Chuck Palahnuik talks about Snuff
Chuck Palahniuk tells Adam Lee Davies why we love the idea of apocalypse.
It hardly seems like nine years since David Fincher's divisive film version of Chuck Palahniuk's first novel, Fight Club,
smeared the author's unchecked worldview across the collective
consciousness. A breathless tale of anarchist soap salesmen,
underground boxing clubs and Nietzschean imaginary pals, it served as
the jumping-off point for a remarkable run of novels in which the
Washington-born writer picked at the seams of modern life and
illuminated the world in strange new ways.
Palahniuk's latest novel, Snuff, recounts an aging porn
queen's filmed attempt to set the world gang-bang record. It is told
from the perspective of three of the 600 men mooching around backstage
waiting for their money-shot at glory. I ask gingerly if Palahniuk did
any special research for his new book. "Not pornography per se. I
talked to a lot of people who... have been performers in adult movies.
There is the sort of sameness about pornography that I think is in a
way a kind of adult bedtime story. You know how it's going to end and
it always ends the same. It's kind of a comfort thing."
Snuff immerses Palahniuk's damaged, spent protagonists back
into some form of community, where they rub fake-tanned shoulders and
double-dip tortilla chips with like-minded others. Community is a
common theme in his fiction. These communities don't always serve his
characters well, however. The retreat in Haunted goes spectacularly wrong and those fight clubs were soon revealed to be a means to a far darker end.
"It depends on how you see the point of community," says Palahniuk. "In the case of Fight Club, the point was to empower and somehow strengthen the individual as the community itself decays and falls apart."
Given the book's title, it's no surprise that mortality looms large in Snuff. In several of his previous novels a fomenting plague is unleashed upon society. For long stretches of Snuff,
one suspects that this book might be going the same way. Why does the
theme keep occurring? "Oh, I think we are very much in love with the
idea. It is a very romantic idea that there will be this apocalypse.
And every year we are sold a different apocalypse. When I was growing
up it was always swine flu... And then it was Sars and then it was Y2K
and now bird flu. And so every fall we're presented with an almost
arbitrary plague or a huge disaster. And then every spring we feel the
joy and relief of having survived. So it's this artificial cycle of
having survived this giant thing which makes us less concerned with the
smaller, circumstantial disasters in our lives."
Snuff is written in Palahniuk's minimal, almost staccato, style.
What is it that attracts him to this way of writing? "Minimalism seems
closest to the sophisticated storytelling of movies... We don't any
longer need to have the relationship between one scene and the next
explained. We will figure it out ourselves."
Then why not just write for the movies? "Well, on one level I really
want to be playing to what is maybe the only strength that books have
compared to other mass media at this point: that they have this really
private nature of consumption and so can depict really extreme things
that movies, and television and music cannot... And second, I want to
explore what Tom Spanbauer [Palahniuk's minimalist workshop leader and
author] calls ‘dangerous writing', which emphasises that the only type
of writing worth doing is the kind of writing that is confrontational
and that is edgy. Anything else is a waste of time."
Snuff (Random House, $34.95) is out now.