Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Petra Mašínová The Element of Violence in Chuck Palahniuk’s Works Bachelor‟s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Mgr. Veronika Pituková 2012 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author‟s signature 2 Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor, Mgr. Veronika Pituková, for her advices and willingness. 3 Table of Contents INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................... 5 1. VIOLENCE IN POPULAR CULTURE AND LITERATURE .......................................... 7 1.1. DEFINITION OF VIOLENCE ......................................................................................... 7 1.2. VIOLENCE AND PLEASURE ......................................................................................... 9 2. CHUCK PALAHNIUK AND VIOLENCE .................................................................. 11 3. PALAHNIUK’S WRITING .................................................................................... 13 3.1. TRANSGRESSIVE FICTION ........................................................................................ 16 4. ANALYSES OF PALAHNIUK’S NOVELS WITH A FOCUS ON THE ELEMENTS OF VIOLENCE .................................................................................................................. 18 4.1. VIOLENCE AGAINST HUMANS AND SOCIETY................................................................... 22 4.1.1. Fight Club ..................................................................................................... 22 4.1.2. Choke ........................................................................................................... 25 4.1.3. Pygmy .......................................................................................................... 26 4.2. VIOLENCE AGAINST ONESELF ................................................................................... 28 4.2.1. Fight Club ..................................................................................................... 28 4.2.2. Choke ........................................................................................................... 30 4.2.3. Pygmy .......................................................................................................... 31 4.3. SEXUAL VIOLENCE ................................................................................................ 32 4.3.1. Fight Club ..................................................................................................... 32 4.3.2. Choke ........................................................................................................... 35 4.3.3. Pygmy .......................................................................................................... 37 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................. 40 WORKS CITED ........................................................................................................... 41 4 Introduction Chuck Palahniuk is becoming increasingly popular every day. This is mainly due to his debut Fight Club and especially due to David Fincher who transformed the novel into a successful film. There are still people who have never heard of Chuck Palahniuk, but it is not easy, especially between young generations, to find those who do not know Fight Club. There is a whole cult around Palahniuk and his work. People quote passages from his novels and establish organizations similar to Project Mayhem or just get inspired by his characters. In the documentary Postcards from the Future Palahniuk tells a story about some man in Florida who walks around and pretends he‟s choking around beautiful women and forces them to Heimlich him and then weeps and says he wants to stay in touch with them and shows them pictures of his family and such. One of the reasons why Palahniuk‟s novels are so popular is the topics of his novels. There is sex, violence and also underdogs with who people can identify and there are also all sorts of happy endings for these underdogs. In my thesis I will focus on the element of violence in Palahniuk‟s novels. I will outline the issues of violence in current culture and literature and try to find out, why is a topic of violence so popular among people. Then through the analysis of three Palahniuk‟s novels, I will find and compare different types of violence that can be found there. The thesis consists of two parts. First is theoretical and the other consists of an analysis. In the first chapter I will provide a definition of violence, take a 5 look at it from the psychological point of view and try to give some reasons why violence is currently so popular. In the second chapter some events from Palahniuk‟s life will be presented. Mostly these will be violent events that have an influence on his writing. In the third chapter I will take a look at Palahniuk‟s style of writing, his inspirations and research methods and provide a characteristic of a genre called Transgressive fiction. In the second part of the thesis, there will be analyses of Palahniuk‟s novels, especially Fight Club, Choke and Pygmy. This part will be divided into three parts according to types of violence in the novels. Those will be Violence against society, Violence against oneself and Sexual violence. In the analytical parts examples will be given from each of the three novels. 6 1. Violence in popular culture and literature 1.1. Definition of violence Patrick W. Shaw, in his work The Modern American Novel of Violence, writes about violence as “an act by one human being that causes pain and injury to another human being. While this is a reliable core definition, the word 'injury' itself needs to be further explained. 'Injury' is a wound that shows up as physical, pragmatic evidence: bruises, blood, cuts, abrasions, contusions. 'Injury' is the kind of hurt a medical doctor can treat or that a qualified pathologist can point to and say 'that's what killed this person.' Assuming the validity of this modified and specific meaning of 'injury', therefore, I define violence as any action, premeditated or not, that is performed with the purpose of injuring or killing another living creature, especially another human” (2). In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness Erich Fromm distinguishes two kinds of violence. The first is “a phylogenetically programmed impulse to attack (or to flee) when vital interests are threatened” (The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness 24). This aggression is common for all animals. “The other type, 'malignant' aggression, i.e., cruelty and destructiveness, is specific to the human species and virtually absent in most mammals; it is not phylogenetically programmed and not biologically adaptive; it has no purpose, and its satisfaction is lustful” (24). Humans rarely have the need to use violence in a defensive way and if so, it is mostly because of other human behave in an aggressive and destructive way. “Man differs from the animal by the fact that 7 he is a killer; he is the only primate that kills and tortures members of his own species without any reason, either biological or economics, and who feels satisfaction of doing so” (25). Even though most humans do not have the need to practice violence directly, there is still lot of people who enjoy at least watching violence or reading about it in newspapers or literature. In the course of history “The problem of violence has occupied a key position in modern Western thought. It has now, however, acquired unprecedented centrality, as America‟s arrival to self-awareness as a potential victim of public, visible, televised violence has imposed renewed scrutiny upon the paradigms under which the topic had been examined. Debates about legal or illegal, legitimate or illegitimate, just or unjust, 'real' or 'symbolic' forms of violence have been revived, with positions, as rule, being now more entrenched than ever” (The Letter of Violence 1). There is no doubt that today‟s popular culture is violent. There is violence in the movies, literature and video games. Not all of them are accepted positively and by everyone, but some people just never seem to have enough. The explanation for that, according to John Fiske is: “Represented violence is popular because it offers points of relevance to people living in societies where the power and resources are inequitably distributed and structured around lines of conflicting interests. Violence on television is a concrete representation of class (or other) conflict in society. The heroes and heroines that a society chooses to make popular at any one point in its history are those figures that best embody its dominant values. Conversely, its popular villains and victims are those who embody values that deviate from this norm” (Understanding 8 Popular Culture 134 – 135). This practically means that the more attractive, young and average the character of the novel or the film is, the better the chances are that he is going to survive to the end of the story. Villains on the other hand are often physically and almost always mentally disadvantaged in some way. Films and literature are the mirror of people and the society in general. People tend to look for their own stories in the viewed or read narratives and their reflection is based on their own experiences. “Violence