Rant – Palahniuk’s future

Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey (2007) is another tour de force by Chuck Palahnuik. This is a distorted dystopian futuresque rambling tale of disjointed accounts centred around the character “Rant” Casey. Because it is an oral tale, and because characters and events are described through the eyes of others there is a lack of exposition, which I for one enjoy. I’ve never been a big fan of the endless descriptions of who, what and where when it comes to future-fic, and I have read quite a bit of that kind of stuff, since one of my major essays was about Dystopia. This novel dumps the reader squarely in medias res and takes off running.

First thing we find out is that Rant is presumed dead. So right off the bat the main character is dead already. The tale of his life gets slowly reconstructed in bits and pieces by the people who have run into him at one time or another. Rant comes from a small town and parts of his childhood are retold, both by friends and foes. The outlandish stories about how Rant has found gold coins in old paint cans all around town, the gory story of how he got his nickname “rant” and stories of his mother and father – all of this is woven into the descriptions of what is going on in the relative now.

The world of Rant is an obscure future deceptively close to our own with some big differences. For instance, there is a curfew separating those who are active during the day from those who live and work at night. It becomes ever more strict when there is an epidemic outbreak of rabies. Nighttimers and Daytimers go through that classic division where they categorise each other as Other and blame societies ills on each other. All the tragically familiar reasoning we have seen time and time again over race, class, gender etc. is suddenly focused on which time of day you are active in.

There is also a loving description of an ousider sub-culture which revolves around party crashing, a sort of deliberate demolition derby run amok in the streets. People dress up as wedding parties, soccer moms, Christmas tree buyers or high school fotball supporters and crash into each other in the streets. It seems the more expensive the cars and fancier the dress-up the better. Rubber necking is more than a past time, it’s an entire world unto itself.

Rant is at the centre of the action, not just because he is wealthy from all the “tooth fairy” money he has, but also because he is a carrier of a new strain of rabies which he infects friends and lovers with. The virus spreads in the Nighttimer community and further deepens the rift between Daytimers and Nighttimers. Rant himself is fine, and there are parallells drawn with Typhoid Mary and other super carriers. The reader will recognise some typically Palahniuk social commentary in the critique of how society handles contagious diseases – from the times of creating a smallpox pandemic amongst the Indians in the 1800s and to the AIDS epidemic in Africa in current times – saying that it’s odd how these things always seem to happen when the rich white west needs to find a cure and needs lots of test subjects.

Rant Casey is a man pieced together through the recollections of others. This is a pretty typically postmodernist attitude towards the truth and identity. He looms large in the text, never given a voice of his own, and the reader has no way of divining his intentions. Why is he so obsessed with sticking his hands and feet down wild burrows and waiting to get stung or bit by whatever lives there? That’s how he contracts rabies and learns of the priapism caused by the bites of certain spiders. What is he up to in general? Infecting people with rabies?

None of this, however, is the strange part of the story. The strange part (well stranger part then) is the theory that slowly comes to light over the pages that given the right set of circumstance and the right mind set you can place yourself outside time and in effect timetravel. No machines needed. This puts an interesting spin on the grandfather theory – one that has been recounted many times – where you travel back in time and accidentally kill your own ancestor. It seems that here the theory here is more about going back in time and siring yourself, creating a superior version of yourself. Palahniuk just sort of slips this in there. Just like he does with the rabies, the party crashing, the curfew and the “ports” some people have in the backs of their heads.

To my mind some of the best dystopian fiction does just that, describes a world alien to ours but without making that the whole point. And just like Fight Club you can easily imagine “Party Crashers” taking a step in from the fictional realm in the good old tradition of life imitating art.

I like the mix of ideas and Palahniuk’s take on the bleak future/now. I like the covert social criticism. I like the way he deals with his topics without becoming preachy and obvious. It is quite a trick to pull off all the differnt voices and still manage not to lose the main plot. This kind of eye witness account of events can become stale and too much like boring journalistic text, but not in this case. It is a good read, sedcutive as ever, funny, nauseating and frightening. The ending is sufficiently open that you can easily imgaine this tale continuing in some form or shape. A dark and disturbing brave new world with all the literary tricks of a really talented author.

MULE

Project Mayhem and other social clubs

Mule:

Me and Librarian are going to do a call-and-response thing about Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996). This is the first novel published by Palahniuk and it was turned into a very successful film directed by David Fincher (Fincher has also directed Aliens 3 and Seven). The movie starred Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter.

Mule:
If you just see the posters for the movie Fight Club you might think it’s just another of those testosterone-heavy boys-will-be-boys kind of things. But for those of us who actually read we know the story is a lot darker than that. And the book is definitely darker than the movie.
So, Librarian, what surprised you most about the book?

Librarian:
Well, I was dragged kicking and screaming to see the movie on DVD (already having fallen asleep on the couch during the first few scenes once, and still thinking precisely that it was some testosterone filled, street fighting glorifying crap) and then it completely blew me away once I realised it wasn’t at all what I’d expected. Anyway, having seen the movie before finally reading the book, the actual topic and story line obviously didn’t surprise me as much as it might have – but the style of writing certainly did! I was not in the least prepared for Palahniuk’s terse narrator’s voice. I’m not sure what I had expected, but those sparse, short, clipped sentences really bugged me for 10-20 pages. “Would it kill you to use an adjective once in a while? Sheeesh.” But it grew on me, it really did.

Mule:
I guess it’s only fitting that you can actually fall asleep while watching Fight Club since one of the basic premises for the existence of Tyler Durden is insomnia, but still…
Speaking of insomnia, let me just say that the description given of sleep deprivation is actually dead on. The state of mind that you get into after a couple of days – if you don’t turn into Tyler Durden, that is, is that everything seems like a copy of a copy of a copy. The colour drains out of reality. I know what I’m talking about here, I have had that. The main character also states that you’re not really awake, but you don’t really sleep either. And that is exactly what it’s like. It’s not that you don’t sleep. It’s more like you can’t really sense when you’re awake and when you’re sleeping. The style of writing is just like Librarian says, really terse. It’s also a textbook example of the “unreliable narrator” – you shouldn’t really trust the narrating voice too much. He even starts off by giving little hints like “I know this, because Tyler knows this”. The voice is also witty and sarcastic and dark. How did that work for you Librarian?

Librarian:
The witty and sarcastic narrator’s voice worked very well for me once I got used to the clipped writing style. That voice lingers. And it certainly matches my sense of humour. So many episodes and one-liners in this novel had me chuckling – at times a slightly uncomfortable chuckle, true, but still. As for the “unreliable narrator”, I agree that the clues are there – but I think I would have been deceived by that narrator, had I not seen the movie already. I am used to evaluating and scrutinizing bits and pieces of information, I do it every day at work – hell, I even teach others how to do it – but for some reason I often switch that process off when reading fiction. I guess I like being surprised by the twists and turns of the story as it unfolds.

Mule:

With fiction you do what Coleridge recommended – the wiling suspension of disbelief. It sort of goes with the territory.
Since I am one of the odd breed that has ten years of university and still works menial jobs through no fault of my own it’s easy for me to identify with lines like “they have us working jobs that we hate so we can buy stuff that we don’t need”. It is a comment on the inherent premise of modern western living that make us sit and try to figure out which coffee-table defines us as a person so we can buy that and fulfil our obligations as consumers. But being a consumer is not the same as being a member of society. Or even a human being for that matter. The basic message of Fight Club seems to be that we have become so far removed from the basic struggle of life that we now focus on stuff that doesn’t matter. And even though I agree with that it is a truth that only applies to the western life-style. And let’s face it – we are spoiled. And like spoiled children we easily forget that not everyone’s experience of life is like ours. Another aspect of the novel and the movie worth spending a few lines on is the role of women in this new society – what about Marla and her sister victims in this story?

Librarian:
In all honesty, I think the few women portrayed in this novel are so exceptionally weird and in such odd places in their lives that I hardly even think of them as women. They are just quirky additions to the story line. I remember thinking, as I read Fight Club, that the author didn’t really have to make Marla *that* much over the top, female or not. While on this topic – another thing that bugged me a bit was the absolute exclusion of women in Tyler’s troops. Why would a personality as clever as Tyler consciously omit half of all the “little people” he could have added to his ranks once the whole plot escalated to being something beyond just the Fight Club sessions per se? I don’t remember if the issue was even explicitly addressed in the novel.

Mule:
I suppose it is kind of difficult to see women getting the same kind of basic gratification from pure testosterone based violence. I do think the terrorist department of project Mayhem definitely could have used a few key women who were active. Marla is basically a damsel in distress. At one point she describes a bridesmaid’s dress as something somebody loved intensely for one day and then threw away. You get the feeling she is describing human interaction in general and her own relationships in particular.

I’d like to close with my favourite quote:

“We’re the people who do your laundry and cook your food and serve you dinner. We make your bed. We guard you while you’re asleep. We drive the ambulances. We direct your call. We are cooks and taxi drivers and we know everything about you. We process your insurance claims and credit card charges. We control every part of your life. We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we’ll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won’t – and we are just learning this fact, Tyler said. So don’t fuck with us.”

Librarian and Mule