I don’t have much to say other than I loved reading this selection from the new Norton Anthology. G and G perform what they preach in “Introduction: Rhizome” from A Thousand Plateaus, a book I feel I must read now.
The challenge the conventional ideas of ideas, of thinking, of books and philosophy: “We will never ask what a book means, as signified and signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with…” (1455). This is the direction I see myself going towards more and more; that is, not looking for meanins but rather trying to understand how things mean. How does a book create meaning? How does society impose its meanings?
G and G challenge the notion of the book in the Western tradition. The book is like a root (the image of logos as a root)– and to go off on an aside here for a minute– I wonder (and I’m sure this is out there somewhere) what G and G would think of Heidegger’s conception of philosophy since he wanted to rethink philosophy not from the tree of logos or the roots but from the very ground from which the logos tree springs. In that sense, I’m sure the would like how Heidegger was challenging accepted modes of thought in philosophy; although, I’m sure they would have qualms with how he reordered philosophy and still found a center from which to spring. However, Heidegger is concerned with Be-coming– Dasien is, after all, the movement of Be-ing. In that sense, I believe that Heidegger can be seen as rhizomic writing. Yet again, though, G and G don’t want a beginning; they want “…neither beginning nor end, but always a middle…” (1458).
Mostly, I like their prose; the way they play with language and with the structure of logical thought: “We are writing this book as a rhizome. It is composed of plateaus. We have given it a circular form, but only for laughs” (1459).
This “logic” outlined in G and G, I believe can be seen in the works of early Palahiuk, in Joyce, in Danielewski, and with philosophers that perform in their text, such as Derrida or Ciouxous.
Reading Gilbert and Gubar this week, I see ways to inform a reading of Invisible Monsters that I want to attempt as soon as I get more time. G & G wonder how a woman can write in a patriarchal world, which can be mirrored in Palahniuk’s novel where characters seek a way to undermine (“write”) in a world that defines them.
G and G reevaluate Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” and question the woman’s role in this theory. The influence appears to always be a male poet’s anxiety over his male predecessor, so then, what happens to woman writers? For G and F the situation, “cannot be simply reversed or inverted in order to account for the situation of a woman writer” (1929). Rather the woman writer must fight how other writers (male) have “read” women.
It is not a fight with the female precursor that G and G posit, but rather that women writers can look at predecessors to see that it (writing) can be done, even in a male dominated world. The go on to explain how women were always looking for ways to break into a male dominated profession, and that if women today can feel freer about writing, it is only because their mother figures struggled to change the system.
What interest me, though, is the second half of the essay where G and G posit that women faced actual pyshical manifestation of illnesses because of the constraints of a patraicharial soceity imposing oder on them: “It is debilitating to be any woman in a society where women are warned that if they do not behave like angels they must be monsters” (1932). It is socialization in a male-centric world that cause women to become ill.
I believe this is what is playing out in Invisible Monsters where Shannon, conditioned to be just a pretty face, a model, in order to radically break from the constructs of society (and possibly manifesting the disease that G and G discuss), decides to destroy her own face. Shannon says she felt like she was trapped in a beauty ghetto, unable to expand and grow but rather pigeon holed; can it be that this feeling arose because, as G and G point out, “Learning to become a beautiful object, the girl learns anxiety about–perhaps even loathing of–her own flesh. Peering obsessively into the real as well as metaphoric looking glasses that surround her, she desires literally to “reduce” her own body” (1933). Shannon, indeed, “reduces” her own body because of the anxiety she feels of the looking glass, and she does so radically.
By mutilating her face, Shannon nullifies the power given to her by patriarchal society. But what does this say about Brandy? I wonder if Brandy, then, doesn’t becomes a model for reversing the order, challenging the assumed patriarchal hierarchy in place? Brandy is a problamatic character here because he still has a penis, and as the one with the penis (and a voice), he is the one who gives the other characters a story to live by. Brandy is the manifestation of the Lacanian subject supposed to know. With his penis (his symbolic phallus of power), he wields his power but under the guise of a female (soon to become an actual male). Or can it be said that Brandy has a transgender/transexual is purposely complicated any easy definable category, as Brandy says she/he wants out of the labels.
Ugh–freaking grad school! Rather than explore this by reading Lacan and other femminist, I have to do homework and grade papers and quizes. But I will get back to this soon. I might use this line of reasoning when I present my paper in Illinois in April.
I have this idea that all of life is about interpretation. No matter what the situation, you decide (decide is not the right word, but it is the first word that comes to mind)– or maybe society or culture conditions you– how you are going to interpret that situation. This is seen all the time. When some people have a break up, they can get over it quickly and move on to someone else while others brood and cry about the break up.
All situations are seen like this. This is what all those new age writers and all this positive thinking, imagine-your-goal-and-you’ll-achieve-it crap is all about, which to an extent, I guess, is true (not the you can will what you want “the secret” crap, but the stuff about you decide how to react (interpret) any situation in life.
It seems this goes back to Kierkegaard a great deal. I see his influence in Heidegger’s they-self, in Sartre’s anxiety, in Camus’s interpretation of Sisyphus. Looking at the post in which Cornell West talks about philosophy as a preparation for death, meditations on death, on living a life which will make us not fear death– this is all seen in Kierkegaard, except K was much to melancholic. K believes that the freedom to chose gives us a feeling of dread because we always know that this choice can have far reaching effects.
For K, it is our responsibility to break out of the crowd by making our own choices and not letting the crowd tell us what to do. If we let others decide for us, if we follow the crowd, then there is always an excuse when things go wrong. To go back to that awful “secret” crap– if things go wrong, it is because you didn’t desire, or positively think about the thing you wanted enough– there is always a scapegoat with these systems, which is why K hated all systems. This idea of one having to make one’s own choices, choices which once made mean people, including yourself, can get hurt, your life can be ruined, other’s lives can be ruined, is an overwhelming responsibility, which is why this leads to dread.
I think Palahniuk really captures that feeling, even taking some of his quotes out of context (the quotes are in context though, within this discussion):
“People don’t want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.”
“You have a choice. Live or die. Every breath is a choice. Every minute is a choice. To be or not to be.”
“You must realize that one day you will die. Until then you are worthless.”
“Reality means you live until you die. The real truth is nobody wants reality”
“More and more, it feels like I’m doing a really bad impersonation of myself.”
Ok, I need to get back to reading…
ohhh… but before I forget– this is Dread and Happiness…
Why doesn’t K, after being haunted by his father and his religious culture not see that he is free to decide his life? Sure, he made a mistake that ruined some poor girl (for a little while) and ruined his own life since he forever pined after her, but he does realize that there is no system out there controlling him and telling him what to do. This is why I think that all of life is interpretation. It seems to be that being freed of such a constraining life would be a happy moment, but K was always shadowed by Dread, but I choosing can be a good thing, I think even if there are all those possible bad outcomes.
Today, I talked to my mentor at USF. Schools assign mentors to people like me coming into a program to show us the rope. We talked for a bit and he seems like a nice enough guy. We are going to meet tomorrow for lunch, and then he is going to show me around campus, and on Tuesday I am sitting in on a class. I don’t care all too much to sit in on a class, but I got nothing to do. Then on Wednesday, I plan on going to Marco Island for a couple of days to hang with the family. Again, I don’t really want to drive three hours, but I am not doing much around here.
I went to a new cafe today in the trendy Hyde Park Village. It had too much of a snobby vibe for me. Although, it does seem to have some nice eateries and is only 5 minutes away. We’ll see how things go.
At the cafe I read Chuck Palahniuk’s Tell All. This book is, at best, mildly entertaining. There are no characters to care for, the plot is moving along really slowly, there are flashbacks that seem to tell nothing. I understand Palahniuk wanting to veer from the formula he followed from Invisible Monsters, Fight Club, Diary, Choke, Survivor et. al.. He had that fast paced style, all action, constantly moving the story, with twist endings, but lately, he is challenging narrative forms, which while commendable, I feel, isn’t working.
Half way through the novel, the plot is trite and boring (very not like Chuck). The story is told from the personal assistant of Miss Kathie Kenton. The assistant seems to have a weird, obsessive thing about her boss. But that is all I got so far. No real action, no real suspense, no real emotion– not even Palahniuk’s trademark analysis or critique of some type or other of societal norms. I guess, in the background, it can be said that the novel is critiquing societies obsession with celebrities and celebrities’ lives, as well as making society look at its fascination with “reality t.v.”, this drive and desire to see it all. But, that is stretching it…
I am mildly entertained– this is more of a beach read than the Palahniuk of old. Hopefully, all this experimenting with narrative form will eventually lead to something substantial. Palahniuk came close to it in Pygmy and there are moments of it in Snuff, but I miss reading a Palahniuk book and not being able to put it down.
Here is a rough draft of a conference paper I want to get back to and possibly, hopefully, publish:
My current research involves the continuation of my master’s thesis. As I was working on my thesis a friend lent me the documentary Derrida. In this movie, Derrida is asked about love. He tells us the question of love is the basic question of philosophy, the question of Dasien, and that is the question of the que or the qua? (the who or the what?)
This idea that the question of love is the same question of being stuck with me. The other influence here is a class in which I read Derrida’s “The Politics of Witnessing” and I noticed how love and identity and the identity the characters in Palahniuk’s work all correlate in some ways.
That is to say: Jacques Derrida states, “all responsible witnessing engages a poetic experience of language,” (66) which is to say that the most responsible way to bear witness to an event is through a poetic language that does not claim to grasp the moment, capture it, or totalize it. Derrida then goes on to conclude his essay, “The Politics of Witnessing” by stating how the poetic experience is the most ethical way of bearing witness by showing itself to be false and not claiming to actually capture the moment. The poem does not claim to represent any actual event as Derrida says:
Revealing its [poetic experience] mask as a mask, but without showing itself, without presenting itself, perhaps, presenting its non-presentation as such, representing it, it thus speaks about bearing witness in general, but above all about the poem that it is, about itself in its singularity, and about the bearing witness to which every poem bears witness (96).
Derrida also states (in his documentary) that love is a question between “who” one loves or “what” one loves (Derrida documentary). The question is: does one love the other or some quality about the other. The idea of loving something about the other or a specific someone (with a self-same identity) leads me to contend that the way one bears witness is also the way one loves. Derrida explains that in bearing witness:
…I affirm (rightly or wrongly, but in all good faith, sincerely) that that was or is present to me, in space and time (thus, sense-perceptible) and although you do not have access to it, not the same access, you, my addressees, you have to believe me, because I engage myself to tell you the truth, I am already engaged in it, I tell you that I am telling you the truth. Believe me. You have to believe me (76).
Isn’t this what one is saying when one is in love? It is an affirmation to the other that, “I love you, you have to believe me.” This is, after all, what is so scary about love. You are left asking yourself, “What is it that this person loves about me?” And then as Lacan would put it, desire becomes my desire to want to fulfill what the other wants of me. I outline these thoughts because it is my belief that these statements can inform a certain reading of Chuck Palahniuk’s texts.
Palahniuk’s characters embrace an ephemeral, non-definable identity that take the form of Martin Heidegger’s conception of identity (Being as Dasein) as always moving ahead of itself, as being-in-the-world-towards-others, rather than a static, non-moving self-identity. I would say that Palahniuk’s novels, specifically Invisible Monsters and Fight Club, can be interpreted as (post)modern day love stories. But these are love stories that describe a love that holds no claim to a who or a what, but rather, a love that speaks in these Heideggarian and Derridian terms.
My contention is that in Chuck Palahniuk’s work, the characters come to a foundational apprehension that their identities and choices in life are all organized by artificial, social constructions, especially the construction of language. Upon achieving this realization, the characters will take steps to challenge this overriding discourse that is ruling their lives, and they will try to break free of their socially imposed identity. Ultimately realizing that they cannot escape the “trap” that is society’s discourse, they fall back on love, but again, this love expresses itself through a poetic expression of language and is towards others who do not have any fixed, fully present identity.
In Fight Club, the narrator’s identity (let’s call him Joe, as in “I’m Joe’s total lack of surprise”) is established by his lack of identity. Joe is an insomniac, and because of the insomnia, Joe has no identity that can connect him to the world around him. Joe says, “This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can’t touch anything and nothing can touch you” (Palahniuk Fight Club 21).
This distance Joe describes is the same distance from experience anyone feels because of the gap in meaning in language, and since as Terry Eagleton points out:
…language is something I am made out of, rather than merely a convenient tool I use, the whole idea that I am stable, unified entity must also be a fiction. Not only can I never be fully present to you, but I can never be fully present to myself either (112).
And this postmodern conception of identity is what Joe describes in insomnia. Joe’s insomnia seems to be his awareness of how language is all around him, constructing his identity—which means he has no “real” identity that is his. Joe realizes how his identity is caught up in not only the language of society that is just “a copy of a copy of a copy, ” but also in the things he feels he needs to own in order to be “complete.” Unable to break free of societal constraints by himself, Joe creates Tyler Durden (there are other reasons Tyler manifest that will be discussed in a moment) and Joe implores, “Oh, Tyler, please rescue me.[…] Deliver me from Swedish furniture. Deliver me form clever art” (Palahniuk FC 46). Tyler is the manifestation of Joe’s unconscious desire to break free from the ruling societal discourse that tells him to buy clever art to be complete.
Furthermore, we come to the apprehension that Joe has come to these realizations about his identity, partially, because of and through Marla, who is the love interest, and this realization is the even more important reason Tyler manifest. Joe explains, “I know why Tyler occurred. Tyler loved Marla. From the first night I met her, Tyler or some part of me had needed a way to be with Marla” (FC 198). Tyler Durden, then, is the manifestation of love. It is Joe’s poetic expression—his way of being able to fall in love with Marla. Tyler is Joe’s “bearing witness” in that bearing witness as Derrida states, “…attest, precisely, that some “thing” has been present to him. This “thing” is no longer present to him, of course, in the mode of perception at the moment when the attestation takes place” (77). This attestation is rather a matter of “you have to believe me”. Love is not “present” and any attempt to explain love and thematize love, only totalizes love, as love is not a thing that can be perceived or that is graspable. Love is, rather, a thing that, “you just have to believe me.” The narrator, Joe, has created this barrier between himself and his love so that he does not have to be present when he falls in love. The reason that Joe creates this barrier is because Marla reflects his lie. Marla in reflecting this lie has pointed out to Joe his insufficiency, his lack—she has castrated him in a Lacanian sense.
Marla castrates Joe in that he feels less of a man because of his “nesting instinct” as he puts it, and therefore has to go to these support group meetings in order to feel complete, in order to get emotional release, in order to sleep, but Marla is a reminder of his lie—her presence there reminds Joe of his lie and his inability to cope in the world. He is castrated by his “lack”—his un-maniliness. Joe has come to realize that he no longer has a manly identity with which to confront Marla and have a loving relationship with; rather, as Joe puts it, “…I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalog” (FC 43). Later, Joe goes on to admit, “Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you” (Ibid 44).
It is this idea of lack (Joe’s lack of manhood) that is what Lacan means by castration. Joe feels an anxiety of confronting Marla without his phallus, his “thing” he can offer her; his desire is to be desired by her, but as Renata Selecl explains Lacan’s idea of castration, “The major problem of male and female subjects is that they do not relate to what their partners relate to in them” (Salecl 93 Reading Seminar XX). She goes on to explain (and again, here, this relates to what is happening with Joe):
For men, the way they desire…is conditioned by the fact that castration has marked them by a lack, which also means that their phallic function has been negated. As a result of this negation, men are constantly anxious that they might not be able to do it: that their organ might disappoint them when they need it most, that others might find them powerless, and so on…. Anxiety often arises precisely when a man encounters a woman who becomes an object of his desire (Ibid. 93-94).
Tyler Durden is the symbolic phallus. Tyler is what Joe thinks that Marla desires.
There is an Oedipal triad going on in as well, in which Tyler is the father (the one with the symbolic phallus that the mother desires and the child longs for); Joe is the child, who longs for the phallus, rather, to be the phallus (the thing) that the mother desires. Lacan states in his seminar, “What the child wants is to become the desire of desire, to be able to satisfy the mother’s desire…. To please the mother…. It is necessary and sufficient to be the phallus” (Lacan seminar of Jan. 22, 1958). And Joe, throughout the novel, is constantly comparing the relationship of Marla and Tyler to his parents, and Joe is constantly fighting for their attention.
Tyler opens Joe up to everything that Joe is lacking, and everything Joe wishes he had (the phallus) in order to attract Marla. Joe has an unconscious desire for Marla, and Marla has a strong attraction to Joe. But the attraction between these two goes even beyond this somewhat reductive conception of desire. What is happening here in this triad is beyond language. What happens in the fight clubs is beyond language, and the love that is expressed between Marla and Joe/Tyler is beyond any fixed conception of language. If Marla does desire Tyler (what is lacking in Joe) she is also, at the same time, desiring something in Joe (what Tyler is lacking).
Either way, or rather, both ways, the two of them (Tyler/Joe) do not have any fixed identity. If we are made out of language (as Eagleton says), and if identity is only possible through language, as it is in Dasien—the being which questions itself, which is in the world with others towards death, then there is no set identity to either one of the two characters that have a relationship with Marla.
This is why it is so easy for Marla to accept that Joe is not Tyler and to still love Joe regardless. Furthermore, Joe realizes that love is beyond words like fight club is beyond words. Fight club and Tyler are examples of training wheels (and this idea of training wheel will be explored in Invisible Monsters as well) for Joe to realize that identity is constructed by society, and that he has to go beyond a desire for Marla that will leave him castrated. As Joe himself says, “It happens that fast. I say, because I think I like you. Marla says, “Not love?” This is a cheesy enough moment…Don’t push it” (FC 197). The reason it is “not love” is because it is not in a conventional idea of love.
It is rather love as bearing witness—as a “you have to believe me—I like you even if I have no identity and do not know your identity.”
A violent love as Zizek would put it—the idea of I love you all or nothing—or as Derrida would say, the idea that I love a who, and that when that who changes (or if I do not love you “all), then I will no longer love you. This love between Marla and Joe is more like that love which is expressed in poetic language—even if she tells Joe before the big final scene of the novel, “It’s not love or anything…but I think I like you, too” and Joe hesitates thinking that Marla means she loves Tyler, and Marla reassures him, “No, I like you…I know the difference.” Even in this moment of doubt, this is a love beyond the conventional conception because the two “in love” have a precarious relationship with their identity.
Joe, after losing everything that defined his identity in the explosion and in his psychosis (Tyler), is still “liked” by Marla, and Joe, who only knows Marla as a “big faker” can still love her even if he has no concrete idea of her identity. Unable to find anything real in the “real world” Joe finds something real in love, but this is a love that is ungrounded—not like real reality. As Joe says of the fight clubs, “This is better than real life.”
In the end of the novel, Palahniuk shows us how Tyler (and all his masculine posturing and axioms) is just a manifestation of a psychosis, and that it is not Tyler that saves Joe in the end, it is Marla and community that saves him. It is love that is undefinable—that like bearing witness is best expressed through poetic expressions of love.
((((Kalvado quote)))))
Think of a valentine’s day gift—in order to show your loved one you love them you give them a superfluous, non-sense gift—candy or flowers. You do not—you cannot– put a price on love as love is not a thing that can be bought and sold.
This is what one sees in Invisible Monsters as well. The main character of the novel is Shannon Macfarland, a model who has purposely disfigured her pretty face to break free from societal constraints put on her because of her beauty. Her brother, also disfigured himself as a teen and is now going through a sex change operation just to break free from what society tells him he should do. In essence, I argue that Palahniuk’s characters deconstruct soceity’s discourse to show how what is natural is not so natural. But in the end, like Fight Club, what is left is a sister and a sister/brother who love each other completely even if they don’t have any identity to love or any thing to love.
Albert Camus said that he wanted to change people but not the world, which he saw as divine , and it seems that Brandy and Shannon feel the same way. They do not want to change the world; they just want to change the way people think about the world around them and about the way people are in the world. Chuck Palahniuk, also, does not seem like he wants to change the world but only the story about the world. It is hard to say what these characters achieve by disfiguring themselves and challenging the dominant discourse other than the awareness they have of societal constraints, and they know that by doing these things they will not be easily defined by society any longer.
Although Palahniuk deconstructs society to show how the natural attitude towards the world we have is not essentially natural, he is also giving his readers a story about community and love. The most astute reading of Palahniuk’s underlying themes can be seen in Jesse Kavadlo’s essay when he states, “Each novel…egregiously violent even by Palahniuk standards—ultimately proposes that what their characters, and all of us, need is—love” (Kavadlo 6). This is seen in IM as the novel ends with Shannon giving up her identity to Brandy. So often people are classified as “giving of themselves” to signify how much they care about community, and arguably there is no better way to express that giveness but to give away identity; especially when one thinks of how long it takes to come up with an identity and how much work is put into that identity. Shannon has worked hard to become a fashion model that can get steady work, and now she will give that over to Brandy so that Brandy can live out her dreams. Presumably, in the process, Brandy will continue to influence others and teach others how society is controlling and defining. She will continue to show how a transgender person can be the object of males’ gazes and desires, and she will continue to subvert the “natural” idea of sexual desires and gender roles. And all this is possible because of the loving gift from Shannon.
Shannon is left looking for something “real,” and for her that something real is love in a world of simulacra which moves forward like plot lines in a book or movie, “The fire in Evie’s clothes is just more and more every second, and now the plot moves along without you pushing” (Palahniuk IM 273). Shannon chooses love over the radical Baudrillardian postmodern idea of the loss of refrenciality as she states:
Give me a complete late-stage revision of my adult life.
Flash.
Give me anything in this whole fucking world that is exactly what it looks like!
Flash.
Here, again, there is the intertextuality of her feelings being tied into a photographer telling her how to feel and “pose.” It also shows how, more and more, Shannon nostalgically wishes for something that has a direct, straight meaning, which is why she clings to Brandy. Later, Shannon says:
Give me release.
I’m tired of this world of appearances. Pigs that only look fat. Families that look happy.
Give me deliverance.
From what only looks like generosity. What only looks like love.
Flash (Ibid. 291).
Shannon is tired of empty signifiers, ‘things that only look like things.’ The only real thing that she can cling to is love and community—the being-with-others, which happens in a transcednt, out of language state. Denzin can insightfully comment on what Shannon is going through. He states:
All knowledge is narrative. Today, more than ever in the history of western civilization multiple, local narratives, framed within larger interpretive patriarchal frameworks, daily circulate through the currents of popular culture, from film to soap operas, comic books, popular music, and romance novels. No, the loss of meaning and the mourning come from the very condition that Jameson and Baudrillard have identified. The cultural logics of late capitalism keep the unattainable (the real, the past, romantic love, true happiness) alive, attempting over and over again to reconcile the image with its referent, the concept with the sensible, the transparent with the communicable experience (Denzin 40).
Unable to find any material reality, she finds something real in the love she has for her brother, Brandy. Shannon, as a model, is surrounded by things that are fake in her work; as the daughter of a farmer who falsely fattens up pigs, she was surrounded by artifice as a child; as the sister of a closeted homosexual, she was surrounded by fake gender roles; and as a friend of Evie, she is surrounded by friends who are not what they seem; and as the girlfriend of Manus, she is surrounded by fake emotions (his fake emotions towards her). All of these things are aspects of identity and the things that influence identity, so it is no wonder that she rebels against these things the first chance she gets. Ultimately what Shannon returns to is: love . The novel ends in her total devotion and love for Brandy, “Completely and totally, permanently and without hope, forever and ever I love Brandy Alexander. And that is enough” (Palahniuk IM 297).
Chuck Palahniuk has been known as the writer of the book that became the famous movie Fight Club, but I hope to shows that Palahniuk is more of a satirist as Kavaldo explains, “More than an existential philosopher, however, Palahniuk is an American ironist…” (7). Kavaldo does an excellent job of closely reading Palahniuk and of not taking Palahniuk’s fiction in the dogmatic fashion some of Palahniuk’s fans have done, which leads critics to condemn Palahniuk for being too violent, too sexist, and too crass. The problem is that the violence is always contrasted by the humanity of his characters. Again, to quote Kavaldo:
A careful reader will, like the narrator [of Fight Club], be left unconvinced by Tyler’s sophistry and instead notice that only his language, exemplified by Palahniuk’s pumped up, brutally funny style, is powerful. His solutions…are not (13)
The same is true of IM, where the reader might side with the drug induced, road trip musings of Brandy’s brutal and harsh rebellion against society. Rather than rebel against society in the extreme way Shannon and Brandy do, the reader must remember that there is no getting outside of society, “Anything we want we’re trained to want” (Palahniuk IM 259). The reader must also remember that this only looks like rebellion, as Shannon repeatedly explains how things only “look like love, generosity, like she is crying” etc. what they are supposed to be. The point is, to reiterate again, to find community and love in a world where everything is false, and society is all just a copy of a copy, powerless vocabulary, just discourse, and makes you feel like you are severely fingering yourself.
I just finished reading Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk. The plot is simple enough: a child was taken from his parents at the age of four and was brainwashed into hating America and trained in combat and terrorism to fulfill “Operation Havoc.” Disguised as a foreign exchange student, Pygmy and his cronies infiltrate middle American homes as innocent students and begin to hatch their deadly plan. In the middle of the book, in Palahniuk fashion, there is sex and violence and a subtle commentary on all those great American things that can be so bad when taken to excess.
The novel is written in a pidgin English as it is the recording of Pygmy otherwise known as agent 67. This style lends a certain comedy to the novel as when Pygmy brutally rapes the town bully in a Wal-mart bathroom. This style also lends itself to a subtle review of all those Palahniuk themes about the dangers of consumerism and hero worship American are so prone to while also exploring a certain xenophobia that has sprung up in recent years towards America and our “spreading of freedom and democracy.”
For instance there is the scene in which Pygmy is describing his Wal-mart surrounding:
“For official record, squirrel maze of retail distribution center puzzle of competition warring objects, all improved, all package within fire color. Area divided into walls constructed from objects, all tinted color so grab eye. All object printed: Love me. Look me. Million speaking objects, begging…”
As in Fight Club we see how Palahniuk is concerned with our society’s obsession with measuring a person’s wealth by what is found in their wallet and homes rather than what is found inside the person. Another theme explored here is that subtle existential absurd—that moment when one stops to question if the life he is living is really worth living, and the person begins to question if his life has any meaning at all.
Pygmy comes to this realization as he begins to develop feelings for his host family’s sister. He questions what will happen if he is successful and kills off all his evil American enemies. His contemplation leads to a running theme throughout Palahniuk that I believe is severely overlooked: love and community. The only essay I have seen that addresses this is Jesse Kavaldo’s essay about Palahniuk being a closet moralist.
It seems that in the end, all of Palahniuk’s novels are about outcast finding someone to love, and this book is no different.
The book does has its flaws. For instance here is a group of foreign kids who talk in this broken English but win the spelling bee. There is also a scene early in the book in which Pygmy doesn’t know what a bathroom is, and this little inconstancies along with the broken writing gets grating at times.
I don’t know if it is the disappointment of Rant and Snuff along with my great desire to see Palahniuk write a good book again, but this was an entertaining book despite its flaws.
The broken style makes the book both grating but also, at times, entertaining. An example of this (and an example that ties in the idea that Palahniuk is really just a big softy, romantic) is after Pygmy receives a kiss from his sister and says, “Tongue of operative me licking own lips so able revisit lingering taste of vanished affection.” The way some of the more violent scenes are told in this style makes the scenes more poignant. The reader is jarred out of the complacency of reading this broken style as he starts to realize what is being narrated. Yet, I feel it could have been done so much better.
There are some issues of communication and, of course, about love and community that are running throughout this book that I would like to come back to soon…
I want to return to the subject of love. I had a proposal accepted for a conference and the subject/theme is love.
My proposal is going to explore Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Invisible Monsters as modern day love stories.
What I mean by that is that love, as the previous post discusses, is usually conceived of as a “who” or a “what” (this is what the Derrida youtube piece discusses). In Palahniuk, though, there is no who or what that falls in love, nor is there ever a clear-cut definition (a satisfactory definition) about love. Old fashioned love stories usually conceive of love as a thing to be “won.” Love in many of these artificial stories is presented as a person who “finds” what he/she has been looking for all his/hers life. And I wonder where did this conception come from? Since Plato’s dialogues (specifically The Symposium), Socrates tells us that love is not about this “thing” that is supposed to complete me in some way. This is the idea that Zizek critiques in the previous post– this idea of ‘I love you all or nothing’– which makes love an objectified thing. It totalizes love.
In Palahniuk, though, there are these characters without a fixed identity. In Fight Club, the unnamed narrator (let’s call him Jack, as in “I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise”), has no fixed identity as we learn that he is both the narrator and Tyler; also, love is never fixed nor defined. Marla tells Jack at the end, “It’s not love or anything but I think I like you.” (Citation needed- it is towards the end…).
In Invisible Monsters we have the same basic concept. Shannon ends up loving Shane so much that she gives Shane her identity, and Shane never really had an identity as he continually changes “who he “is.””
These two examples are a more ethical love; one that does not fixate on a who or what that goes away when that who or what changes.
Love, then, is like bearing witness. Derrida talks about bearing witness in Sovereignties in Question. There Derrida states how poetic language doesn’t claim to accurately portray the event. I am overly simplify his argument here because I am writing this as my students are in a library session, and I am almost out of time.
The best way to talk about love is through this poetic language: “It’s not love or anything, but I think I like you.” If Marla says “This is love,” then she has totalized love and claimed to have grasped it. The “this is” pigeon holes “what” love is– as if it is a thing to have. Palahniuk shows how his characters make no direct claim to “have” love.
I was at a party this weekend talking to some friends and a discussion about crushes and love came up somehow. I was trying to explain to them some ideas I have been kicking around in my head ever sine I completed my thesis. These are thoughts I have had since watching two documentaries.
The first question when it comes to “love” is: what is love? How do we define it? Love is one of those things, I think, that can’t be described in language. Anything you have to say about love is only about love, not love itself. This idea comes from Derrida:
The who or the what of love, like the who or the what of being: We cannot place our finger on the “thing” that it is. And I was unable to explain this to my friends (but that might have had something to do with the alcohol they were drinking).
After thinking about it for a while, I thought of our ideas about love, and how these ideas (and this idea of the “que” or the “qua”) can be seen in Cinderella. Here we have a “love” story, but what is it that the prince falls in love with? Essentially a foot. What is going on in that story that the prince can’t recognize his love by sight, sound, touch, smell, but by the show she wears? Thank goodness that her foot didn’t bloat after a night of dancing, or that none of the other women in the land has the same size foot as Cindy. But it is this essentialism that defines our Western conception of love.
Looking at Romeo and Juliet, we have Juliet saying that “a rose by any other name still smells as sweet”– and it is this rose that we equate with love. This essential something– this self-same identical person that we fall in love with. This is what Derrida points out so aptly. How many times do you hear about a relationship that falls apart because someone in the relationship “changed.” :
For some reason we equate change with something bad (at least in a relationship). Isn’t this what ruins the relationship in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall? Alvie meets Annie, falls in love with her, encourages her to take classes and “better” herslef, and then when she changes, she outgrows him and they break up. So what was it that Alvie fell in love with? Was it Annie? But what about Annie did he fall in love with? And what did Annie see in Alvie? What about Alvie was any different? He is a comletely static character, which is why the audience can see why Annie leaves him, but where does that leave love?
I finally understood this opening scene when taking a Woody Allen class:
This idea of not wanting to belong to a club that would have you as its member is what I understand Lacan is talking about when he talks about desire. Whenever I’ve been in a decent relationship (and this is, more and more, applying to friendships even) I always wonder why the other person likes me. What do I posses that the other person likes and wants to be around. Being at this party as a non-drinker, non-smoker, I have realized that I am getting a little boring in my middle-age, so why do people hang out with me? (I am exaggerating here for the purpose of discusion– because as I say these things, I can also say that whenever a girl turns me down I always wonder what is wrong with her: I am smart, and funny, and handsome– but it all goes back to the idea of what is “love”)– Rather, I should probably emphasize “what is love?”
I think, ultimately, that we shouldn’t put any kind of label on love and try to define it in words. That is the job of the poet: to write about love in a mysterious way. And here I wish I knew more about Hiedeggar and poetic language.
It is through Hiedegger, afterall, that I get this idea of love as not something concrete. As Derrida says, the question of love is the same as the question of “being.” Is being a who or a what? If we take being as being this constantly thrown forward then there is no “thing” that we can call love (or being). If being is being-in-the-world-with-others-towards-death, then it is not a static self-sameness identity that we can grasp. There is no rose or foot to put our shoe on, in this case.
In Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters, this is clearly seen. Here there is a novel where the “who” and the “what” are constantly changing. The main characters are constantly changing their identity and even there psychical bodies, so there is no static who or what to love. But the story is one about love regardless of not having a static thing to love. This is true love– an unconditional one that stays no matter what the object of love “is.”
Love is like being then– always thrown forward ahead of itself and never static. Love is not a foot (that is a fetish– that is lust). Maybe there are so many divorces because people don’t realize that if their partner changes, that is a good thing, and that maybe they should change too. If you don’t move a muscle, that muscle atrophies and dies. Love and being are the same way, no?
And just for fun: Where does love come from? I think Zizek answers that question in an interesting manner:
Fragments 