ABSTRACT
Read as the components of such a system, Palahniuk’s novels published since Fight Club (1996) collectively constitute a semiotics of escalating anxiety2 that addresses the burdens of artistic reputation, acclaim, and expectations, unifi ed by the author’s apprehension that the “worst part of
writing fi ction is the fear of wasting your life behind a keyboard. The idea that, dying, you’ll realize you only ever lived on paper” (SF 56; cf. D 168). He goes so far as to develop the metaphor of artist-as-whore into a central plot: whether the ultimate motive of aging porn star Cassie Wright is to provide a fi nancial legacy for her illegitimate daughter or to secure a place of notoriety in fi lm history, she makes herself the object of a marathon gang-bang that is calculated to kill her. And when that doesn’t happen, she proves so determined to die for her art that she mounts her former leading man while paramedics pump 450 joules’ worth of cardiac defi brillation into him (SN 194-5). Thus, to signify these and related professional anxieties, refracted through the manifold suffering and failures of his characters (many of whom are themselves writers and artists), the novelist balances his characters’ perceptions of impending personal doom with the illusion of control they entertain as narrators of their own stories. While Palahniuk’s narratives contain undeniably apocalyptic elements, they are ultimately their narrators’ personal accounts of suffering, all encoded with the same catalyst for individual self-destruction: when writers and readers “fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind,” the result is that “[w]e trap ourselves” (H 380).
