes a long way in developing a deeper understanding of his style as well as explaining the dichotomous reception his work has received: expansive affection and praise or vitriolic contempt and condemnation. The following essay has three parts. The first part examines the energy and literary qualities of New Journalism, especially as portrayed by Tom Wolfe. The second part outlines similarities in the style and themes of New Journalism and Palahniuk’s writing. Finally, I provide an explanation for the overlap and speculate about the nature of the reception of both. The best way to describe the energy of New Journalism is to reiterate Tom Wolfe’s reaction to an essay written by Gay Talese on an aging Joe Louis, written in 1962. This is the introductory paragraph from Talese’s essay about Louis, who is meeting his wife in an airport:

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Chapter One “Hi, sweetheart!” Joe Louis called to his wife, spotting her waiting for him at the Los Angeles airport. She smiled, walked toward him, and was about to step up on her toes and kiss him–but suddenly stopped. “Joe,” she said, “where’s your tie?” “Aw, sweetie,” he said shrugging, “I stayed out all night in New York and didn’t have time—” “All night!” she cut in. “When you’re out here all you do is sleep, sleep, sleep.” “Sweetie,” Joe Louis said, with a tired grin, “I’m an ole man.” “Yes,” she agreed, “but when you go to New York you try to be young again.” (Talese 317)

And there, reading this essay in Esquire magazine after lunch in the open air pit of the Herald Tribune, in a room filled with smoke and the stench of sweat and deadline, Tom Wolfe is screaming out, “What inna namea Christ is this!” Who did this scribbler Talese think he was? He must have piped it, winged it, made up the dialogue. Maybe even whole scenes . . . the unscrupulous geek. The bastard is making it up! I’m telling you, Ump, that’s a spitball he’s throwing! (Wolfe, “Like a Novel” 10, 11; McKeen 9). Wolfe didn’t know what it was, but he took it to heart with a passion before it had a name. It was eventually and hesitantly dubbed the New Journalism and Wolfe became its most ardent practitioner and reluctant chronicler.2 The article by Talese opened Wolfe’s eyes to a new form of reportage that incorporated the techniques of literature (McKeen 10). His groundbreaking essay was entitled “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby around the Bend.” It appeared in Esquire in 1963, back when Esquire was audacious enough to take journalism and fiction more seriously (and with a better sense of humor) than its competition.3 Readers were puzzled and fascinated by Wolfe’s essay on car customizing. There was no chronology and no history of the automobile industry. There were no traditional interviews. Wolfe interjected his own voice and his own thoughts into the text. The essay did not deal with irresponsible teenagers or the decline of the American empire. It talked about young automobile freaks. But it didn’t call them freaks. The kids became artists. Streamline became baroque and curves and swoops became Dionysian. The entire report was written with great flare and sympathy and exhibition. These hot rod speed demon teenagers who were living fast and squandering their youth and money were depicted as harbingers of a new Renaissance in American culture. Wolfe wrote that this new breed of teenager was really a precursor to the future. Popular Culture, with a big C, a Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline future, yes! (McKeen 27). And Wolfe didn’t even have the

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decency to blush; he jumped right in. Car freaks, young millionaire music producers, Pump House surfers, hair boys, prison girls, Black Panthers, socialites, stockcar racers, erstwhile aristocrats, as well as Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Around the bend, baby! Wolfe wrote about anything and everything having to do with the erosion and transformation of status and social position. The future he saw was not the etiquette and social mores of the previous generation but a new, younger set. The old paternal charisma of the feudal system had been swept away. The euphoria of the ancient status honors of the feast were becoming a thing of the past (Wolfe, Pump House 187-89). The new was: Bangs manes bouffants beehives beatle caps butter faces brush-on lashes decal eyes puffy sweaters French thrust bras flailing leather blue jeans stretch pants stretch jeans honeydew bottoms eclair shanks elf boots ballerinas Knight slippers, hundreds of them, these flaming little buds, bobbing and screaming, rocketing around inside . . . Aren’t they supermarvelous! (Wolfe, Kandy-Kolored 199).

Indeed, aren’t they super-marvelous. Wolfe often maintained that he was simply “the humble chronicler, just the secretary taking notes” (Wolfe qtd. in McKeen 24). This comment is somewhat at odds with what he’s actually doing. Consider “The Voices of Village Square,” a story about the hell-hole of a Women’s House of Detention on the South side of Greenwich Avenue. The prisoners are Sirens that call out to passersby, “Hai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-ai-reeeeee!” Wolfe loves it and wants in on the action too, crying out, O, dear, sweet Harry, with your French gangster-movie bangs, your Ski Shop turtleneck sweater and your Army-Navy Store blue denim shirt over it, with your Bloomsbury corduroy pants you saw in the Manchester Guardian airmail edition and sent away for and your sly intellectual pigeon-toed libido roaming in Greenwich Village—is that siren call really for you? (226)

But, he’s just a fly on the wall, right? The humble chronicler, just letting that Greenwich Village hipster have it. But isn’t it kind of like the reader, who always wants to cry out with the Sirens to the poor bastard Harry, the eighth man in thirty minutes to find himself called Harry or Johnny or Bill or Frankie or Honey or Sammy or Max (Wolfe, Kandy-Kolored 313-15; “Like a Novel,” 16-17). Wolfe lets the reader participate in the story by acting in it himself. Perhaps this is what he meant when he wrote about New Journalism being “some sort of artistic excitement” (Wolfe, “Seizing,” 23).

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Until the 1960s, Wolfe tells us, journalism had been very straightlaced. Only the facts, thank you. He called this “totem journalism.” “A totem newspaper,” Wolfe writes, “is the kind of newspaper that people don’t really buy to read but just to have, physically, because they know it supports their own outlook on life.” The totem story was the story that you’re supposed to read, supposed have with you when you carry the totem paper (Wolfe qtd. in McKeen 24). It is like a boring religion that everyone has but no one cares about. Or the religion that everyone thinks they have to have but don’t really care about. Wolfe wanted to write and report differently, and he wanted journalism to respond to and document the upheavals in society going on around them. However, because social realities were changing, journalism needed to change. Wolfe came to the conclusion that totem journalism ceased to be journalism at all. The “artistic excitement” Wolfe speaks of is nothing short of the thoughtful response of journalists to the tumultuous events of their society, a form of writing mindful of the reader. Gay Talese, George Plimpton, Truman Capote, Jimmy Breslin, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, Norman Mailer, Terry Southern and Hunter Thompson. These are just a few of the “new journalists” featured in Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson’s seminal anthology, The New Journalism. There was no club, no manifesto, and no planning. New Journalism was a grassroots movement. It sought to capture the spirit of the times and the motion of being present, whether that meant being on the bus, at the march, with the team, or in the room with the up-and-coming or the fading and falling. Or, in the case of Hunter Thompson, it was about getting kicked off the bus, skipping the march, forgetting about the team and hooking up with a newfound friend for an evening of madcap adventure. Between 1965 and 1968, a series of publications appeared that, each in their own way, infused journalism with an array of literary techniques. Plimpton trained with the Detroit Lions. Thompson rode with the Hell’s Angels. Didion moved to San Francisco for a study of the hippie scene. Mailer documented his participation and arrest in an anti-war march, and Truman Capote invented the nonfiction novel with a textured account of the murder of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas. All of these works appeared within a few years of one another, alongside Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and some thirty-seven articles in an impressive array of anthologies. Some people loved it, especially a younger generation. Many hated it. A lot of people hate Chuck Palahniuk’s writing too. He’s been identified as misogynist, a nihilist, and an American pornographer, not always in that order. Although Fight Club earned Palahniuk modest

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literary accolades, his later works including Diary, Haunted, Rant, and Snuff have faired less favorably in many quarters.4 Interestingly, the criticism of Palahniuk’s writing bears an uncanny similarity to the criticism New Journalists receive, particularly Tom Wolfe. Both Palahniuk and Wolfe are often identified by reviewers as unscrupulous geeks. Let us recall that, as Katherine Dunn reminds us, a geek is the one with the sharp choppers biting the head off a live chicken, a carnival performer, a charlatan, a para-journalist, a shock-jock writer with an audience of teenage pot-heads. Paired in this way, we are told by critics that Wolfe and Palahniuk aren’t serious writers. This isn’t journalism; this isn’t literature. It is as if many of the critics have responded to Wolfe and Palahniuk the same way that Wolfe had initially responded to Talese: they’re piping it, winging it, throwing spit balls. We read that Palahniuk is a plagiarist and that Wolfe is making it all up, fakers. Reviews of Wolfe’s writings were almost identical in tone, style, and condemnation to reviews of Palahniuk’s work. There are four common criticisms of both, suggesting their work is: 1. poorly written, lacking proper respect and appreciation for the conventions of literature. 2. of baneful influence, leading to the corruption of the youth and contributing to the degenerative tendencies of society. 3. nothing more than a revelry of style over substance. 5 4. written by hacks of questionable moral character.

I could add a fifth, although not a criticism of the writer or writing as such: many reviewers opting for such an all out assault also take a few good jabs or power stomps at the supposed pud-knockers who read the purported trash, usually identifying them as dupes impressed by little more than bread and circuses.6 This is not a critique of criticism, appropriate or inappropriate. What I am interested in is the nature of what has prompted such an acerbic reception. What is it about Palahniuk and Wolfe’s writing that allows critical reviews to be virtually interchangeable? I speculate that there is a potential link between the minimalist style and marginal edge of Palahniuk’s work and the “artistic excitement” of the New Journalism described by Wolfe. While there are numerous issues that could be addressed here, I’ll encapsulate my interests in two questions. First, why is the reception of minimalist literature similar to the reception of New Journalism; and second, how are the two related? As previously observed, Palahniuk has not openly acknowledged a debt to New Journalist writing specifically, although he has mentioned

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Joan Didion and George Plimpton as significant influences on his writing and style. He has made occasional mention of the personality of Hunter Thompson but usually not in references to Thompson’s journalism.7 Perhaps one only needs to ask to have a definitive answer. However, barring this, there is enough biographical material available to draw a few tentative lines between relations of influence. To begin, Palahniuk is a journalist and a fan of journalism. One of his favorite short story writers, Denis Johnson, recently published a series of nonfiction essays called Seek: Reports from the Edges of America and Beyond. It would be difficult to conceive that this is not high on Palahniuk’s reading list. He’s also a reader of Jon Krakauer, author of Into the Wild, a writer recently identified as a “new new journalist.” I would also be surprised if Palahniuk hadn’t read Among the Thugs by Bill Buford, a participatory journalist, who documents his tour with football hooligans; the beating he receives at the end of the account is eerily akin to Thompson’s account of his own beating at the end of Hell’s Angels.8 When readers of Palahniuk have commented on the accuracy of the psychological portrait of violence he’s depicted, I can’t help but recall the near mimesis of Palahniuk’s writing to Buford’s brilliant case study of interpersonal violence. While Palahniuk has mentioned the influence of Hemingway, whose collection Men without Women includes writings on boxing, and Thom Jones’s, The Pugilist at Rest and Cold Snap as well as Jack London’s The Abysmal Brute,, one might also add to this George Plimpton’s participatory account of boxing in his book Shadow Box. It may simply be a coincidence that Joyce Carol Oates and Norman Mailer have also written about boxing in the tradition of literary nonfiction. Katherine Dunn, whose award winning novel Geek Love is one of Palahniuk’s favorite books makes a personal appearance in Fugitives and Refugees. Dunn has also been hailed as a peerless boxing commentator (Starr). Certainly the brutality of a community in ruins, documented thoughtfully by Joan Didion in “Slouching towards Bethlehem,” is never far from central themes in Palahniuk’s work. And, how can we not see echoes of Norman Mailer throughout Palahniuk’s writings? In The Armies of the Night, Mailer observes about himself that he never “felt more like an American than when he was . . . obscene” (48). Similarly, commenting on the content of his novels in an interview with Bob Strauss, Palahniuk remarks that “My theory, in a way, is you can have people doing profane things if they’re doing it for a profound reason” adding that darkly comic tales help people cope with the unavoidable tragedies of life. Palahniuk, like Mailer before him, seems to hold dear to the idea that our obscenity may save us (Mailer 48-49). Lastly, there are remarkable similarities with

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the nefarious pranks of so many of Palahniuk’s protagonists with the ultimate prankster Guy Grand from New Journalist Terry Southern’s hilarious novella, The Magic Christian. Among other things, Grand makes several eclectic and unnerving inserts to the movies showing in a theatre he has purchased, each designed to spoil the film (54-57). While this scarcely shows a literary continuity, it may be helpful to note that the two giants, New Journalist Tom Wolfe and minimalist Gordon Lish can be found together in The Secret Life of Our Times: New Fiction from Esquire along with essays by Raymond Carver, Joy Williams, and Joyce Carol Oates – all of whom Palahniuk has mentioned as influences on his writing. Other students of Gordon Lish include Tom Spanbauer (perhaps one of the most important influences on Palahniuk’s writing), Amy Hempel, and Mark Richard. No dedicated reader of Palahniuk can avoid Amy Hempel’s At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom or Richard’s Ice at the Bottom of the World. The short story “Strays” by Richard is to Fight Club what “The Harvest” by Hempel is to Invisible Monsters. Given that Palahniuk wrote the latest introduction to Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Penguin, 2007), it is almost inconceivable that he hasn’t read Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. My colleague Nicole Goulet did manage to find a single reference to “gonzo journalism” in an interview conducted by Jorge Ignacio Castillo in Prairie Dog, where Palahniuk criticized the style and practice of gonzo journalism as being too self-indulgent. When I read this, I couldn’t help but chuckle, since there are at least two “gonzo” accounts within his nonfiction. Recall his anonymous postcards in Fugitives and Refugees about grinding his molars on acid (a postcard from 1981) and about slurping back gin from a Windex bottle dressed up as Santa Claus in the Cacophony Society’s annual Santa Rampage (a postcard from 1996). Perhaps it was advocacy journalism in retrospect. However, his essay “My Life as a Dog” in Stranger than Fiction strikes me as more than just a little participatory.9 And, of course, Palahniuk has been very open about his volunteer work for an AIDS hospice, which influenced Fight Club, as well as about his attendance of sex addicts’ support meetings for Choke (Interviews with Sirius and Epstein). One of the rather obvious distinctions between New Journalism and Palahniuk’s work is that Palahniuk is writing fiction. Yet, if I can speculate, what makes his fiction controversial, aside from its explicit content, which is neither new nor uncommon, is how it uses the advantages and energy of New Journalism and literary nonfiction. Instead of infusing journalism with literary techniques, Palahniuk infuses literature with the techniques of New Journalism. His books are loaded with facts,

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however dubious: recipes for explosives (Fight Club), instructions for how to eat a lobster (Survivor), morbid medical details (Choke), and even a foray into world religions (Lullaby) and ritual theory (Rant). These factoids are always caught up in the motion of the narrative, yet they work very much like the life status details so important to New Journalists. The first person accounts found throughout his novels are reminiscent of the autobiographical form, and we know there are a lot of biographies and autobiographies that have made their way into his writings: Edie by Jean Stein edited by George Plimpton, Truman Capote edited by George Plimpton, Lexicon Devil on the short life and times of Darby Crash, the semi-autobiographical Heartburn by Nora Ephron, Slackjaw by Jim Knipfel, the infamous Miss Rona by Rona Barrett, and Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy. Although Palahniuk hasn’t mentioned it, there is also the 1970 novel Attic by Katherine Dunn, a semi-autobiographical and poignant account of the time she spent in jail for attempting to cash bad checks. These are only a handful of the books or authors Palahniuk has mentioned in the past decade of interviews. All of them lean toward being on the bus: autobiography, oral biography; these are fly-on-the-wall accounts, wallflower-at-the-orgy accounts as Ephron would have said. It is no wonder that Palahniuk has mentioned Joan Didion so often. Her journalism, like her novels, is narrated close to the realm of experience. She writes like the reader thinks and feels: repetitious thoughts, ambience, and indecision. The intense link between Didion’s writing and her personal experience has been clearly evident, at the very least, since Where I Was From, where she provides a tough and critical account of her own novel Run River. The connection between lived experience and the techniques utilized by New Journalists is fascinating. Every chapter of every book Palahniuk has written could readily be summarized on a sheet no larger than a postcard. This veritable seven page limit is the epitome of scene-to-scene development. As Gay Talese observes, it’s “just like a movie.” In the essay “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” Talese notes that it is written scene by scene: “the first scene is a bar, the second in a nightclub, the third scene in the NBC studio” (qtd in Boynton 367). Palahniuk’s Choke even has a special graphic at the front of each chapter to let the reader know what the next scene is about. It shouldn’t be surprising that some of the writings of the New Journalists or New New Journalists have appeared in film, from Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to Susan Orlean’s Blue Crush and Adaptation, and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. It also shouldn’t be surprising that with the exception of Snuff (at least at the time of writing), all of Palahniuk’s novels have been optioned.

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These parallels in literary technique may explain why people react the way they do to Palahniuk’s fiction. But the parallels go still further. Wolfe wrote about status, insider and outsider, fashion, celebrity, and changing mores. He was interested in social movements and cultural change, especially when it comes to issues of wealth and power. He focused on the Merry Pranksters, car customizers, teenage tycoons, and the radical chic. His electrifying style reflected what he was writing about, turbulent convulsions in society. As a novelist, Palahniuk is not subject to the same constraints that a journalist is, even when his writing is based on the experiences of his friends. Nevertheless, in addition to using the techniques of New Journalism to inform his literary technique, he appears to dwell on one of its most successful themes: the little man or little woman, the figure in trouble with the law, the delinquent, the infirm or deprived.10 In this respect Palahniuk’s interests are closer to those of Talese, who has more admiration for the heroic failure than Wolfe, who focuses more on the rising star. The fictional oral biography in Rant is particularly remarkable and is the clearest exposition of the link between his fiction and New Journalism. Two of the three sources that he cites in the introduction were edited by New Journalist George Plimpton. Rant is a science fiction novel but one that uses the medium of oral biography to tell the story. This gives him the advantages of an oral biography, its substance and multiple perspectives, but it also allows him to give his literary imagination free reign. He seems to be well aware that he’s producing an innovative construal of literature and journalism in his writing. For instance, in the introduction to Stranger than Fiction he writes that “It’s hard to call any of my novels ‘fiction’” (xvii). In another essay in the same collection, he remarks that the novel Fight Club is “less a novel than an anthology of my friends’ lives” (228). What is interesting about Palahniuk’s research is its range: the lives of his friends, medical textbooks, journalism, autobiography, and even novels themselves. Almost anything and everything can be used in a story. For example, in Fight Club, the narrator prays for the plane to crash. This is similar to Maria from Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays, who like Palahniuk’s narrator, cries a lot and bleeds a lot. And, shortly after dreaming of being in a car crash, she decides to become the radical surgeon of her own life: never discuss, cut. In Fight Club the narrator works for a car company that is responsible for people being burned alive in cars that are not designed properly. An insidious scandal, just like Tom Wolfe’s empathetic essay on fighter pilots “burned beyond recognition” in The Right Stuff. Wolfe also has a chapter on space monkeys who push buttons and pull levers. In Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, a novel constructed

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out of many of her essays in Wallflower at the Orgy, Crazy Salad, and Scribble Scribble, we find a lead character who joins a support group, an apartment that is blown up, and a story about someone who fantasizes about being in a plane crash. In Joy Williams’ Breaking and Entering there is a woman who breaks her ankle with a hammer to feel better, a nude beach, a penguin bludgeoned to death, a desire to die, a woman with cancer, mysterious phone calls with no callers, an apocalyptic vision, and insomnia. Williams has also written a tour guide of Florida and a collection of narrative-driven essays on the fallacies of militant humanism which Palahniuk continues to praise as heart-breaking. It is difficult not to bring to mind the lethal contagion found in Lullaby as a mirror of Williams’ understanding of “ill nature.” Everywhere we turn, we find the influence of a New Journalist or some sort of literary nonfiction on Palahniuk’s writing.11 It is perhaps not without a bit of grotesque irony that Palahniuk’s confirmation saint was St. Lawrence, patron saint of cooking, who was barbequed alive on a grill for his journalistic investigation of papal abuses (qtd. in O’Hagan). While Palahniuk has always been quick to announce that his work is based on nonfiction, I think it worth specifying that his writing has a particular debt to New Journalism because of extensive overlap in both technique and theme. Wolfe writes about popular culture, status, and celebrity. He’s interested in the up-and-coming. The future face of America. Palahniuk, however, is interested in the margins. The wrestlers rather than the boxers. The Midwestern combine demolition derby racers rather than the stock car racers. Sexuality and gender bending rather than more or less alternative forms of commune and community. The alienated rather than the radical chic. The parallel is extraordinary. So, what does it all mean? The New Journalists sought to re-think the relation between reporting and journalistic objectivity. They wanted to write their subject matter in a way that became more alive, less scripted. This was best accomplished through the use of literary techniques: dialogue, scene-to-scene movement, third person perspective and lifestatus details, what would today be called branding. Take, for instance, this passage from Bret Ellis’s Less than Zero: “In the kitchen, Trent’s mother is smoking a cigarette and finishing a Tab before she goes off to some fashion show in Century City” (53). This statement creates a stronger impression than “She finished a soda and went to a fashion show downtown.”12 Life-status details. The use of literary techniques allowed the New Journalist to let the reader enter into the narrative. New Journalism had to compete with television and the new electronic media. However, movies and television have been around for several decades

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now. Palahniuk is competing with video games and the internet. He’s facing a similar challenge and has responded in kind. In addition to appropriations from New Journalism, Palahniuk’s writing makes use of literary techniques indebted to minimalism, especially as taught by Tom Spanbauer: “horses,” the repetition of certain stock phrases to orient the reader, “burnt tongue,” a way of writing that slows the reader down, “recording angel,” allowing the judgment to take place in the readers mind rather than on the page, and writing “on the body,” to aim to evoke a physical response in the reader (141-46). The techniques summarized by Palahniuk are remarkable in their overlap with the four elements discussed by Wolfe. In both New Journalism and minimalism there is an effort to release the reader from a historical narrative into a scene-by-scene construction. The style encourages the reader to get carried away, to participate in the narrative by yelling out with the Sirens at Harry or Max passing by; or to break out in a cold sweat and forget to breathe while listening to “Guts.” More than this, what Palahniuk identifies as writing the body reflects the kind of details that participatory or immersion journalism is interested in: “close-to-the-skin reporting” (Boynton xvii). Of course, New Journalism accomplishes this in the third person. Palahniuk almost always writes in the first person, but the effect is similar. The narrative is oriented by using the same “horses” – the rules of Fight Club, for example. Wolfe and Palahniuk are known for their riveting and organic dialogue and both try to create a pulse of expression and exchange. The exuberance of this form of expression is something that Pauline Kael mentioned to Wolfe when they were on a panel together. Recounting the conversation, Wolfe writes that Kael remarked: One of the worst defects of the New Journalism is that it’s ‘non-critical.’ She explains that it merely gets people ‘excited,’ and ‘you are left not knowing how to feel about it except to be excited about it,’ which she considers morally enervating for young people, ‘because the same way they go for movies that have intensity and excitement, they like writing that has intensity and excitement. But it leaves them no basis at all for evaluating the material, and ultimately it simply means that the writing has to go from one change to the next’ (qtd. in Wolfe, “Appendix” 37-38).

She could have been talking about Palahniuk, since Palahniuk seems to be articulating a variation of the nonfiction novel, oriented more toward fiction than nonfiction. When he incorporates facts into his novels they present historical or scientific details that key the reader into a stable world, just as the life status details found in Wolfe’s writings.13

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Palahniuk’s incorporation of research slows and orients the reader from the general disorder of the narrative by presenting supposedly timeless truths; his novels are littered with phrases like “useful information,” “just for the record,” or “true fact.” Whatever the insanity, at least you can feel safe with the knowledge of what a venous air embolism is (Snuff 85). In this way Palahniuk makes use of a rhetorical mechanism that creates a remarkable tension: the quiet pace of status details versus the acceleration of dialogue and scene-by-scene motion. He uses these details, however trivial, to punctuate his fiction, to slow it down. In doing so, whether he draws on the lives of his friends, adopts stories from books he’s read, or adapts passages from etiquette guides, he infuses his work with an aura of journalistic integrity that very likely reminds readers of their (sub)conscious familiarity with New Journalism or literary nonfiction. Readers may also observe that there is always in Palahniuk’s novels the appearance of a certain kind of social realism, a presentation of social reality integral to his work. I think aspects of this come from the New Journalism revolution and is one of the things making his writing effective. Importantly though, it is helpful to notice that what appears as social realism is a rhetorical effect. For instance, it is only the medical certainty spread throughout the oral biography of Rant that makes the narrative plausible. Green Taylor Simms has to tell us that the “black widow spider only kills about 5 percent of those it bites” (71). In effect, without characters such as Simms or Phoebe Truffeau, the epidemiologist, Rant would lose the gritty realism that makes its magical qualities palpable and compelling for the reader. If New Journalism aims to infuse journalism with the techniques of literature it also aims to replace literature that is unrealistic. Wolfe was very open about his hostility to neo-Fabulist writers, writings that abandon social realism in favor of myth and fable and fantasy. Palahniuk is working from the opposite direction. The chapters in his novels read like essays, yet they include moments of magic, precognition, ghosts, and time travel. The stylistic devices that Palahniuk uses, especially the relationships between his fiction, autobiography, and journalism. go a long way in explaining the uncanny similarities in the critical responses to both New Journalism and minimalism. Many of the criticisms of Palahniuk and Wolfe far exceed a comment or critique on the literary merits or perceived political influence of the writing. Why the overbearing and excessive nature of the critical responses? Some of the responses are no doubt honest and thoughtful. For example, from an aesthetic viewpoint there are technical problems and consistency issues in his novels. However, I am putting these concerns to

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the side here. New Journalists participate in a writing style that appears to blur the boundary between facts and fiction, between documentary and story. While I agree with Boynton that the precise nature of the distinction between “facts and fiction” is a bit of a wild goose chase, there is an important similarity here (xviii). Palahniuk has adopted enough of the techniques of literary nonfiction to create an aura of journalistic integrity, even though he’s writing fiction. The tension I’m thinking of here is nicely captured by Vox Day in the essay “The Club that Dare Not Speak Its Name.” Although the essay deals primarily with the film, Day identifies the technical aspects of Fight Club as absurd, commenting that “most fights are concluded in a matter of seconds rather than minutes.” Yet, Day also commends Palahniuk noting that “from a psychological perspective, it is impressively accurate” (144, 146). The fiction and the fact. If the journalist Tom Wolfe became the literary equivalent of a television host (Kallen 52-62), perhaps Chuck Palahniuk’s writing reflects the energy and motion of new media. His writings compete with the scope and range of a POV video game requiring an intellectual and creative balance between action/movement and the more passive gestures of reloading or collecting data. In setting out to return people to reading, Palahniuk presents us with an innovative literary constellation. His version of minimalism and literary nonfiction is a kind of anomaly that doesn’t neatly fit the categories critics are most familiar with. It is a form of writing with an eminently digestible style, yet grapples with excess, vulgarity, and violence. These themes are analogous to events that lead New Journalists to write differently as well. At their best, these innovative writing styles, when they receive widespread popular reception and recognition, can provide us with opportunities to think about the changing rhythms of social fantasy and desire. Or, as Gay Talese eloquently puts it, if the impetus behind New Journalism is to evoke “the fictional current that flows beneath the stream of reality,” then perhaps the same should be said for Palahniuk’s novels (qtd. in Boynton 377).

Notes 1 Thanks must be extended to Nicole Goulet, for her meticulous research assistance, and Andrea Brown, who read many of the essays and novels of New Journalists with me. I also thank the students of RLGN 3110 Issues in the Study of Religion and Evil (2008) for their careful thoughts and insightful discussions about the Merry Pranksters, Fight Club, Jesus Camp, and Jonestown. 2 Ronald Weber notes that New Journalism has also been identified as the art of the nonfiction novel, saturation reporting, advocacy journalism, participatory journalism, underground journalism, journalit, and literary nonfiction (14). More

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recently, Robert S. Boynton has observed that New Journalism and what he calls the New New Journalism “may well be the most popular and influential development in the history of American literary nonfiction” (xi). 3 Wolfe comments that Esquire’s “perverse streak” and “strange appetites” allowed them to survive the mess of the magazine business by means of the “unquenchable foolhardiness” of its editors, further noting that it did so wearing “the most obscene grin imaginable” (Wolfe, “Introduction” xvii, xviii). 4 For less than appreciative reviews, see the following in the New York Times Book Review: Tom Shone on Haunted, Field Maloney on Rant, and Lucy Ellmann on Snuff. Janet Maslin, in The New York Times, has negative reviews of Haunted (“Not for a Full Stomach”) and Rant (“Appetite for Destruction”). See also Jason Anderson’s review of Haunted in The Globe and Mail as well as Adam Mansbach’s critique in the National Post and Malene Arpe’s review in The Toronto Star; Geoff Pevere’s review of Snuff can be found in the Toronto Star as well. Laura Miller’s infamous review of Diary, to which Palahniuk wrote a response, was published in Salon.com. While these reviews cannot be considered representative, they do not express uncommon sentiments within mainstream American and Canadian newspapers. 5 The most well known critique of New Journalism is Dwight Macdonald’s essay “Parajournalism, or Tom Wolfe and His Magic Writing Machine,” reprinted in Ronald Weber’s The Reporter as Artist (223-233). In many respects this essay is to Wolfe what Laura Miller’s review of Diary in Salon.com is to Palahniuk’s writing. A more recent review that is on the same page as Miller’s, although more specific in its objections, is Lucy Ellmann’s review of Snuff. Incidentally, Ellmann’s book Dot in the Universe is listed as one of Palahniuk’s favorites (Barnes and Noble interview). See also Eduardo Velásquez’s review of Fight Club (2002). Veladquez’s review is astonishing in that it reads the novel as a philosophical text, a logical blunder that very much seems to confirm my suspicions about the aura of journalistic integrity created by Palahniuk’s novels. 6 It is probably not coincidental that both Dwight Macdonald and Henry Giroux cite Theodor W. Adorno in support of their respective positions. Adorno’s “mandarin cultural conservatism” has been discussed by Martin Jay in Adorno. This tendency within Adorno’s thought may assist in explaining why an otherwise dialectical and critical thinker could be used in such an undialectical way; Adorno rarely condemned anything in a straightforward and pithy manner. For a more nuanced reading of Adorno’s understanding of the culture industry with an emphasis on his philosophical writings, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute. 7 Thompson is specifically mentioned in the interview with Dawn Taylor and the essays about Palahniuk by Jorge Castillo and James Adams Smith. In Smith’s essay, Palahniuk’s is quoted as saying “Thompson did have a character of persona that he felt himself always living into . . . I thought that character was like Ida Mancini in Choke - really the rebel who was always against. He never really made the stand for something. He was always critiquing outside of himself.”

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For example, when Buford is speaking with one of the “hooligans” about fighting, he is told: “‘We look forward to Saturdays,’ he said, ‘all week long. It’s the most meaningful thing in our lives. It’s a religion, really. That’s how important it is to us. Saturday is our day of worship” (114). 9 I have come across two reviews haphazardly linking Wolfe with Palahniuk’s fiction. The first is a review, a review of Rant by Karl Pike, who observes “Palahniuk does not do what Tom Wolfe loves to call a ‘realistic novel.’” The second, a review of Palahniuk’s Snuff, reads: “Is Snuff brilliantly repulsive, or just repulsive? Sure, it’s a thin plot, padded out with psychosis. Yes, all the characters sound the same. But Palahniuk investigates his novels for months before he begins to write, so they always have a journalistic reek of authenticity and immediacy: he is like Tom Wolfe on acid, and poppers, and speed. Think of it as The Bonfire of the Inanities. Once you have come down and mopped up the vomit, you will be glad you snorted this particular Snuff.” Steven Rosen, in a review of Stranger than Fiction, casually observed the similarity of Wolfe’s style and interests but did not do so in the context of Palahniuk’s fiction. The only more concrete connection I’ve come across is made by David Ansen in his review of Fincher’s Fight Club, “A Fistful of Darkness” (1999). Ansen suggests that Tyler Durden is a kind of “charismatic prankster” akin to the protagonist in Terry Southern’s The Magic Christian. 10 I freely adopt this phrase from Dwight Macdonald without holding me to his infamous critique. The passage appears as follows: “The other kind of suitable game for the parajournalist –though not Tom Wolfe’s pigeon –is the Little Man (or Woman) who gets into trouble with the law; or who is interestingly poor or old or ill or, best all three; or who has some other Little problem like delinquent children or a close relative who has been murdered for which they can count on Jimmy Breslin’s heavy-breathing sympathy and prose” (231). This observation foreshadows Palahniuk’s foray and interest in transgressive fiction. For a helpful survey of transgressive fiction see Rene Chun, “The (Dead)beat Generation.” 11 I have documented the influence on feminism on Palahniuk’s writing in an unpublished essay “‘Her lie reflected my lie’: Feminism and Masculinity in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.” 12 Interestingly enough, this novel is dedicated to New Journalist Joe McGinniss, and the author photograph is taken by Quintana Roo Dunne, daughter of New Journalists John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion. 13 This can be done in several ways: consider the differences between the novels of Bret Easton Ellis, Douglas Coupland or Tom Wolfe, all of which are very specific about identifying contextual details (down to the Betamax VCR and the Tab cola). Such details can also be a bit more ephemeral although no less grounded, as with Joan Didion or Raymond Carver, whose writings are more prone to capture imagistic or transient details: the smell of food, the weather, the color of the light, or the texture of a table.

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Works Cited Anderson, Jason. “Guts and Glory.” The Globe and Mail 14 May 2005: D12. Ansen, David. “A Fistful of Darkness.” Newsweek 18 October 1999. 24 October 2008. . Arpe, Malene. “It Begins Very Ugly and Just Gets Uglier.” Toronto Star 29 May 2005: D05. Barnes & Noble.com Interview with Chuck Palahniuk. Fall 2004. . Barrett, Rona. Miss Rona: An Autobiography. Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1974. Bloom, Harold, ed. Tom Wolfe: Modern Critical Views. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001. Boynton, Robert S. The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft. New York: Vintage, 2005. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute. New York: The Free Press, 1977. Buford, Bill. Among the Thugs. 1991. London: Arrow Books, 2001. Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood. 1965. New York: Vintage, 1994. Castillo, Jorge Ignacio. “Creed of Chucky: Fight Club’s Chuck Palahniuk is a Sucker for Romance.” Prairie Dog: Regina’s News and Entertainment Voice 16-29 March 2006: 20. Chun, Rene. “The (Dead)beat Generation; Transgressive Fiction is Twisted, Sick—and Very Hip.” The Ottawa Citizen 7 May 1995: C2. Cohen, Ed. “Tom Wolfe and the Truth Monitors: A Historical Fable.” CLIO 16.1 (1986): 1-11. Coupland, Douglas. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. —. Shampoo Planet. 1992. New York: Washington Square Press, 2005. Day, Vox. “The Club that Dare Not Speak Its Name.” You Do Not Talk about Fight lub: I am Jack’s Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection. Ed. Read Mercer Schuchardt. Dallas: Benbella, 2008. 143150. Didion, Joan. Play It As It Lays. 1970. Intro. David Thomson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005. —. Run River. 1963. New York: Vintage, 1994. —. Slouching Towards Bethlehem. 1968. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.

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—. Where I Was From. New York: Vintage, 2004. Dunn, Katherine. Attic. 1970. New York: Warner Books, 1990. —. Geek Love. 1983. New York: Vintage, 2002. Eason, David L. “Telling Stories and Making Sense.” The Journal of Popular Culture 15.2 (1981): 125-129. Ellis, Bret Easton. Less than Zero. 1985. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1998. Ellmann, Lucy. Dot in the Universe. New York: Bloomsbury, 2003. —. “Love the Ones You’re With.” New York Times Book Review 8 June 2008: 27. Ephron, Nora. Crazy Salad: Some Things about Women. 1975. Intro. Steve Martin. New York: The Modern Library, 2000. —. Heartburn. 1983. New York: Vintage, 1996. —. Scribble Scribble: Notes on the Media. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. —. Wallflower at the Orgy. New York: Viking, 1970. Epstein, Dan. Interview with Chuck Palahniuk. 3:AM Magazine December 2001. 24 October 2008. . Grealy, Lucy. Autobiography of a Face. 1994. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. Hari, Johann. “Snuff, by Chuck Palahniuk: Porn, but not as we know it.” The Independent 8 August 2008. 24 October 2008. . Hellmann, John. Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. Hemingway, Ernest. Men without Women. 1927. New York: Scribner, 1997. Hempel, Amy. The Collected Stories. Intro. Rich Moody. New York: Scribner, 2006. Jay, Martin. Adorno. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984. Johnson, Denis. Seek: Reports from the Edges of America and Beyond. New York: Perennial, 2001. Jones, Thom. Cold Snap. Boston: Black Bay Books, 1995. —. The Pugilist at Rest: Stories. Boston: Black Bay Books, 1993. Kallan, Richard A. “Style and the New Journalism: A Rhetorical Analysis of Tom Wolfe.” Communication Monographs 46 (1979): 52-62.

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Kavadlo, Jesse. “The Fiction of Self-Destruction.” You Do Not Talk about Fight Club: I am Jack’s Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection. Ed. Read Mercer Schuchardt. Dallas: Benbella, 2008. 13-33. Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Fwd. Chuck Palahniuk. New York: Penguin, 2007. Knipfel, Jim. SlackJaw: A Memoir. New York: Berkeley Book, 2000. Krakauer, Jon. Into the Wild. New York: Anchor Books, 1996. Lehman, Daniel W. “‘Spit flee hide vanish disintegrate’: Tom Wolfe and the Arrest of New Journalism.” Prospects 21 (1996): 397-434. Lewin, Leonard C. “Is Fact Necessary?” Columbia Journalism Review 4.4 (1966): 29-32. Lish, Gordon, ed. All Our Secrets are the Same: New Fiction from Esquire. New York: W. W. Norton, 1976. —. ed. The Secret Life of Our Times: New Fiction from Esquire. Intro. Tom Wolfe. New York: Doubleday, 1973. London, Jack. The Abysmal Brute. Intro. Michael Oriard. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Macdonald, Dwight. “Parajournalism, or Tom Wolfe and His Magic Writing Machine.” The Reporter as Artist: A Look at the New Journalism Controversy. Ed. Ronald Weber. New York: Hastings House, 1974. 223-233. MacKendrick, Kenneth G. “‘Her lie reflected my lie’: Feminism and Masculinity in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.” Unpublished essay, 2007. Mansbach, Adam. “Stories are Knitted Together with Gore.” National Post 28 May 2005: WP17. Mailer, Norman. The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel a History. 1968. New York: Plume, 1994. —. The Fight. 1975. New York: Vintage, 1997. Maloney, Field. “Demolition Man.” New York Times Book Review 3 June 2007: 10. Maslin, Janet. “Appetite for Destruction.” New York Times 7 May 2007: E7. —. “Not for a Full Stomach (Or an Empty One Either).” New York Times 5 May 2005: E9. McKeen, William. Tom Wolfe. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995. Miller, Laura. “Diary.” Salon.com 20 August 2003. 24 October 2008. .

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Mullen, Brendan with Don Bolles and Adam Parfrey. Lexicon Devil: The Fast Times and Short Life of Darby Crash and The Germs. Los Angeles: Feral House, 2002. O’Hagan, Sean. “Fright Club.” The Observer 8 May 2005. 24 October 2008.

Oates, Joyce Carol. On Boxing. 1987. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. Palahniuk, Chuck. Choke. New York: Anchor Books, 2002, —. Diary. New York: Anchor Books, 2004. —. Fight Club. 1996. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. —. Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon (New York: Crown Publishers, 2003). —. Haunted. New York: Anchor Books, 2006. —. Invisible Monsters. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999. —. Lullaby. New York: Anchor Books, 2003. —. Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey. Toronto: Doubleday, 2007. —. Snuff. Toronto: Doubleday, 2008. —. Stranger than Fiction: True Stories. 2004. New York: Anchor Books, 2005. —. Survivor. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. Pevere, Geoff. “Everything You Always Didn’t Want to Know about Porn.” Toronto Star 8 June 2008: D5. Pike, Karl. “Rant by Chuck Palahniuk.” InTheNews 20 May 2007. 24 October 2008. . Plimpton, George. Paper Lion: Confessions of a Last String Quarterback. 1966. Guildford: Lyons Press, 2006. —. Truman Capote. New York: Anchor Books, 1998. —. Shadow Box: An Amateur in the Ring. 1977. Guilford: Lyons Press, 2003. Raffensperger, Mike. Interview with Chuck Palahniuk. On the Circuit January 2008. 24 October 2008. . Ragen, Brian Abel. Tom Wolfe: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002. Richard, Mark. The Ice at the Bottom of the World. New York: Anchor, 1991. Rosen, Steve. Review of Stranger than Fiction by Chuck Palahniuk. Curled Up with a Good Book. n.d. 24 October 2008.

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. Russell, Dennis. “The New Journalism of the Sixties: Reevaluating Objective Reality and Conventional Journalistic Practice.” Popular Culture Review 17.2 (2006): 55-71. Schuchardt, Read Mercer. You Do Not Talk About Fight Club: I am Jacks’ Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection. Dallas: Benbella Books, 2008. Shone, Tom. “Gore Values.” New York Times Book Review 22 May 2005: 20. Sirius, R.U. Interview with Chuck Palahniuk. gettingit.com 14 October 1999. 24 October 2008 . Smith, James Adams. “Chuck Palahniuk on Choke, Cults and Chaos.” UDReview.com 30 September 2008. 24 October 2008. . Southern, Terry. The Magic Christian. 1960. New York: Grove Press, 1996. —. Red-Dirt Marijuana and Other Tastes. 1967. Intro. George Plimpton. New York: Citadel Press, 1990. Spanbauer, Tom. The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon. New York: Grove Press, 1991. Starr, Karla. “Where is the (follow-up to Geek) Love? Willamette Week Online 1 February 2008. 24 October 2008. . Strauss, Bob. “Horrific Events, Tender Understanding.” The Globe and Mail 27 September 2008: R8. Stein, Jean. Edie: An American Biography. Ed. George Plimpton. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. Stull, James. “New Journalism: Surveying the Critical Literature.” North Dakota Quarterly 57 (1989): 164-74. Talese, Gay. Fame and Obscurity. New York: Ivy Books, 1993. Taylor, Dawn. Interview with Chuck Palahniuk. The DVD Journal 25 January 2000. . Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. 1971. New York: Vintage, 1998. —. Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. 1966. New York: Ballantine Books, 1995. Van Dellen, Robert J. “We’ve Been Had by the New Journalism: A Put Down.” Journal of Popular Culture 9.1 (1975): 219-231.

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Velásquez, Eduardo A. “‘Where the Wild Things Are’: Re-Creation, Fall, Re- and In-surrection in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.” Love and Friendship: Rethinking Politics and Affection in Modern Times. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2002. 575-616. Weber, Ronald, ed. The Reporter as Artist: A Look at the New Journalism Controversy. New York: Hastings House, 1974. Weingarten, Marc. The Gang that Wouldn’t Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote and the New Journalism Revolution. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2005. Williams, Joy. Breaking and Entering. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1988. —. The Florida Keys: A History and Guide. 1988. New York: Random House, 2003. —. Ill Nature: Rants and Reflections on Humanity and Other Animals. New York: Vintage, 2002. Wolfe, Tom. “Appendix.” The New Journalism. Eds. Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. 37-52. —. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. 1968. New York: Bantam Books, 1999. —. “Introduction.” The Secret Life of Our Times: New Fiction from Esquire. Ed. Gordon Lish. New York: Doubleday, 1973. xvii-xxviii. —. The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. 1965. New York: Bantam Books, 1999. —. “Like a Novel.” The New Journalism. Eds. Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. 10-22. —. Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine. 1976. New York: Bantam Books, 1999. —. The Pump House Gang. 1968. New York: Bantam Books, 1999. —. Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. 1970. New York: Bantam Books, 1999. —. The Right Stuff. 1979. New York: Picador, 2008. —. “Seizing the Power.” The New Journalism. Eds. Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. 23-36. Wolfe, Tom and E. W. Johnson, eds. The New Journalism. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.

CHAPTER TWO “IF WE’RE TOO LAZY TO LEARN HISTORY HISTORY, MAYBE WE CAN LEARN PLOTS”: HISTORY IN THE FICTION OF CHUCK PALAHNIUK CAMMIE SUBLETTE

In an essay on the current state of the writer’s market, one involving more writers than ever, many of them poorly trained and somewhat delusional about the significance of their own work, Chuck Palahniuk attempts to find some redemption for the masses who today consider themselves writers. He finds that redemption in a modified Jungian approach to human history: “Our flood of books and movies—of plots and story arcs—they might be mankind’s way to be aware of all our history. Our options. All the ways we’ve tried in the past to fix the world” (“You Are Here” 38). In an essay filled with stories of shattered dreams, overbooked agents, and a certain degree of disgust for both sides of the publishing coin—struggling writers and disenchanted agents alike— Palahniuk suggests that the only potential light at the end of the tunnel is that such endeavors might provide knowledge of human history. However, Palahniuk closes the essay with a reflection that none of this rush-to-publish madness would be necessary if we would just study, do our homework, read our history. But we won’t. And Palahniuk knows we won’t. He knows this because he banks on it in nearly every novel he writes. His formula is rather simple; he uses enough genuine history to provide a backdrop of authenticity, whether the subject matter is colonial America or art history. But then Palahniuk takes detours, rarely distinguishing for the readers which historic tidbits originate in fact and which fiction, which are urban legend and which are accepted by the blessed few genuine scholars of the past, the historians. And while Palahniuk’s novels suggest that the worst kind of public history is the

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wave of the future, Disney’s mouse-ears approach the only way to get Americans to do their history homework, Palahniuk likewise implies that the problems attendant with this kind of public history will ultimately do more harm than good. In Palahniuk’s most celebrated novel, Fight Club, Tyler Durden expresses a certain amount of reverence for history, justifying Fight Club (and then Project Mayhem) with history’s long record of human greatness appearing in the most adverse of circumstances. His philosophy, as articulated by one of his many followers, is the most basic kind of yin and yang of morality: “We have to show these men and women freedom by enslaving them, and show them courage by frightening them” (Fight Club 149). The lesson in extremes would be unnecessary, though, if men and women only studied their history; if they, like Durden, realized that “Napoleon bragged that he could train men to sacrifice their lives for a scrap of ribbon” (Fight Club 149). If they knew anything about Napoleon, they may hesitate to jump into Durden’s postmodern and adrenalineinfused army (nonetheless oppressive), realizing that like his historic forefather, Durden would not hesitate to sacrifice a few of his own men for straggling behind. Durden consistently laments that the men of his generation appear to be “God’s middle children,” overlooked because they have “no special place in history” (Fight Club 141). Unless they fabricate them, they have no wars to fight, no massive political systems to build or destroy (Fight Club 149). As Krister Friday asserts, “It is here that we can first glimpse Fight Club’s anxiety over the absence of periodization that could serve as the proper context/support for identity.” For Durden, the problem in remaining nothing more than an historical footnote is that his generation has no real impact, no meaning. Any wake left by his generation is merely a faint and copied trail of the former generations who made something genuine, even if what they made was a mess. As our unnamed narrator grumbles, “For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone” (Fight Club 124). Although Durden reveres history for its ability to record the actions of individuals, making their lives count for something, he also criticizes history, at least recorded history, arguing that it fails to provide information on the technologies and methods of waging wars and building empires, focusing merely on the intellectual processes and eventual results. For example, he notes, there are three ways to make napalm, and none of them appear in history texts (Fight Club 13). Unless Durden is genuinely confused about the kind of sources needed to wage a revolution,

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looking for munitions tips in history texts, he’s criticizing a more common problem in recorded history -- the temptation of historians to sugar-coat history. Still, one has to wonder what kind of history Durden has been reading, for most historical scholarship does, indeed, delve into the grisly parts of human history. Only in a secondary classroom would history appear as one-dimensional as Durden suggests. As James Loewen discovered in his study of twelve secondary history textbooks used in American classrooms, many of the most historically disturbing issues our country has ever faced are glossed or ignored in high school history primers, including discussions of racism, justifications historically offered for inequality, and corruption in the government (Britton 18). This suggests that Durden’s exposure to history has largely ended with his high school education, despite his college background (Fight Club 50-51). Given the light general education requirements in History now common in college curricula (many degrees include only one or two courses in introductory survey courses), unless Durden pursued a more rigorous course of study by major or by choice, neither of which is suggested in the text, a college degree would not necessarily enhance his understanding of history. And, as Palahniuk notes in his introduction to Stranger than Fiction, he “tend[s] to give each character an education and a skill set that limits how they see the world” (xxi). Thus, one of Durden’s central limitations is that he is a novice to genuine history. He’s a tourist of human endeavors at least to the point that his alter-ego, our unnamed narrator, is a tourist of human pain. Elsewhere in Fight Club, it seems that Durden’s problem with history isn’t so much that he thinks historians hide from the gross facts of human history but that they merely record those facts, never participating in the stories they tell, and never inviting their readers to participate. As Paul Kennett claims, Durden “earns the love of his followers by his open contempt for the History that has left them bereft, and his promise to impose a new eschatology that positions them as central players—to affect the course of events” (51). Durden, therefore, creates Project Mayhem and all of its various subcommittees, inviting his members to make history and then read about it. At the very least, members feel newly implicated in history, for even if they were not personally involved in the activities covered by the media, they are connected to Project Mayhem and feel connected to history as it is being generated. It’s in the newspaper today how somebody broke into offices between the tenth and fifteenth floors of the Hein Tower, and climbed out the office windows, and painted the south side of the building with a grinning fivestory mask, and set fires so the window at the center of each huge eye

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blazed huge and alive and inescapable over the city at dawn…. Of course you read this, and you want to know right away if it was part of Project Mayhem. (Fight Club 118-19)

The ideas for various assaults—on buildings, entities, or other people—all come from proposals submitted on scraps of paper by individual members of Durden’s urban armies. Since no one except Durden knows what is written on the scraps and which he retains versus which he throws out, when “assignments” are given, all feel involved, but only a few actually do the deeds, actually launch the attacks. This method is Durden’s own vehicle for group implication without the multiplied risk of letting so many people know the plan(s). Because their attacks increasingly appear as items of newsworthy interest, they all feel historically significant. Durden’s complaint that history remains detached and scholarly is partially addressed by his homework assignments – small experiments in group participation without full group disclosure. However, this solution carries with it another problem, for someone must know the entire story if it’s to be recorded, if the armies created by Durden are to be remembered in the annals of history. Our protagonist notes as much when he asks Durden, “Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?” (Fight Club 15) The problems of recording history and simultaneously participating in it never abate in Fight Club, for those who make history in this text are ultimately killed or become brainwashed and/or insane, leaving them unable to record anything approximating an objective view of what happened. Their very participation in Tyler Durden’s attempted anarchy has rendered them incapable of recording it. Thus, readers are left to rely on a highly speculative text narrated by an extremely unreliable narrator, a man suffering from schizophrenic delusions, a man deemed harmful enough to himself and his society that he is telling his story while confined in an asylum. One possible answer to this historical conundrum is provided by public history, a discipline and practice seeking to penetrate the textual nature of history and put action back into the presentation of the past. But in Palahniuk’s presentation of it, public history is not the balm for historical inaccessibility. In Palahniuk’s Choke, public history pushes traditional history out of the limelight, but here the reverence is gone, leaving only criticisms of the tourism-driven packaging of history. Victor Mancini, narrator and protagonist, works as a first-person interpreter in “Colonial Dunsboro,” a space inhabited mostly by society’s misfits, drug addicts, and lunatics. Referring to his fellow interpreters as a “chain gang of throwbacks,” Mancini notes that “Mistress Plain, the seamstress, is a needle freak. The

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miller is cooking crystal meth. The innkeeper deals acid to the busloads of bored teenagers who get dragged here on school field trips” (Choke 31). All of the interpreters have addictions and ailments related to their twentyfirst century lives, but this is perhaps the thing that makes them most authentic—they are pariahs, something they have in common with the 1734 folks they are paid to portray. As Mancini postulates, The only funny part about Colonial Dunsboro is maybe it’s too authentic, but for all the wrong reasons. This whole crowd of losers and nutcases who hide out here because they can’t make it in the real world, in real jobs— isn’t this why we left England in the first place? To establish our own alternate reality. Weren’t the Pilgrims pretty much the crackpots of their time? (31-32)

Mancini’s biggest criticism of public history, then, is that his behavior and the behavior of his deviant colleagues is frequently more befitting eighteenth century life than tourists realize. Thus, as he explains to a group of fourth graders entrusted to his miscreant colonial teaching, in 1642 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, history records an instance of an adolescent boy executed for “buggering” a number of barnyard animals. Students of American history will recognize this as a rendition of the life of Thomas Granger, a youth who appears in William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation under the section “A Horrible Case of Bestiality.” The two passages are nearly identical, as the following quotes demonstrate: There was a youth whose name was Thomas Granger. He was servant to an honest man of Duxbury, being about 16 or 17…. He was this year detected of buggery, and indicted for the same, with a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey. Horrible it is to mention, but the truth of the history requires it…. And accordingly he was cast by the jury and condemned, and after executed about the 8th of September, 1642. A very sad spectacle it was. For first the mare and then the cow and the rest of the lesser cattle were killed before his face, according to the law, Leviticus xx.15, and then he himself was executed. The cattle were all cast into a great and large pit that was digged of purpose for them, and no use made of any part of them. (Bradford 198)

Here is the same incident, as described by Mancini in Choke: In the summer of 1642 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, a teenage boy was accused of buggering a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves, and a turkey. This is real history on the books. In accordance with the Biblical laws of Leviticus, after the boy confessed he was forced to watch each

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animal being slaughtered. Then he was killed and his body heaped with the dead animals and buried in an unmarked pit. (Choke 179)

Palahniuk’s point, it appears, is that public history glosses some of the most significant aspects of history, for they are painful, ugly, depressing, and void of any readily available simplistic moral platitude. What moral platitude does one take away from the story of Granger? After hearing the story of Granger’s fate, all the children can think to ask is, “What is buggering?” (179). They have no frame of reference for this kind of tale; it jars strikingly with their other history lessons, both those learned in school and in public spaces such as Colonial Dunsboro, where they are encouraged to be brave, bold, and courageous in fighting oppression, but only if the oppression is truly bad and the fighting truly necessary. Granger died, apparently, for the right to violate farm animals. What neat little lesson does that convey? As Mancini relates Granger’s story, the children are wide-eyed, paying rapt attention, for once, to the history lesson. Lest the reader feel sympathy for these innocents, Palahniuk illustrates time and again that they go beyond the run-of-the-mill spoiled brats, behaving as a peculiar kind of twenty-first century American Hitler-Jugend enclave. For example, one of their favorite activities is shaking the eggs in the incubator, intentionally rendering the majority of the chicken population of Colonial Dunsboro lame, crippled, deformed, blind, or otherwise damaged: “a regular chick isn’t as interesting as, say, a chicken with only one eye or a chicken with no neck or with a stunted paralyzed leg, so the kids shake the eggs. Shake them hard and put them back to hatch” (Choke 122). Mancini’s disgust with the children’s behavior is rivaled only by his disgust for the educational experience Colonial Dunsboro purports to offer tourists. About the deformed chicks, Mancini remarks, “So if what’s born is deformed or insane? It’s all for the sake of education” (Choke 122). This location of education at the core of most activities ongoing in Colonial Dunsboro resonates with most actual living history museums. The largest, most well-funded and most well-attended of colonial living history museums in the United States, Colonial Williamsburg, has long operated under the motto selected by its first benefactor, John D. Rockefeller, “That the future may learn from the past” (Carson 14). Kirster Friday observes that “it is a commonplace to say that all (narrative) histories . . . are primarily expressions of the present and for the present, and its condition, and its identity.” The idea is to learn something relevant to our present and future from our study of the past, so historians are to educate with an end in mind, an attempt to convey something valuable, useful, and moral. This is potentially problematic, for the past does not always yield a viable

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moral lesson. In public history, however, the aim is one of education, giving the masses some valuable life lesson to carry away, and therefore, as Lowenthal bemoans, “wishful thinking plays a major role in public history” (38). Harold Shurtleff, the director of research for Colonial Williamsburg during Rockefeller’s oversight, explained their goal as one of “mass education in history” (Carson 14), but this mass education, from the beginning, sacrificed a certain degree of historical accuracy in the interest of telling a good story. Therefore, Palahniuk’s revered space of history is further insulted by public history’s occasional insistence on edutainment, where spectacle sometimes defeats knowledge and the past becomes more unfathomable than ever. Palahniuk seems to be revising Warhol here, for now history is whatever you can get away with. Thus, in Palahniuk’s presentation of what passes for education in Colonial Dunsboro, tourists—especially the young ones—are given a moral pass, allowed to explore their worst impulses without sanction. Not only is history education depleted in Palahniuk’s fictional version of the living history museum, but so is moral education. For example, children visiting Colonial Dunsboro take great liberties with whomever is in the town stocks. Usually Mancini’s best friend, Denny, is the recipient of the children’s brutal curiosity, for he spends most of his days locked in the stocks for some minor violation of historical authenticity. Denny’s most recent offenses include gum chewing, wearing a wristwatch, using Chap Stick, smoking cigarettes, chewing tobacco, wearing cologne, shaving his head, and failing to wash a nightclub stamp from his hand (Choke 26-7; 29; 71). While he’s bent over in the stocks, the children stick things in his nose and mouth, or in his nose and then his mouth, and they decorate his head with graffiti. “Eat me” is written on his head in red marker when readers first meet him, and he apparently landed in the stocks for having this on his head, even though it was written on him while he was in the stocks for another offense committed earlier in the day (Choke 26). Mancini stands vigilant watch over his friend whenever possible, for not only are maniacal school-children on the loose, but, as he relates of the original colonial stocks, “For sure, they don’t teach you this in history class, but in colonial times, the person who got left in the stocks overnight was nothing less than fair game for everyone to nail” (Choke 32). Nonetheless, while Denny is punished for being inauthentic, the tourists “will all be in the tavern drinking Australian ale out of pewter mugs made in Indonesia” (Choke 33). Authenticity, therefore, takes a back seat in Colonial Dunsboro when tourist dollars are at stake, and in the real world of public history, even more than in Palahniuk’s fiction, there are a lot of tourist dollars at stake.

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An estimated 100 million visitors tour over 36,000 American historic sites each year, according to Catherine M. Cameron and John B. Gatewood (108). These same Americans spent over 294 billion tourism dollars in 1988 alone, a figure that, when combined with the 18 billion dollars spent by foreign tourists on American tourism, added up to approximately six and a half percent of our nation’s annual gross national product in 1988 (Mooney-Melvin 37). And it’s increasingly crucial to public history sites that they become self-sustaining, for although the early part of the twentieth century witnessed generous governmental expenditure on history, recent years show a decline in government support (Grabowski 25). Two American government agencies most closely allied with public history, the NEH and NEA, have suffered government cuts in the last thirty years (Grabowski 25). And if museum historians are right in their assertions that “the Reagan revolution of the 1980s was the beginning of the movement to re-privatize art and history in America” (Grabowski 25), then businesses increasingly preside over public history sites rather than non-profits and government agencies. The most successful of these businesses, of course, is Disney, its Orlando site “the most visited tourist attraction in the country” (Grabowski 27). And since, according to Patricia Mooney-Melvin, “conventional wisdom has it that tourists do not necessarily want good history” (43), a site’s popularity sometimes trumps its authenticity. The Disney example is highly illustrative, for its presentation of history “is celebratory, selective, and anathema to almost every professional historian” (Grabowski 27). But, because Disney has also seen an incredible profit-margin from hawking its version of the past, many historians and public history agencies have studied Disney’s methods and displays, hoping to tap some of the financial success of Disney (Grabowski 27). As an historian working at Historic Hudson Valley explained, “‘Museums have to play to an audience that pays to come in, that expects to be entertained’” (qtd. in Krugler 357). The many dedicated scholars working in public history spaces actively engage the controversies regarding authenticity. Historians collectively acknowledge that all history is subject to interpretation, all facts and artifacts necessarily fraught with bias if they are to become meaningful. As Cary Carson writes, “Objective truth is chimera, historical reality consensual, interpretation selective, the practice of history revisionist, and the meanings we ascribe to the past relative and subject to change” (17). Eric Gable, Richard Handler, and Anna Lawson reiterate this message, stating, “[A]ll historical narratives involve selection and interpretation, influenced by ideology” (791). This, however, does not mean that historians are free to spin any and all tales they desire, for as Lowenthal

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asserts, “while realizing that the past can never be retrieved unaltered, historians still strive for impartial, checkable accuracy, minimizing bias as inescapable but deplorable” (32). Historical interpretation, therefore, is an incredibly complicated and sometimes fluid process, its difficulties magnified when the interpretation is aimed at a public mass audience. An ambiguous historical interpretation is often the result of years of scholarly research. For public historians dealing with unsophisticated consumers of history—tourists—this means that much of their research and the research of other historians cannot be used, for it “does not always provide useful or clear answers” (Krugler 358). Aside from their typical inability to manage ambiguity in historical interpretations, mass audiences present some additional challenges for public historians. Americans are incredible consumers of public history. Unfortunately, Americans are also terrible students of history. John D. Krugler claims that “the only significant formal contact that many adult Americans have with their country’s history comes from visits to living history museums” (354). Arriving at historical sites unprepared and poorly informed, tourists are vulnerable to the interpretations they hear, unable to recognize gaps, omissions, or embellishments. In addition, as Diane F. Britton argues, “our culture promotes a sense of the past that clashes with what historians have documented to be true” (14). Americans have a loveaffair with romantic nostalgia, seeking history’s stories of American patriotism, valor, courage, individualism, and goodness even when confronted with an evidentiary vacuum. And we tend to let go of historic truth easier than we let go of our romanticism. For example, when in 1923 Warren G. Harding was reminded that one of his favorite stories of valor—Paul Revere’s historic midnight ride—was mostly fabrication, Harding replied, “‘I love the story of Paul Revere whether he rode or not’” (qtd. in Britton 14). Likewise, we now have “more sites commemorating stations on the Underground Railroad than ever existed in the pre-Civil War era” (Britton 16). Our uncomfortable relationship to our nation’s slave-holding origins pushes us to focus on the Americans who resisted wrong-headed mainstream ideology, even though this means that we skew the historical landscape. Similarly, public historians have to deal with how the present influences a mass audience’s interpretation of the past, often in incongruous and potentially short-sighted ways. This means that historical accuracy might have to be sacrificed in order to maintain good public relations. One of the best examples of this occurred when, in 1969, Colonial Williamsburg acquired Carter’s Gove, a nearby plot of land that once was a plantation. Discussions immediately began concerning how the

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space would be presented to the public. Ultimately, Colonial Williamsburg management determined that one of the most crucial components of Carter’s Grove would be its reconstructed eighteenth century slave quarters (Gable, Handler, and Lawson 801). By the time it was ready for public traffic in the mid-nineteen eighties, historians had done fifteen years worth of research on both this specific plantation and on eighteenth century plantations in general, and they therefore felt relatively confident that their reconstructed space would approximate, in many ways, what an eighteenth century slave quarter would have looked like. Historians researched the diet of slaves in and around Carter’s Grove in the 1700s, and, as the information was conveyed to curators, the garden buttressing the quarters and the quarter’s furnishings and props began to reflect these insights. One of the most significant staples of the area’s eighteenth century slaves was watermelon, as historians determined from crop records and illustrations (Gable, Handler, and Lawson 802). Curators therefore planted watermelons in the garden and included watermelon rinds in the quarter’s food displays. As Gable, Handler, and Lawson report, though, interpreters worried about the message this may send to twentieth century tourists: “[I]nterpreters resisted what they felt was black stereotyping, and the curators apparently agreed. The watermelon was removed from the cabins, and the next year other kinds of melons were grown and displayed, even though statistical data—the social historian's facts—indicated the overwhelming prevalence of watermelon” (802). Thus, a legitimate concern about presentism exercised by unsophisticated tourists led to a deviation from historical authenticity. Mancini’s primary objection to public history, however, isn’t about a lack of authenticity regarding what is included in living history museums. His problem is with what is omitted. As he laments, “living history museums . . . always leave the best parts out. Like typhus. And opium. And scarlet letters. Shunning. Witch-burning” (Choke 29). Mancini, therefore, seeks to reintroduce these topics into the living history museum. Along with his rendition of Thomas Granger’s seventeenth century bestiality, Mancini likewise tells children about bubonic plague (180-81), yellow fever (181), and cancer (181-85), taking special pains to erase their sense of childhood entitlement by providing detailed descriptions of the ways young boys who worked as chimney sweeps suffered and died as a result of squamous cell carcinoma they frequently developed on their scrotum skin, a form of cancer initially called “soot warts” (Choke 185). He likewise takes great pleasure in explaining “ring-around-a-rosy” as a shorthand reference to the plague, a game having everything to do with

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childhood misery and loss, as he tells twenty-first century children, and nothing to do with fun and frivolity. Like Durden before him, then, Mancini accuses history of leaving out the ugly and degrading parts of recorded human existence. Unfortunately, it is at this point that Mancini likewise resembles Durden because of his limited historical knowledge. As he spins tale after grisly tale, he becomes glaringly unreliable as a public historian, for he scoffs at the history he’s supposed to convey to his tourist groups—“some shit nobody wants to learn, like how to start a fire. How to carve an apple-head doll. How to make ink out of black walnuts” (180). Victor is apparently unable or unwilling to discern fact and fiction, history and urban legend. For example, Mancini’s interpretive history of “ring-around-a-rosy” having its origins in the plague is an urban legend, as far as historians and folklorists can tell. As Alice Cary observes, despite interesting theories correlating the nursery rhyme and symptoms of the plague, “there’s no evidence to back these correlations.” The dates are all wrong, too. The first documented record of the rhyme dates from 1790, and the urban legend has the rhyme connecting to the 14th century (Cary). Mancini at least updates the correlation to the 1665 plague (Choke 180), but that’s still more than a century before the rhyme ever shows up in print. Further, the original language does not meld so neatly with plague symptoms, reading, “Ring a ring a rosie / A bottle full of posie / All the girls in our town / Ring for little Josie” (Cary). Therefore, although the legend is frequently repeated as historical fact, sometimes even by those who should know better, the scholarship on the matter provides no genuine backing for the legend. That Mancini repeats the legend as history suggests that he either does not know better or that he sees his role as one of performance, and he’s willing to bend the truth a bit if it makes for a better story. The same is true of Mancini’s commentary on the fates of those colonists left in the stocks overnight. His assertion that they were “fair game for everybody to nail” (Choke 32) is conceivable, for there would have been little one could do under these circumstances to prevent such an assault. Anonymity would have protected the assailants, also, for as Mancini reasons, “anybody bent over had no way of knowing who was doing the ram job” (Choke 32). That, too, makes sense. However, no historical records of this ever happening exist, not in literature, social history, or recorded history. Even Richard Godbeer’s careful and thorough research of sex and sexuality in colonial America has raised no evidence to support Mancini’s claim. Therefore, what Mancini is here lamenting that “they don’t teach . . . in history class” is perhaps better left to those who wish to study fiction.

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Because Choke deals explicitly with history, especially the practice of disseminating it to the mostly uneducated masses, the historical inaccuracies in the novel are intriguing. Since these inaccuracies all originate from the same source—our protagonist, who is a first-person interpreter by day and a con-artist by night—Palahniuk may be undermining Mancini, having him bleat about the need to get all of history into the account and then mucking up history by smashing it together with legend and speculation. As Peter Matthews admonishes of the constant misreadings of Palahniuk as synonymous with Tyler Durden: “Tyler Durden does not speak directly for Palahniuk any more than Heathcliff is the mouthpiece of Emily Bronte” (82). So must we distinguish between Palahniuk and Mancini. Further, Palahniuk says that he does not “‘typically like his characters’” (qtd. in de Rocha 106), and Mancini is sometimes particularly hard to like. As evidenced by his near-death choking performances every night in order to secure wealthy patrons, Mancini, like his antagonistic bosses in Colonial Dunsboro, will tell any story necessary in order to turn a profit. That he fails to provide an accurate presentation of history, then, is hardly shocking. There is an additional explanation for the historical inaccuracies in the novel when they’re taken into consideration alongside the many other historical inaccuracies in Palahniuk’s fiction. When Palahniuk’s novels are interrogated holistically, a pattern emerges, one that suggests Palahniuk is busy telling us plots because we refuse to study history. Plots are interesting and sell books. More importantly, plots will at least fill in some of the gaps that would otherwise lead us to annihilate one another. And, since we won’t study history, we’ll likely never know the difference. A quick run-through of inaccuracies and half-truths related to art history in Palahniuk’s novel Diary include the following: the story of the Mona Lisa’s missing eyebrows (23); El Greco’s astigmatism (24); Bernini’s burnt leg (57); Goya’s lead poisoning (70); and, most significantly, the legendary theory that “famous old masters like Rembrandt and Caravaggio and van Eyck, they just traced” (68). In each of the cases cited, there is some half-truth or speculative argument behind the claim provided. About the missing eyebrows on Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting, readers are told, “[I]t has no eyebrows because they were the last detail the artist added. He was putting wet paint onto dry. In the seventeenth century, a restorer used the wrong solvent and wiped them off forever” (Diary 23-24). According to French engineer Pascal Cotte, there is now definitive proof that da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” once had eyebrows if not eyelashes, for Cotte designed and built an incredibly high-definition camera and scanned the painting, looking for

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traces of brushstrokes that have faded or been removed. Indeed, Cotte claims to have found “a single brushstroke of a single hair above the left brow” (“High Resolution”). So, although there is now evidence that da Vinci’s calm madonna once had eyebrows, there is no evidence to suggest what happened to them. Cotte speculated that they could have been removed in a careless cleaning, but he likewise suggested simple fading as equally plausible. Similarly, Palahniuk’s novel contains an inaccuracy regarding the consensus on El Greco’s distorted images. “In art history,” the Diary narrator, Misty, informs readers, “they teach . . . that El Greco is only famous because of his astigmatism” (24). El Greco’s elongated figures were temporarily and speculatively attributed to ocular astigmatism, it’s true. However, art historians do not even know if El Greco suffered from astigmatism, and it’s looking less and less likely all of the time, for the diagnosis was based on the hypothesis that someone suffering from astigmatism would see a deformity and therefore elongate or otherwise distort his or her artistic rendering of the image. The hypothesis retains very little support, however, because in 2000 Stuart Anstis published his findings from a study designed to test the theory. The study strongly suggested rather quick self-correction and compensation by anyone suffering from the kind of visual distortion caused by astigmatism—an approximate “stretch[ing] of their visual images horizontally by 30%” (Anstis 208). Further refuting the astigmatism theory is the “historical objection” retained visibly in El Greco’s designs, for he sketched his figures on canvas first in pencil, using average proportions, only later elongating figures when he painted over his pencil sketches (Anstis 208). The Bernini inaccuracy is quite minor, for the central idea is the same as in Palahniuk’s rendition and in the one shared by art historians: Bernini burned himself with a candle while sketching his mirrored image in order to produce a pained self-portrait. The resulting work is a marble bust titled Damned Soul (Hayes). In Diary, the narrator explains that Bernini burned his leg in order to capture his pained expression (57), but art historians agree that Bernini burned his left hand (Hayes). The ailment attributed to Francisco Goya, like many of the other illnesses and diseases Diary connects to famous artists, is mostly speculative. Goya may have suffered from lead poisoning, as is suggested in Diary (70). And if he did experience the symptoms of lead poisoning, it was almost certainly because of the lead used in his bright colors, as the narrator of Diary contends (70). However, as Alex Jamieson argues, Goya could have been suffering from any number of ailments, all of them the subject of extended speculation on behalf of various art historians,

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biographers, and even Goya’s family members and associates. The list of possible ailments includes meningitis, syphilis, the lingering effects of a carriage accident, and encephalopathy caused by lead poisoning (Jamieson). Because postmortem diagnoses of our revered artists often follow fads in present medical research and theorizing, art historians exercise and suggest caution in too readily accepting a particular diagnosis, particularly since so often the diagnosis is buttressed by relatively superficial evidence. In an article on the prevalence of bipolar associations with artists, Jo Ann C. Gutin notes that a number of critics worry about fads in attributing infinite and sundry diseases to creativity. At the time of the article, Gutin noted that alcoholism, epilepsy, and syphilis had pre-dated the bipolar association with creativity, and we could now add autism to the list. The most significant inaccuracy or half-truth in Diary is the theory that many of our masters of Western art merely traced (68). This theory, known as the Hockney / Falco Thesis, named for David Hockney and Charles M. Falco, who originated and dispersed it, is incredibly controversial and has been rather soundly refuted in a number of instances. That our narrator, Misty Marie Wilmot, a talented but struggling artist who attended a rather elite art school, repeats the Hockney / Falco theory, claiming that it’s “what they teach you in art school” (Diary 68), suggests a good deal about the way Palahniuk is sifting historical fodder, culling what is relevant to a good story, and ignoring the many complexities of historical interpretation or conflicting accounts. In this particular case, art historians have meticulously analyzed a great many individual works of art, refuting the tracing thesis on the grounds that various angles, shades, and dimensions would be impossible to pull off via the kind of “camera obscura” argued in the thesis (Stork). The half-truths in Diary detailed above merely serve as illustrations for a trend in Palahniuk’s fiction, for in each of his novels, Palahniuk’s narrators repeat a number of speculative half-truths regarding history. Palahniuk is thus sampling history, using enough nonfiction to set the stage for his fictional story, leaving the complications and interpretations to the historians. There are at least two good reasons for this approach— lack of readerly sophistication and a need for some kind of absolute within a fictional world of uncertainty. Palahniuk’s readers are not really prepared for historical ambiguity and controversy, for few of them read widely and even fewer have been exposed to the kind of genuine historical scholarship that historians deem significant. The American public tends to be unprepared for ambiguity in historical scholarship, as Britton, Krugler, and Lowenthal illustrate, and

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Palahniuk’s readers tend to have similar blind spots in their literary and historical training. In source after source, Palahniuk’s readers are characterized as average guys, mostly unexposed to higher education (Binelli and Clark; Hedegaard; Memmott D4). They are a devoted group of fans, many of them male, many of them ranging between ages thirteen and thirty (Memmott D4; Lee 422). They have a reputation as non-readers before approaching Palahniuk, and they are typically classed as blue collar (Hedegaard). Many of these readers also deem themselves fans, accepting and even endorsing their label as “the Cult” (Binelli and Clark; Hedegaard). In addition, many of these fans take Palahniuk’s novels as gospel, assuming his characters reflect his own philosophy of life. In his afterword to the 2005 edition of Fight Club, Palahniuk notes that “young men around the world took legal action to change their names to ‘Tyler Durden’” and burned themselves with lye, replicating the symbolic actions of Durden (211). Similarly, as he reported in an interview with Rolling Stone, in the immediate aftermath of Fight Club success, fans would regularly approach him and ask, “Can I hit you really, really hard?” (Hedegaard) Other fans became insistent, demanding to know where Fight Clubs took place, despite Palahniuk’s assertions that he made up the clubs. Many began holding their own underground slug-fests and then sending Palahniuk pictures of their bashed faces as a kind of homage (Binelli and Clark). All of this suggests that Palahniuk’s readers are not incredibly savvy, for they seem to accept his characters as extensions of Palahniuk, failing to see the incredible flaws and limitations in Palahniuk’s protagonists. Further, like most average Americans, they have little educational background from which to draw intertextual comparisons between Palahniuk’s fiction and the historical events he represents. To be fair, a few sources complicate the standard understanding of Palahniuk’s readers, such as the increasing interest in Palahniuk’s novels taking place in the academy as evidenced by the academic conference hosted at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania (“Afterword” 212) and a growing list of academic articles and doctoral dissertations dealing with Palahniuk’s fiction. Likewise, college students rate the movie adaptation of Fight Club as a cult favorite (Thompson), and Palahniuk’s novels appear regularly on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s list, “What They’re Reading on College Campuses.” Still, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that Palahniuk’s readers are no better educated in history than the representative masses who attend most public history sites, so it’s safe to assert that these readers are mostly unaware of the many complications and ambiguities involved in doing scholarly historical research. As Lowenthal comments, “In most school

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texts, history remains one-dimensional even where controversy is rampant” (37). If there is little known about the raging and incredibly complicated debate over, for example, the settlement of North American Indians, Lowenthal’s example on this matter, then how could mass audiences be expected to follow or appreciate a discussion of the nuances involved in interpreting Goya’s illness and death? Further, Palahniuk apparently knows what public historians struggle to accept: the public is uncomfortable with contradiction, uncertainty. Because Palahniuk foists upon his reading audience so much contradiction and uncertainty elsewhere—including, usually, a fairly healthy helping of ethical uncertainty and existential doubt—he gives readers a break when it comes to history. If, as Jesse Kavadlo claims, Palahniuk is exercising a version of “closet morality,” subtly presenting a false morality followed by its deconstruction, then perhaps the message is already subtle, complicated, and challenging enough for readers. History, at least, remains a known and knowable entity in Palahniuk’s fiction. Indeed, the only questions that remain regarding history in Palahniuk’s fiction are: Will the public choose to access the past, and will those who convey history, educators or interpreters, tell the whole truth?

Works Cited Anstis, Stuart. “Was El Greco Stigmatic?” Leonardo 35.2 (2002): 208. Binelli, Mark and John Clark. “The Cult of Chuck.” Rolling Stone 19 Sept. 2002: 59-60. Bradford, William. From Of Plymouth Plantation. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 5th ed. Vol. 1. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: Norton, 1998. 165-204. Britton, Diane F. “Public History and Public Memory.” The Public Historian 19.3 (1997): 11-23. Cameron, Catherine M. and John B. Gatewood. “Excursions into the UnRemembered Past: What People Want from Visits to historical Sites.” The Public Historian 22.3 (2000): 107-27. Carson, Cary. “Colonial Williamsburg and the Practice of Interpretive Planning in American History Museums.” The Public Historian 20.3 (1998): 11-51. Cary, Alice. “Fact or Fiction?” Biography November 1999: 30. de Rocha, Antonio Casado. “Disease and Community in Chuck Palahniuk’s Early Novels.” Stirrings Still: The International Journal of Existential Literature 2.2 (2005): 105-15.

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Friday, Krister. “‘A Generation of Men Without History’: Fight Club, Masculinity, and the Historical Symptom.” Postmodern Culture 13.3 (2003). Gable, Eric, Richard Handler, and Anna Lawson. “On the Uses of Relativism: Fact, Conjecture, and Black and White Histories at Colonial Williamsburg.” American Ethnologist 19.4 (1992): 791-805. Godbeer, Richard. “‘The Cry of Sodom’: Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England.” The William and Mary Quarterly 52.2 (1995): 259-86. Grabowski, John. “History and Enterprise: Past, Profit, and Future in the United States.” Journal of American Studies of Turkey 22 (2005): 1933. Gutin, Jo Ann C. “That Fine Madness—Manic Depression Is Latest Mental Illness Popularly Linked to Artistic Genius.” Discover Special Issue: The Science of Creativity. Oct. 1996. September 26, 2008. Hayes, Tom. “A Jouissance Beyond the Phallus: Juno, Saint Teresa, Bernini, Lacan.” American Imago 56.4 (1999): 331-55. Hedegaard, Erik. “A Heart Breaking Life of Staggering Weirdness.” Rolling Stone 30 June 2005: 124-30. “High Resolution Image Hints at Mona Lisa’s Eyebrows.” CNN.com 18 Oct. 2007. 26 Sept. 2008. . Jamieson, Alex. “An Essay on the Life and Work of Francisco Goya.” Worked Based Learning in Primary Care 3.3 (2005): 236-52. Kavadlo, Jesse. “The Fiction of Self-Destruction: Chuck Palahniuk, Closet Moralist.” Stirrings Still: The International Journal of Existential Literature 2.2 (2005): 3-24. Kennett, Paul. “Fight Club and the Dangers of Oedipal Obsession.” Stirrings Still: The International Journal of Existential Literature 2.2 (2005): 48-64. Krugler, John D. “Behind the Public Presentations: Research and Scholarship at Living History Museums of Early America.” The William and Mary Quarterly 48.3 (1991): 347-86. Lee, Terry. “Virtual Violence in Fight Club: This Is What Transformation of Masculine Ego Feels Like.” Journal of American & Comparative Cultures 25.3 (2002): 418-23. Lowenthal, David. “History and Memory.” The Public Historian 19.2 (1997): 30-39. JSTOR. University of Arkansas – Fort Smith. 12 Sept. 2008. .

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Mathews, Peter. “Diagnosing Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.” Stirrings Still: The International Journal of Existential Literature 2.2 (2005): 81-104. Memmott, Carol. “Palahniuk’s Work Can ‘Make You Feel a Little Sick.’” USA Today 31 May 2008: D4. Mooney-Melvin, Patricia. “Harnessing the Romance of the Past: Preservation, Tourism, and History.” The Public Historian 13.2 (1991): 35-48. Palahniuk, Chuck. Choke. New York: Random House, 2001. —. Diary. New York: Random House, 2003. —. Fight Club. 1996. New York: Norton, 2005. —. “Afterword.” Fight Club. New York: Norton, 2005. 209-18. —. “Fact and Fiction: An Introduction.” Stranger Than Fiction. New York: Random House, 2004. xv-xxii. —. “You Are Here.” Stranger Than Fiction. New York: Random House, 2004. 27-38. Stork, David G. Art Optics. “Future Discussions: From ‘Rosetta Stone’ to Challenge Paintings.” Ricoh Innovations and Stanford University. 26 Sept. 2008. . Thompson, Stacy. “Punk Cinema.” Cinema Journal 43.2 (2004): 47-66.

CHAPTER THREE TRACKING CONVERSION: A STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF SURVIVOR AND CHOKE TATYANA SHUMSKY

Palahniuk’s Survivor and Choke are gripping tales of personal discoveries and critical change that drives to the heart of the protagonists’ perceptions and outlooks on life. They are tales of conversion. The conversion narrative structure is historically rooted in the religious diary form. Conversion narratives describe a process of change, maturation and, most importantly, healing. The process allows the convert to adapt his world view to include important coping mechanisms that improve his life and grant him admittance to a supportive social network. The function of a conversion narrative structure in turn aims to inspire and encourage the readers to embark on their own conversions. Thus by employing this structure, Palahniuk’s novels embrace narrative’s potential to inspire readers with their secular stories of change, redemption, and increased personal agency. Viewing Survivor and Choke through the lens of the conversion narrative structure allows us to appreciate the subtle schematic undercurrent that links these novels both in terms of form and consequence. This chapter traces the elements of conversion in both texts, exploring the way they fit into a conversation narrative schema and analyzing the traits that identify them as secular conversion narratives. This highlights parallels between the texts and the rhetoric of Christian conversion narratives. Furthermore, I assess the impact and function of the narrative form in relation to Palahniuk’s audience, establishing that Palahniuk’s fictional conversions aim to inspire his readers to take control of their own lives. The tradition of telling or writing about one’s conversion experience was popularized by Christianity. Patricia Caldwell asserts that “nobody

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knows who gave the first full-fledged conversion narrative – or when, or even where it was heard” (45). However, Christians generally trace the tradition to “the apostle Paul, whose conversion on the road to Damascus…became a prototype for those that followed” (Peters 31). In the Book of Acts, Chapter 9, the Bible tells the story of a young Pharisee named Saul, who would convert to Christianity, taking on the name Paul. Saul traveled from Jerusalem to Damascus with special permission to persecute Christians. Nearing the city, he was suddenly surrounded by a bright light and heard a voice ask why he was persecuting him. Terrified and repentant, Saul asked for guidance and was instructed to continue to Damascus. As he rose from the road, he realized he was blind and his companions led him by the hand to the city, where after three days his blindness was lifted. Saul changed his name to Paul and became a devout Christian. The story of Saint Paul’s conversion played a crucial role in his being admitted into the circle of disciples, who distrusted Saul until they heard about his experience.1 The process of conversion and the telling of the conversion narrative are intrinsically connected. Telling one’s conversion story plays a threefold role in the conversion process: it allows the convert to re-live his experience, thereby strengthening his faith; it publicly demonstrates that the potential convert has genuinely converted; and it inspires hope in everyone by emphasizing that nobody is beyond salvation. Peter Stromberg asserts, “the conversion narrative itself is a central element of conversion as it allows the convert to re-live the experience” (3). Retelling one’s conversion reaffirms one’s faith in their interpretation of the events, agrees Ganzevoort: “every story attributes a certain meaning to the events it relates by putting the facts in order” (22). McKnight points out that this type of narrative is an “expression of one’s autobiography that divides life into pre- and post- conversion days” (99), clearly demarcating the internal change. As one Palahniuk character points out, “Telling a story is how we digest what happens to us” (Haunted 380) – it is a way for us to restructure and understand experience. Conversion is about adopting a new religious framework, ideology, or moral code. It focuses on the converts realizing they’re unhappy, often because they lack a coping mechanism of some sort. They set out on a search, encounter a guide and may eventually adopt a new ideology that allows them to cope and function in ways previously hindered by some unbalance or insufficiency. Conversion is about progress; it involves leaving behind a way of life and thought and moving forward to a new lifestyle and cognitive framework. The process of conversion aids in

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building communities of like-minded people, as it is also a process of socialization. Lewis Rambo integrates perspectives of anthropology, psychology, sociology and religious studies to present conversion as “a quest for intellectual, spiritual, and emotional transformation and growth” (52). Rather than a single instance, he defines conversion as a process composed of “a series of elements that are interactive and cumulative over time” (17). These elements or stages are: context, crisis, quest, encounter, interaction, commitment, and consequences. Rambo reminds us that conversion is not linear, and “even though a temporal sequence transpires in conversion processes, the order of the stages is not universal and invariant” (165). Thus, individual converts may go back and forth between stages, stages may coincide and reoccur. Rambo reiterates, “There is no one cause of conversion, no one process, and no one simple consequence of that process” (5). As Rambo argues, conversion is contextual because the “factors in the conversion process are multiple, interactive, and cumulative” (5). The conversion process concerns the formation or reformation of the convert’s identity, affecting his psychology, character, and lifestyle – often resulting in dramatic change. To understand how conversion appears in Palahniuk’s novels, it is imperative to understand the link between conversion narrative structure and the process of conversion. A conversion narrative is an autobiographic account of an individual’s conversion experience. Structurally, it tends to be a bipartite narrative dividing the convert’s life into the before and after the conversion process. At the same time, the narrative is structured around the seven stages of conversion as it retells the individual’s progress throughout the conversion process. The converts’ narratives allows them to recount their experiences, facilitating a process of self-reflection as the narrator assigns meaning and significance to people and events. Although Rambo’s theories focus on religious conversion, the secular conversion process follows the same path and toward a similar aim: to unite individuals in a community of like-minded people. The secular conversion process often involves its own rituals, traditions and actions, with the individual’s role being guided by ideological or moral structures and sensibilities, rather than strictly religious epistemologies. Palahniuk’s novels are full of secular conversions – the following sections examine the nuances of the conversion narrative structure as it appears in Survivor and Choke.

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Context The context stage of conversion concerns those factors in the surrounding environment that unbalance the individual. Rambo explains that “conversion is contextual and thereby influences and is influenced by a matrix of relationships, expectations, and situations” (5). Therefore, context is often perceived as an antecedent rather than a stage of conversion, as it assembles the necessary preconditions for the process to occur.2 To simplify analysis, context is divided into microcontext and macrocontext. Microcontext presents the unique situation, experience and perspective of the conversion narrative’s protagonist. The more universalized framework of the macrocontext invites readers to relate to the character, as we are all intersubjectively related in this matrix of relationships. Palahniuk’s characters harbor a sense of inadequacy that is fostered by their surrounding context. In Survivor, Tender’s insufficiency stems from his lack of independent agency, which he inadequately compensates for with kleptomania, lying, and his involvement in the suicide hotline. For example, Tender Branson’s unbalance can be traced back to his experiences of being forced to watch women in childbirth. Growing up on a farm in the Creedish church district colony in Nebraska, Tender was groomed to become a labor missionary “cleaning houses in the wicked outside world” (231). To ensure the Tenders and Biddies adhered to church doctrine, the children were made to watch every time somebody gave birth in the colony. This turned sex into “pain and sin and your mother stretched out there screaming” (34). His elder brother Adam explains that “the cultures that don’t castrate you to make you a slave, they castrate your mind” (38). The Creedish tactic bound the children with fear and under-education, ensuring their cognitive apparatus would always require external directives. Tender’s microcontext thus illustrates the scars of his childhood. In the wake of the Creedish mass suicide, called “The Deliverance,” Tender becomes part of the Survivor Retention Program – a welfare initiative that supports ex-cult members. Though he no longer wears the mandatory church costume (189), Tender’s life shows few substantial changes from before the Deliverance. He works as a housekeeper and has no friends or relationships. His only company is pet goldfish number 641 (277). Most importantly, Tender has yet to break the chains of his religious upbringing; at thirty-three years of age, he is still a virgin. Similarly, a childhood episode plagues Choke’s Victor Mancini with guilt. Victor’s relationship with his mother Ida was complicated from an early stage. Ida’s litany of petty anti-social crimes lead the courts to

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remove her guardianship over Victor. However, Ida would frequently “claim” (283) her son by kidnapping him from foster families. Ida wanted Victor not to “accept the world as it’s given,” but to create his own reality and “set of laws” (284). Ida’s lessons scared young Victor, who “didn’t want to be responsible for himself, for his world” (285). This prompted Victor to choose “between safety, security, contentment, and her” (285). Young Victor came up with a plan to “get the Mommy arrested and out of his life forever” (285). When they next stopped to eat, Victor ate “his corn dog while it was still too hot” (3) and choked. Ida rushed to save her son by performing the Heimlich maneuver and “the entire restaurant crowded around” (3) the child. Because of the attention, “a waitress recognized him from a photograph on an old milk carton” (4), raised the alarm, and the police captured Ida. Victor’s inability to move forward from this damaging childhood episode is evident in his adult microcontext. Victor’s day job as an Irish indentured servant in a historical re-enactment settlement called Colonial Dunsboro has few prospects. Like his best friend Denny, Victor is a sex addict. However, Victor only goes to sex addict meetings to rendezvous with other addicts. Victor explains that his only escape is during sex when “I’ve got no problems in the world . . . these are the only few minutes I can be human” (20). Victor accepts the “chance to play scapegoat” (61), taking blame attributed to him by senile patients in his mother’s nursing home. He continues to choke on his food in restaurants, having developed it into an elaborate moneymaking scam. Most of his saviors send him birthday cards with cash (48), which he uses to pay for his demented mother’s medical care. Yet it also allows him to relive the childhood moment when “it seemed the whole world cared what happened to him” (3). Victor’s microcontext demonstrates his lack of self-confidence, the scars of the childhood decision forced upon him still clearly visible. Victor Mancini’s unbalance in Choke comes from his lack of confidence and self-assurance, which results in an elaborate cycle of escapism. The damaging childhood experiences endured by Tender and Victor reveal the first set of parallels between the texts. These painful events resonate in the microcontexts of their adult lives. Both characters harbor an unbalance that is aggravated by elements in their unique microcontexts, which is in turn framed by the macrocontext of their conflict with greater sociopolitical institutions and issues encompassing the individual. Macrocontext refers to the “total environment” (Rambo 21) or “the social milieu in which someone is raised [which] provides transportation and communication that make conversion … possible” (McKnight 60). These larger contextual antecedents for conversion include “the fragility of the

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human self in Western societies” and “social cycles of religious transformation in a specific country or place” (McKnight 60). We are all situated within this vast socio-political matrix; thus, macrocontext acts as a gateway for readers to engage with Palahniuk’s characters.3 Survivor and Choke isolate different sectors of this vast matrix, demonstrating the unbalancing effects of the larger phenomenon on the protagonist. Survivor examines the facility of education to dull personal agency and analytical thought, and, further, the media’s ability to misconstrue information. When Tender becomes a televangelist, his lack of agency leaves him saying and doing things he never intended (127). The constant misrepresentation snowballs so far out of control that Tender is forced to hijack a plane in order to set the record straight. In Choke, Palahniuk scathingly criticizes society’s propensity for hypocrisy. Working in Colonial Dunsboro for $6 an hour, Victor is repeatedly denigrated. Yet each time he chokes in a restaurant, his savior happily sends him birthday cards with money. The schism between Victor’s dual lives reveals a tragic irony in society’s approach to the young poor. Victor’s financial situation locks him into conning people in order to pay for his mother’s care, while the ongoing lying only adds to his guilt. However, though the macrocontexts of both novels are different, their function remains the same. Macrocontext combines with microcontext to exert pressure on the protagonist, elevating the sense of unbalance. The sense of unbalance apparent in each protagonist’s context acts as an indicator of an impending conversion.

Crisis The manic pace of Palahniuk’s novels can be attributed to the many crises in every plotline. Across the texts, a crisis is a call to action that compels the protagonist to acknowledge his unbalance. Each crisis is an opportunity to move forward and demonstrate a new level of maturity. Alternatively, a crisis can trigger the reaffirmation of the protagonist’s denial or indifference (Rambo 166). Thus, crisis functions as a test or a barrier. Protagonists are continuously tested and challenged; their victories demonstrate earnest change; their failures reveal the truth about their character. In the conversion process, the crisis stage aggravates the inner unbalance, tipping the convert towards action and thus potential resolution (Rambo 55). Reinder Ruard Ganzevoort describes crisis as “a turning point in life, where the individual faces a problem that he or she cannot solve” (22).4 Ganzevoort argues that people consolidate their interpretations of encounters and experiences into a single narrative, which

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is then used to identify and interpret new situations. When a situation cannot be interpreted by the central story line, the individual can either deny the experience or interrupt the story line. Ganzevoort labels this interruption a crisis. Rambo argues that crisis is the catalyst for change when it causes the convert to break with former modes of interpretation, thereby providing “an opportunity for a new option” (166). The two types of crises central to conversion are “crises that call into question one’s fundamental orientation to life” and crises that are singularly mild but become “the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back” (Rambo 46). Whether intense or mild, a crisis increases the inner unbalance, necessitating decision. The effect of the crisis on a convert is the crucial element of this stage, not the cause, intensity, duration, or scope of a crisis. When a crisis occurs at any stage of conversion, the intensified unbalance may either augment the process or suspend it, causing a reversion. When Victor made the choice between his foster family and his mother, he engineered a crisis that permanently changed his life. Rather than facing his mother and telling her how he felt, he chose to manipulate the situation and make her the victim of circumstance. Thus, Victor plans and orchestrates his first-ever choking incident to betray his mother to the authorities. This single childhood act also reveals volumes about Victor’s underlying nature to the readers: he is a coward who manipulates circumstances rather than honestly admitting his position. As an adult, Victor has turned his choking into an elaborate moneymaking scam. However, when all of his rescuers turn up to Denny’s castle, Victor does not run. “The term ‘powder keg’ pretty much nails it” (289), Victor muses to a crowd of people who each believe that they saved him from choking. Watching “the revelation ripple through the crowd” (289), Victor stands in the glare of headlights, bravely facing the situation he created, illuminating the fundamental change conversion brought about in Victor’s character. In anger, the crowd dismantles Denny’s castle, almost stoning Victor (289). There is courage in not fleeing an angry mob, and by standing his ground, Victor overcomes this crisis and demonstrates how much he has changed from the cowardly child who secretly betrayed his mother. In contrast, Tender faces crisis after crisis only to repeatedly regress and reaffirm his denial. Tender’s inadequacy is the absence of independent agency fostered in him by the Creedish church. After the Deliverance, the caseworker, the agent, Adam, and then Fertility Hollis carried out the role the church originally held for Tender. In the confusion following the caseworker’s death, Tender has a moment of clarity and introspection.

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“The truth is there’s always been someone to tell me what to do. The church. The people who I work for. The caseworker. And I can’t stand the idea of being alone. I can’t bear the thought of being free” (160). Tender understands that each successive substitution re-establishes his dependence on others, but out of fear he continues to fail the tests put before him. However, when Fertility tricks Tender into hijacking a plane, he assumes a position of control and demonstrates his newfound agency. Fertility explains that while nobody can help Tender resolve the situation, she has foreseen that he’ll find a way to tell his life story “and walk away from it” (6). Tender accepts that he has to control the situation and decides to “serve dinner the way I’ve always dreamed” (5). Threatening the passengers with his gun, Tender forces them to eat their meals according to the rules of formal etiquette (5). He jokes, “we’re at a pinnacle of human achievement, and we are going to eat this meal as civilized human beings” (4). Cast once more in an ill-fitting role, the newly-liberated Tender overcomes the challenge and successfully hijacks Flight 2039. Tender’s independent actions demonstrate the change that finally has occurred in him. Survivor also presents a good example of a “straw that broke the camel’s back” crisis. After Adam tricks Tender into euthanizing him, Tender buries his brother in the smoldering pornography landfill that was once the Creedish colony. Fertility arrives in a taxi to take Tender back to the city. When Fertility informs Tender that his fish had died, he observes, “after everything that happened, this should be easy to hear” (22). Instead, Tender is unable to cope and starts to cry, a clear example of a comparatively insignificant problem that overwhelms the individual. Crises function as both a barrier and a test, prompting action and revealing the truth. Although each protagonist faces different crises that demonstrate different aspects of their character and development, the function of the crisis stage is the same in both novels. .

Quest The quest stage is an active search to redress the unbalance that was made evident by the context and aggravated by the crisis stage. Rambo asserts “the notion of quest begins with the assumption that people seek to maximize meaning and purpose in life, to erase ignorance, and to resolve inconsistency” (56). When the term is applied to conversion, the potential convert, troubled by some inner unbalance, embarks on a quest to resolve it. Rambo posits quest as an “activity to relieve the discomfort, resolve the

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discord, remove the sense of tension” (55), emphasizing the process quality of the quest. The convert “quests for answers to needs” (McKnight 50). It is an active search for meaning, knowledge and understanding that aims to restore inner balance. Questing is about “the convert’s reconstruction of his or her biographical memory and deployment of a new system of attribution in various spheres of life” (Rambo 169). Quests allow prospective converts to adopt new cognitive frameworks, actively re-evaluate experiences, and reattribute meaning and causality to certain events. This can potentially lead converts to answer queries or encounter an advocate that will help them further. The quest stage does not necessarily dominate a period in the conversion. Rather, it is “an ongoing process, but one that will greatly intensify during times of crises” (Rambo 56). As Rambo’s model is not sequential, the quest can follow a crisis or, instead, generate one. In Survivor, Tender’s quest coincides with the road trip back to the Creedish church district. Tender has previously expressed firm denial in answer to any opportunities for growth, “I just didn’t want to be fixed. Whatever my real problems might be, I didn’t want them cured” (207). Even on the road trip, Tender is a passive participant, forced to drive to Nebraska at gunpoint by older brother Adam. On the way, Tender tells Adam all he remembers about his childhood, “I remember it was a perfect way of life” (43). In response, Adam objects, “everything you remember is wrong…You remember a lie…you were bred and trained and sold” (41). Adam forces Tender to review the past critically and re-evaluate his memories of Creedish life. Adam reveals to Tender that he engineered the Deliverance when he discovered what the elders did to the tenders and biddies. He explains, “every time our mother had another child . . . they made you sit there and watch” (34). This information allows Tender a new perspective on himself and his life. In contrast, Victor is actively chasing “the confidence. The courage. The complete lack of shame” (37) he first saw in pornography. In Victor’s life, “Wednesday nights mean Nico. Friday nights mean Tanya. Sundays mean Leeza” (16) as he attempts to “get enough sex” (38) to stop wanting it. His ideological quest transpires through experience, as Victor cycles through the same situations seeking emotional inoculation. When senile patients confuse Victor for some miscreant from their pasts, he steps into the role and accepts the blame. Victor’s excessive behavior comically escalates when Dr. Paige Marshall informs him that he could be the direct descendant of Jesus (152-154). Victor’s quest momentarily changes focus towards discovering “what would Jesus NOT do?” (177). However, this is merely a catalyzed continuation of Victor’s original path, repeated

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exposure to experiences in order to immunize himself against the threat they pose to him. Thus, we see Tender and Victor quest for knowledge to redress their balance. Though in one case the quest is a physical journey while in the other, it is experiential, the quest operates towards the same result in both instances. In both novels, the quest stage functions as a search for information leading towards revelation, introspection and reattribution of meaning.

Encounter The encounter stage brings together people searching for answers with people seeking to provide them. Within conversion theory, advocates of a faith or ideology, such as missionaries, often approach potential converts. The advocate is not necessarily a new person to the convert’s life and may have been part of the context or guiding the conversion from the outset (McKnight 50). Scot McKnight argues that “for dynamic communication to take place, and for conversion to follow, the advocate must correlate substantially with the convert and his or her world” (84). The common ground allows for the two to make a connection and proceed towards interaction. Yet Rambo notes that “the outcome of the encounter can range from total rejection…to complete acceptance” (87). In fact, the majority of advocate—convert interactions end unsuccessfully. In Palahniuk’s novels, encounter with the advocate figure is a moment of attraction, fascination, curiosity and instant connection. Palahniuk’s advocates are surprising and charismatic, seducing the convert with qualities the latter wishes to possess. However, Survivor and Choke present two unconventional encounters with two very different types of advocates. Survivor’s advocate figure role is split between two characters, Tender’s brother Adam and his love interest, Fertility Hollis. Tender makes a connection with both advocates because they symbolize the hemispheres of his life. When Tender first sees Fertility, he is attracted to her waif-like body and “long red hair that women only have these days if it’s part of some orthodox religion” (257). This initial misreading of her physical appearance makes Tender believe they may have something in common. Fertility engages Tender in the early stages of a romantic relationship, presenting the possibility of life as a fully integrated social agent. In contrast, Adam represents Tender’s past and the path offered by the Creedish Church. Their first post-Deliverance encounter occurs over the phone, when Adam engages Tender in the systematic Creedish labor

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missionary greeting. “‘May you be of complete service in your lifetime.’ Without a thought I respond, Praise and glory to the Lord for this day through which we labor” (205). Tender’s word choice “without a thought” underscores the automatic nature Creedish education programmed in him. The family ties and religious upbringing that bind Tender and Adam form an undeniable, if unwelcome, connection between convert and advocate. Despite their differences, both advocates collaborate to lead Tender towards personal responsibility and independent agency. The moment of encounter and the figure of the advocate in Choke are strikingly different. Victor’s advocate is a nameless man in a Tarzan suit, pictured on a pornographic website with an orangutan forcing chestnuts into his anus (36). As a child, Victor comes across photographs of this man on the internet and makes an instant connection. Victor explains that “in a world where everybody had to look so pretty all the time, this guy wasn’t. The monkey wasn’t. What they were doing wasn’t” (37). Victor was inspired by the man’s defiance and his courage to publicize pictures of himself in such an embarrassing and compromising position. Victor was especially impressed by the man’s ability to smile, especially if the man wasn’t enjoying the situation. “That’s the kind of pride and self-assurance the little boy wanted to have. Someday” (38), narrates the older Victor, outlining the qualities that attracted him to the advocate. Thus, Victor’s encounter with the advocate occurs via proxy, with no direct dialogue between advocate and convert. However, it is evident that Victor made an instant connection with the man in the Tarzan suit, seeing in him qualities Victor sorely lacks. Victor’s sexual addiction later in life is guided by the ideology he derived from his advocate - that if you have enough of something, you will stop wanting or needing it. Regardless of the respective individual advocates’ specific differences, in the conversion narrative structure, they perform the same function. They make a connection with the converts and introduce them to a new moral code. Importantly, it is also possible to locate a host of advocates whose failure to establish a connection with the protagonist predicated the convert’s rejection of their ideology. In Survivor, Tender’s caseworker is a failed advocate as her attempts at diagnosing Tender’s problems sent him on a mission to actuate her hypotheses. Similarly, Victor’s failed advocate figure is his mother, Ida. Ida’s efforts to introduce Victor to a different cognitive framework led the child to reject and betray her.

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Interaction While encounter allows the two parties to meet and open channels of communication, interaction permits the prospective convert to learn about the ideology through the advocate (McKnight 51). The interaction stage aims towards a dialectical relationship between convert and advocate that can potentially lead to the appropriation of the seeker into the group. “Relationships are often the most potent avenues of connection” between advocates and potential converts (Rambo 167). Advocates teach converts the rituals and rhetoric of the religion or group, as well as introduce them to the rules governing their new role as a member. While “ritual helps people to learn how to act differently” (Rambo 115), rhetoric provides converts with a new “system of interpretation” (Rambo 167). Advocates often seek to encapsulate the convert, for example, by physically isolating them from outside life or directing them towards particular lifestyle patterns (Rambo 106). Ideological encapsulation “involves cultivation of a worldview and belief system that ‘inoculates’ the adherent against alternative or competitive systems of belief” (Rambo 106). Throughout this interaction, converts skillfully filter information, adopting what they like and rejecting what they do not as they seek a remedy for their unbalance. The advocate-convert relationship is reciprocal: “The potential convert has a world out of which he or she comes; the group is its own world; until those worlds interact, no conversion takes place” (Rambo 167). In Survivor, for example, Tender has strong relational links with both Fertility and Adam. The former appears as a romantic relationship, the latter is brotherhood. Physically encapsulated by his advocates on the road trip to Nebraska, Tender is locked into interacting with them. Adam and Fertility develop a push/pull system as they try to teach Tender independent agency. Adam pushes Tender away from the negative Creedish doctrine, while Fertility pulls Tender towards positive possibilities offered in the outside world. Adam presents Tender with the rhetoric that “you never gain a sense of power. You never gain a voice or an identity of your own. Sex is the act that separates us from our parents” (37). He explains to Tender that to gain independence and assume a fullfledged role in outside society, he must turn his back on church doctrine. Tender must enact the ritual of rebellion and deal with his “big issue” (40) by having sex with Fertility. Fertility pulls Tender toward assuming this new role by illuminating the positives. She assures Tender that he will find a way to leave his “whole screwed-up life story behind” (6). Fertility promises Tender, “after that we’ll start a new life together and live happily

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ever after” (6). Tender fulfills the instructions of both advocates, as Fertility advises Tender to tell his life story starting “from the end” (2), pushing him towards his final challenge, hijacking and escaping from the plane. As Palahniuk reveals on his official website, Tender does survive the plane crash, fulfilling all promises and moving towards the lifeaffirming community represented by Fertility. On the site, Palahniuk highlights the passages that can clue readers in to this ‘trick’ ending (Widmyer). In Choke, the advocate-convert relationship is one of unidirectional distanced adoration. The interaction between Victor and his advocate is one of interpretation rather than of dialogue. Looking at pornography during his childhood, Victor mistakenly deduced that “if you could acquire enough, accomplish enough, you’d never want to own or do another thing” (38). Having surmised this message, Victor set its contents as his new goals, thereby ideologically encapsulating himself in this new interpretational framework. Victor goes on to ritualistically thrive on excess and masochism, attempting to attain freedom from fear of loss through excess. Victor believes this to be the process for gaining the courage and self-assurance he lacks. He explains that “to be that comfortable and confident in the world, that would be Nirvana” (38). Achieving this confidence is the promise Victor saw “in the fat man’s smile” (38). Victor says that although he never found out the man’s name, “he never forgot that smile. ‘Hero’ isn’t the right word, but it’s the first one that comes to mind” (39), thereby revealing the strength of Victor’s connection to his advocate, even though the advocate is absent. Interaction with the advocate figure can take a variety of forms. Palahniuk’s advocates may inspire or coerce, lecture or simply allow the convert to infer the message. Yet, their central role as a guide remains consistent with conversion theory.

Commitment The commitment stage is often described as “the consummation” (Rambo 168) of conversion because conversion ultimately concerns an individual’s decision (McKnight 98). The act of decision can be “selfconscious and volcanic” (McKnight 98) or simply a gentle nod of the soul (McKnight 50). Whether instant or progressive, conversion is about “turning from one way of life to another, and a dramatization of that commitment in some ritualized form” (McKnight 98). These dramatizations are often “accompanied by the ritual mutilation of the initiate’s body” (Peters 26). Physically inscribing psychological change

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and marking identification with the group is the essence of conversion. The commitment stage revolves around making a decision, while the associated rituals are about symbolically enacting the change marked by the decision.5 In Survivor, the instance of commitment frames the narrative and coincides with the crisis. When a crisis coincides with the commitment stage, it often lends itself to being read as a commitment ritual. As discussed earlier, a crisis ruptures the unifying narrative of one’s identity, thereby facilitating change. When such a rupture coincides with the commitment stage, it allows the convert to break away from old cognitive frameworks and adopt new ideology. Thereby, the convert overcomes the challenge posed by the crisis by committing to new cognitive frameworks and taking an irreversible step toward cementing his conversion. Tender begins narrating his story with an interrupted prolepsis. The narrative begins at the end of the plot, jumps backwards to an earlier point, and then further fragments the linear sequence of events. The extended analepsis functions to contextualize the significance of the commitment moment that begins Tender’s story. The sheer scale of the immense journey Tender makes towards the moment of commitment underscores the importance of his decision. Thus, tracing Tender’s journey from the Creedish church district to the cockpit of Flight 2039 helps locate the magnitude of Tender’s metamorphosis. When readers first encounter the moment of commitment, we are unaware of the scene’s importance. When we come to it a second time, the interim story has supplied us with the missing facts, allowing readers to properly interpret the situation. Having boarded the plane, Tender interrogates Fertility, “Which one? Who’s the real hijacker?” (8). As Tender searches for the hijacker on the plane, waving Adam’s gun and shouting orders to the cabin crew, he comes to the realization, “Maybe I’m the hijacker” (7). This moment sparks independent analytical activity in Tender for the first time, marking the instance of conversion. He realizes that Fertility has set him up and tries to cope with the fact that nobody can help with this situation (6). Tender takes control and develops a plan for managing the hijacking. Tender’s ability to take action and hijack the plane comes in stark contrast to every previous manifestation of the commitment stage in Tender’s narrative. Tender has cycled through a sequence of advocates, beginning with his church and including the caseworker, the agent, his brother and Fertility. Throughout the novel, as soon as Tender encountered new advocates he fully committed himself to their cause. Tender testified, “My new job is to follow Adam” (44) or “Now Fertility Hollis is here to tell me what to do” (25). The spontaneity of Tender’s previous commitments

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stands in opposition to the more tentative and gradual way Tender assumes control of the hijacking, as he is acting independently of any advocate or guide for the first time. In contrast, Victor’s instance of commitment does not frame the narrative of Choke. Rather, Victor experiences an instant conversion as a child and a gradual conversion as an adult. Initially, the three stages of encounter, interaction and commitment occur simultaneously for Victor Mancini. Victor encounters his advocate via the Internet as a child. Seeing the pornographic pictures, Victor interprets an ideological tract and immediately adopts it. He recalls, “the promises he saw in the fat man’s smile” became the “little boy’s new goals” (38). For Victor, the decision to adopt the new ideology is instant. Victor recalls that after that moment, he would think of those twelve photographs each time he was “scared or sad or alone” because the images “showed him how brave and strong and happy a person could become” (39). The sudden, clear decision of Victor’s childhood contrasts with the gentle nod of the soul that occurs in Victor when he comes to Denny’s castle. Seeing all of his rescuers in the one place, Victor realizes the inevitability of what will happen. Instead of running, he simply surrenders to the fact that his scam has met its predestined conclusion and faces his “Good Samaritans” (50). At that moment, the adult Victor adopts a new ideology, one of facing and paying for one’s own mistakes. Though the instant of decision is different for each character, it always ushers in a new era in their lives. For both characters, the moment of commitment coincides with a crisis – the combination dramatizes the instant and highlights the transformation in the character’s cognitive processes.

Consequences The consequences stage of conversion is considered the most important by a wide range of theorists. McKnight posits that the moment of decision is “less important than its palpable results in life” (99). If it is to be permanent “conversion needs to be ongoing” (McKnight 105). The process is perpetual, perhaps, with the convert daily adhering to the new value and cognitive frameworks and demonstrating “a settled impact on [his] identity and behavior with marked consequences” (McKnight 105). The consequence stage surmises the perceptible changes the conversion process engenders in the convert. In Palahniuk’s novels, the actions following the instant of commitment reverberate with the consequences of that decision. Earlier, we compared

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the final crisis with those preceding it, analyzing the significant change that has occurred in each character. Once protagonists commit to their new moral charters, their actions naturally flow through to ethical behavior, demonstrating that the conversion has really occurred. In Survivor, the success of Tender hijacking Flight 2039 and engineering his apparent death demonstrates his independent thinking and agency. The first thing Tender does upon realizing that he is the hijacker is to indulge a secret selfish whim – to host a dinner the way he has always been taught. By doing so, he reinforces the lessons of his Creedish elders, but the absurdity of the dinner party atmosphere ironically undercuts the seriousness of his childhood programming, thereby demonstrating his independence. Further, Tender formulates a plan for getting the cabin crew and passengers safely out of the plane while ensuring Flight 2039 fulfills its destiny (288-287). These actions illuminate Tender’s new moral code, demonstrating a consideration and value of other people’s lives previously absent from Tender’s cognitive framework. Though it is not initially clear for many readers whether Tender escapes the crash, the novel’s hopeful title, small textual clues, and Palahniuk’s own explanation of Tender’s fake suicide (Widmyer) demonstrate the positive outcome of Tender’s new moral code an ethical action. Similarly, Choke concludes with an episode demonstrating perceptible change in Victor’s actions. Following the mob’s exodus, Victor joins Denny, Beth and Paige in rebuilding the castle. Victor turns toward doing something positive and constructive, investing time and effort in the world around him and contributing to Denny’s project. Victor realizes that rather than “letting [his] past decide [his] future” (292), he should take responsibility for his identity and his life and make those decisions himself. So, he focuses on the job at hand, fascinated with the possibilities it holds; “Where we’re standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything” (293). This new, hopeful and positive Victor is a direct consequence of conversion. Abandoning the ideology of anesthesia through excess, Victor has converted to a cognitive framework that embraces personal responsibility and active participation. Victor’s ethical actions demonstrate the effect of his new moral code.

Modern Conversions for Modern Readers Unfortunately, we are not able to observe Palahniuk’s characters for long after the conversion. Following the commitment stage, the novels end. Instead, what readers retain as a consequence of the characters’ conversions are the conversion narratives themselves. Much like Christian

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conversion stories were told and written to inspire readers, Palahniuk’s novels themselves seem to be trying to inspire conversion. Indeed, extrapolating from the framework offered by the conversion narrative structure, elements of the conversion narrative appear in almost all of Palahniuk’s fiction. When we locate conversions in Palahniuk’s novels, they appear as processes of healing. The implementation of a new cognitive framework provides the protagonist with a new coping mechanism to overcome the fears and insufficiencies imposed by earlier traumas. At the consummation of their conversion, the characters reach a resolution and become fuller adults, able to cope and function in ways they could not manage before. This narrative structure imbues the novels with hope, suggesting the underlying message is – if these characters can get their lives together, so can the readers. Conversion is a process of maturation; at some stage it necessarily becomes a self-conscious search for meaning as the individual learns to assess and formulate his needs. Looking at the common narrative structure, we see that Palahniuk’s novels, exemplified by Survivor and Choke, are united in their aims as much as in their styles. Identifying the similarities between the novels also demonstrates the overall ideology which the characters leave behind, as well as the new cognitive frameworks they adopt. It is possible to conclude that, like their Christian counterparts, Palahniuk’s novels aim to inspire and convert their readers to a moral charter that promotes ethical behavior. The logic is that if the characters are able to regain control over their lives by implementing a new moral charter that flows through to ethical behavior, the readers may be able to achieve the similar results by following a similar process. These attempts at conversion are facilitated by the warm rapport Palahniuk’s texts establish with their readers. For example, both Survivor and Choke alternate between first person narration and focalized second person narration. The use of second person narration, focalized through the protagonist’s point of view, implicates the readers in the action, enabling them to identify with the protagonists. The combination of both types of narration is very effective in establishing a dialogue with the readers, creating strong bonds that invite conviction on the part of the readers. When Tender reaches out to his audience, inviting them to sympathize with him, he states, “whether you clean a stain, a fish, a house, you want to think you’re making the world a better place” (263). Statements like these invite empathetic responses from readers, helping us understand his situation and identify with his problems. In Choke, Victor’s story begins with a direct address to the readers “If you’re going to read this, don’t bother” (1). The reverse psychology of this statement hooks the readers,

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while the use of the second person opens a dialogue between reader and narrator and establishes a sense of intimacy. The result is an easy dialogue with the readers, which simultaneously implicates them in the action. Strong bonds link readers and narrator throughout the latter’s conversion process, demonstrating to the readers the accessibility and beneficial outcomes of the process, while also implicitly teaching them the content of Palahniuk’s ideology. At the chronological start of their conversions, there are clear commonalities in the beliefs and circumstances of Palahniuk’s converts. Examining the similarities of their situations before and after conversion clarifies the ideology which Palahniuk’s converts left behind and the moral code to which they converted. As Palahniuk himself remarked, at the start of their journeys, the characters are isolated in a “faux happiness” (Farley). They share a sense of unhappiness, anger, loneliness, and a desire for attention and love. These protagonists are selfish, self-centred, uncaring and irresponsible. Their lives lack the warm supportive network of family, friends and greater community. Instead, they have an external scapegoat that allows them to deny their own agency and to avoid accepting personal responsibility or making serious decisions. They do not participate in their society, their lack of initiative, coupled with inactivity, leaves them burrowed into their own helplessness. They are slaves to circumstances, aware of their roles in society and feeling frustrated and resentful about their positions. Misguided, their lives are filled with stress and tensions as they focus on superficial fears and concerns. Palahniuk’s characters’ conversions are about facing their limitations, accepting reality and finding a way to cope with their flaws and imbalances. They strive to find knowledge and overcome fears. Through crisis they become stronger and eventually overcome what shackles them. They journey towards truth, honesty, clarity and a sense of internal calm. The early stages of conversion allow them to refocus on what really matters. They unilaterally reject materialistic and superficial concerns, refocusing on forming fruitful relationships and becoming active agents who create and control their circumstances. Moreover, they take responsibility for their actions and consequences as part of embracing a new moral charter. The conversion process guides them toward selflessness, sincere love, and caring, qualities with which they rejoin a community as personally responsible social agents. They create or join a network of friends and family. They accept responsibility for themselves and their actions. They change their lives and demonstrate their agency and capability and independence. They are no longer crippled by fears and share a clarity regarding their values and needs. They are on their way to

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becoming happier, fulfilled individuals who engage with the world around them and are unafraid to do the right thing. For Palahniuk’s characters, conforming to the new set of moral beliefs results in more ethical behavior. At the end of the conversion process, the characters demonstrate positive progress. Each convert has improved as an individual, sharing with the others these unifying overtones of happiness, agency, responsibility, and social participation. Like their Christian predecessors, Palahniuk’s narratives aim to convert their readers to the morally-responsible charter adopted by the protagonists. Palahniuk’s protagonists are flawed and unbalanced; their stories are filled with crisis and trauma. Yet, they manage to find a resolution and regain control over their lives by adopting a new cognitive framework. This framework encourages personal responsibility, social participation, selflessness and love. Palahniuk’s readers are encouraged to employ the same logic as readers of criminal conversion narratives – nobody is beyond redemption (Williams 831); ‘if they can do it so can I.’ Thus, like criminal conversion narratives, Palahniuk’s conversion narratives attempt to inspire and convert readers to the ideology their protagonists adopt. However I do not believe that distilling a one-size-fits-all solution is Palahniuk’s aim. Rather, Palahniuk seems to advise that the conversion process must be individualized for each person. In the final pages of Fight Club, Jack concludes, “God’s got this all wrong . . . We just are, and what happens just happens” (198). If we are all unique individuals, then each person needs to find his own coping mechanism, discover his own conversion process. Palahniuk’s novels are stories of unique conversions that share certain elements of aim and direction. However, each conversion is unique in its specificity, and each novel tells how that individual found his solution. I believe Palahniuk is making the point that we are each capable of taking responsibility for our lives and addressing and resolving our troubles. He is suggesting that a combination of a suitable moral code and subsequent ethical behaviour are one means toward his end. So, while Tender and Victor journey through Survivor and Choke redressing their imbalances, they inspire hope by demonstrating transformation is imaginable and perhaps even possible.

Notes 1

The abruptness of the Paulean conversion is often contrasted with the gradual Augustian conversion. The conversion of Augustine, in his Cofessions, is an extensive memoir tracing Augustine’s experiences and conversion to Christianity.

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Although an important text about teleology of conversion, space constraints prevent an extended discussion here. 2 Religious Studies Professor Scot McKnight criticizes Rambo, arguing that context is not a stage, but “the necessary condition of human existence out of which a person emerges individually and socially to interact with the world, sometimes leading to a conversion” (49). 3 It is possible to argue that Palahniuk’s protagonists are unlikely characters, their unique circumstances so farfetched they border on the freakish. This argument infers that readers cannot connect or engage with such unrealistic portrayals. On the contrary, readers are given access to the characters through the macrocontext. Palahniuk situates his characters within the shared socio-political matrix of the readership; his protagonists battle against common overarching barriers and limitations. Thus, the readership can sympathize with their struggles because we have all experienced disjuncture with the macrocontext. Interestingly, the combination of microcontext and macrocontext proffers the same results in each text. The narratives are compelling unique personal experiences that allow the readers to see something familiar from a very different point of view. 4 Ganzevoort synthesises Paul Ricoeur’s work on narrative identity, which posits narrative as the unifying principle structuring and maintaining identity, and Proudfoot and Shaver’s attribution theory, which examines the central role of interpretation in our construction of meaning and identity. 5 Gerard Peters draws an interesting example of Christian water baptism as a ritual symbolizing death and rebirth (Peters 25).

Works Cited Caldwell, Patricia. The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression. New York: Cambridge UP, 1983. Corveleyn, Jozef and Dirk Hutsebaut, eds. Belief and Unbelief: Psychological Perspectives. International Ser. in the Psychology of Religion. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. Farley, C.P. Interview. “Chuck Palahniuk on Oprah's Diaphragm.” Powells.com July 2001. . 1 December 2004. Forsyth, James. Psychological Theories of Religion. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2002. Fowler, James. Becoming Adult, Becoming Christian: Adult Development and Christian Faith. Rev. Ed. San Francisco: Josey-Bass, 2000. —. Stages of Faith : The Psychology of Human Development. New York: Harper, 1995. Ganzevoort, Reinder Ruard. “Crisis Experiences and the Development of Belief and Unbelief.” Belief and Unbelief: Psychological Perspectives. Corveleyn, Jozef & Hutsebaut, Dirk, eds. International Ser. in the Psychology of Religion. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994.

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Hindmarsh, D. Bruce (1999). “‘My Chains Fell off, My Heart Was Free’: Early Methodist Conversion Narrative in England.” Church History 68.4 (1999): 910-929. The Holy Bible: English Standard Version Containing the Old and New Testaments. London: Collins, 2002. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985. Lonergan, Bernard. “The Dimensions of Conversion,” Conversion: Perspectives on Personal and Social Transformation. Ed. Walter E. Conn. New York: Alba House, 1978. McKnight, Scot. Turning to Jesus: The Sociology of Conversion in the Gospels. Westminster, KY: John Knox, 2002. Palahniuk, Chuck. Choke. New York: Doubleday, 2001. —. Fight Club. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. —. Haunted. New York: Doubleday, 2005. —. Survivor. New York: Norton, 1999. Peters, Gerald. The Mutilating God: Authorship and Authority in the Narrative of Conversion. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1993. Rambo, Lewis R. Understanding Religious Conversion. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993. Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. Trans. Kathleen Blamey. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. “The Story of ‘I’: Illness and Narrative Identity.” Narrative 10.1 (2002): 9-27. —. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Routledge, 2002. Stromberg, Peter G. Language and Self-transformation: A Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. Widmyer, Dennis. “The Ending of Survivor.” Chuckpalahniuk.net: A Writer’s Cult. . Williams, Daniel E. “‘Behold a Tragic Scene Strangely Changed into a Theatre of Mercy’: The Structure and Significance of Criminal Conversion Narratives in Early New England.” American Quarterly 38.5 (1986): 827-847.

CHAPTER FOUR BULLETS AND BLADES: NARCISSISM AND VIOLENCE IN INVISIBLE MONSTERS ANDY JOHNSON

…A plastic surgeon guides the thin, shiny blade of a scalpel through the left breast of another man’s chest, then works a saline-filled bag into the newly created pocket of flesh. He follows the same procedure for the man’s right breast, leaving the anesthetized man with bulging breasts that eventually will fill bikini tops and lacy bras. …A model, feeling trapped by her beauty, points a handgun at her face and pulls the trigger, spraying blood, flesh, and bone across the interior of her car, and transforming her appearance so drastically that children will see her new face and call her a “monster.” On the surface, the two stories seem to have little in common. Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Invisible Monsters, however, uses similar events to reveal the connections between violence, agency, and identity. As with many of Palahniuk’s later works, this 1999 novel includes unusual characters undergoing life-changing journeys and plenty of grotesque touches. Indeed, the themes of this work ripple throughout Palahniuk’s subsequent works. Yet, Invisible Monsters cuts deeper today than when Palahniuk wrote it and seems particularly appropriate for issues of identity, technology, and agency in the early twenty-first century. Since the novel’s publication, plastic surgery has become popular entertainment, thanks to television programs like Extreme Makeover, Dr. 90210, and Nip/Tuck. Patients both fictional and real go under the knife for our amusement, and their surgeons become celebrities. The novel offers a scathing critique of celebrity culture through the mental and physical evolution of its narrator, the former model Shannon McFarland. Her acidic observations on celebrity culture anticipate the advent of stars like Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie—celebrities famous simply for being famous—

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and the obsession with “reality” television in which “average” people gain fame by inviting viewers to watch them undergo numerous humiliations, sometimes as extreme as eating pig rectums. Both the plastic surgery scenario and the model’s facial mutilation that open this essay are examples of a person’s physical transformation. More than that, though, these changes involve acts of violence. Blood must flow; flesh must separate to enact these changes. One might argue that the scenarios contain an important distinction – plastic surgery can be an act of healing, while a self-inflicted gunshot wound seeks only to destroy. Yet, cultural theorists like Virginia Blum remind us that surgery is an act of violence, too: “[I]n cosmetic surgery we find harm being done to a healthy body, cuts being made, blood flowing for no known medical reason” (13). Blum goes on to point out that plastic surgeons recognize the difference between their work and the work of other kinds of surgeons: “This is why plastic surgeons tend to justify their practice through the claim of psychological necessity” (13). Blum suggests one major problem with plastic surgery is that of agency. While the patients request the alterations, Blum’s interviews with them and with surgeons reveal that surgeons often play on their patients’ insecurities to promise results that are likely to disappoint the patients. She notes that surgeons “talk at length about tailoring the change to the individual. But then I look at their own work, and all their patients as well look like members of a not-so-extended family” (Blum 14). The heart of the problem, Blum suggests, is the acceptance of a homogenized beauty standard. As a model, Shannon helps promote physical homogeneity by representing an idealized beauty. She seems aware of the artificiality of her role, revealed in her reminiscences about the mini-dramas she and her former friend and fellow model Evie Cottrell would create in the home furnishings department at Brumbach’s Department Store, posing before curious customers. “Every afternoon,” Shannon says, “Evie and me, we’d star in our own personal unnatural habitat . . . We’d all soak up attention in our own little matinee life” (70). Evie says she prefers lounging at Brumbach’s to being at home because: “It’s too lonely at my real house . . . and I hate how I don’t feel real enough unless people are watching” (69). Evie eagerly embraces the panoptic gaze of the audience, even as Shannon grows tired of it. Shannon’s perpetual desire for personal reinvention pushes her beyond Evie’s shallow narcissism, and she begins to see the ridiculous role she and Evie play in the construction of beauty culture. Palahniuk provides several scenes from their professional modeling jobs to reveal how malleable the models are as icons of homogenized beauty and how valueless their real selves become in the process. One

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assignment requires Shannon and Evie to climb on wrecked cars in a junkyard while wearing “Hermaun Mancing thong swimwear so narrow you have to wear a ‘pussy strip’ of surgical tape underneath” (163). Shannon looks warily at the threatening rusted metal so close to her skin. Another shoot finds the models posed in a slaughterhouse where they wear “Bibo Kelley stainless steel party dresses” while pig carcasses pass behind them “at about a hundred pigs an hour” (241). Shannon finds herself admiring the pigs’ smooth skin. The third job mentioned features the models in an infomercial for Num Num Snack Factory, a food processor for meat. This scene is particularly important for its symbolic touches. Shannon defines the infomercial as “one of those television commercials you think is a real program except it’s just a thirty-minute pitch” (118). The fabricated reality of the infomercial has the quality of a nightmare, or a scene from The Twilight Zone. Everything is oversized or maximized to create a bizarre hyper-reality, from the appearance of the models to the products they’re hawking. Evie’s “desperate eyes are contact lens too green and her lips are heavy red outside the natural lip line. The blonde hair is thick and teased up so the girl’s shoulders don’t look so big-boned” (118). Manus, the planted audience member, samples a canapé, and his “square-jawed face rocks down to give the camera a full-face eyes-open look of complete and total love and satisfaction”; his “thick black hair . . . reminds you how people’s hair is just vestigial fur with mousse on it” (119). Watching the infomercial on television, Shannon sees herself as a “tiny sparkling figure in the background . . . smiling away like a space heater and dropping animal matter into the Plexiglas funnel on top of the Num Num Snack Factory” (119). Perhaps the most symbolic element of the scene, though, is the product itself. The processor “takes meat by-products, whatever you have—your tongues or hearts or lips or genitals—chews them up, seasons them, and poops them out in the shape of a spade or a diamond or a club onto your choice of cracker for you to eat yourself” (120). The machine represents the fashion industry which pulls in individuals and refigures them into homogenized products, somehow investing them with an allegedly increased value. It is significant that Palahniuk adds the phrase “for you to eat yourself.” He could have ended the sentence on the word cracker, but the additional and unnecessary phrase “for you to eat yourself” encourages a cannibalistic reading of the scene. The beauty industry feeds on the unrealistic body images of the consumers, only to reprocess those fears through the fashion, diet, and plastic surgery industries to sell to the consumers.

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Not only is the image cannibalistic, it is also an additional example of how the consumer culture disembodies its own icons. Shannon mentions the disturbing way the studio audience focuses its attention on itself in the monitor: “It’s eerie,” Shannon says, “but what’s happening is the folks are staring at themselves in the monitor staring at themselves in the monitor staring at themselves in the monitor, on and on, completely trapped in a reality loop that never ends” (118). From Shannon watching herself on TV to the audience watching itself on the monitors, the scene is filled with narcissism—a kind of visual cannibalism. Instead of mouths devouring substance, though, the eyes become the organs of consumption, constantly returning to the videoscreens for another visual helping. As Alexandra Howson suggests, “Consumer culture encourages the view that, through the application of technology and information, the body can be endlessly modified. Therefore, the body takes on the character of an unfinished product” (99). These modifications need not be surgical transformations, of course. The models and celebrities we see in print or on screen almost always reflect the mediation of an editor’s hand, either through lighting, makeup, padding, airbrushing, or manipulation via computer. Wrinkles can be removed, highlights added, even eye color changed—all without physically touching the model. Removing these individual characteristics normalizes the fiction of ageless bodies with perfect features and unmarked skin. Consumers then purchase the advertised products in an effort to look like the homogenized model. Thus, as Howson implies, the consumer is never supposed to be a finished product, but is seduced into endlessly looking in the mirror and attempting to adjust his/her body to reach an unattainable ideal. Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulacra is particularly applicable for this interpretation, since the endlessly manipulated image of the model refers to no actual original individual, but exists as an unending cascade of altered images. Brandy tells Shannon: “You’re a product just as much. A product of a product of a product” (217). As Blum’s study reveals with plastic surgery patients and surgeons, the patients want a particular celebrity’s nose, but the celebrity’s nose might not be her own, and the surgeon, in any case, will be unlikely to duplicate the celebrity’s nose, but will instead construct one for the patient from his range of standard types. Similarly, as Shane transforms into Brandy at the end of the novel, and thus into “Shannon,” he models his new appearance on his sister. But, his sister’s appearance is not static, especially if we include her images in the photo shoots and infomercials. Shane might look like a Shannon, but it would be impossible for him to assume a stable image of an evolving person. Of course, the beauty industry relies upon the malleability of

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identity, so Shane need not limit himself to the Shannon of a particular moment. Plastic surgery will allow him to—even encourage him to— constantly change his image so it meets with the current beauty standard, a never-ending cycle that the original Shannon found exhausting. The power of this homogeneity of beauty is what body theorists like Susan Bordo call an “unbearable weight” of pressure upon us all—male and female. In Invisible Monsters, Shannon and Shane are driven to break out of the narcissistic cycle of these empty idealized gender roles. They embrace degrees of narcissism that drive them far beyond starring in vapid television programs, or allowing themselves to be surgically altered oncamera. “We’re so totally trapped in ourselves,” observes Shannon McFarland (266). Shannon and her brother Shane reveal layers of narcissism and a hunger for attention throughout the novel deeply rooted in a childhood of abuse and neglect. As children, they vied for their parents’ attention. Shane suffers facial scars from an exploding aerosol can, which he confesses to planning near the end of the novel. Their parents blame Shannon for putting the can in the trash, however, so she grows up feeling ignored and building resentment toward Shane because she knows her innocence. “His face was all exploded in a hairspray accident,” Shannon says, “and you’d think my folks totally forgot they even had a second child . . . So I just kept working harder and harder for them to love me” (73). Her disconnection from Shane is illustrated perfectly by her refusal to open her window to him after their parents kick him out on a cold night for contracting a sexually transmitted disease: “He said, ‘Hey it’s cold.’ . . . I turned on the bedroom light so I could only see myself in the window. Then I shut the curtains. I never saw Shane again” (150). She literally blocks out his image with her own; her narcissism leads her to abandon her ill and ostracized brother. Appropriately, her rejection of her beauty will be the act that restores her relationship with her brother. Shannon’s longing for love and attention make her modeling career an obvious choice. She gets adoration from an audience, and she gets it by using her beauty—a marked contrast to her brother’s mutilated face. Shannon eventually becomes disenchanted with her life as a model, though. The constant pressure to be beautiful and the limitations built into the lifestyle of a model leave her feeling trapped and emotionally stagnant for its lack of substance: “Never getting anything real accomplished, but getting the attention and recognition anyway. Trapped in a beauty ghetto is how I felt. Stereotyped. Robbed of my motivation” (286). Disgust with beauty is one reason for her decision to mutilate her face with a gunshot, but she also recognizes that her identity and ego are tied to

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her beauty and her desire to be beautiful. She realizes that she and Evie are similarly narcissistic: “[M]ostly what I hate about Evie is the fact that she’s so vain and stupid and needy. But what I hate most is how she’s just like me. What I really hate is me so I hate pretty much everyone” (266). Shannon’s narcissism has mutated into self-loathing, so she must find some way out of herself. “I’m so tired of being me,” she says, “Me beautiful. Me ugly. Blonde. Brunette. A million fucking fashion makeovers that only leave me trapped being me” (224). It would seem that her work as a model has allowed her to adopt various identities, but these identities bear only the patina of individuality and encourage no intellectual or emotional growth. “How is it you can keep mutating and still be the same deadly virus?” she asks (121). Shannon wants a change that shatters her beauty-bound ego, a change to shake her from the numbing gaze of the audience and camera. Shane’s search begins in narcissism, too. He intentionally explodes a hairspray can in his face, explaining, “I was so miserable being a normal average child.” He feels the absence of connection and meaning early in his life. Average and normal make him invisible to what he senses really matters. “I wanted something to save me. I wanted the opposite of a miracle,” he states (282). His early experimentation with “disaster” shows a distinction between the siblings: Shane’s desire to challenge his reality surfaces early, while Shannon’s risk-taking develops after years of unsuccessfully seeking love and attention from others. Shane’s rebellion seems more consciously philosophical; he intentionally tests the assumptions built into American culture and language: “I’m not straight, and I’m not gay,” he tells Shannon. “I’m not bisexual. I want out of the labels. I don’t want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that’s not on the map. A real adventure” (261). For Shane, traditional definitions of sexuality and gender are too restrictive. He refuses to be bound by a closed system, especially one bound by language. His struggle, therefore, is not merely an internal one to reinvent himself, but also is against society as well. He is not content to let others define him; he must challenge their assumptions and their perceptions of reality, too. Shannon and Shane learn that the only way they can free themselves from their narcissism is by embracing their worst fears: “Our real discoveries come from chaos,” Shane tells Shannon. “[F]rom going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish” (258). For them, selfdirected violence provides the pathway to transcendence. Regeneration through violence has a long history, in mythology as well as enacted in historical events. Christianity, for example, has the myth of Jesus

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sacrificing himself for humanity and his subsequent resurrection. And, Richard Slotkin posits Westward expansion in the U.S. as a story of national “regeneration through violence,” even using that phrase as the title of the first volume of his monumental trilogy on the mythology of the American frontier. For the McFarlands, however, self-directed violence is a personal crucible. Jungian theory suggests that one must face death by symbolically killing one’s ego to resurrect into a more advanced identity. Lucy Huskinson explains that what is required is “a Dionysian violence in which the ego is effectively torn apart in order to be born anew” (438). While the process might be violent, Huskinson cautions that it is necessary for growth: “The violence of the Self in this context is therefore not malign, as it is not wholly destructive: it does not seek to eradicate all egoconsciousness, but seeks the ego’s continual improvement by disrupting its misguided orientations” (438). In Huskinson’s terms, Self is composed of the dynamic identities of the McFarlands’; ego is the locus of narcissism or selfishness that prevents them from connecting with each other and the world at large. Note Huskinson’s assertion that violence against the ego is not a negative action because its ultimate purpose is to help the Self “be born anew” (438). Shannon and Shane bear the psychological scars of their childhood and the layers of anger and pain built upon those scars. They must cut through the numbed flesh to find the place where blood still flows. Instead of following what mythologist Joseph Campbell called “bliss,” the McFarlands choose to follow their fears: “It’s the opposite of following your bliss,” Brandy says (Campbell 118; Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters 221). Shannon seems to accept the great sacrifice needed to allow her growth: “This is the biggest mistake I could think would save me. I wanted to give up the idea I had any control. Shake things up. To be saved by chaos. To see if I could cope, I wanted to force myself to grow again. To explode my comfort zone” (286). Note her claim that she wants to relinquish control, to surrender to “chaos.” Not only does her assertion indicate that she recognizes the need for sacrifice, it also reveals her understanding that her beauty for her has been a point of power and agency. To be free, Shannon must destroy her face, the locus of her identity as well as her source of income and self-worth. “I was addicted to being beautiful,” she admits (285). But, the addiction goes beyond her visage: “[B]eauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power,” she says (16). Shannon’s remark echoes Pierre Bourdieu’s suggestion that the body carries social capital (Howson 101). Shannon’s narcissism, therefore, is not merely an aesthetic obsession, but is also a

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fierce desire for power. By destroying her beauty she takes control of her body’s social capital. Her actions reflect her understanding of her beauty as power, and the extreme nature of her decision shows that she realizes her susceptibility to trading on her beauty. She admits “backsliding” by contacting her agent to see if she can get work as a hand or foot model (219). Her eventual desire to mutilate her face signals her intense longing for growth—not merely change. Shannon knows that her ego rests on her need for approval, so a trifling change will not suffice to enact the transition she wants. As a model she has learned that real change must be beyond skin deep. She needs to reformulate how she thinks about herself, and that requires a drastic, permanent alteration of her beauty. If she wanted only physical change she could have settled for “piercings and tattoos and brandings,” which she calls “little paper tiger attempts to reject looking good that only end up reinforcing it” (287). Instead, she speaks of her mutilation in terms of rebirth: “Here was my life about to start all over again” (287). Like any birth, though, the act will be violent, bloody, and irreversible. Shane’s desire for gender change is just such a longing for growth through violence. His rebirth involves the violence of surgery to change his gender to female (though he has not yet had genital surgery) and his identity to Brandy Alexander. The Palahniuk twist is that Shane does not want to be female—he is transforming himself for the challenges it will bring him. “The point is,” Brandy tells Shannon, “being a woman is the last thing I want. It’s just the biggest mistake I could think to make.” (259). He has not yet undergone genital surgery, and seems to hesitate at the enormity of that change: “It’s just such a big commitment . . . being a girl, you know. Forever” (181). His transphobia is not uncommon with transsexuals who fear crossing that final border, becoming what Kate Bornstein in Gender Outlaw calls a “gender terrorist” (71). Thus, he remains in a liminal space, especially to those who would attempt to categorize him by gender or appearance. Yet, there is power too in the limbo of Shane’s unclear gender identification. He joins ranks with the gender defenders, the outlaws willing to bang their heads against the dual binaries of traditional gender roles, whose very lives prove that gender is as ambiguous and fluid as race or class. Shane’s unwanted and incomplete gender change is part of his deliberate rejection of the homogeneity of performative gender typically understood as actual gender in popular culture. As Judith Butler explains in Gender Trouble, cultural discourse about gender and desire have long prioritized sex differences and thus made sexual distinctions seem natural “facts” which then are justified in

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structuring the performance of gender and desire. Shane refuses to perform his assigned gender role, to accept that his gender or desires are performances limited and structured by narrow “male” sexual difference alone. Palahniuk uses Shane to play with the ways sexuality disturbs middle class suburbia. Like David Lynch’s films, Palahniuk urges readers to look beyond the patina of normalcy to see the roiling confusion beneath—not in an effort to criticize traditional family life, but to reveal the truth behind it. The McFarland parents are quick to blame Shannon for the hairspray can in the trash that explodes and scars Shane’s face, but they are just as quick to reject Shane when he is diagnosed with an STD. Furthermore, they fail to protect Shane from sexual abuse from policeman Manus Kelly. Such early instability and confusion has a profound impact on Shane’s sexuality. He admits to Shannon, “[I]t made me confused for a long time” (252). Even Shane’s response to the molestation has a curious ambiguity: “It wasn’t horrible,” he tells Shannon, “but it wasn’t love” (252). Shane’s mutilation from the hairspray can makes him the favorite of the McFarland parents, but the bond is broken after he brings home an STD, and they kick him out. Later, they regret their action when they hear (falsely) that Shane has died from AIDS. In a form of penance and recognition of their selfishness, they throw themselves into the role of activists for PFLAG. Shannon visits her parents on her last birthday before her “makeover” (as she calls the shooting), wanting “just to see them, my folks” (144). However, her parents once again push her aside in favor of Shane as they try to enlist her participation in a gay rights march to honor Shane’s memory. They have become paranoid that their activism has made them targets, so they keep the house lights off and check every noise. Shannon accidentally breaks a candy dish during her visit, causing panic: “[M]y mother screams and drops to the kitchen linoleum. My father comes up from where’s he’s crouched behind the sofa and says, ‘You’ll have to cut your mother some slack. We’re expecting to be hate-crimed any day now’” (146). Shannon remains unmoved by their newly rekindled love for Shane: “I say, ‘You shouldn’t even be in PFLAG. Your gay son is dead, so he doesn’t count anymore,’” which she admits even sounds “pretty hurtful” to her own ears (147). The viciousness of the remark reveals her deep pain and resentment over her place in the family love hierarchy, and is further evidence of her need for growth and forgiveness. That the McFarland parents remain ignorant of the true events swirling around their family while overreacting to perceived threats reveals the conservative, reactionary nature of the nuclear family. Shannon marvels that the same parents who banished Shane from the house the evening they

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learned of his illness (telling him he could go to the health department the next day) could be the same ones who march in PFLAG parades: These same people being so good and kind and caring and involved, these same people finding identity and personal fulfillment in the fight on the front lines for equality and personal dignity and equal rights for their dead son, these are the same people I hear yelling through my bedroom door. “We don’t know what kind of diseases you’re bringing into this house, mister, but you can just find another place to sleep tonight.” (149)

The passage exposes the hypocrisy often found in suburbia: the reactionary fear and loathing of difference that exists until one faces the reality behind the “monster.” Their “genderism,” as Bornstein calls it, is wrapped up in a terror of, and subsequent hatred for anyone who would dare transgress the ostensibly “natural” place of gender or desire (74). In contrast to their earlier reaction to news of Shane’s disease, during Thanksgiving dinner Shannon’s parents disgust her with their “sick horrible sex talk” of rimming, fisting, and felching (92). They have taken the ACT-UP slogan “Silence = Death” to an outrageous end. Shannon might scorn her parents’ change of heart (though her criticism carries with it a certain jealousy), and Palahniuk might intend it to be funny—which it is—but it is also marks a growth in their thinking. It is significant, too, that their change requires a death, albeit a fake one. Shane symbolically sacrifices himself for them, and their hatred of homosexuality potentially dies with him. It is important to note that, in the end, it is Shannon’s transfer of her identity to Shane/Brandy that allows the prodigal son to return home, even if disguised as the daughter. “You can be Shannon McFarland from now on,” she tells him. “My career. The ninety-degree attention. It’s yours. All of it. Everyone. I hope it’s enough for you. It’s everything I have left” (293). While Palahniuk does not include any scenes of Shane’s return home—transformed into Shannon—we can imagine that his parents will ignore his new identity in favor of their “dead” son. Perhaps Shane/Shannon will end up marching in a PFLAG parade with his parents to honor his “dead” former self. In this case, he gets to hear his parents’ newfound sympathy for their long-lost son. The siblings’ reconciliation is central to the novel, as it reflects a theme that Palahniuk attributes to all his works: human connection. In an interview with the Ann Arbor Paper, Palahniuk responds to the perception of nihilism in his writing: “I’m not a nihilist. I’m a romantic. All of my books are basically romances; they’re stories about reconnecting with community” (Williams). His use of violence is not nihilistic—it does not

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represent nothingness—it is life-affirming, an attempt to discard the distractions that separate people from others and from themselves. Palahniuk best emphasizes the point in Stranger than Fiction: “If you haven’t already noticed, all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people” (xv). The challenge for the McFarlands, then, is to break through their narcissism to feel a connection with each other and the world at large. By the end of the novel, Shannon has transcended her hatred toward her brother. “Me, I just want Shane to be happy,” she says. “I’m tired of being me, hateful me” (Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters 291). She tells him, “I’m giving you my life to prove to myself I can, I really can love somebody . . . Completely and totally, permanently and without hope of reward, just as an act of will, I will love somebody” (295). Clearly, she has transformed from the person who admitted, “I’m an invisible monster, and I’m incapable of loving anybody” (198). Her “makeover” and the time spent on the road with her brother have helped heal the pain and resentment from her childhood. She no longer needs the adulation of an audience to find self-worth. Lest we assume that Palahniuk has ended the novel on a note of sentimentality, however, consider that Shannon tells Brandy to contact an agent and climb to the top of the modeling world as Shannon McFarland. “Be famous,” Shannon urges Brandy. “I’m giving you my life because I want the whole world to know you. I wish the whole world would embrace what it hates” (294). By transferring her identity to Shane, Shannon gives him the adventure he craves while luring her former audience into unknowingly accepting the ambiguity so feared by traditional American society. Imagine the controversy if a covertly transgendered person won America’s Next Top Model or became Miss America.1 Shannon has placed her brother in a position to become such a beauty icon, and the result will allow them to challenge American society’s assumptions and fears, thereby forcing Middle America to think beyond binary oppositions and its limited language of experience. “Everybody needs a big disaster now and then,” Shannon says, and passing Shane off as Shannon gives everybody the disaster they deserve (290). Palahniuk notes that he favors “dark, bittersweet endings . . . where it really mimics real life. It's never happily ever after, and a moment after the curtain comes down on even a happy ending, everything's gonna go to shit” (Sartain). Invisible Monsters provides such an open ending, where we know that some disaster eventually will destroy the tenuous happy ending. In Palahniuk’s fiction, disaster’s entropic force always undermines temporary order, even if it requires a nudge from a character to set it in motion.

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Notes 1

Shortly before this volume went to publication, Season 11 of America’s Next Top Model (2008) featured its first transgender contestant, Isis King. Indeed, controversy did follow King’s appearance, but King garnered significant praise for bringing visibility to GLBT issues. Isis King was also featured in the MSNBC special, “Born in the Wrong Body” (2007) which documented her struggle, along with those of other transgendered youth from across the US.

Works Cited Blum, Virginia. Flesh Wounds. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Bornstein, Kate. Gender Outlaw. New York: Random House, 1995. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1999. Campbell, Joseph, and Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth. New York: Doubleday, 1988. Howson, Alexandra. The Body in Society: An Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. Huskinson, Lucy. “Self as Violent Other: The Problem of Defining the Self.” Journal of Analytical Psychology 47 (2002): 437–458. Palahniuk, Chuck. Invisible Monsters. New York: Norton, 1999. — . Stranger Than Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Sartain, Jeff. Interview with Chuck Palahniuk. Strange Horizons. 16 Oct. 2006. 17 Feb. 2007.

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Middleton, CT: Weslyan UP, 1973. Williams, Laura J. “Knock Out.” Ann Arbor Paper 2.24 (2004). 15 July 2005 .

CHAPTER FIVE GOING TO THE BODY: THE TENSION OF FREEDOM/RESTRAINT IN PALAHNIUK’S NOVELS SCOTT ASH

From the identity shifting play of the road trip in Invisible Monsters, to the polymorphous perversity of the airplane sex in Choke, to the theories of art offered in Diary, Foucault would have found much in Palahniuk’s texts worthy of note. In fact, Palahniuk seems self-aware of such a linkage when he mentions Foucault by name in an easily overlooked passage from Choke. During a passage in which Victor Mancini remembers being taken to a zoo by his mother, the “mommy” tells him the story of a killer whale that kept “messing its tank … [so much that the] keepers were embarrassed” (200) and decided to set it free. In thinking of this scenario, Ida Mancini suggests: “Masturbating your way to freedom…. Michel Foucault would’ve loved that” (200). The excessiveness, explicitness and messiness of bodily business in Palahniuk’s novels have certainly gotten the attention of reviewers of his work. Episodes like the bathroom sex scene between Victor Mancini and Nico in Choke or the habit of young men from Waytansea Island of piercing their skin with junk jewelry to try NOT to attract a woman in Diary must be what is on the minds of reviewers when they talk about Palahniuk’s novels. Library Journal’s review of Choke referred to Palahniuk as the “master of depicting the dark and depraved underbelly of our society . . . Some readers may be shocked and even repulsed by much of the subject matter here” (Madom). Similarly, Publishers Weekly’s review of Invisible Monsters employs bodily language to describe Palahniuk’s style, “like he’s overdosed on Details magazine,” and to guess the audience’s response to the novel’s end, “the absurd surprise ending may incite groans of disbelief.”

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By far, the most vitriolic response to Palahniuk’s deployment of the body appeared in Laura Miller’s 2003 Salon.com review of Diary. Among other attacks, she refers to the philosophy she sees underpinning Palahniuk’s work as that of a “stoned high school student” and mocks his references to “something as smelling like shit or piss because the TRUTH is fucking ugly, man.” Though Miller’s review touches on several other points, the review, on the whole, intends to discredit Palahniuk’s work in Diary and his previous novels in general. By focusing on Palahniuk’s use of bodies and simultaneously employing similar bodily language, Miller and other reviewers re-inscribe themselves and their readers within the kinds of disciplinary narratives that Foucault describes and that Palahniuk dramatizes. Essentially, Miller attempts to make herself into the monarch whose laws must be obeyed at the risk of public punishment. The book review thus becomes the kind of spectacle Foucault sees in the guillotine (Discipline 57-59). To extend this analogy, when the reader of such reviews recognizes the disgust they contain, he must choose whether to place himself in the way of similar treatment or to situate himself safely within the normative mores of the culture as expressed by the review. Neither is a comfortable position. In the former case, the readers, like the witnesses to an execution, identify with the victim and, thereby, “are made to be afraid” (Discipline 58). In the latter case, Foucault would argue that readers become “the guarantors of the punishment . . . because they must to a certain extent take part in it” (Discipline 58). Thus, the specter of power puts readers’ “bodies” at stake. By labeling Diary, for example, problematic because it is transgressive or attempts to be, I am arguing that these reviewers are missing the point. Palahniuk’s novels Invisible Monsters, Choke, and Diary revolve, to varying degrees, around the processes and effects of control or discipline of bodies. When in Discipline and Punish, Foucault explicates the ways in which cultural narratives, whether they are laws or book reviews, become productive of power, he argues that such power only exists “in the rites of punishment, of a certain mechanism of power: of a power that not only did not hesitate to exert itself directly on bodies, but was exalted and strengthened by its visible manifestations” (57). Ultimately, the goal of such punishment or its imminent threat is the production of what Foucault calls “docile” bodies who are always already disciplined to behave in ways that support and reinforce the position and policies of those in power (155). An individual so emptied out of personal or subjective agency is mute or, at best, inarticulate except when voicing or serving the agenda of those in power.

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But focusing on Palahniuk’s uses of and references to the body for its own sake misses Palahniuk’s more interesting cultural commentary which is accessed through his consistent deployment of bodily imagery and metaphor. On a structural level, the consistent length of Palahniuk’s novels and his allegiance to a minimalist style testifies to his desire to exert a specific and deliberate discipline on his own work. He clarifies this intention in the essay “Not Chasing Amy” in which Palahniuk describes principles of minimalism and praises Amy Hempel as one of its best practitioners. He writes: Hempel shows how a story doesn’t have to be some constant stream of blah-blah-blah to bully the reader into paying attention . . . Instead, story can be a succession of tasty, smelly, touchable details. What Tom Spanbauer and Gordon Lish call “going on the body,” to give the reader a sympathetic physical reaction, to involve the reader on a gut level. (145)

The idea that an organizational decision could have such an effect on the bodies of readers points to a Foucauldian correlation between texts and bodies. Thus, it should not surprise readers to see so much discussion of and focus on bodies in Palahniuk’s fictions. In particular, Palahniuk’s characters find themselves quite frequently in scenarios that illustrate or could be examined through the theories of discipline and control offered in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Too often, the presence of the tension between discipline and the body is confused with examples of the ineffectiveness of Palahniuk’s “hip nihilism” (Patterson); these reviewers, like their peers who seem hypnotized by Palahniuk’s body play or by his pacing that aspires “to pure verb” (Heffernan 17), too often focus on the recurring theme of construction via destruction, as in the following passage from Invisible Monsters: “I’m only doing this because it’s just the biggest mistake I can think to make. It’s stupid and destructive, and anybody you ask will tell you I’m wrong. That’s why I have to go through with it” (Palahniuk, Invisible 258). Shane/Brandy, the presumed dead brother of the novel’s narrator Shannon MacFarland, makes the above statement about his/her process of changing his body from masculine to feminine but, in doing so, helps Palahniuk make a larger point. This character feels, just as many of Palahniuk’s characters feel, the need to escape the hegemonic control of what society deems are appropriate behaviors and choices. Choke’s Ida Mancini makes this point in sharper ways when she tells Victor that the “. . . laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom. Without access to true chaos, we’ll never have true peace” (159). Seen in the light of Foucault’s work in Discipline and Punish, the tensions between law and

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chaos, between safe and unsafe in Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters, Choke, and Lullaby read as dramatizations of identity crises. Instead of looking at the focus on the body as a solely pyrotechnic element of Palahniuk’s work, I argue that the body is exactly the site of a battle for the individual in postmodern, hyper-capitalistic America. This conflict is between the individual and the society as a whole, frequently comprised of corporate “bodies.” By positing an opposition between the individual and society as a whole, it is not my intention to argue for an essentialist distinction between the body and the society. Such binary distinctions serve limited purposes, at best. A more productive interpretive approach recognizes that in contemporary America the individual and the society both exist and have their own agendas. The tension between them demonstrated so prominently in Palahniuk’s novels reflects the reality that the interests of these entities do not complement one another, forcing clashes to determine who will be in control. Palahniuk’s novels astutely narrate contemporary social conditions where hostility between the society’s collective interests and structures clash with the individual’s. Such social tension produces individuals who only feel successful when they have removed themselves more and more from other people and from the communities to which they belong. Palahniuk’s first sentence in Stranger than Fiction admits just that. He writes, “If you haven’t already noticed, all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people” (xv). He suggests that this isolation is a byproduct of people succeeding in making their most individualized American dreams come true. “Whether it’s a ranch in Montana or basement apartment with ten thousand DVDs and high-speed Internet access, it never fails. We get there, and we’re alone. And we’re lonely” (Palahniuk, Stranger xv). Thus, in order to reverse this isolation, in order to return to the world, people must destroy the worlds of their own making (xv). But, in Palahniuk’s fictions, his characters create these kinds of isolated and idiosyncratic worlds to escape the unsatisfying shaping influences or controls in the society at large. Here, Palahniuk invokes, in his own way, Foucault’s theme of discipline. His work implicitly asks which is the discipline to which we will submit, an internal, intensely personal form that pursues the agenda of the individual? Or, will it be an external, impersonal form that pursues the agenda of the society or of some interest of the society? Additionally, these novels point out what Foucault’s argument also anticipates – that escaping all systems of discipline to find freedom in some absolute sense, to find an authentic sense of self is likely an unrealistic dream, for we are all controlled and disciplined subjects within larger discursive systems.

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Palahniuk’s characters are always lonely and looking for community, whether they live by society’s dictates or whether they take matters into their own hands. The narrator in Invisible Monsters, Shannon MacFarland, destroys her own face to break out of the isolation and dehumanization she feels as a result of her success in the beauty industry but does not find a more satisfying connection to the world behind the veil that physically and emotionally separates her from everyone. Victor Mancini, the narrator in Choke, leaves medical school but does not find a better kind of community by having sex with female prisoners on one-night furloughs under the guise of attending sex-addiction therapy or by allowing anonymous diners to “save” his life when he chokes himself on food. The narrator in Diary, Misty Wilmot, puts her art to the side in order to focus on her life as a wife and mother but finds herself working as a chambermaid and drinking herself into a stupor. As these narratives ebb and flow looking for models of community building, as they move back and forth between lives devoid of satisfactory meaning, they consistently are blocked by coercive efforts to limit options. Foucault’s influential text Discipline and Punish offers a trenchant diagnosis of the mechanism that enables society to put individuals in the awkward positions so often found in Palahniuk’s books. That mechanism is discipline and its site of action is the body of the person at issue. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault writes, “discipline organizes an analytical space” (143). He goes on to argue: Discipline increases the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminishes these same forces (in political terms of obedience). In short, it dissociates power from the body; on the one hand, it turns it into an ‘aptitude’, a ‘capacity’, which it seeks to increase; on the other hand, it reverses the course of the energy, the power that might result from it, and turns it into a relation of strict subjection. (138)

While Foucault was talking about conditions in Europe more than two centuries ago, his formulation of discipline speaks readily to the contemporary moment in America. Essentially, discipline’s presence, the presence of a regime of behavior, creates bodies that are either docile or resisting. However, there is little reason to believe in either case that the consequences of these responses matter. If the body is “docile,” then there are ways in which the individuals will feel limited in their specific, individual freedom. If the body “resists,” then it is subject to punishment, usually as an extension of educational, medical or legal discipline. The body is always visible in the economy of discipline that Foucault describes and in the universes that Palahniuk creates. In Palahniuk’s novels,

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disciplinary practices come from two sources: corporate interests seeking to maximize the economic aptitude of docile individuals, and personal interests that aim to maximize the political aptitude of resisting individuals, through self-expression and community identification. Foucault’s analysis goes further to suggest that the hegemonic disciplinary practices of powerful corporate entities are exhaustive in their efforts to affect individuals’ lives and bodies down to even the smallest increment of time and movement. . . . the more time is broken down, the more its subdivisions multiply, the better one disarticulates it by deploying its internal elements under a gaze that supervises them, the more one can accelerate an operation, or at least regulate it according to an optimum speech, hence this regulation of the time of an action that was so important in the army and which was to be so throughout the entire technology of human activity . . . (154)

By organizing the movements of a soldier or the schedule of a prisoner to this degree of detail, the humanity of the body is emptied out. What is left is a mechanized object, an automaton, that knows only a disciplinary regimen and does not have access to its own rationale for being or acting. Thus, when that individual is faced with a crisis situation, there is no internal logic for them to fall back on; no internal logic to provide the context for any decision to be made. Instead, that individual must make a third party’s logic work. When that happens with or without a sense of self-awareness, Foucault would argue that the panopticon has taken hold and been internalized by the individual. Foucault borrows Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a hypothetical prison design, as a metaphor for how society can coerce. Foucault writes that the “major effect of the Panopticon . . . [is] to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (201). He goes on to argue that Bentham’s figure is not an abstraction but rather is “a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use” (205). In short, it arranges things in such a way that the exercise of power is not added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, but is so subtly present in them as to increase their efficiency by itself increasing its own points of contact. (206)

To simplify, the individual in a society as disciplined as contemporary America cannot act independently because the context of his thinking is foreclosed by the interests of the society. It has infiltrated his consciousness like a virulent and self-defeating expression of Freud’s

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superego. Confronted by this enemy both without and within, the individuals in Palahniuk’s texts look for ways to fight back, to escape. Shannon McFarland’s plight in Invisible Monsters features some traits of the Foucauldian dilemma. As is true of all of Palahniuk’s fictions, the scenario confronting his main character is far more complicated than seems plausible or than can be reduced to a single theoretical explanation or simple summary. A former model, Shannon finds herself incapable of dealing with the competing problems created by the apparent death of her brother, her parents’ overzealous role-playing as parents of a dead gay child, and her sizeable relationship problems. Along the way, she shoots herself in the face, burns down two homes of her “friend” Evie, feeds female hormones to her ex-boyfriend Manus, and befriends the unique Brandy Alexander who turns out to be her not-quite-dead brother Shane. All of this sound and fury accelerates the reader to the narrative’s conclusion where sister and brother are reunited. More than that, Shannon gives her identity to her brother to help them both escape the lives that they find so dissatisfying. But, with Shane in the hospital as a result of having been shot and Shannon without a voice or face, the novel’s ending does not offer a positive prognosis for the future of either character. Holding some of the above storylines to the side for the sake of this discussion, looking more narrowly at Shannon’s life as a model, and subsequent afterlife, reveals the value of applying Foucault’s theory of discipline and power to the text. At the first, Shannon becomes aware that her success as a model has less to do with her ability to do or think anything in particular than it does with her ability to be something other than herself. In particular, her value as a model is directly related to her ability to “be hired to be walking sex furniture to wear tight evening dresses all afternoon and entice the television audience into buying the Num Num snack factory” (Palahniuk, Invisible 39). Of note in this passage are the way that Shannon knows that she has been objectified and the fact that she is confined within a “tight” costume. These conditions dramatize Foucault’s sense that discipline serves power by exerting minute control over the body of the individual to the point that the body becomes mechanized. By being rendered “docile,” “a new object was being formed . . . It is the body of exercise, rather than of speculative physics; a body manipulated by authority rather than imbued with animal spirits” (Foucault 155). This transition from body to machine corresponds with a shift away from seeing value in the individual herself and towards seeing value in the product the individual has become a part of (i.e. the process of selling the Num Num snack factory). In similar ways, critics Pippa Brush and Sandra

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Lee Bartky have employed Foucault to their respective discussions of the women’s cosmetic economy and of the political terrain women must negotiate when they present their femininity. In “Metaphors of Inscription,” Brush argues that the cultural focus on the malleability of the female body via cosmetic applications (whether topical or surgical) and the persistence of this focus results in a reformulation of the “natural” body. She writes, “the ‘principle of compulsory visibility,’ becomes so harsh a scrutiny that it transcends the power of the human eye . . . and becomes a technological gaze. The concern with ‘minutiae’ becomes the instrument of discipline” (Brush 39), a discipline that only a machine could endure. Shannon’s experience of being “sex furniture” echoes Bartky’s point that the world a woman can occupy is “not a field in which her bodily intentionality can be freely realized but an enclosure in which she feels herself positioned and by which she is confined” (Bartky 134), like furniture in a room. Having mastered the first stage of the regime’s disciplinary application by becoming a successful model makes it easier for the ethos of that regime to seep into Shannon’s consciousness. Once she knows what she must look like at every moment in order to satisfy the interests of power, she internalizes the policing mechanism of those in power, in particular the fashion photographers who choreograph the positioning of her body. Hearing the voice of the photographer in her own head becomes Shannon’s experience of Foucault’s panopticism. Even after she has shot her face off to escape her life as a model, she still carries around the internalized panoptic power that controls her. The fashion photographer inside my head yells: Give me pity. Flash. Give me another chance. Flash. (Palahniuk, Invisible 41)

The effect of the panopticon in this case reminds Shannon that all of her behaviors are inauthentic. They are not actions as much as they are poses produced for a specific occasion because of their utility (Foucault 138). She is no longer capable of action and expression because she sees any action that she might take or choice she might make as immediately corrupted and co-opted. This dynamic persists, despite Shannon McFarland’s efforts to escape her life as a fashion model, and no matter how extreme her efforts to retreat from social controls might be. Even after she has shot her face off, she still carries around the internalized authority that controls her. In fact,

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nearly all of the novel’s most dramatic and powerful moments are undercut, immediately, by the re-emergence of this policing agent, the internalized “fashion photographer.” Even at a moment when she considers the way she is manipulating the body of her former boyfriend Manus with female hormones, she does not experience the full weight of her actions because that photographer choreographs what she is supposed to feel. “Give me peace. Flash. Give me release. Flash” (101-2). The result is a feeling of complete disempowerment. . . . We’re so trapped in our culture, in the being of being human on this planet with the brains we have, and the same two arms and two legs everybody has. We’re so trapped that any way we could imagine to escape would be just another part of the trap. Anything we want, we’re trained to want. (259)

Shannon’s inescapable self-awareness of the panopticon paralyzes her, neutering any attempts to free herself. After all, having turned herself into a faceless, voiceless monster (thus staying “visible” to the disciplinary regime as the opposite of what is desired), her resistance to the regime of power is mute. In fact, it is her recognition of the trap’s completeness that pushes her to such extremes. In that, she shares a personality trait with Choke’s Victor Mancini. In Choke, Palahniuk sets into a motion another set of hyperbolic actions and characters that do not interact as much as they slam against one another. The protagonist, Victor Mancini, cannot seem to get himself on a path to a coherent future for himself. He is trapped in a childhood dominated by his mother’s drug-induced illegal activities, trapped in his own dissatisfaction with medical school, trapped in his sex addiction and trapped in relationships with people who cannot make him feel any better about himself. To squeak by financially, he recreates a powerful moment from his childhood. He re-enacts a childhood choking incident in restaurants in order to be ‘rescued’ by nearby diners. Victor becomes being the positive center of attention for everyone in the restaurant and manipulates his rescuer to “adopt” and support him. In each day’s mail, he searches for birthday cards from his new “parents” who hope he is doing well and who send him money to keep him afloat. Amidst this blur of activity, Palahniuk again invokes parts of Foucault’s theory. When we meet Victor, he has already dropped out of medical school, is addicted to sex and “choking” himself in restaurants around the city, has found a job at a historical village where every crime against historical accuracy is punished, and is taking care of his “mother” who has been hospitalized. Each of these facets of his life can be illuminated via

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different parts of Foucault’s thinking about the power of discipline. Just as Shannon McFarland shot herself in an attempt to get free of the modeling industry, Victor has taken matters into his own hands to escape a universe he feels yields him no free space. However, given the power of the systems of discipline arranged around him, particularly his medical school training, his job and his filial obligation, the only arena over which he can exert any control is his own body. Thus, like the killer whale who responded to his “benign” incarceration by dirtying his tank by continual masturbation (Palahniuk, Choke 200), Victor resorts to acts of physical rebellion like frequent, anonymous sexual activity and simulated choking. In one scenario, he has met a woman and agreed upon a plan for him to “rape” her, as it serves both of their bodily interests. But, as Foucault would point out, the transgressive nature of rape, the physical, emotional, and sexual violations at its core, are domesticated by having it planned and bound by rules. While hiding in the woman’s apartment on the agreed upon day, Victor takes a pair of her pantyhose to put over his head: . . . and when I leap at her with the knife she says, “Are those my pantyhose you’re wearing?” I twist one of her arms behind her back and put the chilled blade to her throat. “For crying out loud,” she says. “This is way out of bounds. I said you could rape me. I did not say you could ruin my panty-hose.” (Palahniuk, Choke 171)

Even as these two individuals attempt to be “resisting” bodies in the disciplinary economy of what is accepted as “normal” or “safe” sexual behavior, the fact that they are not actually violating any laws and are policing their own “resisting” behavior keeps them “docile.” Yet, despite the unsatisfactory nature of this encounter and others that he has, Victor chooses to continue his behavior. Thus, he becomes a model of Foucault’s sense of “delinquency.” In fact, Foucault argues that the effectiveness of the power of those in authority to punish resisting behavior without allowing any space for minor rebellions makes recidivism a foregone conclusion (266). The persistence and pervasiveness of external sources of control over Victor is illustrated when Victor goes to a strip club and cannot leave behind his previous training from medical school. “I went to the USC School of Medicine long enough to know that a mole is never just a mole” (103). Thus, when he watches a dancer, Victor only sees a patient.

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Everybody you see naked, you see as a patient. A dancer could have clear lovely eyes and hard brown nipples, but if her breath is bad she has leukemia. A dancer might have thick, long, clean-looking hair, but if she scratches her scalp, she has Hodgkin’s lymphoma. (104)

Like Shannon’s internal photographer, Victor cannot get rid of all of the textbook information he learned as a medical school student. He finds his habit of diagnosing the dancers distasteful, but he cannot stop himself, even as he acknowledges that living this way makes his life “. . . less about living and more about waiting. For cancer. For dementia” (105). Even in those moments when he might not choose to police his own behavior, Victor is reminded of the power of the panopticon. This is especially true when he is at work at a colonial American village. Historical accuracy is so prized and so demanded that the village even has stocks to punish employees for their misdeeds. Victor’s friend Denny has been caught in crimes like chewing gum, using Chap Stick or wearing his wristwatch (26-27). Having the stocks and actors placed in them to represent what happened in colonial America would be one thing, but since the stocks are used to punish transgressions against the terms of employment, they are not merely representative. Although cast in Palahniuk’s typically absurdist fashion, a visitor to the village has written “Eat me” on the back of Denny’s head at an opportune moment when his wig fell off (26). This plot element illustrates another powerful element of Foucault’s theory of how visible power can be used to control society through the spectacle of the scaffold. By “publishing” (Foucault 45) Denny’s punishment to the other members of the colonial community, those in charge put on display “the physical, material, and awesome force of the sovereign” (Foucault 50). Proof of the efficacy of this deployment of discipline through punishment is that Victor is not willing to help Denny blow his nose with a clean tissue, using instead his dirty, sodden handkerchief because “all I’d have to do is offer him a nice clean facial tissue and I’d be next in line for a disciplinary action” (26). In the “modern” job economy, the disciplinary action that workers fear is not placement in the stocks but the threat of downsizing. Therefore, it should not surprise that economic and sociological critics have begun to use Foucault’s theory of discipline to examine the current state of economic affairs. Jerald Wallulis’ argument in “From Discipline to Insecurity in Work: Illegible Technologies of the Self in the ‘New Economy’” brings Foucault’s cultural analysis into the business thinking of the 21st century. Given the realities of downsizing and outsourcing, even favored employees can expect no protection from their companies. The balance between the survival interests of the company and its

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employees has becomes heavily weighted in favor of the company. In effect, the corporate body has fused with mechanistic principles, making it less hospitable to the discreet individuals who service it, so the individual must risk more to maintain, let alone increase, their chances of success. Particularly, Wallulis wants to examine the potential for individuals to act as “free agents” as an alternative route to success rather than just becoming “docile” actors in the new business economy. In the “old” economy, one could argue that there was a more reciprocal relationship between worker and employer. “The promise of a career was the reward offered to the company’s good workers, and a company of such good and loyal workers had its own expectations of a long-term existence” (Wallulis). In this older model, while the worker was encouraged to be docile, to see their ervice to an employer as a relationship obligation, there were tangible rewards for this behavior other than simply avoiding “punishment.” The new worker must perpetually keep looking for new employment opportunities – whether lateral or vertical, whether connected to previous employment or not. Where the “career” offered a somewhat coherent narrative from which a person could derive a sense of self, the new job history has a more random and more episodic feel. Wallulis asks, in response to this reality, whether the absence of continuity and loyalty in the economic marketplace could have a trickle-down effect to the psychological and psychosocial elements of the lives of the workers whom it affects. The older system was legible and, therefore, could allow the worker to feel a sense of mastery and control from having “read” the narrative correctly. The newer system is illegible because there is no dependable formula for success; success does not create a sense of mastery or control because success can feel far too accidental. The corrosive effect of this dynamic on the worker’s, on the individual’s, sense of self might just encourage the kind of exaggerated responses to the world featured so often in Palahniuk’s texts and so ably by Victor in Choke and Shannon in Invisible Monsters. While Misty Wilmot’s behavior is not as rebellious as Victor’s or Shannon’s, Diary offers another Palahniuk text in which an individual must fight to define herself against the backdrop of a disciplinary system that is more interested in perpetuating its own existence and power. Perhaps because of Palahniuk’s recent shift towards a horror aesthetic, Diary offers a more complete and, therefore, frightening representation of a community that has become a fully functioning, nearly seamless panopticon. In this novel, a whole town is complicit in taking Misty hostage. This woman – artist, wife and mother – struggles to make sense of the conflicting intersection of her own interests and those of the town.

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In order for the interests of the town to succeed, she must be reduced to a blindfolded, catheterized conduit for the art that will support the town’s existence. For her to survive and save herself, in some form, requires a consuming fire that destroys the hotel she lives and works in as well as all the art she has created. Misty arrives at Waytansea Island after marrying Peter Wilmot, a member of one of Waytansea’s oldest families, whom she met when they were both in art school. By the time the reader meets her, her life has fallen nearly completely apart. Her art career has dissolved and has been replaced by work as a chambermaid at the island’s main hotel. Her husband has been hospitalized in a coma after an apparent suicide attempt. Her daughter, Tabbi, is being tutored by her paternal grandmother Grace in all of the secrets of fine china and the ways to make Misty feel small. As a result, Misty has fallen into a self-imposed regimen to manage her various pains. “A couple drinks. A couple aspirin. Repeat” (18). Her pain and her need to continue self-medicating only become worse as more and more townspeople ask when she will start painting again. Given the state of her life, her marriage and her finances, painting seems the last thing she needs to or can do. But, the town will not be denied. In order to fulfill a historic pattern and to protect itself against the incursions of summer people, the town must have Misty paint. In fact, the town is so insistent on repeating the pattern connecting Misty to previous women artists like Maura Kincaid that “every four generations, a boy from the island would [have to leave the island in order to] meet a woman he’d have to marry” (206), even if that boy was gay as was Misty’s husband, Peter. The boys could not decide to ignore their duty, but they conspired to find ways to not be the one who attracted the woman to save the island. The brooches, they pinned through their foreheads, their nipples. Navels and cheekbones . . . They calculated to be revolting. To disgust. To prevent any woman from admiring them . . . Because the day one unlucky boy married this woman, the rest of his generation would be free to live their own lives. (207)

Even as they as attempted to resist the dominant pattern of their town, these young men could not break completely out of the discipline of the pattern. Knowing what it would mean for them and for the woman to be involved, they still could not be more than pawns to the larger game. As Misty’s understanding of the town’s agenda grows, the town steps up its discipline of her body to make sure that her resistance does not become too strong. In this effort, the expertise of the town’s physician, Dr. Touchet, is enlisted. At first, she is simply poisoned to be made more

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malleable to control (130-132). By the time the novel moves closer to its climax, she has been catheterized, has had her eyes taped shut, and has had one leg put in a cast. All of this prevents her from being herself and from pursuing her own agenda, from living in and controlling her own body. To the town, she is irrelevant except as the machine through which its survival will be protected. Despite the hostile and degrading treatment she receives, Misty cannot help but start to give in to the discipline of the town. For lunch, Paulette brings up more food Misty doesn’t eat. Already the leg cast feels loose from all the weight she’s lost. Too much solid food would mean a trip to the toilet. It would mean a break in her work . . . Her shoulders ache and pop, and her wrist grinds inside. Her fingers are numb around a charcoal pencil. (173)

Additionally, it’s no surprise that the more mechanized Misty becomes, the more mechanical her work becomes. The first hint of this correlation appears earlier when Angel Delaporte, Peter’s lover, observes that Misty can draw shapes with mechanical precision completely freehand (140141). Her art has become less about human interpretation of the world, images filtered through her psyche and body, and more about a soulless, photographic reproduction of images. The cultures of discipline that Foucault examines, whether military, medical, or legal, use discipline to force bodies to conform and to ensure that the products that the culture needs can be generated. Misty’s concerns or dreams are not even secondary to the people of Waytansea. By the time she decides to burn down the Waytansea Hotel, along with all of her paintings and all of the summer tourists who gathered to buy them, her resistance does not matter. Either her plan will be foiled, in which case the paintings will be sold and with the money generated, the island will be able to afford to close itself off from the world, or her plan will be successful, in which case the negative publicity will be so intense that people and companies will pay whatever is necessary to erase their connections to this tragedy (256). Either way, the system has fulfilled its mission, served its agenda. That Misty can leave the island in the aftermath of these events is not really an escape of any consequence. Just as Shannon and Victor have their attempts at finding ways out undermined, Misty knows that the system she’s escaped has not been destroyed by her actions. In fact, it will just keep going, just as she repeated what previous occupants of her position had hoped to stop. The well-designed disciplinary machine

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anticipates and has planned for any rebellious behavior, thus rendering it less effective as rebellion. The inability of these protagonists to find balance between individual agency and regimes of discipline heightens the relevance of Foucault to studies of Palahniuk’s work. His characters have themselves, as much as anyone or anything else, to blame. As Foucault writes: The Panopticon [the machinery of disciplinary power] is a marvelous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power . . . The efficiency of power, its constraining force have, in a sense, passed over to the other side . . . He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it . . . he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.” (202-203)

In Palahniuk’s work, his characters choose the form of control to which they must yield. The choosing does not make the control any less domineering. It may, in fact, make the whole situation all the more maddening.

Works Cited Bartky, Sandra Lee. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power”. Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 129-154. Brush, Pippa. “Metaphors of Inscription: Discipline, Plasticity and the Rhetoric of Choice.” Feminist Review Spring 1998: 22-43. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Heffernan, Virginia. Rev. of Lullaby. The New York Times Book Review 20 Oct. 2002: 17. Madom, Heath. Rev. of Choke. Library Journal 126.14 (2001): 132. Miller, Laura. Rev. of Diary. Salon.com. 20 August 2003. . 23 May 2005. Palahniuk, Chuck. Choke. New York: Doubleday, 2002. —. Diary. New York: Doubleday, 2003. —. Invisible Monsters. New York: Norton, 1999. —. “Not Chasing Amy.” Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories. New York: Doubleday, 2004. 141-46. —. Stranger than Fiction: True Stories. New York: Doubleday, 2004.

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Rev. of Invisible Monsters. Publishers Weekly. 246.27 (1999): 56. Wallulis, Jerald. “From Discipline to Insecurity in Work: Illegible Technologies of the Self in ‘The New Economy.’” Intertexts 6.1 (2002): 110-18.

CHAPTER SIX BRANDY, SHANNON, TENDER, AND THE MIDDLE FINGER: ALTHUSSER AND FOUCAULT IN PALAHNIUK’S EARLY NOVELS RON RIEKKI

O: In talking about your works in the past, you’ve quoted Michel Foucault, Marshall McLuhan, Camus, Kierkegaard. Do you read a lot of philosophy and cultural critique? CP: Yeah, I do, because it’s always giving me glimpses into understanding parts of the world I took for granted before. I love that. You just think things are a certain way, and then you find out the nature of why they’re that way. I’m in love with that moment of insight. O: Do you consciously write to meet philosophical theories you’ve read? CP: Totally consciously. — Chuck Palahniuk (Robinson)1

From structuralism to feminist literary criticism, there are plenty of ways to approach a text, but when Chuck Palahniuk tells you that he “totally consciously” writes with theory in mind and when he has been known to quote directly from Michael Foucault in interviews, then a Foucaultian analysis of his texts seems not only obvious, but necessary. In his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault argues that society “is itself prisonlike, ‘carceral’” (“Michel” 1618), linked by a network of prisonlike or carceral “apparatuses” (Foucault 1639). This conception of Foucault is critical to understanding Palahniuk’s writing. Complementary to Foucault’s conception of carceral apparatuses/ mechanisms is Louis Althusser’s post-Marxist conception of the internetworking of corresponding Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). Palahniuk’s novels repeatedly take anti-capitalistic stances, mocking corporations, often destroying the symbols of capitalistic enterprise, those

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enterprises being encrusted with and entrusted to the complex network of ISAs—complex and yet quotidian. In Althusser’s groundbreaking Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward an Investigation) he labels several of the primarily identifiable ISAs, including the religious, the educational, the familial, the legal, the political, and the cultural. Palahniuk’s satirical attack on ideology—and thereby a direct attack on capitalism, as capitalism and ideology are inseparable bedmates—is not disguised; in both Survivor and Invisible Monsters, it is an in-your-face, brutal unmasking of those ISAs.2 Palahniuk’s novels attack ideology on a grand scale; religious, familial, and political ISA representations are mocked and symbolically ransacked. Like Engels’ “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,” Palahniuk’s early novels Survivor, Invisible Monsters, and Fight Club undermine property-family ideology, viewing the ‘house’ as a symbol to be overturned, the prison-like protective edifice that maintains ideological order. The ‘house’ and all of its capitalistic manifestations are treated with disdain, something to be destroyed, set fire to, looted, and even exploded.3 The house has direct connections to a plethora of ISAs; in many ways, it is the ISA symbol (with the White House perhaps being the RSA symbol). Legal steps must be taken to acquire a house. It is a religious ceremony—marriage—that most often triggers the purchase of a house, or an upgrading to a larger house. The family, of course, is centered in the house. Links to communication ISA/ideology-spreading devices are commonplace in the home; large screen TVs and THX-Enhanced Surround Sound ensure the communication ISA is given added significance through scale and volume. This interrelationship is centered in the home, and in Palahniuk’s novels the home is the site for redefining the cliché nuclear family of conservative familial ideology. Palahniuk writes about a man battling against capitalistic servitude with the various ‘houses’ as symbol of that battle. In Palahniuk’s first novel Fight Club (1996), the protagonist’s condominium is stuffed with it with IKEA furniture; Njurunda coffee tables and a Haparanda sofa group with orange slip covers. No detail is spared in the exetended description of the narrator’s possessions, only to have them explode, fly down, burning, fifteen stories.4 In Palahniuk’s next two published novels, Survivor (1999) and Invisible Monsters (1999), Palahniuk only expanded upon his almost-terroristic approach to materialistic lavishness.5 There are overtones of the World Trade Center in Palahniuk’s Parker-Morris Building, both Ground Zeros; and Survivor is about an airplane hijacker.6 In Survivor, the exploding condo of Fight Club becomes an endless list of corporate violence scattered throughout

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the book, a heavy-handed Marxist take on the violence of capitalism. Fertility Hollis dreams of chandeliers falling, planes crashing, and trains derailing; she has visions of movie theaters burning. Those visions are coming true, visions including multiple car accidents, tanning salon explosions, subway collisions, oil tanker and cruise ship capsizings, stadium collapsings, and casino fires. A casino on fire—could there be any grander example of Palahniuk’s iconoclastic approach to the moneygrubbing West—especially during these current times of Vegas overdose, of endless commercialization of gambling into the mainstream, of poker as ESPN-worthy sport? Palahniuk’s satire attacks family ISA “house” symbolism and its broader counterpart of all-encompassing capitalistic “corporate house” symbolism, but it also aims at products that fill these houses, the output of these corporations, specifically their commodities. Traditionally thought of as helping ease life’s burdens, in Palahniuk’s fiction products themselves are actually weapons.7 Suicides occur with and by the aid of capitalistic product. For Palahniuk the technology of capitalism is demonstrably object-bondage, tied to alienation, and this manifests in suicide using capitalistic object, death from labor-separated object. In Survivor, a battery explodes acid into a car mechanic’s face; a hair spray bottle supposedly explodes into Shannon McFarland’s brother’s face. In the consumer society of Palahniuk’s fictional worlds (and our non-fictional worlds), face has specific meaning—face is more valuable than soul. Furthering this demonization of product, in Survivor, the Creedish believe that evil flows through technology’s electrical wires; and this is proven to be in many cases true. It is via the phone that Tender Branson convinces the suicidal to kill themselves. When the Creedish do commit suicide, it is by hanging themselves with extension cords and drinking herbicide. Or, when Tender Branson’s caseworker wants to kill herself slowly, is uninterested in living to old age, she uses cigarettes—alienation through commodity, death through product. The surface of capitalism is easier salads and shinier teeth; the dehumanizing reality of capitalism is slitting your wrists with Gillette and enduring botched expensive plastic surgeries with no refund. The greatest products of all, in Palahniuk’s work, are humans, commoditized as subjects to the elite. The protagonists of both Survivor and Invisible Monsters go through a marketing of the self, whereby they become owned, become property, exemplified clearly by having one character be referred to as “Evelyn Cottrell, Inc.” (Invisible Monsters 265). This dehumanizing commodification of the individual is distinctively separate from the Marxist bifurcation of bourgeoisie (property owners) and proletariat (propertyless workers); this is human as property, sub-

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proletariat, slave.8 Tender Branson, Shannon McFarland, and Brandy Alexander go through Kafka-esque transformations that explicitly illustrate the ability of consumer culture to convert humans into products, and then they struggle to transform and escape subjectification to the consumerist system and objectification into products themselves. In Survivor, Tender Branson and his communications ISA/media-controlled ilk succumb to “Deca-Durabolin and testosterone cypionate” (137), “Equipoise” (137), “levothyroxine sodium” (136), “Metahapoctehosich” (135), wearing a “wig” (135), “tanning” (134), “wearing makeup” (134), “Retin-A” (134), “Rogaine” (134), “steroids” (134), “laser resurfacing” (89), “chemical peels” (89), “[d]ermabrasion” (89), and more. Shannon McFarland and Brandy Alexander go through nose and “jawline contouring” (180), extracted ribs (196), “torpedo boob job” (82), “silicone” (198) implanting, shaved trachea and brow (198), lipo-sucked hips (198), realigned forehead (198), “maxomilliary operations” (198), “electrolysis” (198), more “dermabrasion” (203), “vaginoplasty” (223), and more—a process that Shannon McFarland admits is mutilation. This mutilation (in the historical, misogynistic traditions of suttee, footbinding, infibulation, etc.9) means pain, a pain that is actually honored, respected, and even craved—which shows the level of power in ideological brainwashing. The “mutilation,” as McFarland rightfully dubs it, requires and perpetuates the money/product cycle. In Invisible Monsters, Palahniuk mentions Valiums, moisturizer, Darvons, tranquilizers, painkillers, oral estrogens, Percodans, Compazines, Chanel Number Five, Nembutals, Percocets, anti-androgens, Progestons, Transdermal estrogen patches, blusher, eye shadow, Benzedrine, Dexedrine, Quaaludes, Soma, Dialose capsules, Solaquin Forte cream, Demerol, Darvocet-Ns, Darvocet-N 50s, hormones, Provera, Climara, Premarin, whiskey, estradiol, vodka, and ethinyl estradiol. This is a significantly abbreviated list. Even the focal character is named Brandy Alexander. The result is a capitalistic spiral of addiction economics. If you can hook someone, you can monetarily exploit them to seemingly inconceivable excess, and monetary exploitation is at the heart of capitalism, as well as at the heart of Palahniuk’s three 1990’s novels. Palahniuk exemplifies this exploitation with the destruction of Shannon McFarland. McFarland takes a gun to her own face, permanently disfiguring it. A product uses a product to destroy the cycle of exploitation. What we see exploited are people’s penchants for narcissism, solipsism, and the overwhelming drive to be photographed, to have cameras pointed at them. The cameras themselves eventuallyu become the

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panoptic center of attention, and to use Foucaultian terminology, that panoptic center is carceral.10 By carceral Foucault means the prison-like qualities of modern existence, the ever-present watchfulness of camera, how people are constantly under surveillance and in fact crave that watchfulness. Emails become daily voluntary transcriptions of the masses’ thoughts, easily traceable. Corporations send cookies into computer systems to trace the information consumers are interested in. Every phone call a person ever makes is listed in a telecommunications company’s database, accessible by the government. Cell phones and automobiles pinpoint Americans’ whereabouts at all times through triangulation capabilities. Uniformly and consistently, people are on cameras throughout the day—ten, twenty, thirty different cameras in malls, gas stations, squad cars, tracking every step taken, every move made. This is corporation as stalker; the male gaze has become the corporate gaze or the governmental gaze. One would think that freedom-loving citizens would revolt at such carceral surveillance, except for one thing: ideology makes people actually crave the carceral. The photogenic, photo-addicted Shannon McFarland and the P.R.-addicted Tender Branson are archetypes of hundreds of thousands of people trying out for reality television shows.11 The ominous Big Brother of Orwell is deceptively enfeebled into Big Brother, a reality television show embedded with carceral ideology, where sexploitative, onanistic, bureaucratic voyeurism and prison-like environments are desired. Leaving that environment by being voted off of it is looked at as a sad act rather than as one to be embraced. Palahniuk’s ISA-attacking Survivor, where the hijacked passengers are dropped off in Vanuatu (2), is overshadowed by Survivor: Vanuatu, an ISA-embracing ‘reality’ show also thoroughly embedded with carceral ideology. Palahniuk conscientiously reminds the reader of this carceral networking throughout his novels. In Survivor, every time Fertility Hollis talks to her brother, she can hear the click-click in the background of an FBI tape recorder. In Invisible Monsters, Brandy Alexander warns that at the Canadian border, the police have microphones listening to people’s conversations in their cars as they are waiting to cross. This effect of a media-centered world of constant surveillance creates—as Tender Branson explains—a feeling that our natural habitat is on television, that reality is not nature but rather nature viewed through camera lens à la Wild Kingdom. What is meaningful is not the Zulu tribesman but rather the tribesman as he is photographed by National Geographic. A resultant posing occurs, an unnaturalness represented as natural, a cycle of people “watching themselves watch themselves watch themselves watch”

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(Invisible Monsters 119). In Althusserian terms, the process “subjects the subject to the Subject” (Althusser 1507), or as Tender Branson argues, “There’s no point in doing anything if nobody’s watching” (Survivor 151). Christian terminology speaks of God watching us at all times, capitalistic Christianity speaks of Santa watching us at all times, and rightist Republican sociopolitical thinking speaks in terms of Uncle Sam watching us at all times.12 The ironically-named Patriot Act is just a further step in the direction of carceral as norm, with paternal observation as the model. Ideological State Apparatuses—our radio and television shows13, our schools, our families, even our sports—are set up to further these carcerally ideological and ideologically carceral mind sets. RSAs, or Repressive State Apparatuses, are in place to ensure that ISAs cannot be toppled. RSAs (e.g. the FBI, CIA, military, police, etc.) protect ISAs primarily through violence or the threat of violence. The police constantly hover throughout Palahniuk’s novels, but this is not where the heart of the violence in his novels lies. Rather, that violence emerges in a proletarian revolt. But unlike the mass revolt of Marxism, it is instead a revolt of the self, and in the acts of Shannon McFarland, Brandy Alexander, and Tender Branson on their selves. Perhaps one of the more significant differences between Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Survivor or Invisible Monsters is that there seems to be a more Marxist revolt in Fight Club where the masses are actually able to coalesce around a common ideology besides just the revolt of the individual. Ideology, at its most effective, leaves the person feeling as if nothing can be changed (at a basic level, a ‘my-vote-won’tcount’ mentality). In this mind set, one of inevitable defeat, the fight to be able to control anything, especially the body, becomes even more significant. The protagonists in Palahhiuk’s Survivor and Invisible Monsters take active steps, often seemingly self-destructive steps, in order to make vital statements on control. Getting a sex change operation that one does not even want, permanently disfiguring one’s face with a shotgun blast, and allowing all of the land one’s family owns to become a dump site for discarded porn are not traditional steps for success, but the main characters in Palahniuk’s novels are sickened by what the world proclaims to be successful. “It was church doctrine that the rest of your life would be the same work. The same being alone. Nothing would change. Every day. This was success” (Survivor 191). ISA dictated success represents a turnthe-other-cheek mentality of maintaining status quo, thereby ensuring the continuation and strength of capitalistic exploitation and enforcing the ideology of class superiority. Proletarian revolutionary success, on the other hand, is ironically an overturn-the-money-changers’-tables mentality

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of undermining the status quo, of weakening and destroying capitalistic exploitation and ruling class hegemony. Religious allusions are being used here with a specific point in mind. Throughout the greater part of history, the strongest Ideological State Apparatus has been that of the Church, an ISA dedicated to control of the self, but notably control of the self as dictated by Church ideology. Interestingly, it is this ISA Palahniuk denounces in Survivor. Althusser creates a tautology between Priests and Despots, and in Survivor Palahniuk does the same. The attack in Survivor is directed specifically at religious ISA control and Palahniuk pulls no punches, creating such a level of satire that it seems part of the broad-reaching atheistic attempts to deconstruct the “banal discourse” (Althusser 1506) that is the God myth. Palahniuk is a poetic modern day Feuerbach; where Feuerbach’s Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit pointed out Christianity as an inhumane, egoistic religion, Palahniuk seems to make the same claims, but with a slight twist. For Palahniuk, it is Christians themselves who are inhumane and egoistic – due in no small part to their outrageous ideologies. Outrageous ideology is littered throughout Survivor (although one could argue that “outrageous ideology” is a somewhat redundant term). Palahniuk’s fictional Creedish is a representation of the real life People’s Temple, The Order of the Solar Temple, and Heaven’s Gate mass suicides, as well as the Branch Davidian disaster. In this respect, Palahniuk is also perhaps a modern day Althusser, someone interested in the laborious work necessary to reveal class struggle and the excesses of ideological falsity, but Palahniuk does so in a way that is less arduous and more entertaining, though momentous nonetheless. His warning of the all too real dangers of religious ideology in our present day is somewhat matter-of-fact. Religious ideology is used to pressure votes for a certain presidential candidate; religious ideology is used to support pro-war attitudes; religious ideology is used to further ruling class agendas. This is one of the ugly beauties of ideology, its ability to be nonsensical and yet canonical, and to morph as it sees fit, as Orwell demonstrates so effectively.14 Althusser goes so far as to make the claim that ideology has no history; it is manufactured, “nothingness” (Althusser 1496). Althusser’s language has Feuerbachian overtones; God has no history, is manufactured/manmade, is nothing/fake. The marriage scene in Survivor is the epitome of Palahniuk’s fictional attempt to demonstrate ideological nothingness/falsity.15 The bride is an actress, an understudy, who is set to lip-synch her vows, fake putting on a ring, and fake kissing the “husband,” all in front of a packed Superdome audience. Palahniuk’s dramatized mass deception echoes the

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Marxist criticisms of the culture industry as made by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Culture industry mass deception is also layered throughout Invisible Monsters. In the junkyard fashion photo shoot, Shannon McFarland and Evie Cottrell, dressed in thongs and wearing high heels, climb high on a pile of rusted cars with serrated edges to stand on tiptoe with legs spread apart while holding a chainsaw close to their faces. Ad agency communication ISAs operate on the level of illusion, which corresponds to capitalistic exploitation. Rather than simply saying this, Palahniuk, like any good fiction writer, shows it, imagistically. What Norman Rockwell does with family, Palahniuk does with family ideology. What Rembrandt does with icon (in works of his such as The Resurrection of Christ), Palahniuk does with iconoclasm. What Andy Warhol does with consumerism,16 Palahniuk does with ad agency communication ISA aesthetic. And, the religious ISA and the communication ISA are, of course, not mutually exclusive. They work hand in hand and are strengthened by their partnership; Palahniuk demonstrates this partnership throughout. Tender Branson’s Christmas specials and packed stadium appearances, his interviews and satellite feed into his kitchen are extensions of this—the communication ISA, the intentional overdose of the carceral that is meant to desensitize one to the carceral. Ideological State Apparatuses and carceral apparatuses are “mechanisms of normalization” (Foucault 1646) that work in “a multiple network of diverse elements” (Foucault 1647), both founded on the benefits of profit. It is this networking that makes ISAs, in fact, carceral. When the family oversees and questions the person who steps outside of ideological bounds, that is one thing to deal with. But when ISAs work together, i.e., when communications ISAs create mass media that emphasizes ideological thought, and when religious ISAs cooperate and all of the other ISAs work in tandem to ensure that thinking outside of ideology is wrong, dangerous, and even insane, then the ISA/carceral network becomes incontestable. The watchfulness of ISA networking secures ideological thinking unquestionably. This panoptic approach ensures docility. When the carcerally ideological fails, when someone acts outside of its boundaries, then the ideologically carceral is in place to further the carceral state, to make its carceral networking manifest in more obvious ways, to show its power. At its most basic level, stepping outside of ideology is stepping outside of capitalism. As soon as the Creedish refuse to pay taxes, Repressive State Apparatuses become interested. The first thing Shannon McFarland does upon leaving the hospital—once she has officially stepped back out into the real world after her resignation from bourgeois life—is steal a turkey, a physicalization of her outsider-

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ness, her new categorization as member of the lumpenproletariat. Her struggle now will be against those bourgeois elements she was once a part of but now is apart from, those ISAs and RSAs and their carceral threat. The State embraces the consumer, the spender, the wealthy, those who feed the economic machinery, those who tithe. The carceral/penal ‘embraces’ (if we can call handcuffs and straitjackets an ‘embracing’) the criminal, the non-consumer, the poor, those who undermine capitalism, those outside of institutions. Marxism divides people into three classes— the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and the lumpenproletariat. The latter are the criminals of society, those outside of the bourgeoisie (propertyowners) and the proletariat (workers). Palahniuk loves to pair the bourgeoisie, whom he often heightens to the incredibly rich, against the proletariat, who in the course of his novels become lumpenproletariat.17 Palahniuk creates a unity of opposites that pits the ultra-rich against those willing to question the ideological (and who thereby quickly become lumpenproletariat). The “this is another rich house”-ness (Invisible Monsters 186) of Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, and Survivor are ranged against the Tyler Durdens, Shannon McFarlands, and Tender Bransons. All have their penchants for destroying those rich houses with fire and shotgun blasts (Invisible Monsters), peeing in their “sweet tomato bisque with cilantro and clams” (Fight Club 79), and destroying their pristine land with porn trash (Survivor). This is Marxist warfare, class struggle on the page, the crux of Palahniuk’s attack.18 That attack is meant to create an awakening, a dystopian representation of the hassle of modern day convenience. Palahniuk’s stream of mansions with foyers and fireplaces, these ideological symbols of elite disregard for poverty, serve as center stage for Palahniuk’s first three novels. Also at center stage, as well as equally symbolic, are the characters themselves, their bodies portrayed alternately as houses and temples. Palahniuk’s people exemplify the debilitating effects of the hegemonic control of capitalism; they demonstrate that control, show19 that control. Shannon’s McFarland’s face holds as much symbolic weight as the house featured in the story’s opening and close. Both are equally destroyed, yet equally saved, a salvation that comes from turning away from capitalism. Such bodily conscientiousness is further represented in the pharmaceutical overdosing found in modern culture. Lastly, when the home and the body are not being controlled by the self, ISAs and RSAs work hand in hand to ensure that ideology is indisputably in place. In many ways, like all good artists, Palahniuk is a teacher, a satirist holding up a mirror to the worst features of American capitalistic society

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and all of its horrors. In Althusserian eyes, the enlightenment Palahniuk provides is heroic. To use Althusser’s words, “They ‘teach’ against the ideology, the system and the practices in which they are trapped. They are a kind of hero” (Althusser 1495). One such “they,” or one such “hero,” is Chuck Palahniuk. Althusser believed that “the only way we can hope to reach a real knowledge of art . . . [is to pay] attention to the ‘basic principles of Marxism’” (Althusser 1483). To fully understand Chuck Palahniuk’s writing as a whole, we need only to turn directly to his own words on the subject. In an interview on National Public Radio’s 360, Palahniuk made a reference to Derrida. The interviewer replied, “It all comes down to Jacques Derrida.” Palahniuk’s reply to the interviewer’s comment was one word: “Foucault.”

Notes 1

Palahniuk has cited numerous philosophical influences on his work throughout the years. Foucault’s specific examination on the intersection of individual subjectivity and social discipline makes him an especially valuable theorist for investigations of Palahniuk’s fiction. 2 This is satisfying perhaps to those dissatisfied with the effects of runaway capitalism, the obvious culture wars which are in effect ideology wars, the problem of debasing Bushonomics, etc. 3 These capitalistic manifestations of ‘house’ include “a condominium on the fifteenth floor of a high-rise” (Fight Club 41) and the “Parker-Morris Building” (Fight Club 13) that are both completely decimated, a “baronial West Hills manor house” set on fire, (Invisible Monsters 272), a “four-bedroom Maplewood Chateau” (Survivor 51) where the contents are smashed “in the street” (Survivor 46), “a commercial bakery that’s going to explode” (Survivor 183), “a gas station going to explode” (Survivor 181), a “movie theater [. . . that] will burn,” (Survivor 119), etc. 4 Palahniuk takes similar pleasure with Fight Club’s opening scene in the Parker-Morris Building: “The breaking glass is a window right below us. A window blows out the side of the building, and then comes a file cabinet big as a black refrigerator, right below us a six-drawer filing cabinet drops right out of the cliff face of the building, and drops turning slowly, and drops getting smaller, and drops disappearing into the packed crowd” (Fight Club 12). Again, we see house/building/property deconstruction in Survivor: “The windows we left open suck air inside, and the easy-living open floor plan channels this airstream out through the front doors. Embroidered throw pillows blow off the sofa and bounce out the front doors around Adam. They fly at Fertility, hitting her in the face and almost tripping her. Framed decorative art, botanical print reproductions mostly and tasteful racehorse prints, flap off the walls and sail out to explode into shards

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of glass and wood slivers and art” (Survivor 47). In Invisible Monsters, Palahniuk opens up with a house on fire. 5 Invisible Monsters was actually completed before Fight Club. In the “Interviews” section of disc 2 of the DVDs to Postcards from the Future: The Chuck Palahniuk Documentary, Palahniuk’s Doubleday editor Gerry Howard talks about receiving Invisible Monsters before Fight Club. 6 Of course, this is coincidental, as the books were written years before 911 happened, but there is a feel that—similar to Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul (also written prior to the events of 9/11)—the author has his fingers on the world’s pulse. 7 Other writers’ books link product and violence. An abbreviated list includes Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive, J G Ballard’s Crash, and Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. But where those authors may have dedicated a book to the concept, Palahniuk seems more radically obsessed with the violence of capitalism (and one could argue the capitalism of violence) in the entirety of his first three novels. 8 Palahniuk’s protagonists even know that they are capitalistic slaves. In Survivor, Tender Branson says, “Bred and trained and sold little slave that I am, I go right to work cleaning” (Survivor 16). Their struggle is to break free of that self-acknowledged servitude, a servitude that extends. Slaves enslave others. In Invisible Monsters, “Evie’s house was big—white with hunter green shutters, a three-story plantation house . . . she has these minimum-wage slave Laotians who refuse to live in” (123). 9 A must-read for those further interested in studying the historical, commercial, social, and overall patriarchal contexts for supposedly-justified female mutilations is Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology. Specific chapters of note include “Indian Suttee: The Ultimate Consummation of Marriage,” “Chinese Footbinding: On Footnoting the Three-Inch ‘Lotus Hooks,’” and “African Genital Mutilation: The Unspeakable Atrocities.” 10 At the Chuck Palahniuk Conference in Postcards from the Future, Palahniuk speaks of his own distaste for panoptic existence, stating, ironically with a camera pointed at him, “How does it feel to be at the conference? It feels really creepy. It feels a little self-involved. And so to be the focus of attention after spending my entire childhood and early adulthood running from cameras is at odds with everything I’ve been trained to do.” 11 “Seventy thousand people auditioned for the chance to become this year’s national pop music ‘Idol’” (“What” 1). Factor in all reality television show auditions and all the seasons of these auditions and we would easily be in the hundreds of thousands of people auditioning for reality TV, perhaps even a million. Ironically, I would be included in those statistics. 12 At the Saturday keynote lunch address [April 12, 2003] filmed in the documentary Postcards from the Future: the Chuck Palahniuk Documentary, Palahniuk makes this language explicit, stating, “And we all know that Santa Claus is like the training wheels to God.” 13 For many years, Palahniuk did not own a TV: “The author lives outside the mainstream – on Sauvie’s Island, a crumb of land off the lip of Portland, Oregon.

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He doesn’t have cable. He doesn’t even have a television. The two local radio stations fade in and out restlessly” (“Invisible Man” 1). 14 Palahniuk’s lecture entitled “The Death of Protest: The Rebirth of Charm— Self-Expression as a Way to Entertain People and Change Their Reality” pays tribute to Orwell’s effectiveness as a novelist and social critic, demonstrating his influence on Palahniuk’s own writing. 15 Palahniuk talks extensively about nihilism, especially Kierkegaard’s importance to his own writings, in numerous interviews he has given. 16 For examples, see Rockwell’s oil on canvas of “Freedom from Want,” Rembrandt’s oil on canvas of “The Resurrection of Christ,” and Warhol’s prints of his Campbell’s Soup series. When viewing the Rockwell painting in particular, compare how contrasting Shannon McFarland is alone with her stolen turkey. 17 According to Marxist theory, “the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes—the property-owners and the propertyless workers” (Marx 764). Those property-owners are the bourgeoisie. The property-workers are the proletariat. Marx creates a sub-category for the proletariat class identified as the lumpenproletariat who are the criminals of society operating outside of standard capitalism. 18 On the DVD commentary to Fight Club, Palahniuk states, “A few years ago in Tacoma there were a lot of e coli bacteria poisonings at a Jack-in-the-Box and some children were killed. And it really impressed me how we trust our lives with the people that we give absolutely the least respect and the least money to and yet they hold the lives of us and our children in their—literally—in their hands. And these are the people that we want to give minimum wage and abuse. It just—it seemed really odd. That these are the people that hold the most power”. 19 By “show” here I mean a triple-entendre: 1) the most obvious meaning of demonstrating, 2) the applied creative writing technique of showing instead of telling, and 3) show in the grand theatrical sense.

Works Cited Althusser, Louis. “From Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Gen. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 1483-1509. Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. DVD. Twentieth Century Fox, 1999. Foucault, Michel. “From Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Gen. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 1636-1647. “Invisible Man.” Time Out New York. 14-21 Oct. 1999. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “From Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Gen. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 764-767.

Althusser and Foucault in Palahniuk’s Early Novels

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“Michel Foucault.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Gen. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 1615-1622. Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: Henry Holt, 1996. —. Invisible Monsters. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999. —. Survivor. New York: Anchor Books, 1999. “Palahniuk, Slapstick, Skyspace.” Studio 360, National Public Radio. February 12, 2006. Postcards from the Future: The Chuck Palahniuk Documentary. Dir. Dennis Widmyer, Kevin Kölsch, and Josh Chaplinsky. DVD. Kinky Mule Films, 2003. Robinson, Tasha. “Interview: Authors Double Feature, Chuck Palahniuk.” The Onion A.V. Club. 13 Nov. 2002. The Onion. 13 Jan. 2006. .

“What the parties could learn from ‘American Idol.’” Look Smart Find Articles. Aug. 2004. LookSmart, Ltd. 5 Jun. 2007. .

CHAPTER SEVEN BEHIND THE QUEENS’ VEILS: POWER VERSUS POWERLESSNESS IN C.S. LEWIS’S TILL WE HAVE FACES AND PALAHNIUK’S INVISIBLE MONSTERS JAMES DOLPH

Though Chuck Palahniuk engages in an iconoclastic exploration of gender identity in Invisible Monsters, there is something familiar about the overall impact of the author’s third novel. The synergy of character, motif, and theme bring to mind, paradoxically, C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces (hereafter TWHF). 1 However dissimilar the two books and their authors— Palahniuk’s writes a transgressive tale of cross-dressing, drug abuse, and murder; while Lewis, the foremost Christian thinker of the 20th century, employs the Cupid-Psyche myth to spin a story of Christian symbolism and Platonic philosophy—each deals with the tension between human power and human powerlessness. Some Christian readers of Lewis—though they may find Invisible Monsters’ subject matter objectionable—will benefit from a reading of the sexually-charged Palahniuk novel because it translates TWHF’s themes into a contemporary context, confirming the Narnian author’s ability to harness archetype. Palahniuk fans who discover TWHF may also gain a deeper appreciation for the universality of the themes embedded within the quirkiness of Invisible Monsters’ storyline. In a 1984 book of Lewis criticism, Dabney Adams Hart comments on TWHF, observing how, “Orual demanded not only the security of power, but the security of answers from the gods. Security, Lewis suggested … is an illusion” (142).2 Both Lewis and Palahniuk stalk this theme using the same three-pronged analysis of gender role confusion, obsessive love, and redemption. Moreover, this examination is scrutinized in the same terms: gender role discomfort, brought about by societal expectation and

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exacerbated by familial dysfunction leads to spiritual conflict and beauty worship that manifest as obsessive love, which finally take Lewis’s and Palahniuk’s characters on explorations of revenge and death down their paths to redemption. Writing for Christianity Today, Louis A. Markos analyzes the use of classical and pagan myths to build Christian apologetics, discussing Lewis’s enduring themes in light of French philosopher Roland Barthes’ view of fiction as a “tissue of signs, endless imitation, infinitely postponed” (7). Palahniuk, in an interview with The Onion A.V. Club, also invokes Barthes. Condoning liberal interpretation of his own work, Palahniuk says he supports “Barthes’ idea of the death of the author. People are going to bring their own body of knowledge, their own experience, to whatever. It is possibly going to be, for them, something in contradiction to what it was for you. I can’t control that, so I won’t even worry about it” (Robinson 6). With the Barthes principle firmly in place, archetypes in both works emerge easily and converge quickly. When comparing TWHF to Invisible Monsters, the epistemological parallels between the works are most immediately apparent in the authors’ similar interrogations of gender issues. In a 1999 Village Voice interview with Emily Jenkins, Palahniuk explains Brandy Alexander’s motivations, noting their origins in the philosophies of Michel Foucault 3: We really have no freedom about creating our identities, because we are trained to want what we want. What is it going to take to break out and establish some modicum of freedom, despite all the cultural training that’s been our entire existence? It’s about doing things that are completely forbidden, that we are trained not to want to do. In Fight Club, it was that we are taught to avoid violence. In Invisible Monsters, it was that Brandy Alexander does not really want a sex change. And in a way, having it was the most important thing she could think to do, because it would destroy an identity that was being imposed upon her by society. (2)

C.S. Lewis reveals similar sentiments regarding gender in the second of his space books, Perelandra: Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity that divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the many things that have feminine gender; there and many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. On the contrary, the male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine. Their

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At a surface level, these views may seem to conflict, particularly in consideration of Palahniuk’s postmodern perspective of the word gender. Contemporary definitions of gender differ from the characterization of the term in Lewis’s time. However, Lewis, like Palahniuk, regards gender not as an issue exclusively tied to sex organs, but to the psyche. Despite allegations of gender bias in some of his previous writing, TWHF best illustrates Lewis’s enlightened view of sexual politics, as his portrait of Orual is one that challenges gender-defined mores. Indeed, many C.S. Lewis scholars write specifically about TWHF’s scrutiny of universal themes. Joe Christopher, in a 1977 essay, notes, “the novel is equally rich with the archetypical pattern of life, the great patterns in which the common reader may also find himself participating” (212). Societal expectations regarding gender lead the main characters of each novel to adopt new, more secretive identities, thus rejecting their femininity. In the case of Orual, it is most practical for her to rule her realm as the ghostly and mysterious warrior queen who records her “complaint against the gods” in the text of TWHF. Shannon McFarland, Palahniuk’s main protagonist, becomes the shadowy, nearly identity-less follower and chronicler of Brandy Alexander’s cross-country odyssey. In Invisible Monsters, Shannon begins to move from passive, budding supermodel, to active agency as an assassin and arsonist. At the center of Shannon’s transformational odyssey is Brandy, a garish transvestitetranssexual, struggling toward the final stage of a male-to-female sex reassignment. Brandy’s gender transcendence affects Shannon much more profoundly—especially when filtered through the first person narrative— than it does Brandy herself. The impact upon Shannon is particularly sharp when Palahniuk reveals Brandy’s hidden identity as Shannon’s long-lost brother, Shane. Comparably, TWHF’s Orual begins challenging her society’s norm of female behavior when she becomes Queen of Glome. Her approach to rule is not only forceful, but also masculine and immediate. She is already managing the politics of her realm as her father, the king, lies on his deathbed. She offers political asylum to Prince Trunia of neighboring Phars, who concurrently conducts a civil war with his brother, Argan. When challenge to Trunia’s supplication arises, Orual takes to the arena to do battle with Argan. At this point, she begins transmogrifying “by learning fighting, and labouring, to drive all the woman out of me” (184). As in any novelistic treatment of character, both the Lewis and the Palahniuk protagonist undergo fundamental changes. The major shift for

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both Princess Orual and Shannon McFarland occurs as the direct result of losing a sibling. Their respective transformations, happening in terms of gender role metamorphoses, merely manifest psychological and familial trauma. Orual’s beloved youngest sister, Psyche, is a virgin sacrifice to the Shadowbrute, an invisible monster living in the nearby mountains. Shannon’s brother Shane, his face mangled after a hairspray accident, runs away from home when the parents disapprove of his homosexuality. Later, the McFarlands believe he is a victim of the ultimate invisible monster, the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS. For both Orual and Shannon, shock and uncertainty ensue when each realizes her sibling still lives—but in a transfigured state. Psyche, now the wife (not the victim) of an invisible and unseeable god (not a monster after all), lives in comfort and luxury imperceptible to normal human senses. Shane, now Brandy, comports herself outrageously as she tours high-end real estate open houses, pilfering pharmaceuticals from the medicine cabinets of the rich. Psyche and Shane (Brandy) both experience trials and tribulations as well as bliss and contentment. Psyche, as with her counterpart from Greek mythology, endures suffering at the behest of the court’s goddess, Ungit, while Brandy’s troubles flow from both her cosmetic surgery and her alienation flowing from familial dysfunction. Meanwhile, Orual and Shannon live their lives vainly attempting to hide their ugliness—both physical and psychological—behind veneers of detachment embodied by the veils they wear. Orual wears hers because of congenital hideousness that Lewis “wisely never tries to describe . . . but lets people make comments on” (Christopher 121). Palahniuk, much more forthcoming with description of his character’s unsightliness, describes Shannon’s in detail. Disfigured in an automobile crash caused by a sniper’s bullet, she covers her mutilation with a veil at the suggestion of Brandy Alexander. In each case, the veils 4 exist not so much to hide repulsive faces, but to empower the two women by camouflaging emotions and intentions. Lewis’s Queen explains this late in TWHF, “the wildest stories got about as to what that veil hid . . . The upshot of all this nonsense was that I became something very mysterious and awful” (228-229). Shannon reveals her veil’s power early in Invisible Monsters, “All . . . to see is my veils . . . There’s nothing about me to look at so most people don’t. It’s a look that says: Thank you for not sharing . . . When nobody will look at you, you can stare a hole in them” (24-25). Shannon elaborates later in the novel, “Behind another veil, the real world is that much farther away” (110). Then Brandy tells her, “Behind the veil, you’re the great unknown . . . Most guys will fight to know you. Some guys will deny you’re a real

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person, and some will just ignore you” (111). Shannon ponders this and evaluates every man as, “The zealot. The atheist. The agnostic” (112). Besides the veil, other pieces of clothing become fundamental connectors of beauty and worship. Shannon describes one high-fashion ensemble as “a knock-off of the shroud of Turin . . . cut so the shiny red buttons will button through the stigmata” (14), and she goes on to say that the outfit makes her feel “sacred and immoral” (14). In this same passage, the veil adds to the “elegant and sacrilegious,” launching Palahniuk’s complex reflection on the nature of ugliness and beauty, and of the divinity of both. Standing as mirrors to the unsightly Orual and Shannon, the beauty of the siblings translates into adoration from the casts of characters Lewis and Palahniuk create, reaching the precarious pinnacle of obsession. When Psyche, elevated to the status of a minor deity-on-earth, gains power— albeit only perceived by the peasants—to heal those stricken with the plague, apotheosis leads the Kingdom of Glome to disillusionment, “‘The Accursed! The Accursed! She made herself a goddess’ . . . ‘She is the curse itself’” (TWHF 39). Eventually, her father decides to offer her as a sacrifice to the Shadowbrute. By the end of the book, Orual discovers that Psyche has become an icon worshipped by a neighboring culture. Likewise, Shane loses his preferred child status (which he gained, strangely enough, partly because of his mutilation by the exploding can of hairspray) when the parents reject him after he develops a sexually transmitted disease. Later, word comes of his death from AIDS. Full of remorse, the parents become gay rights advocates, taking great pains to learn all about homosexual cultural codes and vernacular. They also try, unsuccessfully and hilariously, to contribute an appropriate piece to the national AIDS quilt.5 In his book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis points to the dangers of adulation when he writes, “Love, having become a god, becomes a demon” (83). Palahniuk indulges in this sort of warning through his use of religious allusion as well. One of Palahniuk’s main “choruses” 6 in Invisible Monsters is the statement: “Sorry, Mom/Sorry, God,” which echoes the sermon which Fight Club’s Tyler Durden preaches in response to the concept of fathers as the models for God,“What you have to consider . . . is the possibility that God doesn’t like you. Could be God hates us . . .” (141). The question of a god’s mercy juxtaposed with divine cruelty looms throughout Invisible Monsters, just as it does in TWHF. Palahniuk depicts the connection between familial love, beauty, and deification many times throughout his book. At one point, atop the Seattle Space Needle, Shannon writes “postcards from the future,” one of which laments her injury and disfigurement and expresses the fear that she will

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never again find love. Her solution to this depression is to “compensate by worshipping the queen supreme [Brandy]” (104). Lewis explains the menace of inordinate veneration most directly in The Four Loves: “Love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god”; which of course can be re-stated in the form “begins to be a demon at the moment he begins to be god.” This balance seems to me an indispensable safeguard. If we ignore it the truth that God is love may come to mean for us the converse, that love is God. (17)

If “love is God,” as Lewis assesses, then obsessive love is a vindictive and possessive god that ultimately imprisons the parents in both Invisible Monsters and TWHF. Chapter Four of Lewis’s book shows the king shut up in his castle against the entreaties of his people. At first, they desire the ministrations of Psyche, but later they demand retribution. Similarly, the McFarlands lay low in their home, believing they could be targets of antigay hate crime. Both families find themselves sequestered for reasons of cultural paranoia connected to the deification of their favored child, leaving the less-esteemed Orual and Shannon to strive for power at once on their own, yet with reference and deference to their dead, transmogrified siblings. The parents in both works become prisoners of themselves, since Orual’s father gives power to his temple priests whose ecclesiastic rule through the power of the goddess Ungit undermines and controls his own. Clyde S. Kilby observes, “Orual is clearly aware that the blood of the gods is in her family” (171), so the familial origin of the king’s fealty to Ungit drives the self-sabotage. Likewise, Palahniuk’s assertion in Invisible Monsters that parents stand in the place of God echoes throughout the book, not only in the “Sorry Mom / Sorry God” chorus, but also in the ranting of Manus Kelley, Shannon’s vice-cop boyfriend and the secret lover of the pre-Brandy Shane. Events come full-circle, creating dependence on, and imprisonment in, the emotional temples built by the siblings’ memories and the faux-detachment that both Orual and Shannon have toward them. However, the two veiled characters become obsessed with their more beautiful counterparts, clinging more closely than they ever realize. Lewis sums up the meaning of TWHF in a 1957 letter to Kilby. Quoted in William Griffin’s literary biography, this piece of correspondence explains: Orual is, not a symbol, but an instance, a ‘case’ of human affection in its natural condition, true, tender, suffering, but in the long run tyrannically

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Chapter Seven possessive and ready to turn to hatred when the beloved ceases to be its possession. What such love particularly cannot stand is to see the beloved passing into a sphere where it cannot follow. (384)

This symbolism clarifies another correlation between the two books – the two protagonists share a destructive kind of selfish love for their siblings. Obsession overtakes Orual as she journeys to Grey Mountain with the warrior Bardia in search of Psyche. Upon finding her sister, Orual refuses to believe the young princess happy in her invisible palace. The queen then rejects the girl, blocking out thoughts, feelings, and memories, even as she subconsciously lives her life always in veneration of her beautiful sister. The transfigured sibling leads Shannon as well, but Palahniuk takes a much more tangible approach by making the partnership physical, not merely metaphysical. Though clues abound, Shannon does not suspect that Brandy is Shane. Despite Shannon’s first-person narration, which repeatedly suggests animosity exists between Shannon and Shane, she and Brandy ultimately team up to destroy their arch-nemesis, Evie Cottrell. The pairing works only because of Shannon’s obsession with beauty and her worship of its icon, the manufactured woman who is “the queen supreme” (223), Brandy Alexander. Obsession, in this case, acts as a stabilizing catalyst that allows the siblings’ relationship to be renewed. Lewis builds TWHF on the premise that obsessive love may usurp not only God, but also existence itself. Palahniuk associates this obsession with the media, particularly the fashion magazine industry and television with their icon-constructing powers. Chapter Six of Invisible Monsters arranges itself around this premise, opening with Shannon’s assessment of “planet Brandy” as a place where “the universe is run by a fairly elaborate system of gods and she-gods. Some evil. Some are ultimate goodness. Marilyn Monroe, for example. Then there’s Nancy Reagan and Wallis Warfield Simpson. Some of the gods and she-gods are dead. Some are alive. A lot are plastic surgeons” (76). Manus comments upon this strange spiritual realm, comparing life and God to television: “life as a metaphor for television” (77); “Television really does make us God” (79); and “all we are is God’s television” (81). Though the vice-cop finally decides, “The Princess B.A. is God” (83), Brandy counters with the declaration, “Rona Barrett is my new Supreme Being” (83), exemplifying the elevation of a media figure to the status of god. Though peppered with humor and bordering on the absurd, Palahniuk’s spiritual commentaries are just as serious as Lewis’s. Palahniuk recognizes and reflects upon perplexed modern spirituality in a recent interview with medical student Shahin Chandrasoma, observing, “Instead of having

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shamans, we now have personal trainers. If we don’t ever die, then we don’t have to worry about heaven or hell—sort of a whole redirection from the spiritual to the physical. It seems apt that doctors, pharmacists, would become the new priests” (203). Life’s confusion, expressed in terms of gender and family dysfunction, lead to cosmic befuddlement and targeted fixation on beauty, driving the characters to strive for the ultimate Biblical goal of redemption. Amelia Franz, commenting upon Lewis’s letter to Kilby on TWHF, observes, “obsessive love leads Orual to resist yielding to the higher love destined for Psyche, and ultimately to destruction of the object of her love and of Orual’s own soul to the point of self-induced misery and guilt for the rest of her days.” Franz’s estimation constitutes a précis of Orual’s resolve to find redemption at the end of her life. The question remains, however, about whether Orual reaches salvation by the conclusion of the novel. Lewis writes in The Problem of Pain that some will not be redeemed: “If a game is played, it must be possible to lose it. If the happiness of a creature lies in self-surrender, no one can make that surrender but himself (though many can help him to make it) and he may refuse” (118). Certainly, the end of the book leaves the issue of Orual’s salvation open for interpretation, as the queen discovers the fates of and experiences the revelations from various supporting characters. The warrior Tarin, castrated 7 by Orual’s father for surreptitiously seeking the fleshly pleasures of Orual’s middle sister Redival, serves now as an esteemed ambassador from a nearby kingdom. Tarin reveals the sadness and jealousy that Redival feels, having lost the love of Orual to her elder sister’s obsession for Psyche. Orual, already angered by the realization that her earlier actions brought about Psyche’s trials, receives an even more clear and indefensible depiction of the selfishness of her love in the disclosure of Ansit, the wife of the war chief Bardia. Confronting the queen when she arrives to pay her respects upon the soldier’s death, Ansit talks accusingly of the stress her husband endured related to his military service. The old woman indicts Orual for putting the man in an early grave and robbing his family of his love and time. 8 These revelations enrage her and, even as she ponders revenge upon Ansit, the queen pauses to reflect upon her life. In the final scenes of the novel, the gods whisk Orual from her deathbed into the far reaches of the deep earth. They strip her of her clothing and, most importantly, her veil. She sees then that she is the goddess Ungit and that Ungit has many faces. James Como summarizes TWHF as Orual’s “lucid and rather convincing complaint [against the gods], a rhetorically formal apologia,” but cautions,

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“When rhetoric and redemption meet in the self, one of them must give way, since rhetoric requires a voluble ego and redemption its death, as an antecedent to its rebirth and resurrection” (6). Como here alludes to salvation through the reinvention of self, another parallel between Lewis’s and Palahniuk’s novels. Throughout Invisible Monsters, Shannon refers to her postdisfigurement life as the Brandy Alexander Witness Reincarnation Plan. Palahniuk’s characters, attempting to remake themselves, face the same dilemma as Orual. Near Invisible Monsters’ conclusion, during and after the attack on Evie’s wedding, all of the characters engage in introspection leading to unveiling of hidden elements. Brandy reveals herself as Shane and admits to engineering the hairspray accident himself. Shannon divulges having shot herself. Manus finally gives in to his not-so-latent homosexual longings. Even Evie Cottrell comes clean, confessing her transsexuality. As with Orual, Shannon’s redemptive fate is unclear, as truths about her feelings emerge when the other characters reveal mysteries about themselves. In a final comparison, Orual and Shannon finally allow their transfigured siblings to pass on into a new existence. In the construction of the final acts of both novels, both Lewis and Palahniuk employ Dantean imagery.9 Joe Christopher refers to this connection when he writes of Dante’s Limbo and the Limbo of Lewis’s book, The Pilgrim’s Regress, which contains “those who spend their lives in desire of the Spirit (God) but do not seek to fulfill the desire, and so receive an eternity of unconsummated desire” (C.S. Lewis 14). Therein, Christopher also makes the association to TWHF, as he does in his 1977 essay wherein he compares the ending of the Lewis’s novel to Dante’s Inferno (210-212). Palahniuk refers to the fire-and-bullets-ravaged culmination of Invisible Monsters’ action as “Evie’s plantation inferno” (161), but, when Tamara Straus, in an interview for AlterNet.com, opines “the themes of [Palahniuk’s] novels tend to divine from Dante’s eighth circle,” a deep relationship between the two authors’ thematic emphasis on redemption emerges. The Straus interview flushes out the major link between these two works, however, when Palahniuk tells her, “I am the biggest romantic you’re probably ever going to meet . . . My novels are all romantic comedies . . . But they’re just romantic comedies that are done with very dysfunctional, dark characters . . . playing in a very classic sort of boygets-girl scenario” (1). Of course, Palahniuk speaks of romanticism in the sense of literary “love,” not in the scholarly sense of romance itself. Nevertheless, romanticism brings the Lewis-Palahniuk connection into sharper focus. Christopher devotes two chapters in his book to C.S. Lewis

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as “The Romancer,” noting in Chapter Eight, regarding Nathaniel Hawthorne’s definition of the romance, that, “the truth for Nathaniel Hawthorne and the truth for C.S. Lewis may not resemble each other, but if they are both human truths, they at least will suggest the complexity of the human situation” (89). The same may be said for the truths of both Lewis and Palahniuk. But, if romance embodies the ideal in literature, then most assuredly both writers have agendas to create characters and situations that will entertain, as well as cause readers to think about the concept of human power and human powerlessness.10 Even though their thematic concerns are often similar, the two authors’ lives are poles apart. Lewis, known for his Christian apologetics and his friendship with Tolkien, lived a quiet life and taught at Oxford. Palahniuk is friendly with the likes of Trent Reznor and Marilyn Manson. In an interview for Gear magazine, Palahniuk quotes Manson as saying, “[Aldous] Huxley and [John F.] Kennedy died on the same day. To me, that opened up some kind of schism or gateway to what was going to happen” (“Reading Yourself” 154). What the Goth rocker fails to note is that C.S. Lewis also died on November 22nd, 1963. Interestingly, commentators Ted and Virginia Byfield make a link between the satanic theatrics of Marilyn Manson and the works of C.S. Lewis, referencing the third Space Book, That Hideous Strength, as well as his Christian treatise The Abolition of Man. Whether seen as synchronicity or mere coincidence, the unexpected parallels between the two authors occur with surprising frequency. The comparison, based upon the same principles that Christopher uses in his Hawthorne romance analogy, speaks to the desire on the part of both Lewis and Palahniuk to make commentary on the human condition. Despite his sometimes-devilish connections, Palahniuk expresses a measured respect for Christianity, telling interviewer Tasha Robinson: People have asked me to write things like “I love Satan” in their Bible, and there’s things like that I can’t condone, for whatever reason. Nobody’s told me anything to date that I’ve been completely reviled by. The Cacophony Society crucified a pink seven-foot rabbit outside St. Mary’s Cathedral in Portland on Easter Morning, and I refused to take part in that, because it seemed like it was attacking these people’s religion. So I have a threshold, too. (4)

More to the point, Palahniuk explains to Chris Switzer that “[religion is] a benefit in that it serves a real social purpose and it brings people together in spiritual inquiry” (2). Palahniuk criticizes Christian metaphor, however, lamenting the oversimplification of the spiritual:

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Chapter Seven In our culture where fathers are sort of absent, and where fathers are no longer a huge item of respect, or discipline, or whatever—if we’ve already been using that metaphor to describe God, and then the real thing in society, the father, breaks down, what happens to our idea of God? This shortcutting to comprehend God by using our world breaks down our idea of God when our world breaks down. That’s what I don’t like. That’s what I’m always attacking in my books. (2)

Palahniuk sees the demeaning of the sacred in other areas as well, as he notes in an interview with Dick Staub in the online edition of Christianity Today: I went to Bed, Bath and Beyond and I started seeing all of the sort of beautiful religious symbols of every other culture suddenly being used on bath mats and toilet seat covers and wallpaper borders. We've trivialized these things that had sacred power in the same way that we've trivialized language so language has no power either.

These points of clarification on divine issues, seen in some interviews, do not diminish the fact that Palahniuk’s overall tone tends towards nihilism. This philosophical bent may seem to stand in opposition to the devout apologetics of C.S. Lewis. However, Paul Holmer, observes, [Lewis] shows us repeatedly . . . how a kind of moral certitude is finally achieved. He sends us back to our fathers, mothers, poets, sages, and lawgivers . . . The tissue of life around us, when taken with seriousness, is already a moral order. . . the world has no single character, and it must be understood in a variety of ways. His books create, almost as Kierkegaard did, the living variety of paradigms . . . here the requirements are new capabilities, new capacities altogether . . . For his works, especially his novels, have a way of creating a kind of longing for innocence, for purity, for humility, candor, and contentment . . . Only its occasion can be created by another, and that is what Lewis’s literature becomes. (109)

A comparison of Lewis to Kierkegaard is comparable to the reexamination Palahniuk makes of the existentialist philosopher, “People get nihilism wrong. Kierkegaard said that in the face of nothingness, you have complete freedom to reinvent yourself and the world around you. Destroying everything is the first step. The second step is building it back up, which is much harder. Most nihilists don’t think about that second step” (Speer 1D). Further expressing this, and using Christian imagery to do so, “It's the death and the resurrection,” Palahniuk says. “Things have to come to that point of the death, whether it's Christ's death or the satori that Buddha achieved. They have to come to that point of ultimate

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destruction before they can really be redeemed” (Staub). The protagonists of TWHF and Invisible Monsters are indeed saved. They set out to reinvent themselves in the face of nothingness and, in the end, accomplish their objectives. Obsessive love drives each toward the goal, ultimately leading them to seek and find opportunity for salvation. Though the question remains ultimately unanswerable, Lewis and Palahniuk, through their similar-yet-separate inquiries into gender, beauty, and redemption, thoroughly interrogate the dilemma of human power versus human powerlessness. Parallel paradigms emerge in TWHF and Invisible Monsters, making the two books “companion pieces” of a sort. The final clue to the linkage between C.S. Lewis and Chuck Palahniuk materializes in the latter’s assessment of the Bible, “They're stories . . . that connect you to everyone else. And I love finding things that are archetypal in everyday life that . . . Suddenly you realize in a way you are each other's family” (qtd. in Staub). This, of course, may be said of all literature. Whether they hail from the Inklings school or the “Cult” camp, readers gain a deeper understanding of discourse and the vicissitudes of life when they cross the divide between Lewis’s anti-modernist apologia and Palahniuk’s postmodern parables.

Notes 1

I discussed the similarities between the two books with one of the founders of www.chuckpalahniuk.net, Amy Dalton, at the first conference on Palahniuk’s work in 2001 at Edinboro Univiversity of Pennsylvania. Dalton, having read Lewis as a child, became wide-eyed. Suddenly remembering TWHF, she admitted to a perceived correspondence as well. 2 Christopher characterizes the climax of TWHF as Dantean. By that same token, Invisible Monsters refers to “Evie’s plantation inferno” (161). 3 In his three-volume The History of Sexuality (published 1976-1984), Foucault argues that gender is not sex. Rather, he proposes an operational view of gender as a variable that shifts and becomes altered according to personal decisions and societal pressures. 4 Coincidentally, Shannon’s first veil has a “Greek key design,” calling to mind the ancient, Greek-influenced culture of Glome in Lewis’s book. 5 Since 1987, The AIDS Memorial Quilt has become not only a memorial to the more than 40,000 victims named there, but also the world’s largest continuing communal crafts project. 6 Choruses—repetition of thematic lines in Palahniuk’s prose—are one element that make his writing style almost instantly recognizable. 7 An occurrence that bears some coincidental resemblance to the forced pharmaceutical un-sexing of Manus Kelley in Invisible Monsters.

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Once again, an odd parallel to the strange and unexpected love triangles appearing in Palahniuk’s novel: Shannon-parents-Shane; Shannon-Manus-Shane; Shannon-Manus-Evie; Shannon-Brandy-Shane. 9 Christopher gives particular attention to Lewis's depiction of human circumstance using erotic imagery and his explication of the phenomenon of selfishness masquerading as selflessness. 10 At whatever wide latitudes critics may place Invisible Monsters and TWHF, a crossroads exists between the readers of both authors, a correlation which lives somewhere within the fields of fantastic fiction fandom. Although a literal interpretation of Lewis’s “Space Trilogy,” including Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, plant the series firmly within the genre conventions of science fiction, Lewis’s reputation within the mainstream flows from his fantasy saga, The Chronicles of Narnia. Both the Space and the Narnia collections use their respective platforms to build complex representations of human spirituality as they relate to the human condition. Because of the fantastic nature of these books, as well as for their Inklings connection, many readers of J.R.R. Tolkien venture into the works of Lewis. Similarly, disciples of futurist writers like Phillip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, most of whom have come across Tolkien during their readings in postmodern sci-fi and literary fiction, appear to flock to Palahniuk because of his rebellious and offbeat thematic bent.

Works Cited Chandrasoma, Shahin. “Physician, Shamans, and Personal Trainers: An Interview with Chuck Palahniuk.” The Western Journal of Medicine. May (2002): 200-203. Christopher, Joe R. “Archetypical Patterns in TWHF.” The Longing for a Form: Essays on the Fiction of C.S. Lewis. Ed. Peter J. Schakel. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1977. 193-212. —. C.S. Lewis. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1987. Como, James. “Rhetorica Religii” Renascence. Fall (1998). 3-21. Foucault, M. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. New York, Viking: 1980. Franz, Amelia F. “A Great Gulf Fixed: The Problem of Obsessive Love in C.S. Lewis’ TWHF” Into the Wardrobe: A Website Devoted to C.S. Lewis. Dec. 1994. Dec. 2002. . Griffin, William. Clive Staples Lewis: A Dramatic Life. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986. Hart, Dabney Adams. Through the Open Door: A New Look at C.S. Lewis. Auburn: U of Alabama P, 1984. Holmer, Paul L. C.S. Lewis: The Shape of His Faith and Thought. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.

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Jenkins, Emily. “Extreme Sport.” Village Voice. 13-19 Oct. 1999. 55-56. Kilby, Clyde S. “ TWHF: An Interpretation.” Orcrist. Winter (1971-72). 55-56. Hopper, Justin. “In the Company of Men.” Salon.com. 20 Apr. 2001. 30 Oct. 2003. . Lewis, C.S. The Abolition of Man. New York: Macmillan, 1947. —. The Four Loves. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960. —. Perelandra. New York: Macmillan, 1965. —. Pilgrim’s Regress. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1958. —. The Problem of Pain. New York: Macmillan, 1962. —. Till We Have Faces. New York: Doubleday, 1956. Markos, Louis A. “Myth Matters” Christianity Today. 23 Apr. 2001: 3240. Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: Norton, 1996. —. Invisible Monsters. New York: Norton, 1999. —. “Reading Yourself.” Stranger than Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 2004. 147-159. Robinson, Tasha. “Interview with Chuck Palahniuk.” The Onion A-V Club. 13 Nov. 2002. . Speer, Richard. Interview with Chuck Palahniuk.“The Bogeyman Portlander Chuck Palahniuk.” Williamette Weekly. 18 Sep., 2002: 1D. Staub, Dick. “The Dick Staub Interview: Chuck Palahniuk.” 8 Oct. 2002. 30 Oct. 2003. . Straus, Tamara. “The Unexpected Romantic: An Interview with Chuck Palahniuk.” AlterNet. 19 Jun. 2001. 30 Oct.2003. . Switzer, Chris. “From Destruction to Creation” turtleneck.net, an online journal of literary culture. Summer (2001). 30 Oct. 2003. .

CHAPTER EIGHT THE ANCHORESS AND THE GRAFFITI: DIARY AND “THE YELLOW WALLPAPER” KATHY FARQUHARSON

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) ends with the swoon of its narrator’s husband. Bluebeard overthrown, he lies unconscious in her path as she creeps around her room amid the strips of wallpaper she has peeled from its walls. In Chuck Palahniuk’s Diary (2003) the narrator’s husband is prostrate from the outset. Deep in a coma following a narrowly failed suicide attempt, he has left no letter. Instead, as it emerges in a series of telephone calls from irate homeowners to his wife, he has been sealing up the rooms he was in the process of refurbishing. His wife, Misty Wilmot, visits one of his victims who has been trying to find her breakfast nook: In her kitchen, the yellow wallpaper peels back from a hole near the floor. The floor’s yellow tile is covered in newspapers and white plaster dust. Next to the hole’s a shopping bag bulging with scraps of busted plasterboard. Ribbons of torn yellow wallpaper curl out of the bag. Yellow dotted with little orange sunflowers. (52)

The room is disclosed through the hole in the wall, also lined with yellow wallpaper, and covered in Peter Wilmot’s graffiti. The ribbons of wallpaper are, I suggest, Palahniuk’s salute to Gilman. Although it stops short of being a retelling, Diary is a novel haunted by “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Misty’s task, like that of Gilman’s narrator, is to read the writing on the wall. Getting at this writing is not easy, in either text. It involves much stripping of wallpaper and burrowing through plaster. And it is not just pattern and graffiti the women struggle to decipher. They also interrogate the walls themselves, engaging with the space/architecture, inside/outside, public/private debate that raged throughout the century that

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separates “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Diary. Just how solid is a wall, and on which side should they be? Misty has an acute, pathological awareness of domestic architecture which is, she suggests, a legacy of her trailer park upbringing. From early childhood, the “bourgeois daydreams of some poor white trash kid” have driven her to paint pictures of large houses, each visualised in minute detail: “Every house, every room, the carved edge of each fireplace mantel. The pattern in every parquet floor. Every tile … every wallpaper pattern. Every shingle and stairway and downspout” (8-9). Perhaps because her mother works in a fiberglass insulation factory, Misty’s fantasies do not stop at surfaces. She is just as intimate with the walls’ cavities and can reproduce every twist of wiring and plumbing in her drawings. Upon her marriage, these fantasies prove to be supernatural previsions of the houses on Waytansea Island, her new marital home. Here every building is constructed of “decades of stuff, all of it layered together” (94). Generations of islanders have been papering over cracks. Now wallpaper is peeling and paint flaking to reveal hidden messages, warnings from the past. Waytansea walls are noxious and unhealthy. Wallpaper smells “like a million cigarettes came here to die,” and in the wall cavities, Misty claims, “you can find lead pipes, asbestos, toxic mold, bad wiring. Brain tumors. Time bombs” (26-7). Walls represent separation and exclusion–poisonous boundaries between us and them. Driven by the desire to keep themselves in and outsiders out, the Waytansea Islanders render the outside redundant by bringing it inside, replicating the island in the hotel lobby. Eventually they move into the hotel completely, battening down the hatches against the wealthy mainlanders with rarely-occupied island homes, the “siege of awful strangers” whose “corporate graffiti”–the brand names and slogans that cover the external walls–the islanders seek to erase (87, 169). The Waytansea Hotel accommodates only the indigenous, and Misty finds her marriage has qualified her for admission. The “ancestral hall” in which Gilman’s narrator is confined for a rest cure is equally claustrophobic (31). Encircled by hedges, walls and lockable gates, it is a patriarchal house shored up by history. The attic room she inhabits is intended to be curative–it is “big” and “airy,” and filled with “sunshine galore” (33). But she herself experiences it as a space of ill health–literally, as a sick room. As noxious as Palahniuk’s, there is a sickness emanating from the walls’ surfaces. The wallpaper’s “vicious influence” resides partly in its colour–a yellow which is “repellent,” “almost revolting,” “unclean,” “hideous,” “unreliable,” and “sickly” (35, 33, 40). It reminds the narrator of “all the yellow things [she] ever saw–not

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beautiful ones like buttercups, but old, foul, bad yellow things” (42). The walls begin to discharge this yellowness in a stain, and in a “creeping,” “hovering,” “skulking,” “peculiar,” “yellow” smell–a miasma that pervades the interior (42-3). Critics have argued variously (and persuasively) that the yellowness of these walls represents fin de siècle decadence, imperialist anxiety, or the “stain or whiff” of both female sensuality and male hysteria (Jacobus 241). Whatever it signifies, yellow is the colour of obscenity and horror, and it is inside the characters themselves. Interrogating walls is a task both narrators accept, albeit reluctantly. They are in good company. Twentieth-century theorists from William Morris onward have asserted that we should resist our tendency to experience architecture inattentively, in what Walter Benjamin calls a “state of distraction” (233). Umberto Eco claims that architecture is not simply a “presence”; it is also “an act of communication, a message” (202). For Roland Barthes, too, architecture is text. And, while the urban explorer Jeff “Ninjalicious” Chapman entreats his readers to “let the blinders off” and “relearn how to pay attention to [their] surroundings.” Iain Sinclair leaves behind the “aimless urban wandering” of the flâneur in favour of what he calls “journeys made with intent–sharp-eyed and unsponsored” (75). He and his companion seek out graffiti, “shivering,” he says, in their “thirst for text” (39) Similarly driven, Gilman’s and Palahniuk’s heroines begin to read the surfaces of the walls that surround them, to interpret the “delirium of coded information” which, Sinclair maintains, is hidden in graffiti and wallpaper pattern (49). Feminist readings of “The Yellow Wallpaper” have suggested the wallpaper pattern represents male text–the patriarchal medical discourse of John (the narrator’s husband and physician) and his mentor Silas Weir Mitchell. Interpreting this text is far from easy. Its contradictions are “torturing,” and its lack of consistency is a “constant irritant to the normal mind” (31, 40). The narrator wonders “how it was done and who did it, and what they did it for. Round and round and round– round and round and round–it makes me dizzy!” (43). Reading is no easier in Diary. Writing is hidden, repressed, papered over and walled up. Like the pattern in “The Yellow Wallpaper” it provokes disgust and nausea. Written “in a big spiral that starts at the ceiling and spins to the floor, around and around so you have to stand in the center of the room and turn to read it until you’re dizzy, until it makes you sick,” it is disordered, hostile text–apparently racist, and offensive to Misty (27). At first she resists the impulse to interpret, dismissing it as “just crazy talk,” “gibberish,” “mess,” and “vandalism” (55, 101, 114, 122). The “sentence

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fragments and doodles, the drips and smears” are almost illegible (5). Trying to decipher the pattern on her walls, the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” complains, “You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following … it slaps you in the face, knocks you down and tramples upon you” (40-41). Misty also bewails “the way reading something can be a slap in your face” (54). But she is firmly steered along her interpretative path by the handwriting analyst, Angel Delaporte. “Powdered with white plaster dust,” marked by walls, he instructs Misty in graphology, which he declares to be a “bona fide science” that bridges outer and inner worlds (29, 51). Surrounded by experts (even her 12-year-old daughter is a “connoisseur of extinct china patterns”), Misty remains a reluctant reader (134). But Angel holds her finger, forcing her to trace her husband’s text, sometimes literally illuminating it with a torch. Finally, in a bricked up laundry room, she succeeds in “sketching the doodles off the walls” (114). Reproducing it enables her to absorb, and finally to interpret, the writing on the wall. Misty is an experienced reader of surfaces. At art school she acquired some expertise in the anatomy of skin. Now she spends hours scrutinising her comatose husband’s liver spots, wrinkles and face muscles. She maintains, indeed, that every face is a “diary of wrinkles” to be read (253). The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is another accomplished reader. John has forbidden independent reading (always in control of text, he reads to her), so instead she turns her attention to the wallpaper. She has, actually, some experience with wallpaper-reading. Like Gilman herself, who studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, she claims to “know a little of the principles of design” (37). She knows what laws to look for in her search for meaning and does not find them in this decadent, florid pattern which “commits every artistic sin” (33). She displays the jealousy of the academic expert: “I know [Jennie] was studying that pattern, and I am determined that nobody shall find it out but myself!” (42). What she finds is a subtext. There is a layer between the surface of the wallpaper and its sticky side. The design partially obscures a second pattern which increasingly absorbs her attention. She begins to read through the writing on the wall, the dominant text of male medical and marital direction. She sees the muted text beneath, and recognises that it moves independently. Once she distinguishes the figure of a trapped woman, it becomes her mission to release her. It is not only reading that the rest cure prohibits. John also insists that his wife refrains from writing. Her diary, therefore, is written in secret and probably, in the absence of any other paper, on the wallpaper. Diary, like “The Yellow Wallpaper,” takes the form of a diary. It is, indeed, awash

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with figurative diaries – the slogans of the mainlanders, Peter’s writing on the wall, builders’ messages sealed inside walls, messages on surfaces from Misty’s predecessors beyond the grave, children’s growth marked on walls, autographs on Misty’s fiberglass cast – and all are ways of making a mark, of talking to the future. Graffiti are, as Richard Sennett says, “simple smears of self” (205). It was always Peter’s intention that his walls be penetrated, his writing read. Penetration is, indeed, what he craves. Diary is a novel overflowing with what Steven Connor calls the “rapture of epidermal rupture” (71). When Misty first meets Peter he lifts his unravelling sweater to reveal a brooch that pierces both sweater and bloodstained nipple. Now comatose, he is pierced by tubes and catheters that feed and medicate him, measure his blood pressure, pump air into his lungs and drain fluid. His skin is far from an unbroken boundary between inside and outside. The relationship between Misty and Peter is, indeed, a duel of piercings. She is catheterised and injected by his family doctor, impaled on his brooch, and impregnated by him after he has pierced her diaphragm. In her turn Misty becomes an accomplished penetrator of all kinds of boundaries, “jabbing keys into locks” as she loots the cabinets and closets of the Wilmot house and breaks through Peter’s doorless walls with an arsenal of corkscrews and steak knives (31). Visiting him in the hospital, she repeatedly stabs his unconscious body with his own brooch. Eventually caught by hospital staff and escorted from his bedside, she shouts at him, “Why the fuck did you get me pregnant?” (158). This piercing is vengeful. Penetration is something Misty, unlike her husband, invariably avoids. Her only orgasm is experienced during a “dry humping” episode on the floor of an art gallery, and she is appalled by any openings of the flesh. Skin, she warns, is as susceptible to cracking as the island’s walls. When you smile “each contraction of your zygomatic major muscle … pulls your flesh apart. The way cables pull aside a theater curtain, your every smile is an opening night. A premiere. You unveiling yourself” (4). At the end of the novel the burnt corpses of the mainlanders are “black and crusted, cracked and showing the meat cooked inside, wet and red” (256). And Peter’s father, his stinking breath leaking through his mouth, is “an old island house with his own rotting interior” (151). Unwholesome and corrupt, the inside shows through gaps in the outside–an exposure that never fails to horrify Misty. When she is imprisoned in an upper room, ostensibly, like Gilman’s narrator, for medical reasons, Misty is further immobilised by a fiberglass cast. With Peter’s painting smock “stiff and sticking to her arms and breasts,” her hands “crusted with dried paint,” and her eyes kept shut with

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masking tape she feels like she’s “an ancient mummy;” “fossilized;” “embedded in amber” (173, 164). It is as though she has been sealed inside the walls themselves–not just in the space they enclose. She is, actually, happy to be so preserved. An “anchoress,” “sealed in to give the building a soul,” she welcomes both cast and walls because they provide what she always seeks–protection from penetration (186). And it is not just physical penetration she shuns. Misty is quite as resistant to being read. She urges Peter not to read her coma diary. “Just skip ahead,” she directs him, “Skim over it” (40). She has no time for “blabbing your life story” (56). The danger in diaries is self-exposure. The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is another reluctant diarist. “I don’t know why I should write this,” she complains, “I don’t want to … I don’t feel able” (38). The compulsion to write is replaced first by the drive to read the wall, then to dismantle it. The wall, though, is not easily breached. Her initial intention, removing the pattern, is thwarted by the pattern itself. It “strangles so” that she decides instead to penetrate one layer deeper–to remove the wallpaper altogether (44). The wallpaper puts up almost as much resistance as the pattern, but eventually she succeeds in peeling “yards” of it from the wall, and her doppelganger is released (45). In a similar denouement Misty Wilmot sits inside the last of her husband’s sealed rooms amid “curls and shreds of wallpaper” that she has stripped from the wall (228). She exposes the message others have tried to erase, gets under Peter’s skin, and successfully reads his text as warning, not threat. Despite such acts of architectural demolition, neither narrator feels an unequivocal yearning for the outside. Their impulse to escape is counterbalanced by a strong attachment to the interior. The woman trapped in Gilman’s wallpaper escapes, but not into the room. Instead she flees to the other side of the wall, where the narrator watches her through the window: “away off in the open country, creeping as fast as a cloud shadow in a high wind” (44). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar assert that her progress represents “the progress of nineteenth-century literary women out of the texts defined by patriarchal poetics into the open spaces of their own authority” (90). Although this authority seems limited (the woman still “creeps,” after all), she has made it out into the public realm. Up until now the narrator has shown herself inclined to identify with this liberated, “new” woman, but only as an escapee from the wallpaper. Now that they are on opposite sides of the wall, she distances herself from her. To be absolutely certain of their separation, indeed, she ties herself to the bed. She has contemplated jumping out of the window but declares she knows “well enough that a step like that is improper and may be

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misconstrued” (46). The other side of the wall is still a male space from which she prefers to exclude herself. “I don’t like to look out of the window even … you don’t get me out on the road there,” she says, turning her back on too much emancipation (46). The room is now a sanctuary to which she attaches herself as if by an umbilical chord, and it is in its perimeter that she chooses to creep: “My shoulder just fits in that long smooch around the wall,” she says with satisfaction, “so I cannot lose my way” (47). Keeping close physical contact with the wall, she remains anchored to the room’s centre–her eyes averted from the windows through which the woman, who has multiplied, now peoples the outside. Misty Wilmot, too, displays an agoraphobic reluctance to detach herself from the inside. The more “inside” she is, indeed, the safer she feels. The ocean “hisses and bursts” constantly outside, as alien and threatening as the landscape outside Gilman’s attic room (57). When her daughter was born Misty “curled around [her], trying to keep her inside” (214). Now Tabbi is “pale from being inside,” and has seen no flowers but those “painted around the rim of a teacup” (168). Sure enough, as soon as she leaves Misty’s protection and moves outside, she apparently drowns in the sinister waves. Misty deals with exterior space simply, by converting it to interior space. Setting out to paint a landscape, she actually paints a Hershel Burke Renaissance Revival armchair. She makes a second, more successful attempt but is driven immediately to obscure her landscape with architecture, paving over grass, sinking foundations and erecting walls with her number 4 sable paintbrush. Misty is happiest when she is most inside–sealed within her attic walls, her fiberglass cast and her reticence. She is, however, less attached to her anchoritic role than the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” When Peter sets her the Jungian task of describing a sealed white room in three words, she replies, “Temporary. Transitory … Confusing” (182). She seems to anticipate escape. Angel initiates her deliverance, tearing the masking tape from her eyes. Once he has been murdered (his dead skin cells hoovered up by the forensic detectives along with the plaster dust), Misty assumes responsibility for her own release. Piercing both cast and skin with a knife, she frees herself from her fiberglass shell. “A chrysalis,” she calls herself. “A butterfly emerging, bloody and tired. Reborn” (219). She overcomes her reticence, electing to “hid[e] her story in plain sight” (259). Out of the confusion of diaries, via Palahniuk, it is Diary she publishes. And, although the escape of the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is less complete, her diary too has found its way into safe hands–those of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Both Weir Mitchell’s rest cure and Waytansea’s xenophobia have depended on

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architectural collusion. But, in the end, bricks and mortar are no match for writing. It is the diaries that breach the walls and are released into the public realm.

Works Cited Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Trans. H. Zohn. London: Fontana, 1992. Chapman, Jeff “Ninjalicious.” Access All Areas: A User’s Guide to the Art of Urban Exploration. Toronto: Infilpress, 2005. Connor, Steven. The Book of Skin. London: Reaktion, 2004. Eco, Umberto. “How an Exposition Exposes Itself”. Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. Ed. N. Leach. London: Routledge, 1997. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. London: Yale UP, 2000. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women, 1890-1914. Ed. A. Richardson. London: Penguin, 2002. Jacobus, Mary. “An Unnecessary Maze of Sign-Reading”. Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism. London: Methuen, 1986. Palahniuk, Chuck. Diary. London: Random House, 2004. Sennett, Richard. The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. Sinclair, Iain. Lights Out for the Territory. London: Penguin, 2003.

CHAPTER NINE CHUCK PALAHNIUK'S DIARY: AMERICAN HORROR, GOTHIC, AND BEYOND HEIDI ASHBAUGH

The question of what exactly constitutes a horror novel has been debated for many years. Part of what makes a definition of horror so hard to pin down is its tendency to be subjective. One example of this problem is that our interpretation of horror changes as we get older. When we are young, horror is largely composed of the unknown. It's the Boogeyman, monsters, and things hiding in the shadows. We are afraid of what we do not yet know about life—what is real and what is not. As we get older, though, what scares us usually changes to a large degree. While we may still get a scare from vampires and werewolves, we realize that there are things that can happen to us—indeed do happen to people around us on a daily basis—that are much more frightening. We learn about the pain and helplessness that can come from a spouse betraying us, dying, or becoming ill; the loss of ability to control our own body such as paralysis, illness, or insanity; or, being unable to care for and protect what matters most to us in life such as our children, family, home, or job. The changing nature of psychological responses to events or beings as horrifying or terrifying, whether it be due to different maturity levels in the reader or different current cultural and social concerns, works both toward keeping a definition of horror elusive as well as maintaining the genre's effectiveness. Diary by Chuck Palahniuk is a good example of contemporary American horror. Many of the topics included in the book fit well into what adults have nightmares about: a spouse attempts suicide; a spouse is critically ill and unlikely to recover, but lingers on; an unprepared woman is forced to become the breadwinner for her family; a child is feared dead; and severe disability of body and mind is experienced. In her book on American horror fiction, Linda J. Holland-Toll addresses the issue of atypical horror saying, “a great many fictions which are not readily

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recognizable or strictly definable as horror . . . have such strong elements of horror embedded within them that the emotional engagement many readers experience locates them in horror territory” (5). In particular, it seems that many of the things that adults fear are based more on psychological factors than on tangible things. Many adult fears have to do with being unable to function in some way or another, and many times the situation feared is a socioeconomic slip into liminal class status within the American social structure. “The American nightmare, as refracted in film and fiction, is about disenfranchisement, exclusion, downward mobility, a struggle-to-the-death world of winners and losers” (Skal 354). It is this tendency of American horror to reflect internalized and socially-related fears that edges Diary’s generic conventions toward the Gothic. While the genre of horror concentrates mainly on the feelings of fear and dread, the Gothic novel contains fearful and dreadful situations placed within a certain social environment and physical landscape.

Diary in GothicTraditions Diary’s epistolary format functions well within both the English Gothic and the American Gothic traditions. In this instance, the book purports to be the diary of Misty Wilmot. The end of the novel reveals that this diary will be turned over to the proper people who can publish her work, so that something can be learned from her story. Misty, writing to the publisher under the alias Nora Adams, states, “My hope is this story will change the way she lives her life. I hope this story will save her – that little girl – whatever her name will be the next time” (Palahniuk 261). She hopes she will be able to warn the future reincarnation of herself, and this idea of warning, or needing to convey a message or lesson, is also an element often demonstrated by the heroines of the traditional Gothic. The hotel on Waytansea Island, with its decaying grandeur, functions as the castle. She is confined to the hotel against her will after she falls and hurts her knee, and the paintings that she subsequently produces are all done blindfolded, in darkness. The pills the doctor prescribes for her, which are actually poison, cause Misty to experience a voyage to the brink of her own existence. There is a dark family secret concealed by the “family” of the island people, and “visited” upon Peter and Misty, since Peter is from the island and thus a “son” of the “father.” And, there are various elements of inappropriate sexuality, beginning with the relationship between Peter and Angel, and then later realized in the sexual tension experienced between Misty and Angel, and possibly between Misty and Peter as well.

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In his work New American Gothic, Irving Malin explains how the traditional Gothic elements have been adapted and Americanized: “[V]iew the castle as the outpost of authoritarianism, the voyage as the flight from such authoritarianism into new directions of strength or love; the reflection as the two-sidedness of motives, the 'falseness' of human nature”(79). In the American Gothic style, while there still may be a “haunted castle” it is more likely to be a regular house haunted by a family secret. However, the function that the castle represents can be played out in other ways, such as by showing a victim as trapped due to physical or social restraints. The castle then can be abstracted even to the point of representing the individual psychology of one person's mind—hence the narcissism identified with the American Gothic. The voyage can be an actual physical escape, but it can also be construed as a mental voyage and escape from constraining values. The reflection is no longer ghostly, but a mirror of the unpredictable whims of a social community which is impacted by the variety and debilitation of various individual psychological states. These adapted conventions of the American Gothic, the castle, the voyage, and the reflection, are recognizable in Palahniuk's Diary, and Palahniuk adds his own twist to many of the accepted conventions. For example, Misty is held captive by members of Waytansea Island’s presiding class, just as the traditional Gothic heroine is often imprisoned in a cellar or nunnery. She is held hostage first economically and psychologically, since she doesn't have quite enough money or courage to go back to her mother, and then physically, when she has an “accident,” hurts her knee, and subsequently is held captive in the hotel. It is appears that she is a means to an end for the families of the island. By placing her origins in the trailer park, Palahniuk communicates that Misty comes from a lower class, and there is never any realistic belief that the island elite plan to elevate her to one of their “own.” Of course, she is identified as the one who will save them, but then again, it doesn’t seem to matter that the blood sacrifice comes from the lower classes. She plays the part of both the helpless female and the focal point for displaying a community which has sacrilegiously turned away from the idea that each life is equally sacred. She has also been modernized from the traditional female protagonist and stands in for a current social concern, that of the single mother trying to survive and raise her child. Misty takes a psychological voyage into the “dark forest” when her husband Peter apparently attempts suicide. The reality is that she suddenly has to provide for her mother-in-law, daughter and herself, all while she is dealing with a string of remodeling messes that Peter has left in his wake. These closed-up rooms that Peter left behind also function as a secondary

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instance of hidden text, another example of a traditional Gothic storyline device. Within these rooms Peter has scrawled his impressions of his wife – unflattering comments upon her physical appearance. Misty's physical appearance has gone downhill over the years and reflects the decrepitude of her spiritual nature as well, since she has quit her painting and now cleans hotel rooms for a living. Palahniuk also gives attention to Peter's appearance after his failed suicide attempt. His body is withered and pulled into a torturous posture by his deteriorating muscles. The description of Misty poking him with a pin when she visits – a feeling that Peter fails to register – seems to symbolize his inability to feel her pain, which is also reflected in the text of his closed-up rooms. Once she finally uncovers the closed-up room within the hotel (castle) and is nearing the end of her journey, the true nature of her suffering (and Peter's) is revealed to her. Peter has explained the circumstances leading up to his attempted suicide and Misty has begun to uncover the mystery that now surrounds her life. While traditional novels were lent distance from the author by being framed within a text, Misty distances herself from her own life by writing the diary in third person, but she still cannot escape her inherent narcissistic tendencies. Ultimately, the diary is concerned with only her view of her life and her inner feelings, and as such is exclusively subjective in nature. At first glance this would appear to less authoritative than the traditional convention. However, in today's culture of self-help through television talk shows incessantly promotes the idea of the importance of the individual self, and thus encourages narcissism. Thus, this change to the traditions of the Gothic convention is natural as a reflection of current culture. The idea of reflection is used in various ways throughout the book to illustrate that things and places are not what they seem: the island people and the quality of life they represent; her husband and daughter; her savior, Angel; and—possibly most disturbing—Misty herself. Thus, the basic elements of both the traditional and the American Gothic are very evident in Palahniuk's work. However, there is another branch of the Gothic that Diary fits into extremely well. A branch which, since Misty acts as both author and heroine, gives the novel a more fitting and substantial link to the Gothic tradition.

The Female Gothic Throughout the history of the Gothic, a differentiating pattern can be argued to have evolved distinguishing between the Gothic plot and

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resolution as written by men (the Male Gothic) and women (the Female Gothic). Ellen Moers is widely accepted as being the first to identify a particular strain of the Gothic as the Female Gothic. In her 1963 work Literary Women, Moers explains that, “As early as the 1790's Ann Radcliffe firmly set the Gothic in one of the ways it would go ever after: a novel in which the central figure is a young woman who is simultaneously persecuted victim and courageous heroine” (Moers 91). Moers was the first in a line of feminist critics who have studied the Female Gothic from a variety of angles that departed drastically from the victimization of women as presented in the Male Gothic. In Helene Meyers’ Femicidal Fears, she discusses how critics like Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Janice Redway, and Tania Modleski consider the way the genre has allowed women writers, as well as readers, to protest traditional roles for women. Critics such as Kate Ferguson Ellis and Eugenia DeLamotte argue that the Female Gothic is actually the center of the genre and that the Male Gothic works as a response to this center. The critic Diane Long Hoeveler feels that the Female Gothic has functioned in a negative way for feminist studies by creating “self-destructive” roles for women. And, Michelle Massé and Anne Williams argue that while the Gothic is not necessarily a female tradition, the issue of “female subjectivity” is a long-standing issue of the Gothic (26). Starting with Radcliffe, we can trace this sub-genre as it continues through the years with well-known authors such as the Brontë sisters in the 19th century, Daphne DuMaurier in the 1930's, Victoria Holt in the 1960's, and even up to the present with authors such as Anne Rice and Poppy Z. Brite. Some of the main topics covered by these authors are those of a woman's place in society and the home, the often precarious nature of marital relationships, and the fear of entrapment caused by maternity and motherhood. Critic Anne Williams argues that there are reliable plot differences between the Female and the Male Gothic, which . . . differs from the female formula in narrative technique, in its assumptions about the supernatural, and in plot. Male authors do not conventionally conceal their gender behind the mask of female pseudonym, nor indeed, do women appear to write many tales in this tradition. The female Gothic generates suspense through the limitations imposed by the chosen point of view; we share both the heroine's often mistaken perceptions and her ignorance. (102)

The Male/Female differences in viewpoint and narrative style also carry over into the topic of the supernatural. While the unexplained is a part of the main plot for all Gothic novels, in addition, the Male Gothic utilizes a

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variety of points of view, while the Female Gothic limits the reader to the point of view of the author. The Female Gothic will explain away the supernatural while the Male Gothic accepts the supernatural as existing. The endings of these novels are also different, with the Male Gothic having a tragic ending with loose ends and the potential for future destruction or danger, and the Female Gothic a happy ending with everything resolved, many times with a wedding. Overall, while the Female Gothic is concerned with terror and a continued fear of what might happen, the Male Gothic ranges into the realm of horror with bad, bloody, and dangerous things actually occurring. During the 1960's, several writers such as Victoria Holt and Phyllis A. Whitney located the Female Gothic close to the modern romance because of a number of shared genre conventions. In addition to the traditional Gothic conventions, these novels began to share their own type of plot structure, with some minor variations. Joanna Russ credits David Sonenschein with analyzing 73 such tales and coming up with some basic plot structure elements: that “the main 'other' was usually a male . . . older . . . either the narrator's spouse or a previously unmarried single male,” there is a feeling of “uneasiness underlying each story,” there is a sense of “risks that simply being a woman may entail,” and that “relationships are volatile, hostile, and even dangerous” (Russ 34). In these novels, women are subjected to terrors that may or may not be imposed upon them by their spouse or potential spouse, may or may not be supernatural, and which lead them through trials and tribulations that test their mental, emotional, and physical strength. The typical resolution of the novels is to expose the terrors as not being propagated by the focal point male, being completely explainable without supernatural elements, and leaving the female protagonist feeling more secure and content within her feminine role. The resolution of these ideas in Diary is slightly different in that the role of the focal point male is played by a much larger and intimidating group of individuals, since it is the islanders as a whole who are threatening. And, rather than having the supernatural elements be easily and safely explained away at the end of the story, the supernatural figures appear to possess Misty’s own child, and can be seen to appear even more threatening at the end of the novel than at the first, since they are now acting from within this new, closer relationship to the heroine. What is perhaps most interesting about Palahniuk's work is how it bridges not only both the American and English Gothics, but also patterns itself on a particular sub-form of the genre. In Diary, Palahniuk has created a modern version of the Female Gothic. In her essay “Somebody's Trying to Kill Me and I Think It's My Husband,” Joanna Russ outlines a

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typical plot formation found in the Female Gothic. Her study covered six different novels ranging from 1953 to 1970. These were some of the bestselling books of this genre. The particulars of each story studied are detailed, but, as Russ says, “Although scenery ranges from exotic New Zealand to exotic Northern Ontario . . . the House, the Heroine, the SuperMale, the Other Woman, the Ominous Dialogue, the Secret and the Untangling are the staples of every one of these books” (Russ 34). Because Palahniuk has modernized, and at times inverted, these elements, they may not be obvious at first. Upon close examination, though, the close ties between Diary and Joanna Russ’s Female Gothic become evident.

House, Heroine, and an Isolated Country To a large, lonely, usually brooding House (always named) comes a Heroine who is young, orphaned, unloved, and lonely. She is shy and inexperienced. She is attractive, sometimes even beautiful, but she does not know it. Sometimes she has spent ten years nursing a dying mother; sometimes she has (or has had) a wicked stepmother, a bad aunt, a demanding and selfish mother (usually deceased by the time the story opens) or an ineffectual, absent, or (usually) long-dead father, whom she loves. The House is set in exotic, vivid and/or isolated Country. The Heroine, whose reaction to people and places tends toward emotional extremes, either loves or hates the House, usually both. (Russ 32)

The Heroine in Diary is Misty Wilmot, and we meet her through the diary that she began keeping after her husband Peter's apparent suicide attempt. Although she addresses her diary entries to Peter, this is also how we, the reader, learn her story. We learn that Misty comes from a poor background, and she grew up in a trailer park in Georgia. This is a background that fits well with the Gothic profile of the underprivileged Heroine. Misty gives details of her past and her dreams of the rich life through her diary which she writes in third person, a tactic that seems distance Misty even from herself and to add to her lifelong unhappiness: The whole time this kid's growing up, maybe her mom was never home. She never knew her dad, and maybe her mom worked two jobs. One at a shitty fiberglass insulation factory, one slopping food in a hospital cafeteria. Of course, this kid dreams of a place like this island, where nobody works except to keep house and pick wild blueberries and beachcomb. Embroider handkerchiefs. Arrange flowers. Where every day doesn't start with the alarm clock and end with the television. (Palahniuk 9)

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The details of Misty’s life help frame her as the modern Gothic heroine. We see the circumstances listed in Russ’s description in modernized syle. Misty comes from the lower class and has a poor relationship with a mother who is gone most of the time and her father who has never been around. Palahniuk’s description of Misty seems to transform the modern latch-key child of a single parent into the “orphaned, unloved, and lonely” traditional Gothic heroine (Russ 32). Misty's talent is drawing, and she concentrates on drawing houses. These are all the kind of houses that Misty dreams about living in. They are also the kind of houses that can be found on Waytansea Island, where her new husband Peter lives. The fact that the Heroine's new home is on an island emphasizes the aspect of the isolated Country. She is literally cut off from the mainland by water. The main action of the story takes place in the Waytansea Hotel where Misty is eventually ensconced and forced to produce her art. The hotel physically fills in for the brooding Gothic House, and Misty is at different times of the novel both enslaved there and held prisoner. The name of the hotel and the island, Waytansea, catches the reader's eye because it is so obviously used as a foreshadowing device, and the name also evokes much of the atmosphere of the Gothic so that we are clued in to anticipate that all is not what it seems. The reader is blatantly told to “wait and see” what happens to Misty's life and her dreams. When Misty first arrives at her new home she becomes very emotional because she feels like all her dreams of a life of wealth and leisure have come true: [F]or her to ride the ferry into Waytansea Harbor with the birds singing and the sun bouncing bright off the rows and rows of the hotel windows. For her to hear the ocean rolling into the side of the breakwater, and feel the sun so warm and the clean wind in her hair, smelling the roses in full bloom . . . the thyme and rosemary . . . This pathetic teenager who'd never seen the ocean, she'd already painted the headlands and the cliffs that hung high over the rocks. And she'd got them perfect. (Palahniuk 12-13)

She is greeted by all the residents of the island when she arrives as Peter's bride and they have a dinner in her honor. She feels like a princess and swears never to return to her trailer park roots. Throughout this arrival, the Waytansea Hotel seems to look benevolently upon her. However, in later years, as Misty and Peter's fortunes have changed, she sees the island and hotel in a very different light. “You used to walk into the Waytansea Hotel and get a window table, no problem. It used to be you never saw litter on Waytansea Island. Or traffic. Or tattoos. Pierced

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noses. Syringes washed up on the beach. Sticky used condoms in the sand. Billboards. Corporate tagging” (Palahniuk 15). The atmosphere of the island has changed and it has now become crowded and commercialized. The rich and charming atmosphere she appreciated when she arrived has been transformed to something much less appealing. The hotel also has its problems: In the Wood and Gold Dining Room, across from the fireplace, are windows that look down the coastline. Half the glazing putty has dried hard and crumbled until the cold wind whistles inside. The windows sweat. Moisture inside the room collects on the glass and trickles down into a puddle until the floor is soaked through and the carpet smells bad as a whale washed up on the beach for the last two weeks of July. The view outside, the horizon is cluttered with billboards, the same brand names, for fast food, sunglasses, tennis shoes, that you see printed on the litter that marks the tide line. Floating in every wave, you see cigarette butts. (Palahniuk 18)

Misty's view of the island and hotel has shifted to the opposite emotional extreme from when she first arrived. And, while it is likely that many of the changes she is witnessing are external to her, it is also probable that the discouraging facts of her life have created a view of her surroundings tainted with disgust and dissatisfaction.

The Super-Male After a short prologue, this latter-day Jane Eyre forms a personal or professional connection with an older man, a dark, magnetic, powerful brooding, sardonic Super-Male, who treats her brusquely, derogates her, scolds her, and otherwise shows anger or contempt for her. The Heroine is vehemently attracted to him and usually just as vehemently repelled or frightened – she is not sure of her feelings for him, his feelings for her, and whether he 1) loves her; 2) hates her; 3) is using her; or 4) is trying to kill her. (Russ 32)

Misty meets Angel Delaporte because he is a former customer of Peter's. When Peter remodeled Angel's house, he walled in the kitchen. Peter has written strange, paranoid statements about the island and its people all over the walls of the covered over kitchen. He has also written derogatory and embarrassing statements about Misty on the walls. Angel proceeds to dissect Peter's handwriting for Misty and explain the meanings behind how Peter writes each of his letters. As we look at Angel, we can see a man who is somewhat of an eccentric bad-boy or playboy type, the

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eternal swinging bachelor who seems to ooze sexuality and to always be on the prowl for the next sexual conquest. He has the apparel: monogrammed bathrobe, leather pants, and gold chain. And, he has the habits: drinking wine, carrying a flask, and smoking. He is also much more in control of himself than Peter and doesn't get flustered easily. He comes to Misty's rescue during their first meeting in the house. Peter has described Misty in extremely hurtful and derogatory terms which highlight her appearance: “a fat fucking slob in a pink plastic uniform . . . her blond hair's gone gray and smells like the shit she uses to scrub out your toilets . . . her tits hang down in front of her like a couple of dead carp” (Palahniuk 25). Angel responds to this laundry list of Misty's shortcomings by looking her over honestly and giving her his opinion: “And Angel Delaporte, he looks back over his shoulder at her, at Misty's hips, then her breasts inside her pink uniform, then her face. He squints and shakes his head a little and says, 'Don't worry, your hair's not that gray'” (Palahniuk 29). This response to Misty seems to communicate the idea that she’s is okay, but definitely not beautiful, or even attractive. The fact that this response makes her happy, even just a little bit, shows a glimpse of how damaging to her selfesteem all the previous years of abuse by her husband have been. Angel and Misty's friendship continues to grow as he goes with her to other houses that Peter has “remodeled.” We feel that Misty is attracted to Angel because they are described as “. . . a man and a woman standing close together in a small dark room” (Palahniuk 50). Also, Misty describes what Angel is wearing: “. . . these tight brown leather pants that smell the way shoe polish smells. . . That smell Misty used to pretend to hate, that's how Angel's leather pants smell pressed up against her” (Palahniuk 51). Angel is also trying to teach Misty about graphology by taking her hand and having her trace Peter's writing. There is a palpable sexual tension between the two, made uncomfortable because of her receptive response to Angel’s less-than-enthusiastic appraisal of her as a woman. Angel makes a good candidate for the Super-Male, even though he does not fit neatly into all the descriptors. While he could be considered as “dark” and “magnetic,” we later find that he is not much older than Misty, since he was in school around the same time as she and Peter were. He is also not openly derogatory or contemptuous of her. Rather, he fits the image of a dark and somewhat mysterious man because of how quickly he befriends her. Here is one of Palahniuk's inversions on the Female Gothic theme which actually seems to locate a modern story more firmly within the Gothic genre: It is just as disconcerting when strangers befriend quickly as when they are openly antagonistic. All of the same motives listed for the Super-Male can exist in these circumstances because quick

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friendship is often looked upon skeptically – why is this person being so nice to me? What do they want from me? In fact, this theme is much more popular in today's society than the “traditional” Super-Male theme. As portrayed in the true-crime genre in print and television, very often the person who is supposed to be trustworthy ends up being the one who takes advantage of the victim. The fact that Angel Delaporte is eventually revealed as Peter’s homosexual lover is yet another inversion of this role that Palahniuk has created. Angel is both savior and rival to Misty, fulfilling the darker suspicions surrounding the Super-Male and creating an ironic twist on this role. However, the island community as a whole can also be seen as another candidate for the role of Super-Male. If we see the community as taking on this role, we can say that it is dark and magnetic because Misty has already told us these things by explaining how she used to feel about the island and how she feels about it now. The community that at first welcomed her by coming out to celebrate her marriage to Peter, now seems to have relegated her to serving and cleaning up after the tourists who bring money into the community. While Misty is no longer under the same dreamy spell as when she came to the island, she is also still held there by her attachment to Peter, and it is some time before she seriously considers leaving, but by then it's too late. If we question the motives of the community, we can also see that Misty’s relationship with the community is similar to that of the traditional Gothic heroine’s relationship with the Super-Male. Traditionally, the figure of the Super-Male is one whose motives and feelings are unknown to the heroine, just as Misty is unaware of the true nature of the island community’s feelings for her. When she arrived at the island she was hoping that she would find love, not only from Peter, but also from the island residents. In her present situation, she has been relegated to a low social level within the community and is treated in a hateful manner by Peter’s mother, who could be seen as acting as a representative of the island community’s true feelings. In addition, Misty later learns that the islanders are using her for the paintings that she can produce, and that the poison they are feeding her to keep her painting will ultimatley kill her. So, the utilization of the island community as a whole can be seen as another way that the traditional Female Gothic format has been inverted in Palahniuk’s story.

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Another Woman The Super-Male is not the Heroine's only worry. In the emotionally tangled and darkly mysterious “family” set up in our House are hints of the presence of Another Woman who is at the same time the Heroine's double and her opposite – very often the Other Woman is the Super-Male's present wife or dead first wife; sometimes she is the Heroine's missing cousin, or the woman the Super-Male appears to prefer to the Heroine. (Russ 33)

In the traditional Female Gothic, the Other Woman is related to the Super-Male in some form or fashion. If we again look at the island community as playing the role of the Super-Male, we can then see the Other Women as being the two artists who came before Misty – Maura Kincaid and Constance Burton. These women are well-known on the island for their artistic contributions and are celebrated as local heroes. Misty's mother-in-law, Grace, is constantly trying to get Misty to go back to her painting, encouraging her to follow in the footsteps of these famous women and implying that she is nothing without it: “Misty dear, you'd have more money and dignity if you'd go back to painting . . .” (Palahniuk 20). However, rather than criminal, immoral, or promiscuous, these women appear to be heart-broken and unlucky. They are in reality sympathetic figures who are constantly being used as examples of the type of individual Misty should be. When she goes to the library, she cannot find a book that these women have not written in. They haunt her everywhere, with their names showing up in unlikely places like on windowsills and a jail cell wall. The implied fear behind the Other Woman is that of being unable to measure up to an ideal – usually an ideal that is invisible to the Heroine but that is kept alive in the memories of, or even worshipped by, everyone around her. However, just as Angel plays opposing parts in Diary, the role of the Other Woman is also conflicted. Near the end of the novel, Misty discovers that Maura Kincaid and Constance Burton are actually her previous incarnations. Palahniuk inverts the role of the Other Woman by having it played by Misty herself in former lives. This leaves Misty in the irreconcilable state of feeling that, rather than being unable to measure up to her former selves, she is actually unable to correct the mistakes she made in former lives, and she feels doomed to repeating the cycle.

The Young Girl Her only consolation is to be kind, womanly, and good, both to the SuperMale and (sometimes) to a Young Girl, often the daughter of the Super-

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The Young Girl in Diary is Misty's daughter Tabbi. Although Tabbi is Misty and Peter's daughter, there is a disconnection between her and her mother that lends a distance to their relationship. This distance between mother and daughter is reinforced by the way that Tabbi’s grandmother Grace co-opts her from Misty. Grace spends more time with Tabbi because Misty has to work. Grace attempts to give Tabbi the experiences of the island’s upper class by taking her out to eat at the hotel where Misty works (which Misty pays for), buying her jewelry (with the money Misty has saved to return home), and, most importantly, by making Tabbi privy to the overall plan and the part that Tabbi and Misty play in it. Once we realize that Tabbi has not actually drowned, but rather has actively and knowingly conspired with her grandparents to make her own mother think she has drowned, then we understand that Tabbi has been completely corrupted. “What they don't teach you in art school is how to react when you find out your only child has connived to break your heart. For now, with just Tabbi and her mother in the bathroom, maybe it's the daughter's job to piss off her mother” (Palahniuk 224). It becomes very clear how deeply this corruption has gone when Tabbi explains to Misty at the end of the story that she also betrayed Peter, has killed her grandparents and others, and intends to continue the islanders’ tradition: Smiling and ancient, Tabbi says, “If you tell, then I tell”. . . Misty says, “What will you tell?” Still smiling, Tabbi says, “I set fire to their clothes. Granmy and Granby Wilmot taught me how, and I set them on fire . . . [w]hen my father asked me to run away with him, I told Granmy . . . I saved us. I saved the future of the whole island” (Palahniuk 257).

There is an implied threat to Misty – Tabbi's own mother – that she should not try to stand in the way. Tabbi acts as Misty's only consolation after what has happened to Peter, but she is also corrupted by the island people.

A Buried Ominous Secret In addition to the Heroine's other troubles, she gradually becomes aware that somewhere in the tangle of oppressive family relationships going on in the House exists a Buried Ominous Secret, always connected with the Other Woman and the Super-Male (whatever relation they happen to bear one another in the novel). The Super-Male is at the center of this Secret; when she unravels the mystery about him (does he love her or is he a threat to her?) she will simultaneously get to the bottom of the Secret. (Russ 33)

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In Diary we have two Buried Ominous Secrets unveiled at basically the same time. When Angel Delaporte comes to rescue Misty from her imprisonment in the attic of the hotel, the confusion of the mystery starts to lift. Misty, beaten down from being poisoned and thinking that her daughter is dead, starts asking pertinent questions and demands to be answered: Misty says, “Stop.” She says, “Just why are you here?” Why since the start of all this has he been her friend? What is it that keeps Angel Delaporte pestering her? Until Peter wrecked his kitchen, until Misty rented him her house, they were strangers. Now he's pulling fire alarms and dragging her down the stairway. Her with a dead kid and a comatose husband. . . Before they go another step, Misty waves her fists at Angel, Misty whispers, “Tell me.” Collapsed on the stairs, she whispers, “Why are you fucking with me?” (Palahniuk 204-205)

Angel Delaporte reveals to Misty that he and Peter were lovers before Peter met Misty. He also reveals the reason that he and Peter didn't work out was because of the Secret, a system that had been in place on the island for generations: “. . .every four generations, a boy from the island would meet a woman he'd have to marry. A young art student. Like an old fairy tale. He'd bring her home, and she'd paint so well it would make Waytansea Island rich for another hundred years. He'd sacrifice his life, but it was just one life. Just once every four generations” (Palahniuk 206). It is only by uncovering the secret of Angel and Peter's relationship that Misty begins to uncover the Ominous Secret of the island community. After Angel Delaporte is killed, Misty decides to see what Peter wrote on the walls of the room that he closed up in the hotel. Here she finds proof of his feelings for Angel, but she also finds out that Peter's last thoughts were of rebelling against the twisted tradition of his community. “By the time you find this . . . I'll be gone. I'm leaving with Angel tonight. If you're reading this, then I'm sorry, but it's already too late. . . I'm genuinely sorry for Misty” (Palahniuk 229). Peter refused to be killed like the husbands of all the other artists were, and he had planned on running off with Angel. There are also hints that the art work she has been producing is tainted since Peter writes, “Don't unveil the devil's work” (Palahniuk 229). At this point, Misty realizes that her husband's accident was not an attempted suicide, but was actually an attempted murder. Misty also takes the red diary that Grace has and reads it. She realizes that this is the diary of a woman who lived a hundred years ago and that her story is almost a mirror image of Misty's. Peter's dad explains to Misty that she is actually a reincarnation of both Maura Kincaid and Constance

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Burton and that she has filled this same role for the island community twice before. The Secret relates to the Super-Male and the Other Woman on a dual level. It is the Secret that involves the reasons behind Angel Delaporte's involvement with Misty as they fit into these roles within the story. But, the Secret is also something conspired between the island and the previous incarnations Maura Kincaid and Constance Burton. By the end of the story, both interpretations of the giant buried secret have been uncovered: the secret of Peter’s true sexual orientation and his relationship with Angel, as well as the larger secret of the cyclical paganistic sacrifice and rebirth rituals practiced by the residents of Waytansea Island.

Untangling Once the Heroine finds out about the Buried Ominous Secret, the plot of the Female Gothic really begins to unfold: “Her happiness with the Super-Male is threatened, her life is threatened (sometimes several times), minor characters are killed, storms take place, there is much ad-libbing of Ominous Dialogue, and so on” (Russ 33). Misty's friendship with Angel is shattered by his revelation that his underlying reasons for helping her involve his attachment to Peter. She has also faced the life-threatening consequences of long-term poisoning, and she has been held prisoner in the attic of the hotel. For a time, it appeared that Misty's daughter, Tabbi, had been killed, and Angel Delaporte is eventually killed in her own bed at the house she rented to him. Misty begs her father-in-law to give her clues to the ominous events on the horizon, “Please. Just tell me what's going to happen. Will the paintings explode? Will the hotel collapse into the ocean? What? How does she save everyone?” (Palahniuk 245). And, the whole affair is eventually ended by a huge fire which guts the hotel and kills all the islanders and visitors who could not escape because they were entranced by Misty's paintings. After the fire, Tabbi boldly confesses her involvement in the events and Misty realizes that her daughter wishes to continue the island tradition. Tabbi implies that she would not hesitate to kill her mother in order to do this. As they pass the previously-locked mausoleum, Tabbi asks if Misty would like to see inside: “One, two, three steps into the dark, you can see them. Two skeletons. One lying on the floor, curled on its side. The other sits propped against the wall. Mold and moss grown up around their bones. The walls shine with trickles of water. The skeletons, her skeletons, the women Misty's been” (Palahniuk 259). Misty, the heroine, has decided to conquer her fear and try to find a way to warn the next woman – her future self – and to keep her from falling into this same trap, which has

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been set by the islanders over and over throughout the years. She hopes to discover how to stop this cycle, as well as help herself get it right when she is once again reincarnated. In an effort to prepare for a future defeat of the islanders, she hides the story of her experience, written down in detail in her diary, by sending it to a popular novelist for publication.

Other Female Gothic Comparisons While Russ's study most easily lends itself to comparison with Diary, Barbara Bowman's research on the plot structure of Victoria Holt's novels is also worthy of examination. Bowman researched Holt's novels and found similar character conventions with stories in which the narrator is usually the heroine and which contain several other basic character types: a femme fatale, a male friend, either an ideal father or a contra-father, a vague mother, and the hero. The femme fatale functions as an alter-ego to the heroine and embodies “both what the heroine desires to be and what the heroine most fears” (Bowman 70). In Diary it appears that this character is represented by the two previous reincarnations of Misty, Constance Burton and Maura Kincaid. This woman alternates between acting as a protector of the heroine and being a threatening figure. Sometimes she “dissolves into an illusion, a ghost” (Bowman 70). The “ghosts” of these two previous women haunt Misty throughout the novel and represent a level of artistic talent that she feels she cannot obtain. Later in the novel, we see that the repetitious signatures of these women were an attempt to warn Misty of what had happened to her in her previous lives. These women are not just ghosts haunting Misty; because she is somehow a reincarnation of these women, she is in effect haunting herself. This inversion by Palahniuk creates an interesting paradox for the femme fatale character. Bowman identifies the male friend as a “pale version of the hero” or sometimes as “a division between light a dark heroes” (70). He is usually a “light” hero who does not get chosen as the heroine's mate. “Often, however, he is the hero's rival, thus doubling the attention to the heroine and establishing an insidious competition with the hero” (70). We can identify this character within Diary, but once again, Palahniuk inverts this character’s standard tropes with a modern twist. Angel Delaporte functions as the male friend to Misty in contemporary fashion. They investigate the houses that Peter “remodeled” together and Angel eventually comes to Misty's rescue in the hotel. He functions as a “light” hero in that he does not mean Misty any harm, and he has her best interests at heart when he suggests, with genuine appreciation, that she sell her artwork. However,

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Angel is not actually the hero's rival because he and Peter were lovers. Rather, he is Misty’s rival. This inversion by Palahniuk has the effect of doubling the attention to the heroine by making her an even more sympathetic narrator. Misty never expected to be replaced in her relationship with Peter by another man.. The ultimate effect of this inversion is to play upon the reader's emotions, exacerbating Misty's betrayal by both her husband and her new male friend. This double betrayal is ultimately because of the fact that she is a woman, just one more element of her predicament over which she has no control. The roles of ideal father and the contra-father are mirror images of each other. If the story contains an ideal father, then the heroine will have grown up either without a mother or with an ineffectual mother. The father will be idealized and romanticized, and it is likely that he dies at a particularly critical point in the heroine's life. If the story contains a contra-father, he will have been “unattainable and distant” and “may even outwardly express revulsion for the heroine” (Bowman 71). It is interesting that Bowman characterizes the father by saying that “in both (images) the father is a male ideal for the heroine” and that “in both cases, the father creates a highly unrealistic image of the male that the hero only manages to overcome through a crisis in which the heroine must face her own mortality” (71-72). In the novel, Misty never knew her father, so it is almost by default that he takes the role of the contra-father. Since she had no male figure growing up on which to base her ideas of what a father or husband should be, she is severely limited in her judgment on this matter. This lack of socialization with typical male roles is a contributing factor in both her eventual choice of an unsatisfactory mate and in her general failure to predict or understand men in general. The contra-father's possible role of expressing revulsion for the heroine is also filled in nicely by Misty's husband who writes the unflattering descriptions of her on the walls of the closed up rooms, and expresses his general revulsion for female sexuality through details about Misty's body. Once Misty understands the source of Peter's revulsion for her, a discovery that also uncovers the secret of the islanders, she can begin to focus on resolving the impending crisis on the island. The vague mother is “barely present for the heroine, which dramatizes the lack of female models that the heroine has in her early life and accounts for the definition of the female primarily in terms of her sexual identity” (Bowman 72). We learn early in the novel that Misty's mother is rarely home because she has to work two jobs to support her daughter and herself. While this is another inversion of the typical Female Gothic plot by Palahniuk, it is actually an insightful observation on contemporary

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society. Misty dreams of other ways of living where women can “Embroider handkerchiefs. Arrange flowers” (Palahniuk 4). The sexual identity that Misty inherits from her mother is that of a provider, usually of services, but also of the necessities of daily living. The other lives that Misty dreams about are traditionally feminine and domestic. She hopes to obtain some semblance of these other lives by marrying Peter and moving to Waytansea Island, but they are kept constantly distant and unattainable. She ends up being a provider, just like her mother, both by waiting tables at the hotel and by producing the paintings required by the islanders to enact their centennial rejuvenation. Bowman says of the hero that he is “distorted;” he appears to be a rake and is charming, attractive and mysterious; he “causes her to feel uncertain about herself” (72). Typically in the Female Gothic, the heroine decides between the hero and the male friend. In Diary we have a very atypical hero. Peter is somewhat of an anti-hero from the start of his and Misty's relationship. He is attractive to her and somewhat mysterious, and, when he begins to pay attention to her, Misty falls for him. Later in their marriage, he makes her feel uncertain about herself. She feels that her marriage and family are enough, but he continually questions her failure to continue producing art. In Peter, we can see a distorted image of the typical Gothic hero. There are things about him that conflict with the traits of the heroic role. In art school he had issues with self-mutilation, which physically demonstrates his psychological conflict. He is not a heterosexual and had been having a homosexual affair with Angel Delaporte since college, which shows his fundamental sexual conflict. Because of these distortions from the common male/female relationship, Peter is not really emotionally suited for a relationship with Misty, or to play the hero of the novel in the traditional sense. In addition to the emotional and psychological distortions, the aftereffects of his suicide led to a coma, creating a physical distortion because his muscles have withered and contracted. One of Palahniuk's more interesting inversions of the plot surrounding the character of Peter in the role of the hero is that Misty does not, in the end, choose between Angel and Peter because Angel and Peter have already chosen each other.

Diary – Mingling the Male and Female Gothics Anne Williams' exploration of the differences between the Male and the Female Gothic also provides some interesting comparisons for the study of Diary. While Palahniuk has positioned his work within the realm of the Female Gothic, many of his inversions involve elements of the Male

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Gothic. One inversion from the Female Gothic is that the author, Palahniuk, is male while traditionally this genre has been written by female authors. The narrative style of the novel is also somewhat different. While we do not hear multiple viewpoints from different characters (as we would in the Male Gothic style), and while the story is exclusively told from Misty's point of view (as is common in the Female Gothic style), there is also a distance atypical of the Female Gothic because Misty is actually addressing her diary to Peter instead of simply recounting a story to the audience; the reader is positioned more in the role of an eavesdropper than as the intended audience. This matters because while we seem to be getting a less “edited” version of what Misty thinks and says, and her writing does have the personal and confiding nature seen in the Female Gothic, there is still the idea of Peter as a third person interjected between Misty’s words and the reader. This additional “ear” to the story places the writing style somewhere between the Male and Female Gothic traditions. The elements of the supernatural in the novel are the reincarnation of Misty and the centennial sacrificial “rebirthing” of the island. The “rebirth” of the island is only partially explained by the insurance money and subsequent bribery the islanders impart on the corporations who advertised there and who will pay anything to get their names off of a place where such a tragedy has happened. The rest of the “rebirth” aspect of the story is an episode of pure horror – the mass sacrifice of the hotel guests as they stand helpless and hypnotized by Misty's painting. Misty’s reincarnation, though, is left unexplained. This “loose end” quality of the Male Gothic is further stressed by the possibility that there will be future recurrences of the island sacrifices, despite Misty's attempt at the end of the novel to circumvent this recurrence. The ending of the novel is not the happy one required by the Female Gothic, but rather leaves a feeling of business left unfinished and a nightmare that could return again. This unfinished ending is more typical of the Male Gothic, and helps Diary’s claim to the horror genre, another link in the long line of Gothic adaptability.

Ideas for Future Studies Comparison of Palahniuk's Diary to the Female Gothic is just one method of examining this particular text as it relates to the long history of the Gothic genre. Palahniuk has done something extremely interesting by writing from the viewpoint of a female protagonist in a genre which has long been dominated by women. Because the roles played by the female

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characters differ from contemporary norms, it seems that Palahniuk’s work opens the way for new ideas in women’s and feminist critical study. In addition to genre and gender studies, Diary uses a wide variety of other traditional symbolic motifs which could be looked at in semiotic, cultural, religious, and psychological studies. Palahniuk's blending of traditional conventions with new inversions, which relate closely to contemporary social issues, could lead into continued studies of a variety of subjects such as the genres of horror, transgressional, and cult fiction. In short, there is evidence of a variety of critical tendencies apparent in this work as studied on its own, as well as in relation to other works by both Palahniuk and other contemporary writers. In studying the roots of horror and the Gothic, it becomes clear that these genres and sub-genres evolved in order to reliably reflect the social, cultural, and psychological aspects of their readers throughout the years. The continued difficulty in placing a firm definition on either the horror or the Gothic genres is a direct result of what makes them so effective and keeps their audience coming back for more. “A fiction which cannot be marginalized or defined as fantastic and thus easily resolved and categorized is much more threatening than a fiction which actually occupies the margins, which is clear and demarcated by the fantastic” (Holland-Toll 6). We cannot dismiss Palahniuk's fictions as purely fantastic – they are too rooted in our everday lives, yet they often reflect fears and limitations which are terrifying to contemplate. In this manner, Palahniuk’s horror novels, Diary, Lullaby, and Haunted, continue a long tradition of literatures by serving as a threshold between genres, a passageway into contemporary adaptations more suited to today's readers. These works have the common themes of more modern, realistic horror, as well as aspects of a further adapted American Gothic, both of which relate to how they address issues of liminality within social settings. While they occupy the margins, they sometimes hit close to home – to the ordinary and everyday normalcy of the uncontrollable and unpredictable nature of life. As Holland-Toll says, this is what makes them disturbing and provocative and what makes repeated reading, study, and criticism a requisite.

Works Cited Bowman, Barbara. “Victoria Holt's Gothic Romances: A Structuralist Inquiry.” The Female Gothic. Ed. Juliann E. Fleenor. Montreal: Eden Press, 1983. 69-81.

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Davenport-Hines, Richard. Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin. New York: North Point Press/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998. Goddu, Teresa A. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. —. “Historicizing the American Gothic: Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland.” Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction: The British and American Traditions. Eds. Diane Long Hoeveler and Tamar Heller. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2003. 18489. Holland-Toll, Linda J. As American as Mom, Baseball, and Apple Pie: Constructing Community in Contemporary American Horror Fiction. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State U Popular Press, 2001. MacAndrew, Elizabeth. The Gothic Tradition in Fiction. New York: Columbia UP, 1979. Malin, Irving. New American Gothic. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois UP, 1962. Meyers, Helene. Femicidal Fears. Albany, NY: State U of NewYork P, 2001. Moers, Ellen. Literary Women. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1976. Palahniuk, Chuck. Diary: A Novel. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Russ, Joanna. “Somebody's Trying to Kill Me and I Think It's My Husband: The Modern Gothic.” The Female Gothic. Ed. Juliann E. Fleenor. Montreal: Eden Press, 1983. 31-56. Skal, David J. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. New York: Penguin, 1993. Tracy, Ann B. The Gothic Novel, 1790-1830: Plot Summaries and Index to Motifs. Lexington, KY: The UP of Kentucky, 1981. Williams, Anne. Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago, IL: The U of Chicago Press, 1995.

Works Consulted Brown, Marshall. The Gothic Text. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2005. Fitzgerald, Lauren. “Female Gothic and the Institutionalization of Gothic Studies.” Gothic Studies 6.1 (2004): 8-18. Lloyd-Smith, Allan. American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Continuum, 2004. Masse, Michelle A. “Gothic Repetition: Husbands, Horrors, and Things That Go Bump in the Night.” Signs 15.4 (1990): 679-709.

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Smith, Andrew and Diana Wallace. “The Female Gothic: Then and Now.” Gothic Studies 6.1 (2004): 1-7. Wisker, Gina. Horror Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Continuum, 2005. Wright, Angela. “'To Live the Life of Hopeless Recollection': Mourning and Melancholia in Female Gothic, 1780-1800.” Gothic Studies 6.1 (2004): 19-29.

CHAPTER TEN “PARADIGMS ARE DISSOLVING LEFT AND RIGHT”: BAUDRILLARD’S ANTI-APOCALYPSE AND CHUCK PALAHNIUK’S SURVIVOR MARY W. MCCAMPBELL

Survivor, the last Chuck Palahniuk novel released before the turn of the millenia, heralds death’s approach as disconcertingly certain and seductively mysterious. The novel’s protagonist, Tender Branson, is the lone survivor of a religious suicide “Creedish Church” cult that he managed to escape when he turned eighteen. Since his departure from the cult compound and its necessary death pact, he has been obsessed with the totalizing presence and power of death, even outside of the cult’s structured walls. Tender has been exposed to discussions of death all of his life in the Creedish church and remembers the command that “when the apocalypse was imminent, celebrate, and all Creedish must deliver themselves to God, amen” (Palahniuk 229). After making the transition to the world outside of the commune, Tender finds that his newfound freedom is a joke, as he cannot escape death and now has no external paradigm from which to narrate its place in his life. In Tender’s world, not only is death alive, but God is dead—and the certainty of death provdes a lingering sense of mystery and macabre stability. This sense of stability is precisely what the world around him lacks, as Tender begins to see the world in much the same way as Jean Baudrillard – plastic, hyperreal, and utterly materialistic. In the scorched, post-Christian landscape of the novel, contemporary society clings to the distraction of the image to enable them to forget that there is no distinction between image and reality. Jean Baudrillard’s diagnosis of a hyperreal society drenched with sickly sweet “milk and honey” exposes the fatal underbelly of “material paradise” of contemporary American culture (“Anorexic Ruins” 34). The ultimate goal, for Tender, is to find a

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new paradigm from which to understand his own life and eventual death, but along the way he finds out how elusive meaning can be in a hyperreal society. Tender notices that this world relies on representations of unreality, desperately working to avoid the reality of death. Tender is briefly taunted by the promises of his material world, yet sees the solid shadow of impending death located directly below the sheen of consumerist gloss. Although he will eventually realize that he can use this new religion of glitzy consumerism for his advantage, his initial concern is in playing a game with death in an attempt to demystify it. This game gives him the ability to control the death of others by displaying his telephone number in public places as a suicide hotline number. When the distressed callers ring and ask for advice and support, he tells them to kill themselves and gains satisfaction by listening to them do it. Tender plays this depraved death game because he is angry and frustrated by what he sees as death’s irresistible authority over human life. Death always has the last word, and if Tender can’t stop death, he wants to be the one narrating the death tales of others. But his fatalistic obsession with the fact that all narratives lead to death continues to anger him: Think of this as on the job training. Think of your life as a sick joke. What do you call a caseworker who hates her job and loses every client? Dead. What do you call the police worker zipping her into a big rubber bag? Dead. What do you call the television anchor on camera in the front yard? Dead. It does not matter. The joke is that we all have the same punchline. (Palahniuk 162)

Nothing has meaning or value in a world where everyone, no matter what they have achieved in life, will end in the same manner. No matter what achievements are gained or delusions are held, death is ultimately the great equalizer. We can’t escape this violently imposed democracy. Because Tender can’t shirk this oppressive punchline, he decides to play within the system, using the supreme and singular rule of death to entertain himself. He sees no positive absolutes in a media saturated culture of non-reality, so he becomes obsessed with courting death, the only fixed aspect of life as he sees it. Death is the only lifelong constant in Tender’s existence; he laments that the rules for everything else, including relationships, constantly change.

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In this era of “liquid modernity,” as Zygmunt Bauman puts it, constant flux and change lead to existential instability in this epoch of “disengagement, elusiveness, facile escape and hopeless chase” (120). Fertility Hollis, Tender’s mysterious girlfriend of sorts, shares his views on death’s secure appeal as she says, “Since change is constant, you wonder if people crave death because it’s the only way they can get anything really finished” (Palahniuk 150). Trusting that death is the only sure thing to court, Tender is unable to produce love or affection because he finds no solid standard on which to base relationships that are ultimately unpredictable, frightening and fragile. Although Branson plunges into death’s mysterious arms, he is unsure of what will be waiting for him at the other end. Like most of Palahniuk’s protagonists, Tender is dissatisfied with the notion that material accumulation can produce meaning, define identity; he is convinced that meaning is only a temporary pointer towards an ultimately meaningless death. Tender knows that death is the end of the story, and although he senses the futility of both death and life, he longs to find out that perhaps death does contain mystery and meaning rather than empty, deterministic finality. In the early parts of the novel, Branson frequents mausoleums in hopes of meeting supernatural beings who could prove to him that there is a reality beyond the immediate material-virtual world. He puts his ear to the crypts with mad desire to hear some sign of life: “Not that I’m crazy or anything. I just want some proof that death isn’t the end. Even if crazed zombies grabbed me in some dark hall one night, even if they tore me apart, at least that wouldn’t be the absolute end. There would be some comfort in that” (255). When he first spots Fertility Hollis, he is disappointed that she is a human being. Like Dan, the protagonist of Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs who has “no pictures of an afterworld for myself” (Coupland 15), Tender longs for pictures, symbols, metaphors—a hint evidence of afterlife, even if it is frightening. Unlike Dan, who grew up in a disenchanted suburban setting, Tender was nurtured on pictures of an afterlife; in his cult compound, he was trained to live an earthly life whose main focus was the afterlife. Yet he has no pictures anymore. Having forsaken the religious hysteria of his youth, he still does not want to embrace the faux religion of American consumerism. His attempts to find evidence of life after death are also an attempt to find a third, real, source of meaning—a starting point from which to reinterpret the jagged narrative of his life story. Branson’s desire to find meaning in the “end” is, ultimately, an apocalyptic longing. Paul Fiddes argues that the traditional narrative structure is “eschatological,” providing an ultimate revelation or disclosure

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through which we can re-interpret the rest of the tale (5). Fiddes notes that, when reading, we “demand some kind of ending to a story” and that this is reflective of the original task and pattern of apocalyptic literature that “has a strong momentum towards the organization and unification of history from the perspective of the end” (24). But this end must not be absolute, final, futile if it is to read meaning in the events that led up to it. When Tender spots Fertility, he hopes that she would be a representative of the other side, a ghost even, so that he could know that there actually is an other side rather than a cold, closed door that marks the end. Watching Fertility, he fantasizes about being “hugged in her cold, dead arms and told that life has no absolute end” (Palahniuk 251). He also wants to be reassured that his life is not “some Funeral Grade bit of compost that will rot tomorrow and be outlived by my name in an obituary” (251). But in these mausoleum scenes, Palahniuk also reminds us of the death of God, and therefore, the impossibility of an afterlife. As Fertility and Tender wander around and admire the different artistic representations of Christ, they notice that each depiction of Jesus, from different time periods and cultures, is moulded in the image of their contemporary social concerns and fashions: “In the wing built in the 1930s, Jesus is a Socialist Realist with huge superhero muscles” (244). Palahniuk suggests that Christ is created in the image of man, not vice versa. These narratives bear witness, not to a God that discloses the ultimate truthful end of life’s narrative, but simply to the narratives themselves, stories that were crafted and conformed in our cultural images to point towards a hollow hope for a revelatory “end.” Palahniuk writes, “In the eighties wing, there’s no Jesus, just the same secular green polished marble and brass you would find in a department store” (244). The image of God as supernatural redeemer is absent, replaced by a uniform piece of bland “department store” marble and brass, indicating the initiation of a new, “free” secular religion in which Tender will, ironically, himself become a new, unredeemed and hopeless, messiah. The reality of a world in which “everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist” leads Tender, not to freedom, but to “Sartre’s state of anguish, abandonment and despair” (Casado de Rocha 156). Although Tender is disappointed to find that Fertility is merely human, he is intrigued that she does have a “supernatural” gift as a prophetess. But this gift, although supernatural, appears more as a glitch in a closed, mechanistic system than a window to another, spiritual reality. It seems just one more cruel joke in the plotline of his life, of human life in general, the joke of a barren prophetess who can foresee doom and gloom but has no power or hope to change anything. Fertility is spiritually barren.

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Tender’s search for some sort of revelation is met with Fertility’s disclosure of the nature of the universe, in which, “There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns” (118). These patterns do not reveal the presence of a designer, but the irreversibility of a deterministic system. In this system “there is no free will” and “the bad news is we don’t have any control” (118). Although God is absent from the world of this novel, this does not indicate an opportunity for human creativity and freedom, but the cold, relentless impersonality of fate. Life is discernible as a narrative structure, but the author is dead. In the cold, deterministic universe represented in Survivor, the central certainty is that life moves toward death, but life moving toward death is marked with ambiguity. In response to the fluid formlessness of his “free” and godless existence, Tender relinquishes all control, deifying anyone who is willing to regiment his days. Perhaps this untamed desire for some kind of structure or form is, once again, ultimately an apocalyptic longing for revelatory meaning. Jack Gladney, the narrator of Don DeLillo’s 1984 White Noise, also lives a life consumed with the inevitability of death, and he attempts to tame it by taking anti-death drugs and teaching Hitler studies at the local college. Like Tender, Gladney recognizes that death without an afterlife is the absence of plot; he claims that “to plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control” (DeLillo 292). He notes that “we start our lives in chaos, in babble” but that life becomes meaningful when it has shape and structure: “a plot, a scheme, a diagram” (291). One of the central questions in White Noise concerns the nature of one’s life-plot: is the plot meaningful when we create it ourselves, or is meaning created only when validated, revealed from the other side? Tender Branson also has these concerns, yet he is too shell-shocked from the trauma of his past to construct his own diagram. His hope for a hint that something exists beyond his visible narrative has also been unfulfilled. He constantly looks outside of himself to find some sense of order, a plan from which to run his life, give him identity and provide structure, hoping, like Gladney, that this will “hold off the chaos” (Palahniuk 263). Having rejected any ultimate transcendent authority, and tiring of playing the role of demi-god by orchestrating the “suicide hotline” deaths of others, Tender becomes dependent on many surrogate gods. These authority figures in his life (employers, case workers) provide him with the “plan for running his day to day life” (263). Throughout the course of the novel, Tender goes from ingesting the Creedish doctrine and its subjective interpretations of The Bible as his only authority, to spewing these doctrines out and following the precise liturgies of his daily planner. His employers, who, like God, he has never had actual face-to-face contact

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with, leave him a list of minute by minute cleaning instructions that Tender builds his life around. Jesse Kavadlo notes that, “He is the opposite of Nietzsche’s übermensch: weak willed, weak minded, controlled mentally, emotionally, physically” (15). Once again, neither the escape from the cult nor the recognition of the supposed death of God have left Tender free to exercise his “will to power.” The dissolutions of absolutes in Tender’s life do not initiate a magical transformation into a courageous superman. Conversely, his suspicions about the “universal order” lead to a dependency on others to decode this order for him. Tender has been assigned a caseworker to prevent him from committing suicide as the rest of his family and childhood community have; the caseworker uses her text of mental disorders to diagnose Tender with a different mental illness every week. He openly accepts and conforms to these diagnoses, another set of rules that tell him how to exist, until the caseworker is murdered and her textbook publishes a new edition in which the rules are changed. Tender’s anxiety over these changed rules is similar to Jack Gladney’s anxiety over the rearranged supermarket shopping aisles at the end of White Noise. Both novels portray men trying to navigate the postmodern landscape, searching for a fixed source of meaning that will assign them identity. Tender and Jack have trusted in the mass produced products of a corporate-driven and scientifically-dependant society to become their religious scriptures. In “The Implosion of Meaning in the Media,” Jean Baudrillard indicates the religious significance that is assigned to the production of information in contemporary society when we mistakenly assume that it leads to the production of meaning: Everywhere information is thought to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning . . . Information is thought to create communication . . . We are all complicitous in this myth. It is the alpha and omega of our modernity, without which the credibility of our social organization would collapse. (Simulacra 80)

Both Tender Branson and Jack Gladney have trusted manufactured, revised, and changeable information as the “alpha and omega” to create structure and purpose in their lives. But these societally constructed “rules” are not trustworthy; the supermarket peddles bigger and better products in order to gain more capital, and the rules of medicine (exact science or game of educated guessing?) change when new discoveries are made and older “truths” are proved invalid. Although Tender rejects the demented fundamentalism of the community he grew up in, he cannot tune out the “background noise” of randomly decontextualized pieces of scripture that constantly interrupt his

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thinking. The constant interjections of misplaced Bible passages in the text are again reminiscent of DeLillo’s White Noise. When Jack Gladney and his family interact in their home, their conversations are constantly being filtered through excerpts of TV advertisements promoting health, wealth and happiness mixed with news snippets foreseeing doom. The collective subconscious of postmodern culture – television – has moulded the minds and actions of the Gladney family just as the Creedish adapted scriptures have infiltrated Tender Branson’s every thought and action. Both Jack Gladney and Tender Branson are reacting to a specific paradigm that has been provided for them by the only overarching structure dominant in their lives. Tender ultimately rejects the scriptures that haunt him, recognizing that the structure they provide is an extreme alternate reality, a contrast to the “real” world he now inhabits. Tender replaces the cult’s unsound metanarrative for an equally false, manipulative one as he succumbs to a media agent’s persistent offers to make him a celebrity. Tender, searching once again for a sense of order in his life, attempts to buy into the world of the hyperreal, now allowing an agent to write his rules for him. The only doctrine of multinational capitalism, which Tender now embraces as a new postmodern sublime, is capital. Tender, the “survivor,” is hailed by the public as a new messiah; he is a media-hyped religious leader who guides the false hopes of his audience while squandering their money. Peddling the rhetoric of the apocalypse to a culture so depthless that revelation is seemingly impossible, Tender learns to use the tools of the system for his own benefit while simultaneously being controlled by his agent. Even the superstar is not strong enough to be the superman. When considering Tender’s role as evangelist celebrity, Eduardo Mendieta sees the exchange of one false paradigm for another: “From the religion of the eschaton, he moves on to the religion of the fabricated star, the manicured and made up prophet” (397). In Palahniuk’s novel, religion is just another commodity, like the blanket notion of celebrity, used to manipulate mass audiences. Although Tender steals the spotlight, drawing thousands into a frenzy of celebrity worship, he is only a puppet on a string, once again appealing to some malignant authority figure for the plan of his life. Although Tender has no control over anything, his show creates the illusion of the complete opposite reality. His girlfriend Felicity, the aggressive psychic, has a daily planner full of disasters that will happen in the near future; Tender uses this information to deliver predictions, prophecies, and wonders to his adoring audiences. Tender’s nameless agent, a conglomerate figure exuding the stench of bottomless consumer capitalism, is at least honest about the depthless amorality of his business

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and his audiences. In the commercial world he inhabits, he sees no distinctions between good and bad, life and death, sacred and profane—the only dividing line is the line of capital. In the recent documentary The Corporation, Noam Chomsky argues that the corporate world is “tyrannical and inherently monstrous” because corporations are entities that are accountable to no one and have “no soul to save, no body to incarcerate.” There are no values or principles, only a desire to both consume and exhibit wealth through the creation of celebrity. Palahniuk clearly emphasizes the exploitation of the apocalyptic longings of the masses when fed to the corporation of religious spectacle. In addition to seeing performativity as his own code of living, Tender’s agent observes that in a society with no transcendent norms to create value, the masses look for a figurehead to create their spiritual and cultural paradigms. As the doctrine of this world is commodity, its high priest is the celebrity, an embodied representation of the unrealizable Other of capital. The agent holds the same beliefs as the public; however, they are in denial of their own superficiality while the agent diabolically uses his for personal gain. The agent is a black hole of consumption, a self-made god that manipulates others into believing an idealistic lie they readily cling to in order to escape the realities of death and decay that permeate all their lives. In the agent’s world, “The key to salvation is how much attention you get. How high a profile you get. Your audience share. Your exposure. Your name recognition. Your press following. The buzz” (Palahniuk 152). Although the audience feigns religious devotion and a desire for sanctified guidance, “According to the agent, the biggest factor that makes you a saint is the amount of press coverage you get” (152). In this plastic society, one in which dependence on the ever-abundant image has managed to “murder the real” (Baudrillard, Simulacra 196), the only way to sainthood is through becoming an image yourself. Baudrillard notes that “everywhere socialization is measured by the exposure to media messages. Whoever is underexposed to the media is desocialized or virtually asocial” (80). Just as exposure to the media initiates individuals into “society,” those who actually become the media—its image and messages—are elevated to the level of saint, priest, even messiah. This is the dogma that has also indoctrinated Tyler in Douglas Coupland’s Shampoo Planet, the young people in Delillo’s White Noise, and the numbed teenagers in Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero; sainthood is bestowed on those who are in the most magazines and on television the most frequently. As we can see here from a concise passage in Bret Easton Ellis’ The Informers, these media endorsed saints teach their flock the same path: “My eyes skim pages of advertisements that

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show me the best way to live” (Ellis 81). This public clearly looks for superficial beauty and depthless rhetoric rather than substance; Tender reemphasizes this point by noting that the Christ figure on most crucifixes looks more like a Calvin Klein waif model than a divine sacrifice (Palahniuk 151). Tender, exercising on a stairmaster in order to mold his image to those archetypal figures from television, comments that “These days. People aren’t going to fill stadiums to get preached at by someone who isn’t beautiful” (153). Even “evangelists” and other religious figures disclose the one-dimensional “meaning” based on image that dominates the culture. Tender exercises on what he calls his “stairmaster to heaven,” a flippant title rich with associations with his role as rock star / celebrity / messiah, and with its constant illusory movement that feigns climbing becomes symbolic for the promises of the progressive “religion” of secular modernity. He says that “You are going up and up and up and you are not getting anywhere. It’s the illusion of progress. What you want to think is your salvation” (153). This “illusion of progress” is one dimension of a modern metanarrative in which “progress,” the new religion or “salvation” is defined by external, material factors such as beauty and wealth. Tender explains that as he climbs, “paradigms are dissolving left and right” (152). At this point in the narrative, we are well aware that Tender is a paradigm junky, and that his paradigms of choice are largely disposable and easily interchangeable. He thinks he has purged himself of dependence on paradigms, but he simply has traded the old ones for the glossy framework of a new streamlined faith in the production of artificial meaning and beauty. The agent, who is responsible for Tender’s “trip” on the stairmaster, recognizes that reality has been absorbed by television to the extent that, “If you’re not on videotape, or better yet, live on satellite hook-up in front of the whole world watching, you don’t exist” (150). The public are so consumed with superficial spectacle that they deny any sense of truth or reality beyond it by assigning ultimate value to pure entertainment. This acknowledgement of the death of the real is the next step after acknowledging Nietzsche's parabolic claim that "all of us are murderers . . . God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him" (168). According to the nihilistic rhetoric of the agent, after killing God, the next murder must be that of the real, and all are implicated in its murder. But this vision of a meaningless collection of unreal images, a landscape of nothing but replication, is a bleak vision of the future. The self has become nothing more than a reflective surface, a catch-all for media projected messages that erase any sense of individual value or

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meaning. Tender imagines a time in which we will “all have the same thoughts at the same time. We will be in perfect unison. Synchronized. United. Exact” until we become “the way ants are” (110). Palahniuk emphasizes how a new kind of media-generated collective memory is erasing individuality, encouraging bland homogeneity. In this vanilla vision of the future, Palahniuk, clearly echoing Baudrillard, writes that everything will become “a reference to a reference to a reference” (110); human memory has been replaced by virtual text, which is impossible to transcend. In this world of identical simulacra, the source of meaning also shifts so that “The big question people ask isn’t ‘What’s the nature of existence?’ . . . The big question people ask is ‘What’s that from?’” (110). The reality of a constructed virtual world has encroached upon and recreated a value system in which entertainment provides both the questions and answers that define existence. These now-sacred texts create a microcosmic value network from which it is impossible to untangle an unmediated truth. The extent to which media entertainment has become the dominant defining factor of reality is clearly seen in Survivor when Fertility and Tender predict the result of the Superbowl. Previously, they had predicted life threatening disasters and were completely ignored, but when they foresee the Superbowl outcome, this is considered sacrilege. Tender is attacked by an angry mob for destroying the mystery of the worshipping congregation’s sacred entertainment. Although Tender is a celebrity success, he is still quite miserable. The artificial world of stardom can do nothing to ward off the pull towards absolute death that tortures him. The liquid values of his material world do nothing but further his spiritual decay, setting fire to his own internal apocalypse. Jesse Kavadlo notes that Palahniuk’s novels hinge upon “metaphysical destruction—which, when enacted, becomes selfdestruction” (12). Tender’s supposed fate is that he implodes at full force. Before hurling his own body from heaven to earth, he records his confessions in the plane’s cockpit. Apparently, his final act of life is, once again, a recorded performance. According to Palahniuk, though, Tender does successfully engineer his escape from the hijacking, as well as covering his escape with a recording played into the flight recorder (Widmyer). Regardless of either way a reader perceives his life or death at the end of the novel, Tender symbolizes the ultimate victim of a reprobate society, the walking dead of the postmodern malaise. Tender’s apparent suicide is analogous to the symbolic suicide of Fight Club’s nameless narrator, an act that destroys the narrator’s alter-ego, Tyler Durden. The nameless narrator in partnership with Tyler Durden and angry at the false promises of corporate America, quits his job and starts Fight Club, an

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underground meeting where men abuse each other in order to get back in touch with the real. Like Tender, the nameless narrator soon becomes a celebrity, and his alter ego, Tyler Durden, urges him that his last great feat is in the form of a death spectacle: “The last thing we have to do is your martyrdom thing. Your big death thing” (203). After the narrator lives through his attempted suicide, his alter ego, Tyler, is destroyed. In the final pages of the novel, readers find the narrator in a symbolic heaven where he sees, “God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God’s got this all wrong” (207). In the end, Fight Club’s narrator finds no answers — only a feeble deity taking notes on the lives of others. Like Tender, Fight Club’s nameless narrator’s apocalyptic longings are unfulfilled. The numbers on the pages of Survivor are sequenced backwards, defying the fulfilment of apocalyptic linearity. We move backwards with Tender toward (un)certain death, toward his ultimate, expected end. The book’s movement towards death in a non-traditional, disorienting manner does not provide the apocalyptic closure that might have been expected. Baudrillard claims that although we desire the sense of an ending, an apocalypse – either disastrous or revelatory – it will not ultimately come. This “messianic hope,” as Baudrillard calls it, reflects the fact that the “desire for the end is the desire for the beginning” (“Hystericizing” 3). In becoming obsessed with questions about the end, we are searching for the answers to questions about origins, about meaning itself. This yearning for origins and ends is ultimately a yearning for a grand narrative, for structure, for purpose; without these historical and philosophical bookmarks, how can we interpret the significance of any of life’s events? According to Baudrillard, we ultimately can’t, and this is exactly why we try to manufacture meaning through the artificial world of simulacra whose only grounding absolute is not some solid yardstick measure of truth / falsehood nor of right / wrong, but the absolute of the fluid nature of capital. As the novel ends, Tender admits that he was taking his time to “tell people the story of how I got up to this point,” so he could “figure a way out” (Palahniuk 3). The telling of his story should be his salvation; the formation of his narrative should lead towards some sort of redemption, or at least buy some time. But does it? We are left waiting for an end that never comes, at least as far as a reader’s immediate experience is concerned. Interestingly enough, this is exactly what Baudrillard says will happen when we wait for the apocalypse to disclose some sense of meaning or closure: “The worst indeed is that there is no end to anything and that everything will continue to take place in a slow, fastidious, recurring and all encompassing hysterical manner—like nails continue to

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grow after death” (Hystericizing 1). The “worst indeed” is waiting and not knowing; we, as readers, experience this at the end of the novel. Palahniuk has tricked us into thinking that the story ends, but narrative closure and therefore, disclosure, would be too easy, too apocalyptic for a book at the end of the millennia. In this sense, Survivor fits the mould of Baudrillard’s mournful definition of what he calls the “anti-apocalypse.” But do the novel’s final ambiguities point to the certainty of Baudrillard’s nihilism? Trapped in the cockpit of a crashing plane, Tender records his story: “Testing, testing, one, two, three. So here is my confession. Here is my prayer. My story. My incantation. Hear me. See me. Remember me. Beloved Fuck-up. Botched Messiah. Would-be Lover. Delivered to God” (1). The religious significance of his chosen words such as “prayer,” “incantation,” and “confession” infuse his supposedly final acts with a sense of ritual, with a movement toward meaning. As we remember Tender’s story, we remember his impulses toward death, but also toward life, his searching for signs of the afterlife in a mausoleum, attempting to give structure and purpose to his own life. He feels that he has failed in these quests, revealed when he says, “It’s all done. It’s all just a story now” (1). The story has been set down for posterity, solidified. There is no room for change anymore, only a definite movement toward an empty end. But is this end truly fatal and empty? Tender tells us that “the sky is blue and righteous in every direction. The sun is total and burning and just right there, and today is a beautiful day” (1). Whether Tender lives or dies, we have no way of knowing if Tender is on the edge of the apocalypse or falling into the final home of his native plastic, the landfill of silent, pointless death. Or maybe, just maybe, his desparate plan works and he survives, to live happily ever after with Fertility. We can only wait, but no answer will ever come from Tender.

Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean. “The Anorexic Ruins.” Looking Back on the End of the World. Eds. Dietmar Kamper & Christoph Wulf. New York: Semiotext(e), 1989. 29-48. —. “Hystericizing the Millenium.” European Graduate School Faculty Homepage. 5 pgs. 18 July 2005.

—. Simulacra and Simulation. Detroit: Uof Michigan P, 1994. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.

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Casado de Rocha, Antonio. “Disease and Community in Chuck Palahniuk’s Early Fiction.” Stirrings Still: The International Journal of Existential Literature 2:2 (Fall/Winter 2005):105-115. Coupland, Douglas. Microserfs. London: Flamingo, 1995. DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Viking Penguin, 1984. Ellis, Bret Easton. The Informers. London: Picador, 1994. Fiddes, Paul. The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Kavadlo, Jesse. “The Fiction of Self-Destruction: Chuck Palahniuk, Closet Moralist.” Stirrings Still: The International Journal of Existential Literature 2:2 (Fall/Winter 2005): 3-24. Mendieta, Eduardo. “Surviving American Culture: On Chuck Palahniuk.” Philosophy and Literature 29 (2005): 394-408. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza). The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Vol. 10. Trans. Thomas Common. Ed. Oscar Levy. New York: Gordon Press, 1974. Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. London: Vintage, 1996. —. Survivor. London: Vintage, 2000. Widmyer, Dennis. “The Ending of Survivor.” Chuckpalahniuk.net: A Writer’s Cult. .

CHAPTER ELEVEN INVISIBLE CARROTS AND FAINTING FANS: QUEER HUMOR AND ABJECT HORROR IN “GUTS”1 JEFFREY A. SARTAIN AND COURTNEY WENNERSTROM

To date, there is no evidence that anyone has ever lost consciousness, thrown up, or shrieked from the act of merely reading “Guts.” Rather, the now well-documented faintings and outbursts associated with this story seem confined to public performances, particularly Chuck Palahniuk’s own recitations.2 In this chapter, we strive to make sense of the complex crossover between the representational themes of “Guts” and the corporeal reactions it elicited between 2003 and 2007.3 By doing so, we hope to explain how Palahniuk’s tales of masturbation gone awry, of male bodies shattered and turned inside-out, managed to send adult audience members to the hospital. We also investigate the story’s extended connotations, exploring how it arrived at such a point in the cultural consciousness that it became the textual centerfold in two major international publications, as well as the introductory tale in Haunted, Palahniuk’s seventh novel.4 In the following pages, we analyze the cultural connotations of audiences’ immediate sympathetic identification with Palahniuk’s protagonists. How and why did the Palahniuk’s aural descriptions of sexualized trauma unravel so many of his book-tour attendees? What enabled this story to evoke dramatic physiological responses from bodies presumably anesthetized to gore and abjection by postmodern desensitization? As queasy and sickened Palahniuk fans clearly demonstrated, even in a cultural milieu overly-familiar with eroticized violence, accounts of sexual evisceration can still inspire abject repulsion. Palahniuk certainly is not the first author or artist ever to illicit somatic effusions from his audience, but “Guts” is remarkable for the way it was

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able to transfer—across time, space, and corporeal boundaries—the misery and humiliation of its masturbating victims onto the real bodies of listeners. In 2003, the author attributed the fainting and vomiting to the audiences’ uproarious laughter. Palahniuk said, Cults and some fundamentalist religions have evolved a type of formula. They get people to either sing or to chant until their blood is hyperoxygenated. They basically hyperventilate. This physiologically sets the audience up, so that later when you preach, they’re already very vulnerable. That’s the same thing that’s happening when the audience laughs at the story. They set themselves up for the third part of the story, which is very tragic and sad, quite different than the first two parts. (Sartain)

While Palahniuk’s physiological assessment of what happens during his readings certainly seems accurate, this essay is much more concerned with why people faint and pass out during recitations of “Guts.” Why does this story makes them emotionally vulnerable? How does the story’s content affect people’s psychosomatic responses, and why is this story the site of such powerful cathexis for audiences?

Social Silence, Individual Trauma To begin, “Guts” overtly challenges a recognizable and idiotic paradox at the heart of contemporary attitudes towards male sexuality. On the one hand, masturbation has traded in its antiquated association with mental illness or moral shortcoming for an understanding of masturbation as necessary for psychological balance and physical well-being. A massmarketed porn industry geared towards male self-pleasure is easily accessible via the internet; and more traditional magazines like Playboy, Penthouse, and even Hustler have become mainstream brand names. In general, masturbation tends to be acceptable and encouraged, as long it as remains within heteronormative limitations. Despite its general permissibility, masturbation is expected to be a secretive, closeted thing, a kind of unspeakable presence whose existence dare not speak its name. Moreover, men are bombarded by conflicting messages that simultaneously praise masturbation as fundamental for the male psyche, while condemning individuals for failing to conceal the act. When Palahniuk’s characters get caught while getting off in unconventional ways, they suffer immediate and lasting humiliation within the very system that capitalizes on the joys of self-pleasure.

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There is something all-too-familiar, even uncanny, about the estranging silence which hovers, like an apparition, over his characters’ interwoven disasters. Through the three teenagers’ anguish in “Guts,” Palahniuk highlights the disastrous results of contemporary culture’s tendency to hype masculine autoeroticism while simultaneously silencing rational discourse about sex. Unsurprisingly, many real-life teenagers, like Palahniuk’s fictionalized ones, are unable to navigate the gaping chasm between media culture’s public titillations and the private repressions of domestic life. Blending outrageous comedy with excruciating pain, “Guts” demonstrates the potential for physical danger and psychological damage that lurks in families who refuse to acknowledge their children’s developing sexuality with open and truthful dialogue. Palahniuk poignantly mixes humor with horror to chastise mothers and fathers who fail to help adolescents avoid, cope with, and recover from the trials and tribulations of puberty. From the story’s trifling embarrassments of lubed carrots to the more pressing concerns of catastrophic disembowelment, tactics such as silence, shame, and guilt are used by out-of-touch parents to suppress their teenagers’ burgeoning sexual desires and deny their autoerotic mishaps. Parental evasion borders on cruelty, however, as the absence of accurate information about sex forces the three protagonists to rely on hearsay and blind experimentation in coming to terms with their bodies and pleasures. For two of these three young protagonists, who become living sacrifices to inane notions of propriety, the results are calamitous. On the surface, then, “Guts” promotes sexual education—the old aphorism, ’Always use the right tool for the right job,’ springs to mind. A fine and wise cautionary tale, indeed, but warning people not to stick wax shards into their urethras is hardly the end of the story’s social commentary. “Guts” also calls for an ideological and hermeneutical shift around simplistic notions of gender, sex, and decency. At a deeper level, Palahniuk addresses the stupidity of condensing the vast spectrum of human sexual experience into the inflexibly defined spaces of heteronormativity, decorum, and privacy. Here, as in the rest of his fiction, Palahniuk deconstructs male embodiment as it is envisioned by western culture’s strict adherence to fixed gender categories based on rigid genital distinction. Fundamentally, “Guts” divulges an open secret, not that men masturbate (this is quite obvious), but that the reality of male embodiment is inherently queered. By exposing the fragility of the male body, “Guts” asserts two truths that oppose fictions about sexual difference inherited from Enlightenment epistemologies. First, “Guts” slices through the myth

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of masculine invulnerability by demonstrating that men can and do get hurt, even when they try to pleasure themselves. Second, “Guts” undermines contemporary culture’s investment in a myth of masculine bodily autonomy by showing that male bodies, just like female ones, are penetrable, susceptible, and always intersubjective. The teenagers’ masturbatory experiments and their subsequent failures represent the fear and ignorance that surrounds any alternative expression of sexuality. Palahniuk suggests that the thing that will not let any of his characters breathe, ultimately, is an irrational fear of the perceived deviance of anal play and the penetration of the male body. Palahniuk thus interrogates phallogocentric paranoia that places non-reproductive sex somewhere outside of discourse; as St. Gut-Free puts it, “what even the French won’t talk about” (20). The audience’s visceral responses to readings, as well as subsequent attempts to recast the story’s gender commentary in a more masculine mode, underscore mainstream culture’s continued aversion to non-normative sexuality. Therefore, Palahniuk’s short story exemplifies the insidiousness implicit in a regime of silence where people’s supposedly-aberrant embodied experiences are repeatedly submerged in the murk of ideology and repression. While Palahniuk’s carrot, wax, and pool kids are fictionalized versions of real-life teenagers, their families are all-toorealistic portrayals of contemporary culture’s reckless enthusiasm for libidinal and erotic hegemony.5 Even though Saint Gut-Free escapes drowning in the pool, he is forever after drowning in a tautological cycle of social shame and familial guilt—the stifling nature of which he expresses when he satirically reassures readers, “Now you can take a good, deep breath. Because I still have not” (21).

Discursively Drowning Deviance When “Guts” was published in his seventh novel, Haunted, Palahniuk dubbed the narrator Saint Gut-Free, whose name connotes and announces his defining trauma. In the beginning of the story, Saint Gut-Free muses over families who cover up their loved-ones’ accidental deaths by autoerotic asphyxiation. Parents make these tragedies look “better,” he quips sardonically. “Intentional at least. The regular kind of sad teen suicide” (14). This humorous and poignant observation cuts to the core of Palahniuk’s interrogation of social silences around supposedly-deviant male sexuality. In fact, as our research on autoerotic fatalities suggests, the stigma surrounding accidental suffocation during masturbation renders it impossible to attain accurate statistics about how many men (and women,

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of course, though there far fewer of these cases) have actually died this way.6 Before police investigators arrive at the scene of unintentional selfstrangulations, often pornography or erotica have mysteriously vanished; bodily fluids have evaporated without a trace; and male bodies that had previously been wearing bras and panties appear to have magically changed into more standard male attire. As Burgess and Hazelwood observe in “Autoerotic Asphyxial Deaths and Social Network Response,” Although the victim may not have engaged in manual masturbation during the final autoerotic act, the victim is often found with pants unzipped or genitals exposed or the genitals wrapped to collect semen. Again, the sexual nature of the death is distressing to many family members and they may alter the clothing before the authorities arrive. (169)

The authors continue, There are some families who accepted that the victim had died accidentally but would not accept the nature of the death as sexual. Parents of a 21year-old college student were successful in having the cause of death changed on the death certificate. And there are a few cases in which the family would not accept the determination that the death was accidental. Most often these families believed the death was a homicide and became angry with investigating officers for closing the case prematurely. Some families were upset and angry with the victim and refused to believe anything. One family refused to bury a son after learning that his death was sex-related. (169)

Like the experimental teenagers’ parents in “Guts” who are so embarrassed by their sons’ injuries, many people appear sympathetically humiliated by the peculiarity of autoerotic fatalities. Hence, family members and friends drastically alter the scene of death, as if to protect themselves from any association with sexual deviance. Rather than refusing to bury their dead sons, they actually use silence to bury their living sons, and their sexual traumas, alive. By interweaving the three tales of sexual trauma that were never discussed again, Saint Gut-Free attempts to speak the unspeakable. His story gives voice to a pain, which in spite of its obvious visibility and physical inscription on male bodies, is placed out of sight and outside of discourse. The inherent admonition in “Guts,” that accidental sexual injuries or suicides might go undiscussed, unmourned, and thus unprevented, is validated by the social stigmatization of transgressive sexuality that exists in the very literature that attempts to examine and illuminate it. Take, for instance, Autoerotic Fatalities, a study intended to help mental health

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professionals, clergy, FBI investigators, and people who have lost loved ones understand the “pathology” of autoerotic asphyxiation , wherein the authors debate “whether there [is] a risk of propagating this dangerous behavior by writing about it” (xi). Elaborating on their dilemma, authors Hazelwood, Dietz, and Burgess remind the reader, [O]ther behavioral scientists and clinicians have faced similar problems. For many years physicians studying sexual behavior published their observations in Latin in order to prevent the undereducated classes from learning of such matters, under the theory that discussions of sexual behavior would incite lust and lead to depravity. (ix-x)

Walking what they perceive as a fine line between the useful investigation of a problem and its perpetuation, the authors begin Autoerotic Fatalities with the following italicized caveat: Do not attempt any of the autoerotic activities described or depicted in this monograph. These activities are inherently dangerous and carry a risk of death. There is no reason to believe that these activities are pleasurable to the average person, and there is every reason to believe that they may prove fatal. (xii)

In context, this dissuasive tactic appears unnecessary and redundant. There is something faintly absurd about the authors’ tautological insistence that killing oneself by mistake is in no way “pleasurable to the average person.” Ultimately, the authors’ feel justified in publishing their findings not because they believe that discourse is a forceful weapon against accidental strangulation, but because "these behaviors [are] already visible to the public through literature, films, and the mass media"(ix). Autoerotic Fatalities reminds readers of the long literary tradition of erotic asphyxia by listing non-erotic texts, such as Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1954) and Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959), that feature choking scenes. Erotic fiction, especially the writings of the Marquis de Sade, were the authors’ most consistent literary reference, though. Indeed, nearly every source we reviewed on the topic referenced the infamous passage from Justine (1791) wherein the libertine Roland forces the heroine and Therese to choke him until he ejaculates. Ironically, though, not one source took the time to recognize the contemporary cultural resonances of Sade’s writings.7 While the Marquis de Sade, with his penchant for stomping on crucifixes and whipping prostitutes while pouring wax into their wounds, is certainly a figure of sadism, he is also an important figure of queer sexuality.8 As Prancine Du Plessix Gray argues, Sade identifies his

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heroine’s victimized subject position because he is both sadistic and masochistic in equal doses. So merciless is Justine’s fate, so relentless is her suffering at the hands of omnipotent tormentors that one could be tempted to see this as Sade’s most autobiographical novel; seeing the innumerable times Sade begged his sexual partners to whip him, it can be argued that he is quite as much of a masochist as he is a sadist, and that his fantasies of torture are geared to experiencing pain as they are to inflicting it. (317)

Like Sade’s story, then, “Guts” troubles the hierarchical delineations traditionally ascribed to sadomasochistic explorations of gender difference. Put another way, audience responses to “Guts,” as well as the story itself, underscore contemporary culture’s fundamental resistance to queerness. As the story depicts and factual research confirms, heteronormative taboos against supposedly-deviant sexuality are so ingrained that, for many, mental illness or suicide are preferable to sexual exploration as explanations for their loved ones’ deaths. If it goes without saying that most people would classify selfsuspension for heightened sexual gratification as deviant, it is unsettling that the so-called experts in human sexuality still find the practice perplexing and pathological. In countless articles on autoerotic fatalities, beginning in the 1950s and continuing through the present day, psychologists and medical authorities seem unable to wrap their minds around the strangeness of the circumstances surrounding these deaths, indicated by the heteronormative biases in their rhetoric. The authors of Autoerotic Fatalities, however noble in their intentions, manage to inscribe popular culture’s fear and sensationalism about alternative sexual practices into professional medical literature. They are not alone. As we discovered in our research, often when toxicologists, criminologists, and forensic pathologists work together to comprehend a trend in sexuallyrelated deaths, they tend to use language that highlights sexual difference and perceived deviance. For instance, in one study, the authors describe “three very bizarre cases . . . of unusual phenomenons,” one involving a Twenty eight-year-old, fireworker, single. He lived alone, was said to be a simple-minded good fellow. He spent the evening together with the fire brigade of his small town. The others described him as totally normal when he went home at midnight. Early in the next morning (at 7.00 a.m.) he was found dead, suspended beneath the bridge over a small river, the legs (with boots) dangling in the water. (Koops)

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This description is as patronizing as it is incredulous: how and why a “simple-minded” and “totally normal” small-town firefighter could or would devise “a peculiar bound belt system” for “sexual bondaging [sic]” is beyond any concrete explanation—meriting vague adjectives such as “bizarre” and “unusual” (Koops). Above all, though, medical practitioners seem flabbergasted by the gender performativity that accompanies many of these cases, and become baffled by the queerness of the sexual fantasies that involve men dressing up in women’s lingerie. Consider the following passage from an article which fixates on the fetishistic nature of the victim donning female apparel, demonstrating paranoia about sexual difference: A 27-year-old married white drug salesman was found hanging in his basement. A rope had been placed over a towel protecting his neck. The doors to the basement were locked. He was clothed in female attire, including silk panties, bra, and falsies made of rolled up socks. The panties were stained with semen. He had no prior history of homosexual behavior or transvestitism. No evidence of erotic materials or drugs were detected on investigation. The death was ruled accidental. (Walsh 161)

What seems most troubling to the authors is not so much that accidental sexual injuries or suicides occur, but rather that any man would choose to put on female clothing, wear “falsies,” and immobilize himself to seek sexual gratification. The literature reviewed is almost universal in proclaiming the psychological motivations behind bondage fantasies as paraphilia, a “sexual perversion or deviation” (OED), or hypoxyphilia, “the desire for the state of oxygen deficiency” (Hazelwood 81). Such characterizations depend on the stability of culturally-circumscribed gender roles and essentialist sex categories; both assume normative stances regarding sexual activities and desires. The descriptions of these victims as somehow deviant reveal much more about the discursive perpetuation of repressive ideology than it does about the victims’ last moments.

Queering the Male Body: “Gutting” Cartesian Dualism The heteronormative bias indicated by these researchers’ language is symptomatic of a larger resistance towards male bodies that do not maintain the heteronormative status quo. It is precisely contemporary culture’s squeamishness about gender performativity that Palahniuk reveals in “Guts.” The story allegorically unravels the fragile fiction of Cartesian dualism by portraying an inherently queer male subjectivity, one

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that bleeds, tears, opens, and cannot finally retain its borders. Queer subjects defy rigid gender distinctions, and directly oppose Western culture’s continued adherence to an Enlightenment discourse of binary gender difference directly inherited from Descartes. In the Cartesian imagination, which distrusts the sensual world, there is a strict division between the sexes, physically manifested in the perceived differences between male and female bodies. The Cartesian system insists on the masculine subject as self-contained and unassailable, whereas the female body, as Elizabeth Grosz points out, has been scripted in the Cartesian worldview as exactly the opposite. Woman, she asserts, “has been constructed not only as a lack or absence but . . . as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid; as a formless flow; a viscosity, entrapping, secreting; as lacking not so much the phallus but self-containment” (198).9 Western culture has come to abhor the excruciating reality of male vulnerability, and has a deep emotional investment in hiding it through silence. Anything that forces recognition that men, too, are prone to sexual violation, pain, and lasting injury—speedily becomes a thing “too low to even get talked about” (“Guts” 13). Men who undermine the myth of masculine self-containment are sure to find their stories marginalized and repressed by heteronormative discursive practices, usually through feminizing language intended to elicit shame, guilt, and social separation. The greatest narrative and philosophical triumph of “Guts” is that it exposes the inanity of a pervasive ideological fiction of men’s bodily and psychic autonomy. Palahniuk’s male protagonists find themselves in compromising, life-threatening situations at the moment of pleasure when they should be least vulnerable: when they are not relying on or trying to please a partner, when they do not expect to see or be seen, and when they literally have themselves in their own hands. Yet “Guts” graphically insists on the masculine body’s inherent frailty and intersubjectivity, showing how it is never completely sealed or protected, is never entirely private, and can never exist in inviolable isolation. The traumatized male bodies in “Guts” suffer a double-exposure to the outside world, first from the physical pain involved in these accidents, and second from an inability to erase that trauma’s marks on the body, which people see and despise. For Palahniuk’s three characters, individual traumas become public offenses, utterly impossible to mask. The carrotkid’s social shame at family gatherings is the mildest form of scrutiny endured by any of the three main characters. His story quickly transitions from the comedy of potential shame (what people might think in public), to the tragedy of actual disgrace (being found out by his mother in private). Palahniuk spotlights the heightened scrutiny and shame that

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accompanies masculine vulnerability in the scene where the wax-kid’s clandestine experiment of inserting a long sliver of wax into his urethra is exposed to his family. “This kid, with his folks, his whole family, them looking at the black X-ray with the doctor and the nurses standing there, the big V of wax glowing white for everybody to see, he has to tell the truth” (15). Finally, Palahniuk shows how St. Gut-Free’s body is never free of hypercritical scrutiny and the shame it continues to bring: “Nowadays, people always tell me I look too skinny. People at dinner parties get all quiet and pissed off when I don’t eat the pot roast they cooked” (20) because “I’ve never weighed a pound more than I did that day when I was thirteen” (21). Each of the characters undergoes continual social mortification because of the resistance to cultural myths that they embody.. They pursued non-normative sexual gratification, and because of their failure to conceal the acts, as well as their own vulnerabilities, they are publicly and privately marginalized and alienated. Throughout, “Guts” continually stresses the queerness of male bodies by paradoxically associating masculine embarrassment with domestic, feminized activities and spaces. The story’s usage of the feminized, the domestic, and the quotidian blurs rigid categories of sexual difference around the three main characters. Physcial elements of the story, such as the carrot, the dripping wax, and the water of the pool, effuse an organic sensuality, traditionally linked to images of femininity in Western culture. For instance, “Guts” begins with the tale of a 13 year-old boy fascinated by the idea of “pegging” (12). He veils his quest for anal pleasure from everyone at the supermarket behind a mock culinary prowess: “He buys milk and eggs and sugar and a carrot, all the ingredients for a carrot cake. And Vaseline” (12). After all the carrot-kid’s efforts at concealing his experiment, the teenager, not even achieving an orgasm, is forced to stash his carrot in a pile of laundry when called down for supper. His hasty decision turns out not to be very well conceived, however: “All his dirty clothes, while he ate dinner, his mom grabbed them all to do laundry” (13). Afterward, the “carrot kid’s” humiliation is forever embodied in “That ghost carrot . . . That something too awful to name” that still lingers over his family’s holiday gatherings (13). Further, the pool scene in “Guts” becomes a metaphoric rebirth, complete with visceral reminders of the body’s essential materiality: blood, fecal matter, and dead sperm. Symbolically, the portrayal of the feminized natural world ravishing and destroying male bodies in “Guts” represents a reversal of the symbolic logic of “rational individualism, the discourse of Descartes and Locke that predicates the discrete nature of bodies” (Castle 103). Palahniuk denounces this kind of separateness through his narrative’s inclusive

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voice, linking his characters and readers together through their commonalities: “This wax kid and the carrot kid are different people, but we pretty much all live the same life” (15). “Guts” thus instantiates Judith Butler’s insightful notion that bodily suffering reconnects us to “the fundamental sociality of embodied life” (22). In Undoing Gender, the theorist describes how the social aspects of mourning undermine a stable, uniform, and independent selfhood by transporting and transforming individuals beyond self-recognition: If we return to the problem of grief, to the moments in which one undergoes something outside of one’s control and finds that one is beside oneself, not at one with oneself, we can say grief contains within it the possibility of apprehending the fundamental sociality of embodied life, the ways in which we are from the start, and by virtue of being a bodily being, already given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own. (22)

In the sudden vertigo of trading individual experience for intersubjective experience, Butler reminds us that people are transported “beyond themselves,” much like those who found themselves fainting and retching at Palahniuk’s readings seem to have been. The structure of “Guts,” itself a narrative downward spiral (strikingly reminiscent of the ear’s shape), may amplify masculine fears of disempowerment when recited, as if the story’s traumas relentlessly assault the senses and the imagination. In Derrida’s terminology, when “Guts” is read aloud, the performative experience of aural penetration is at work. As the philosopher observes in the Margins of Philosophy, symbolically “the auditory canal [is] a vagina” (Tympan xiv, ftnt.6), and in this analogy, cannot close or shut itself off voluntarily.10 In essence, hearing “Guts” mimics forced entry, as it slams Cartesian illusions about the autonomous male subject against the realities of intersubjective dependence and collective existence. Following Butler and Derrida’s theories, we hypothesize that Palahniuk’s audience members, unable to close their ears, may have become suddenly “implicated in lives that were not their own.” The empathetic responses from the audience members who fainted and retched constitute a remarkable and admirable phenomenon because, while Palahniuk paints his protagonists as unsung heroes, those who publicly reacted to this story are also unsung heroes; their bravery apparent when they express a form of public empathy with the story’s alienated characters and taboo content. Both Derrida’s postmodern philosophy and Palahniuk’s fiction challenge fundamental myths of masculine autonomy that support uncritical, repressive gender categories. In The Ear of the Other, Derrida

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proposes that the openness of the ear is absolutely necessary for philosophical discourse. Using the example of Nietzsche’s autobiography Ecce Homo, Derrida testifies to the fragile reliance of the self on the listening presence of an Other. The singular concretization of Nietzche’s identity into language in and through autobiography (what Derrida calls his “signature”) depends on his readers receiving his ideas, letting Nietzsche’s ideas occupy their respective psyches. Here, Derrida uses the image of the ear to explain how Nietzsche gives birth to himself by offering his corpus to reading and interpretation: Nietzsche’s signature does not take place when he writes [but rather] when the other comes to sign with him, to join with him in alliance and . . . to hear and understand him . . . the signature becomes effective—performed and performing—not at the moment it apparently takes place, but only later, when ears will have managed to receive the message. (50)

Following Derrida’s logic, Nietzsche cannot exist as a text, or in the world, until his voice is not merely read, but is appropriated into another reader’s thoughts.11 Derrida’s theories about the inextricable linkage between philosophic ideas and lived embodiment resonate with the central themes of intersubjectivity and male fragility in “Guts,” as both authors emphasize the collective components of individual identity.

Re-Masculinization: “The Most Gruesome Short Story Ever Published?” “Guts” appears so successful at shattering myths of masculine autonomy that Palahniuk’s fiction frequently inspires readers, listeners, and viewers to recast their experiences of encountering his story through acts of re-masculinization. Misreading Palahniuk as uncritically hypermasculine is nothing new. One only need think of how the split-psyched, fragmented, nameless narrator of Palahniuk’s Fight Club becomes the ripped and bleeding Tyler Durden, played by Brad Pitt, chiseled mediaicon of fetishized ruggedness.12 Similarly, the faintings at the “Guts” readings themselves were described by many audience members and witnesses as a kind of extreme sport or rite of passage, not as feminine weakness reminiscent of 18th-century heroines. One attendee of the 2003 New York reading of “Guts,” chronicled in Postcards from the Future: The Chuck Palahniuk Documentary, declares, “I enjoyed it. Glad I didn’t pass out.” His friend quickly interjects, “I was hoping to pass out.” Still another attendee elaborated on the events of the night, “Yeah, it was actually my friend who passed out the second time. I kinda freaked out

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because he was like . . .” At this point, Dennis Widmyer, one of the documentary’s directors asks, “The guy screaming? Is he OK?” The attendee responds with a smirk and a thumbs-up, “He’s in the hospital right now. Thank you Chuck Palahniuk.” Finally, the story’s publication history implies further attempts at resignifying the story’s social significance, as the cover of the Guardian Weekend dares readers to enjoy “the most gruesome short story ever published.” The publication in Playboy transforms the story’s theme of social embarrassment into titillation with the headline: “The worst part about doing something perverse and stupid? Getting caught” (76). Perhaps the most telling instance of readers attempting to recast the story’s commentary about masculinity is in the Wikipedia entry on Palahniuk’s Haunted.13 Since 24 February 2006, the online encyclopedia has humorously declared that “the narrator's sister later becomes impregnated by semen deposited by the narrator in the pool, which results in her having an abortion.” As all who read the story should know, however, this statement is grossly inaccurate. While the narrator does temporarily invite us to participate in his juvenile nightmare of incestuous procreation, he soon offers a corrective to his freakish manifestation of sexual guilt: “In the end, it’s never what you worry about that gets you” (16). The Wikipedia contributor’s longstanding misreading is thus symptomatic of a larger cultural blindness about male autonomy. After all, the narrator’s worst nightmare had been (re)producing a monstrous separate self that reflects Otherness by mirroring it from the outside-in, the incestuous baby “looking just like me” (16). Reminiscing about his life before the unimaginable worst really did happen, the narrator muses, “That used to be my WORST fear in the world: my teenage virgin sister, thinking she’s just getting fat, then giving birth to a two-headed retard baby. Both heads looking just like me” (16, our emphasis). One does not need to be a sophisticated close-reader of fiction to comprehend the relative weakness of human sperm, to realize that it cannot live in chlorinated water outside of the body to survive until some vague future moment when his mother or sister might go for a swim. Following the textual clues Palahniuk scatters, astute readers will see that the sister’s terminated pregnancy in “Guts” is really a more run-of-the-mill variety of teen pregnancy, no less traumatic and difficult for the family for its unincestious source. Misinterpretations like the one in Wikipedia are textually ungrounded, but more importantly, they reinforce heteronormative bias similar to the medical discourse about autoerotic asphyxiation examined earlier. Both discourses reify conservative ideologies about acceptable sexual behavior and dissuade rational

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discourse through rhetoric that renders all potential alternative positions as deviant. What seems impossible within the cultural myth of the impenetrable male body is the literal unraveling of masculine self from the inside-out. Within an ideology based on Cartesian dualism, it becomes impossible for the narrator to conceive of the sublime horror of discovering the Otherness within—a struggle illuminated when he cannot recognize his own intestines. He initially thinks, “some kind of snake, blue-white and braided with veins, has come up out of the pool drain and is holding on to my butt,” and adds, “some horrible sea monster, a sea serpent, something that’s never seen the light of day, it’s been hiding in the dark bottom of the pool drain, waiting to eat me ” (18). He is numbed, unable to comprehend the abject interiority that he cannot feel as a part of himself. “Your guts don’t feel much pain” (18), he attests, as if they sense and act of their own accord. The narrator’s continuing trauma comes from the shock of having his lifelong illusions about masculinity literally unravel before his eyes. His vulnerability represents an internal, feminized Otherness that ultimately deconstructs Cartesian myths of masculinity. Through its overt narrative, thematic concerns, and audience responses, “Guts” consistently undermines the boundaries of heteronormative cultural myths. By demonstrating the sexual shame and alienation these fictional characters suffer, the story points to real-world trends in public and private sexual repression. “Guts” depicts the silencing of real teenagers’ sexualities in favor of ideology the social controls that bolster it. However, as “Guts” asserts over and over, the cultural silencing and misinformation surrounding male auto-eroticism is stupid, irresponsible, and potentially fatal. Tales of actual sexual nightmares that are not fully expressed or are entirely erased take on a tangible discursive stickiness; palpable, omnipresent, and unbearably thick in the air we all breathe: “even then my parents never mentioned it again. Ever. That is my family’s invisible carrot” (21). Admirably, Palahniuk is among the writers who choose to break with conventionality and social taboos, lending his words to those unspeakable carrots, and inciting fainting fits in the brave.

Notes 1

We would like to thank the students in Courtney’s course at Indiana University, “The Anatomy of Feeling: Representation of Emotion in Popular Culture,” who so intelligently discussed and inspired our understanding of “Guts.” 2 Sacred and Immoral’s Appendicies list relevant media coverage of the events surrounding Palahniuk’s readings of “Guts.” Of particular note are Postcards from the Future: The Chuck Palahniuk Documentary (2004), and Palahniuk’s essay,

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“The Guts Effect.” These sources detail the visceral reactions that audiences had to “Guts.” Interestingly, as Palahniuk notes in “The Guts Effect,” foreign audiences hearing the story performed in translation were subject to the same types of reactions as English-speaking audiences. 3 According to Palahniuk in “The Guts Effect,” the story is now responsible for 73 faintings worldwide. Numerous interviews, profiles, and news stories from the period (listed in this volume’s Appendicies) confirm the escalating total as Palahniuk’s tours continued. 4 “Guts” was first published as the cover feature for the Manchester Guardian Weekend from 13 March 2004, where readers were informed “At public readings, people faint. It’s repulsive. It’s not for the squeamish. This is a warning: Many readers will find this offensive.” Playboy published “Guts” in their March 2004 issue under contention, as Palahniuk describes, “Playboy magazine had declined to buy the ‘Guts’ story, some staffers saying it was too extreme. But when their Fiction Editor, Chris Napolitano, came to the event at the Union Square Barnes and Noble and watched several more half-naked people drop-that night, he and my agent crossed the street to the bar at the W Hotel and inked a deal” (“Guts Effect” 408). Playboy’s cover more subtly bills the story as “Gut-twisting fiction by Chuck Palahniuk.” 5 Chuck Palahniuk describes his sources for the story in “The Guts Effect.” “No, [the first week I read “Guts”], my writer friends just laughed, and I told them how the three-act story of "Guts" was based on three true anecdotes. Two had happened to friends, and the last had happened to a man I'd met while attending sex addict support groups to research my fourth novel. They were three funny, gradually more-upsetting true stories about experiments with masturbation gone wrong. Horribly wrong. Nightmarishly wrong. But these were stories so funny and sad that for years, every time I boarded an airplane, I said the silent prayer: "Please God, do not crash this plane because I'm the only one of Your children who knows all three of these great stories..." In silence, I'd bargain, "Just let me do something, make something to preserve all three” (406). 6 We would also like to thank the Kinsey Institute for Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University for their generous access. Their collections broadened the scope and depth of this inquiry greatly. 7 Listed in our Works Cited, see Walsh (1977). In our Works Consulted, see especially: Gwozdz (1970), Rosenblum and Faber (1978), Schneider (1978). 8 Sexologist Kraft-Ebing coined the term “sadism” after the Marquis. In what was nicknamed the “affair d’Arcueil,” Sade was accused and found guilty of whipping and pouring wax onto a prostitute named Rose Keller. See James A. Steintrager. Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman. (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004), especially 88-114. 9 For Descartes, the senses are utterly unreliable as a way of knowing and perceiving. In what she calls Descartes’ “wax argument,” Dalia Judovitz describes how the philosopher illustrates his distrust of the sensual through the metaphor of the metamorphosis of wax under the flame. Such a metamorphosis of wax under the flame, the dissolving of what appears to be a stable body right in front our eyes, detaches us from the material world and renders our senses virtual. Due to

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Descartes’ wish to master the melting, unstable liquidities of the materiality through reason, discipline, and the domination of the cogito, he associates the body with a deceptive, ephemeral femininity: a “virtualization that enables Descartes to speak of the body not as a lived entity, but as a disembodied technical and mechanical thing” that must be considered not as an “organic entity but as a dissected corpse, whose mechanical logic is associated with the artifice of automata” (Judovitz,71-72). 10 In Snuff (2008), Palahniuk appears to play directly with Derrida’s notion that the ear is the site of all philosophic discourse. “The religious school she went to, growing up, Ms. Wright said how all the girls had to wear a scarf tied to cover their ears at all times. Based on the biblical idea that the Virgin Mary became pregnant when the Holy Spirit whispered in her ear.The idea that ears were vaginas. That, hearing just one wrong idea, you lost your innocence. One detail too many and you'd be ruined. Overdosed on information. True Fact. The wrong idea could take root and grow inside of you” (50). Further, in Choke (2001), Victor Mancini repeatedly focuses his fetishistic interest on Paige Marshall’s ears. Longingly, he "look[s] into the dark secret insides of her ear,” (23) and later realizes, "I was right about her ears. For sure, another hole she can't close, hidden and frilled with skin. Framed in her soft hair” (89). Victor’s thwarted desire for Paige’s ear hinges on his unresolved childhood conflicts with Ida Mancini, his domineering mother. He transfers his frustrated desires to a fetishistic focus on Paige’s ear, a fixation which recurs throughout the novel and suggests she is no more than a blank page for upon which he inscribes his desire. 11 This thread of Derrida’s theory resembles contemporary arguments about the formation of identity, memory, and consciousness in cognitive science, best articulated in Douglas R. Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop (New York: Basic Books, 2007). As Hofstadter argues, identity is largely a matter of interpolating others’ perceived identities and your own subjective experiences into a vast and unique matrix of memories. Thereby, to perceive someone, to remember them, and to adapt to them demonstrates the way in which individuals affect, in varying degrees, each others’ consciousness. Derrida’s notion about the intertextuality of identity demonstrated above marries naturally to this argument, as to read someone’s work is to allow them space in one’s consciousness. 12 David Fincher’s film adaptation of Fight Club has cast Palahniuk’s media image as ruggedly masculine and hyperbolically subversive. His work, though, often deconstructs attempts at hypermasculinization, as “Guts” so astutely demonstrates. Even in David Fincher’s adaptation of Fight Club (1999), there are two very specific scenes that suggest the film’s smirking Hollywood glee at casting Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden. Consider the irony of Durden’s speech, “We all were brought up to think we were movie gods and rock stars…but we’re not” when delivered by Brad Pitt. Also consider the scene near the end of the film when Edward Norton runs in front of a bus – very briefly a movie marquee is visible. A misspelling of Seven Years in Tibet, a 1997 Brad Pitt film, is listed on the marquee. Consider then, that within Fight Club’s diegesis, the real-world actor Brad Pitt exists. Following that logic, viewers can deduce that the film’s narrator has conjured the specter of the Hollywood icon to identify as his alternate personality

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in a type of narcissistic wish fulfillment. To individuals not privileged to the narrator’s point-of-view, though, only one individual appears, played by Edward Norton. In this subtle move, the film mocks its own Space Monkeys who think they’re following a man with a vision for the future, when they’re really following a man who just wants to look and act like a movie star to get the girl. 13 The Wikipedia edit from 10:18, 24 February 2006 by contributor “Applemask” reads the textual clues of “Guts,” stating, “It is also insinuated that the narrator's sister may have been impregnated by semen deposited by the narrator in the pool in the past, although this may be paranoia on the narrator's part.” At 13:25, only five hours later, the contributor “LGagnon” changes the entry to the form we quote in the text above, commenting vaguely in the revision history, “actually, she was impregnated; this is explicitly mentioned in the story, and further elaborated on in Haunted's main storyline.” Upon multiple readings of “Guts” and Haunted, we have found no evidence to support the assertion of actual incest in “Guts.” There is a small reference late in the book to “Saint Gut-Free’s two-headed baby” (378), but in context, this reference does not support a literal interpretation of the incest theme; rather it implies the same figurative image of fear and Otherness used in the story previously

Works Cited Burgess, Ann Wolbert and Robert R. Hazelwood. “Autoerotic Asphyxial Deaths and Social Network Response.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 53.1 (1983): 166-70. Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Castle, Terry. Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century Culture and Fiction. Stanford UP, 1986. Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other. Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Ed. Christie V. McDonald. Trans. Peggy Kamaf. New York: Schocken Books, 1985. —. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. Fincher, David, dir. Fight Club. Novel by Chuck Palahniuk. Fox, 1999. Gray, Francine du Plessix. At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life. New York and London: Penguin Books, 1999. Grosz. Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1994. “Haunted.” Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haunted_(novel). Hazelwood, Robert R., Park Elliot Dietz, and Ann Wolbert Burgess. Autoerotic Fatalities. D.C. Heath: Lexington, MA. 1983. Judovitz, Dalia. The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001. Palahniuk, Chuck. Choke. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

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—. “Guts.” Haunted. New York, Doubleday, 2005. 12-21. Rpt. of Playboy March 2004: 76+. Rpt. of Guardian Weekend [Manchester, UK] 13 Mar. 2004: 16+. —. “The Guts Effect.” Haunted. 2005. New York: Doubleday, 2006. 40511. —. Snuff. New York: Doubleday, 2008. Sartain, Jeffrey A. Phone Interview with Chuck Palahniuk. 18 Sept 2003. Walsh, F. M., et al. “Autoerotic Asphyxial Deaths: A Medicolegal Analysis of Forty-Three Cases. Legal Medicine Annual. Ed. C. H. Wecht. New York: Appleton-Century-Crots, 1977. 157-82.

Works Consulted Blank, Joani, ed. First Person Sexual: Women and Men Write about SelfPleasuring. San Francisco: Down There Press, 1996. Breitmeier, D., et al. “Accidental Autoerotic Deaths between 1978 and 1997: Institute of Legal Medicine, Medical School Hannover.” Forensic Science International 137.1 (2003): 41-44. Dietz, P. E. and R. R. Hazelwood. “Atypical Autoerotic Fatalities.” Medicine and Law 1 (1982): 307-19. Eber, Milton and Charles V. Wetli. “A Case of Autoerotic Asphyxia.” Psychotherapy 22.3 (1985): 662-68. Groenendijk, Leendert F. “Masturbation and Neurasthenia: Freud and Stekel in Debate on Harmful Efects of Autoerotcism”. Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality. Vol. 9(1) 1997:71-94. Gwozdz, Feliks. “The Sexual Asphyxias: A Review of Current Concepts and Presentation of Seven Cases.” Forensic Science Gazette 1.2 (1970): 2-4. Henderson, Deborah Parkman, et al. “Autoerotic Asphyxia in Adolescents.” Journal of Emergency Nursing 21.1 (1995): 81-83. Koops, E., et al. “Unusual Phenomenology of Autoerotic Fatalities.” Forensic Science International 147 (2005): S65-S67. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Milner, R. "Orgasm of Death". Hustler August 1981: 33-34. Myers, Wade C., et al. “The Relationship between Serial Sexual Murder and Autoerotic Asphyxiation.” Forensic Science International 176.2-3 (2008): 187-195. Ponton, Lynne. The Sex Lives of Teenagers: Revealing the Secret World of Adolescent Boys and Girls. 2000. New York: Plume, 2001.

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Rosenblum, Stephen and Myron M. Faber. “The Adolescent Sexual Asphyxia Syndrome.” American Academy of Child Psychiatry Journal (1978): 546-558. Schneider, Bob. “Strange Sexual Deaths.” Screw. 12 June 1978: 4-7. Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de. Justine: Ou Les Malheurs de la Vertu.Paris: Éditions de la Renaissance, 1967. Schliesinger, Louis B. and Eugene Revitch, eds. Sexual Dynamics of AntiSocial Behavior. Illinois: Charles C Thomas Publishers, 1983. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofksy. “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl”. In Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary, and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism. Eds. Paula Bennet and Vernon A. Rosario II. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. Toblin, Robin L., et al. “Unintentional Strangulation Deaths from the "Choking Game" among Youths Aged 6-19 Years – United States, 1995—2007.” Journal of Safety Research 39.4 (2008): 445-448. Usher, Alan. “Accidental Hanging in Relation to Abnormal Sexual Practices.” Newcastle Medical Journal 27 (1963): 234-37.

CHAPTER TWELVE OF FAILED ROMANCE, WRITER’S MALPRACTICE, AND PROSE FOR THE NOSE: A CONVERSATION WITH CHUCK PALAHNIUK MATT KAVANAGH

Sometimes cultural critics are like small children. We all want to hear the same old story, over and over. When it comes to novelist Chuck Palahniuk, we can never get enough of the story of his meteoric rise and remarkable emergence from obscurity to become a publishing blockbuster with Fight Club. That’s all old news, however. Palahniuk has been publishing for over a decade now and the problems he’s wrestling with have more to do with plotting his next book than adjusting to sudden fame. After all, he’s had some time to get used to it. This interview catches up with Palahniuk just after he finished Haunted and just prior to going on tour in support of it. Touching on all of his published fiction to date, we took the opportunity to discuss some of the main themes that animate his work, the anxiety of influence, reasons for his foray into genre fiction with Haunted, and the perils of writing transgressive fiction after 9/11. The following consists of a conversation held over email in February and March of 2005.

Getting Started Matt Kavanagh: Among other things, your first novel Fight Club features a paramilitary group that engages in various acts of anti-capitalist terrorism. Your second novel is narrated to the flight recorder of a hijacked commercial jet. The film based on Fight Club concludes in spectacular fashion—the destruction of an unnamed city’s financial center. And all this before September 11. At the time your novels and David Fincher’s film came out, they seemed symptomatic of widespread premillennial tension. Now they seem both uncannily prescient and yet strangely distant. It would seem that even though Y2K and 9/11 are events separated only by a matter of months, they belong to completely different

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worlds. What do you think about the War on Terror? If you hadn’t enjoyed success prior to it, do you think you would have ever found your audience? Chuck Palahniuk: In the days after September 11, 2001, my editor told me that several book projects had just died on his desk. These were all “transgressional” fiction, like Fight Club or American Psycho, where characters act out in order to gain a sense of personal power. According to my editor, Random House didn’t feel the market would support these stories in the near future. At 20th Century Fox, the studio bosses quietly let the option expire on my second book, Survivor, despite having spent significant money on the screenplay and development. Again, because no one could expect an audience to see humor or insight in any form of civil disobedience or consensual violence. In subsequent book contracts, fewer publishers are offering to protect writers from lawsuits based on readers who might injure themselves or others while mimicking the events of a book. Until September 11, 2001, my publishers had always offered legal protection to me. Now, publishers say that rising insurance rates (due to 9/11) have ended that practice. If someone does something stupid, and claims a book of mine prompted their action, the Random House lawyers won’t come to my rescue. That’s the most chilling trend. It’s hard not to expect writers to muzzle their characters or very clearly depict “socially responsible” consequences for the events in their books. With the new possibility of “writers malpractice” lawsuits, no, I can’t imagine Fight Club coming to market right now. About the War on Terror – I have no idea. MK: You’ve just finished Haunted, a collection of short stories that together form a larger narrative. How does it differ from the work that comes before it? What’s next on the agenda? CP: How does Haunted differ from my other novels? First, it consists of 23 short stories, welded together by the chapters of a novella. Free verse poems act as the introduction for each story, and no single aspect of the book lasts longer than a few pages. My intention was to mimic the texture of “best of” collections. For example, the Best of Poe, which would alternate short novels with stories and poems. This would allow me to expand a story to 400+ pages while still building to moments of insight and drama on a rapid, regular schedule. The reader would find real “pay offs” about every twenty pages. The short stories would provide these frequent “reveals” without complicating the main plot with too many

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twists. It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet of story telling. And in a gruesome way it’s my “food” book. Every writer seems to write a novel based on food and cooking. Mine is based on starvation, but food plays a role in every story. Beyond that, the over-supply of drama is meant to trivialize drama, not just in books but in life. A tale full of sound and fury, but signifying Nothing – except our constant hunger for sound and fury. Conflict, fear, violence and hate exist because we LOVE them. That’s Haunted. What’s next is a trilogy, or three-part novel based on non-fiction forms. An extended fake documentary about a dysfunctional near future.1 It’s already got my weekly writers workshop laughing. MK: For a successful author, a new release invariably means a book tour. Canadian writer Margaret Atwood took some flak from fans recently for floating the idea of a virtual autographing machine, one that would allow her to sign her books from home. (Curiously, she brought this up at the same time that U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was roundly criticized by just about everybody when it was revealed that he was using an automatic signature writer on condolence letters for service members killed in action.) What are your thoughts on book tours? Is Atwood (unlike Rumsfeld) onto something? When people vest so much in a signature, is a book still a book or just a piece of memorabilia? CP: A book tour is the punishment for bringing a book to market. After all that time alone, or with a close group of friends, you’re pushed in front of audiences and prompted to become a different person. Between these public events, which can last for hours and hours, you’re alone in hotel rooms and airplanes. It’s a roller coaster that would turn anyone into a manic-depressive. The biggest challenge is to “fool” myself into having a good time. This includes reading new, unpublished work – as wild as I can write – and, shipping give-away prizes to the events. If I start signing books early and make quick-enough progress, I can “doctor” the books with official-looking stamps that say things like: “Property of Such and Such Men’s Prison Library” or mental hospital or sex-change clinic. Stamping the pages randomly, I can write an inscription that implies a long, sordid history between me and that particular reader. By being a fool, my goal is to avoid the pretentiousness of book readings. And to have fun. Usually, at least half the people at my book events have never been to a public reading. I want their first book event to be shocking and funny and outrageous. If that means I have to throw dozens of bloody, severed hand

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and legs into the crowd – actually, very realistic Hollywood props – then, that’s what I’ll do. MK: One story in the literary world that is playing out against the backdrop of this interview is the suicide of Hunter S. Thompson.2 You often discuss the centrality of non-fictional devices in your fiction. I was wondering if the new journalism in general and gonzo journalism in particular provided you with any insights in how to meld the two? CP: I haven’t been a fan of “gonzo” journalism for a long time. For too long, it’s been an excuse for the writer to navel gaze. Too many nonfiction articles have started with long, detailed descriptions of the writer’s emotions as he chooses the perfect necktie for the interview. Or the writer’s internal monologue in response to the subject of the article. These pieces seldom do more than showcase how clever the writer can be, when I’m more interested in the subject – which gets lost or ignored. This kind of cleverness usually becomes cruelty, and all it does is hide the writer’s fear of being with the subject and asking honest, well-considered questions. “Gonzo” has come to mean scared, cruel, self-obsessed and lazy reporting. What reporting I do is the very traditional creative non-fiction I learned in college, where the subject is presented and the reporter stays off camera. That way, the readers aren’t constantly reminded that they’re meeting the subject through an interpreter or filtering witness. MK: Haunted is the third in a projected trilogy of horror stories. What prompted you to experiment in the horror genre? At a time when America is convulsed with domestic unrest and significant political tension, does genre fiction offer a safe port in the storm? CP: Let’s consider this from three angles: First, with our culture so equally divided, the only way to introduce new possibilities and insights will be by making them entertaining. Charming or spooky or seductive, but in a seemingly neutral way. If the audience feels served and entertained, they’re more likely to tolerate and recognize a different viewpoint. No one wants to spend their time and money getting preached at so any kind of a message must first be entertaining. Second, I love horror. Ever since the old EC horror comic books and the 1970’s occult boom, I’ve craved plot twists and hidden back stories and big reveals. By the 1980’s horror became little but monotonous slasher films, and trite monsters, like vampires and werewolves. My goal was to

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invent some modern monsters or horror scenarios based on ordinary, banal parts of modern life. My book Lullaby deals with memes, and the way mass culture can fill your head and leave your mind crippled and unable to imagine or think. The next book, Diary deals with gentrification and how a culture unaware of the past will make the same mistakes, again and again, forever. Haunted deals with a thousand horrific ideas – but mostly with our loss of spirituality and how we’ll torture ourselves for any assurance of an afterlife. Third, transgressional fiction gets boring. Someone standing on a soap box and beating a drum can only hold any audience for so long. Writing within a genre is more fun for me, the writer.

Influences MK: A quick glance at the jacket cover of a Chuck Palahniuk book shows that you have received praise from no less than Bret Easton Ellis, Thom Jones, and Robert Stone. The blurbs compare you to Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and R. Crumb. That’s heady stuff. There’s also a fairly obvious theme here: something along the lines of a literary fraternity embracing one of its own. And yet, the two authors that you credit most are women, Amy Hempel and Katherine Dunn. Did you miss the pledge ceremony? CP: It’s even more ironic when you consider that I’ve never finished a DeLillo or Pynchon book. But I love reading Denis Johnson and Mark Richard. People just seem to need a short-hand with which to describe everything: White men. Black women. Asian women. Actually, it’s very racist and sexist, being boiled down to skin pigment and genitalia. Most bookstores have become these little ghettos where white, black, gay and Jewish voices stand apart on their little shelves. Separate but equal. I also enjoy Nora Ephron’s essays and fiction. Crazy Salad is one of my favorite books. And I’m nuts for Joy Williams, especially her essay collection, Ill Nature. In it, Williams wrote: “You don’t write to make friends.” I’d like that tattooed on my forehead. MK: Has anyone been left off this list? CP: Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote. John Steinbeck and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ira Levin is the God of Plotting. Michel Houellebecq is the God of sexiness. I pray to Dorothy Parker and

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Nathaniel West for bitter, heart-breaking ideas. And Ken Kesey isn’t bad – for a white man from Oregon. MK: Diary has this question posed on the inside of the front cover: Where do you get your inspiration? It seems a fair question, so… CP: Since I began to write, my process depends on being able to explore and vent my emotions around a personal issue that I can’t resolve or tolerate. I can dress any on-going misery in the costume and mask of a metaphor and spend months wrestling with it in a very public way. By the time the book is done, I’m no longer emotionally reactive to the issue. I have no feelings about it. And the issue just – poof – disappears. It’s very uncanny how this can happen. For example, my book, Lullaby, was really about my on-going war with a neighbor who’d blast her stereo outdoors, dominating every sunny day with her loud bagpipe music or Chinese opera. She’d lived in her house for decades and intended to die there. But after writing Lullaby, about the dominance of memes, I came home from book tour and found her house vacant. For sale. She’d packed everything, had a huge shouting match with her husband and disappeared. The new neighbors are very nice, and writing that book kept me from going to jail for murder. MK: Don DeLillo has said that his early fiction was as influenced by the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard as it was by any writer in particular. Indeed, Invisible Monsters features the typically cinematic language of jump-cuts to signal a transition between a series of quick takes. Does film figure in your creative process? What other types of cultural products have a hold on your imagination? CP: This is how dumb I am. Invisible Monsters isn’t inspired by “jump cuts” or any film device. It’s inspired by the fat fashion magazines I used to see at the Laundromat. Those magazines seemed to present such chaos. All those stylized images and the hyperbole of the language. The pages were never numbered, and the articles always “jumped” from page to distant page. These are magazines like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. I usually fall in love with some non-fiction form of printed communication, then copy those forms to tell a made-up story. That way, I benefit from the “authority” or credibility those non-fiction forms imply. If nothing else, the forms give me a new model for story telling. I seldom use anything from films. Okay, not seldom – never. Those non-fiction forms include the oral storytelling of an in-flight “black box” tape recorder in Survivor,

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the fourth step “personal inventory” of a 12-step group in Choke, and the “coma diary” kept by the loved-ones of coma victims in Diary. All are what historians would call “primary” history sources.

Romance MK: In the new introduction to Fight Club, you discuss the novel’s reception: “One reviewer called the book science fiction. Another called it a satire on the Iron John men’s movement. Another called it a satire of corporate white-collar culture. Some called it horror. No one called it a romance” (xvii). Are you a romance novelist—for men? CP: No. If you consider all my novels, you’ll find gender and race become unimportant. MK: A line that gets repeated a couple of times in Invisible Monsters makes for a fitting epigraph to any number of your books: “The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person” (104). Your characters generally face some sort of a bar to romantic fulfillment, an impasse of sexual relations. Fight Club ends with the narrator locked away in an asylum, his only contact with Marla—who he only belatedly realizes is his love interest—coming in the form of letters she writes to him. In both Lullaby and Survivor, the protagonists are long-time celibates who have been scarred by a past sexual trauma. Neither finds resolution in a conventional happy ending. Are you a writer of failed romances? CP: Yes and no. My characters are – so far – always victims of themselves. They’re alone because they sabotage any chance of bonding with another person. They don’t want to give up what seems like autonomy in their lives and become dependent on another person. This is less and less a “male” issue or fear. It’s become more common among the men and women I meet. Really, the relationship that forms is the first step toward the character uniting with a larger community of people. My first four books take individuals who are isolated in a way that society says should make us happy – isolated by their beauty or career or lovely home – and the plots reintroduce those people back to humanity.

Apostolic Fiction MK: You’ve described Fight Club as “apostolic fiction”, a story told of a martyred hero by a follower who survives. Apostolic fiction is a mode that

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you’re certainly comfortable with—it recurs in most of your novels. Consider Tender Branson’s relation to his brother Adam in Survivor, Shannon McFarland’s relationship with Brandy Alexander in Invisible Monsters, Victor Ward and his mother in Choke, Misty and Peter Wilmot in Diary. Why do your narrators continually adopt the position of the one left behind? In what sense do you consider yourself a survivor? CP: In writing a story, I’m always aware of the storyteller and the audience. I need to create a “foil” who listens and acts as the reader, on the page. For the same reason Conan Doyle created Dr. Watson, I create a passive “innocent” (comatose or otherwise) to whom the protagonist can explain his worldview. Stories told in the third-person, where the storyteller “hides,” and told to a nonspecific “listener” bore me. Creating a false “reality” or context for telling the story is as important as the story, itself. Actually – because there are so few plots – the context is more important. Imagine how boring, preachy and melodramatic Citizen Kane would be without the context of the newsreel reporters pursuing the central question of Rosebud? MK: Clearly, there is something about this manner of narrative that resonates with the average reader. What do you think it is? CP: Creating a context for the story embeds it in the reader’s reality, making the story seem less “make believe.” Then, by mimicking the way people tell stories out loud, and supporting the story with a raft of factual trivia, I can make the very improbable plot seem possible. All my devices serve to support plots which are usually based on true stories; but these are stories so full of extreme behavior and coincidence, that a reader wouldn’t accept them without the supporting reality of context, natural speech patterns and factual details. MK: I suppose this is characteristic of apostolic fiction, but a common refrain sounded by your characters is yearning for transcendence; however, it’s a yearning that sidesteps organized religion. I’m thinking here of Tender’s celebrity apotheosis in Survivor, Oyster’s deep ecology in Lullaby, and Tyler’s explicitly aesthetic turn in Fight Club – “a of perfection was worth the effort” (33). What sort of background do you bring to this and how does it inform your work? CP: All my characters yearn simply to “fix” something. None of them are ready to accept their lives or situations. Part of this is simply the human

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need to create drama and challenge in order to entertain ourselves. Part, is the idea that we can achieve some perfect life without pain or shame. Another aspect is just the human drive to dominate others; that’s Oyster’s ambition: just to bully his peers and make them wrong if they don’t accept him as superior. In Survivor, Tender continues to use the model for success he was taught as a child: Work hard. Be good. Please others. He clings to that blueprint until it fails him completely, and he’s forced to create an adult path of his own. My entire life has been spent trying to achieve permanent happiness. I think that’s the case for most people.

Writing MK: In the new introduction to Fight Club, you explain that the genesis of the novel was a seven-page short story that you wrote in order to experiment with technique. What resulted—the rules of fight club—have attained pop immortality, if late night talk show hosts are any indication. I was intrigued to hear that Fight Club originated as the solution to a formal problem as opposed to a moment of sociological insight (into, say, the crisis in masculinity). Have any other of your novels emerged out of a similar question of technique (i.e. how to tell the story as opposed to what you actually tell)? CP: The novel that came out this spring, Haunted, was originally a collection of short stories. Besides those, I had an idea for a short novel about a writer’s colony where the inmates would be trapped and confronted with their own limited talent and experience. Instead of publishing the collection and the novel separately, I’ve combined them so the short stories are told as backstories by the writers trapped in the colony. The resulting book is a mix of the realistic stories and the surreal framing device of what happens among the trapped writers. Again, this is just an experiment in storytelling, my attempt to combine different “textures” of story and information, and edit them to run together tightly and quickly. MK: You suggest that much of your writing is done in public places and that you craft your work to be heard above the din of a noisy room. Are you writing for readers or listeners? Eyes or ears? CP: I write for the nose. To create a sympathetic physical reaction in the reader, smells are very important in my books. Dialogue is less important. An odor hits everyone at once and it’s harder to escape.

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Class MK: An enduring fantasy in America is that everyone is middle class or about to be. The characters in your fiction, though, are deeply suspicious of the mantra of middle-class uplift—and with good reason. The economy has become more volatile than it was a generation ago and any mention of jobs these days is usually framed as a lament over outsourcing (even Lou Dobbs, a CNN business commentator, has gotten in on the act by railing against the “exporting” of America). Is it fair to say your characters are class-conscious? CP: My characters are suspicious of their own desire to succeed and isolate themselves. They’ve had a taste of success and the isolation it buys, and my characters realize that isolation will destroy them. So, they destroy their own “success” and force themselves back into community with other people. Maybe this is my Catholic upbringing, but my characters know that God is only present when two or more people are together. Their salvation relies on being forced to interact with others.

Adaptation MK: Fight Club reminds me of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Certainly, both novels share a fascination with violence, dark humor, and adversarial relation to consumer culture. Beyond that, however, I’d like to concentrate on the circumstances of their reception. American Psycho was pilloried by reviewers before it was even published, creating a critical firestorm that made any ‘innocent’ reading of it impossible. Fight Club had success as a cult novel since its publication, but what vaulted it into the popular consciousness (and you onto the bestseller lists) was David Fincher’s film adaptation and the outcry over that. Do you feel like your readers come to your work at a remove? Put another way, is the relationship between your first-time readers and your work akin to a blind date that’s been set up by David Fincher, matchmaker? CP: Yes, probably most readers find my work through David’s movies. But David’s movie was so accurate at depicting the original book that it’s difficult to say where the attraction starts. The chicken or the egg. Ellis was already famous when his book American Psycho debuted, and it dealt with non-consensual violence, where villains victimized others. The mostimportant aspect of Fight Club was the consensual nature of the violence. The terminally-ill characters were misled, but the protagonist was

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eventually unmasked and humiliated in front of them. It was a very oldfashioned, socially responsible novel. All the social contracts were fulfilled. MK: You’ve made some comments recently encouraging first-time readers to start with Lullaby since it is the least likely of all your novels to appear as a film. Part of your reasoning is that a reading a book, unlike watching a film, is a consensual experience. What do you mean by that? CP: About the consensual nature of books, it takes time and effort to read a book, and the audience is free to stop at any time. It takes more effort to continue consuming the story than it does to stop. But, with a film, the audience is passive and more likely to be subjected to the story via a “trapped” setting such as an airplane or theater. Or surprised by the film on television, coming uninvited into their home. Plus, seeing the film as part of a group marks the viewer as someone who’s had that “experience.” When you read a book, you can keep your experience private, and you can better control your participation with the story. MK: Fight Club for Xbox and PS2. Did someone miss the point? CP: Our culture digests everything by recreating it more and more, in simpler forms. So this was no surprise. Eventually everything becomes a one-liner on The Simpsons. My goal has never been to protect and defend my work. A finished book is dead to me. My priority is always the next, unfinished, exciting project.

Choking MK: In Choke, Victor Mancini makes a living by going to a restaurant and strategically choking in order to have someone step in and rescue him. Victor’s logic is that once someone has saved your life, they are responsible for your welfare: “It’s a homegrown version of those overseas children’s charities” (77). In effect, he forces a relation of intimacy on a complete stranger. What can be more intimate than being responsible for saving someone’s life? This seems radically at odds with what we’ve come to see as the fundamental expression of individual agency: one’s ability to choose. Is the most authentic gesture one that we’re forced to make? Is our sense of agency conferred upon us from elsewhere?

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CP: It’s still a choice. The way I depict the choking scenes, people compete for the role of ‘savior’ because they know how it will raise their social stature and give them a heroic story to tell. Thereafter, their heroic status will depend on the continued life of the person they saved. As long as the “hero” believes himself to have “chosen” and to be the dominant party in the scene, the hero is happy. Once the hero discovers he’s been manipulated, his dominant status ends. Still, you could argue that the newer status as “victim” makes the hero even more noble: Someone sinned-against for their best intentions. MK: Beyond its plot function, choking is a powerful metaphor. On the one hand, it attests to the gluttonous aspect of consumer culture. On the other hand, it is also an involuntary reflex, gagging. Does this ambivalence capture your own response to consumer culture? CP: Very little of my work is about consumer culture; beating that drum gets boring, fast. I prefer the idea of “choking” as failing despite your best efforts. Like when you shoot foul shots in basketball, and the entire crowd shouts, “Choke! Choke! Choke!” Plus, there’s less sexual baggage.

History MK: Your novels don’t give much of a sense of history beyond a general sense of the now. Paradoxically, that ahistoricism is itself an historically produced category. There’s a line in Invisible Monsters that provides a clue as to when history went off the rails: “The future ended in 1962.” What do the 1960s mean to you? CP: The question has more to do with the Seattle World’s Fair of 1962, an optimistic projection of the future – just before the chaos of the 1960’s seemed to fixate on the world’s problems instead of its blessings. That utopian landscape – featuring the Space Needle and Monorail – promised a world where most hardships had been overcome, and humanity could relax and venture into proactive, fun adventures like space travel. Instead, the world has fixated on pollution, disease, war and hardship. The problems instead of the blessings. I wanted this to suggest that “tipping point” in most people’s lives, when they become disillusioned with their dreams and resign themselves to patchwork, stop-gap measures instead of the lofty visions they had as children.

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MK: In Fight Club, Tyler is intent on toppling a massive office tower, but only because it will crush his real target: History itself as embodied by the national museum below. For the film, the target changes to credit card companies. What did you think of this decision? CP: It was the screenwriter, Jim Uhls, who decided that credit card companies would make a good target, one that would enroll the audience in the action. Part of making a movie is to make the symbolic into the literal – to manifest a timeless, placeless world, using the images and resources of the present world. I didn’t care for making the target that literal, but I accept that my goal - to show a generation assuming control of their world and marking their place in history through a huge gesture that might not translate into a flesh-and-blood story presented to people eating popcorn and worried about their real debts

Gender and Sexuality MK: In Fight Club, you describe the triangle between the narrator, Tyler Durden, and Marla in the following terms: “This isn’t about love as in caring. This is about property as in ownership” (4). While it pointedly remains unclear just who occupies which role (owner or owned) in this passage, it echoes the feminist argument that women exist in patriarchal systems as little more than tokens exchanged between men. What is the status of women in your work? CP: I consider my characters to have no race or gender. They each represent a dynamic that moves the plot, prompting other characters to take action. Doing this, they act out or demonstrate human behaviors and fallacies to comic effect. Even if the characters are destroyed or remain unenlightened, I hope the reader recognizes their errors and is less likely to make those same mistakes. MK: In the various worlds you depict, the Father has disappeared, but patriarchal relations remain. Where does the power lie in a post-patriarchal society? CP: The adult is the wall or resistance against which a child can test himself. It’s by battling the adult parent that the child learns to endure and to become stronger. I’d argue that this conflict works best between samesex parents and children. In a world of absent fathers, the son tends to test himself against society or the law, forming groups with other fatherless

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sons to support each other in shared battles with this larger authority. Power lies with the individual who succeeds at larger and larger goals, constantly seeking challenges in order to grow. Personal power cannot be defined by the “other” without losing power to that other and becoming used by – a reaction to – that other. Patriarchal or matriarchal or whatever. MK: Freud described the ego as above all, a bodily ego. Our self-image is traced along the skin. Among the guys that you depict there seems to be an underlying panic about their bodies, one that predictably has psychic repercussions (Fight Club being the best example). Bodies are porous and permeable; they are subject to infiltration and dissolution. Bodies, in short, are unruly and require discipline, whether it is imposed from within (e.g. steroids) or without (e.g. consensual beatings). Is this anxiety specific to masculinity? Or is it more generally a crisis of late capitalist subjectivity? CP: In the original short story, Fight Club, which became chapter six of the novel, the narrator says, “I just don’t want to die without a few scars. I see those cars that are stock cherry right out of a dealer’s showroom in 1956, and I think, ‘What a waste’” (48). In Choke, the female protagonist says, “You have to trade your youth for something” (207). In Invisible Monsters, the narrator destroys her face because her beauty isolates her, and she knows it’s transitory and allows her to easily dominate others. All my books deal with the paradox of staying aware of mortality while not being stopped by the fear of death. My characters use their physical bodies as vehicles or means for living a full life, not trying to preserve their youth and prevent death. They’re willing to destroy their appearance and current identity for a chance at real enlightenment and insight.

Fandom MK: You have an unusually reciprocal relationship with your fans. Your official website, www.chuckpalahniuk.net for example, started out as a fan endeavor. Now it is home to an online writing workshop. What exactly is your relationship to this workshop? What do you hope to accomplish with it? CP: I contribute essays to the website, monthly, and answer questions submitted by visitors, about how I write. This way, I can share aspects of the “Minimalism” style I wish I’d known as a beginning writer. Online, I can answer a single question for a large audience instead of answering that same question again-and-again on an individual basis. Really, the website

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is no different than a newsletter I might distribute, or class I might teach. To take the spotlight off myself and redirect attention to a subject that serves more people, I’m supporting the website’s focus on encouraging and helping writers.

Notes 1

Here, Palahniuk is referring to Rant, published in 2007. After several years of ill health, famed author and gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson took his own life with a revolver on February 20, 2005. 2

APPENDIX A PRIMARY BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR CHUCK PALAHNIUK

Editor’s Note All efforts have been made to make the primary bibliographies as complete and accurate as possible. However, due to the ephemeral nature of many of the magazines and newspapers where Palahniuk publishes, it is difficult to obtain complete information on every source. Annotations are included throughout these bibliographies to explain variations, reprints, and, in some unfortunate cases, missing information. All works by Chuck Palahniuk are arranged chronologically, all secondary works and adaptations are alphabetical by author. Throughout, MLA style guides have been followed as closely as possible, with exceptions or items of interest marked by an asterisk.

Book-length Fiction by Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club. New York: Norton, 1996. * In printings since October 2005, Palahniuk’s essay “There Was a Book” appears, either as an Introduction to the volume, or as an untitled Afterword. Invisible Monsters. New York: Norton, 1999. Survivor. New York: Norton, 1999. Choke. New York: Doubleday, 2001. Lullaby. New York: Doubleday, 2002. Diary. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Haunted. New York: Doubleday, 2005. Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey. New York: Doubleday, 2007. * The hardcover was also released as Signed Limited Edition. The SLE was limited to 1,000 copies, and was packaged in a one-piece, 4-color slipcase that matches the original dustjacket. The book is printed black, with the title created in spot gloss, speckled page edges, a 1/8 inch

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ribbon marker, a signed tip-in sheet, and an exclusive essay by Palahniuk entitled "Recipes for Disasters" (323-27). Snuff. New York: Doubleday, 2008. Pygmy. New York: Doubleday, 2009.

Book-length Non-Fiction by Chuck Palahniuk Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon. New York: Crown, 2003. Stranger than Fiction: True Stories. New York: Doubleday, 2004.

Audiobook Adaptations of Palahniuk’s Work Choke. Perf. Chuck Palahniuk. CD. RH Audible, 2003. Unabridged. Diary. Perf. Martha Plimpton. CD. Random House Audio, 2003. Unabridged. Fight Club. Perf. Robert Gerzon. Audiocassette. Highbridge Audio, 1999. Unabridged. Haunted. Perf. Marc Cashman, et al. CD. Random House Audio, 2005. Unabridged. Invisible Monsters. Perf. Anna Fields. CD. Blackstone Audio, 2007. Unabridged. Lullaby. Perf. Richard Poe. Audiocassette. Recorded Books, 2002. Unabridged. Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey. Perf. Various. CD. Recorded Books, 2007. Unabridged. Snuff. Perf. Todd McLaren. CD. Tantor Media, 2008. Unabridged. Stranger than Fiction. Perf. Chuck Palahniuk and Dennis Boutsikaris. CD. Random House Audio, 2004. Abridged. Survivor. Perf. Paul Garcia. CD. Blackstone Audiobooks, 2006. Unabridged.

Other Adaptations of Palahniuk’s Work Dust Brothers. Fight Club: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. CD. Restless Records, 1999. Fight Club. Playstation 2 and X-Box Video Game. Vivendi Universal, 2004. Fincher, David, dir. Fight Club. Novel by Chuck Palahniuk. Screenplay by Jim Uhls. Perf. Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham-Carter. Fox, 1999.

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Gregg, Clark, dir. Choke. Screenplay by Clark Gregg. Perf. Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly Macdonald, and Brad William Henke. Fox Searchlight, 2008.

Short Fiction by Chuck Palahniuk “Negative Reinforcement.” Modern Short Stories Aug. 1990: 49-52. “The Love Theme of Sybil and William.” Modern Short Stories Oct. 1990: 69-72. “Fight Club.” Pursuit of Happiness. Ed. Linny Stovall. Hillsboro, OR: Blue Heron, 1995. 131-37. Revised and reprinted as Chapter 6 of Fight Club. “Project Mayhem.” Story 44.2 (1996): 33-39. Revised and reprinted as Chapter 16 of Fight Club. “Invisible Monsters.” Columbia 26 (1996): 8-17. Revised and reprinted as Chapter 3 of Invisible Monsters. “Survivor.” Story 45.2 (1997): 38-43. Revised and reprinted as Chapter 31 of Survivor. “Survivor.” Northwest Edge: Deviant Fictions. Ed. Lidia Yuknavitch and L.N. Pearson. Portland, OR: Two Girls, 2000. 189-99. Reprint of Chapter 44 of Survivor. “Enabler.” Playboy June 2000: 102+. Revised and reprinted as Chapter 20 of Choke. “Cruising Altitude.” Playboy Jan. 2001: 106+. Revised and reprinted as Chapter 40 of Choke. “Sleep.” Nerve.com. 18 Sept. 2002. . Rpt. of Chapter 29 of Lullaby. “From Choke.” The Best American Erotica 2003. Ed. Susie Bright. New York: Touchstone, 2003. 36-46. Reprint of Chapter 2 of Choke. “Fight Club.” The Outlaw Bible of American Literature. Eds. Alan Kaufman, Neil Ortenberg, and Barney Rosset. New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 2004. 20-25. Reprint of Chapter 16 from Fight Club. “Guts.” Playboy March 2004: 76+. Rpt. in Guardian Weekend [Manchester, UK] 13 Mar. 2004: 16+. Rpt. in Haunted. 12-21. “Punch Drunk.” Playboy Mar. 2005: 86+. Rpt. in Haunted. 182-91. “Slumming.” Official Haunted Website. . Rpt. in Haunted. New York: Doubleday, 2005: 67-80. “Foot Work.” Playboy May 2005: 108+. Rpt. in Haunted. 30-39.

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“Hot Potting.” The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 2006: 19th Annual Collection. Eds. Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link, and Gavin J. Grant. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006. 348-54. Rpt. of Haunted. 332-43. “Insiders.” Best Life Sept. 2007: 127+.

Essays and Other Works by Chuck Palahniuk “Almost California.” The Stranger. Rpt. in Stranger than Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 2004. 200-205. * According to Palahniuk, this essay appeared during the filming of Fight Club, sometime in 1998. “Escort Service.” Bikini June 1999: 112. Rpt. as “Escort.” Stranger than Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 2004. 135-99. “Origami Lips.” Black Book Summer 1999: 68-69. Rpt. as “The Lip Enhancer.” Stranger than Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 2004. 20611. “I Made Most of It Up, Honest.” Los Angeles Times 12 Sept. 1999: Weekend Insert 8+. “The Backlash Backlash Movie: What’s Missing from Jesus’ Son.” Portland Mercury 13-19 July 2000. . “Massive Attack.” Gear Sept. 2000: 128-29. Rpt. as “Frontiers.” Stranger than Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 2004. 92-98. “Hope and Gory.” Gear Oct. 2000: 76+. Rpt. as “Where Meat Comes From.” Stranger than Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 2004. 8-26. “Sleepless in London: Advice for the Just-Famous Author.” Portland Mercury 30 November 2000. . “Juliette: The French Way.” Black Book Fall 2000: 166-72. Rpt. as “In Her Own Words.” Stranger than Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 2004. 119-31. “Navy Submarine.” Nest Fall 2000: 174-88. Rpt. as “The People Can.” Stranger than Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 2004: 99-108. “American Goth.” Gear Dec. 2000: 68+. Rpt. as “Reading Yourself.” Stranger than Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 2004. 147-59. “Why Isn’t He Budging?” Boswell. Rpt. in Stranger than Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 2004.132-40. * This is all the information available on the original publication of this essay at the time of publication. “A Castle to Live in.” Portland Mercury 15-21 February 2001. .

Primary Bibliography for Chuck Palahniuk

197

“The View from Smalltown, USA.” Sunday Herald 16 September 2001, Seven Days: 1. . “Extreme Behavior.” Gear Oct. 2001: 121-23. Rpt. as “Testy Festy.” Stranger than Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 2004. 3-7. “Monkey Think, Monkey Do.” Gear Dec. 2001: 110. Rpt. in Stranger than Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 2004. 212-15. “Fright Club.” Independent 13 October 2002. Rpt. as “The Lady.” Stranger than Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 2004. 109-15. “Now I Remember.” Review of Memento. Metaphilm. 16 December 2002 . Rpt. as “Now I Remember…” Stranger than Fiction. New York: Doublday, 2004. 221-26. “Freak Speak: The Story behind Lullaby.” Randomhouse.com. 16 December 2002 . “She Breaks Your Heart: Chuck Palahniuk on Amy Hempel.” LA Weekly 20 Septemeber 2002. 16 December 2002. . Rpt. as “Not Chasing Amy.” Stranger than Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 2004. 141-46. “Bodhisattvas.” Dog Culture: Writers on the Character of Canines. Ed. Ken Foster. Guilford, CT: Lyons, 2002. 153-67. Rpt. in Stranger than Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 2004. 160-70. “Installing Drivelines.” GQ Jan. 2003: 111. “Our ‘Siege of Noise.’” Across the Board May 2003: 8. “Prankstering.” Black Book. Fall 2003: 98-99. Rpt. as “My Life as a Dog.” Stranger than Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 2004. 55-60. “Abuse is Often of Service.” Mortification: Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame. Ed. Robin Robertson. New York: Fourth Estate, 2003. 107-08. “Demolition.” Playboy January 2004: 162+. Rpt. in Stranger than Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 2004. 39-54. “Interview with a Keno Girl.” Las Vegas Weekly 12-18 Feb 2004. . “Brinksmanship.” Speakeasy May/June 2004: 7-8. Rpt. in Bold Type . Rpt. In Stranger than Fiction. New York: Doubleday, 2004. 216-220. “There Was a Book.” Introduction. Fight Club. 2004. New York: Henry Holt, 1996.

198

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* This introduction first appears in the 2004 Owl Books/Henry Holt paperback as an Introduction, and appears in later Norton paperbacks as an untitled Afterword. “If Death is Just a Doorway…” Black Book Dec. 2004/Jan. 2005: 62-63. Revised and Reprinted. “If Death is Just a Doorway … Why Shouldn’t it Have a Door Policy?” The Revolution Will Be Accessorized: Blackbook Presents Dispatches from the New Counterculture. Ed. Aaron Hicklin. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. 179-84. * This is a mock ad spread for afterlife celebrity services. “The Guts Effect: A Letter to British Booksellers.” Official Haunted Website. . Rpt. as “The Guts Effect” in Haunted Trade Paperback. 405-11. “A Church of Stories.” Nerve.com 14 Apr. 2005. . Review of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Penguin Classics Website . Rpt. as “Slaves and Saviours: What One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest Taught Me.” Guardian Film [Manchester, UK] May 2005. Rpt. as Foreword. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. By Ken Kesey. 1962. New York: Penguin Classics, 2007. ix-xiii. . “Last Weekend.” Guardian [Manchester, UK] 6 May 2006. . “’Till Death Do Us Part.” Guardian [Manchester, UK] 26 May 2006, Film & Music: 5. . “Mister Elegant.” Vice 13.12 (Dec. 2006): 53-56. . Introduction. Clown Girl. By Monica Drake. Portland, OR: Hawthorne, 2007. ix-x. “Recipes for Disaster.” Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey. Signed Limited Edition. New York: Doubleday, 2007. 323-27. “The Book That Changed My Life.” Best Life June/July 2008: 80. “The Fringe is the Future.” Foreword. You Do Not Talk about Fight Club: I am Jack’s Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection. Ed. Read Mercer Schuchardt. Dallas, TX: Benbella, 2008. 7-11.

Primary Bibliography for Chuck Palahniuk

199

Books with Blurbs by Chuck Palahniuk Davidson, Craig. Rust and Bone: Stories. New York: Norton, 2005. Erian, Alicia. The Brutal Language of Love: Stories. New York: Villard, 2001. Foster, Ken. The Kind I’m Likely to Get: A Collection. New York: Quill, 1999. Johnson, Jeremy Robert. Angel Dust Apocalypse. Portland, OR: Eraserhead, 2005. LeRoy, J.T. Sarah. New York: Bloomsbury, 2000. Lipsyte, Sam. The Subject Steve: A Novel. New York: Broadway, 2001. Lyon, Elizabeth. A Writer’s Guide to Fiction. New York: Perigee, 2004. MacDonell, Allan. Prisoner of X: 20 Years in the Hole at Hustler Magazine. Los Angeles: Feral House, 2006. O’Nan, Stewart. A Prayer for the Dying. New York: Henry Holt, 1999. Rieckhoff, Paul. Chasing Ghosts: A Soldier’s Fight for America from Baghdad to Washington. New York: New American Library, 2006.

APPENDIX B SECONDARY BIBLIOGRAPHY SCHOLARLY WORKS

Scholarly Works on Chuck Palahniuk’s Books Annesley, James. “Branding, Consumption, and Identity.” Fictions of Globalization: Consumption, the Market, and the Contemporary American Novel. London: Continuum, 2006: 27-59. Appelbaum, Robert and Alexis Paknadel. “Terrorism and the Novel: 19702001.” Poetics Today 29.3 (2008): 387-436. Ashbaugh, Heidi. “The Modern Alienated Male: A Comparison of Dostoevsky and Palahniuk.” MA Thesis, Texas Women’s U, 2003. Baker, James Andrew. Necessary Evil: Rhetorical Violence in 20th Century American Literature. Diss. Texas A&M U, 2006. DAI 68 (2007): 2451. Bennett, Robert. “The Death of Sisyphus: Existentialist Literature and the Cultural Logic of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.” Stirrings Still 2.2 (2005): 65-80. Bishop, Kyle. “Artistic Schizophrenia: How Fight Club’s Message is Subverted by Its Own Nature.” Studies in Popular Culture 29.1 (2006): 41-56. Boon, Kevin Alexander. “Men and Nostalgia for Violence: Culture and Culpability in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.” Journal of Men's Studies 11.3 (2003): 267-76. —. “Heroes, Metanarratives, and the Paradox of Masculinity in Contemporary Western Culture.” Journal of Men’s Studies 13.3 (2005). 301-12. Day, Vox. “The Club That Dare Not Speak Its Name.” You Do Not Talk about Fight Club: I am Jack’s Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection. Ed. Read Mercer Schuchardt. Dallas, TX: Benbella, 2008. 143-50. Delfino, Andrew Steven. Becoming the New Man in Post-Postmodernist Fiction: Portrayals of Masculinities in David Foster Wallace's Infinite

Secondary Bibliography – Scholarly Works

201

Jest and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. Saarbruecken, Germany: VDM Verlag Dr. Mueller e.K., 2008. Fawver, Kurt D. “Destruction in Search of Hope: Baudrillard, Simulation, and Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke. ” MA Thesis. Cleveland State U, 2008. Foster, Wendy. ‘Crawling through These Cracks’: The Apocalyptic Body in Contemporary Literatures of Transgression. Diss. U of British Columbia, 2006. DAI 67: 4542. Edbauer, Jenny. “Big Time Sensuality: Affective Literacies and Texts That Matter.” Composition Forum 13.1-2 (2002): 23-37. Flannery, Denis. “Jamacia Kincaid and Chuck Palahniuk: AIDS, Resurrection, and Recognition.” On Sibling Love: Queer Attachment and American Writing. Aldershot, England: Ashgate: 2007. 123-50. Giles, James R. The Spaces of Violence. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2006. Goodlad, Lauren M.E. “Looking for Something Forever Gone.” Cultural Critique Spring 2007: 104-26. Gunter, James C. “The Rhetoric of Violence.” MA Thesis, Brigham Young U, 2008. Hall, Mark M. “The Journey is the Destination: Pursuing Masculinity.” MA Thesis. North Carolina State U, 2004. Jordan, Matt. “Marxism, Not Manhood: Accommodation and Impasse in Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.” Men & Masculinities 4.4 (2002): 368-79. Kavadlo, Jesse. “The Fiction of Self-Destruction: Chuck Palahniuk, Closet Moralist.” Stirrings Still 2.2 (2005): 3-24. Revised and Reprinted as “The Fiction of Self Destruction.” You Do Not Talk about Fight Club: I am Jack’s Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection. Ed. Read Mercer Schuchardt. Dallas, TX: Benbella, 2008. 13-34. Kennett, Paul. “Fight Club and the Dangers of Oedipal Obsession.” Stirrings Still 2.2 (2005): 48-64. Kennett, Paul J. “Simulations of Paternal Signification in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.” MA Thesis. U of Calgary, 2004. Lee, Jennifer. “The Coporatization of the American Dream: Satires of Consumer Culture within the Works of Douglas Coupland, Harry Crews, and Chuck Palahniuk.” MA Thesis. SUNY New Paltz, 2004. Leubner, Benjamin Jordan. “The Point of View of the Author: Intersections in Philosophy and Literature.” MA Thesis. Montana State U, 2004. Manzanas Calvo, Ana María. “The Migrational City: Invisible Practicioners and Unreadable Texts in Chuck Palahniuk’s ‘Slumming:

202

Appendix B

A Story by Lady Baglady’ and Helena Viramontes’s ‘The Cariboo Café.” Sri Lanka Journal of the Humanities 33.1-2 (2007): 113-29. Mathews, Peter. “Diagnosing Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.” Stirrings Still 2.2 (2005): 81-104. McKinney, Christian. “The Salvation Myth.” You Do Not Talk about Fight Club: I am Jack’s Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection. Ed. Read Mercer Schuchardt. Dallas, TX: Benbella, 2008. 65-84. Mendieta, Eduardo. “Surviving American Culture: On Chuck Palahniuk.” Philosophy & Literature 29.2 (2005): 394-408. Moore, Stephen. “Thirty-Year-Old Boys: Absent Fathers and the (Im)Possibility of New Masculinities in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.” MA Thesis. U of Chicago, 2002. Göç, Murat. “Palahniuk’s Desperate Men and the Gender Angst.” Interactions: Ege University Journal of British and American Studies. 17.1 (2008): 49-60. Ng, Andrew Hock Soon. “Muscular Existentialism in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.” Stirrings Still 2.2 (2005): 116-38. O’Brian, Sean. “Survivor: Creating Identity through Self-destruction.” MA Thesis Truman State U, 2004. Oleson, JC. “’Drown the World’: Imperfect Necessity and Total Cultural Revolution.” Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left 3.19 (2007): 19-104. . Peterson, Per Serritslev. “9/11 and the Problem of Imagination: Fight Club and Glamorama as Terrorist Pretexts.” Orbis Litterarum 60.2 (2005): 133-44. Pettus, Mark. “Terminal Simulation: ‘Revolution in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 6.2 (2000): 111-27. Player, Bailey Thomas. “‘The True Male Animals’: Changing Representations of Masculinity in Lonesome Dove, Bonfire of the Vanities, Fight Club, and A Man in Full.” MA Thesis, Florida State U, 2006. Robertson, Samantha. “Terminal Autonomy: Chuck Palahniuk’s Inversion of the Orwellian Tradition of Repression-Based Dystopias.” MA Thesis. Dalhousie University, 2005. Rocha, Antonio Casado de. “Disease and Community in Chuck Palahniuk’s Early Fiction.” Stirrings Still 2.2 (2005): 105-15. Sartain, Jeffrey A. “’Even the Mona Lisa’s Falling Apart’: The Cultural Assimilation of Scientific Epistemologies in Palahniuk’s Fiction.” Stirrings Still 2.2 (2005): 25-47.

Secondary Bibliography – Scholarly Works

203

—. “Selected Bibliography of Chuck Palahniuk.” Stirrings Still 2.2 (2005): 143-67. Schopp, Andrew. “Pathologically Queer: The Fragmented Queer Subject in Fight Club and The Talented Mr. Ripley.” Essays on the Culture and Literature of Desire. Ed. Cheryl Alexander Malcom and Jopi Nyman. Gdansk, Poland: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdanskiego, 2005. 12642. Schuchardt, Read Mercer. “Chuck Palahniuk, Existentialist Paramedic.” You Do Not Talk about Fight Club: I am Jack’s Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection. Ed. Read Mercer Schuchardt. Dallas, TX: Benbella, 2008. 1-6. Skinner, Chris. “Beating up Your Father’s World: Contemporary Male Crisis and the Cultural Concern of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.” MA Thesis. Belmont U, 2004. Smažilová, Adéla. “Achieving Cult Status: Chuck Palahniuk’s Early Fiction.” MA Thesis. Masaryk U, 2007. Soerenson, Bent. “Narratives of Disorder – Disorders of Narrative.” PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts 18 July 2006. . Smith, William E. III. “The Use Value of Fight Club in Teaching Theories of Religion.” Teaching Theology and Religion 11:2 (2008): 87-91. Takehana, Elizabet ‘Osk. “Chuck Palahniuk and Jean Baudrillard: The Terminal State of Human Subjectivity.” MA Thesis. U of California San Bernardino, 2006. Tomášek, Filip. “Introducing Generation X: The Main Themes in Douglas Coupland’s Generation X and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.” Thesis. Jan Evangelista PurkynČ U, 2003. Ta, Lynn M. “Hurt So Good: Fight Club, Masculine Violence, and the Crisis of Capitalism.” Journal of American Culture 29.3 (2006): 26577. Tuss, Alex. “Masculine Identity and Success: A Critical Analysis of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.” Journal of Men’s Studies 12.2 (2004): 93-102. Velásquez, Eduardo A. “’Where the Wild Things Are’: Re-Creation, Fall, Re- and In-surrection in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.” Love and Friendship: Rethinking Politics and Affection in Modern Times. Ed. Eduardo A. Velásquez. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. 575-616.

204

Appendix B

—. The Consumer’s Guide to the Apocalypse: Why There Is No Cultural War in America and Why We Will Perish Nonetheless. Wilmington, DE: Isi, 2007. Waelder, Pau. “Bruised and Happy: The Addicted PainStation Players.” Gaming Realities: A Challenge for Digital Culture. 2006. . Walters, Timothy L. Unconditioning Postmodernity: Radical Acts of Resistance in Contemporary Texts. Diss. McMaster U [Canada], 2004. Widmyer, Dennis. “A Brief History of ChuckPalahniuk.net” You Do Not Talk about Fight Club: I am Jack’s Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection. Ed. Read Mercer Schuchardt. Dallas, TX: Benbella, 2008. 207-16. Wyatt, Dustin M. “At the Darkest Moment Comes the Light: The Postmodern Psychological Nekyia in the works of Bright Eyes, Chuck Palahniuk, and Derek Hess, and in the Films Garden State and Sideways.” MA Thesis. Midwestern State U, 2005. Ziegler, Robert. “Having the Last Word: Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 37.4 (2007): 4-6.

Scholarly Works on David Fincher’s Adaptation of Fight Club Ashcraft, Karen Lee and Lisa A. Flores. “’Slaves with White Collars’: Persistent Performances of Masculinity in Crisis.” Text & Performance Quarterly 23.1 (2003): 1-29. Brookley, Robert Alan and Robert Westfelhaus. “Hiding Homoeroticism in Plain View: The Fight Club DVD as Digital Closet.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19.1 (2002): 21-43. Chandler, Christopher N. and Philip Tallon. “Poverty and Anarchy in Fight Club.” You Do Not Talk about Fight Club: I am Jack’s Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection. Ed. Read Mercer Schuchardt. Dallas, TX: Benbella, 2008. 35-52. Chow, Galvin P. “The Return of Hobbes.” You Do Not Talk about Fight Club: I am Jack’s Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection. Ed. Read Mercer Schuchardt. Dallas, TX: Benbella, 2008. 133-42. Clark, J. Michael. “Faludi, Fight Club, and Phallic Masculinity: Exploring the Emasculating Economics of Patriarchy.” Journal of Men’s Studies 11.1 (2002): 65-76.

Secondary Bibliography – Scholarly Works

205

Clark, Suzanne. “Fight Club: Historicizing the Rhetoric of Masculinity, Violence, and Sentimentality.” Journal of Composition Theory 21 (2001): 411-20. Corbett, James. “Soap and Anarchy.” You Do Not Talk about Fight Club: I am Jack’s Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection. Ed. Read Mercer Schuchardt. Dallas, TX: Benbella, 2008. 53-62. Craine, James and Stuart C. Aitken. “Street Fighting: Placing the Crisis of Masculinity in David Fincher’s Fight Club.” Geojournal 59.4 (2004): 289-96. Deacy, Christopher. Faith in Film: Religious Themes in Contemporary Cinema. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. —. “Integration and Rebirth through Confrontation: Fight Club and American Beauty as Contemporary Religious Parables.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 17.1 (2002): 61-73. Diken, Bulent and Carsten Bagge Laustsen. “Enjoy your Fight! – Fight Club as a Symptom of the Network Society.” Cultural Values 6.4 (2002): 349-58. Dowbenko, Uri. “Fight Club: The Movie Reveals Secrets of Janus Mind Control Programming.” You Do Not Talk about Fight Club: I am Jack’s Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection. Ed. Read Mercer Schuchardt. Dallas, TX: Benbella, 2008. 109-16. Duncan, Christopher M. “Liberalism and the Challenge of Fight Club: Notes Toward an American Theory of the Good Life.” disClosure 12 (2003): 119-44. Elkington, Trevor G. Moments in Space, Spaces in Time: Phenomenology and the Embodied Depth of Cinematic Image. Diss. U of Washington, 2001. DAI 62 (2001): 2612A. Elliot, Paul. “The First Rule Is…Images and Reflections of the Rhyzome in Fight Club.” Postgraduate English 12 Sept. 2005. Eshelman, Raoul. “Performatism in the Movies (1997-2003).” Anthropoetics 8.2 (2002). Friday, Krister. “’A Generation of Men without History’: Fight Club, Masculinity, and the Historical Symptom.” Postmodern Culture: An Electronic Journal of Interdisciplinary Criticism. 13.3 (2003). . Gallagher, Mark. “Tripped Out: The Psychedelic Film and Masculinity.” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 21.3 (2004): 161-71. Gallego, Carlos. The (Post)Modern Spectacle: A Study in Ideological Fantasy and 20th Century American Culture (Wallace Stevens, Charles Bernstein). Diss. Stanford U, 2003. DAI 64: 1653A.

206

Appendix B

Gibson, Pamela Church. “Queer Looks, Male Gazes, Taut Torsos and Designer Labels: Contemporary Cinema, Consumption and Masculinity.” The Trouble with Men: Maculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema. Ed. Phil Powrie, Ann Davies, and Bruce Babington. London: Wallflower, 2004. 176-86. Giroux, Henry A. “Private Satisfactions and Public Disorders: Fight Club, Patriarchy, and the Politics of Masculine Violence.” Journal of Composition Theory 21 (2001): 1-31. —. “Brutalized Bodies and Emasculated Politics: Fight Club, Consumerism, and Masculine Violence.” Breaking in to the Movies: Film and the Culture of Politics. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. 25888. Giroux, Henry A. and Imre Szeman. “IKEA Body and the Politics of Male Bonding: Fight Club, Consumerism, and Violence.” New Art Examiner 28 (2000/2001): 32+. —. “Ikea Boy Fights Back: Fight Club, Consumerism, and the Political Limits of Ninties Cinema.” The End of Cinema As We Know It: American Film in the Nineties. Ed. Jon Lewis. New York: New York UP, 2001. 95-104. Godawa, Brian. Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom and Discernment. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2002. 100, 204. Gold, Steven N. “Fight Club: A Depiction of Contemporary Society as Dissociogenic.” Journal of Trauma and Dissociation 5.2 (2003): 1334. Goodlad, Lauren M.E. “Men in Black: Androgyny and Ethics in The Crow and Fight Club.” Goth: Undead Subculture. Ed. Lauren M.E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2007. 89-118. GrǛnstad, AbsjǛrn. “One-Dimensional Men: Fight Club and the Poetics of the Body.” Film Criticism 28.1 (2003): 1-23. Halbritter, Bump. “Musical Rhetoric in Integrated-Media Composition.” Computers and Composition: An International Journal for Teachers of Writing 23.3 (2006): 317-34. Hanson, Peter. The Cinema of Generation X: A Critical Study of Films and Directors. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002. Hewitt, Andrew. “Masochism and Terror: Fight Club and the Violence of Neo-fascist Ressentiment.” TELOS (2006): 104-31. Hollands, Neil. Adaptation of Novels into Film – A Comprehensive new Framework for Media Consumers and Those Who Serve Them. MS thesis. U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2002. Iocco, Melissa. “Addicted to Affliction: Masculinity and Perversity in Crash and Fight Club.” Gothic Studies 9.1 (2007): 46-56.

Secondary Bibliography – Scholarly Works

207

Issacs, Bruce. “Non-Linear Narrative.” Post-Punk Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2005. 136-38. “’Just Like Independence Day!’ The Falling Towers on 9/11 and the Hegemonic Function of Intertextuality.” Conference Papers – International Communication Association, 2005 Annual Meeting. 1-31. Kelty, Christopher. “A Theory of Animation: Cells, L-systems, and Film.” Grey Room Fall 2005: 30-63. KÕranog‫ޞ‬lu, Gu‫ޠ‬lbin Evren. “’Generation X in Cultural Discourse: Douglas Coupland, Richard Linklater, Chuck Palahniuk, and David Fincher’s Works of Resistance.” Thesis. Tez-(Yu‫ޠ‬ksek lisans)-Bas޽kent U‫ޠ‬niversitesi, 2002. Landis, Chris. “Tyler Durden Is a M*therf#cker.” You Do Not Talk about Fight Club: I am Jack’s Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection. Ed. Read Mercer Schuchardt. Dallas, TX: Benbella, 2008. 151-56. Lee, Terry. “Virtual Violence in Fight Club: This Is What Transformation of Masculine Ego Feels Like.” Journal of American & Comparative Cultures 25.3-4 (2002): 418-23. Lizardo, Omar. “Fight Club, or the Cultural Contradictions of Late Capitalism.” Journal for Cultural Research 11.3 (2007): 221-43. Loren, Scott. Our Wills and Fates: The Politics of Identity in Contemporary American Fiction and Film. Diss. U. of Zurich, 2005. Makelberge, Nicolas. “Flow, Interaction Design and Contemporary Boredom.” MA Thesis. Göteborg U and Chalmers U of Technology, 2004. McNutt, David. “I am Jack’s Happy Ending: Fight Club and Tolkien’s Eucatastrophe.” You Do Not Talk about Fight Club: I am Jack’s Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection. Ed. Read Mercer Schuchardt. Dallas, TX: Benbella, 2008. 85-106. Misek, Marla. “Case Study for Fight Club and Seven, Package Makes Perfect.” EMedia Magazine 14.11 (2001): 27-29. Nayman, Ira. “The Man Who Wasn’t There: Narrative Ambiguity in 3 Recent Hollywood Films.” Creative Screenwriting Mar/Apr 2001: 5760. Nelson, Anna and John Nelson. “Greening Nietzsche: From Fight Club to Magnolia.” Conference Papers – American Political Science Association, 2002 Annua lMeeting. Boston, MA: 2002. 1-43. Niemi, Alison. “Film as Religious Experience: Myths and Models in Mass Entertainment.” Critical Review 15.3-4 (2003): 435-46. Palladino, Paulo and Teresa Young. “Fight Club and the World Trade Center: On Metaphor, Scale, and the Spatio-temporal (Dis)location of Violence.” Journal for Cultural Research 7.2 (2003): 195-218.

208

Appendix B

Park, E.J. “Rebel Consumer.” You Do Not Talk about Fight Club: I am Jack’s Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection. Ed. Read Mercer Schuchardt. Dallas, TX: Benbella, 2008. 117-18. Peele, Thomas. “Fight Club’s Queer Representations.” Journal of Composition Theory 21 (2001): 862-69. Petersen, Per Serritslev. “9/11 and the ‘Problem of Imagination’: Fight Club and Glamorama’s Terrorist Pretexts.” Orbis Litterarum 60.2 (2005): 133-44. Quiney, Ruth. “’Mr. Xerox,’ The Domestic Terrorist, and the VictimCitizen: Masculine and National Anxiety in Fight Club and AntiTerror Law.” Law and Literature 19.2 (2007): 327-54. Remlinger, Stefanie. “Fight Club: The Most Dangerous Movie Ever?” The Aesthetics and Pragmatics of Violence. Proc. of the Conf. at Passau University, 15-17 Mar. 2001. Ed. Michael Hensen. Passau, Germany: Stutz, 2001. 141-53. R.F.A. “The Capitalist Cuckoo’s Nest” Human Architechture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge. 1.1 (2002): 1-8. Robinson, Sally. “Putting the Stud Back into Gender Studies.” Times Higher Education Supplement 15 Dec. 2000, VI: 2. Rodriguez, Victor M. “Blowing the Skyline of the Mind.” You Do Not Talk about Fight Club: I am Jack’s Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection. Ed. Read Mercer Schuchardt. Dallas, TX: Benbella, 2008. 107-108. Schuchardt, Read Mercer. “A Copy of a Copy of a Copy.” You Do Not Talk about Fight Club: I am Jack’s Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection. Ed. Read Mercer Schuchardt. Dallas, TX: Benbella, 2008. 157-74. Sirc, Geoffrey. “The Difficult Politics of the Popular.” Journal of Composition Theory 21 (2001): 421-33. Stirling, Kirsten. “'Dr Jekyll and Mr Jackass': Fight Club as a Refraction of Hogg's Justified Sinner and Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” Refracting the Canon in Contemporary British Literature and Film. Ed. Susana Onega and Christian Gutleben. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. 83-94. Revised and Reprinted as “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Jackass.” You Do Not Talk about Fight Club: I am Jack’s Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection. Ed. Read Mercer Schuchardt. Dallas, TX: Benbella, 2008. 119-32. Thompson, Stacy. “Punk Cinema.” Cinema Journal 43.2 (2004): 47-66. Tripp, Daniel. “’Wake Up!’: Narratives of Masculine Epiphany in Millennial Cinema.” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 22.2 (2005): 181-88.

Secondary Bibliography – Scholarly Works

209

Vacker, Barry. “Slugging Nothing.” You Do Not Talk about Fight Club: I am Jack’s Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection. Ed. Read Mercer Schuchardt. Dallas, TX: Benbella, 2008. 175-206. Vizzini, Ned. “Tyler Durden, Boss Playa.” You Do Not Talk about Fight Club: I am Jack’s Completely Unauthorized Essay Collection. Ed. Read Mercer Schuchardt. Dallas, TX: Benbella, 2008. 63-64. Wegner, Phillip E. “Where Prospective Horizon is Omitted: Naturalism and Dystopia in Fight Club and Ghost Dog.” Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination. Ed. Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini. New York: Routledge, 2003. 167-85. Weiner, Eric. “Making the Pedagogical (Re)Turn: Henry Giroux’s Insurgent Cultural Pedagogy.” Journal of Composition Theory 21.2 (2001): 434-51. Westerfelhaus, Robert. “At the Unlikely Confluence of Conservative Religion and Popular Culture: Fight Club as Heteronormative Ritual.” Text & Performance Quarterly 24.3-4 (2004): 203-326. Whitehouse, Glenn. “Unimaginable Variations: Christian Responsibility in the Cinema of Broken Identity.” Literature & Theology 18.3 (2004): 321-50. Wicks, James A. “’It Was on the Tip of Everyone’s Tounge, Tyler and I Just Gave it a Name’: Fight Club’s Representation of Consumer Culture.” MA Thesis, Oregon State U, 2005. Wike, Scott and Barbara Pickering. “The Search for Male Identity within Modern Society: A Rhetorical Analysis of David Fincher’s Fight Club.” Popular Culture Review 15.2 (2004): 63-76. Zavodny, John. “I Am Jack’s Wasted Life: Fight Club and Personal Identity.” Movies and the Meaning of Life: Philosophers Take on Hollywood. Eds. Kimberly A Blessing and Paul J. Tudico. Chicago: Open Court, 2005. 47-60. Zipfel, Pam. “Fight Club: Male Identity in the Culture of the City.” The Image of the City in Literature, Media, and Society. Selected papers of the Soc. For Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery Conf., Mar. 2003, Colorado Springs, CO. Ed. Steven Kaplan and Will Wright. Pueblo, CO: Soc. for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, U of Southern Colorado, 2003. 3-6. Žižek, Slavoj. “The Ambiguity of the Masochist Social Link.” Perversion and the Social Relation. Ed. Dennis Foster, Molly Anne Rothenberg, and Slavoj Žižek. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003. 112-25.

APPENDIX C SECONDARY BIBLIOGRAPHY – SELECT BOOK AND FILM REVIEWS

Fight Club Angel, Karen. Washington Post News Feed 1 Dec. 1996: 6. Gaughan, Thomas. Booklist 92 (1996): 1804. “Lit Picks.” Variety 3 June 1996: 8.Steinberg, Sybil S. and Jeff Zaleski. Publishers Weekly 243.23 (1996): 60. Ulin, David. Los Angeles Times Book Review 18 Aug. 1996: 1. Yablonski, Linda. Bomb 58 (1997): 8.

Survivor Lange, Alexandria and Brett Kelly. “Shorts.” Rev. of The Sopranos, by Alan Warner, Survivor, by Chuck Palahniuk, and Roger Fishbite, by Emily Prager. New York Magazine 12 Apr. 1999: 83. Kirkus Reviews 66 (1998): 1755. Steinberg, Sybil S. Publishers Weekly 245.48 (1998): 49.

Invisible Monsters Needham, George. Booklist 96 (1999): 233. Kirkus Reviews 67 (1999): 1160. Steinberg, Sybil S. Publishers Weekly 246.27 (1999): 56.

Choke Beato, G. “Heimlich Maneuvers.” Washington Post 27 May 2001: T6. Davis, Alan. “Family Fictions.” Rev. of The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger, Blue Diary, by Alice Hoffman, The Dying Animal, by Philip Roth, Choke, by Chuck

Secondary Bibliography – Select Book and Film Reviews

211

Palahniuk, and How to be Good, by Nick Hornby. Hudson Review 55.1 (2002): 161-66. Green, John. Booklist 97 (2001):1355. Katsoulis, Melissa. Times [London] 17 Aug. 2002, Play: 19. Kaveney, Roz. Times Literary Supplement 10 Aug. 2001:19. Madom, Heath. Library Journal 126.4 (2001): 132. Maslin, Janet. “An Immature Con Man with a Mom Problem.” New York Times 24 May 2001: E9. Matthews, David. “Choking on Misogyny.” Australian 11 Aug. 2001: R14. Maunsell, Jerome Boyd. Times [London] 14 Aug. 2001, Features: 21. Medwick, Cathleen. “Fall Fiction Harvest.” Rev. of The Furies, by Fernanda Eberstadt, A Window Across the River, by Brian Morton, One Pill Makes You Smaller, by Lisa Dierbeck, Diary, by Chuck Palahniuk, and American Woman, by Susan Choi. O, The Oprah Magazine Sept. 2003: 202. Miller, Michael. Village Voice 10 July 2001: 44. Patterson, Troy. Entertainment Weekly 25 May 2001: 72+. Reese, Jennifer. New York Times Book Review 27 May 2001: 16. Publishers Weekly 250.27 (2003): 26-27. Washington Post Book World 27 May 2001: 6. Yarbrough, Scott. Magill Book Reviews Online 1 Feb 2002. Zaleski, Jeff. Publishers Weekly 248.13 (2001): 37.

Lullaby Cape, Jonathan. “A Case of Rock-a-Die Baby.” Irish Times 7 Dec. 2002, Weekend. Francis, Mike. “The Dead Zzzzone - A Lullaby Means Goodnight Forever in Chuck Palahniuk’s New Novel.” Oregonian 15 Sept. 2002: E7. Green, John. Booklist 98 (2002): 1887. Havrilesky, Heather. “Rhyme Spree.” Washington Post 15 Sept. 2002: T10. Heffernan, Virginia. “Name That Tune.” New York Times Book Review 20 Oct. 2002: 17. Julian, Robert. “Killing Them Softly.” Bay Area Reporter 31 Oct. 2002: 43. Kempf, Andrea. Library Journal 127.13 (2002): 144. Lacayo, Richard. “A Few Words to Die By.” Time 23 Sept. 2002: 76. Rpt. in Time Europe 14 Oct. 2002: 90. Lim, Dennis. “Crib Notes.” Village Voice 20 Nov. 2002: 65.

212

Appendix C

Maslin, Janet. “A Seller of Unreal Estate: Creepy Is as Creepy Does.” New York Times 12 Sept. 2002: E9. Matthews, David. “Killing Time with Poetry.” Australian 28 Sept. 2002: D6. Nashawaty, Chris, et al. “The Week.” Rev. of The Conversations, by Michael Ondaatje, Things You Should Know, by A.M. Holmes, Lullaby, by Chuck Palahniuk, and The Book of Illusions, by Paul Auster. Entertainment Weekly 31 Sept. 2002: 148- 49. Kirkus Reviews 70 (2002): 834. Salij, Marta. Detroit Free Press 25 Sept. 2002. Skidelsky, William. “With a Song in Your Heart.” Times Literary Supplement 1 Nov. 2002: 27. Smith, Kyle. People 14 Oct. 2002: 53. Thomas, Nicholas. “A ‘Lullaby’ Lethal to Kids.” USA Today 10 Sept. 2002, Life: 4D. Trethan, Phaedra. Philadelphia Inquirer 23 Oct. 2002. Zaleski, Jeff. Publishers Weekly 249.26 (2002): 46-47.

Diary Bigge, Ryan. “One Indignity at a Time.” Toronto Star 2 Nov. 2003: D14. Edwards, Jacqueline. Kliatt Sept 2003: 54-55. Flynn, Gillian. Entertainment Weekly 5 Sept. 2003: 79. Green, John. Booklist 99 (2003): 1846. Kamine, Mark. “Doomed to Suffer.” Times Literary Supplement 10 Oct. 2003: 25. Levin, Douglas. “Dear Diary: Help Me!” Oregonian 24 Aug. 2003: E7. Maristed, Kai. “Along for the Wild Ride with a Freewheeling Artist.” Los Angeles Times 10 Sept. 2003: E8. Miller, Michael. “Full-Blown Dread.” Village Voice 27 Aug. 2004: 35. Nesbitt, Marc. “For Art’s Sake.” Washington Post 31 Aug. 2003, Book World: T9. Kirkus Reviews 71 (2003): 829. Maslin, Janet. “Two People in Comas, But One’s Still Awake.” New York Times 4 Sept. 2003: E8. Publisher’s Weekly 250.27 (2003): 50. Sullivan, James. Book Sept. 2003: 92. Wilson, Frank. Philadelphia Inquirer 10 Sept. 2003. Wright, David. Library Journal 128.12 (2003): 125. Zaleski, Jeff. Publishers Weekly 250.27 (2003): 50-51.

Secondary Bibliography – Select Book and Film Reviews

213

Haunted Bourdain, Anthony. “A Book You Have to Read.” Entertainment Weekly 21 July 2006: 74. Ciriaco, Mike. Frontiers 10 Apr. 2007: 123. Green, John. Booklist 101 (2005): 1102. Hand, Elizabeth. “The Hunger Artists.” Washington Post 29 May 2005, Book World: T6. Hegarty, Shane. “Going for the Gag Reflex.” Irish Times 13 Aug. 2005. Kerr, Calum. “On Palahniuk’s Haunted.” Stirrings Still 2.2 (2005): 13942. Maslin, Janet. “Not for a Full Stomach (or an Empty One, Either).” New York Times 5 May 2005: E9. Pastorek, Whitney. Entertainment Weekly 20 May 2005: 80. Pashley, Tim. Times Literary Supplement 15 Aug. 2005: 21. Peterson, Vernon. “Palahniuk Moves into Danger Zone.” Oregonian 8 May 2005: E1. Priest, Christopher. “Beating a Retreat.” Guardian Unlimited 11 June 2005. . Raab, Scott. “Big Book of the Month.” Esquire June 2005: 42. Kirkus Reviews 73.3 (2005): 143. Publisher’s Weekly 252.8 (2005): 154. Shone, Tom. “Gore Values.” New York Times Book Review 22 May 2005: 20. Sunday Times 28 May 2006: 49. St. Andre, Ken. Library Journal 130.8 (2005): 75-76.

Rant Almond, Steve. “The Riled Ones.” Los Angeles Times 22 April 2007. . Boice, James. “The Sausage Factory Never Closes.” Esquire 2 May 2007. . Brenner, Wayne Alan. Austin Chronicle 13 Apr. 2007. . Clarke, Kelly. “Chuck Palahniuk Gets Cine-Man-Tic, Again.” Willamette Weekly 33.25 (2007). .

214

Appendix C

Daley, David. “Palahniuk’s Rant Fails to Draw Many Raves.” USA Today 8 May 2007: 4D. Graff, Kier. Booklist 103.13 (2007): 39. Haegele, Katie. “Rant: Spreading Rabies and an Odd Sort of Wisdom.” Philadelphia Inquirer 11 May 2007. Hitchings, Henry. “Destruction Derbies.” Times Literary Supplement 18 May 2007: 22. Hill, Joe. “A Short and Unhappy Life.” Washington Post 20 May 2007. . Jensen, Jeff. Entertainment Weekly 11 May 2007: 77. Kirkus Reviews 75.6 (2007): 249. Lindquist, Mark. “A Bizarre Ride to the ‘Edge of Crazy.’” Seattle Times 27 Apr. 2007.. Lively, Adam. “Grotesque Loses Its Gaiety.” Sunday Times 27 May 2007: 46. Lowrey, Sassafras. “Rant and Rave.” Rev. of Rant, by Chuck Palahniuk and Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Role of Gender and Conformity, Ed. Matt Bernstein. Just Out 5 Oct. 2007: 49. Maloney, Field. “Demolition Man.” New York Times Book Review 3 June 2007: 10. McWeeny, Drew. “Moriarty Rants About Chuck Palahniuk’s New Novel Rant!” Ain’t It Cool News 19 Apr. 2007. . Maslin, Janet. “Appetite for Destruction; A Messianic Monster, Trained in Pain.” New York Times 7 May 2007: 7. Maury, Laura. “Beautiful Boy’s Boredom Leads to Rabies Scare.” San Francisco Chronicle 6 May 2007. . Nazaryan, Alexander. Time Out New York 26 Apr – 2 May 2007. . Publisher’s Weekly 254.10 (2007): 35. Smith, Kyle. “Wit, Pain, and Dystopian Fantasies.” Wall Street Journal Eastern Edition 28 Apr. 2007: P8. Tracy, Marc. “Our First Look at Chuck Palahniuk’s Latest Novel.” New York Magazine 23 April 2007. .

Secondary Bibliography – Select Book and Film Reviews

215

Snuff Burana, Lily. “Top This.” Washington Post 8 June 2008. . Churchwell, Sarah. “Chicken-Chokers’ Convention.” Guardian [Manchester, UK] 16 Aug. 2008.

Dawson, Rob. Gay Times Aug. 2008: 46. Deveson, Tom. “Written on the Bodily Fluids.” Sunday Times 25 Oct. 2008: 55. Ellman, Lucy. New York Times Book Review 8 June 2008: 27. Ervin, Andrew. “Palahniuk Plumbs Porn.” San Francisco Chronicle 22 May 2008. . Goldberg, Ted. “Sex, Lies, and Videotape.” Chicago Tribune 31 May 2008. . Graff, Kier. Booklist 104.13 (2008): 30. Hollands, Neil. Library Journal 133.6 (2008): 78. Kirkus Reviews 76.5 (2008): 213. Kleid, Suzanne. “Gangbangs by the Book.” Rev. of Snuff, by Chuck Palahniuk and Beautiful Children, by Charles Bock. Bitch 40 (2008): 16-17. Lindquist, Mark. “Snuff: A Porn Queen’s Quest for Immortality.” Seattle Times 23 May 2008. . Losnedahl, Lindsey. Review-Journal [Las Vegas] 23 June 2008. . Owen, Paul. Times Literary Supplement 3 Oct. 2008: 20. Patin, Matthew. Austin Chronicle 30 May 2008. . Percy, Benjamin. “The Only Thing Worse Than Boring Porn is Chuck Palahniuk’s New Novel About Boring Porn.” Esquire 24 June 2008. . Pevere, Geoff. “Everything You Always Didn’t Want to Know about Porn. The Sex is Dirty, Literally.” Toronto Star 8 June 2008: ID5.

216

Appendix C

Publisher’s Weekly 255.6 (2008): 47. Ward, Kate. Entertainment Weekly 23 May 2008: 127.

Fugitives and Refugees Antrim, Taylor. “Beyond the Fringe.” New York Times Book Review 31 Sept. 2003: 5. Finlayson, Iain. Times [London] 6 Mar. 2004, Weekend Review: 16. Gold, Sarah F., et al. Publishers Weekly 250.19 (2003): 51-52. Jacob, Sam. Modern Painters Summer 2004: 142. Mackin, Laurence. “Postcards from the Edge of Portland.” Irish Times 10 Apr. 2004, Weekend. McCormick, John. Library Journal 128.12 (2003): 112. Ott, Bill. Booklist 99 (2003): 1858. Kirkus Reviews 71 (2003): 663-664. Reynolds, Christopher. “Oddity Portland and Cleanly France.” Los Angeles Times 10 Aug. 2003: L9. Robischon, Noah.Entertainment Weekly 18 Aug. 2003: 80.

Stranger than Fiction Bozikovic, Alex. “How to Turn Gold into Straw.” Toronto Star 1 Aug. 2004, Entertainment: D14. Ciuraru, Carmela. “Raw, Tender Truths from Fight Club Hard-Hitter.” Los Angeles Times 16 June 2004: E1. Chiarella, Tom. “Big Important Book of the Month.” Esquire Aug. 2004: 36.. “The Enduring Charm of Freaky Violence.” New York Times 14 June 2004: E7. Finlayson, Iain. Times [London] 14 Aug 2004, Weekend Review: 14. Green, John. Booklist 100 (2004): 1591. Ives, Nancy R. Library Journal 129.11 (2004): 70-71. Kirkus Reviews 72 (2004): 381. Publishers Weekly 251.21 (2004): 57. Riippa, Laurele, et al. “Hardcovers: Literary Criticism & Essays.” Rev. of The Merry Recluse, by Caroline Knapp, Stranger than Fiction, by Chuck Palahniuk, and Mortification, by Robin Robertson. Publishers Weekly 251.4 (2004): 163-64. Robischon, Noah. Rev. of Stranger than Fiction, by Chuck Palahniuk. Entertainment Weekly 18 June 2004: 90.

Secondary Bibliography – Select Book and Film Reviews

217

Sartain, Jeff. “All the Lonely People.” American Book Review 26.1 (2004): 26.

David Fincher’s Adaptation of Fight Club Bernstein, Jeanne Wolff. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 83.5 (2002): 1191-99. Brown, Corie. “Getting Ready to Rumble.” Newsweek 6 Sept. 1999: 66. Censi, R. Cineforum 39.9 (1999): 39-40. *Italian Language Journal Crowdus, Gary. “Getting Exercised over Fight Club.” Cineaste 25.4 (2001): 46-54. Goodwin, Christopher. “The Beaten Generation.” Australian 24 Sept 1999: O16. Horowitz, Jane. “The Family Filmgoer.” Washington Post 15 Oct. 1999, Weekend: N45. Leigh, D. Sight and Sound 10.5 (2000): 64. Klawans, Stuart. “Films.” Rev. of Fight Club and Boys Don’t Cry. Nation 8 Nov. 1999: 32+. Kusz, Kyle W. “Fight Club and the Art/Politics of White Male Victimization and Reflexive Sadomasochism.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 37.3-4 (2002): 465. Levy, Shawn. “Put up Your Dukes.” Oregonian 15 Oct. 1999, Arts & Entertainment: 27. Macauley, Sean. “A Dull Blow to Pitt of the Stomach.” Times [London] 18 Oct. 1999, Features: 43. Mars-Jones, Adam. “The Bruise Brothers Lose on Points.” Times [London] 11 Nov. 1999, Features: 51. Maslin, Janet. “Such a Very Long Way from Duvets to Danger.” New York Times 15 Oct. 1999: B14. Meneghelli, A. Cineforum 39.8 (1999): 48-49. *Italian Language Journal Nasson, Tim. “Brad Pitt: ‘Fight Club’ May Be the ‘Biggest Homo Movie Ever.’” Bay Windows 17.43 (1999): 3-4. Nichols, Peter M. “A Complex Film in a Plain Wrap.” New York Times 9 June 2000: E24. Palmer, Martin. “Biff-fest with a Conscience.” Times [London] 8 Nov. 1999, Features: 47. Potts, R. Times Literary Supplement 3 Dec. 1999: 19. Regan, Tom. “Rev up the Hype, Book Oprah for Our Newest ‘Victim’: Men.” Christian Science Monitor 25 Oct. 1999: 9. Smith, Warren and Debbie Leslie. International Feminist Journal of Politics 4.1 (2002): 129-36.

218

Appendix C

Stratton, David. “Impaired by Overkill.” Australian 13 Nov. 1999: R20. Taubin, A. “So Good It Hurts.” Sight and Sound 9.11 (1999): 16-18. —. “21st Century Boys: David Fincher Stages a Theater of War in Fight Club.” Village Voice 13 Oct. 1999. Tobin, Y. Positif 465 (1999): 43-44. *French Language Journal Turan, Kenneth. “The Roundhouse Miss.” Los Angeles Times 15 Oct. 1999: F1. Vachaud, L. Positif 467 (2000): 45. *French Language Journal Walker, Alexander. “A Nazi Piece of Work.” Weekly Standard [London] 11 Nov. 1999:29.

Clark Gregg’s Film Adaptation of Choke Abele, Robert. Los Angeles Times 26 Sept. 2008. . Ebert, Roger. Chicago Sun-Times 25 Sept. 2008. . Groen, Rick. “So Cluttered You’ll Be Gasping for Air.” Globe and Mail [Toronto] 26 Sept. 2008. . Harvey, Dennis. Variety 22 Jan. 2008. . Holden, Stephen. “Heimlich Maneuvers on the Way to Self.” New York Times 26 Sept. 2008: 17. Jones, Kimberly. Austin Chronicle 26 Sept. 2008. . Puig, Claudia. “Choke Tries to Throttle Viewers with Its Outrageousness” USA Today 26 Sept. 2008: 7D. Sragow, Michael. “Choke is a Ghastly Bore.” Baltimore Sun 26 Sept. 2008. . Stein, Ruthie. San Francisco Chronicle 26 Sept. 2008. .

Secondary Bibliography – Select Book and Film Reviews

219

Torrance, Kelly Jane. “Palahniuk Coughs up another Winner.” Washington Times 26 Sept. 2008: B2. Wilonsky, Robert. “Doing It Just Ain’t Cutting It in Choke.” Village Voice 24 Sept. 2008. .

APPENDIX D SECONDARY BIBLIOGRAPHY – SELECT MEDIA COVERAGE

Interviews, Profiles, and Articles about Chuck Palahniuk 1996 Baker, Jeff. “Rules of the Game.” Oregonian 11 Aug. 1996: F1.

1997 Baker, Jeff. “Daniel, Palahniuk Honored, But All Win at Book Awards.” Oregonian 8 Nov. 1997: C1. “The Paradigm of Compromise: An Interview with Chuck Palahniuk.” Boswell 1 (1997): 34-37.

1998 Baker, Jeff. “Hollywood Likely to Turn Portlander’s Book into Film.” Oregonian 3 Mar. 1998: D1. —. “The Art of Writing Dangerously.” Oregonian 24 May 1998: L1.

1999 Baker, Jeff. “Chuck Palahniuk Fights Back.” Oregonian 24 Oct. 1999: E1. Birkets, Sven. “Marquee Names.” Esquire Apr. 1999: 64+. Burana, Lily. “Cult Club.” Village Voice 2 Mar. 1999: 157. “Chuck Palahniuk: A Chat about the Novel Fight Club.” Online Chat. CNN.com 27 October 1999. 16 Dec. 2002 . Drake, Monica. “The World from Inside a Tiny Writing Group. The Stranger 18-24 Mar. 1999. .

Secondary Bibliography – Select Media Coverage

221

Fincher, David, dir. Fight Club. Novel by Chuck Palahniuk. Screenplay by Jim Uhls. Perf. Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, Helena Bonham-Carter. Fox, 1999. * The 2-disc DVD release features an audio commentary by Chuck Palahniuk and Jim Uhls. Jenkins, Emily. “Extreme Sport.” Village Voice 19 Oct. 1999: 67. Mudede, Charles. “Them’s Fightin’ Words: Talking with Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk.” The Stranger 14 Oct. 1999. . Sirius, R.U. Interview with Chuck Palahniuk. gettingit.com 14 October 1999. 24 October 2008 . Sullivan, James. “Model Misbehavior.” San Francisco Chronicle 12 Sept. 1999.

2000 Taylor, Dawn. Interview with Chuck Palahniuk. The DVD Journal 25 January 2000. .

2001 “Alumnus Finds Success in Fiction and Hollywood.” Flash: Newsletter of the School of Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon Spring/Summer 2001. . Baker, Jeff. “By the Throat with His New Novel Choke, Portland Writer Chuck Palahniuk Has Hollywood Right Where He Wants It.” Oregonian 13 May 2001: F1. —. “All Times a Great Artist, Ken Kesey is Dead at Age 66.” Oregonian 11 Nov. 2001: A1. Bures, Frank. "Chuck Palahniuk: Choke Hold on the Zeitgeist." Poets & Writers May/June 2001: 24-31. Epstein, Dan. Interview with Chuck Palahniuk. 3:AM Magazine December 2001. . Farley, C.P. “Chuck Palahniuk on Oprah’s Diaphragm.” Interview. Powells.com 5 July 2001. . Finch, Rob. “Chuck Palahniuk (Photo).” Oregonian 13 May 2001: F1. Maryles, Daisy. “Choke Hold.” Publishers Weekly 248.24 (2001): 26.

222

Appendix D

2002 Billen, Andrew. “The Man Who Sees the Future.” Times [London] 9 Sept. 2002, Features: 4. Binelli, Mark. “The Cult of Chuck.” Rolling Stone 19 Sept. 2002: 59-60. Chandrasoma, Shahin. “Physicians, Shamans, and Personal Trainers.” Western Journal of Medicine 176.3 (2002): 200-202. Du Shane, Tony. “Drinks with Tony.” Interview. 13 Sept. 2002. . Dunn, Adam. “Chuck Palahniuk: Road Trips and Romance.” Publishers Weekly 249.35 (2002): 49. Glassie, John. “The Pugilist Novelist.” New York Times Magazine 29 Sept. 2002: 21. Kaplan, Michael. “Q + A: Chuck Palahniuk.” Book Sept. 2002: 11. McClaran, Robbie. “The Survivor’s Story.” Pages Sept. 2002: 92-95. Reynolds, Susan Salter. “Author’s Angry Worlds Have a Cult Following.” Los Angeles Times 6 Oct. 2002: E1. Robinson, Tasha. Interview. The Onion A.V. Club 13 Nov. 2002. 16 Dec. 2002 . Salij, Marta. “Author Stirs Guts and Romance.” Detroit Free Press 24 Aug. 2002. Simon, Tony and Drew Winchester. “Cooking with Chuck (The Guy Who Wrote Fight Club).” Too Much Coffee Man 16 (2002): 18-20. Sosnoski, Karen. “A Tiny Window of Chaos: Fight Club Author Chuck Palahniuk.” Grappling Mar. 2002. Staub, Dick. Interview. Christianity Today. 8 Oct. 2002. . Transcript of Online Chat Session with Barnes & Noble.com. chuckpalahniuk.net 5 Nov.1999. 16 Dec. 2002 .

2003 Bright, Susie. “Talking with the Best American Erotic Authors.” The Best American Erotica 2003. Ed. Susie Bright. New York: Touchstone, 2003. 5-27. * Palahniuk’s answers are on 5, 9, 17, 23. Jarvis, Michael T. “That Queasy Feeling.” Los Angeles Times 28 Sept. 2003: E3.

Secondary Bibliography – Select Media Coverage

223

Katsoulis, Melissa. “Chuck Palahniuk – Inter Alia.” Times [London] 27 Sept. 2003, Weekend Review: 11. Masson, A. “Chuck Palahniuk – Portrait of the Artist as Magician.” Novelle Revue Francaise. Jan. 2003: 127-42. Phillips, Andrew. “What a Mob Scene.” Newsweek 1 Sept. 2003: 10. Ramos, Nester. “Plugged in Observered We Barely Saw Ye, Chuck.” Oregonian 19 Dec. 2003, Arts & Living: 5. Robischon, Noah. “Joining the Club.” Entertainment Weekly 26 Sept. 2003: 67. Turnquist, Kristi. “The Cult of Chuck.” Oregonian 9 Sept 2003: E1. Valby, Karen. “Chuck Palahniuk Does Not Attend Fight Club.” Entertainment Weekly 26 Sept. 2003: 62+. Wadsworth, Andrew. “Chuck Palahniuk: ‘I Was Choking on Animal Hair!’” Blender Nov. 2003. .

2004 Bozikovic, Alex. “How to Turn Gold into Straw.” Toronto Star 1 Aug. 2004. Chalmers, Robert. “Chuck Palahniuk: Stranger than Fiction.” Independent 1 Aug. 2004: . Glaister, Dan. “I Dare You.” Guardian Weekend 13 Mar. 2004: 12+. “It’s Paula-nick.” Online Q & A. Guardian Unlimited 24 Mar. 2004. . Sartain, Jeff. “Professor Palahniuk? Not Quite.” Poets & Writers Mar/Apr. 2004: 16. Seabrook, Andrea. “Interview: Chuck Palahniuk Discusses His Style of Writing in Stranger than Fiction.” Weekend All Things Considered (NPR) 4 July 2004. . Teeman, Tim. “Fight Club Author Came out of Closet Last Year.” Times [London] 7 Aug. 2004, Weekend Review: 11. Widmyer, Dennis, Kevin Kölsch, and Josh Chaplinsky, dir. Postcards from the Future: The Chuck Palahniuk Documentary. DVD. Kinky Mule Films, 2004.

224

Appendix D

2005 Curtis, Bryan. “Chuck Palahniuk: The Macho Novelist Makes a Leap of Faith.” Slate.com 22 June 2005. . Epstein, Daniel Robert. “Chuck Palahniuk: Author of Haunted.” Suicide Girls.com . Greenstreet, Rosanna. “Q & A.” Interview. Guardian [Manchester, UK] 10 Sept. 2005. . “Gut Check: The First Rule of Interviewing Chuck Palahniuk.” Amazon.com. . Hedegaard, Erik. “A Heartbreaking Life of Staggering Weirdness.” Rolling Stone 30 June 2005: 124-30. Lawless, Andrew. “Those Burnt Tounge Moments – Chuck Palahniuk in Interview.” Three Monkeys Online May 2005. . Memmott, Carol. “Palahniuk’s Works Can ‘Make You Feel a Little Sick.’” USA Today 31 May 2005, Life: 4D. O’Bourke, Brett. “For Fight Club Author, Success - Like a Plot - Can Be Prickly.” Miami Herald 31 May 2005. O’Hagan, Sean. “Fright Club.” Observer [London] 8 May 2005.] . “Palahniuk, Chuck.” The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction. London: Rough Guides, 2005. 189-90. “TBR: Inside the List.” New York Times Book Review 6 May 2005: 42. Seven, Richard. “Author Chuck Palahniuk: On Portland’s Edge.” Seattle Times 20 Nov. 2005: Pacific Northwest 22.

2006 Castillo, Jorge Ignacio. “Creed of Chucky: Fight Club’s Chuck Palahniuk is a Sucker for Romance.” Prairie Dog: Regina’s News and Entertainment Voice 16-29 March 2006: 20. Seabrook, Andrea. “Novelist Palahniuk Sets aside Time for His Fans.” Weekend Edition Sunday (NPR) 8 Oct 2006.

Secondary Bibliography – Select Media Coverage

225

2007 Eichenberger, Bill. “Young Imaginations Need More Fiction, Satirist Says.” Columbus Dispatch [OH] 16 May 2007. Jones, Phillip. “To Extreme to be Read Out Loud?” Bookseller.com 30 Mar. 2007. . Transcript. “Interactive Chat: Chuck Palahniuk.” Journal-Sentinel [Milwaukee] 1 May 2007. .

2008 Ayers, Chris. “Celebrity Blank.” Times [London] 5 Aug. 2008: Features 20. —. “Compulsive Revulsion.” Times [London] 26 July 2008: Features 6. Bloom, Julie. “A Song for Choke.” New York Times 14 Aug. 2008: 2. Bunn, Austin. “Open Book.” Advocate 20 May 2008: 42-45. Glass, Brett. “The Insurmountable Monica Boulevard.” Just Out 3 July 2008: 40. * Discusses actress Monica Boulevard’s role in making “Cassie Wright” online promotional videos for Snuff Lerner, Nathan. “Author’s New Adaptation Hits the Big Screen.” Philadelphia Gay News 3 Oct. 2008: 24-25. Rosenfeld, Jordan E. “Chuck Palahniuk: Shock and Awe.” Writer’s Digest 11 Feb. 2008. < http://www.writersdigest.com/article/THE_WD_INTERVIEW_Chuck _Palahniuk_Shock_And_Awe/>.

Other Selected References to Chuck Palahniuk Alford, Henry. “Dark Diary.” Vanity Fair Sept. 2003: 188. Baker, John F. “Fight Club Author to Broadway.” Publishers Weekly 247.12 (2000): 15. —. “No D’Day Choke for Chuck.” Publishers Weekly 249.27 (2002): 12. Barker, Andrew. “Clark Gregg.” Daily Variety 17 Jan 2008: A12. Bing, Jonathan. “Scribe’s Combo Deal a Knockout.” Daily Variety 11 Apr. 2001: 1+. Bigge, Ryan. “Luring the Underground into the Light.” Toronto Star 1 June 2008: ID1. Burbo, Todd. “Fight Club the Game?” Business CustomWire 4 Oct. 2004.

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Appendix D

Dee, Jonathan. “Ready-Made Rebellion: The Empty Tropes of Transgressive Fiction.” Harper’s Apr. 2005: 87+. Donadio, Rachel. “Monda’s World.” New York Times Book Review 29 July 2007: 23. “Doubleday/Broadway K.O.’s W.W. Norton, Nabs Choke.” Daily Variety 16 Mar. 2000: 4. Duge, Brenda J. “Fight Club.” Men and Masculinities: A Social, Cultural, and Historical Encyclopedia. Eds. Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004. 300-302. Elder, Robert K. “Writer’s Roots Run Deep in Heartland.” Interview with Amy Hempel. Chicago Tribune 30 July 2007. “Faint Praise.” New York 29 Sept. 2003: 12+. Fleming, Michael. “Fox 2000 Wins Right to Fight.” Variety 26 Feb. 1996: 4. Fonseca, Tony. “The Doppelgänger.” Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares. Vol. 1. Ed S.T. Joshi. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2007. 187-213. Guran, Paula. “Tomes of Terror and Trepidation.” Publishers Weekly 251.10 (2004): 38+. Heller, Steven. “Cover Stories.” New York Times Book Review 10 Aug. 2008: 27. * This is an interview/profile of Rodrigo Corral, who has designed covers for Palahniuk’s novels since 1999. Hudson, Robbie. “Stars of Click Lit.” Sunday Times 6 Aug. 2006: 27. * Reviews Widmyer’s website, www.chuckpalahniuk.net. Jacobs, Farrin. “The Cult of Palahniuk Gets Hibbert on the Charts.” Book Publishing Report 25 June 2001: 3+. Kaplan, Ben. “Trailers.” New York 3 Dec. 2001: 82. Levy, Shawn. “Palahniuk and the Cult: Lively Talk, Rabid Fans.” Rev. of Postcards from the Future, dir. Dennis Widmyer, et al. Oregonian 12 Dec. 2003, Arts & Living: 40. Maryles, Daisy and Dick Donahue. “Behind the Bestsellers.” Publishers Weekly 250.36 (2003): 18. Morrison, Chloe. “Movie Influence Studied in New Year’s Arson.” Chattanooga Times/Free Press 5 Jan 2008. Nathan, Paul. “Future Shock.” Publishers Weekly 243.4 (1996): 22. Preusch, Matthew. “A City Proud of Its Underbelly Slims Down and Tones Up.” New York Times 1 Dec. 2003: A14. Sartain, Jeffrey A. “Chuck Palahniuk.” LGBTQ America Today. New York: Greenwood, 2008. 844-45.

Secondary Bibliography – Select Media Coverage

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Schechner, Sam. “Harry Potter and the Deluxe Book Gambit.” Wall Street Journal 8 June 2007: W3. Simon, Scott. “Profile: Real-life fight club in San Jose pits men against each other in dangerous hand-to-hand combat.” Weekend Edition Saturday (NPR) 30 July 2005. Snider, Suzanne. “Est, Werner Erhard, and the Corporatization of SelfHelp.” Believer May 2003: 18-28. * Snider mentions Palahniuk’s experience with the Est workshop, but errs on some of the factual information. Palahniuk’s personal correction of Snider is printed in the Letters to the Editor in Believer Aug. 2003: 4. Swallow, James. Dark Eye: The Films of David Fincher. Surrey, UK: Reynolds and Hearn, 2003. Taubin, Amy. “21st Century Boys.” Village Voice 19 Oct. 1999: 43-44. Terzian, Peter. “Kill Your Darlings.” Print Oct. 2008: 66-71. * This article talks about Rodrigo Corral’s designs for Stranger than Fiction’s cover. Waxman, Sharon. “David Fincher Takes on Fight Club, 1996.” Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System. New York: HarperCollins, 2005: 135-52. “What They’re Reading on College Campuses.” Chronicle of Higher Education 1 Nov. 2002: A8. —. 22 Oct 2004: A10. —. 26 Nov. 2004: A7. —. 26 May 2006: A8. —. 30 June 2006: A5. —. 25 July 2008: A4.

CONTRIBUTORS

Scott Ash is an Associate Professor of English at Nassau Community College in Garden City, NY. His primary research interests include 19th and 20th century American literature and American popular culture. He has an essay on Stephen King's columns for Entertainment Weekly appearing in a forthcoming collection of essays on King's work, edited by Mary Findley. In addition to the traditional American literature surveys and the introductory college composition courses, he has also taught courses in mystery and detective fiction and film and literature. Heidi Ashbaugh is an Instructional Design Specialist for Lifelong Learning at Texas Woman's University in Denton, Texas. She also teaches as an adjunct in online literature, writing, and library science classes, and previously worked as an academic librarian. She earned both her M.A. in English and her M.L.S. from Texas Woman's University. Her current interests include the development of online pedagogy, and studies in contemporary literature as a motivator for first-year college composition students. James Dolph works at the University of Central Oklahoma as a lecturer in the English Department, studied theatre at Northeastern Oklahoma State University (BA, 1986), political science at California State University San Bernardino (MA, 1989), Russian at Monterey California’s Defense Language Institute (too much time in the military), creative writing at UCO (MA, 2002), and drama at the University of Oklahoma (MA, 2007). James will probably never finish school, and is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Art at Vermont’s Goddard College. Monica Drake is the author of Clown Girl, a novel, and currently teaches at the Pacific NW College of Art. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Oregon Humanities Review and Nerve.com. She can be reached at: http://www.monicadrake.com.

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Kathy Farquharson is a second year Ph.D. student at Roehampton University, London, UK. She is writing a thesis on domestic architecture in twentieth-century literature. Kathy has given numerous conference papers in the UK, and has recently contributed to a book on her other research interest, confessional autobiography. Andy Johnson is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Kentucky, where he has taught courses in film, literature, and composition. His research and writing concentrate on film and twentieth century American literature, with a particular interest in issues of resistance and rebellion. In addition to his critical work, he has published poetry in Limestone: A Journal of Art and Literature. He wishes to thank Emily for her patience and valuable assistance, and his family for all their encouragement and support. Matt Kavanagh teaches in the English Department at Okanagan College in Kelowna, British Columbia. He received his Ph.D. from McGill University, where he wrote about the work of Palahniuk, Don DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis and others as examples of ‘capitalist realism.’ His current research examines representations of finance in contemporary American fiction. Kenneth MacKendrick is Associate Professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Manitoba. His doctoral thesis, Discourse, Desire, and Fantasy in Jürgen Habermas' Critical Theory was published by Routledge in 2007. He regularly teaches courses dealing with Evil in World Religions, Death and Mourning Rituals, Contemporary Christianity, New Religious Movements, and Critical Social Theory. His current research deals with the writings and reception of Chuck Palahniuk, with an emphasis on the religious roots of Palahniuk's writing and the changing nature of religion in North American culture. Mary McCampbell is assistant professor of English at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her current research interests and publications focus on the interrelation of the religious impulse and popular culture, including analyses of the novels of Douglas Coupland and Bret Easton Ellis and examinations of the emergence of faith discussions in indie rock culture.

230

Contributors

Ron Riekki holds degrees from Central Michigan University (B.S.), Brandeis University (M.F.A.), the University of Virginia (M.F.A.), and Western Michigan University (Ph.D.). He has also studied at Prague’s Charles University and l’Université du Québec à Chicoutimi and has taught at Moraine Valley Community College, Auburn University, and at homeless shelters and in the prison system (he encourages other authors and scholars to be active in community volunteerism with literacy and creative writing). His novel U.P. was published by Ghost Road Press in 2008. In 2010, Ghost Road will publish Riekki’s novella A Portrait of the Artist as a Boogey Man. Both books were influenced by Palahniuk’s writings. Jeffrey A. Sartain teaches literature and writing at Indiana University, where he is completing his Ph.D. in English. He primarily writes on technology, narrative, and the information industry. His myriad interests include contemporary literature, contemporary film, and creative writing. His work has appeared in publications all over the world, including Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, American Book Review, Playboy Ukraine, Playboy Russia, and South Africa’s Weekender. Sacred and Immoral is his first edited collection. Tatyana Shumsky is a business journalist living in New York. Her stories have been published in The Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones Newswires, and Forbes.com. She is due to graduate from NYU’s Masters’ Program in Journalism, Business and Economic Reporting in December 2008. Her reporting interests lie in covering the energy and financial services industries. Born in Moscow, Russia, Tatyana's family immigrated to Australia in the mid-90s. She grew up in Sydney, completing a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in English at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She went on to study finance, earning a Graduate Diploma in Commerce from UNSW, before commencing her current degree at NYU. Tatyana is fluent in Russian and enjoys photography. Cammie M. Sublette is an assistant professor of English at the University of Arkansas – Fort Smith. She teaches and writes about African American literature, popular culture, postmodern literature, genre studies, composition, and literary theory.

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Courtney Wennerstrom is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Indiana University, currently working on her dissertation entitled Polyamorousness: 'Divided Affection' in Eighteenth-Century Life. Her other interests include Romantic women writers' use of linguistic, queer, theatrical and deconstructive performativity, and the discourse of “effusion.” Recently, she published on the relationship between early medicine, wax dolls, Gothic fiction and contemporary pornography in European Romantic Review; and has an article forthcoming in Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net called “Legacies of Tortured Sensibility; or, What Shakira Learned from Sade.”

INDEX

“A Writer's Cult”, 36, 52, 113, 191, 192 “Guts”, 11, 159–75 Adorno, Theodor W., 96 agency, 40, 43, 45, 46, 47, 50, 51, 55, 57, 58, 61, 62, 67, 74, 87, 104, 188 Althusser, Louis, 89, 90, 94, 95, 98 apostolic fiction, 184–86 Atwood, Margaret, 180 aural penetration, 169 autoerotic asphyxiation, 162–66, 171 Barrett, Rona Miss Rona, 8 Baudrillard, Jean, 64, 146, 151, 153, 155, 156, 157 beauty, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 71, 77, 103, 106, 108, 109, 113, 154, 184, 191 Beckett, Samuel Waiting for Godot, 164 Bentham, Jeremy, 78 Bible, The, 41, 111, 113, 150, 152 Bradford, William Of Plymouth Plantation, 26 Breslin, Jimmy, 4 Buddha, 112 Buford, Bill Among the Thugs, 6, 15 Burroughs, William S. Naked Lunch, 164 Butler, Judith, 169 Gender Trouble, 68 Undoing Gender, 169 Cacophony Society, 7 Camus, Albert, 89

capitalism, 76, 89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 152, 178, 191 Capote, Truman, 4, 182 Cartesian dualism, 166–68 Carver, Raymond, 7, 15 Choke, 7, 8, 14, 73, 74, 75, 77, 81, 82, 83, 84, 174, 184, 185, 188– 89, 191 representations of history in, 27– 28, 31–33 reviews, 73 secular conversion in, 40, 42, 43–44, 44, 45, 46, 48–49, 50, 52, 54, 55, 56, 58 Chomsky, Noam, 153 Christ, Jesus, 25, 48, 66, 112, 149, 154 Christianity, 40, 41, 55, 56, 58, 59, 66, 94, 95, 103, 111, 112, 146 Citizen Kane, 185 class, socioeconomic, 36, 68, 69, 94, 95, 97, 100, 125, 126, 131, 136, 164, 187 community, 6, 10, 42, 52, 57, 70, 77, 78, 83, 84, 126, 134, 135, 137, 138, 151, 184, 187 Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur, 185 conversion, 40–58 Coupland, Douglas, 15 Crash, Darby Lexicon Devil, 8 Crumb, R., 182 culture industry, 14, 96 DeLillo, Don, 182, 183 White Noise, 151, 152 Derrida, Jacques, 98, 169, 170, 174 Margins of Philosophy, 169 The Ear of the Other, 169

Sacred and Immoral: On the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk Descartes, Rene, 173 Cartesian dualism, 172 Diary, 5, 73, 74, 77, 84, 85, 86, 116–23, 143, 182, 183, 184, 185 comparison to "The Yellow Wallpaper", 116–23 gothic influence, 124–43 representations of history in, 33– 35 reviews, 14, 74 diary (form), 40, 119, 121, 122, 125, 127, 130, 137, 139, 142 Didion, Joan, 1, 4, 6, 8, 15 "Slouching towards Bethlehem", 6 Play It as It Lays, 9 Run River, 8 Where I Was From, 8 discipline, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 98, 112, 174, 191 Dunn, Katherine, 5, 182 Attic, 8 Geek Love, 6 Dunne, John Gregory, 4, 15 Edinboro University, 36, 113 Ellis, Bret Easton, 15, 182 American Psycho, 99, 179, 187 Less than Zero, 10 embodiment, 49, 52, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 94, 97, 120, 124, 127, 140, 153, 155, 161, 162, 166, 167, 168, 171, 172, 173, 174 Engels, Friedrich, 90 Ephron, Nora Crazy Salad, 10, 182 Heartburn, 8, 9 Scribble Scribble, 10 Wallflower at the Orgy, 10 female. See embodiment femininity. See gender Fight Club, 4, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 15, 36, 58, 90, 94, 97, 98, 99, 106, 155,

233

156, 170, 178, 179, 184, 185, 186, 187, 190, 191 critical reception, 36 representations of history in, 23– 25 reviews, 14 Fight Club (film), 100, 174 David Fincher, 174, 178, 187 Jim Uhls, 190 reviews, 15 Fight Club (video game), 188 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 182 Foucault, Michel, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86, 87, 89, 93, 96, 98, 103 Discipline and Punish, 74, 75, 77, 89 The Birth of the Prison, 89 The History of Sexuality, 113 Fugitives and Refugees, 6, 7 Gender, 10, 66, 68, 70, 102, 103, 104, 109, 113, 128, 143, 161, 162, 165, 167, 169, 184, 190 gender performativity, 68, 166 gender roles, 65, 68, 69, 102, 105, 166 transgender, 71, 72 gentrification, 182 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins "The Yellow Wallpaper", 116– 23 Gothic (genre), 124–43 Grealy, Lucy Autobiography of a Face, 8 Haunted, 5, 41, 143, 159, 162, 171, 175, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 186 reviews, 14 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 111 Hemingway, Ernest Men without Women, 6 Hempel, Amy, 7, 75, 182 “The Harvest”, 7 At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, 7 Hofstadter, Douglas R.

234 I Am a Strange Loop, 174 homosexuality, 70, 105, 106, 110, 134, 141, 166 Horkheimer, Max, 96 horror, 143, 124–43, 181 Houellebecq, Michel, 182 identity, 23, 27, 42, 51, 53, 54, 55, 59, 61, 65, 67, 68, 70, 71, 73, 76, 79, 102, 103, 104, 140, 141, 148, 150, 151, 170, 174, 191 Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97 individuality, 23, 30, 42, 43, 44, 56, 59, 62, 63, 64, 66, 74, 76, 78, 79, 84, 87, 91, 94, 98, 126, 127, 129, 135, 153, 154, 155, 160, 167, 168, 169, 170, 174, 175, 184, 188, 191 intersubjectivity, 43, 162, 167, 169, 170 Invisible Monsters, 7, 61–72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 84, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 115, 183, 184, 185, 189, 191 Althusserian theory in, 100 comparison to Till We Have Faces, 102–14 Foucauldian tensions in, 87 reviews, 73 Johnson, Denis, 182 Seek 6 Johnson, E.W., 4 Jones, Thom, 182 Cold Snap, 6 The Pugilist at Rest, 6 Kael, Pauline, 11 Kesey, Ken, 3, 183 One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 7 Kierkegaard, Søren, 89, 100, 112 Kierkegaard, Søren, 112 Kierkegaard, Søren, 112 King, Stephen Maximum Overdrive, 99

Index Kinsey Institute for Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University, 173 Knipfel, Jim Slackjaw, 8 Krakauer, Jon Into the Wild, 6, 8 Levin, Ira, 182 Lewis, C.S. Till We Have Faces, 102–14 Lish, Gordon, 7, 75 London, Jack The Abysmal Brute, 6 Lullaby, 8, 10, 76, 143, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 188 Mailer, Norman, 4, 6 The Armies of the Night, 6 male. See embodiment Marx, Karl, 100 Marxism, 89, 91, 94, 96, 97, 98, 100 masculinity. See gender McLuhan, Marshall, 89 memes, 182 Merry Pranksters, 3, 9 Miller, Arthur, 182 minimalism, 1, 5, 7, 11, 12, 13, 75, 191 Amy Hempel, 75 Gordon Lish, 7, 75 technique, 11, 106, 113 Tom Spanbauer, 11, 75 misogyny, 4 New Journalism, 1–15 New Journalism, The, 4 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 170 Ecce Homo, 170 übermensch, 151 nihilism, 4, 70, 75, 100, 112 Oates, Joyce Carol, 6, 7 oral biography, 8, 9, 12 Other, 129, 130, 135, 136, 138, 153, 169, 170, 171, 172, 175, 191 Palahniuk, Chuck, 1, 6, 7, 9, 14, 22, 24, 36, 52, 57, 70, 71, 75, 76, 89, 98, 99, 100, 103, 108, 110, 111, 112, 113, 173, 178–92

Sacred and Immoral: On the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk book tours, 159, 160, 170, 172, 173, 180 critical reception, 1, 5, 12, 14, 36 fiction. See book titles influence of New Journalism, 1– 15 non-fiction. See book titles representations of history in the novels of, 22–37 secular conversion narratives of, 40–58 panopticism, 80, 99 Panopticon, 78, 80, 83, 87, See Foucault, Michel Parker, Dorothy, 182 Plimpton, George, 4, 6, 8, 9 Shadow Box, 6 Truman Capote, 8 pornography, 4, 47, 48, 50, 52, 54, 94, 97, 160, 163 Postcards from the Future, 99, 170, 172 postmodernism, 23, 76, 104, 113, 114, 151, 152, 155, 159, 169 Pynchon, Thomas, 182 queer subjectivity, 167 race, 68, 184, 190 Rambo, Lewis, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 59 Rant, 5, 8, 9, 12, 180, 192 reviews, 14, 15 religion, 4, 8, 13, 15, 49, 51, 95, 111, 147, 148, 149, 152, 154, 160, 185 religious conversion. See conversion Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs), 90, 94, 97 Richard, Mark, 7, 182 “Strays”, 7 Ice at the Bottom of the World, 7 romance, 70, 110, 111, 129, 178, 184 romanticism, 110 Russ, Joanna, 129, 130, 131, 132, 135, 136, 138, 139 Sade, Marquis de, 164, 165

235

Justine, 164, 165 sadism, 173 Science fiction, 9, 114 secular conversion. See conversion September 11, 2001, 90, 99, 178, 179, 178–79 sexuality, 10, 66, 69, 70, 160, 161, 162, 171, 172 simulacra, 64, 155, 156 Snuff, 5, 8, 12, 174 reviews, 14, 15 social realism, 12 Southern, Terry The Magic Christian, 7, 15 Spanbauer, Tom, 7 St. Paul, 41, 58–59 Stein, Jean Edie, 8 Steinbeck, John, 182 Stone, Robert, 182 Stranger than Fiction, 7, 9, 24, 71, 76 reviews, 15 subjectivity, 74, 76, 87, 91, 92, 94, 98, 128, 165, 166, 167, 191 Survivor, 8, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 146, 183, 184, 185, 186 possible film adaptation, 179 postmodern concerns in, 146–57 secular conversion in, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46–47, 48, 49–50, 50, 51–52, 53–54, 55, 56, 58 'trick ending', 52, 155, 156–57 Talese, Gay, 1, 4, 8, 9, 13 terror, 68, 70, 90, 129, 178, 179 Thompson, Hunter S., 1, 4, 6, 181, 192 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 8 gonzo journalism, 7, 181 Hell's Angels, 6 transgressive fiction, 15, 74, 143, 178, 179, 182 transsexuality, 68, 104, 110 transvestitism, 104

236 University of Oregon, 1 violence, 61, 62, 66, 67, 68, 70, 90, 91, 94, 99, 103, 159, 179, 180, 187 Vonnegut, Kurt, 182 West, Nathaniel, 183 Wikipedia debates over veracity, 171, 175 Williams, Joy, 7 Breaking and Entering, 10 Ill Nature, 182 Williams, Tennessee, 182 Wolfe, Tom, 1, 4, 5, 7, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15

Index “The Voices of Village Square”, 3 “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That KandyKolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby around the Bend”, 2 The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 4, 7 The Right Stuff, 8, 9 Wolfe,Tom, 10 www.chuckpalahniuk.net. See "A Writer's Cult"