There's such a satisfying feeling in finishing a book-- especially in a timely manner. This is especially true if a class expects it of you, but happily, that's not a concern right now. (It will be, though. It will be...)
I'm happy to report that Damned has indeed expanded Chuck Palahniuk's previous outlines of novel shape and growth. In terms of my question last time--is Palahniuk's contemptuous attitude toward the everyday schmuck based on a criticism of everyone else, or the criticism of the self within a system of schmucks?-- I assert that it is indeed the latter. Why?
Because Madison-- the protagonist of Damned-- makes significantly more growth or even evolution, than any of Palahniuk's former characters to my knowledge. Being young is probably a huge influence on that, but it also is important to note that she's also not alive, and therefore thrown into a system of being that is entirely up to Palahniuk's composition. Which is hugely ironic because the notion of the character-within-story comes into play. (I'll try to avoid any spoilers.)
Let's just say that on one or two occasions both Madison and the reader are forced to consider whether or not Madison is actually a free-willed character-- as in an entity with her own life that is being told in a story-- or a bound character-- one who was a character from the get-go and is bound by the fate of the story already written.
As a young author, I got a little excited over this. Why? Because it does fascinating things with the notions of perspective, of fate, of life and death, and the identity of an individual. These notions are the stuff of legend. Seriously. Look at any Greek epic, tragedy, any Shakespearean play, almost any great contemporary novel and if it's not about politics or satire, then it's going to be about someone trying to find himself, to find a lover with whom to build a life, to struggle with the inevitability of death, or to transcend mere mortality.
In Madison's case, this is complicated by the aspects of her early death, her youth, and therefore a shaky idea of "selfhood" to begin with, her ambivalence between loving and hating herself, the notion that this ambivalence is a reflection of Palahniuk's own sense of identity, and the idea that she has been written into existence-- along with her family and possibly all of her friends and anyone else she's met-- by a rather exceptional and questionable entity.
I'm sighing as I write this. I don't want to give away who her supposed writer is, but it's just such a juicy topic...
Well, I'll leave that to you. Take my frustration as a sign that it's actually a tantalizing read; Chuck Palahniuk broke the 4th wall with dynamite and hellfire, revealing a frustratingly snarky, but refreshingly ambitious and willful character with a great amount of depth and growth to go through. That, and there's a bit of promise for a sequel-- something I've never experienced in a Palahniuk novel. Clearly, he's taking this particular character and plot seriously as well. Well...as seriously as Palahniuk can take anything...
My point is that Palahniuk uses Madison not only as a vessel for some of his doubts and ambitions in negotiating the "self." There are quite a few moments in the book that would back that assertion up, but I'll simply use: "No, it's not too late for me to devote myself to being funny or artsy...however, having failed at my initial strategy, I'll never again have such faith in a single identity." Sure, Palahniuk is probably a 40-something-year-old and not worried about a middle school identity anymore, but it's true that he rarely addresses the notion of identity so openly and with so much confessed doubt in his works. I'm not saying that he doesn't use his other protagonists in a similar, if not the same manner, but that Madison is a prime and unusual example. In addition, he intends to expound upon this, continuing to use Madison's identity and rebellious existence to fuel a new novel.
Since this sequel has yet to be written, I've moved on to the other spectrum of excellent--and hellish-- writing with George Orwell's 1984. This book has been on my bookshelf for at least two or three years, so I'm excited to finally get on with it, though I'm not very far in just yet.
For anyone unaware of its incredible reputation, it's a dystopian novel based on Orwell's-- actually Eric Blair's-- ideas of what the world will degrade into after the 1940s, filled with terrifying depictions of the confiscation of individual freedoms in the face of war.
George Orwell-- Eric Blair-- has also written Animal Farm, another chilling social commentary that uses the lives and organization of animals on an every day farm to reflect the political rise of a nation in turmoil. For anyone who has yet to read Animal Farm, I can wholeheartedly recommend it; I realize that the notion of social commentary and political metaphors can drive interest out of a person like a whirlwind, but it's written in such a way that the political metaphors occur as a back-of-brain phenomena. Not occurring within the occipital lobe, of course, but I mean to say that it occurs quietly, almost subconsciously, and that the true appeal arises in realizing why the horrific events and transformation from innocent farm to complicated community actually strike a cord within every individual.
Whew-- I just got chills.
So, from one hell to another, I suppose. In addition, I'm planning on dipping my toes into the murk of Amnesia: The Dark Descent soon as well as Fear: First Encounter Assault Recon, two horror games that I hope will be just as nourishing to indulge in.
Amnesia is a PC game-- now Mac, too-- that basically models the old point-and-click adventure games. However, it's reputed to be terrifyingly confusing. Your character is someone with-- everyone say it together-- amnesia, and can't recall who he really is or why on Earth he's appeared in this creepy castle where the game is set. The point of the game is to get out of the castle and try to recollect what happened to you before the game started. Naturally, there's a creepy monster that makes creepy noises, and lots of dark murky water to wade through, so it's going to have its startling moments.
Fear is the first in a series of horror First Person Shooter/Adventure games. You play as a soldier encountering a paranormal and supposedly horrifying force that is murdering people. I've actually only played part of the third game before, but from what I've gathered, there's a complicated family involved with a number of fascinatingly dangerous and mysterious powers, as well as a very creepy and possibly incestuous history. Don't take my word on that just yet. It's just a vibe I'd been getting.
So Hell on all sides, perhaps. I'm curious to see whether there are some parallels among them-- horror does have basic elements, no matter the medium of expression, so it might be fun to find those connections and maybe even exploit them in future works.
P.S. I knew it was impossible to die from a marijuana overdose. Madison's actual death is much more interesting and it makes sense why she would repress the memory. Read Damned.
Monday, May 21, 2012
Friday, May 18, 2012
Style
One aspect of writing that I believe motivates the most competition and distinction among authors is the development of, and use of style. By style, I mean sentence structure, diction, the management of tone-- all of that stuff. It's like voice, but with more attention to the flexibility and capability of the writer.
I bring this up now because I'm ankle-deep in Chuck Palahniuk's newest work Damned. Some of you may know that Chuck Palahniuk is the guy responsible for Fight Club (yes, it was a novel first, as he doggedly tells everyone in the afterward), Choke, Lullaby, and Stranger Than Fiction. He is publicized in Damned as "American fiction's most brilliant troublemaker." This may or may not be true... I'll get into that. First!
Damned is the story of a self-proclaimed fat 13-year-old named Madison, a girl who has not really reached puberty, whose parents are self-absorbed, self-important, and well, the way you'd expect celebrity parents to be: indulging in lavish products, homes everywhere on the planet, and tons of adopted minority kids. Madison has recently died of a marijuana overdose and spends the book describing her journey through Hell-- a place ridden with old candy and popcorn and landmarked by monuments of excrement and other things that ooze out of people-- on her way to tell Satan how he messed up in bringing her there. Apparently, Palahniuk is greatly influenced by The Breakfast Club-- a movie I've never seen, come to think of it-- as she wonders around Hell with a cast of extremely stereotypical high schoolers (the Jock, the Bimbo, the Punk, the Nerd).
Now I've read quite a bit of Palahniuk's works (Lullaby, Fight Club, Diary, Invisible Monsters, and Pygmy); I picked up Damned because I thought it would be a change of pace from the style he uses in almost every one of his novels. (Now we're back up to speed.) Palahniuk has a general pattern: take a sulky, unnoticed, middle-aged protagonist, have them narrate a series of strange events-- often movingly described and mysterious up until the very end-- and then have them realize that they've had a crucial role in all of these things that no one fully understands until the very end. Along the way, the protagonist offers you an initially tantalizing array of satirical statements about where and how they live; they are hopelessly jaded, hate themselves and hate others because of the shallowness of it all, and can't wait to tell you about it in the most intricate language possible. There's probably some anal rape involved, too. Also, parent-hatred; parents are inevitably flawed and selfish and messed up in Palahniuk's works, even if they are the protagonists.
I had stopped reading his work after a while because I was tired of feeling like every one of his protagonists was hateful toward the reader for no particular reason other than that they were the sort of people who would read Palahniuk's books. Damned is narrated by a pre-teen. She is insecure, and surrounded by people her own age who are not the absurdly original characters Palahniuk normally creates. He had to do something new, I thought.
Somehow, he managed to make her almost just as jaded, just as spiteful and whiny and exploding with unprovoked sass. This got me thinking-- well, actually, the thought was simply, "WHAT IS THIS GUY'S PROBLEM?!"
Initially, I had believed that Chuck Palahniuk-- the "troublemaker"-- was only interested in putting his fingers in people's pies. Basically, I thought he just loved to remind the masses why they were boring and terrible people, and do so via characters who represent the sort of people who normally go unnoticed in the grand scheme of things. I thought he liked to have normal people berate other normal people for being too damn normal while thinking that they're (the others) the hot sh*t on toast by using strange and complex bodies of knowledge about the world's strangest trivia in order to reveal how completely mindless society is.
Take, for instance, Chapter 3 of Lullaby:
"Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead... These people who need their television or stereo or radio playing all the time. These people so scared of silence. These are my neighbors. These sound-oholics. These quiet-ophobics.
Laughter of the dead comes through every wall."
I literally just flipped to a random page and found that quote. Lullaby is my favorite novel of his, but it's dripping with the same acidic loathing toward fellow man.
Don't get me wrong; I don't disagree when Palahniuk is described as "brilliant." I've been unspeakably moved by some of his works. I've been left in public places at the end of a work, mouth open, eyes wide, heart racing, thinking, "My God...have I been under a spell?"
Nevertheless, it's a bit much to be hit like that by beautiful scenes and words, and then pummeled with hateful remarks about the comforts of living a middle-class life.
So, reading Damned, it occurred to me: what if Palahniuk not only pities the masses? What if he also pities his protagonists? I mean, yes, some of them live in pathetic circumstances or are immoral enough that anyone would have to pity them. But what if he actually doesn't like them? What if they're just as despicable as the people they themselves despise?
Take Madison. She won't shut up about how pathetically fat she is. Which is, in itself, pretty pathetic. Think about it. Most of the time, if someone whines about that sort of thing, we-- the despicable masses-- think, "Well, you got yourself like that." If they deal with it and continue to be cool people anyways, or if they even overcome it, we think, "Wow, that's a cool person." Is Chuck Palahniuk secretly the same as us? Does he think Madison should shut up, too? Honestly, he makes her seem pretty ordinary, pretty annoying, even, in her stereotypical, whiny, pre-pubescent talk. Even if she continually blurts, "Yes, I know the word gender. Ye gods! I may be pudgy and flat chested and nearsighted and dead, but I am NOT a moron."
(First off, no one said you were a moron...secondly, no one cares if you're nearsighted, third-- almost EVERYONE knows the word "gender"...*grumblegrumble*)
But we could make this argument with a number of his protagonists. Fight Club's narrator is a guy with a job no one really thinks about, a personality dominated by his hunger for something new, and his bemusement over why he hangs out with such exceptional crazies as Tyler and Marla. The plot unwinds with his realizations of why he does what he does, what his feelings towards his parents have manifested in his pathetic life, that the popular products and brands in his home were meaningless, and that meaning comes from being the absolute lowest you can be. Lullaby's narrator is a guy who goes home alone and empty and angry, who destroys things to feel anything, who eventually experiences magic-- but only after meeting some nudists and a narcissist real-estate agent. Even Pygmy from Pygmy, the most original of the works (it's written entirely in broken English), is an ambiguous minority kid from an ambiguous (probably imaginary) country, who falls in love with a stereotypically snotty teenager but pities and condemns the pathetic American people. The ambivalence between hating and loving the mundane is prevalent in all of those novels, and makes up a good bit of character in each of Palahniuk's protagonists.
Palahniuk's series of patterns in plot and character development, as well as the snarky and defensive language that comprises most of his narration creates a style that is hard to pin down. Is it moving? Is it beautiful? Is it pure satire or some introspection? (Actually, honestly, there is a lot of introspection. Why else are there so many Freudian moments and examples of anal rape?) Is it contemptuous or pitying? Revolting or refreshing?
So the question stands: is Palahniuk's contemptuous attitude toward the everyday schmuck based on a criticism of everyone else, or the criticism of the self within a system of schmucks?
I'm starting to think it's the latter-- which would be pretty impressive-- but I'll get back to this in my next post, hopefully in addition to some other topics.
I bring this up now because I'm ankle-deep in Chuck Palahniuk's newest work Damned. Some of you may know that Chuck Palahniuk is the guy responsible for Fight Club (yes, it was a novel first, as he doggedly tells everyone in the afterward), Choke, Lullaby, and Stranger Than Fiction. He is publicized in Damned as "American fiction's most brilliant troublemaker." This may or may not be true... I'll get into that. First!
Damned is the story of a self-proclaimed fat 13-year-old named Madison, a girl who has not really reached puberty, whose parents are self-absorbed, self-important, and well, the way you'd expect celebrity parents to be: indulging in lavish products, homes everywhere on the planet, and tons of adopted minority kids. Madison has recently died of a marijuana overdose and spends the book describing her journey through Hell-- a place ridden with old candy and popcorn and landmarked by monuments of excrement and other things that ooze out of people-- on her way to tell Satan how he messed up in bringing her there. Apparently, Palahniuk is greatly influenced by The Breakfast Club-- a movie I've never seen, come to think of it-- as she wonders around Hell with a cast of extremely stereotypical high schoolers (the Jock, the Bimbo, the Punk, the Nerd).
Now I've read quite a bit of Palahniuk's works (Lullaby, Fight Club, Diary, Invisible Monsters, and Pygmy); I picked up Damned because I thought it would be a change of pace from the style he uses in almost every one of his novels. (Now we're back up to speed.) Palahniuk has a general pattern: take a sulky, unnoticed, middle-aged protagonist, have them narrate a series of strange events-- often movingly described and mysterious up until the very end-- and then have them realize that they've had a crucial role in all of these things that no one fully understands until the very end. Along the way, the protagonist offers you an initially tantalizing array of satirical statements about where and how they live; they are hopelessly jaded, hate themselves and hate others because of the shallowness of it all, and can't wait to tell you about it in the most intricate language possible. There's probably some anal rape involved, too. Also, parent-hatred; parents are inevitably flawed and selfish and messed up in Palahniuk's works, even if they are the protagonists.
I had stopped reading his work after a while because I was tired of feeling like every one of his protagonists was hateful toward the reader for no particular reason other than that they were the sort of people who would read Palahniuk's books. Damned is narrated by a pre-teen. She is insecure, and surrounded by people her own age who are not the absurdly original characters Palahniuk normally creates. He had to do something new, I thought.
Somehow, he managed to make her almost just as jaded, just as spiteful and whiny and exploding with unprovoked sass. This got me thinking-- well, actually, the thought was simply, "WHAT IS THIS GUY'S PROBLEM?!"
Initially, I had believed that Chuck Palahniuk-- the "troublemaker"-- was only interested in putting his fingers in people's pies. Basically, I thought he just loved to remind the masses why they were boring and terrible people, and do so via characters who represent the sort of people who normally go unnoticed in the grand scheme of things. I thought he liked to have normal people berate other normal people for being too damn normal while thinking that they're (the others) the hot sh*t on toast by using strange and complex bodies of knowledge about the world's strangest trivia in order to reveal how completely mindless society is.
Take, for instance, Chapter 3 of Lullaby:
"Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead... These people who need their television or stereo or radio playing all the time. These people so scared of silence. These are my neighbors. These sound-oholics. These quiet-ophobics.
Laughter of the dead comes through every wall."
I literally just flipped to a random page and found that quote. Lullaby is my favorite novel of his, but it's dripping with the same acidic loathing toward fellow man.
Don't get me wrong; I don't disagree when Palahniuk is described as "brilliant." I've been unspeakably moved by some of his works. I've been left in public places at the end of a work, mouth open, eyes wide, heart racing, thinking, "My God...have I been under a spell?"
Nevertheless, it's a bit much to be hit like that by beautiful scenes and words, and then pummeled with hateful remarks about the comforts of living a middle-class life.
So, reading Damned, it occurred to me: what if Palahniuk not only pities the masses? What if he also pities his protagonists? I mean, yes, some of them live in pathetic circumstances or are immoral enough that anyone would have to pity them. But what if he actually doesn't like them? What if they're just as despicable as the people they themselves despise?
Take Madison. She won't shut up about how pathetically fat she is. Which is, in itself, pretty pathetic. Think about it. Most of the time, if someone whines about that sort of thing, we-- the despicable masses-- think, "Well, you got yourself like that." If they deal with it and continue to be cool people anyways, or if they even overcome it, we think, "Wow, that's a cool person." Is Chuck Palahniuk secretly the same as us? Does he think Madison should shut up, too? Honestly, he makes her seem pretty ordinary, pretty annoying, even, in her stereotypical, whiny, pre-pubescent talk. Even if she continually blurts, "Yes, I know the word gender. Ye gods! I may be pudgy and flat chested and nearsighted and dead, but I am NOT a moron."
(First off, no one said you were a moron...secondly, no one cares if you're nearsighted, third-- almost EVERYONE knows the word "gender"...*grumblegrumble*)
But we could make this argument with a number of his protagonists. Fight Club's narrator is a guy with a job no one really thinks about, a personality dominated by his hunger for something new, and his bemusement over why he hangs out with such exceptional crazies as Tyler and Marla. The plot unwinds with his realizations of why he does what he does, what his feelings towards his parents have manifested in his pathetic life, that the popular products and brands in his home were meaningless, and that meaning comes from being the absolute lowest you can be. Lullaby's narrator is a guy who goes home alone and empty and angry, who destroys things to feel anything, who eventually experiences magic-- but only after meeting some nudists and a narcissist real-estate agent. Even Pygmy from Pygmy, the most original of the works (it's written entirely in broken English), is an ambiguous minority kid from an ambiguous (probably imaginary) country, who falls in love with a stereotypically snotty teenager but pities and condemns the pathetic American people. The ambivalence between hating and loving the mundane is prevalent in all of those novels, and makes up a good bit of character in each of Palahniuk's protagonists.
Palahniuk's series of patterns in plot and character development, as well as the snarky and defensive language that comprises most of his narration creates a style that is hard to pin down. Is it moving? Is it beautiful? Is it pure satire or some introspection? (Actually, honestly, there is a lot of introspection. Why else are there so many Freudian moments and examples of anal rape?) Is it contemptuous or pitying? Revolting or refreshing?
So the question stands: is Palahniuk's contemptuous attitude toward the everyday schmuck based on a criticism of everyone else, or the criticism of the self within a system of schmucks?
I'm starting to think it's the latter-- which would be pretty impressive-- but I'll get back to this in my next post, hopefully in addition to some other topics.
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