Back in 1999, when the movie Fight Club came out, it knocked a lot of people back on their heels. Today, author Chuck Palahniuk—who wrote the book the movie is based on—is knocking them out as he tours about the country, reading his short stories, including "Guts." Due to be published next month in Playboy, "Guts" has so far caused 39 people to faint, two of whom were taken to the hospital. He'd like Vegas to make it an even 40.
It's no surprise that Palahniuk is gleeful when relating this. After all, he's the man behind stories of a cult member crashing a hijacked plane (Survivor), a horribly disfigured fashion model (Invisible Monsters), a man who pretends to choke to con his saviors (Choke), and his latest book, Diary, about a woman leaving a diary to her comatose husband.
Are you so sick of people asking you about Fight Club that you want to haul off and punch them in the face?
Oh, hell no. Fight Club was my meal ticket. It got me out of the garage at Freightliner, so I can never be completely resentful of that.
Who are you reading right now?
Right now, I just reread a bunch of Edgar Allen Poe. I mostly read nonfiction, especially when I'm working on something because I'm always looking for nonfiction information to add to what I'm working on.
For Poe, was it a collection of short stories?
Yeah. Really, the one thing that jumps out is "The Masque of the Red Death," because the thing I'm working on now is sort of an unpacking of that form.
Given the 9/11 attacks, would you write a book like Survivor now?
I could write it, but I doubt that it would get published. Nine-eleven has really made transgressive fiction a lot more of a dicey thing. People just don't want to see anything from eco-terrorism to cultural terrorism. It's all lumped together as terrorism now, and there's less of a sympathetic audience for it.
Do you think that makes it harder, because a lot of work does involve characters who are fighting against society and who are doing things that could be regarded as terrorism?
It makes transgressive fiction harder to get out there in order to get read, but that's not a bad thing. In the 1950s, writers like Orwell found ways to get their message out cloaked in genre, whether it was horror or science fiction or fantasy. I think we're heading back into that. Going through a period of repression, or at least not public acceptance of overt social criticism, it forces us to be a little more clever and seductive in the ways we present ideas.
Would you say you're the voice of your generation or the product of your times?
[Laughs] Dear God! The secret is that I'm twice the age of most of my readers. I'm 42 in two weeks, and most of my readers are in high school and college. I'm typically the oldest person at any of my book events.
What is it about your work, do you think, that attracts the younger reader?
I think a lot of it is the immediacy of the voice. It's a very conversational, stand-up-comedian voice, which seems to be directly addressing the reader. It's not like you're reading a story; it's more like you're hearing a story being told to someone. People respond to that. And the very salacious or edgy subject matter; people really respond to that. Books have such a small readership compared to any other mass media, such a small audience, and it's a consensual audience. When somebody picks up a book, they are sort of agreeing to make an effort to consume it. It's not like a movie, where you can just turn on the TV, and boom, you're assaulted by this movie. Or you turn on the radio and there's this song. Books really have this consensual, limited audience, and yet books do very little with that kind of freedom. Books can do anything that movies and music cannot do right now, and nobody's going to give a rat's ass because nobody reads. But books just choose not to do that.
I'm going to guess that you're a big fan of magical realism.
Well, magical realism, but also just very upsetting, dark things that people don't want to look at. The idea of making a comedy out of consensual violence in Fight Club; books can do that because a book is such a small investment compared to a movie or even an album.
In Diary, you've got a character, Misty, who is forced to paint by the world around her. Do you feel like Misty?
I do, because I do feel a compulsion to constantly be working on something, and I don't feel a lot of freedom in the face of that compulsion. And in a way, a lot of Diary was a response to the idea that death is the ultimate source of drama in anything. Escaping death. What if we could just deny death? What would be the horror beyond, in a world without death? And the horror would be having to live the same life over and over and over, which could ultimately be much more horrific than the idea of dying. So just the idea of the experiment of can you deny death and still have horror, because all horror seems key to death. Escaping death, escaping that future.
Also in Diary, the action takes place on Waytansea Island, so what are we waiting for?
We're waiting because history always goes in these cycles. None of us really live in any one place long enough to recognize these cycles. So we basically end up doing the same things over and over. History just repeats itself. And we know so little of history that we don't recognize that this war is just a different version of last year's war. Our lives are just different versions of our parents' lives.
Your writing is very concerned with our modern world and the damage or restraints it puts on people. Do you think there's any cure? Any quick fix other than going back and starting over?
The only quick fix is not a very quick fix. The only thing I can fall back on is my own method, which is to find an art form, some way of expressing yourself, and find some way to study that and make your life about studying and perfecting that form of self-expression, and coming together with other people who value that form of self-expression and having lifelong relationships based on studying that craft or that discipline.
In a way, you save an enormous amount of money because you're not out there constantly buying distractions. You're creating distractions. And you have relationships that aren't based on proximity, people you live next to and work with. And ultimately, you are given the tools by which to organize and reflect on your life and ultimately create your life, so you're not just living into the future, you're creating the future, you're dictating the future. I really feel we're moving into a phase when self-expression is going to be the new, next, big, huge thing.
You're being an optimist!
Oh, yeah, it seems like an inevitable thing. As people get more and more education, and they have more life to reflect on, more experience to archive and make sense of, they have more free time, and as they're more and more disgusted with the entertainments that are out there, and they're given the technology to create their own, I think we just naturally are moving into a phase when everybody's going to be do-it-yourself. And there's an enlightenment, a peace, that comes from having that kind of self-expression project constantly working in your head, and I think that's going to be a little bit of a salvation for us. We won't be looking externally for our distraction, we'll internalize our distraction.
If you had to pick a famous author to write your own life story, who would it be and why?
How about John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces)?
Why him?
Because I think he had a real sense of pushing comedy to the point of heartbreak, and recognizing the comedy in heartbreak, but not being stopped by heartbreaking things; finding a way of pushing them hard enough that we would laugh at them instead of being stopped by them, and we'd get past them in that way.