Masaryk University

Faculty of Arts

Department of English
and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Michal Minárik

Writing of Chuck Palahniuk –

development and popular aspects
Master‘s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph. D.

2011
 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently,
using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

……………………………………………..
Author‘s signature

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 Acknowledgement

I would like to thank my supervisor, Stephen Hardy, PhD., for his guidance and patience.

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Table of Contents
Introduction ................................................................................................ 5

1. Basic information .................................................................................. 7

1.1 Chuck Palahniuk – a person .............................................................. 7

1.2 Palahniuk‘s writing career ............................................................... 11

1.3 Popular culture studies ................................................................... 14

1.4 John Fiske – Understanding Popular Culture (1989) .......................... 20

1.5 Relevance...................................................................................... 22

1.6 Pleasures....................................................................................... 23

1.6.1 Evasive pleasures ..................................................................... 24

1.6.2 Pleasures of the body ............................................................... 26

1.6.3 Productive pleasures ................................................................ 28

2. Writing style ....................................................................................... 31

2.1 Literary tradition ............................................................................ 31

2.2 Palahniuk‘s writing style .................................................................. 34

3. Fight Club (1996) ................................................................................ 48

3.1.1 Productive pleasures in Fight Club ............................................. 60

4. Development of Palahniuk‘s writing....................................................... 65

4.1 Middle period ................................................................................. 65

4.1.1 Lullaby (2002) ......................................................................... 65

4.1.2 Rant (2007) ............................................................................. 70

4.2 Third period – Tell-All (2010) .......................................................... 76

5. Conclusion .......................................................................................... 83

Works cited .............................................................................................. 89

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Introduction

―The guy who wrote Fight Club‖. Sixteen years after publishing his first

novel, thirteen books later, this is still the most common way people refer to

Chuck Palahniuk. This is not because he would not write another successful

novel (in fact, every one of his works has been sold in millions of copies and

translated into dozens of languages) – this is because Fight Club has become a

part of an imaginary canon of modern culture: David Fincher‘s adaptation of

Palahniuk‘s first novel not only arose controversy, but it gradually became

immensely popular with a young audience and seems to maintain this status

even today. It remains one of the most quoted movies on the Internet, as it is

perpetually re-created and cited in various ways. The story and its characters

have become popular in the ways not many movies did1 and the way its fans

treat the story is commonly referred to as cult following. A great portion of the

popularity was understandably transferred also to the author of the original

novel himself and his other novels, which lead to creation of similar cult

following around his persona.2 Nowadays, Palahniuk has millions of devoted

fans and a rock star status.

Palahniuk‘s books are commonly read also by people who do not usually

read books. Attracting such a wide body of readers, he has become a

controversial figure as various kinds of readers constantly argue about true

1
Online stores are full of products with Fight Club motifs, Internet users present quotes from
the movie as their mottos; whole websites are dedicated to amateur artworks inspired by Fight
Club. To be discussed further in thesis.
2
Even his official fan-created website itself is titled ―The Cult: The Official Chuck Palahniuk
Website.‖

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nature of his writing – ―for some, his work represents mere shock literature,

deviant and aggressive with adolescent sensibility. For others, Palahniuk‘s

fiction speaks great truths about the nature of their lives, and for still others,

he‘s merely a ripping good read― (Sartain xvii). Since the cultural revolution

western society has gone through during past several decades effectively

blurred the historical dividing line between high and low culture, it is no longer

possible to assess the literary and artistic value of the form and content of his

writing, but using the scales applicable today one cannot deny the true nature

of literary activity - it is popular.

This diploma thesis has two objectives: First, to analyse Palahniuk‘s first

novel, Fight Club, using the characteristics of popular culture as described by

John Fiske in order to determine potential reasons why the novel has achieved

the high level of popularity among readers, which lead to establishing

Palahniuk‘s unique position within the literary scene of today. The second

objective is to follow the development of Palahniuk‘s writing and compare some

of the aspects of novels from his later writing periods with the first novel in

order to clarify how his works changed throughout the years.

The first chapter will provide basic information about Chuck Palahniuk

and his writing career, followed by a brief history of popular culture studies and

a subchapter focusing on John Fiske‘s book Understanding Popular Culture,

which will function as a theoretical basis for analysis of Fight Club. The second

chapter will focus on Palahniuk‘s writing style and techniques he uses to

increase the readability of his works. The third chapter will focus solely on the

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novel Fight Club and the analysis of its popular aspects as defined by John

Fiske, while the fourth chapter will analyse the development of Palahniuk‘s

writing, using the novels Lullaby, Rant and Tell-All as examples.

In order to be able to follow the development of Palahniuk‘s career from

the author‘s point of view, primarily his own words from numerous interviews

and public appearances will be used as a basis for the analysis in this thesis.

Moreover, since this thesis is primarily focused on the reasons for the success

of his writings, the analysis will concentrate more on the technical and external

aspects of his novels than on their exact ideological content.

1. Basic information

1.1 Chuck Palahniuk – a person

This chapter should serve as an introduction to Chuck Palahniuk as a

person in order to provide basic information about his life before he became a

successful author, since his experiences had a defining influence on the nature

of his writing (as will be demonstrated further in the thesis).

Charles Michael Palahniuk was born on February 21, 1962 in Pasco,

Washington into an economically underprivileged family. He spent his early

childhood living out of a mobile home in Burbank, Washington and later, after

his parents divorced, he and his siblings moved to their maternal grandparents‘

cattle ranch.

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 Palahniuk never got to know his father‘s parents as his grandfather shot

his grandmother dead during an argument over the cost of a sewing machine

while their son, Chuck‘s father, kept on watching from under a bed. This short

episode might serve as just a small example of not quite usual nature of his

family and his early life,3 which had a significant influence of his writing, as his

personal experience keeps on being reflected in all his works.4 Either way, it

was his parental grandparents who gave the origin to his unusual surname and

its nonstandard pronunciation – coming to the United states from Ukraine,

people were referring to them using just their first names, Paula and Nick,

which eventually became a legitimate surname, keeping its original

pronunciation (―paul-ah-nick‖, which is frequently mispronounced).

After graduating with a BA in journalism at the University or Oregon,

Palahniuk worked for a local newspaper, covering everything from school board

meetings to murders, but he eventually grew tired of it and started working as

a car mechanic, occasionally writing car-repair manuals. During these years he

was trying to live the most adventurous life Portland, Oregon provides with

available money, living in various cheap flats with friends and strangers,

drinking, driving, reading and playing endless pranks. Many of his experiences

and experiences of his friends from these years found their way into his novels,

3
He provides more details about his turbulent lifestyle in his non-fictional novels Non-Fiction
(2004) and Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon (2003), as well as the ways
they are reflected in his other novels.
4
Palahniuk incorporates a lot of his personal issues into his novels, often as a way of coming to
terms with certain situations. For example novel Lullaby (2002) was a result of personal
struggle with court trial with his father‘s murderer as Palahniuk was asked to be part of decision
as to whether he should receive the death sentence, therefore the pivotal motive ―What if
words could kill?‖ Moreover, many of the scenes from his childhood are transformed into scenes
in the novels – e.g. family robbing derailed trains late in the night in Invisible Monsters (1999).

8
either as an inspiration (e.g. ―Project Mayhem‖ in Fight Club is a reworked,

more violent version of Cacophony Society in which Palahniuk participated) or

as literary adaptations of the actual events (e.g. his friends stealing prescription

drugs from rich people in order to use them for their own needs, which is one

of the main motives of Invisible Monsters).

Having decided it was time to do something with his life, Palahniuk made

two important steps that eventually turned out to be defining moves for his

future career – firstly, he started working as an volunteer escort for terminally

ill patients, encountering death and the cruel reality of the lives of people

inevitably approaching death on the daily basis. This is a kind of experience

that not only inevitably changes the way a person perceives both living and

dying, but in this case also inspires Palahniuk to use the cruel reality of support

groups as an important structural element of Fight Club and later also Choke.

Moreover, he claims that he uses his novels as a means of dealing with the

cruellest moments of life5 and this experience made him face these moments

regularly and thus made him work out the techniques how not to be paralysed

by them, which he transfers into the novels.

Secondly, and more importantly, he moved from writing just to keep his

mind occupied while waiting for spare parts to attending an actual writers‘

workshop. At first very unsuccessfully, as his first attempted lengthy novel If

You Lived Here, You‘d Be Home Already not only failed with publishers and now

5
He claims that his novels are always about ―finding a way to laugh at really dark things that
would otherwise keep us paralyzed […] Finding some way to reinvent it in order to be able to
deal with it or at least not to be paralyzed by it‖ (―Stranger than Fiction Interview‖).

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Palahniuk usually refers to it as ―800 pages of garbage‖, but also the lady who

led the workshop asked him to stop attending as some members of the group
6
just did not feel safe with him in there. Instead, she recommended a

workshop called ―Dangerous writing‖ lead by Tom Spanbauer, who finally

directed Palahniuk‘s writing towards what it looks like today.7

Under Spanbauer‘s supervision Palahniuk moved from the ―many-

worded‖ writing to a much more streamlined, minimalistic style, which led to

the first few short stories publishable in magazines, among them a seven-page-

long story Fight club published in a compilation Pursuit of Happiness. It took

him three months to extend this to book-length and three days to sell it to W.

W. Norton for ―kiss-off money‖ (Fight club 216). Chuck Palahniuk was 34 years

old when his first novel was published. He was 36 when 20th Century Fox

released movie Fight Club, starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, after success

of which no publisher considered his novels too dark to be published anymore.

That applies also to Invisible Monsters (1999), now Palahniuk‘s popular classic,

which was refused as too disturbing couple years earlier.

These days Chuck Palahniuk, a bestselling author, is currently on a sold-

out book tour in United States, promoting his latest novel Damned, which was

published in October 2011 as his fourteenth book (twelfth novel). Damned

should be first part of a planned trilogy loosely based on Dante‘s Divine

Comedy.8 At the same time, he started actively cooperating with his own online

6
See ―Chuck Palahniuk: Tell-All‖ video.
7
Palahniuk‘s writing style will be analyzed more thoroughly in chapter 2
8
See ―Chuck Palahniuk Goes to Hell‖ interview.

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writers‘ workshop ―The Cult Writers‘ Workshop‖, providing its members with

essays on craft of writing itself and lately also reviewing selected stories by its

members.

1.2 Palahniuk’s writing career

Critics and the author himself usually characterize the writing of Chuck

Palahniuk as transgressive fiction, which is a genre that Palahniuk defined as

―fiction in which characters misbehave and act badly, so they commit crimes or

pranks as a way of either feeling alive, gaining a sense of personal power or as

a political acts of civil disobedience‖ (Postcards from the Future). More broadly

it can be defined as:

Genre of fiction in which characters feel limited by the expectations and

norms of society. The protagonists seek ways to break from those

boundaries past the limit of social acceptability, which often leads to

them appearing mentally ill, anti-social, or nihilistic. Most books of the

genre explore taboo subjects such as drugs, violence, sex, incest, crime,

pedophilia, or highly dysfunctional family relationships. (―Parliament

books‖)

This genre is commonly represented by writers like Bret Easton Ellis,

Irvine Welsh or Douglas Coupland. Often depicting the abovementioned

controversial topics using accessible forms of narration, these authors represent

a radical new generation of popular-democratic American literary tradition.

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Inspired by authors like Kurt Vonnegut and his openly satirical approach, they

provide social criticism in a manner that is accessible and attractive to the

audience, using the writing techniques similar to the ones used famously by the

authors like Ernest Hemingway or Jack Kerouac.9

The genre of transgressive fiction (at least in the form it was defined and

used by Palahniuk) was unofficially pronounced dead after the terrorist attacks

on September 11, 2001, after which most of the forms of civil disobedience,

which were typical for it, were regarded as generally unfavourable and most of

the publishers refused to publish novels displaying this kind of behaviour.10

Palahniuk commented on this change favourably: ―You can only stand on a

soap box and beat a drum for so long before you just turn it into a wallpaper.

Maybe it‘s time that societal commenting has to be charming, seductive and

really entertaining the way it had to be in 1940s and 50s‖ (Postcards From the

Future). This situation forms an obvious breakpoint in his writing career, as the

face of his novels started to change noticeably after 9/11.

The four books Palahniuk published before this date (Fight Club (1996),

Survivor (1999), Invisible Monsters (1999) and Choke (2001)) represent the

first period of his writing. These novels share a lot features in common and

might serve as typical representatives of the genre of transgressive fiction.

The characters of these novels are generally individuals, who have been

marginalized from their societies. They suffer from various kinds problems

9
Influence of these authors on this American literary tradition is briefly discussed in the chapter
2.1
10
Palahniuk talks about the death of the genre in Postcards From the Future and interview in
the essay collection Sacred and Immoral: On the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk, p.179.

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(physical, mental disorders, serious injuries, family issues, etc.) they are trying

to solve in rather uncommon, and often illegal, ways (stealing, pranks, acts of

terrorism). These novels are characterized by strongly cynical tone of narration,

non-linear plots and generally violent nature. These are the novels, which are

usually praised the most by the members of his fan-base.11

The novels published in the years after 2001 embody the change

towards a more entertaining and charming form of writing Palahniuk mentions

in the quote above. Lullaby (2002) and Diary (2003) still bear some

characteristics typical to his first novels (cynical tone, main character is an

outcast, non-linear plot12), but are not as violent in their nature anymore. The

subsequent novel Haunted (2005), the third book of this ―horror trilogy‖, is

Palahniuk‘s first significant experiment with narrative, as it consists of a frame

story incorporating 23 short stories, which are usually preceded by a free-verse

poem. The short stories generally create horrors about ordinary things of

everyday encounter, while in the first two horrors of the trilogy Palahniuk used

more traditional horror motives (killing poem and a conspiracy of inhabitants of

one island).

With the next novels Palahniuk moves to even more adventurous writing

experiments – Rant (2007) is an oral biography with features of science-fiction,

Snuff (2008) is a provocative novel narrated by four people, that was originally

supposed to be a play, Pygmy (2009) is an epistolary novel narrated by 13-year

11
As seems to be the case from various Internet discussions and comments of his readers.
These early novels usually are the first Palahniuk‘s books these readers encounter, typically
after seeing the movie Fight Club.
12
Though in Lullaby he already experiments with the plot structure and switches between two
lines of narrative.

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old exchange student in the USA, using an invented form of very broken

English, Tell-All (2010) is a fictionalized novel from the times of Golden Age of

Hollywood written in a manner of gossip columns of the time, while his most

recent novel Damned (2011) tells a story of a young girl, who wakes up in hell,

using the structure of Judy Blume novels. Damned is intended to be the first in

a trilogy of novels, which will copy the structure of the Divine Comedy.

Palahniuk also published two non-fiction books: a guidebook for the city

he used to live in, presenting interesting places and stories from his past -

Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon (2003) and Stranger Than

Fiction (titled Non-Fiction in some countries) (2004), which is a collection of

various essays, stories and interviews.

1.3 Popular culture studies

Popular culture is concept that came into existence as a result of

turbulent changes brought into society by the industrial revolution. According to

the British cultural theorist Jim McGuigan, the concept of popular culture was

first described by Gottfried Herder13 at the end of eighteenth century, when he

based its definition on the distinction between ―learned culture‖ and ―popular

culture‖. Popular culture here stood for ―Romantic reaction to Classicism, the

attempt to break with excessively formalistic, dry and unemotional art‖

(McGuigan 10) Since Herder saw this as recovering the impulses, spontaneity

and ―naturalness‖ of ordinary people, it was originally understood as some form

13
See McGuigan 10.

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of retreat from contemporary forms of national identity and reviving the

―folklore‖ aspects of the original groupings. This initially positive understanding

of the new cultural phenomenon, however, gradually changed: it came to be

understood as a cheap form of entertainment aimed at mass audience, which,

instead of reviving the bygone cultural traditions, quietly started forming

standardized opinions of its consumers.

These opinions were most famously expressed by members of the

Frankfurt School of critical theorists, most importantly by Theodor W. Adorno

and Max Horkheimer, whose critical studies remain one of the most widely

recognized popular culture studies even today. This is the case mainly for a

chapter from their book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), ―The Culture

Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception‖, where they coined the key term

―culture industry‖, which replaced the term ―mass culture‖ used in their earlier

works as they state that the popular forms of culture were not only radically

simplified in order to match the demands of the lowest common denominator,

but, moreover, these filtered and identical works can be as well produced

industrially. They present the opinion that ―cultural production has moved from

artisanal stage […] to an industrial stage. For them, the modern culture

industry produces safe, standardized products geared to the larger demands of

the capitalist economy.‖ (During 29)

Adorno and Horkheimer claim that ―the whole world is made to pass

through filter of the culture industry‖ (Adorno 126), which enables the liberal

democratic society to use capitalist media ―to manipulate the masses and

15
consumer culture to buy them off, thereby suppressing critical reason and

eliminating the possibilities of revolutionary social change‖ (McGuigan 47).

Openly criticizing this modern development in the field of culture they warn

against creating uniform society allowing the suppressed individuals only an

illusion of individuality that is carefully controlled. In their eyes thus popular

culture becomes capitalist system‘s tool for keeping the society in order the way

that is convenient to it. This opinion strongly resembles Antonio Gramsci‘s

concept of cultural hegemony, which refers to the ways dominant class block in

society constructs and sustains its leadership over subordinate groupings

through the means of consent.14

It is not only the political aspect of popular culture that Adorno and

Horkheimer criticize – they also focus on its actual form and content, setting

high and low forms of art into a sharp contrast, for which reason their studies

are often regarded as elitist. In their view the suppression of real individuality in

art led to situation, where the filtered forms of art ceased to anything but style,

as all the works are different only on the most superficial level. Popular culture,

which is presented as opposite of ―high art‖, and most of its modern forms,

including television, Hollywood movies, popular music and others are radically

rejected and as they serve for pure entertainment and their generally try to

portrait the world as seductively and realistically as possible, with no real depth.

For this reason Adorno and Horkheimer focus primarily on political aspects of

popular culture and reject possible artistic potential of the modern forms, as

well as possibility of any form of free will or participation of their consumers.

14
See McGuigan 63.

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 This possibility was more deeply investigated at the beginning of the

eighties by Michel de Certeau in Practice of Everyday Life (1980). Even though

popular culture is not the primary concern of the book, de Certeau still provides

an important new insight into this branch of studies, as he deals not only with

―strategies‖ of the producers, the structures of power, but also with ―tactics‖

consumers use in environment produced by dominant institutions. De Certeau

presents the act of consumption as another form of production, which is

manifested through various ways of using the products imposed by a dominant

economic order. Likening citizens of capitalist states to Native Americans, who

had no choice but to accept Spanish culture imposed on them, he presents

consumers as immigrants in system too vast to be their own and too tightly

woven for them to escape from it – instead, they transform property of

someone else just to borrow it for themselves. Practice of consumption of

popular culture thus becomes a practice of ―making do‖ with what is available.15

Though de Certeau‘s attitude towards contemporary forms of culture is

considerably more positive than Adorno‘s, he still presents them as useful and

functional means of ruling and forming the society. Unlike the German scholars,

de Certeau proposes and analyses possible forms of defence against these

strategies.

The shift towards more sympathetic form of popular culture studies was

brought by the beginning of the post-modern period and death of grand

narratives, when ―the distinction between high art and popular culture was lost

15
See de Certeau xi – xxiv.

17
because of the uncertainty which now surrounds establishing unequivocal

criteria for judging the value of cultural forms‖ (Watson 57). Blurring, or even

cancelling, the line between the high and the low simplified the radical

transformation of (popular) culture studies, where many scholars started to

carefully analyze these popular texts, some even admire them. This lead to

creating a new epoch in this field and dividing the studies into two contradictory

periods with diametrically different attitude to recent transformation of art.

―The major difference between these early writers and the contemporary

postmodern critics, is that the latter are celebrating these developments‖

(Watson 60).

The attitude of some of the contemporary critics might seem almost too

welcoming. What used to be a mass-produced, empty form of entertainment

for simple-minded masses now has become a cultural text worth detailed

analysis in order to better understand how we live. Furthermore, many of the

contemporary scholars started opposing the idea of single-minded, uniform and

blindly consuming mass society itself. British media scholar John Fiske very

clearly summarized his ideas concerning mass culture in the seventh chapter of

the book Understanding Popular Culture (1989):

Mass culture is a term used by those who believe that the cultural

commodities produced and distributed by the industries can be imposed

upon the people in a way that irons out social differences and produces

a unified culture for a passive, alienated mass audience. Such a process,

if it existed and it does not, would be anticultural and antipopular; it

18
 would be the antithesis of culture understood as the production and

circulation of meanings and pleasures, and of the popular as an

intransigent, oppositional, scandalous set of forces. There is no mass

culture, there are only alarmist and pessimistic theories of mass culture

that, at their best, can shed light only on the industrial and ideological

imperatives of the power-bloc, but none at all on the cultural processes

by which the people cope with them and either reject them or turn them

into popular culture. (176)

In this book and in its companion book Reading the Popular (1989) Fiske

provides an analysis of contemporary cultural texts and mainly their

consumption, building mostly on works by Michel de Certeau, but also Antonio

Gramsci, Roland Barthes and Pierre Bourdieu. Unlike them, he mostly ignores

political aspects of popular culture and provides almost no critique of the

practises and goals of the ruling power. Instead, he openly applauds the

popular texts, their ability to match the taste of the general public and mainly

the way the people ―make do‖ with what they are offered.

This approach was harshly criticized by British scholar Jim McGuigan,

who categorizes Fiske as a ―new revisionist‖, therefore a representative of the

approach defined by Philip Schlesinger as ―a collapse into subjectivism […] a

hermeneutic model of media consumption that forces a breach between

politico-economic arguments about the production of culture and the ways in

which it is consumed and interpreted‖ (qtd. in McGuigan 74). McGuigan sees

this kind of approach as symptomatic of a general trend of simple inversion of

the mass culture critique at its worst focusing plainly on popular readings,

19
which are applauded for no apparent reason.16 Even though he recognizes this

new revisionism as one of the latest trajectories of British cultural populism, he

refuses this approach by claiming that a proper analysis should avoid abjectly

uncritical complicity with the prevailing free market ideology and its hidden

powers.

Taking these imperfections of Fiske‘s approach into account, the author

of this thesis decided to use his book Understanding Popular Culture as a main

reference point for analysis of Palahniuk‘s writing, since the primary concern of

this thesis is supposed to be an answer to the question ―Why is Chuck

Palahniuk‘s writing as popular as it is?‖ and Fiske‘s analytic methods should

serve as a useful means for answering this, while works of other scholars might

be used to analyse political aspects of his writing.

1.4 John Fiske – Understanding Popular Culture (1989)

Even though Fiske does not deny the fact that popular culture promotes

a set of social values convenient for the ruling power (―white patriarchal

bourgeois capitalism‖), he states that it would not be possible to industrially

produce culture tailored to the needs and aims of ruling elite and impose it on

consumers. He claims that ―the people are not the helpless subjects of an

irresistible ideological system, but neither are they free-willed, biologically

determined individuals‖17 (44). He proposes a different understanding of

16
See McGuigan 70-75.
17
All quotations in this chapter will be from Understanding Popular Culture (1989), unless a
different source is stated.

20
popular culture that is created by constant struggle of these two sides and only

then becomes complete. He supports this claim by a quote from Stuart Hall‘s

studies of popular culture describing the mechanism of the power-relations:

―The people versus the power-bloc … Popular culture, especially, is organized

around the contradiction: the popular forces versus the power-bloc‖ (qtd. in

Fiske 28). Putting more stress on the consumers and mostly ignoring the

behaviour of the aforementioned power-bloc, Fiske‘s popular culture becomes

―the culture of the subordinated and disempowered‖ (4).

Building on studies by Michel de Certeau he describes the guerrilla

tactics the disempowered use to transform the provided culture to their aims

and turn it against the system. This ability to ―make do‖ becomes the most

important aspect of the popular culture and its consumers. Fiske devotes a

major part of the book to the analysis of how people transform the popular

texts and more importantly why do people choose to consume and

subsequently transform particular texts.

In order to determine the exact reasons why Palahniuk‘s works are

popular among broad body of readers this thesis will use Fiske‘s criteria for the

attractiveness of individual texts. It is therefore necessary to list the criteria

that might be useful for the analysis of Palahniuk‘s novels, particularly Fight

Club.

Throughout the book Fiske provides and analyses numerous principles

based on which people tend to choose the individual instances of cultural texts

and enjoy them. To determine these principles he uses various forms of popular

pleasures, since he claims that in order to be popular the text has to offer a

21
certain degree of pleasure. Achieving pleasure is the reason why people

consume the cultural texts in the first place, thus possibility of providing this

pleasure is the key determinant of the attractiveness of a text. Fiske describes

its formants this way: ―Pleasure results from this mix of productivity, relevance

and functionality, which is to say that the meanings I make from a text are

pleasurable when I feel that they are my meanings and the they relate to my

everyday life in a practical, direct way‖ (57).18

1.5 Relevance

Based on the definition above, the ability of the reader to relate to a

particular text seems to be the crucial condition for successful consumption of

the product and its closeness to its reader. It determines the ways and degree

to which the consumer can identify with it and thus becomes the primary

principle for attractiveness of popular text. Fiske states: ―Popular culture has to

be, above all else, relevant to the immediate social situation of the people.‖

(25) That is, if the popular text is to be attractive to a consumer, he or she

must be able to relate to it in some way and thus it has to be rooted in the

immediate reality and ―can never be radically free from the power structure of

the society within which it is popular.‖ (134) This brings us back to the

relationship of ruling power and consumer, because keeping to this principle a

popular text can never radically deny the social reality. It can oppose it, but

never deny it and thus it inevitably supports it.

18
All quotations in this chapter and its subchapters will be from Understanding Popular Culture
(1989), unless a different source is stated.

22
 Still, relevance is not measurable characteristic. It cannot be globalized

and can only be considered in individual cases. Fiske thus again moves from

general aesthetic criteria towards individual, almost indefinable characteristic.

―Unlike aesthetic criteria, those of relevance can be located only in the social

situation of the reader; they can reside in the text only as a potential, no a

quality. Relevance is a quality determined by and activated in the specifics of

each moment of reading‖ (130). Reading is the act of consumption that is

necessary in order to make the cultural text complete by relating it to the

individual experience of the reader through the individual ways of identifying

with it, which would not be possible in case the text were not any relevant to

the individual.

1.6 Pleasures

As long as the condition of relevance is met, there are numerous other

aspects by combination and transformation of which the actual pleasures are

created. Fiske presents popular pleasures in opposition to hegemonic ones. He

claims that ―popular pleasures arise from the social allegiances formed by

subordinated people, they are bottom-up and thus must exist in some

relationship of opposition to power […] that attempts to discipline and control

them‖ (49).

Fiske divides the pleasures into two main forms: evasion and

productivity. He instantly relates them to concepts of plaisir and jouissance by

Roland Barthes and produces a parallel in which he describes them through

both examples from everyday life and theories of scholars like Foucault,

23
Bakhtin, Bourdieu and Kant.

Evasive pleasures (paralleled with jouissance) are the offensive pleasures

―that occur at the moment of breakdown of culture into nature. It is a loss of

self and of the subjectivity that controls and governs the self – the self is

socially constructed and therefore controlled […] The loss of self is, therefore,

the evasion of ideology‖ (50). These forms of pleasure are primarily related to

body and they socially tend to cause offense and scandal.

On the other hand, productive pleasures (paralleled with plaisir) are

―centred around identity, social relations and [they] work socially through

semiotic resistance to hegemonic force‖ (56). They are related to producing

meanings and are involved with recognition, confirmation and negotiation of

social identity, which may or may not confront the dominant ideology. Fiske

stresses that the productive pleasures are pleasurable only because they are

produced by the individuals experiencing them.

All the characteristics determining the attractiveness of a particular

popular text are therefore result of influence activating one or both of the

aforementioned forms of pleasure. Fiske sum this up: ―Popular pleasures, then,

consist of both the producerly pleasures of making one‘s own culture and the

offensive pleasures of resisting the structures of domination‖ (58). Next several

paragraphs will shortly describe several of these aspects that might be

applicable on the novels of Chuck Palahniuk.

1.6.1 Evasive pleasures

As was already mentioned, the popularity of popular culture is closely

24
tied with power relations and the constant quiet struggle of consumers against

dominant ideology, as all of them share the experience of disempowerment and

subordination. Since the tightly woven system will not let the people escape

completely, they are looking for at least a temporal escape through the cultural

texts, which provide the feeling of evasion or experiences they are not able to

go through in real world. They are looking for the features of unrestricted

existence.

The most literal way to provide these pleasures is through the plot itself,

when an author provides these evasive or normally unachievable acts through

the behaviour of characters to which the reader can relate and therefore go
19
through these experiences himself.

One of the less obvious, yet more explicit, ways of representing these

evasive desires is violence, for general popularity of which Fiske provides social

rather than psychological explanation: ―Represented violence is popular

because it offers points of relevance to people living in societies where the

power and resources are inequitably distributed and structured around lines of

conflicting interests. Violence on television is a concrete representation of class

(or other) conflict in society‖ (134). He refuses the notion that the society and

its culture is more violent in its nature because of the in-born blood thirst of the

consumers, claiming that the true reason for popularity of the violent texts is

growing socioeconomic differences. Moreover, since violence represents a

metaphor for class and social conflict, it cannot be any kind of violence, but

19
Fiske describes several ways in which the consumer can relate to the consumed text,
applying these mechanics on examples of texts like television series Dallas and Prisoner, the
movie Rambo, the genre of romance novels, the pop singer Madonna and many others. Later in
this thesis they will be applied to Palahniuk‘s novels in a similar way.

25
obviously a form of violence to which the consumers can relate. Otherwise it

would not be any attractive to most of the audience.

Violence furthermore works as an example of excessive depiction, which

in itself, according to Fiske, represents an effective way of enabling an even

greater portion of the general audience relate to the situation depicted in this

way. To illustrate this, he uses stories from tabloid newspapers. He claims that

sensational stories deviating from the norm are pleasurable because they allow

the consumers to blame the system of their own failures (116). They

subsequently not only have something to relate to and find the story attractive,

but also are able to point-out the failures of the system and deviances from it,

which are of an counter-establishment nature in themselves.

1.6.2 Pleasures of the body

Several of the attractive features with which Fiske deals are related to

the pleasures of the body and aforementioned breakdown of the culture into

nature, which stands for freedom from the oppressive system. He comments on

the importance of body as a symbol: ―The body is an appropriate medium

through which to articulate the social experience of many subordinated and

oppressed groups in capitalism whose everyday sense of the social system is

not one of fairness and equality‖ (100). For these reasons (not only) patriarchal

capitalist systems started to intensively politicize body, which has become a

target of massive control. Fiske includes excerpts from studies by Foucault and

de Certeau, who have analysed the ways the system uses the body as a site for

26
exerting social power.

First he includes an example of bodily control through Christian church

that has traditionally defined the body as the ―terrain of the devil and a threat

to the purity and control of the soul‖ (90) and claims that later also law and

medicine has joined this approach in order to ―exercise social control through

disciplining the meanings and behaviours of the individual body‖ (91).20

Moreover, these traditional institutions were later joined by the capitalist

apparatus itself as it started to promote the idealized standards of physical

beauty of the body through advertisements. A modern ideal individual is not

only slim and well built, but also well dressed and clean. ―The meanings of

health are social and not physical, the meanings of beauty are political and not

aesthetic‖ (92). In order to achieve the pleasure of jouissance one has to

threaten these standardized ideals and step outside what is allowed. Fiske

mentions two ways a body can escape social control – either through pleasure

or through pain.

Even though sexuality might be the first connotation with body

pleasures, Fiske barely mentions this extremely broad topic as a potentially

attractive feature of a cultural text. Nevertheless, sexual content obviously still

figures as a useful means of attracting audience, even despite considerable

liberating effects of sexual revolution in past several decades.

Instead, Fiske decides to discuss different liberating aspects that might

be successful with the audience (and which might also be useful for analysis of

20
The law uses a body as a terrain for punishing the unpermitted behaviour, while medicine
uses it to impose social norms of physical and mental health on the individual.

27
Palahniuk‘s works). He explains them on an example of a wrestling match:

Firstly, it is pain itself, which in a certain situations ceases to be a form

of punishment and works as a means for stepping outside the system. During

the wrestling match it becomes ―an inversion of social norms, a liberating

moment from normality, a symbolic statement of desire for freedom from social

control that the terrified social order can never extinguish or finally discipline‖

(95). In these situations might pain, usually perceived as means of punishment,

become an attractive aspect, mainly when it is associated with already

mentioned violence.

By comparing wrestling with ―cleaner‖, socially acceptable forms of

entertainment, Fiske is able to point out another of the evasive pleasures

allowing the consumer to take a step away from the limiting system – dirt.

―Cleanliness is order – social, semiotic, and moral […] – so dirt is disorder, is

threatening and undisciplined‖ (99). General dirtiness is something that is

typical of lower classes and opposed, feared by the elite. It is a loss of control

and it leads for disorder. Moreover, it represents the return to the natural state.

Few of the consumers would prefer to live in dirt and disorder, but they

generally enjoy consuming it at least in this symbolic state representing a threat

to the order imposed on them.

1.6.3 Productive pleasures

Fiske introduces concept of a producerly text based on Barthes‘s

28
categorization of texts as writerly and readerly.21 This new, third category

figures is a combination of the two – a popular writerly text, which is easy to

read and understand, but still lets the readers choose the meaning for

themselves. ―The producerly has the accessibility of readerly one, […] but it

also has the openness of writerly. The difference is that it does not require this

writerly activity, nor does it set the rules to control it‖ (104). It is the kind of

text that enables for popular production and therefore leads to the

aforementioned productive pleasures. This characteristic of the text is obviously

necessarily related to the condition of relevance – for the text to provide the

productive pleasure it not only has to enable the reader to relate to it, but also

stimulate them to make their own sense of it and provide enough freedom to

do it.

The freedom that producerly text provides, as Fiske notes, might be one

of the crucial elements making the difference in popularity of classical literature

and simpler forms of entertainment – since the popular forms of entertainment

usually do not provide the consumer with detailed information and prefer

showing to telling, the reader is easily able to transfer the signs into a meaning

that is closer to them. ―Showing the obvious leaves the interior unspoken,

unwritten; it makes gaps and spaces in the text for the producerly reader to fill

from his or her social experience and thus to construct links between the text

and that experience‖ (122).

Using de Certeau‘s concept of consumption as another form of

21
Readerly text – closed, undemanding, presenting clear meaning, reserved for popular writing;
Writerly text – constantly challenges the reader to rewrite it, make sense of it.

29
production (de Certeau xii), Fiske discusses the stage of consumption

characterised by active, enthusiastic participation of the consumer: the

consumer becomes a fan. ―Fandom is characterized by two main activities:

discrimination and productivity. Fans draw sharp and intolerant lines between

what, or who, they are fans of and what they are not‖ (147).

This way of active participation in a popular text not only enables

consumers to become part of community and define their identity, but also

leads to various forms of self-presentation. These activities range from

decorating one‘s room with posters, through wearing garments with motives

from the favourite popular text, to imitating the lifestyle of the characters or the

author himself. These modes of behaviour to might serve to different purposes

like creating personal image in front of the others, finding one‘s place in society

through community of fans or achieving the feeling of having found one‘s

identity through the particular text – all of them favourable to the consumer

and thus potentially leading to greater popularity and enjoyability of the

particular text.

Fiske furthermore presents one more productive pleasure involved with

this active participation – bricolage. He defines this term by words of Claude

Lévi-Strauss as act of creative combination of materials and resources at hand

to make objects, signs or rituals that meet their immediate needs (qtd. in Fiske

150), which, again, leads to de Certeau‘s practice of ―making do‖ through which

the subordinated make their own culture out of the resources of the ―other‖.

Fiske includes numerous examples of these practices executed by various

groups of fans that go to great lengths to produce imitations and adaptations of

30
the original text, texts that represent the missing parts of the original or various

objects with motives from the particular text. These practices generally tend to

provide the consumer with even greater creative pleasure through allowing him

not only to relate to the original text, but also to express oneself.

This brief overview of some of the popular pleasures and potentially

attractive aspects of popular texts described by John Fiske shall serve as a list

of characteristics traceable in Palahniuk‘s works in order to provide explanation

for widespread popularity of his writing. These criteria will be considered mainly

for his first novel, analysis of which will be subsequently compared with

characteristics of his later novels, in order to both determine their popularity

and study the development, which his writing has undergone.

2. Writing style

2.1 Literary tradition

The subchapter on the writing style of Chuck Palahniuk is based mainly on the

way he himself presented it in various interviews, public readings and essays, in

which he usually mentions only influence of Tom Spanbauer and Amy Hempel,

possibly Katherine Dunn, as he generally tends to focus on more contemporary

authors. These authors are obviously working out of tradition of the writers

from earlier periods of mostly American literature, who were inspired by aspects

of earlier British literature. Palahniuk‘s answers to questions about literature

asked by journalists make it obvious that he is aware of the this tradition,22 but

22
e.g. see Sartain 182.

31
he rarely mentions its influence as he clearly prefers to relate his writing more

to imitating the aspects of real life than to literary traditions, with exception of

often-mentioned minimalism. Not to ignore this literary tradition in this thesis,

this subchapter will include a very brief overview of crucial authors that shaped

democratizing tendencies within American literary tradition.

The first of the important American authors that started to adjust his writing in

order to make it accessible to broader body of readers was undoubtedly Mark

Twain. Being a former journalist, he projected influences of journalistic practice

into his works and considerably improved their readability. In order to portray

the life at American south veritably and make the characters speak like real

people, he started to employ more colloquial language, making use of local

dialects and regional accents. Besides that he managed to build his writing

around distinctively American themes and set it in distinctively American

environment. His works are, moreover, notable for they usage of humour and

satire, which was lead to even greater popularization of his writing. Mark Twain

may be rightfully regarded as a pioneer of popular-democratic American literary

tradition.

Another important figure in this tradition is Ernest Hemingway, whose

innovative journalistic approach to literature has had a decisive influence on

next generations of American writers. Having witnessed the horrors of the

World War II in Europe, Hemingway concluded that the abstract language was

not effective enough and decided to base his writing on economic, understating

32
approach. Calling his style the ―iceberg theory‖23 Hemingway tended to express

the crucial information indirectly through the form of dialogue, action or

omissions, so the readers have to figure out the meaning themselves, thus both

keeping the text simple and forming more intensive emotions.

Jack Kerouac, a Beat novelist and poet, moved this tradition further towards

contemporary face of American literature. His spontaneous prose in the form of

unedited record of mostly actual events had considerable impact on the

approach to the topics literature portrayed. Kerouac was considered literary

iconoclast by many of his contemporaries as he started to cover the topics that

were considered to be taboo in literature, like promiscuity, drugs, spirituality

and others. Breaking the rules of literary writing and becoming a respected

writer he enabled for further development of literary genres covering formerly

forbidden topics.

Another of the great names of the American literature that should be included

into list of the authors that had defining influence on the tradition, out of which

Palahniuk is writing, is Kurt Vonnegut. Known for his absurdist humour, science

fiction topics and wide array of postmodernist techniques, Vonnegut provided a

very open, harsh, yet entertaining critique of the contemporary world. Due to

his satirist and rebellious approach to writing he is often considered to have a

defining influence on genre of transgressive fiction.

23
―the facts float above water, the supporting structure and symbolism operate out of sight‖
(Baker 117)

33
The aforementioned authors, either due to their innovative style or approach to

the discussed topics, represent certain landmarks in the development of the

literary tradition that allowed for later formation of the genre of transgressive

fiction. What do they share in common both with each other and with the

authors of transgressive fiction is certain democratic approach that made their

works available to the readers. This tendency was obviously always shaped by

the conditions in which their works were written. As will be demonstrated

further in this thesis, nature and form of Palahniuk‘s writing in a similar manner

reflects the period in which it was produced and might thus be seen as one of

the directions, in which this tradition was further developed.

2.2 Palahniuk’s writing style24

The way Chuck Palahniuk writes is undoubtedly one of the crucial

reasons for his success with younger readers and that including those who

usually do not read any books. These people tend to prefer different forms of

entertainment that the hi-tech modern world provides and find reading too

slow, too complicated, too boring. Still, these people represent a considerable

portion of Palahniuk‘s readers25 and this is possible only due to an accessible

form of writing that is simple and dynamic enough to compete with the

24
This chapter concerns with the general characteristics of the writing style Palahniuk utilizes in
most of his books and does not mention various language experiments that became typical of
his later novels. These experiments will be discussed separately.
25
As seems to be the case based on various online discussions, where many people confess
Palahniuk‘s books are actually the only books they read. The author himself commented on this
trend on several occasions (e.g. Postcard from the Future) and tries to encourage these fans to
read more through promoting other authors on his website, during public readings, etc.

34
audiovisual forms of entertainment. Attracting these kinds of readers was his

intention from early on, as he stated in a documentary Postcards from the

Future: The Chuck Palahniuk Documentary (2003): "My commitment, when I

started writing was to write the kind of books that would bring the people back

from music videos, from video games, back from movies and television and

would serve them in the way that all those other forms of entertainment were

serving them."

As already noted, it took him some time to find the proper means to

attract readers, as his early attempt on long horror novel in a manner of greatly

popular Stephen King26 was just a ―reeking waste of trees‖, as he called it

recently.

His unsuccessful attempts to please publishers and rejection from the

first writers‘ workshop he attended made Palahniuk to change approach. He

made a decision to write just for fun and make the process of writing the

reward itself.27 Combination of the process of simply jotting down funny stories

from the parties and advices of Tom Spanbauer enabled Palahniuk to adjust his

writing style to the form that can be seen in his first successful books.

It was Tom Spanbauer who had a defining influence on Palahniuk‘s style.

He was the one who very openly informed him about the nature of his writing

and proposed the solution. As Palahniuk reports, Spanbauer literally said: ―Why

don‘t you just write the way you talk? Because your writing really sucks. You‘re

26
Not much is known about Palahniuk‘s first attempted novel, since it is not available to public.
He only stated that it was a lengthy horror copying Stephen King, which did not go well and
these days he commonly refers to it by various derogatory names.
27
See ―Chuck Palahniuk‘s speech at Grub Street writer conference.‖

35
a really, really bad writer, but you can tell stories, so why don‘t you write the

way you tell stories.‖28 Oral-based language has become Palahniuk‘s new policy

in writing.

After he started transforming stories he was told by the people at

various parties and imitating the language they use, his writing acquired the

feel that is much closer to wide public and thus much more accessible – looking

for inspiration everywhere from parties through bars all the way to hospitals,

Palahniuk started to analyze the way people try to ―sell‖ their stories to their

listeners and imitate this style on the paper. ―Telephone sex lines, illness

support groups, twelve-step groups, all these places are schools for learning

how to tell a story effectively. Out loud. To people. Not just to look for ideas, 29

but how to perform‖ (Non-Fiction xx).

To achieve this dynamism that makes the verbal story telling attractive

and accessible he started to put stress on verbs, paratactic style and fast pace

of plot, just presenting the action, not commenting on it extensively:

One thing I don't care for, that really angered me, was fiction that just

plodded along, and would spend a whole chapter discussing the color of

an orange or someone waiting for their tea to cool enough that they

could drink it. I was like, "screw this", I wanted fiction based on verbs,

rather than a fiction based on adjectives. I get into enough description

as I can to get by, but I really think that's the reader's privilege to fill in

the blanks and I'll handle the verbs. (―DVDtalk interview‖)

28
See Postcards from the Future.
29
Ideas and stories picked up to be analyzed in next chapters.

36
 Here Palahniuk‘s previous experience starts to play an important role,

since one of the tools that enables him to draw his writing closer to reality is his

knowledge from studies of journalism. Kenneth MacKendrick claims that

―Palahniuk‘s work is thoroughly versed in tone, style, and genre of the New

Journalists‖ (MacKendrick 1) and the author himself agrees: ―Journalism made

me a good minimalist‖ (―Creed of Chucky‖).

MacKendrick points out an obvious parallel between approaches and

critical reception of Palahniuk and the codifier of the term New Journalism, Tom

Wolfe, who defined this new approach as ―some sort of artistic experiment‖

(Wolfe 23) intended to replace outdated ―totem journalism‖ with a kind of

writing that would be more fitting to the new social conditions and would allow

the reader to participate in the story by acting in it themselves ―The New

Journalist 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‖ (MacKendrick 10). This effect is achieved by enriching

journalistic writing with literary techniques, while several decades later Chuck

Palahniuk ends up doing the same thing the other way round – he applies

journalistic techniques into fiction,30 or ―fiction‖ as he himself claims ―It‘s hard

to call any of my novels ‗fiction‘‖ (Non-Fiction xvii). This is mainly due to the

fact that most of his early novels were formed to a certain degree by reshaping

30
This approach was, obviously, applied by many authors before (most notably by Ernest
Hemingway). MacKendrick points out the parallel between Palahniuk and New Journalists
mainly due to the similarly controversial reception and Palahniuk‘s common referring to the
influence of journalism on his writing (―So much of what I do is just journalism. […] Tattle-
tailing, I prefer to call it‖(―Agony Column interview 2005‖).)

37
and combining real-life stories he was told by other people.

As far as writing technique itself is concerned, MacKendrick comments,

approaches of New Journalism proposed by Wolfe31 are greatly overlapping

with form of minimalism taught by Tom Spanbauer (who claims he learnt it

from Gordon Lish). ―Dangerous writing‖ techniques that Tom Spanbauer

teaches in the already mentioned workshop are described in Palahniuk‘s essay

―Not Chasing Amy‖ in the collection Stranger than Fiction: True Stories (2004,

titled Non-Fiction in the United Kingdom & Australia), where he demonstrates

them on a short story by his beloved Amy Hempel.

First of the tricks he mentions is ―horses‖ which is Spanbauer‘s code

word for choruses. These are inseparable part of every Palahniuk‘s novel: short

phrases and formulas repeated with slight changes every once in a while both

unify the fast-running plot and, at the same time, gradually build the general

theme of the story. To include just few examples of ―horses‖, we may mention

now notorious rules of Fight club,32 ―Sorry Mom, Sorry God‖, fashion magazine-

like ―Jump to …‖ and ―Give me [smile, sexi, amnesia, new parents, etc.]. Flash.‖

throughout Invisible Monsters (1999) or ―These [sound-oholics, quiet-ophobics,

etc.]‖ and repeated class-action lawsuit ads throughout Lullaby (2002) – these

are just few of the motives that Palahniuk frequently repeats, using different

ones for every novel.

Repetition is a phenomenon that ―permeates nature, human life, the

various arts (music, painting, dance, literature) and many disciplines

31
See MacKendrick 13.
32
See Fight Club 50.

38
(philosophy, psychoanalysis, history, education, communication theory,

linguistics, poetics)‖ (Rimmon-Kenan 151), where it serves numerous functions.

Rooted in the pre-textual and pre-oral cultures, repetition used to be a

fundamental element of communication, learning and entertainment and in

many ways it preserves this function even today. In literature the smaller

formulaic repetitions, like the choruses Palahniuk uses, are comfortingly

stabilizing, while longer repetitions of patterns tend to provide a cross-

reference.33 By repeating the forms and patterns the author is able to establish

some kind of ritual with the reader. Palahniuk commented on choruses: ―I use

choruses, because human beings use choruses. […] We do this. We sort of

create these little landmark phrases that mark shared experience with each

other‖ (―Agony Column interview – 2005‖). This feeling of shared experience

enables him to create a bond between the book and its reader.

In the same interview, he mentioned another function of these repeated

choruses: ―It‘s a way of acknowledging previous plot points […] you turn them

into a chorus or a phrase and then you just refer back to all the emotions of

that previous moment with that really short phrase. Human being do it, so I do

it in my writing‖ (―Agony Column interview – 2005‖). The repetition, in this case,

serves as another tool transforming the experience of real-life interpersonal

communication into a written text, which is, as already mentioned, one of the

landmark approaches Palahniuk uses in his writing style.

In the afterword of the republished version of Fight Club Palahniuk notes

that in his first books choruses were used mainly as a signal of jumping to a

33
See Maguire 113.

39
new angle or aspect of the story and hold these aspects together without

disturbing the reader too much. ―A bland kind of buffer that would be a

touchstone or landmark a reader would need to not feel lost. A kind of neutral

sorbet, like something served between courses in a fancy diner. A signal, like

buffer music in radio broadcasts, to announce the next topic. The next jump‖

(Fight Club 213). Using this technique in the subsequent books he obviously

managed to find more convenient aspects of the choruses and even though his

writing style was gradually changing, the ―horses‖ appear very noticeably in

each of his novels throughout the whole writing career.

Another important writing technique Palahniuk mentions in the essay is

―recording angel‖, which means reporting without explicit judging or

commenting, which, again, noticeably, resembles journalistic writing and

Hemingway‘s ―iceberg theory described in the chapter 2.1. He explains:

―Nothing is fed to the reader as ‗fat‘ or ‗happy.‘ You can only describe actions

and appearances in a way that makes a judgment occur in the reader‘s mind.

Whatever it is, you unpack it into the details that will reassemble themselves

within the reader‖ (Non-Fiction 144). In one of the online discussions he

himself admits that it was journalism studies that enabled him to employ this

technique effectively: ―Studying journalism is the same quest for objectivity so

"recording angel" came a little easier to me than it does a lot of writers‖

(―Washington Post – Lullaby‖).

Palahniuk uses this technique extensively and generally tends to avoid

accumulating adjectives even when describing a scene or introducing a

character. He defines the situation in short, providing an important illustrative

40
detail for readers to create the image for themselves. For example, at the

beginning of Invisible Monsters he describes a scene at a wedding where house

is set on fire and bride, a fashion model, shots another fashion model with a

shotgun. Main character Shannon, a former fashion model and a friend of both

abovementioned characters, watches the situation, the blood staining an

expensive suit jacket, and confesses: ―It‘s not that I‘m some detached lab

animal just conditioned to ignore violence, but my first instinct is maybe it‘s not

too late to dab club soda on the bloodstain‖ (13). This is the first line by which

Palahniuk characterizes Shannon and the mindset of a woman whose whole life

consisted of showing off in expensive clothes. This way he is able not only to

introduce a character in as few words as possible, but also achieves more

authenticity with a reader. Steve White explains why this is more effective than

providing detailed description of both her looks and mind:

If you tell the readers something, they‘ve no reason to believe you. But

if you ‗show,‘ if you describe the details of your story‘s reality as a

‗recording angel‘ or a ‗transparent eyeball,‘ the readers will draw their

own conclusions. And you‘ll have tremendous authority as an author.

Because readers will always believe their own conclusions. (Novel Dog)

This involvement of the reader is moreover strengthened by including

the reader in the novel itself through the means of metafiction. Again, we may

use the very beginning of Invisible Monsters as an example. The book starts

with: ―Where you‘re supposed to be is some big West Hills wedding reception in

a big manor house with flower arrangements and stuffed mushrooms all over

41
the house. This is called scene setting: where everybody is, who‘s alive, who‘s

dead‖ (11). Even though Palahniuk replaces concrete descriptive adjectives with

words like ―some big‖ and breaks the archaic literary rules by addressing reader

directly and naming the literary aspect itself in a manner of post-modern

literature, he is able to create a believable setting by indirectly forcing the

reader to imagine it exactly the way it is most natural for them. The same way

of addressing the reader is commonly utilized throughout Fight Club: famously

for example in the recipes for home-made explosives (―Mix the nitro with

sawdust, and you have a nice plastic explosive‖ (12)) or when just generally

referring to social reality of the reader (―You do the little job you‘re trained to

do. Pull a lever. Push a button‖ (12)).

Another technique to involve a reader Palahniuk mentions in ―Not

Chasing Amy‖ is ―writing on the body‖ or evoking a physical response in the

reader, involving them ―on a gut level‖ – ―You don‘t have to hold the reader by

both ears and ram every moment down their throat. Instead, story can be a

succession of tasty, smelly, touchable details‖ (Non-Fiction 145). This technique

works on a very similar principle as the principle before, but the details are

purposely aimed at fueling reader‘s imagination in connection with their own

body. Example from Fight Club: ―With a gun stuck in your mouth and barrel of

the gun between your teeth, you only talk in vowels‖ (13). This kind of an

unusual detail forces the reader to process it, apply it on their own body and

thus create an emotional reaction, even if unconsciously.

In this essay, Palahniuk does not mention another element that has

become a trademark of his writing – factoids. Shortly formulated facts with

42
often hardly provable reliability can be found randomly included in each of his

novels. They are situated seemingly at random and usually provide trivial

information from history, nature or science that relate to the content of a

particular novel. In Fight Club it is the recipes for explosions, Survivor includes

tips for home chores,34 in Snuff it is sex-related trivia from history and various

facts from history of Hollywood,35 in Diary it is factoids from history of art,36

etc. Though most of the information can barely be confirmed and in many

cases might seem unbelievable, the author claims that they are true at least up

to his knowledge: ―My journalist's bogey is that if I'm going to use it as a non-

fictional device, it has to be true, as far as I can research it. All the trivia is

true‖ (―A.V. Club interview‖). Several years after this claim, he, however,

confessed to inventing some of the facts in later novels.37

Palahniuk uses these pieces of information not only to entertain, but also

to strengthen the connection between the book and reality and thus enable the

reader to relate to it. MacKendrick comments on this technique in his essay:

―When he incorporates facts into his novels they present historical or scientific

details that key the reader into a stable world‖ (MacKendrick 11). Palahniuk

employs this technique not only through the factoids. In many of his novels he

includes references to actual places, people and events in order to set the

34
―To get lipstick out of a collar, rub in a little white vinegar‖ (Survivor 263).
35
―According to the British anthropologist Catherine Blackledge, the human fetus begins to
masturbate in the womb a month before birth‖ (Snuff 23).
36
―In art school, you learn that Leonardo da Vinci‘s painting, the Mona Lisa, it 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).
37
This is the case mostly for Tell-All. See ―Agony Column interview 2010.‖

43
narrative as firmly in reality as possible and make the invented story more

veritable. ―In a way, I want to make the incredible plausible by burying it in

non-fiction stuff. Make the little tiny details all true, so people will believe the

really big, outlandish stuff‖ (―A.V. Club interview‖). This approach plays an

important role for example in novels Rant and Tell-All, which will be discussed

later in this thesis.

All these techniques together contribute to an ultimate goal of

minimalism – to tell more by writing less. ―Less becomes more. Instead of the

usual flood of general details, you get a slow drip of single-sentence

paragraphs, each one evoking its own emotional reaction‖(Non-Fiction 145).

MacKendrick sees this fast-paced writing as a functional means for literature

that has to compete with video games and the Internet. He, again, parallels

Palahniuk with New Journalists who had to compete with television and

electronic media, but as these have been around for several decades by now, it

is time to gear up and keep the tempo with the technological development.

The preference of fast and short forms is apparent also in the structure

of the novels themselves – Palahniuk‘s writing is obviously very short story

based. Individual chapters usually stand for separate episodes and might

remind reader of several short stories linked into a novel. This is the case

mostly in Haunted (2005), which is literally a collection of various short

stories linked together by a framing story of the people who tell these

short stories, but most of his novels fall into a similar pattern, even if less

obviously.

There are several reasons why short stories are an important

44
element of his fiction. Firstly, it was the literary form that enabled him to

be published as he found it impossible to find a publisher with his

imperfect lengthy first novel. Moreover, after having several of the short

stories published he found out that he can easily write bridging scenes to

link these stories into actual novels, which were much easier to sell to an

agent as long as several of their chapters have already been successfully

published in literary magazines.38 He continued with this practice even

with his later novels when he did not have to struggle to find a publisher

and readership. He carries on regularly writing and publishing short

stories even nowadays. On several occasions he claimed: "Short stories

have always been really my highest priority." (―Speech at Grub Street writer

conference‖).

Another, more important reason, is obviously Tom Spanbauer‘s

influence. It was under his guidance that Palahniuk moved from eight-

hundred-paged novels to seven-page-long short stories. On one of the

public readings Palahniuk presented Spanbauer‘s teaching philosophy:

‘If you can't do it in seven pages, you sure as hell can't do it in seven

hundred.‘ So seven pages was the ideal length for a story. And seven

pages, I could keep that hidden at work and I could pull that out and

line edit it in work at any time I wanted to. You could put seven pages

underneath a track manual and no one will ever find it. (―Speech at

38
See ―Speech at Grub Street writer conference‖.

45
 Grub Street writer conference‖)

This way he could carry on writing even when in work, just to keep his

mind occupied during the long breaks between individual repairs, working on

short stories and carefully editing them the way they would constantly hold the

attention of other members of the workshop for whom he had to read them

aloud, which was another Spanbauer‘s strategy how to analyze a story. All the

stories had to be short enough to be read aloud in full and analyzed word after

word. This way the students were able to both keep the story ―dangerously‖

dynamic and pay full attention to every word. Concerning the function and

benefits of reading the work aloud Palahniuk stated in an interview:

By reading out loud you instantly find out where you've overwritten,

where the energy starts to fade. [...] I know the purpose of each

sentence and in the workshop where I started Tom Spanbauer would

stop us and would say 'Ok, why did you chose that word?' And at any

point in your presentation you might be stopped and forced to make a

case for even the smallest aesthetic choices. So you really had to reason

them out even before you put them on the page. (―Agony Column

Interview 2010‖)

This practice pushed Palahniuk‘s writing style even closer to imitation of

the oral forms of presentation, as he was advised earlier on. Moreover, with

these readings occasionally taking place in various sports bars or pool halls, he

regularly had a chance to confront his writing with laic general public, who do

46
not usually care for literature at all. Minimalistic approach obviously proved to

be a tool that allows to produce literature that is successful also with this kind

of a (non-)reader. And that applies not only through the aforementioned

techniques, but also through the general simplicity of the structure. On one of

the public readings Palahniuk commented on minimalism and its structure:

You really keep your elements really paired down. [...] You do the very

most you can do with very minimal number of elements. And this

includes your objects as well as your characters and your settings. That

instead of introducing new things ongoingly and loosing energy every

time you have to lapse into description of this another new thing, you

keep things simple so that things acquire greater sort of energy as you

see them again and again in different circumstances. (―Chuck Palahniuk:

Tell-All‖ video)

This quote, which provides yet another explanation to the

aforementioned issue of repetition, may be used to sum up Palahniuk‘s

minimalistic clinging to shortness and dynamics as key technical elements of

writing serving to make his writing more accessible and attractive to broader

body of readers. Again, this approach might be considered to be post-modern

in its nature as it directly opposes to the pre-modern literary tendency to use

the literature as a tool for distinguishing the ―art-enabled‖ elite from the ―art-

challenged‖ rest. For this reason we may classify the formal aspects of his

writing as non-artistic based on the classical criterions. On the other hand,

Palahniuk never claimed to have any artistic tendencies, but he expressed a

47
desire to write novels that would bring the young ones back to reading and this

precise form proved to be successful means for fulfilling this wish.

3. Fight Club (1996)

The first four novels by Chuck Palahniuk represent a separate period of

his writing – these are the novels published before the terrorist attacks in New

York and Washington that reportedly killed the transgressive fiction. As these

books were written before 9/11, they generally still bear the typical features of

this genre, as their characters utilize various forms of civil disobedience as

means for achieving personal freedom or feeling of being alive. The

characteristic features of these novels will be exemplified upon his first novel,

Fight Club (1996), which seems to bear the most of the typical features of this

period of the author‘s writing career. At the same time, this novel remains his

best-known work and has a defining influence on his popularity. For this

reason, this novel will be analyzed separately and the elements of the popular

fiction mentioned by John Fiske will be considered more thoroughly, since Fight

Club is usually the piece of writing that brings the readers to reading

Palahniuk‘s other works. This situation is mainly a consequence of the popular

success of its motion picture adaptation directed by David Fincher, which lead

to creating the aforementioned cult following and growing interest about the

original novel.39

39
e.g. The very first comment concerning the novel on website amazon.com: ―Like many, I had
heard of the book "Fight Club" after seeing the movie.‖ The movie represented the breakpoint
in Palahniuk‘s career, since it presented an otherwise unknown novel to the general audience.

48
 The basic narrative of the novel depicts a nameless narrator suffering

from insomnia due to frequent business trips. Desperate in his struggle with the

illness, he finds his ease in attending support groups for terminally ill. Here he

unconsciously creates an idealized alter-ego, Tyler Durden, with whom he

founds Fight Club – a gradually growing group of men meeting in basements

just to fight each other and thus feel powerful and free for several minutes.

Fight club gradually turns into Project Mayhem, whose main purpose is to use

public assaults and pranks to draw people‘s attention to inequalities of the

capitalist, consumerist society. When the project gets out of hand, the

nameless narrator realizes that Tyler is in fact just a product of his mind, living

while he thought he was sleeping, and tries to stop the project. Even though

the ending is unclear, he obviously fails in this attempt.

This novel is based on the original seven-page-long short story about a

club where one can ask the other attendees for a fight, which was Palahniuk‘s

first published literary attempt.40 As he saw it was successful, Palahniuk

collected various real stories he overheard on parties with friends and wrote a

framing story that would make them into a full novel. The stories usually

concern various pranks his friends played out of combination boredom and

personal rebellion against the society. From various reactions Palahniuk

described on many occasions it is obvious that these stories were of great

success with the readers, since many of them confessed that they and their

40
He later used this story as chapter 6 of the novel: See Fight Club 215.

49
peers tend to behave in similar ways41 and were excited about having a chance

to read about them in a fiction book.

Since Palahniuk set the plot of the novel among the young blue-collar

workers dissatisfied with the lives they live and filled it with true stories, great

many of the readers found it easy to relate to the book, mainly with the angry

young men, who form a considerable part of every generation. As mentioned,

Fiske considered relevance of the cultural text to its consumer the crucial

element for determining its potential success with consumers42 - reactions of

the Fight Club fans published on the Internet seem to point at relevance of the

story to their immediate experience as to one of the defining characteristics of

the story (both the novel and movie).43 This was pointed out also by the author

of one of the essays on Fight Club: ―Judging by the online reviews and posts at

cites like Amazon.com and The Cult, many fans emphasize how strongly they

relate‖ (Kavadlo12).

In order to facilitate the identification with the main character Palahniuk

combines frequent usage of the second person narrative (already discussed in

the chapter about his writing style) with a nameless narrator telling the story

from his prospective. The narrator is sometimes referred to as Joe,44 which

41
Including David Fincher, who used to slice porno movies into family movies during his part-
time job as projectionist, and many other stories Palahniuk uses to entertain his audience at
public readings. Examples in: Non-Fiction 213, Fight Club 215, etc.
42
―popular culture has to be, above all else, relevant to the immediate social situation of the
people‖ (Understanding Popular Culture 25)
43
Examples of a typical online statement about relevance of Fight Club: ―Whether consciously,
or subconsciously, the average ‗Generation X' male of modern society can relate to and
understand Fight Club, which makes both the novel and motion picture such an important
proclamation regarding the state of our modern culture‖; ―I can relate to Fight Club 100%.‖
44
Due to its usage in one of the choruses based on medical magazines, where internal organs
talk about themselves in the form of first person narrative (―I am Joe‘s prostate‖(58)), where

50
stands for a common phrase ―regular Joe‖ or ―average Joe‖ used to refer to an

average citizen of the United States. The author portrays him as a dissatisfied

white young man, who spends most of his time working for a big company,

does not have enough excitement in his life, spends his money buying products

he is offered in advertisements and generally feels alone.

Palahniuk characterized the struggle with loneliness as one of the

defining and unifying motives of his writing in general: ―If you haven‘t already

noticed, all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to

connect with other people‖ (Non-Fiction xv). He defines this as an opposite of

the American dream, since this dream is built on the desire to become rich and

successful enough to rise above the others. In Understanding Popular Culture

John Fiske refers to the American dream as to a bitter illusion, since great

majority of Americans are not successful in achieving the dreamt-of success

and status of powerful individuality (115). Instead, most of them are spending

most of their time working towards this status, achieving mainly the loneliness,

but usually no considerable success. Palahniuk continues: After we‘re miserable

enough - like the narrator in his Fight Club condo […] we destroy our lovely

nest and force ourselves back into the larger world‖ (Non-Fiction xvi).

This plot pattern provides the readers with the combination of numerous

pleasurable experiences – burning their past, starting anew, achieving a new

social status within a community and going through unseen forms of adventure

during the process: besides this, Fight Club displays a leadership of the

the name Joe stands for a reference to average American. Palahniuk adapts this form and uses
it to express the narrators feelings, e.g. ―I am Joe's Enraged, Inflamed Sense of Rejection‖
(60), ―I am Joe‘s Blood-Boiling Rage‖ (96) etc.

51
formerly unsuccessful character in a constantly-growing secret society. Both

Fight Club and Project Mayhem represent examples of community to which

reader can relate, thus stimulating the productive pleasures, which, according

to Fiske ―center around social identity and social relations, and work socially

through semiotic resistance to hegemonic force‖ (Understanding Popular

Culture 56).

These communities are led by Tyler Durden, who represents an ultimate

role model and with whom the reader identifies through the narrator. Not only

among the fans, the character of Tyler Durden has achieved unprecedented

levels of popularity for a fictional character.45 He is an embodiment of the

narrator‘s thoughts about ideal male: ―I love everything about Tyler Durden, his

courage and his smarts. His nerve. Tyler is funny and charming and forceful

and independent, and men look up to him and expect him to change their

world. Tyler is capable and free, and I‘m not‖ (Fight Club 174). As long as the

reader identifies himself with the narrator, they admire Tyler in a similar way,

since he represents a perfects solution to all the narrator‘s personality problems

and empowers him to take the action he was not able to take by himself.

Kavadlo states: ―what makes Durden attractive to the narrator—his potency,

wit, and sly subversion—are the same qualities that appeal to a readership of

solitary young men‖ (10).

In the same way Tyler transfers his capabilities and knowledge on the

45
As mentioned, thousands of teenagers online made the character their role model, stating
Tyler‘s quotes as their mottos. The popularity of the character lead for example to
transformation of the quote ―What would Jesus do?‖ into commonly used ―What would Tyler
Durden do?‖ and creating the religion of Durdenism, stating its basic concept as ―what god
created in six days, we will burn on the seventh.‖ Tyler Durden has become a cultural symbol.

52
narrator (―I know this because Tyler knows this‖ (Fight Club 12)), the narrator

transfers them on the reader using the second person narrative – for example,

the quote above is followed by another recipe for home-made explosive that

directly addresses the reader. Through the process of gaining this kind of

knowledge46 directly from a former dissatisfied Joe, who now has the power to

destroy the tallest building in the world and make it fall on a museum, thus

achieving the ruling power not only over present, but symbolically also over the

past (―‘This is our world, now, our world,‘ Tyler says, ‗and those ancient people

are dead‘‖ (14).) the reader gains a considerable feeling of empowerment.

Fiske comments on the importance of the similar effect of a cultural text:

―The matrix of pleasure, relevance and empowerment lies at the core of

popular culture‖ (Understanding Popular Culture 66). In Fight Club the aspects

of pleasure and empowerment are closely tied, as empowerment is created

mainly through the evasive and rebellious actions of the communities created

by the narrator and Tyler.

The evasive actions in the novel are mostly defined by two main

characteristics: humour and violence. Proportional relationship of these

characteristics is generally changing with development of the plot – pranks at

the beginning of the story are more defined by humour, while the actions at the

end of the novel are directed towards radical violent changes in society.

The pranks played by Tyler and members of Fight Club bear many

features of the evasive tactics of the popular audience as described by de John

46
―You take enough blasting gelatine [recipe provided few lines earlier] and wrap the
foundation columns of anything, you can topple any building in the world. […] This how-to stuff
isn‘t in any history book‖(Fight Club 13).

53
Fiske.47 Fiske defines the pranks consumers play as ―a desire for ‗sneaky thrills‘

that the boredom and discipline of everyday life denies them‖ (Understanding

Popular culture 39), where the stores themselves48 are just metonyms for the

power-block in general, which is the ultimate target of these actions. The

characters of Fight Club gradually move from targeting regular consumers

(slicing pornography into family movies), through wealthy elite of society

(secret masturbating into food at posh parties) to international business

corporations, as the ultimate goal of Project Mayhem is absolute anarchy.

As the seriousness of the attacks increases, the amusing potential

decreases and, since the narrator is trying to stop the last phase of Project

Mayhem, the last actions, which already can be categorized as terroristic

attacks,49 can barely provide the reader with any evasive pleasure. The first

pranks, which are based on real stories of Palahniuk‘s friends, not only can

provide the evasive pleasure, since they mock the social classes that represent

the system, but also are considerably humorous.

Humour in itself plays an important role in Fight Club. The humorous

elements Palahniuk uses are mostly rooted in the cynical tone of his writing.

The entertaining effect of the cynical approach has its origin in evasive

pleasures as well. Cynicism, as defined by Kennedy, offers ―the possibilities of

rhetorical resistance as well as places from which speakers and writers who

remain at the margins can launch critique‖ (26) - Palahniuk uses the cynical

47
John Fiske used the concept originally defined by Michel de Certeau in Practice of Everyday
Life.
48
Fiske discusses these raids mainly in connection with shopping malls.
49
Dictionary.com defines ―terrorist attack‖ as surprise attack involving the deliberate use of
violence against civilians in the hope of attaining political or religious aims‖

54
tone to directly mock the representative elements of the higher social classes,

pointing out the information that are usually considered impolite to express.

These comments tend to be connected with various physical acts of tricking the

elements of the system.

Example from chapter 19 (members of Fight club crept into a medical

waste landfill in order to find material for making soap):

―Fat,‖ the mechanic says, ―liposuctioned fat sucked out of the richest

thighs in America. The richest, fattest things in the world.‖

Our goal is the big red bags of liposuctioned fat we‘ll haul back to Paper

Street and render and mix with lye and rosemary and sell back to the

very people who paid to have it sucked out. At twenty bucks a bar,

these are the only folks who can afford it. (Fight Club 150)

Palahniuk uses a similar tone also for describing and commenting various

elements of the plot that are not directly linked to critique of the system.

Creating a contrast between the dispassionate way of narration and the violent

details he expresses this way, he achieves a humorous effect. The following

example is part of the description of narrator‘s flat and refers to the thickness

of its walls:

Still, a foot of concrete is important when your next-door neighbour lets

the battery on her hearing aid go and has to watch her game shows at

full blast. Or when a volcanic blast of burning gas and debris that used

to be your living-room set and personal effects blows out your floor-to-

55
 ceiling windows and sails down flaming to leave just your condo, only

yours, a gutted charred concrete hole in the Cliffside of the building.

(Fight club 41)

The author projects the cynical combination of violence and humour also

in the actions of the characters. This is the case mainly with some of the

aforementioned pranks, where the members of the Project mayhem not only

aim to cause damage to the supranational companies, a symbol of the system,

but also want to enjoy the evasive pleasure of the violent act themselves as

they combine it with expressive forms of ridiculing them for pure

entertainment. Humour here forms an important part of their actions as Tyler

calls for more and more violent acts and the project gradually changes from a

rebellious group into a terrorist organization, which was not a primary

expectation of its members. The original members of the Fight club were

interested in gaining the evasive pleasure and feeling of personal liberation,

therefore they turn the violent acts into fun – e.g. they paint a big smiling face

on the front side of the building and let two of the offices explode so they form

eyes of the face (118) or drill holes into cash dispensers in order to fill them

with pudding (133).

Still, violence plays an important role in the novel. As is obvious from the

analysis thus far, rebellion against the system plays a pivotal role in the story

and, as Fiske noted,50 the violence is direct embodiment of this struggle.

Violence in Fight Club can be divided into two categories with different

50
See Understanding Popular Culture 134.

56
functions: mechanical violence directed towards the dominant system and

violence in a form of fights between individual members of Fight club.

The violence in the form of terroristic attacks executed by Project

Mayhem in the second part of the book is more linked to the evasive pleasures

produced by active resistance. During these attacks the system stands for a

direct target and Palahniuk thus very clearly expresses its metaphorical

relationship with the resistance that Fiske presents as attractive to the

audience. Fiske states: ―Violence is popular because it is a concrete

representation of social domination and subordination, and therefore because it

represents resistance to the subordination‖ (136). However, by the end of the

novel the narrator turns against these acts and so disallows the reader to fully

enjoy them, since he demonstrates that the underground community with

which he and the reader were indentifying starts to resemble the dominant

system towards which it was supposed to rebel.

For this reason, the violence represented in its physical form might

become even more attractive to the reader than the attacks, even despite the

fact that it does not have any obvious reason and was not directed towards the

system itself. Attractiveness of this form of violence lies in its form of execution,

not in the violent act itself – chapter 6, the original short story that formed a

basis for the novel, presents the act of fighting in a very similar way to Fiske‘s

presentation of wrestling.

Male bodies are used in a manner, which is not aesthetic, as it is usual in

modern forms of presentation, yet functional. Fiske notes about this form of

presentation: ―The body that refuses to be aestheticized works actually as both

57
the language of the subordinate and the means of participation in subordinate

cultural forms‖ (97). Palahniuk very openly expresses the distinction between

the aestheticized bodies and their function in Fight club:

The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if

being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says.

[…] There‘s grunting and noise at fight club like at the gym, but fight

club isn‘t about looking good. There‘s hysterical shouting in tongues like

at church, and when you wake up Sunday afternoon you feel saved.

(Fight Club 50-51)

The fighting itself is thus a means for achieving the pleasure of

―breakdown of culture into nature‖51 which Fiske quotes from Barthes‘s concept

of jouissance and adapts it for evasive pleasures of the body. Members of the

club engage in the activity in order to achieve the feeling of being alive and not

bonded by society – ―You aren‘t alive anywhere like you‘re alive at fight club‖

(Fight Club 51). This feeling is achieved through the combination of turning

one‘s back on the civilized society and feeling of personal empowerment.

By joining the fight club, an underground community, one becomes a

part of the undisciplined part of society that rules in dirty basements and

parking lots, out of reach of the ruling power. ―The working-class body,

shouting its billingsgate or fighting in the aisles, erupting out of its category as

audience, is dirty and threatening‖ (Understanding Popular Culture 99). The

51
See Understanding Popular Culture 50.

58
dirt, disorder and evasive behaviour provide the fighters with feeling of going

one‘s own way and thus finally living one‘s own life without being disciplined, if

only for one evening a week. While Fiske states that this body of labour is

always ready to erupt from its socioeconomic category, Palahniuk shows the

beginning of this eruption, since the fighting and liberating pain associated with

it were obviously the first step towards the broad public indiscipline of the

young men who achieved the feeling of empowerment and freedom. The

author uses the fights primarily for this purpose, as he claims that fight club

really was not about loosing or winning fights (see Fight Club 51) and that

―Nothing was solved when the fight was over, but nothing really mattered‖

(53).

What originally started as an act of self-destruction,52 evolved into

empowering tool,53 which not only became the reason for taking care of one‘s

body, but also transformed the fear of the attendees into determination – ―Most

guys are at fight club because of something they‘re too scared to fight. After

few nights, you‘re afraid a lot less‖ (54), ―I felt finally I could get my hands on

everything in the world that didn‘t work‖ (53). These are the feelings that

mostly angry white young men that are able to identify with the narrator, a

regular Joe, find desirable. In the documentary Postcards From the Future

Palahniuk comments on the success of the first novel among these dissatisfied

youngsters: ―It resonated with a group of people who never read and so it's

their only book. It's like their bible, they carry it with them all the time.‖

52
Narrator: ―I just don‘t want to die without a few scars‖ (Fight Club 48).
53
Fiske calls the pain ―a bodily sensation out of control of the law, medicine and morality‖, see
Understanding Popular Culture 95.

59
 As was demonstrated in this chapter, the novel Fight Club very openly

provides its readers with many of the evasive pleasures that John Fiske

described in his study as attractive. Combining the aspects with the writing

style that was analysed in the previous chapter, Palahniuk offers these feelings

to the reader in an accessible and entertaining way, which becomes attractive

to even broader body of readers, mainly the ones that find it easy to identify

with the characters described.

3.1.1 Productive pleasures in Fight Club

The second type of popular pleasure John Fiske presents in

Understanding Popular Culture are productive pleasures. While evasive

pleasures were related to various forms of resistance against the system, the

productive pleasures are formed in connection with producing meanings and

―center around social identity and social relations, and work socially through

semiotic resistance to hegemonic force‖ (56). Some forms of this type of

pleasure formed mainly by process of identification of the reader with the

underground communities Palahniuk describes in Fight Club were already

discussed in the previous subchapter. This subchapter will focus on the

expressed forms of productive processes related to the novel and its readers.

First of the forms of production to be mentioned in this chapter directly

relates to the already discussed process of identification with the characters

and their groupings: the ways the readers transfer the narrative of the novel

into reality. In afterword to the reprinted version of Fight Club Palahniuk

60
provides three-page-long list54 of the ways in which various features of the

novel were put into use in both public and commercial spheres. He mentions

people setting up secret fight clubs in numerous places around the world,55

people taking the legal action to change their names to Tyler Durden, people

scarring kisses into their hands with lye similar way as it is described in the

novel or putting quotes from the novel on their garments. Fiske refers to these

practices as another forms of achieving the productive pleasures:

Fans are productive: Their fandom spurs them into producing their own

texts. Such texts may be the walls of teenagers‘ bedrooms, the way

they dress, their hairstyles and makeup as they make of themselves

walking indices of their social and cultural allegiances, participating

actively and productively in the social circulation of meaning.

(Understanding Popular Culture 147)

All of these acts might be seen as attempts to form communities that

directly reflect the communities described in the novel. Having these effects on

the readers, the influence of book thus reaches out into a real world, where it

serves as means of expression, but it is also gaining more popularity since fans

indirectly promote it by this behavior. This way of promotion of the novel

through the fans themselves instead of the usual commercial forms of

54
See Fight Club 210.
55
On the other hand Palahniuk opposes to the idea that the novel would be a reason for public
disobedience demonstrated by the acts depicted in the novel, since most of the pranks he
included in the novel are based on real stories and were obviously practiced by people long
time before the novel was published. ―We were just blue-collar nobodies living in Oregon with
public school education. There was nothing we could imagine that a million people weren‘t
already doing‖ (Fight Club 215).

61
promotion gives way to creation of a similar fan-base bearing the

characteristics of a cult following. As long as the novel becomes ―cool‖56 in this

way, it is instantly used for commercial purposes – illustrative example from

random internet webpage: ―Busting out with "Fight Club" quotes anytime,

anywhere will make you instantly cooler.‖57

In order to neutralize the possible evasive effects and use it for

commercial and financial success the means of capitalist society turned the

potentially dangerous popular text into a consumer product. Fiske follows

similar development in his studies of jeans and practice of their tearing by their

users, who used it as a symbol of resistance. The jeans producing companies

themselves started producing them already rigged: ―signs of opposition are

turned to the advantage of that which they oppose and fashionably worn-torn

garments become another form of commodities‖ (Understanding Popular

Culture 18). Similarly, Palahniuk enumerates dozens of way the originally

rebellious book was used for commercial purposes by various companies

promoting their products.58 Not only were quotes from the novel included on

various products for men, expensive brands of clothes used it as an inspiration

for their new fashion collections, but also popular auction website ebay.com

offers 2727 products found after searching for string ―fight club shirt‖59 – the

56
A quote from online analysis of Palahniuk‘s Rant: ―I‘m sorry, but if you haven‘t seen ―Fight
Club,‖ you have light years to catch up with us cool people.‖
<http://moonwalkerwiz.wordpress.com/2010/02/01/a-long-long-rant-about-palahniuks-rant/>
57
Quote from webpage Made Man which calls itself ―a top online destination for men, dedicated
to giving guys unbeatable information to live better, smarter, happier lives.‖
<http://www.mademan.com>
58
See Fight Club 210.

62
novel was turned into a commercially successful brand.

Another, non-commercial, form of active usage of the productive

pleasure is already mentioned practice of bricolage that John Fiske adapts from

Claude Lévi-Strauss. Here, the fans of the popular text use the aspects of the

text to create art forms of their own. Motives from Fight Club are not only one

of the most popular themes on popular online community deviantart.com

devoted to showcasing various forms of user-made artwork, but fans also

created several websites devoted to various forms of graphic and digital user-

made art using Fight Club as its topic,60 including the biggest of them, the

gallery section of Palahniuk‘s official website. Palahniuk has a long tradition of

supporting his fans‘ creative activities. On numerous occasions he claimed that

one of the main purposes of his stories is to make people tell their stories.61 In

the documentary Postcards From the Future he moreover comments on the

first conference focused on his writing that was organized by fans in 2003, that

he came to realize that it was more ―an excuse for the people to present, to

create and to express themselves, a forum for people to explain their point of

view. It is much less a Chuck love fest then it is really just sort of using my

work as a catalyst for creating and expressing their work.‖62

After this event Palahniuk started to conduct a gradually growing writers‘

workshop on his official website. Starting with several published essays on the

59
Experiment on 3 November 2011: string ―fight club shirt‖ put into search feature of the
website <http://global.ebay.com>
60
e.g. < http://fuckyeahfightclub.tumblr.com/>,
<http://www.angelfire.com/rebellion/pssc/gallery/home.html>, etc.
61
See ―Chuck Palahniuk‘s speech at Grub Street writer conference.‖
62
See Postcards From the Future.

63
literary techniques he uses, he gradually expanded it into its present form,

when he not only regularly provides tips for writing and homework for the

members, but nowadays also collects the best works of its members with

intention to publish a collection of short stories by aspiring writers who formed

a worldwide creative writing community on his website.

John Fiske commented on similar practices of the consumers in the

chapter devoted to the productive pleasures, where he explains them using the

examples of similar acts by fans of the pop-singer Madonna and devotees of

the television series Star Trek. Fiske includes examples of either fans recreating

the popular texts in different forms (similar to the fictional book covers

published in the gallery on Palahniuk‘s official website) or using the original text

in order to create a similar text (which might be likened to Palahniuk‘s fans

writing transgressive fiction) and calls these activities ―a creativity of social

relevance rather than that of aesthetic quality. It is popular creativity, popular

culture at work‖ (Understanding Popular Culture 148). He states that these acts

incorporate multiple pleasures: pleasure of recognition (of the original context

of the reproduced work), pleasure of reproduction (putting the original text into

new context) and pleasure of production of the new text. As long as the

readers of Palahniuk‘s novels achieve the abovementioned pleasures through

the productive acts described further above, they tend to become more

important for the readers as the act of reading itself, which, in this sense,

agrees with the crucial argument of John Fiske: ―Popular culture is made by the

people‖ (Understanding Popular Culture 24) and its creativity lies in the

productive use of the texts themselves. As long as Chuck Palahniuk and the

64
community around him continue to support this behavior of his readers, the

popularity of his writing keeps on growing.

4. Development of Palahniuk’s writing

4.1 Middle period

This section will focus on the novels from the middle period of

Palahniuk‘s literary career in order to illustrate the changes his writing

has gone through since the early transgressive novels. Though it is

difficult to set an exact dividing line between the second and the third

period of his writing, as the nature of his novels was changing from book

to book (unlike the first four novels, which are very similar to each other

in their nature), this subchapter will briefly discuss two novels: one from

very beginning of this period and one from its end.

A short analysis of the novels Lullaby and Rant will focus mostly on

the characteristics that allow comparison with the novels from the first

period, particularly Fight Club: structure of the novel and language used,

form of social critique, evasive elements and displayed violence.

4.1.1 Lullaby (2002)

Lullaby (2002) is Palahniuk‘s fifth novel, first novel he wrote as a

full-time writer63 and first novel published after the terrorist attacks in

63
See ―A.V. Club Interview.‖

65
2001, though it was finished before them and supposedly delivered to his

publisher in New York on the very day the attacks occurred. The author

never mentioned any changes being made to the book after the attacks

in order to make it publishable after the certain unwritten limitations on

portraying violence in the sphere of entertainment were imposed due to

the acts of terrorism.

The basic narrative of the novel concerns a newspaper reporter

Carl Streator, who finds an explanation to the sudden infant death

syndrome in a lethal culling song read to the children by their parents.

Having accidentally killed his own wife and child by reading this song, he

sets off for a road trip with intention to find and destroy all copies of the

book in which it was published. For this trip he is joined by several other

people who have their own intentions with the song and other spells from

the collection in which this song was originally included.

Lullaby still shares several characteristics with the first four novels,

though, first signs of experiments already occur. The narrative is more

carefully structured in comparison with his older novels, as Palahniuk

uses linear narrative in past with several italicized chapters commenting

the story from the temporal end in order to foreshadow the development

of the narrative. The writing style is still strictly prototactic and verb-

based. The narrator frequently refers to his journalistic practice and often

explains various elements of this occupation, which he instantly puts into

66
use. For example, at the beginning of the chapter 2, Carl mentions being

told off by his editor, since he did not provide enough details. He thus

very explicitly starts to provide unimportant details about people, e.g.:

The details about Henderson are he's got blond hair combed across his

forehead. He dropped out of law school. He's an editor on the National

desk. He always knows the snow conditions and has a lift pass dangling

from every coat he owns. His computer password is ‘password.‘ (Lullaby

39)

Describing characters in this way, Palahniuk combines two techniques

mentioned in the chapter about his writing style – he offers a short detail that

helps the reader to create their own idea about the character and the phrase

―The details about [character] are‖ becomes one of the ―horses‖ utilized

throughout the novel. Using the journalistic tone of writing very openly and

frequently including dozens of facts, the author achieves a direct connection

with reality of the reader. Moreover, he again commonly addresses the reader

in the second person and thus enables them to identify with the character of

novel.

Palahniuk again includes aspects of critique of establishment, though in

case of Lullaby they are no longer directly shouted out loud by a rebellious

character, as Tyler Durden did. Instead, Palahniuk uses more subtle form of

critique, occasionally referring to various information from history and

literature. For example, one of the problems that the novel commonly mentions

67
is general lack of silence, as the characters are constantly surrounded by loud

music and other forms of entertainment. Palahniuk comments:

Old George Orwell got it backward.

Big Brother isn‘t watching. He‘s singing and dancing. He‘s pulling rabbits

out of hat. Big Brother‘s busy holding your attention every moment

you‘re awake. He‘s making sure you‘re always distracted. He‘s making

sure you‘re fully absorbed. He‘s making sure your imagination withers.

Until it‘s as useful as your appendix. He‘s making sure your attention is

always filled. (Lullaby 18-19)

The author not only mellows the critique of the system, he even includes

a character of eco-terrorist Oyster, which he uses to ridicule the short-sighted

radical forms of rebellion. Oyster is characterized by his own utterances like:

―Clothing is dishonesty in its purest form‖ (Lullaby 96) or ―[bean salad] with

Worcestershire sauce in the dressing […] that means anchovies. That means

meat. That means cruelty and death‖ (Lullaby 52). Clearly mocking the self-

invited radical saviours and rebels, Palahniuk obviously took a step away from

the explicit evasive pleasures offered in the first novel. Also the amount of

violence displayed considerably decreased, or is at least displayed in less

explicit manner – number of deaths caused by the characters is multiplied in

comparison with the first novels (e.g. Fight Club – two characters killed,

including Tyler), but all of them are caused by the culling song as part of the

68
author‘s contemplating about potential deadly effect of words,64 not as a

symbol of power relations working in society.

Though Palahniuk continues in tradition of exploring the ways of finding

one‘s way to reconnect with the world, he comments on a slight change in this

aspect:

My first four books, from Fight Club to Choke dealt with personal

identity issues. The crises the narrators found themselves in were

generated by themselves. Lullaby is my first book with a narrator who is

less responsible for his situation. In the classic horror model, the

narrator is a status-quo sort-of everyman who finds himself thrust into

incredible circumstances. And he is floundering, way out of his depth.

(―Random House interview‖)

Palahniuk thus partly abandons the principles of transgressive fiction as

it was represented in his early novels, where the dissatisfying situation of the

main character was usually determined by their own behavior or their social

status. As long as Carl was put into his position outside the society by a family

tragedy occurring later in his life, he sets off for the adventurous trip because

there is nothing he can lose and he wants to prevent the song from causing

more damage, not as a part of his reinventing himself through evasive

pleasures.

64
As mentioned before, Palahniuk worked on the novel at the time of trial with murderer of his
father, Dale Shackleford, when he was asked to help in process of deciding whether
Shackleford should be sentenced to capital punishment. His words thus had a potential to kill a
human being and the author used the writing process as a means of dealing with this dilemma.

69
 By embracing the approach typical for horror genre, Palahniuk opens his

writing for new possibilities in the future, as his characters no longer have to

struggle against whole dissatisfying world. The author can therefore focus on

different problems than rebelling against one‘s surroundings and portray more

than expressive violence directed towards unbeatable system.

4.1.2 Rant (2007)

Rant (2007) is Palahniuk‘s eighth novel and it might be seen as the last

novel from the middle period of his writing, since it is the last of his books

bearing some of the typical features of transgressive fiction, yet he already

extensively experiments with the form of narration, what became typical for his

later works.

The basic narrative of the novel follows the life of a fictional character

Buster ―Rant‖ Casey from his early childhood in a rural town of Middleton

through his role as a ―superspreader‖ in nation-wide epidemic of rabies, until

his unclear death during an event of urban destruction derby, Party Crashing.

The narrative includes motives of time travel and science fiction and, as the

reader realizes only later in novel, takes place in a near dystopian future.

In this novel Palahniuk employs form of an oral biography, where he

wrote replicas of more than 50 (mostly fictional) characters sharing their

experiences with Rant and structured them into thematic, mostly

chronologically ordered chapters. This form enabled him not only to keep to the

his typical oral-based writing style, as the whole book is constructed of spoken

utterances of various people in a manner of ―talking heads‖ commonly used in

70
documentary movies, but also, as he called it, ―minimalistically‖ strip out

everything to include only the story with no establishing shots and cut from one

topic to another. He claimed he can ―move rapidly either topically or

chronologically without any kind of set-up or transitional phrasing‖ (―Agony

Column Interview 2007‖).. As long as the characters provide only scraps of

information, reader is forced to ―develop the causal relationships between

things‖ and invent their own meaning65 and thus become more involved with

the written text.

What is more important, using this form of narrative, Palahniuk is able to

create a stronger illusion of reality. By including not only the invented

characters and information, but also facts and trivia from history, science and

law66 and quotes from real-life scientists (e.g. Victor Turner), the author firmly

anchors the story into reality of the reader well before they have a chance to

realize it does not occur in their reality. This situation enables Palahniuk to

move the narrative between respective realities and timelines without making it

alienating to the reader. Even though Rant is thus fur the only Palahniuk‘s novel

with science fiction elements, he managed to make it relevant enough for

reader to identify with it, keeping to the principles of relevance presented by

Fiske, who claimed that ―too radical a change would break the relevance‘s

between textual representation and social experience‖ (Understanding Popular

65
See ―Agony Column Interview 2007.‖
66
e.g. ―Under the Foreign Quarantine Regulations (42 CFR 71.54), it is illegal to sell bats as
pets within the United States‖ (Rant 78), ―Beyond the incubation period, also known as the
‗eclipse‘ period, of six to ninety days, the virus replicates in localized tissue adjacent to the
infection site. Retrograde axoplasmic flow moves the virus rapidly throughout the central
nervous system. [etc.]‖ (Rant 80), ―After the 1960s, the common racoon (Procyon lotor) became
the species most likely to be infected‖ (Rant 82).

71
Culture 133).

In Rant Palahniuk keeps to the topic of reinventing one‘s way among the

people, as a poor boy from a ―hillbilly burg‖ (Rant 10) becomes a leader of an

underground community and a national celebrity. Moreover, to enable Rant to

achieve this kind of experience Palahniuk returns to the elementary features of

the transgressive fiction, as the characters are trying to achieve the feeling of

being alive through rebellious forms of behaviour. The practice of Party

Crashing, however, is not primarily intended as a form of attacking the system,

unlike many of the acts in the first novels. As long as the dysfunctional society

in which the plot is set divided all the citizens into day-timers and night-timers,

nights, when the Party Crashing events are held, are the official time of the

lower class citizens which are only limited by not being allowed to get out

during the day. They therefore do not feel such a strong urge to rebel against

establishment and they crash their cars primarily in order to achieve the

intensive feelings that make them feel more alive:67

Anytime Rant had an orgasm, or the moment after we‘d been rammed

by another team, right when he blinked his eyes and seemed to realize

he wasn‘t dead, he‘d smile and say the same thing. At that moment,

Rant would always smile, all dopey, and say, ‗This is what church should

feel like…‘ (Rant 215)

In an interview about this novel, Palahniuk referred to these practices as

67
Even though these practices obviously involve certain degree of evasive pleasure and might
be seen as a form of attack on the system.

72
to liminoid experiences defined by Victor Turner,68 since they are supposed to

be short-lived events where people step out of their ordinary lives to participate

and lose their ordinary status in order to come together as equal participants.

They thus find a new way of being with each other and in a way find a new,

more convenient society.69

Similarly to Lullaby, also in Rant the social critique is presented in a more

indirect and subtle manner. In this novel Palahniuk focuses on the socially

inherent practices leading towards conformity and social obedience. He

illustrates these practices on the way children are brought up in a rural town,

where, as Rant claims, they are constantly lied to. He mentions examples of

Santa Claus, Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy, where ―Each of these three

traditions asks a child to believe in the impossible in exchange for a reward.

[…] From toys to candy to money. […] Or plainly put, beginning with all the

possibility of childhood, and ending with an absolute trust in the national

currency‖ (Rant 62). Longing for something real, Rant invents ways to break

these traditions, ridicule the authorities and expose them as corrupt. Therefore

he himself takes up a role of Tooth fairy and exchanges the teeth his

schoolmates give him for valuable old coins in order to overturn the social

situation: ―All the children rich. All the adults smiling and wheedling and playing

nice to get money‖ (Rant 53). Similarly, he makes children touch real intestines

in the haunted house, claiming that he thought it is always done that way and

68
Turner defined liminoid as a ―successor of the liminal in complex large-scale societies, where
individuality and optation in art have in theory supplanted collective and obligatory ritual
performances‖ (qtd. in La Shure, Charles. ―About: What is liminality?‖ Liminality. n.p. 18 Oct
2005. Web. 5 Nov. 2011.)
69
See ―Agony Column Interview 2007.‖

73
that he ―didn‘t know pillars of the community as trusted and honoured and

respected as Scout den leaders, grown-ups, would lie to little kids‖ (Rant 60).

Using the small rural town as a metaphor for a contemporary society he points

out the reason for the people‘s desire leading to the evasive actions, like Party

Crashing, taken in order to experience the reality.70

Palahniuk therefore obviously keeps to the topic of evasive pleasures and

people‘s clinging to them also in this novel, but either does not depict them in

such an obvious and explicit manner or if they take a rebellious form, their

primary intention is not directed against the ruling power. He also approaches

violence in this moderate manner – though plot of Rant includes the second

highest number of deaths among Palahniuk‘s novels (after aforementioned

Lullaby), most of them are caused by various animals (dogs, bees, black widow

spiders, etc.), handled by Rant, on older members of his family. The violent

actions, which Fiske described as a metaphor for attack on the system, thus,

again, take form of struggles between the generations of a rural town, not an

explicit form of violent attacks against public targets as it used to be in first four

transgressive Palahniuk‘s novels.

On the other hand, as far as evasive pleasures are concerned, this

approach enabled Palahniuk to become more explicit in a matter of return to

the natural state as opposed to civilized life. What makes the character of Rant

different from all the other inhabitants of Middleton is, besides his desire for

something real, his connection with nature – not only his smell and taste were

70
―He was trying to find something real in the world. Kids grow up connected to nothing these
days, plugged in and living lives boosted to them from other people. Hand-me-down
adventures. I think Rant wanted everybody to experience just one real adventure‖ (Rant 60).

74
extremely developed, but he became addicted to the poisons transferred to him

by bites of spiders, scorpions, snakes and other animals he was constantly

―fishing‖ for: ―One bite of venom, one little squirt of poison at a time, Rant was

training for something big. Getting vaccinated against fear. No matter the

future, any terrible job or marriage or military service, it had to be an

improvement over a coyote chomping on your foot‖ (Rant 72). Young rebellious

Rant thus represents the power of nature openly challenging the habits and

traditions of civilized society. Though he dies at the end of the novel, his body

is never found and the real conditions of this situation remain unclear. Intensive

discussion on the topic of time travel by the end of the novel implies that in the

end he, unlike in Fight Club, might be successful not only in his struggle against

society, but even against rules of human mortality and time.71

The two novels from Palahniuk‘s middle period signalize an obvious

change in his writing. He started to move from simply put and accessible forms

of writing towards more challenging and experimental forms of narration. At

the same time, he gradually abandons explicitly evasive topics in favour of

broader, less controversial topics. This approach signalizes the trend towards

which his further writings will evolve. Even though he starts to use different

approach, the author seems to keep to the original critical attitude, which he

now expresses in a less explicit manner.

71
Which, again, is something Tyler Duren promises to the narrator in the very beginning of
Fight Club: ―We really won‘t die. […] This isn‘t death really. We‘ll be legend. We won‘t grow
old‖ (Fight Club 11).

75
4.2 Third period – Tell-All (2010)

Tell-All, Palahniuk‘s eleventh novel, will be used as a representative

novel of so far the author‘s latest writing period, which is be characterized by

further experiments with narration and gradual abandoning of the practices and

topics of transgressive fiction, as will be illustrated on this particular novel.

Novel Tell-All, published in 2010, and Pygmy,72 which was published a

year earlier, might be perceived as a two-book series in which language and

style became more important than the plot itself, since both of them present

otherwise banal story in a very specific, less accessible manner that lead to

certain level of disappointment with fans of Palahniuk‘s early novels.73

The basic narrative of Tell-All is set in the Golden Age of Hollywood and

depicts a struggle of fading movie star Katherine Kenton to save her career and

later also her life as a her potential another husband is trying to kill her in order

to be able to publish her detailed post-mortal biography. The story is narrated

by Miss Kathie‘s assistant Hazel ―Hazie‖ Coogan.

Palahniuk based this novel on the aforementioned paradox between the

nature of the story and its form. When presenting the novel he discussed

occurrence of these paradoxes in his novels:

72
Pygmy is an epistolary novel written in a form of letters of an exchange student from
unnamed totalitarian state, who arrives to the United States with intention to execute a terrorist
attack and, while waiting for the command, he describes the life of ordinary American family.
Throughout the book, Palahniuk uses Pygmy‘s own invented form of broken English, which
makes the novel rather difficult to read. E.g. ―Commencing ritual meal, pig dog brother load
meat to own mouth, masticating roasted muscle fiber‖ (Pygmy 166).
73
A question at recent Q&A at Palahniuk‘s last promotion tour might serve as an example: ―The
two books in between. What happened? Why don‘t I get them? There‘s something in there as if
you went off on attention and I don‘t get it. What do people like about it?‖ (―Cooper Union
2011‖).

76
 I like to have a story about something that is at odds with the content

of the story. [talks about nature of romance novels and how they use

heavily-coded euphemisms to refer to sexual acts]. A really flowery,

euphemistic language for really carnal, brutal things. So in a way I

wanted to write Tell-All using this over the top, quote end quote

beautiful language to talk about really base things. In this case it‘s a

love story about hatred. The core of the book is the hatred of one

person for another. (―Chuck Palahniuk: Tell-All‖ video)

In Tell-All thus Palahniuk abandons his usual dynamic verb-based writing style

and adopts the euphemistic language used in harlequin literature, using long

descriptive sentences, accumulating adjectives and adverbials. The author

employs this elaborate, flowery language not only in descriptions of the

exaggerated romantic scenes (―Abandoning the sodden glory of her puckered

shelter I pewed my steaming tribute, gush upon jetting gush, the pearlescent

globules of my adoration and profound admiration spattering Katherine‘s

unutterably beautiful visage‖ (Tell-All 115)), but also for descriptions of other

scenes in order to create a humorous paradox between the content and the

form. E.g. a scene in Miss Kathie‘s war movie:

Before another note from the orchestra, Miss Kathie leaps to slam an

artillery round into the massive deck gun. Wheeling the enormous

barrel, she tracks a diving Aichi bomber, aligning the crosshairs of her

gun sight. Her sailor whites artfully stained and shredded by Adrian

77
 Adolph Greenberg, her bleeding wounds suggested by sparkling patches

of crimson sequins and rhinestones sewn around each bullet hole.

Singing the opening bars of her big song, Miss Kathie fires the shell,

blasting the enemy aircraft into a blinding burst of papier-mâché. (Tell-

All 108)

As can be seen from the examples above, parody and exaggeration are

the primary means Palahniuk uses to achieve humorous effect, which he

obviously intended to use as the primary means for achieving attractiveness of

the novel, since it no longer offers any evasive pleasures and violence is

described exclusively in the euphemistic manner. Moreover, narrator is no

longer a regular Joe, as it used to be with most of the novels before, but a

wealthy movie star living among other celebrities, thus a person and an

environment with which Palahniuk‘s readers barely can identify, because the

author does not try to find similarities between the celebrities and ―normal‖

people, but instead decides to exaggerate the reality of their existence. In

Palahniuk‘s vision of classical Hollywood thus Lillian Hellman writes movie

scripts depicting exaggerated views of real events, e.g.: the female movie stars

themselves bare-handedly rescue dozens of babies from concentration camps,

while wearing expensive jewelry and Channel No. 5 perfume, before sneaking

into Hitler‘s bunker and strangling him; famous fashion designers gather in

order to design the atom bomb to be used on Hiroshima and decorate it with

rhinestones; actress saves John Glenn in American spacecraft Friendship 7

before engaging in sexual act in space; etc.

At the same time Palahniuk, careful not to completely alienate the reader

78
completely, again presents the story in a form of non-fiction writing in order to

root it in reader‘s reality in a similar manner as it was described before. He

commented on this approach during one of the public readings on Tell-All tour:

One of my favorite things to do was always to find a nonfiction form.

Because that will allow me to tell even more fantastic fictional story

while lending a sense of gravity. Using a non-fiction form of Walter

Winchell or Hedda Hopper gossip columns allows me to […] tell an

inappropriate story, where the form and conventions of the form

actually play against the nature of the story. (―Chuck Palahniuk: Tell-

All‖)

Palahniuk thus offers this story using the form in which the readers in

the past usually encountered the celebrities – he employs various elements of

magazines‘ gossip columns, where journalists used to expressively present

highs and lows of celebrities‘ existence. Palahniuk even copies some of the

invented phrases coined by their authors, invents similar ones in the same

manner and uses them side by side (e.g.: ―What Hedda Hopper calls a ‗funeral

flirtation.‘ Louella Parsons a ‗graveside groom.‘ Walter Winchell a ‗casket

crasher‘‖ (Tell-All 28)). The author claimed that using this practice he intended

to return the language the ―slangy, plastic quality that only exists to a lesser

degree today‖74 in comparison with reinventing the language that used to occur

on daily basis in these columns. Besides obvious humorous effect of the

74
See ―Chuck Palahniuk: Tell-All‖ – Palahniuk mentions the term ―Brangelina‖ used for Brad Pitt
and Angelina Jolie today as one of the rare occasions of this usage of language today

79
invented ironic terms (like ―was-band‖ for ex-husband or ―baritone babe‖ for a

lesbian) he thus achieves a more natural tone of the gossip columns.

Another aspect of this genre that Palahniuk employs is ―relentless

namedropping‖ (he refers to it as a ―name-dropping form of Tourette‘s

syndrome‖) and boldfacing the proper nouns in the same manner as the names

of the celebrities are boldfaced in the columns. The names of the celebrities,

historical figures and trademarks then stand out in the text in order to attract

the sight of the reader. Besides other functions (to be discussed further in the

text) these names, that are part of the reader‘s reality, strengthen the

connection between the book and the actual world in a similar manner they

usually do in Palahniuk‘s novels. Due to the exaggerated nature of Tell-All,

intentional namedropping and fictionalized movie scripts based on true stories,

the author uses more of these connecting points with reality than in any other

of his novels. The proper nouns and their usage become one of the ―horses‖

themselves. Another of these ―horses‖, that situates the story in a particular

year is a phrase ―the year when every other song on the radio was [Patti Page

singing ‗(How Much Is) That Doggy in the Window?‘ etc.]‖ (Tell-All 17) that the

author repeatedly uses instead of stating particular year. By referring to actual

information concerning the particular year he, again, achieves more realistic

reference than by plainly stating that the situation occurred in year 1953 (in

this case).

Another of Palahniuk‘s usual tricks that he uses in order to involve the

reader in the story is metafictional involvement of the reader, for which he uses

a form of movie script in this novel. Tell-All, instead of being divided into

80
chapters, consists of three acts divided into separate scenes. Each of the

scenes describes the location and situation in the beginning: ―Act one, scene

four opens with Katherine Kenton cardling an urn in her arms. The setting:

dimly lit interior of the Kenton crypt, [etc.]‖ (Tell-All 23). Moreover, the author

regularly directly addresses the reader: ―Here, let‘s make a slow dissolve to

flashback‖ (Tell-All 17); ―If you‘ll permit me to break the fourth wall, my name

is Hazie Coogan. [and Hazie continues talking to the reader throughout the

chapter]‖ (Tell-All 7). Since movie scripts play an important role in the novel

and Palahniuk often includes scripts of the various movies in which Miss Kathie

is supposed to play, the script form transforms the novel itself into one of the

exaggerated scenarios that the reader reads in the same manner as Kathie

reads her scripts. The story, however over the top it is, thus achieves a non-

fiction form that Palahniuk mentions in the quote above, as the movies Kathie

reads about are based on the true events. In the scripts these events are

exaggerated, which is the same thing the author does with his ―real‖ story.

Unlike most of Palahniuk‘s earlier novels, Tell-All does not contain any

form of direct social critique. Instead, he uses the boldfaced proper nouns in

order to point out the consequences of growing interest of the entertainment

industry, crippling the self-expressive abilities of the people. He commented on

this in one of the interviews:

My crackpot theory is that people are losing their skill to express

themselves, and they're, in a way, farming that task out. If they want to

express themselves they buy a song or they buy a greeting card that's

81
 already processed by someone who's kept that skill. We can't express

our own feelings anymore so we have to hire someone to do that. To a

large extent movies take that on, they're our therapy and our

expression. (―SuicideGirls – Tell-All‖)

In Tell-All he therefore uses the accumulated boldfaced names and

brands in order to illustrate the function they play in our communication.

Palahniuk talks about these names as of non-language or form of macros

generating complex meaning and leading to association with certain status.75

Throughout the novel he therefore uses the names as very functional means for

illustrating the statuses of the actors. The first party of Lillian Hellman is

described in this manner: ―Easily half of the twentieth-century history sits at

this table: Prince Nicholas of Romania, Pablo Picasso, Cordell Hull and Josef von

Sternberg. The attendant celebrities seem to stretch from Samuel Beckett to

Gene Autry to Marjorie Main to the faraway horizon‖ (Tell-All 2). Fashion brands

worn by the characters become the expression of their wealth,76 the famous

names from the history become archetypes of people,77 movies and historical

events become archetypes of situations,78 etc. The communication between the

celebrities becomes only gibberish with an occasional name dropped: ―Lilly‘s

drivel possibly constitutes […] the outcome of an orphaned press agent raised

75
See ―Chuck Palahniuk: Tell-All‖ video.
76
E.g. ―The heady aroma of her Chanel no. 5‖ (Tell-All 1).
77
E.g. ―This woman is Pocahontas . She is Athena and Hera . Lying in this messy, unmade bed,
eyes closed, this is Juliet Capulet. Blanche DuBois. Scarlett O‘Hara‖ (Tell-All 48).
78
E.g. ―Beyond her first words, Lilian‘s talk becomes one of the jungle tracks one hears in the
background of every Tarzan film, just tropical birds and Johnny Weissmuller and howler
monkeys repeating‖ (Tell-All 3).

82
by wolves and taught to read aloud from Walter Winchell‘s column. Her

compulsive prattle, a true pathology. Cluck, oink, bark…Jean Negulesco‖ (Tell-

All 3). The mixture of random animal sounds combined with a random celebrity

name becomes one of the Palahniuk‘s ―horses‖ used throughout the novel. On

numerous occasions Palahniuk claimed that he decided to set the novel in the

Golden Age of Hollywood primarily because he wanted to make into a flood of

names without being sued by the people – he therefore uses only the names of

already deceased people.

The radical change in the writing style, topics discussed, setting and

other elements that used to be typical for Palahniuk‘s early novels led to

creation of a novel that is almost incomparable to his writing in the first period.

Tell-All is an entertaining novel due to the ever-present exaggeration, but most

of the fans of his earlier works have hard time accepting this change of style.

With this novel he probably targets a completely different audience, since the

young people that found it easy to relate to the characters in Fight Club or

found the next novels dynamic and entertaining, are probably not familiar with

great majority of the people the author refers to in this novel and prefer

reading the simpler, more dynamic forms of writing. These changes and their

reception will be further discussed in the conclusion.

5. Conclusion

As mentioned in the beginning, Palahniuk claimed his primary intention

when starting writing was to attract young people back to reading. In one of

the interviews he commented on what he believes (and what he was taught by

83
Spanbauer) makes a book attractive to a reader:

You have got to make people laugh, that‘s most important. You have

got to make them feel something, some sympathetic physical reaction.

Involve them on gut level. Disease does that, illness does that, violence

does that, sex does that. […] I think young people, primarily, love it.

Because they expect a lot more from a book. Books really have so much

competition from music, movies and video games and they really want a

book that will hit them the way the movie or concert hit them.

(―Interview by Andrea Seabrook‖)

Palahniuk obviously kept to these principles very strictly in beginning of

his writing career, as the first four novels contain most of the elements

mentioned above. The effort to involve the reader in the book as much as

possible lead to increased relevance of the first novel, that the readers usually

point out and which John Fiske defined as one of the crucial conditions for

potential attractiveness of a popular text. Similarly, the author‘s intention to

achieve this effect through displaying intensive human experiences like

violence, rebellion and overcoming diseases lead to formation of various

evasive pleasures that, according to Fiske, are the primary motivation for

consuming popular texts. Though almost unknowingly, Palahniuk managed to

write a novel that bears most of the determining aspects needed for popular

success of particular text. Though hundreds of pages of careful scholarly

84
analysis of hidden meanings of Fight Club have been written,79 Palahniuk still

claims that all he wanted to do was write a story: ―Before the University of

Pennsylvania hosted conferences where academics dissected Fight Club with

everything from Freud to Soft Sculpture to Interpretive Dance […] there was

just a short story. It was just an experiment to kill a slow afternoon at work‖

(Fight Club 212-3).80

As is obvious from the online discussions and as Palahniuk himself

claims, the first novel (and its movie adaptation) was successful mainly with the

young people and usually with the people who do not generally read books.

The novel primarily targeted the younger audience, as the author claims that

they long for their big experience. This was openly articulated by Tyler Durden,

who claims that ―we are God‘s middle children […] with no special place in

history‖ (Fight Club 141) and that ―We don‘t have a great war in our

generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of spirit‖

(Fight Club 149). Palahniuk thus provides this experience through the form of

relating the reader to the experiences of the characters who win their personal

struggles, which attracted mainly the young and dissatisfied readers. Journal

Entertainment Weekly described these fans and their excitement in the

following manner:

79
E.g. Fall/Winter 2005 issue of online magazine Stirrings Still: The International Journal of
Existential Literature contains more than 150 pages of analysis of mostly Fight Club from
existential point of view, demonstrating its work with numerous ideological concepts and
theories.
80
On the other hand, several years later he claimed that he accepts the idea of the death of
the author, as presented by Roland Barthes and therefore there is not a wrong way to read his
books. The readers create their interpretation based on their own body of knowledge and
experience. See ―A.V. Club interview‖.

85
 His fans -- many of whom are young men, unemployed, or making do

on minimum wage, tattooed and pierced, with black Sharpie pen on

their nails and cut-off Dickies and red laces through their Chuck Taylors

-- lap up his stories, so thrilled are they to be in their hero's presence.

See, they didn't really read before. Maybe some Marvel comics or

fantasy novels, maybe some Bret Easton Ellis. But they saw this movie

''Fight Club'' and something took hold and suddenly they're buying

hardcovers and standing in line for three hours to meet a writer.

(Entertainment Weekly)

The approach to writing used in the first four novels attracted wide

audience including also the kind of fans described above, which is devoted

enough to articulate their appreciation for their (in many cases only) favorite

writer in ways81 that might be defined as cult following. Novels from Palahniuk‘s

early writing period are generally still the most appreciated ones even after his

approach to writing changed.

The breakpoint in his writing career, as mentioned, was September 11,

2001, which he commented in one of the interviews:

To a certain extent it sort of happened at the perfect time for my career

because I did not want to be standing on the soapbox as an angry

young man into my forties. This way I get sort of transitioned into my

cultural criticisms in a forward way. The best cultural criticism of the

40's and 50's came out of oppressive times. It was fantasy and science

81
Described in the introduction.

86
 fiction and it wasn't taken like form someone on a soapbox. It's my goal

to be charming and entertaining in my rants. (―SuicideGirls – Lullaby‖)

Even though the terrorist attacks became the articulated breakpoint, the

real reason for the change in approach was probably his transformation into a

full-time writer, which allowed him more time for research during writing. At

that time Palahniuk started to refer to scholarly theories and consciously import

them into his books, as he claimed in one of the interviews:

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. (―A.V. Club Interview‖)

Palahniuk thus keeps to the intention mentioned in several of the quotes

before and starts to experiment with forms of narrative and situations depicted.

Though the body of readers that was described in quote from Entertainment

Weekly above can barely appreciate the inclusion of these ideas, the change in

Palahniuk‘s situation started to influence the form and content of his writing in

the ways that were discussed in chapters above – his social critique became

87
less openly expressed and the author tends to incorporate it into the story itself

instead of its open articulation by rebellious characters and their behavior. The

first novels after this change in approach still contained many of the aspects

typical for Palahniuk‘s early transgressive fiction, including motives of a

character struggling to find their way back to the world (most of the novels),

evasive acts (e.g. Party Crashing in Rant), severe violence (Haunted),

provocative topics (Snuff), and others, but their importance gradually

decreased. While Pygmy, even despite radical change in writing style, still might

be related to the author‘s earlier writings due to rather open critique of

American society, Tell-All, as can be obvious from the analysis above, barely

shares any characteristics with Palahniuk‘s early novels. Though he does not

avoid displaying of sex and violence, their occurrence is so heavily coded that

the ―original‖ fans82 are barely able to enjoy it and thus seem to be rather

dissatisfied with it.83 At the same time, the last novels do not seem to be

successful with other readers either, and are usually rated as average.

It might be possible to speculate about true motivation behind

Palahniuk‘s literary development. Some of the voices in online discussion claim

that he is plainly trying to keep pace with the ―fight club generation‖ which is

growing up and provide his fans with what he expects them to like, others

claim that he purely mellowed out in order to reach broader audience.

82
Term ―original‖ is used here to refer to the fans praising Palahniuk‘s early fiction.
83
E.g. First comment on Tell-All page at amazon.com states: ―Discovering someone has gone
missing is nothing short of tragic. There's just no other possible explanation. Tell-All cannot be
written by the same Chuck Palahniuk who wrote the brilliant novels Fight Club, Choke, and
Survivor. Alien abduction, demonic possession, mind control, something. Anything. I refuse to
accept depreciation of creativity and talent as a viable option.‖

88
Palahniuk himself claims that purely does what he feels like and responds to

situations in his personal life.84 The fact is that his writing has gone through a

significant change since beginning of his writing career. Though majority of his

fans still seem to prefer his early writings and are (usually quietly) dissatisfied

with his new books, the cult that was built around his persona is strong enough

to constantly attract new readers of his old books, which preserve this cult

alive. Chuck Palahniuk himself still seems very enthusiastic about opportunities

literature provides and therefore continues to promote literature, as he claims

that books are a unique, powerful medium and there still are many places ―that

only books can go‖ (Haunted 412), so it is important to attract people back to

reading.

Works cited
Primary sources:

Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. London: Vintage, 2006. Print.

---. Lullaby. London: Vintage, 2003. Print.

---. Rant. London: Vintage, 2008. Print.

84
Palahniuk, speaking publicly as often as he does, always explains particular influences leading
to writing any of his books.

89
---. Tell-All. London: Jonathan Cape, 2010. Print.

Secondary sources - Print:

Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectics of Enlightenment.

London: Verso, 2010. Print.

Baker, Carlos. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP,

1972. Web.

de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkley: University of

California press, 1984. Print.

During, Simon. The Cultural Studies Reader. London: Roughtledge, 1993.

Print.

Fiske, John. Reading the Popular. London: Routledge, 1997. Print.

---. Understanding the Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 1997. Print.

Hall, Stuart. ―Notes on Deconstructing ‗The popular,‘‖ People‘s History and

Socialist Theory. Ed. Raphael Samuel. London: Routlege & Kegan Paul,

1981. 227-240. Print.

MacKendrick, Kenneth. ―Chuck Palahniuk and the New Journalism

Revolution.‖ A. Sacred and Immoral: on the Writings of Chuck

Palahniuk. Ed. Jeffrey Sartain. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge

Scholars Publishing, 2009. 1-21. Print.

Maguire, Laurie E. Shakespearean Suspect Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,

1996. Print.

90
McGuigan, Jim. Cultural Populism. London: Routledge, 1992. Print.

Palahniuk, Chuck. Diary. London: Vintage, 2004. Print.

---. Haunted. London: Vintage, 2006. Print.

---. Invisible Monsters. London: Vintage, 2000. Print.

---. Non-Fiction. London: Vintage, 2005. Print.

---. Pygmy. London: Vintage, 2010. Print.

---. Survivor. London: Vintage, 2000. Print.

Postcards from the Future: The Chuck Palahniuk Documentary. Dir. Joshua

Chaplinsky, Kevin Kolsch, Dennis Widmyer. ChuckPalahniuk.net, 2003.

DVD.

Sartain, Jeffrey A. Sacred and Immoral: on the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk.

Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Print.

Watson, Nigel. ―Postmodernism and Lifestyles‖. The Routledge companion to

postmodernism. Ed. Stuart Sim. London: Routledge, 2001. 53-64. Print.

Wolfe, Tom. ―Seizing the Power.‖ The New Journalism. Eds. Tom Wolfe and

E.W. Johnson. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. 23-36.

Secondary sources - Electronic:

Castillo, Jorge Ignacio. ―Creed of Chucky: Fight Club‘s Chuck Palaniuk is a

Sucker for Romance.‖ Prairie Dog: Regina‘s News and Entertainment

Voice March 2006: 16-29. Web. 20 Oct. 2011.

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―Chuck Palahniuk: Tell-All‖. 30 June 2010. Online video clip. Youtube. 25

March 2011.

―Guest Post – Genres: Transgressive fiction.‖ Parliament Books. Parliament

books. n.d. Web. 3 Nov. 2011.

Kavadlo, Jose. "The Fiction of Self-destruction: Chuck Palahniuk, Closet

Moralist." Stirrings Still: The International Journal of Existential

Literature 2:2 (2005): 3-24. Web. 30 Oct. 2011.

Kennedy, Kristen. "Cynic Rhetoric: The Ethics and Tactics of Resistance."

Rhetoric Review, 18:1 (1999), 26-45. JSTOR. Web. 31 Oct. 2011.

White, Steve. ―Chuck Palahniuk.‖ Novel Dog. WordPress.com 10 Jan. 2010.

Web. 13 Oct. 2011.

―Lullaby.‖ The Washington Post. The Washington Post, 2 Oct. 2002. Web. 13

Oct. 2011.

Palahniuk, Chuck. ―Chuck Palahniuk at Cooper Union 11.1.11.‖ 1 Nov 2011.

Online video clip. Livestream.com. 5 Nov 2011.

---.―Chuck Palahniuk Goes to Hell.‖ Interview by Adam Weinstein.

MotherJones.com. Mother Jones. n.d. Web. 21 Oct. 2011.

---. ―Chuck Palahniuk: Lullaby.‖ Interview by Daniel Robert Epstein.

SuicideGirls.com. SuicideGirls. 1 Jan. 2003. Web. 25 Oct. 2011.

---. ―Chuck Palahniuk‘s speech at Grub Street writer conference.‖ 19 May

2010. Online video clip. Vimeo. 25 March 2011.

92
---. ―Chuck Palahniuk: Stranger than Fiction.‖ Interview by Andrea Seabrook.

NPR. NPR. 4 July 2004. Web. 25 Oct. 2011.

---. ―Chuck Palahniuk: Tell-All.‖ Interview by Nicole Powers. SuicideGirls.com.

SuicideGirls. 27 May 2 010. Web. 4 Nov 2011.

---. Interview by Allison Heilborn. Random House. Random House, n. d. Web.

4 Oct. 2011.

---. Interview by Geoffrey Kleinman. DVDtalk. DVDtalk.com, 2000. Web. 12

Oct. 2011.

---. Interview by Rick Kieffel. The Agony Column. Bookotron.com, 2005.

Web. 25 Oct. 2011.

---. Interview by Rick Kieffel. The Agony Column. Bookotron.com, 2007.

Web. 25 Oct. 2011.

---.Interview by Rick Kleffel. ―A 2010 Interview with Chuck Palahniuk.‖ The

Agony Column. Bookotron.com. 2010. Web. 25 March 2011.

---. Interview by Tasha Robinson. A.V. Club. A.V. Club. 13 Nov. 2002. Web. 9

Nov. 2011.

---. ―Chuck Palahniuk: Tell-All‖. 30 June 2010. Online video clip. Youtube. 25

March 2011.

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. ―The Paradoxical Status of Repetition.‖ Poetics

Today, Vol. 1 No. 4, Narratology II: The Fictional Text and the Reader

(Summer, 1980): 151-159. JSTOR. Web. 28 Oct. 2011.

93
 Scott-James, Rolfe-Arnold. ―Popularity in Literature.‖ The North American

Review, Vol. 197, No. 690 (May, 1913): 677-691. JSTOR. Web. 29 Oct.

2011.

Valby, Karen. ―A Knock Out.‖ Entertainment Weekly. Entertainment Weekly.

23 Sep. 2003. Web. 28 Oct. 2011.

Resumé (Slovak)

Diplomová práca sa zaoberá aspektmi populárnej kultúry v knihách autora

Chucka Palahniuka a vývojom jeho tvorby. Palahniuk je známy najmä širokou

základňou oddaných čitateľov a tým, že v mnohých prípadoch oslovuje i

jedincov, ktorí sa literatúre bežne nevenujú. Za svoju popularitu autor vďačí

najmä úspechu filmovej adaptácie jeho prvého románu Fight Club (1996), ktorý

priviedol divákov k čítaniu ďalších jeho kníh. Preto je táto kniha, zaradzovaná

do žánru transgresívnej literatúry, podrobená analýze za využitia aspektov

94
populárnej kultúry, ktoré popísal John Fiske vo diele Understanding Popular

Culture (1989). Táto analýza dokazuje, že Fight Club obsahuje mnohé z prvkov,

o ktorých Fiske tvrdí, že sú atraktívne pre čitateľov, konzumentov textov

populárnej kultúry. Diplomová práca obsahuje i stručnú analýzu Palahniukovho

autorského štýlu, vďaka ktorému sa knihy stávajú prístupnejšími pre širšie

okruhy čitateľov. Druhá časť práce sa zoaberá zmenami, ktorými Palahniukova

tvorba prešla v neskorších fázach jeho autorskej činnosti, kedy sa obsah i forma

jeho kníh začali výrazne meniť. Porovnanie s jeho prvým románom ukazuje, že

autor upúšťa od pôvodného explicitného vyjadrovania kritiky spoločnosti a

foriem rebélie voči nej, pričom sa prikláňa k dômyslenejšiemu spracovaniu

týchto tém, ako i iným témam a časom i výrazným experimentom s formou ich

spracovania. Tento vývoj je dokumentovaný prostredníctvom troch diel

z rôznych období Palahniukovej tvorby: Lullaby (2002), Rant (2007) a Tell-All

(2010). Posledný menovaný román už sa veľmi výrazne odlišuje od autorovej

rannej tvorby, čo viedlo k istej nespokojnosti fanúšikov jeho starších diel, ako i

celkovo priemerným hodnoteniam neskoršej tvorby.

Resumé (English)

This thesis deals with aspects of popular culture contained in the novels by

author Chuck Palahniuk and development of his writing. Palahniuk is known

mainly for a wide fan-base of devoted readers and his success with the

individuals, who usually do not read books. The author became popular among

readers mainly due to success of the motion picture adaptation of his first novel

Fight Club (1996), which brought people also to his other novels. This novel, a

95
work of transgressive fiction, is therefore analyzed using the aspects of popular

culture described by John Fiske in Understanding Popular Culture (1989). The

analysis demonstrates that Fight Club contains many of the characteristics

which Fiske considers to be attractive for readers, the consumers of popular

culture. The thesis includes a brief analysis of Palahniuk‘s writing style which

makes his novels more accessible to broader body of readers. Second part of

the thesis focuses on changes that occured in the later phases of his writing

career, when both the content and form of his books started to change

considerably. Comparison of his later works with the first novel shows that

Palahniuk gradually abandons his former practice of explicit displaying of social

critique and various forms of social resistance. Instead, he discusses these

topics in more subtile manner, starts to discuss also different topics and

introduces various experiments with the form of narrative. This development is

documented on examples of three novels from various periods of Palahniuk‘s

carrer: Lullaby (2002), Rant (2007) and Tell-All (2010). The last novel

mentioned obviously significantly differs from the author‘s early writing, which

resulted in dissatisfaction of admirers of the author‘s first novels and overally

average ratings of his later novels.

96