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Home , Choke (novel), Fight Club (novel), Invisible Monsters, Simulacra and Simulation

This thesis has been approved by

The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of English

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Dr. Robert Miklitsch Professor, Critical Theory & Cultural Studies Thesis Advisor

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Dr. Josephine Bloomfield Honors Tutorial College, Director of Studies English

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Dr. Jeremy W. Webster Dean, Honors Tutorial College

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THE PURSUIT OF A “HAPPY ENDING”: ’S AND THE SEARCH FOR

HUMAN CONNECTION

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A Thesis

Presented to

The Honors Tutorial College

Ohio University

______

In Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for Graduation

from the Honors Tutorial College

with the degree of

Bachelor of Arts in English

______

by

Robin Gillespie

June 2010

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Table of Contents I. Introduction ...... 4 II. The Disappearance of Shared Reality: ’s Simulacra ...... 8 III. “A Pure Dream, Empty and Vain”: Ruling in Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” ...... 13 IV. Chivalry is Dead: Romance in Twenty-First Century ...... 18 V. The Grand Gesture: and the Pursuit of Marla Singer ...... 21 VI. “I Want to Be Someone’s Constant Savior”: Love and Sexual Addiction in ...... 31 VII. People as Products: The Relationships of ...... 39 VIII. Conclusion...... 48

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I. Introduction

A nameless office grunt, a sexual addict, and a disfigured fashion model— these are the modern-day heroes of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, Choke, and

Invisible Monsters. The protagonists of these novels struggle with a growing sense of ennui in a life limited by socially constructed norms until they meet their counterparts, their would-be heroines. The main theme of these novels is the protagonists’ desires to connect to another person—to love. Their inability to achieve this goal stems from the dehumanization and resulting detachment from others, caused by what Jean Baudrillard calls the “precession of the simulacra,” or simulations of reality (Simulacra and Simulation 1), and Louis Althusser’s “ideological

State Apparatuses” (“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 136).

Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) and ’s adaptation Fight Club

(1999) follow a nameless narrator, who works for a car company assessing the cost efficiency of doing recalls. Consequently, he is plagued with insomnia and a growing detachment from others, which motivates him to attend support groups for illnesses he does not have. There, he meets Marla Singer, an impostor like him, and his with her leads to his encounter with Tyler Durden. Together, they create fight club, where men gather to physically fight one other. Fight club escalates into Project

Mayhem and eventually into a final confrontation between the narrator and Tyler.

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Victor Mancini is a sexual addict working on the fourth step of his recovery;

Choke is a “moral inventory” of his life (Palahniuk, Choke 16). He describes his numerous sexual encounters, his job at a re-creation of a colonial village, and the choking he fakes to receive sympathy and financial support. He depends on this money to pay for his mother’s hospital bills. Paige Marshall, a doctor at the hospital, treats his mother, who is suffering from extreme dementia. Victor’s interaction with

Paige causes him to further question societal demands and his mother’s expectations as he reevaluates his life in recovery.

At the beginning of Invisible Monsters, Shannon McFarland is a high-end fashion model, whose face is disfigured by a gunshot wound. While hospitalized, she meets Brandy Alexander, who is in the last step of her gender reassignment and has a year left to live as a woman before having the last surgery. The two of them, along with Shannon’s ex-boyfriend, Manus Kelly, travel throughout North America, stealing prescription drugs from large houses to both ingest and sell up for sale. During this time, Shannon recalls memories of her modeling career and of her family, fixating on her resentment toward Shane, her deceased brother, who is still “more the center of attention than he ever was” (Palahniuk, Invisible 92).

Palahniuk’s novels offer fulfillment of progressive fantasies. In the beginning, the characters are increasingly numbed by their everyday lives, distancing themselves from other human beings, who are dehumanized to the point of being

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products or an amalgam of conflicting identities: “Quotidian existence has become mundane in the most of [sic] derogatory senses, meaning banal and crass, un-existing and uninteresting, superficial and unbearable” (Mendieta 401-2). Bored by

“quotidian existence,” the characters break free from their position as homogenized workers and subscribe to a new ideology. Each character adopts a radical new school of self-invented spiritual dogma to counter the effects of the precession of the simulacra and the influence of ISAs. The narrator embraces fight club and eventually

Project Mayhem to reassert his masculinity and enable a romance with Marla. Victor begins to abandon hope of recovery and pursues a hedonistic lifestyle as he attempts to reconcile his desire to be a better person with his inability to change. Shannon leaves the world of fashion and enters “the little world of Brandy Alexander,” a lifestyle outside societal norms (Palahniuk, Invisible 77).

The protagonists then become actual individuals, free from bourgeois control.

The novels chronicle their growing discontent with their current lives, their experimentation with new radical , and after some revision of these new beliefs, their adoption of a new, rejuvenating perspective. Their ensuing rebirth enables them to connect to another person to reach a level of true, mutual understanding. Recognition of desires as defined social constructs by the bourgeoisie and taught through ISAs motivates these characters to question authority and to eventually revolt. The destruction of simulacra and modes of reproduction, or what

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have come to replace reality and authentic relationships, is necessary for love in postmodern society.

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II. The Disappearance of Shared Reality: Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra

Postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard utilizes the Saussurean concept of the sign, which consists of two parts: the signifier and the signified. According to

Baudrillard, the sign has lost one of its parts: the signified has been destroyed, and all that remains is the signifier. Baudrillard further asserts that the loss of the signified implies the domination of the signifier—what was merely a representation now becomes a simulation, destroying the distinction between what is true and what is false (and reality itself). Signifiers have moved away from simply representing signifieds to simulating them entirely.

Baudrillard explains how the sign replaces meaning and reality through the example of religion:

All Western faith and good faith became engaged in this wager on the representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could be exchanged for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange—God of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum—not unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference. (5-6)

If God, the ultimate signified, can be substituted by the signs that represent religious faith, then the meaning of religion disappears—the primary referent no longer exists.

Shannon refers to a simulacrum, or an “uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference,” in her description of the audience in her infomercial: “It’s eerie, but what’s happening is the folks are staring at themselves in the monitor staring at

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themselves in the monitor staring at themselves in the monitor, on and on, completely trapped in a reality loop that never ends” (Palahniuk, Invisible 118).

Caught in an endless surveillance cycle, the audience illustrates the position of humans in the “weightless” system that replaces reality.

According to Baudrillard, reality does not occur naturally; it is systematically manufactured: “The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, modes of control—and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these…it is no longer really the real, because no imaginary envelops its anymore” (Baudrillard 2). What we call reality is a copy of a copy of a copy; production infinitely occurs, but the products are far from original. Palahniuk frequently incorporates this idea into his novels to identify what humans actually experience, which is “a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere” rather than reality

(Baudrillard 2). The protagonists of Palahniuk’s novels recognize the emptiness of the hyperreal and subsequently challenge its rule over their everyday lives.

Baudrillard describes the conditions of the society in which Palahniuk’s novels occur: “What every society looks for in continuing to produce, and to overproduce, is to restore the real that escapes it. That is why today this ‘material’ production is that of the hyperreal itself. It retains all the features, the whole discourse of traditional production, but it is no longer anything but its scaled-down refraction” (23).

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Recognizing the loss of the real, society produces to compensate, but its product is the hyperreal. Palahniuk’s novels frequently discuss the cycle of production and consumption, as well as the effects of excess. The narrator of Fight Club has an obsession with purchasing luxuries; Choke follows a sexual addict; and people themselves are described as products in Invisible Monsters. The protagonists begin as part of this production cycle, but by the conclusion of the novels, they escape the system and attempt to manipulate it.

Although the media hint at omnipresent threats to instill fear into a captive audience, which is trapped in a voyeuristic circuit, “a reality loop that never ends,” what is more harmful: reality or illusion? “Simulation is infinitely more dangerous because it always leaves open to supposition that, above and beyond its object, law and order themselves might be nothing but simulation” (Baudrillard 20). Fight Club’s

Tyler takes on this perspective as fact and pushes the boundaries society has arbitrarily chosen, bending the rules, if not breaking them completely. Brandy of

Invisible Monsters utilizes a similar theory to purge human beings of all responsibility for their actions. These characters offer justification for breaking all the rules and violating taboos.

Baudrillard also analyzes the effect of the rapid flow of information, a concept discussed at length in Choke: “Everywhere information is thought to produce an accelerated circulation of meaning, a plus value of meaning homologous to the

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economic one that results from the accelerated rotation of capital. Information is thought to create communication” (80). However, information obstructs communication. The instantaneous availability of information is falsely considered to make meaning accessible, and furthermore, meaning has now been assigned economic worth, as a “plus value” in the balance sheet.

Baudrillard cautions against the overflow of information, while Palahniuk offers a solution to the danger of knowledge. Knowledge replaces the natural experience of perception—Ida Mancini uses a drug in Choke as a “cure for knowledge”: “She’d seen the mountain without the framework of . Without the cage of associations. She’d seen it without looking through the lens of everything she knew was true about mountains” (Palahniuk, Choke 149). Communication should result from the “accelerated circulation” of information. However, “the credibility of our social organization… is collapsing, and for this very reason: because where we think that information produces meaning, the opposite occurs” (Baudrillard 80).

Free-flowing information appears to offer abundant meaning, but it self- destructs in the act of performing meaning: “Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning” (Baudrillard 80). People are led to believe that their access to information and their “participation at every level” will give them meaning (Baudrillard 80). Because meaning is not being produced through information, the illusion of meaning is crucial to uphold: “Immense energies are

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deployed to hold this simulacrum at bay, to avoid the brutal desimulation that would confront us in the face of the obvious reality of a radical loss of meaning” (Baudrillard

80). What Baudrillard refers to as the “loss of communication” (80) is a source of major conflict in Palahniuk’s novels. The protagonists’ recognition of the loss of meaning and communication triggers their resistance to postmodern society’s “law and order.”

The domination of the simulacra over the real, “substituting signs of the real for the real” (Baudrillard 2), has uniformly occurred to eradicate the real, and this loss of shared experience and meaning complicates communication and love in

Palahniuk’s novels. The system of substitution is a self-sustaining one, in which simulations are repeatedly resurrected and can never be lost—but at the expense of the real. Palahniuk’s characters attempt to escape this cyclical system by challenging established rules in order to make relationships possible.

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III. “A Pure Dream, Empty and Vain”: Ruling Ideology in Althusser’s

“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”

While Baudrillard interprets Sassurean linguistic theory to posit his concept of the simulacrum, Althusser uses Marxist theory to discuss the subtle but powerful influence of “ideological State apparatuses (ISAs)” and their enforcement of

(bourgeois) ideology, “the system of ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group” (149). To individuals, ISAs are institutions, involved in everyday life; examples include: “the religious ISA (the system of different

Churches), the educational ISA (the system of the different public and private

‘schools’), the family ISA…the communications ISA (press, radio, and television, etc.), the cultural ISA (literature, the arts, sports, etc.)” (Althusser 136-7). Under the guise of a “neutral environment purged of ideology,” ISAs teach “‘know-how,’ but in forms which ensure subjection to the ruling ideology or the mastery of its ‘practice’”

(Althusser 148, 128). Ordinary activities such as attending school and going to church serve a higher purpose: they actually maintain a capitalist society.

Capitalism requires a system of oppression by the ruling class and subjection of the working class; this relationship must be reproduced along with the means of production. The bourgeoisie ensures the continued subjection of the working class through “a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order, i.e. a reproduction of submission to the ruling ideology for the workers, and a

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reproduction of the ability to manipulate the ruling ideology correctly for the agents of exploitation and repression” (Althusser 127-8). As the bourgeoisie demonstrates

“its hegemony over and in the State Ideological Apparatuses,” the proletariat adopts the ideology taught through the ISAs (Althusser 139). The bourgeoisie must ensure that reproduction succeeds by exploiting workers as subjects. This reproduction is exactly what Palahniuk’s characters challenge; they refuse to be submissive and eventually assume the “ability to manipulate the ruling ideology” for themselves.

ISAs are the mechanisms that perpetuate the existence of postmodern capitalist society by maintaining the balance of power between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat: “All ideological State apparatuses, whatever they are, contribute to the same result: the reproduction of the relations of production, i.e. of capitalist relations of exploitation” (Althusser 146). The educational ISA in particular dominates this process of reproduction and exercises repression that rivals the state’s means of enforcement (i.e. the police and the judicial system). Althusser highlights the subtle mechanizations of production in his discussion of the school:

It takes children from every class at infant-school age, and then for years, the years in which the child is most “vulnerable,” squeezed between the family State apparatus and the educational State apparatus, it drums into them, whether it uses old or new methods, a certain amount of “know-how” wrapped in ruling ideology…Somewhere around the age of sixteen, a huge mass of children are ejected “into production”: these are the workers or small peasants. Another portion of scholastically adapted youth carries on…and fills the posts of small and middle technicians, white-collar workers, small and middle executives, petty bourgeois of all kinds. (147)

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Through education, members of the proletariat learn the necessary knowledge to occupy their predetermined positions as “workers” or “petty bourgeois.” The ruling class exploits control of supposedly “neutral” institutions to reinforce subjugation of the working class—the primary subject of Palahniuk’s novels (particularly Fight Club).

The communications ISA is also discussed at length in Palahniuk’s novels.

Through the media, individuals receive the ruling ideology through “the communications apparatus by cramming every ‘citizen’ with daily doses of nationalism, chauvinism, liberalism, moralism, etc., by means of the press, the radio, and television” (Althusser 146). Tyler Durden frequently acknowledges these sources of ISA influence. These “isms” all contribute to the illusion of the American dream:

"We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars” (Fight Club 1999). Tyler incriminates the images promoted through TV as falsely encouraging the “reality” of the American dream.

These images motivate consumers to continue their participation in the market under the assumption that they will “make it big” one day.

In order for the capitalist system to function, the proletariat, also known as

“the productive forces,” has to be effective and capable (Althusser 126). Althusser describes how laborers are judged to be efficient: “I have said that the available labour power must be ‘competent,’ i.e. suitable to be set to work in the complex system of the process of production. The development of the productive

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forces…produce the result that the labour power has to be (diversely) skilled and therefore reproduced as such” (126-7). A good worker not only performs the job assigned to him, but he must be “diversely skilled”—those skills are taught through school, family, and religion, or ISAs:

Children at school also learn the “rules” of good behavior, i.e. the attitude that should be observed by every agent in the division of labour, according to the job he is “destined” for: rules of morality, civic and professional conscience, which actually means rules of respect for the socio-technical division or labour and ultimately the rules of order established by class domination. (Althusser 127)

What is considered to be “good behavior” is defined entirely by the ruling class, who carefully chooses rules of “morality,” “respect,” and “order” to uphold capitalist society and preserve the gap between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Althusser’s reference to “class domination” indicts the bourgeoisie, or the dominant class, as the arbiters of these rules.

ISAs enforce “the ruling ideology, which is the ideology of ‘the ruling class,’” and they accomplish this objective “massively and predominately by ideology, but they also function secondarily by repression” (Althusser 138-9). The evidence of this

“repression” is clear through the lens of Palahniuk’s novels. His characters all feel oppressed and contained, and their opposition to the hegemonic rule of the bourgeoisie gives them a greater sense of fulfillment. At the “site of class struggle,” the protagonists of Fight Club, Choke, and Invisible Monsters attempt to escape the

ISAs to regain control of their lives by discovering a new ideology (Althusser 140).

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Individuals exist as “always-already subjects,” made by ISAs (Althusser 161); the narrator, Victor, and Shannon of Fight Club, Choke, and Invisible Monsters, respectively, attempt to break free of their positions as subjects.

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IV. Chivalry is Dead: Romance in Twenty-First Century Society

Eighteenth-century novels laid the foundation for modern romance by reinforcing the “emotional intensity that makes a good romance” (Paizis 29). They include “a private setting, within which a heroine is brought into conflict with a hero” and an “encounter out of which ensues an affective adventure that ends happily”

(Paizis 29). The emotions evoked by the relationship between the hero and the heroine persist in romance novels today. This formula persisted through years of romance novels, finally progressing to a modern “anti-romance”:

The effect of the type of romance that resolutely turned its back on was to encourage the appearance of the anti-romance. Not-so-young, not-so-attractive heroines meet less-than-glamorous heroes; bored wives went on extramarital flings; heroes married the wrong woman. But the happy ending remained, and the pattern is of interest in its pre-figuring of themes more widely explored by the genre in the 1990s. (Paizis 31, emphasis added)

The characters of Palahniuk’s novels could be described as “not-so-young, not-so- attractive,” and indeed their stories conclude in a happier way than how they began.

Furthermore, the action of romance novels revolves around the “quest” for

“Love and Socialization” and “esteem” (qtd. in Paizis 165). Each of the characters is pursuing love, a connection to another person, but that connection is not possible without a degree of “Socialization” and “esteem.” The narrator of Fight Club needs

Marla but feels too inadequate and emasculated to pursue her. The manifestation of the Tyler Durden personality—the ideal man in every capacity—coincides with his desire for her. Victor attempts to change after meeting Paige, but only when he hits

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bottom and is exposed for everything he is can he feel liberated enough to be with her. Shannon has rejected her brother’s love since childhood, seeking acceptance from the wrong people, but her accident forces her to abandon her life and start afresh. Palahniuk’s characters seek self-worth and love simultaneously.

In discussing the male and female stereotypes within the romance genre,

Paizis indicates the influence of ISAs on characterization—the hero is a “ruling class male” and “the very embodiment of Power and virility” (qtd. in Paizis 94), while the heroine is “manipulated by the economic interests behind the magazines, the advertisers, the fashion houses, the consumer industry who all have an interest and a stake in the female market” (94-5). Shannon of Invisible Monsters obviously suffers from this influence through her serious investment in perfecting her looks.

Palahniuk’s male characters are just as vulnerable to these apparatuses; they are

“fed stereotyped images of themselves” and “false needs are created in them” that cause them to support and lose their masculinity (Paizis 95).

All the protagonists of Palahniuk’s novels struggle to communicate their thoughts and desires because simulacra, produced by the dominant group, have destroyed shared meaning and isolated individuals. The heroes and heroines of

Palahniuk’s works have inherently flawed relationships; their personalities are reflective of societal norms: “Most readers recognize the romance hero as a construction, one that reflects contemporary ideas of masculinity more than any

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woman’s ideal man” (Zidle 23). Palahniuk’s protagonists certainly reflect

“contemporary ideas” through their “conspicuous consumption and the gratification of desire” (Zidle 24). Furthermore, the hero “possesses a rejection or devaluation of meaningful male-female relationships” (Zidle 23). Initially, the narrator, Victor, and

Shannon are all critical of human connection, but their transformations at the end of the novels through their “happy endings” change their perspectives.

Palahniuk’s characters must move to higher levels of self-awareness in order to form lasting and meaningful relationships, and they all eventually overcome the dehumanizing effects of simulacra and ISAs to make connections to their fellow human beings. The romance genre “evokes a collective consciousness…a collective experience of society and a collective aspiration for improvement” (Paizis 177).

Palahniuk’s novels paint a sympathetic picture of the marginalized members of society, encouraging the “improvement” of the society that has depersonalized them.

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V. The Grand Gesture: Fight Club and the Pursuit of Marla Singer

The beginning of Fight Club is an onslaught of information without any apparent connection: The narrator is held at gunpoint by Tyler Durden while he explains how to make explosives and counts down the minutes until the detonation of an iconic commercial building. The narrator identifies “a woman named Marla

Singer” as the catalyst for the series of events that have led to the narrator’s current situation (Fight Club, 1999). The narrator first meets Marla in support groups for serious diseases, where he finds release: “This was freedom. Losing all hope was freedom. If I didn’t say anything, people in a group assumed the worst. They cried harder. I cried harder. Look up into the stars and you’re gone. Walking home after a support group, I felt more alive than I’d ever felt” (Palahniuk , Fight 22). The arrival of

Marla Singer, another “tourist” like him, interferes with this catharsis and retriggers his insomnia (Palahniuk, Fight 24).

The narrator’s intense need for human connection that he attempts to find in support groups stems from his job and lifestyle. As an analyst for a major car company, he determines the cost of a recall against human life, which causes his detachment from humanity:

You take the population of the vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement (C). A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don’t do the recall. If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt. If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don’t recall. (Palahniuk, Fight 30)

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His job requires a constant reduction of human life to a formula, resulting in his desensitization to human suffering—he refers to the burden of knowing that human lives are simply one side of an equation as “job security,” and nothing more

(Palahniuk, Fight 31). Baker posits that Palahniuk uses “rhetorical violence” to demonstrate that the “value of human life is quantifiable— it is appropriate, expected, that compassion is measured against cost” (141). Death loses its emotional weight once people become “by-products of a lifestyle obsession” (Fight Club, 1999).

The narrator fantasizes about death as the ultimate end to the tedium of his job and lifestyle: “The cabin hangs at the wrong angle under the roar of the turbines, and you will never have to file another expense account claim. Receipt required for items over twenty-five dollars. You will never have to get another haircut” (Palahniuk, Fight

31). He constantly hopes for the end to a life consumed by the monotony of his job and his preoccupation with purchasing catalogue items.

The narrator’s personal life consists of indiscriminately buying things regardless of their utility:

And I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue. We all have the same Johanneshov armchair in the Strinne green stripe pattern. *…+ The Alle cutlery service. Stainless steel. Dishwasher safe. The Vlid hall clock made of galvanized steel, oh I had to have that. *…+ Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you. (Palahniuk, Fight 44)

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In Fight Club (1999), the narrator recants his purchases as a panoramic view of the apartment is shown, including item descriptions and prices, to mimic the layout of

“an IKEA furniture catalogue.” The endless acquisition of useless novelties gives the narrator an inadequate sense of completion, and in order for consumer to prevail, the narrator must never feel complete: “The main character is beset by a sense of insignificance that seems intimately tied to his role as modern consumer and producer” (Jordan 372). Bourgeois ideology operates to indoctrinate the narrator, and millions of others, with the need to consume without a satiable end, and the narrator recognizes that products of the consumer culture are “tied to alienation”

(Riekki 91).

The detachment from community bred by the narrator’s job and lifestyle motivates him to seek human contact through support groups. He feels a connection to death through the members who believe they could die any day, “the amazing miracle of death” that could happen at any moment (Palahniuk, Fight 37). He still envisions death as he did during his numerous business trips, describing in detail the death of Chloe, a support group member: “Picture Chloe’s popular skeleton the size of an insect, running through the vaults and galleries of her innards at two in the morning. Her pulse a siren overhead, announcing: Prepare for death in ten, in nine, in eight seconds” (Palahniuk, Fight 36). These types of fantasies soothe the narrator and enable him to sleep. Marla, however, who is not suffering from a terminal illness,

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interferes with the narrator’s release by attending support groups. Her arrival eventually triggers the narrator’s creation of an alter ego, Tyler Durden.

The destruction of his apartment by a bomb, which is later revealed to have been set by himself, liberates him from his catatonic state. Baker explains that while consumerism is a social concern in Fight Club, it functions as a literary tool:

“Ultimately, however, Palahniuk is not condemning consumerism in and of itself—he is simply using it metaphorically to elucidate the irony of elevating the acquisition of

‘things’ over the value of human life” (Baker 173). Consistent with Marxist ideology, human lives are dispensable and quantified by their contribution to the capitalist machine. To escape this mentality, the narrator quickly surrenders his life of modern

“convenience” for Tyler Durden and a dilapidated house, which becomes the epicenter for the rest of the narrative.

The family ISA is a frequent target of Palahniuk’s novels. Fight Club questions the traditional role models within the family ISA: “What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women” (Palahniuk, Fight 50). Men feel incomplete in the absence of a father figure and consequently experience a loss of masculinity.

Male rituals have dwindled due to the loss of male examples in society: “Being a man meant having gone through certain rites of passage which were overseen and officiated by other men. But that time was long along. How do men become men in a culture that only projects violent male role models, or commercialized and glossy

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versions of males?” (Mendieta 396). The men attempt to transcend the absence of physical male rituals by shunning romantic attachments in order to achieve a sense of masculinity. If masculinity is attached to what culture dictates it should be, then it becomes a target of fight club and eventually Project Mayhem due to its ties to civilization.

The narrator reconciles different male images before adopting the Tyler personality. Remaining Men Together, a testicular cancer support group, demonstrates the loss of masculinity both within himself and men in general. The members express extreme feelings of worthlessness because of this void. Big Bob,

“eyes already shrink-wrapped in tears,” in particular epitomizes emasculation— because of cancer, he has grown breasts as a side effect of a hormonal imbalance

(Palahniuk, Fight 21). The narrator leaves this behind for fight club, an arena that reinstates the old masculine rituals based on physical strength, giving the narrator power over the messages promoted by the communications ISA. The narrator’s commentary on a Calvin Klein ad for men’s underwear is a critique on the current state of masculinity: “Is that what a real man looks like?” (Fight Club, 1999). He refers to the production involved in creating the male model in the ad, such as the toning of the body and the airbrushing of flaws—there is nothing real about this image—so he rejects it and the communications ISA after he creates fight club.

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The narrator embraces fight club to reassert the masculinity lost within his

“nesting instinct.” If his physical body bears the evidence of a lifestyle of accumulating “stuff,” he is unscathed and unscarred, but the destruction of his nest removes that buffer: “I just don’t want to die without a few scars, I say. It’s nothing anymore to have a beautiful stock body. You see those cars that are completely stock cherry, right out of the dealer’s showroom in 1955, I always think, what a waste”

(Palahniuk, Fight 48). The emphasis on masculinity as an impossible ideal is a criticism of traditional gender roles promoted especially by the media, though it is far from the only producer of those roles. Palahniuk raises the question: What is the evolutionary need for conditioning our bodies when physical harm is unlikely?

Fight club replaces the frame of reference depicted in professional fighting and violence on television:

Like every guy on his first night of fight club, I breathed in and swung my fist in a roundhouse at Tyler’s jaw like in every cowboy movie we’d ever seen, and me, my fist connected with the side of Tyler’s neck.…We both stood there, Tyler rubbing the side of his neck and me holding a hand on my chest, both of us knowing we’d gotten there somewhere and like the cat and mouse in cartoons, we were still alive and wanted to see how far we could take this thing and still be alive. (Palahniuk, Fight 53)

The Tyler way to true rebirth is “hitting bottom,” to reach a point where nothing else can be lost (Palahniuk, Fight 69). The narrator embraces this philosophy to escape the simulacra that have become his way of life, “the insomnia distance of everything, a copy of a copy of a copy. You can’t touch anything, and nothing can touch you”

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(Palahniuk, Fight 96-7). Fight club closes that breach, and that touch with reality enables his relationship with Marla. However, fight club soon mutates into Project

Mayhem, a militant organization working to deconstruct the ISAs, which threatens the lives of the narrator and his supporters.

The narrator’s adoption of the Tyler persona is inextricably connected to meeting Marla. Tyler is the “heroic ideal,” a man with the freedom to do anything

(Jordan 372). For the narrator of Fight Club, consumer culture has eliminated the need for heroes, and using Tyler, he attempts to subvert that culture and lead a social movement—producing the “New Hero” (Zidle 28). Thus, he begins a sexual relationship with Marla (unknowingly, as he still sees himself as separate from Tyler).

Ultimately, the narrator uses Tyler to direct his anger toward an absent father figure, a major cause of his emasculation, and establishes himself as the new father, the new God, with the men of fight club and Project Mayhem as his sons, or followers.

His reassertion of power enables him to pursue Marla and establish a convoluted, though genuine, relationship with her.

The Project Mayhem agenda includes any act that would “teach each man in the project that he had the power to control history” (Palahniuk, Fight 122). The men focus their efforts on dismantling civilization itself, reducing it to a “prematurely induced dark age” to restore the earth (Palahniuk, Fight 125). As the project spirals out of control, the narrator consequently realizes that he is Tyler Durden, the true

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architect of the events that have transpired. He has essentially waged a “great war of spirit,” an effort to alter the status quo in response to “a spiritual depression” he had been experiencing since the beginning of the (Palahniuk, Fight 149). As violent social upheavals, fight club and Project Mayhem are erratic and unpredictable, essentially making death a reality, rather than simulated, for the first time.

Big Bob, a former member of the testicular cancer support group and of

Project Mayhem, dies and triggers the narrator’s destruction of his alter ego. Baker compares the anti-capitalist, anti-civilization dogma of Tyler to the narrator’s former basis of morality or “consumerist ideology” to illustrate their similar lack of stability:

In Fight Club, existentialist philosophy serves as a rationale that validates the violence in the mind of Tyler Durden, a primitivist/nihilist who preaches that morality is a socially-constructed myth, and a person’s individuality is only revealed by the violation of social norms…fight club is nothing more than a distillation of the ‘dog-eat- dog’ mentality of corporate America where everyone is objectified and the struggle for power is the ultimate goal. Project Mayhem, conversely, serves as an icon of corporate America itself where workers are nothing but faceless cogs in a corporate machine of dehumanization and destruction. (Baker 138-9)

Rather than being a better alternative to consumerism, the new philosophy dehumanizes its followers and provides only an illusory feeling of change, and when fight club escalates into Project Mayhem, the narrator attempts to counteract what his Tyler personality has set in motion.

The novel concludes with the narrator in a mental institution, with the realization that “We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We

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just are, and what happens just happens” (Palahniuk, Fight 207). He summarizes the philosophies he has experienced and thereby dismissed, and he has reached a middle ground, an acceptance of reality. Fight Club, as a “narrative of a personal crisis arising from an apprehension of the modern world as corrosive of personal identity and in particular masculinity,” represents the acting out and fulfillment of fantasies that recover a masculine identity (Jordan 372). Tyler Durden, as the male ideal constructed by the narrator, initially represents complete freedom, but Tyler eventually imposes control on the men of fight club and Project Mayhem. The narrator must then escape from his original source of escape—by killing his Tyler personality.

Fight Club proposes that “deconstructing modernity’s illusory and alienating metanarratives of techno-rational and materialistic progress” can “open up new possibilities for human freedom,” or deconstruction of simulacra and Althusser’s ISAs

(Bennett 74). The outliers of society, represented by the main characters of Fight

Club, demonstrate how sterilized and insulated individuals have become in order to postpone death falsely cautioned by the bourgeoisie through ISAs. These same people are placated by endless consumption. Initially, the narrator avoids confrontation and attaches himself to the safety of consumerism, the simulation of life: “There’s no possibility of real disaster, real risk, we’re left with no chance for real salvation. Real elation. Real excitement. Joy. Discovery. Invention. The laws that keep us safe, these same laws condemn us to boredom” (Palahniuk, Fight 159). Society has

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not saved us; it has sedated us, as a side effect of the domination of the simulacra and the ideology of the ISAs, according to Tyler. The creation of fight club is the resistance against the homogenizing and dehumanizing effects of modern culture:

“Sought out pain and danger are palliatives for….a void of meaning, a lack of direction. Consumerism capitalizes on this sense of lack and awareness of absence. It offers us gratification, but one which can only be momentary” (Mendieta 396). As only “palliatives,” the narrator rejects fight club and Project Mayhem as well as consumerism, dismissing them for their depersonalizing effect on their participants.

What remains is his connection with Marla, who waits for him outside the mental institution.

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VI. “I Want to Be Someone’s Constant Savior”: Love and Sexual Addiction in

Choke

While Choke and Fight Club share many similar themes and utilize a male voice, Victor, though equally detached from others and growing increasingly dissatisfied with “quotidian existence” like the narrator, is controlled by a sexual addiction and an obsessive need for attention. As part of his recovery, he keeps a journal describing every sexual escapade, his relationship with his sick mother, and the choking he fakes to gain money and sympathy. Choke is that journal, in which

Palahniuk reinforces the theories of Baudrillard and Althusser while developing

Victor’s relationship with Paige.

Choke comments on Fight Club’s evaluation of family and the growth of single, female households, the “generation of men raised by women,” which has heavily influenced Victor’s relationships: “The truth is, every son raised by a single mom is pretty much born married. I don’t know, but until your mom dies it seems like all the other women in your life can never be more than just your mistress. In the modern Oedipal story, it’s the mother who kills the father and then takes the son”

(Palahniuk, Choke 15-16). The relationship between Victor and “The Mommy” illustrates Victor’s need for compassion and foreshadows his later behavior: his sexual addiction and choking as a means to support himself financially (Palahniuk,

Choke 2). The exclusion of the father from the Oedipus triangle means a lack of the

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male authoritative figure in the traditional family setup promoted by the family ISA— reality contradicts ideology, creating a disconnect between what Victor expects and what he receives.

Victor chokes to get attention, or what he perceives as genuine care, even love, when he is saved: “At that moment, it seemed the whole world cared what happened to him. All those people hugging him and petting him. Everybody asked if he was okay. It seemed the moment would last forever. That you had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved” (Palahniuk,

Choke 3). He echoes similar sentiments in the minutes after sexual activity: “These are the only few minutes I can be human. Just for these minutes, I don’t feel lonely”

(Palahniuk , Choke 20). Victor describes dependency rather than love, and until he encounters Paige, his mother’s doctor, he subscribes to this form of attachment.

Victor grapples with lacking the unattainable “American dream” of rags to riches (just like the men of Fight Club), and his failure to achieve it only increases his feelings of worthlessness and dependent behavior.

Victor craves “one person I can rescue. I want one person who needs me.

Who can’t live without me. I want to be a hero, but not just one time.…I want to be someone’s constant savior” (Palahniuk, Choke 118). Victor is a sexual addict and cannot escape the addiction mentality. He wants to “rescue” someone but not understand them; he wants a “person who needs” him rather than a person who

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loves him. Victor’s current state of socialization is one of dependency, a desire for others to need him: “I’m not so much a good friend as I’m the doctor who wants to adjust your spine every week. Or the dealer that sells you heroin. ‘Parasite’ isn’t the right word, but it’s the first word that comes to mind.…I’m not so much a good friend as I’m the savior who wants you to worship him forever” (Palahniuk, Choke 33).

Victor’s dependent behavior reflects a larger societal problem: “Here the issue is how dependency itself becomes an addiction, or rather how in the midst of a culture that flourishes and thrives by promoting and instigating addiction, the very means by which individuals seek to uncouple themselves from these imposed and acquired dependencies becomes a major part of their lives” (Mendieta 401). Victor continues his addiction through support groups for sexual addicts; he frequently refers to these meetings as educational sessions, opportunities to learn more ways to be sexually deviant. Addiction is promoted by the bourgeoisie through ISAs—if

“workers” like Victor are narcotized by addiction, they will not rebel against the capitalist system.

One of the major themes of Choke is the limitations of current meaning and how it affects language; Ida Mancini utilizes a drug, called “trichloroethane,” to essentially “undo” knowledge (Palahniuk, Choke 148). Essentially, she desires to reverse the process initiated by the educational ISA; knowledge, or “know-how,” is

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merely a mask for the reproduction of the relations of production—how the bourgeoisie ensures its dominance over the working class:

“That big glorious mountain. For one transitory moment, I think I may have actually seen it.” For one flash, the Mommy had seen the mountain without thinking of logging and ski resorts and avalanches, managed wildlife, plate tectonic geology, microclimates, rain shadow, or yin-yang locations. She’d seen the mountains without the framework of language. Without the cage of associations. She’d seen it without looking through the lens of everything she knew was true about mountains. What she’d seen in that flash wasn’t even a “mountain.” It wasn’t a natural resource. It had no name. (Palahniuk, Choke 148-9)

Here is a clear demonstration of Baudrillard’s theory: the signifier, the word

“mountain,” carries a “cage of associations” that interferes with the act of seeing.

The signified no longer exists; it has been replaced by the language used to describe it, a language largely situated in consumer culture. According to Ida, “‘We don’t live in the real world anymore, she said. ‘We live in a world of symbols’” (Palahniuk 151).

Meaning and communication are destroyed, disrupting the closeness of personal ,

Choke relationships.

According to Baudrillardian thought, simulacra interferes with communication; therefore Victor’s inability to connect points to the larger issue of society itself. Fawver establishes some important connections between Palahniuk’s novel and Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation: “Indeed, many of Palahniuk’s novels, Choke foremost among them, advocate both a violent evolution of

Baudrillardian thought and a massive regression in communication; such texts trace

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the path of simulation and mediation, but, in the end, veer away, toward a much more hopeful future” (Fawver 3-4). Within the novels, this “evolution” springs from a desire to connect to someone, and the revolt coincides with the arrival of the destined object of the protagonist’s love—Paige Marshall is that object for Victor:

“Even in a church, even laid up on an altar, without her clothes, Paige Marshall, Dr.

Paige Marshall, I didn’t want her to become just another piece of ass” (Palahniuk,

Choke 164). Victor cannot conceptualize a mutual, loving relationship at this point— he is deeply embedded in a personal identity crisis: to his mother, he is different people; to the people who save him, he is their charity case. He constantly shifts roles, making serious relationships impossible.

“You gain power by pretending to be weak. By contrast, you make people feel so strong. You save people by letting them save you. All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog. People really need somebody they feel superior to. So stay downtrodden. People need somebody they can send a check to at

Christmas. So stay poor” (Palahniuk, Choke 50). Victor demonstrates his own way of gaining control: by staging these threats against his life, he manufactures heroes and continues to manipulate them by playing upon their emotions, to win their pity.

Victor argues that his staged choking creates adventure for ordinary, everyday people: “Why I do this is to put adventure back into people’s lives. Why I do this is to create heroes. Put people to the test” (Palahniuk, Choke 49). He willingly plays the role of victim, exaggerating his condition to receive sympathy and also flatter his

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saviors’ egos. This simulation of heroism is comparable to the emptiness of simulacra, especially when Victor describes his identity: “More and more, it feels like

I’m doing a really bad impersonation of myself” (Palahniuk, Choke 69). His very self has become a simulacrum, representing a major conflict with personal identity.

Struggling with his identity, Victor assumes the role of Dorian Gray—the patients at his mother’s hospital utilize him as a cathartic outlet:

Yesterday at St. Anthony’s, I tell him, it was the same as that old movie where there’s a guy and a painting, and the guy gets to party and lives to be about a hundred years old, and he never looks any different. The painting of him, it keeps getting uglier and trashed with alcohol- related everything and the nose falls off from secondary syphilis and the clap. All the residents at St. Anthony’s, now they’re all eyes closed and humming. Everybody’s all smiling and righteous. Except me. I’m their stupid painting. (Palahniuk, Choke 72)

Victor has no identity and has become an amalgam of others’ projections.

Furthermore, to his mother he is different people, what Victor describes as “Gestalt ambush” (Palahniuk, Choke 84). While the narrator of Fight Club experiences only one personality, Victor seemingly assumes many, but who is Victor Mancini? “He has no self identity of his own with which to help these elderly patients, so he simulates someone who can. To the patients, as well as his mother, Victor becomes something of a hyperreal being” (Fawver 15). Simulation is all Victor can engage in – he produces heroes through his choking act, and he constantly shifts identities to provide the patients with the release of their past grievances.

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Victor confronts the question of his identity when Paige Marshall deciphers his mother’s journal, which claims that her son is a descendant of Christ, the ultimate savior that Victor aspires to be. His deepest desire appears to have come true, but he sees this potential role exclusively in predefined terms: “Such a messiah would be merely a simulation of whatever mediated images and characteristics have come to be associated with ‘messianic.’ Therefore, the world is left with saviors who are merely trying to perfect the signifiers of past saviors who may also have been simply simulating characteristics of ‘perfect love’” (Fawver 17). What would the term

“messiah” mean without its historical tradition? Choke questions the very “realness” of religion, one of Althusser’s ISAs: “The text is fully aware that even stolid institutions, God and religion for instance, are just copies of copies of copies with no underlying reality” (Fawver 17). Despite this lack of “reality,” Victor claims that

“‘from now on, I want to try and be a better person.’ Choking in restaurants, fooling people, I’m not going to do that kind of shit anymore” (Palahniuk, Choke 239). Once

Victor truly desires self-improvement, he then seeks to improve society; a

“restructuring begins with individual identity and cascades outward; the self is leveled and rebuilt and then, in turn, the newly un-emptied self attempts to level and rebuild culture” (Fawver 6).

Victor experiences the worst kind of humiliation—he is exposed on television by his former saviors for what he really is—but this experience actually liberates him.

He creates a life outside tradition, free from the simulation of “law and order,” what

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his mother always wanted for him: “‘I don’t want you to just accept the world as it’s given,’ she said. ‘I want you to invent it. I want you to have that skill. To create your own reality. Your own set of laws’” (Palahniuk, Choke 284). In the last few pages of the novel, Victor is an individual ready to “invent” his own life: “We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts.

Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it’s our job to invent something better” (Palahniuk, Choke 292). Despite the overwhelming feeling of lost meaning, Victor attempts to reach the shared space between individuals. With this sense of empowerment, he feels that he can choose his own life, a complete transformation from the trapped individual at the beginning of the novel. Not only does Victor have a relationship with Paige, but he is building “a world out of rocks and chaos” without a defined function yet—the ultimate liberation from the restrictive ISAs: “Where we’re standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything” (Palahniuk, Choke 292-3).

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VII. People as Products: The Relationships of Invisible Monsters

While Fight Club and Choke express anti-capitalist attitudes toward “family

ISA ‘house’ symbolism and its broader counterpart of all-encompassing capitalistic

‘corporate house’ symbolism” and “products that fill these houses” (Riekki 91),

Invisible Monsters fixates on how people themselves have become part of production. As a model Shannon McFarland constantly reinvents herself to be a top- of-the-line product; the pressure to be beautiful and perfect consumes her life and perspective.

Shannon perceives her world in terms of fashion and designers—superficial beauty— which is evidence of “how malleable the models are as icons of homogenized beauty and how valueless their real selves become in the process”

(Johnson 62). As a product of the fashion world, she reinforces its dogma—its ideology:

Anymore, when I see the picture of a twenty-something in the newspaper who was abducted and sodomized and robbed then killed and here’s a front-page picture of her young and smiling, instead of me dwelling on this being a big, sad crime, my gut reaction is, wow, she’d be really hot if she didn’t have such a big honker of a nose. My second reaction is I’d better have some good head and shoulder shots handy in case I get, you know, abducted and sodomized to death. My third reaction is, well, at least that cuts down on the competition. (Palahniuk, Invisible 16)

Shannon engages in the desensitizing production process that has transformed her into a commodity by applying it to a murder victim, viewing her as an unfinished product that needs to be fixed by surgery in order to by aesthetically pleasing by

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current society’s chosen standards. Death no longer exists: humans have become less human and more like commodities to be sold, manipulated, and eventually dismantled when no longer effective: “Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a Barbie doll. Erasing a computer disk. Burning a book. Probably that goes for killing anybody in the world.

We’re all such products” (Palahniuk, Invisible 12). When people become products, sterilized and emotionless, what happens to romance, love, and relationships?

Like the narrator of Fight Club’s initial pursuit of useless catalogue items,

Shannon attempts to become a better product, breeding a detachment from others.

Shannon’s pursuit has no foreseeable end; perfection will always be out of reach as long as the bourgeoisie benefits. If the bourgeoisie has control of ideology, it can manipulate the definition of perfection to mean anything. Since no one can achieve perfection, people become like the products on store shelves: “Here are all the favorite name-brand products, all those colors, French’s mustard, Rice A Roni, Top

Ramen, everything trying to get your attention. All that color. A whole shift in the beauty standard so that no one thing really stands out” (Palahniuk, Invisible 54). As

Shannon “improves” herself, she is no longer unique, blending in with a growingly homogenized labor force.

Shannon’s simulation of emotion for the camera infiltrates her everyday life;

Invisible Monsters is punctuated by these empty demands for emotion: “Give me

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attention. Flash. Give me beauty. Flash. Give me peace and happiness, a loving relationship, and a perfect home. Flash” (Palahniuk, Invisible 220). She begins defined in terms of the fashion world, and the emotion she simulates for photographs becomes the emotion she must simulate all of the time. Shannon also reveals her desire for a traditional “happy ending,” the cliché American dream far removed from reality. The “perfect home” is merely “a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock-Tudor big manor house. It’s a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is, aren’t we all?”

(Palahniuk, Invisible 14). Palahniuk echoes Baudriallian theory, as a simulacrum is only “a copy of a copy of a copy.”

Palahniuk incorporates an important metaphor to demonstrate the true nature of self-improvement—Shannon stars in an infomercial featuring the Num

Num Snack Factory, a device used to reinvent an old product: “the Num Num Snack

Factory takes meat by-products—your tongues or hearts or lips or genitals—chews them up, seasons them, and poops them out in the shape of a spade or a diamond or a club onto your choice of cracker for you to eat yourself” (Palahniuk, Invisible 120).

The factory symbolizes the fashion world; although the end result varies very little from the original product, the beauty industry profits from repackaging old products to look like new. According to Johnson, “the machine represents the fashion industry which pulls in individuals and refigures them into homogenized products, somehow investing them with an allegedly increased value” (63). Shannon’s desire to improve

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herself is reflective of what the beauty industry wants—if Shannon feels incomplete, she will spend unlimited money on trying to achieve completion: “The beauty industry feeds on the unrealistic body images of the consumers, only to reprocess those fears through the fashion, diet, and plastic surgery industries to sell to the consumers” (Johnson 63). Due to the nature of ISAs, Shannon will never feel complete, so she fixates on securing an audience—to be blindly adored for her superficial beauty—to compensate.

By herself, Shannon feels no sense of individual worth and requires an audience of any kind to feel real and loved. She frequents Brumbach’s, a furniture store that simulates the interiors of actual homes, to fulfill her obsessive need for attention. She must simulate life in this store in order to feel real:

Customers would stroll by and there would be Evie and me sprawled on a pink canopy bed, calling our horoscopes on her cell phone. We’d be curled on a tweedy sofa sectional, munching popcorn and watching our soaps on a console color television. Evie will pull up her T-shirt to show me another new belly button piercing. She’ll pull down the armhole of her blouse and show me the scars from her implants. “It’s too lonely at my real house,” Evie would say, “And I hate how I don’t feel real enough unless people are watching.” (Palahniuk, Invisible 69)

This passage refers to cultural conventions about ideal domestic life with “tweedy sofa sectional” sets and “console color television[s].” Shannon and Evie simulate what they both lack in actual reality, emphasizing the disparity between the ideal and the real, the burden of the family ISA.

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Shannon’s family appears to fit the mold of the typical nuclear family—two parents, two kids—but far from being a source of love and compassion, the family is just another ISA, and it can only simulate love. Shannon’s parents throw their son from the house after learning that he is gay, but after his death, they excessively celebrate his memory:

These same people being so good and kind and caring and involved, these same people finding identity and personal fulfillment in the fight on the front lines for equality and personal dignity and equal rights for their dead son, these are the same people I hear yelling through my bedroom door. “We don’t know what kind of filthy diseases you’re bringing into this house, mister, but you can just find another place to sleep tonight.” (Palahniuk, Invisible 149)

Rather than accepting Shane while he was alive, the McFarlands become obsessed with maintaining the appearance of loving their son through gay rights activism, and as a result, Shannon is ignored.

The accident that leaves Shannon disfigured actually gives her the opportunity to escape her compulsion for self-improvement. Without modeling,

Shannon is free to pursue anything, and her meeting with Brandy Alexander empowers her to end her career. Brandy gives her veils to cover her face so that

Shannon can pursue her desire for anonymity: “A sphinx. A mystery. A blank.

Unknown. Undefined. Unknowable. Indefinable. Those were all the words Brandy used to describe me in my veils. Not just a story that goes and then, and then, and then, and then until you die” (Palahniuk, Invisible 261). Although Shannon’s life is now “unknowable,” the veils complicate her identity, and as they travel the

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continent, stealing prescription drugs, Brandy gives Shannon multiple identities, such as Daisy St. Patience of the House of St. Patience and Bubba-Joan, daughter of the

Reverend Scooter Alexander (Palahniuk, Invisible 107, 64). The constant shift of identity causes Shannon to feel like she has no identity of her own, like Victor of

Choke.

Shannon is introduced to “Brandy-ism,” a new ideology that recognizes people and institutions as products, thus dissolving their power within ISAs: “‘You’re not any more responsible for how you look than a car is,’ Brandy says. ‘You’re a product just as much. A product of a product of a product. The people who design cars, they’re products. Your parents are products. Their parents were products. Your teachers, products. The minister in your church, another product’” (Palahniuk,

Invisible 217). Brandy indicts family, education, and religion, or Althusser’s ISAs, uncovering them as products of the bourgeoisie. Brandy Alexander is constructed by others just like Shannon: “Her hair, her figure, her hippy, hippy forward Brandy

Alexander walk, the Rhea sisters invented all that” (Palahniuk, Invisible 169).

Although Brandy allows the Rhea sisters to physically transform her, she has control over her own life in a way Shannon never has. Brandy is revealed to be Shane,

Shannon’s brother, and becoming Brandy Alexander is simply “the biggest mistake I can think to make” (Palahniuk, Invisible 258).

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Brandy argues that humans’ status as products removes all sense of free will and, furthermore, personal responsibility. Although that leaves the characters essentially free to do anything, their actions are still confined, determined entirely by the ISAs. Shane leads his sister to a new philosophy, enabling Shannon to seek out new meaning outside society’s prescribed language:

“You’re a product of our language,” Brandy says, “and how our laws are and how we believe our God wants us. Every bitty molecule about you has already been thought out by some million people before you,” she says. “Anything you can do is boring and old and perfectly okay. You’re safe because you’re so trapped inside your culture. Anything you can conceive of is fine because you conceive of it. You can’t imagine any way to escape. There’s no way you can get out,” Brandy says. “The world,” Brandy says, “is your cradle and your trap.” (Palahniuk, Invisible 219)

This realization enables and empowers Brandy and, eventually Shannon, to break free from “what I’d been trained to want. What everybody wants” (Palahniuk,

Invisible 220). Brandy recognizes that ISAs define desire in terms of what the bourgeoisie has determined and taught through “the capitalist education system, and by other instances and institutions” (Althusser 127). Brandy and Shannon would rather leave the “cradle” and its protection for an “adventure,” something original.

Brandy describes a female mountain climber to demonstrate her philosophy on how life should be lived outside what has been predetermined:

Her example is a woman who climbs a mountain, there’s no real rational reason for climbing that hard, and to some people it’s a stupid folly, a misadventure, a mistake. A mountain climber, maybe she starves and freezes, exhausted and in pain for days, and climbs all the

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way to the top. And maybe she’s changed by all that, but all she has to show for it is her story. (Palahniuk, Invisible 259)

Brandy embodies this kind of thinking; for “no real rational reason,” Shane transforms into Brandy. She leaves the realm of the knowable and the safe and risks security and safety to experience the real.

Together, the McFarlands “want out of the labels,” a life that is not “crammed into a single world. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that’s not on the map. A real adventure’” (Palahniuk, Invisible 261). Shane in particular refuses to accept any sort of label on his gender or sexuality: “For Shane, traditional definitions of sexuality and gender are too restrictive. He refuses to be bound by a closed system, especially one bound by language. His struggle, therefore, is not merely an internal one to reinvent himself [i.e. Shannon], but also is against society as well” (Johnson 66). Shane and Shannon move beyond “the lexicon of either/or, and not both; it is a transsexualism, one that does not transit between, but reaches beyond. Brandy is in search of a world that is not on the map of gender and sexual relations as we have known them” (Mendieta 400).

At the conclusion of the novel, Shannon feels that she can pursue the “real discoveries” that “come from chaos,” because of the progression of her relationship with Shane from hatred to love (Palahniuk, Invisible 258). Invisible Monsters differs from Fight Club and Choke in that the central relationship is not a romance between hero and the heroine; rather, the renewed relationship between Shannon and Shane

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and their acceptance of one another is the resolution of the novel’s conflict. Moving past the “performance of gender and desire” and “binary oppositions and its limited language of experience,” the McFarlands can create their own paths, a path founded in the real without the influence of ISAs (Johnson 69, 71).

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VIII. Conclusion

Throughout the novels, Palahniuk constantly refers to the existing culture as a palliative and suggests that “adventure,” where true happiness and desire rather than what we are trained to want, lies outside current societal norms. The protagonists of Fight Club, Choke, and Invisible Monsters, recognizing how society dehumanizes its members, reject the ideology taught by the ISAs. Bourgeois ideology shapes the production of the society, which manufactures the hyperreal under the pretense of the real. These characters’ understanding of that truth gives them the power to manipulate it themselves and feel strong enough to escape their insulated lives. They essentially risk life and limb in order to experience the real, leaving behind their simulated emotions. This risk gives these characters the only thing they truly wanted: one person to connect with. The resolution of the conflict between the protagonists and their counterparts makes a “happy ending” possible; the realization of the heroes’ “lack of emotional connection to others” eventually unites them with their heroines (Zidle 27).

The narrator of Fight Club physically suffers in his pursuit of a masculine identity, an identity needed to have a relationship with Marla. His adoption of the

Tyler Durden personality and creation of fight club are attempts to regain his masculinity. The conclusion of the novel leaves them separated but still communicating through letters, while the film promotes a more exaggerated

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romantic ending with the narrator and Marla holding hands as they watch the bombs set by Project Mayhem destroy commercial buildings around them.

Struggling through addiction, Victor has only relationships of dependence, until he meets Paige. He intensely desires for her to be different from the many other women he has slept with, but he is incapable of anything more until he ends his addictive behavior. The novel concludes with the two of them building a structure with no defined function: “It’s creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos.

What’s it’s going to be, I don’t know.…And maybe knowing isn’t the point. Where we’re standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything”

(Palahniuk, Choke 292-3).

Desperate for love and acceptance, Shannon models for the attention, constantly maintaining and improving her appearance, as that is the only thing she is appreciated for. Her brother, as Brandy Alexander, gives her the love she seeks after her “accident” that leaves her face disfigured (which she eventually reveals to have caused): “Her rejection of her beauty will be the act that restores her relationship with her brother” (Johnson 65). Shannon relinquishes the hold her beauty once had over her life, therefore establishing the connection she always wanted and giving her the strength to pursue a life without boundaries.

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All of Palahniuk’s protagonists progress to a different level of consciousness; however, the endings are not “happy” in the traditional romantic sense:

Palahniuk’s work has broader theoretical implications; his optimism is not simply grounded in a world where people of all races and creeds are holding hands and singing campfire songs. Instead, his positivity stems from the belief that a reshaping and rebuilding of realness is possible. Palahniuk’s romanticism yearns for a restoration of signs to meaning, a sweeping salvation of reality from the clutches of simulation, all accomplished in one small step at a time. (Fawver 10)

Palahniuk’s novels do reflect this sort of “optimism,” or at least a belief in possibility that life can change and that connection with another person is possible. If “the ultimate condition of production is therefore the reproduction of the conditions of production” (Althusser 123), then the ISAs must be dismantled. Only through rejection of the ISAs can individuals make a connection, and Palahniuk’s characters overcome the loss of the signified to communicate with others and have their happy ending.

Gillespie 51

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an

Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster.

London: NLB, 1971. 123-173.

Baker, James Andrew. “Necessary Evil: Rhetorical Violence in 20th Century American

Literature.” Diss. Texas A & M U, 2006.

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U

of Michigan P, 1994.

Bennett, Robert. “The Death of Sisyphus: Existentialist Literature and the Cultural

Logic of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.” Stirrings Still: The International Journal

of Existential Literature 2 (2005): 65-80.

Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. Fox 2000 Pictures, 1999.

Johnson, Andy. “Bullets and Blades: Narcissism and Violence in Invisible Monsters.”

Sacred and Immortal: On the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk. Ed. Jeffrey A.

Sartain. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. 61-72.

Mendieta, Eduardo. “Surviving American Culture: On Chuck Palahniuk.” Philosophy

and Literature 29 (2005): 394-408.

Palahniuk, Chuck. Choke. New York: Anchor, 2001.

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---. Fight Club. London: Norton, 1996.

---.Invisible Monsters. New York: Norton, 1999.

Riekki, Ron. “Brandy, Shannon, Tender, and the Middle Finger: Althusser and

Foucault in Palahniuk’s Early Novels.” Sacred and Immortal: On the Writings

of Chuck Palahniuk. Ed. Jeffrey A. Sartain. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge

Scholars, 2009. 89-101.

Zidle, Abby. “From Bodice-Ripper to Baby-Sitter: The New Hero in Mass-Market

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Johnson-Kurek. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1999. 23-34.