“WHERE WOULD JESUS BE IF NO ONE HAD WRITTEN THE GOSPELS?”

Chuck Palahniuk & ‘autobiographical writing’

Beginning a somewhat theoretical essay on the craft of writing with a cliché is
probably highly inappropriate, and yet when I try and think of what to say
about the writing of Chuck Palahniuk all I can think of is that it ‘speaks to
me’ so I guess it will have to do.

When considering famous diarists, or autobiographers, to discuss, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Anais Nin and Frida Kahlo come to mind of course, but to be perfectly honest their work means very little to me. While Chuck Palahniuk is known as a novelist rather than an autobiographer his non-fictional work, published in a collection entitled Stranger Than Fiction, informs the reader of his personal life, his attitudes towards writing, and indeed the ‘real-life’ inspirations behind his characters.

What interests me about Palahniuk’s work, as I shall further discuss in this essay, is his attitude toward the notion of memory and our incessant need to record it discussed in ‘Now I Remember…’, and the blurring which occurs between fact and fiction. Upon reading ‘Consolation Prizes’ I began to think of fact and fiction as parallels to the old ‘chicken or the egg’ problem.

Palahniuk thinks “it’s hard to call any of my novels fiction,” [2004,xvii] and says of his most renowned novel Fight Club that “parts of [it] have always been true. It’s less novel than an anthology of my friend’s lives” [2004:228]. Not quite novel, not quite autobiography, not quite biography but rather an amalgamation of all three, it’s what I would refer to as autobiographical writing. It is not exclusively about the life of the author, or one specific person he knows, rather it is the sum of stories he has experienced in his life, both directly and through the retelling and collection stories from others. Ironically Palahniuk adamantly insists the actual institution of “fight clubs are make-believe. You can’t go there. I made them up” [2004:228]. Although, since the novel became a major motion picture starring Brad Pitt in 1999, ‘fight clubs’ have allegedly sprouted up all over the world. An interesting case of what was once fiction becoming fact. Palahniuk claims “what’s left is proof we can create reality” [2004:231]. Although this raises an interesting question; does fiction stop being fiction when it is how people begin to live their lives or do people simply live in a fictionalised reality?

Palahniuk acknowledges this bizarre blurred boundary between fact and fiction in ‘real’ life in ‘Consolation Prizes’ where he accounts the surreal experience of how “friends who’d been anarchist waiters with shaved heads were now being served eggs by a real waiter who was an actor who was playing a fake anarchist waiter with a shaved head” [2004:229]. This is the fact becoming overtaken by the fiction; the simulacrum now more real than the real.

Palahniuk’s ‘novels’, which do not focus on the life of the author and are not wholly factual, function as a journal of sorts for him. He explains that “the world is made of people telling stories...and any long story, any novel, is just a combination of short stories” [2004,xix]. He does not specify who it is the stories ‘belong’ to, and it does not seem to matter, as long as they are not forgotten. Palahniuk says “the books I write are my overflow retention system for stories I can no longer keep in my recent memory” [2004:223]. If a journal is nothing more than a way for us to record that which we do not want to forget, I believe this validates Palahniuk’s work as autobiographical writing.

The works specifically denoted as non-fictional featured in Stranger Than Fiction read more like a series of short memoirs of Palahniuk’s life, they don’t seek to tell a whole story but rather the small important sections he doesn’t want to forget. Although the book is broken into three sections; ‘People Together’, ‘Portraits’ and ‘Personal’ even the stories not featured in the ‘Personal’ section essentially can be considered personal because they are about people he has been in contact with, making their lives now part of his life.

‘Now I Remember…’ focuses on what Palahniuk refers to as the “predominant art form of our time” [2004:222], note-taking, and our incessant need to record and document every moment of our existence. “We record and archive” [2004:222]. I am guilty of this somewhat pointless crime, post it notes border my beside table, my desk, and my computer, I write lists, my digital camera and phone memory cards are always full with photographs and messages I can’t bear to delete, my email inbox is always at capacity, and I can’t throw out any piece of paper because its bound to have some deathly important fact written on it, but honestly what is it all for? It seems unnecessary and yet it’s a habit I just can’t quit. Palahniuk discusses Thamus and ‘pharmakon’ and how “writing would allow humans to rely too much on…external means of recording. Our own memories would wither and fail. Our notes and records would replace our minds” [2004:224]. We take written, photographed, and recorded accounts of our lives as undeniable facts and no longer trust in memory, yet these ‘external means of recording’ lack the ability to recreate how we felt, at least for now. Palahniuk doesn’t fully understand what compels him to keep filing cabinets full of receipts but knows that without them wouldn’t remember anything. I see memory and our documentation as not enemies but allies, both working to help us maintain a sense of history and a future. Palahniuk closes ‘Now I Remember…’ with “don’t bother to write this down,” [2004:226] and yet, he wrote it down, and here I am three years later strangely compelled to write it down again. But why? I say because I don’t want to forget it but that in itself is a rather flimsy argument but once more it’s all I’ve got.

I don’t think in the greater scheme of things it matters which came first the chicken or the egg, just as I don’t believe it really matters who they belonged to, I think all that is important is that they are recorded as having existed at all. Palahniuk writes in his introduction to Stranger Than Fiction; “we spend our lives looking for evidence – facts and proof – that support our story” [2004:xxi]. For me autobiographical writing is about not wanting to forget, my stories, the stories of those I care about, and the stories of those I’ve simply overheard. All these tiny pieces of information probably aren’t all that important to the future or history of the world, but they could be, as our unnamed narrator in Fight Club asks: “Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?” [Palahniuk,1999:15]
REFERENCES

• Palahniuk C, 1996, Fight Club, W.W. Norton & Company, New York.
• Palahniuk C, 2004, Stranger Than Fiction, Anchor Books, New York.