Every Story Is a Ghost: Chuck Palahniuk and the Reenchantment of Suffering

EVERY STORY IS A GHOST: CHUCK PALAHNIUK AND THE REENCHANTMENT OF SUFFERING Eric Repphun Whether life is worth living and when—this question is not asked by medicine. Natural science gives us an answer to the question of what we must do if we wish to master life technically. It leaves quite aside, or assumes for its purposes, whether we should and do wish to master life technically and whether it ulti- mately makes sense to do so.1 The worlds of the American cult writer Chuck Palahniuk are worlds haunted, even defined, by pain and suffering. Over the course of his twelve novels, Palahniuk, still perhaps best known for his 1996 debut novel Fight Club, explores the role and character of the human body in a heav- ily rationalized culture, and does so in a manner that makes his work a valuable site for the study of the contemporary religious landscape. Palahniuk’s confrontational, controversial novels seek to revalue both brute physical pain and the more active process of suffering. They seek to remove both from strictly biomedical and therapeutic settings, at the same time recalling—though never recreating—forgotten or undervalued understandings of suffering, some of which echo traditional Christian con- ceptions of the transformative potential of such suffering. That being said, Palahniuk revels in ambiguity and misdirection; his attitude towards the body is profoundly ambivalent and is thus difficult to articulate clearly. At the same time that he affirms the truth of the fully rationalized understanding of the human body dominant in modern biomedicine, he rejects absolutely conventional biomedical ideas about the value of physical pain and suffering. As Rebecca Sachs Norris notes, the valuation of pain within biomedicine is narrowly prescribed within a diagnostic framework: “In Western biomedicine, pain and the suffering it entails are understood to have no value except as an indicator of a biomedical condition; pain is a 1 Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated and and edited by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946, 144. © Eric Repphun, 2011 | doi:10.1163/9789004225343_008 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. Eric Repphun - 9789004225343 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 03:09:00PM via free access 130 eric repphun symptom to be alleviated . there is no framework for pain as a meaning- ful or transformational experience except as a necessary component of treatment or cure of the physical body . The meaning of pain or suffering is strictly utilitarian.”2 In contrast to this highly instrumental view of pain, Palahniuk’s novels explore and affirm the possibility that pain undertaken as an act of will represents not only a conscious rejection of the rationalization of the body but also a reclamation of agency and authenticity in a culture that has commodified the individual and turned living bodies into mere instruments. It is crucial to note at this point that pain and suffering are matters not only of individual human bodies but also of culture, making pain and suffering into an ideal site for the exploration of religion and the body. It is also essential to be clear that pain and suffering are not simple cognate terms; as Ariel Glucklich has argued: “pain must be dis- tinguished from suffering; it is a type of sensation usually—though not necessarily—associated with tissue damage . Suffering, in contrast, is not a sensation but an emotional and evaluative reaction to any number of causes, some entirely painless.”3 Nor is the line between pain and suffering clearly drawn; perhaps suffering can best be understood as an interpretive act, a ‘reading’ of pain; however, the individual’s experience of pain, as Norris and Glucklich both note, is always already embedded within the cultural frameworks that define and delimit both the value and the range of acceptable meanings granted to the experience of physical pain. In other words, within a given cultural context, a body is expected to understand pain in certain ways and to suffer according to convention and societal norms. Many of Palahniuk’s characters, through various means—bare-knuckle boxing (Fight Club), staged automobile accidents (Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey, 2007), horrific acts of self-mutilation (Haunted, 2005; Invisible Monsters, 1999; and to a lesser extent Diary, 2003 and Snuff, 2008)4—invite pain into their lives and imbue it with a transcendental, 2 Norris, Rebecca Sachs. “The Paradox of Healing Pain.” Religion 39, no. 1 (2009): 23. 3 Glucklich, Ariel. Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 11. Here he is referring to the official American Medical Association definition of pain as “an unpleasant sensation related to tissue damage.” 4 Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club, New York: Owl Books, 1996; Palahniuk, Chuck. Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey, New York: Doubleday, 2007; Palahniuk, Chuck. Haunted, New York: Doubleday, 2005; Palahniuk, Chuck. Invisible Monsters, New York: W.W. Norton, 1999; Palahniuk, Chuck. Diary, New York: Doubleday, 2003; and Palahniuk, Chuck. Snuff, New York: Doubleday, 2008. Though there is little room to discuss them Eric Repphun - 9789004225343 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 03:09:00PM via free access every story is a ghost 131 though rarely overtly religious value. Palahniuk’s characters understand their pain outside of conventional structures of value and transform their pain into a form of suffering that is at the same time a rebellion against the banality and safety of a therapeutic culture that values physical pain only for its diagnostic value and which marginalizes those who seek it out. In his novels, Palahniuk gives his readers a world seemingly turned upside down, where fist fights build community, car crashes heal the damaged, physical beauty is a curse, therapy insulates people from each other and from themselves, and where self-destruction just might be the answer. To Palahniuk’s credit, this inverted world is so compellingly and convincingly drawn that it becomes a tool for serious social, economic, and religious criticism. If we read them closely and with a keen eye towards his cultural context, Palahniuk’s novels can be seen as important representations and even instantiations of a larger movement in modernity that I want to call ‘reenchantment.’ Reenchantment The word “reenchantment” derives its meaning from what looks to be its antonym, “disenchantment,” first coined in the seminal work of the sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) in the early days of the twentieth century. Weber’s theory and concomitant narrative of “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) or “rationalization” is well known and we need not rehearse it in any detail here, though a few brief remarks are necessary for context. Put very briefly and doubtless committing considerable violence against the depth and subtlety of Weber’s work: in the millennia-long process of rationalization, beginning in an imagined prehistorical world dominated by what Weber called “spirits,” moving through to the rise of personified deities and universal gods, reaching its peak in ascetic Protestantism in here, Palahniuk has published a number of other novels: Palahniuk, Chuck. Survivor, New York: Anchor, 1999; Palahniuk, Chuck. Choke, New York: Anchor, 2001; Palahniuk, Chuck. Lullaby, New York: Random House, 2002; Palahniuk, Chuck. Pygmy, New York: Doubleday, 2009; Palahniuk, Chuck. Tell-all, New York: Doubleday, 2010; and Palahniuk, Chuck. Damned, New York: Random House, 2011. He has also published two books of non- fiction writing; Palahniuk, Chuck. Stranger than Fiction: True Stories, New York: Doubleday, 2004, and Palahniuk, Chuck. Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon, New York: Crown Publishers, 2003; as well as a smattering of other works, including a fascinating non-fiction essay on the intersection of contemporary religion and personal narrative; Palahniuk, Chuck. “A Church of Stories.” http://www.nerve.com/personalessays/palahniuk/churchofstories, accessed 6 February 2008. Eric Repphun - 9789004225343 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 03:09:00PM via free access 132 eric repphun the American colonies in the seventeenth century, all considerations of value are gradually subordinated to considerations of function, operation, and utility. For Weber, there is a general tendency in human societies as they march towards the present to move from valuing questions of why to valuing questions of how, to move from a value-based rationality focused on the ends of action to a detached, instrumental rationality concerned only with the means. Even if he is very often very badly misunderstood or misrepresented, Weber’s work is widely known in the academic world. This need not sug- gest, however, that the concept of reenchantment as it is commonly used is related in any real way to his original sociological theory of Entzauberung. It is rather from commonplace (as opposed to sociological) understandings of disenchantment that the term reenchantment derives much of its immediate suggestiveness and takes on much of its meaning. This more general idea of disenchantment is, as the philosopher Charles Taylor argues, an integral part of some dominant forms of modern self-understanding, at least in the European sphere: [O]ur understanding of ourselves and where we stand is partly defined by our sense of having come to where we are, of having overcome a previous condition. Thus we are widely aware of living in a ‘disenchanted’ universe; and our use of this word bespeaks our sense that it was once enchanted. More, we are not only aware that it used to be so, but also that it was a strug- gle and an achievement to get to where we are; and that in some respects this achievement is fragile.

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