I used to be a huge fan of Chuck Palahniuk. Well, that’s not exactly fair; I still consider myself a fan of his writing, but for different reasons. Palahniuk is good at two things: creating really memorable plots, and making fun of current popular culture. For that, I can respect him. But the truth of the matter is, no matter how you look at it, Palahniuk is not a truly transgressive writer.
Palahniuk describes some disgusting things in his book Haunted, most memorably, the story “guts.” This was a pretty disgusting story, yes; it was very vivid and explicit, true. But people - supposedly even Palahniuk himself - circulated rumors about people supposedly passing out during readings of it, which simply never happened, to try to make it more controversial. OK, this worked, and “Guts” is always going to be a notorious story. But I can’t consider it transgressive fiction. Why? Because the taboos are all still there in the characters’ own minds. Everyone in Palahniuk’s work is self-loathing, disgusted with their own behavior, and this is still setting up an implicit boundary between the narrator and the reader.
Furthermore, his last effort, Snuff, was simply an awful book. It was about a woman who gets gang-banged to death. You would think that a story about a woman who gets gang-banged to death would actually be somewhat shocking, but the book manages to make it SO booooorrrriiiiing that I frequently found myself thinking, “this is what passes for edgy these days?” Putting aside that the narrative is poorly pieced together, and that the multiple characters in the story are woven into the plot in the most clunky way possible, THE PREMISE OF THE BOOK IS NOT INTERESTING. And it is not transgressive. I can’t stand seeing Palahniuk described as a transgressive writer.
First of all, true transgressive fiction, to me, is marked by characters who LOVE what they are doing, who actively participate in the sickest shit imaginable and never once have even a passing thought that what they are doing is wrong in any way. This is the thread that drives books like Crash and Hogg. The behavior of the narrators, though it seems utterly revolting to the reader, just comes naturally to the narrator and there’s never any internal monolog about whether or not it’s the “right thing” to do. And secondly, though people will write about sex and gore, they still refuse to touch the one last true taboo in our society, which is race. I have yet to see a current novel with a bigoted narrator - a genuinely bigoted one, for whom everything involving race, religion or even gender is crude, vile and completely against the values of polite society. That is something that has the potential to create a true transgressive novel and yet I’m not seeing it, unless there’s some really obscure writer out there who I don’t know about.
Where is our next Ballard, our next Delany, our next Keshner? Are people nowadays afraid to write what they really want to? I’m starting to wonder if maybe the internet - despite the anonymity that it can confer on someone - is also a deterrent to a genuinely talented writer putting a truly transgressive work out there, because he’s afraid that somehow, through the wonders of information technology, every potential employer is going to find out about it and it might ruin his chances of success forever?
What do you think?