Body and Trauma in Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted

chapter 9 Body and Trauma in Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted Claudio Vescia Zanini Abstract Chuck Palahniuk’s 2005 novel Haunted presents a group of wannabe writers confined for a retreat. The description of their interaction during confinement intertwines with the short stories they produce, and in both narrative levels, the writers invariably re- visit memories of abuse, loss, social displacement and frustration. While confined, they spend part of their time inflicting pain and mutilation to themselves, aiming at the fabrication of new traumas, which they believe will increase the public’s inter- est in their works and lives. I analyse the representation and fabrication of trauma in Haunted through the manipulation of the body via bruising, (self- inflicted) mutilation, gender and age bending, cross- dressing and exacerbated sexualisation, among others. Jean Baudrillard’s concepts of simulation and hyperreality support the fabrication of trauma in the novel, whereas images of bodies changed by trauma are associated to the three phantasies that, according to Baudrillard, haunt the contemporary world: cancer, terrorism and transvestite. Keywords representations of trauma – body – Haunted – Chuck Palahniuk – Jean Baudrillard – simulation – hyperreality – cancer – transvestite – terrorism In 2005, Chuck Palahniuk, American author better known for Fight Club (1996), published Haunted: A Novel of Stories. At the time, the author drew some attention to Haunted by capitalising on a phenomenon that came to be known as the ‘Guts effect’: in his American tour promoting the novel, Palahniuk deliv- ered dramatic readings of its opening short story, entitled ‘Guts’, a first-person narrative of a teenager who describes in detail the loss of his intestines during a masturbatory experience underneath water while sitting on the pool’s pump. Due to its graphic nature, and its detailed description of the narrator’s © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004407947_011 Claudio Vescia Zanini - 9789004407947 Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 09:47:48PM via free access 174 Zanini intestines (and its contents, for that matter), the story is reported to have made over eighty listeners either faint or vomit.1 The novel’s basic premise is built upon a group of strangers who have re- sponded to an intriguing note left all over town, inviting people to put their lives on hold for three months so as to pursue their dreams of becoming suc- cessful writers. Not much is said regarding the location and the working con- ditions, except for the inclusion on food and lodging. The promise of leaving behind aspects of mundane life seduces nineteen wannabe poets, screenwrit- ers, novelists and playwrights, who gather in order to join the writers’ retreat. They do not go by their real names, but adopt pennames such as Mother Na- ture (a hippie masseuse), Chef Assassin (a man who lost his job as a chef after a bad review) or Agent Tattletale (a man whose job was to identify disabilities invented by people in order to collect pension from the government). In some cases, the penname includes a nobility title, such as Baroness Frostbite, the Earl of Slander or the Duke of Vandals. The multiple functions of these epi- thets include: a. dispossessing the members at the retreat of individuality until they produce their short stories, when they reveal core aspects of their past; b. in the cases of those pennames that include a nobility title, emulating, even if whimsically, nobility members from other haunting works of literature – Count Dracula, Lord Ruthven, Countess Carmilla Karnstein, for instance. As we shall see, this aspect is particularly important insofar as Haunted connects on many levels to Gothic literature; c. pointing out in an ironic fashion how far from nobility these wannabe writers actually are – Baroness Frostbite used to be a waitress, for instance; d. reminding themselves (and readers as well) of the traumatic experiences each of them has undergone until the presenta- tion of their stories. For example, in Baroness Frostbite’s story, entitled ‘Hot Potting’, we learn that she actually underwent frostbite, earning her not only the epithet but also a deformed face, that constantly exposes her darkened rotten gums. Instead of enjoying the inspirational perks of an idyllic place as Wordsworth, Mary Shelley and Blake had before them, they end up locked up in an aban- doned theater supplied with costumes and thematic rooms, such as the Ital- ian Renaissance lounge, the French Louis xv lobby, the black mohair Egyptian auditorium, the Arabian Nights gallery, the red imperial- Chinese promenade, and, as one would expect, the Gothic smoking room. Eventually, confinement takes its toll, and as weeks pass, a frenzy of (self- inflicted) mutilations and 1 Palahniuk himself addresses the issue in a text available at <http:// chuckpalahniuk. net/ fea- tures/ the- guts- effect>, Viewed 5 February 2016. Claudio Vescia Zanini - 9789004407947 Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 09:47:48PM via free access Body and Trauma in Chuck Palahniuk’s Haunted 175 murders unfolds. Their main concern, we are constantly reminded, is to have a marketable story to tell, which would grant them literary success, money, and a considerable share of public attention. In order to achieve such a goal, the inmates turn to their most traumatic memories throughout the writing process and do their best to make confinement as harsh as possible: they lock themselves up, waste their food supply, tamper with water and gas facilities, and ultimately mutilate others and themselves, as the following passage describes: ‘Director Denial has already hacked off fingers. So has Sister Vigilante – plus some toes, using the same paring knife that Lady Baglady borrowed from Chef Assassin to slice off her ear.’2 In spite of its nonchalant tone, the passage above retains the graphic nature found both in Palahniuk’s oeuvre and in many of the works discussed in the chapters present in this section: it certainly applies to the novel analysed by Danielle Schaub, Alan Cumyn’s Man of Bone, whose main character’s highly sensorial captivity narrative involves the description of disgusting sounds, sensations and feelings; it is also something noticeable in David Rabe’s play Sticks and Bones, whose characters eventually resort to obscenities and ex- tremely violent actions, as Aslı Tekinay shows in her reading of the play; how- ever, Gen’ichiro Itakura’s analysis of Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil has a stronger resonance with Haunted, insofar as Itakura argues that Aslam em- ploys the technique of using highly graphic images as a response to the mod- ern tradition of trauma narrative traced back to modernism as a means to symbolise trauma and indicate disruptions and displacements. As my reading of Palahniuk’s novel presented over the next pages will prove, the same hap- pens in Haunted. The approach to Haunted from the perspective of trauma studies presented here benefits from Leanne Dodd’s framework in her chapter about crime fic- tion as trauma literature.3 The description of trauma proposed by the Austral- ian Psychological Society (aps) – ‘very frightening or distressing events [that] may result in a psychological wound or injury – a difficulty in coping or func- tioning normally following a particular event or experience’4 – emphasises what trauma does rather than what it is. Some of the trauma aftermaths iden- tified by the aps brought by Dodd in her text – hyperarousal of the nervous sys- tem, intrusion of repetitive thoughts and memories, numbing responses such as addiction, self- harm and dissociation and undesirable behaviours ranging 2 Chuck Palahniuk, Haunted: A Novel of Stories (New York: Doubleday, 2005), 149– 150. 3 See Leanne Dodd’s chapter in this volume. 4 Australian Psychological Society, ‘Understanding and Managing Psychological Trauma’, Viewed 10 February 2016, <http:// www.psychology.org.au/ publications/ tip_ sheets/ trauma/>. Claudio Vescia Zanini - 9789004407947 Downloaded from Brill.com10/03/2021 09:47:48PM via free access 176 Zanini from withdrawal to violence – occur to the writers in Haunted throughout the retreat. Haunted is indeed a narrative made of traumatic stories.5 Besides the epi- sodes of loss, murder, rape, abusive relationships, child abuse, accidental mutilation, and impairing disease that inspire the stories within the novel, the title clearly evokes ghosts, arguably the most efficient metaphor for trauma in literature and other means of storytelling. These writers decide to do what others have done before them, that is, to try to come to terms with their traumas by revisiting them through writing, in a process that allows a parallel to the metaphor of ‘releasing a voice through the wound’ proposed by Cathy Caruth in Unclaimed Experience.6 On the other hand, reliving their traumas through writing and storytelling does not suffice: new traumas are sought, the writers generally believe that the public and the media will only embrace them in the future if they present visible and palpable trauma (‘How they act inside here, it won’t matter, but once those doors come open they’ll need to be kissing and hugging every time a camera turns their way. People will expect a wedding. Maybe even children.’).7 Such belief explains the mutilation frenzy and conse- quent dismantlement of the human body so frequently perceived in Palahni- uk’s work and most particularly in Haunted. Indeed, Andrew Slade goes as far as to say that for the American author ‘the practice of mutilation is the sublime figuration of survival’,8 and in this case, ‘survival’ entails coming to terms with the past. The suffocating space and the absence of windows are apt metaphors for the inescapability of trauma, as well as for the characters’ dislocation and alienation. The Gothic literary tradition, deeply rooted in devices to express trauma such as the return of the past and its materialisation into a monstrous character, is at first perceived in the novel due to its dark setting.

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