The false of the happy consciousness

“Those who identify themselves with the whole, who are installed as the leaders and defenders of the whole can make mistakes, but they cannot do wrong – they are not guilty. They may become guilty again when this identification no longer holds, when they are gone” – Herbert Marcuse

The charm of Chuck Palahniuk’s work lies in its unfathomable depiction of the common people’s striving for pleasures, all sorts of self-gratification that are not well known. The first two stories by Saint Gut-Free and Mother Nature in his innovative novel Haunted directly exposed some finest examples about the side-effects of de-sublimation, a process that the subject submits completely to the pleasure principle, which in turn being revenged by the reality principle.

Chuck’s style is quite witty and lucid, never pretentious in narrating the stories of his marginal characters. Reading this book is like traveling in an alienated place, physically it’s familiar, because it’s just plain and like everywhere else. The characters in these places seem quite normal at the first glance. But soon, their strangeness would be exposed by some particular features. And as their stories are unfolded, most of them would simply unheard before, which directly challenge the social norm. It’s quite easy to hastily judge such a book as a kind of tabloid type, which tries to attract readers’ attention by presenting unusual details, titillating one’s desire for something sinful or evil in the eyes of the norm of social acceptance, but nevertheless, practiced by a lot of people privately.

Is Chuck a moralist? It’s hard to tell, but his story is a fine-crafted illustration of some Marcuse’s difficult ideas about one-dimensional man in an affluent and post industry society. It will tell you how the happy consciousness that most of us strive to maintain is a fantasy we create for ourselves.

Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted

I started to know this name through the filmic adaptation of his Fight Club. Thrilling and wonderful, it's been selected by some of my classmates in the film studies as a sample for the cult film. When the word 'cult' is dedicated to a film or a book, it always means something mysterious that resists any attempts to interpret clearly. I remember BBC 4 chose later evening time slot to show this film sometime in 1993, and branded as the most anti-capitalist film that has been ever made. I have never read the original novel, but the moment I saw his non-fiction book Stranger Than Fiction in the foreign bookstore located at Wangfujing shopping street in Beijing, I immediately bought it.

The cover is a UK version, a dog head on a human body, wearing suit with a book in its hand. The cover design has already conveyed transgressive tone. Palahniuk’s style is edgy and subjects in general are those of the unspeakable categories in the mainstream. One story is about an old guy, who has died of a heart disease. In the anatomy, doctor finds an unusual big size heart and also, an unusual size of his dick. The dramatic contrast is the dead body has such a quality of muscle which can never achieved naturally, and ironically, the guy has been revealed as a patience of impotence.

Palahniuk shows his seriousness about the distorted self-identity issue in American society, and clearly shows how commercialization has functioned in shaping such an invisible hand. The theme he has already explored in the Fight Club. I should say these stories are more powerful than many writings in various culture studies. Palahniuk is a daring writer, in the sense that the subject he tackles has been considered very tricky and marginal, and generally it is in the consensus that such a subject should not be discussed. This in turn becomes a charm of Palahniuk’s work.

It’s very difficult to find any forbidden fields now in writing a novel. Palahniuk has just managed to find some, and it has caused a kind of sensation, and above all, it makes you think about yourself, and the fantasy each one of us has had in this world.