Angels, Anarchy, and Atavism: an interview with Chuck Palahniuk

By Jessica Hopsicker

It's impossible not to bring up Chuck Palahniuk's cult masterpiece Fight Club , when a few devout followers legally changed their name to Tyler Durden, and fight clubs multiply like mushroom spores worldwide. One can't help but begrudgingly recall the stomach- churning “Guts” that seminal first short story in Haunted about masturbation disasters that made all those people faint at his readings. There's so much more to it than that.

He doesn't speak to the angry, jaded, and disenfranchised youth, his novels, hijack their minds, launching them on a ride from the very first line. Readers throttle though the black terrain of what he likes to call Satirical Horror and Transgressional Fiction fraught with sexual deviance, gore, and violence. His words shock and nauseate but also somehow incite and inspire in significant ways. Cast into labyrinthine plot lines, text and sub text strewn with arcane trivia and useless information, Chuck subjects the readers to poignant themes tackling consumerism, social stigmas, and sexuality. He pummels the “gentle reader” to the point of whiplash with the grotesque and subversive. Through the course of Fight Club, Survivor, Invisible Monsters, Choke, Lullaby, Diary, Haunted, Rant , and Snuff the reader emerges a different person.

The second novel adapted for film is Choke , released September 26 2008, will also be considered as definitive Chuck. Just days away from its release, I finally snagged an interview with the man.

Jessica Hopsicker: When you develop a character, does it start out as a personality or a set of ideas?

Chuck Palahniuk: It starts out as a physical action.

JH: Really?

CP: Yeah. All of my characters start out as a gesture or a repeated course of action that creates them physically on the page. People I think interpret verbs in a much more involuntary way, less sort of intellectual way. Verbs sort of come in under their radar and have a more subconscious effect on the reader.

JH: Interesting. Is there any place that you wouldn't go as an author?

CP: Not really. I've kind of accepted that regret is a short term reaction. In the long term, regret is kind of a sure sign that I've done something that is worth doing.

JH: Do your ideas meet your expectations on film?

CP: Maybe, only because I don't have very much as far as expectations. I really don't want to try to control somebody else's work and so I don't bring any expectations to their product.

JH:. What is it like to write about a character and see the character cast as an actual person?

CP: It feels like a big completion, because my characters are typically based on real people. It's seeing the character go from being a person, to being a story, and then back to being a person. So, in a way it's kind of full cycle.

JH: What sort of verbs do you have in mind when you're creating these characters?

CP: They're always physical verbs. Like, “shit,” or “kiss,” or “run.” Because there's been a number of studies recently that show that the human brain interprets those words as if the person reading those verbs were actually doing the action. And your brain really doesn't know that difference between a physical verb and the actual action. That's also why I try to avoid passive or intellectual verbs. Abstract verbs, like “think” or “love” or “believe” or “remember,” as well as just the word “to be,” “is,” or “to have;” going through your work and getting rid of all the examples of “is” or “have” is the first the step toward making it much more dynamic and tangible.

JH: Group therapy appears to be a theme in your work. Can you elaborate on what it represents?

CP: It's really only been in a couple things. There were the support groups in Fight Club and the twelve step recovery groups in Choke . And in a way I've always felt that support groups are taking on a function that churches used to provide. It used to be that people would go to church once a week and present the worst aspects of their behavior and be forgiven by their community and accepted back into community through communion. But more and more churches have become places where people go just to look good. And support groups have really become the place where people can risk looking bad and find forgiveness and find reconnection with their peers. So I'm always looking for those sort of storytelling places where people talk about their worst selves and also kind of hone their storytelling skills out loud.

JH: Do you find that there's anything redemptive about he American culture today?

CP: I really don't think American culture is any better or any worse than it's always been. If you read any kind of history going back, you see that what we're experiencing now is almost identical to what we were experiencing a hundred years ago. In the year 1900, we were involved in the Philippines War, the Spanish-American War. We were trying to occupy the Philippines and we were losing soldiers at a remarkable rate. Really almost everything that's happening now was happening a hundred years ago. That really kind of takes the edge off of what happens here and now.

JH: Is the current political landscape interesting to you as a writer? In the course that we're going now, or is it still pretty much the same old thing?

CP: It really just does feel like the same old thing. It's always pretty much the same conflict and the same sets of ideals and the same issues. Technology makes them a little different generation to generation, but they really are of a pattern.

JH: It also seems kind of like they're rushing towards the end of the world.

CP: It's always rushing toward the end of the world. When you have Y2K and you have SARS and then you have bird flu and then you have swine flu, and I think that the end of the world just sells a lot of newspapers. We're always being sold “The End of the World.”

JH: What kinds of impressions have you gotten about your following?

CP: They tend to be people who were passionate about books when they were much younger. A lot of required reading kind of put them off of reading, and they are really rediscovered how much they enjoyed reading as much younger children. They tend to be internet savvy and they tend to be finding community through the internet. Those are the generalizations I can say right now. I'm hoping that long term, that people themselves will start writing. Because it seems like the natural progression from enjoying reading would be to enjoy writing.

JH: That would be good if you could have your hand in that.

CP: It would be nice. It would be sort of the ultimate compliment, that your work excited or gave someone else permission to create their own work.

JH: Did you ever think that Fight Club would resonate so deeply with these people?

CP: I had no intention and no expectation that Fight Club would even be a book. But it was a lot of fun to write, and I think that's the first sign that something is going to reach an audience.

JH: What other kinds of projects are you working on?

CP: The book for next year is called Pygmy , and that's done. I'm working on the book for, I guess it would be 2010.

JH: What is Pygmy about?

CP: Pygmy is kind of a dark comedy about terrorism. It's about a twelve-year-old kid who is sent over as an exchange student from an unnamed foreign country. He's supposed to be here to live with a middle class, Christian, suburban family, but his real mission is to build a science fair project that will win at the local competition and be taken to Washington, DC for finals, and there it will explode, killing everyone on the east coast.

JH: Sounds like a good book.

CP: It's a romance.

JH: How so?

CP: Oh, he's got a host sister. I guess the daughter of his host family, who he becomes infatuated with. And so that's the romance.

JH: Do you think Choke the movie will be widely accepted?

CP: You know, again, I really...

JH: No expectations?

CP: Yeah, exactly.