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This thesis has been approved by The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of English _________________________ Dr. Robert Miklitsch Professor, Critical Theory & Cultural Studies Thesis Advisor _________________________ Dr. Josephine Bloomfield Honors Tutorial College, Director of Studies English ______ _________________________ Dr. Jeremy W. Webster Dean, Honors Tutorial College Gillespie 2 THE PURSUIT OF A “HAPPY ENDING”: CHUCK PALAHNIUK’S NOVELS AND THE SEARCH FOR HUMAN CONNECTION _____________________________________ 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 Gillespie 3 Table of Contents I. Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 4 II. The Disappearance of Shared Reality: Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra .................................................... 8 III. “A Pure Dream, Empty and Vain”: Ruling Ideology in Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” ................................................................................................................... 13 IV. Chivalry is Dead: Romance in Twenty-First Century Society .............................................................. 18 V. The Grand Gesture: Fight Club and the Pursuit of Marla Singer ........................................................ 21 VI. “I Want to Be Someone’s Constant Savior”: Love and Sexual Addiction in Choke ............................. 31 VII. People as Products: The Relationships of Invisible Monsters ............................................................. 39 VIII. Conclusion........................................................................................................................................... 48 Gillespie 4 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 David Fincher’s film 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 conflict 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. Gillespie 5 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 Gillespie 6 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 ideologies, 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 Gillespie 7 have come to replace reality and authentic relationships, is necessary for love in postmodern society. Gillespie 8 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 Gillespie 9 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