ABSTRACT
Eduardo Mendieta argues that “Palahniuk’s novels are attempts at surviving American culture” (395). In his interpretation of Palahniuk’s work, American culture must be overcome precisely because of its oppressive tendencies. American culture is sick and Palahniuk offers a diagnosis and prognosis of that sickness and of how we might reclaim the health of the individual (Mendieta 408). Mendieta’s interpretation lets us inquire into the aesthetic mode in which survival appears in the novels. The representation of survival is itself sublime, though the events themselves that press pain, terror, or death upon us are not. But, still, the fact of survival emerges belatedly. The practice of mutilation becomes sublime by being cultivated as a practice of redemption and survival. Monstrous behavior extends outward to monstrous acts and mutilated bodies. Chuck Palahniuk’s mutilation of bodies addresses this question through an ironic, if classical, deployment of a sublime aesthetic, one in which pleasure comes only with pain and terror. A monstrous sublime, then, that pursues the
representation of pain as a source of redemption and solace subtends his writing. This chapter describes the way in which Palahniuk translates the attraction and revulsion associated with mutilated bodies into a fi guration of the sublime that belongs to the postmodern Pacifi c Northwest of the United States as a strategy for surviving the onslaughts of a culture that, ironically, also aims at destruction. Finding the sublime in and through the practices of mutilation, Palahniuk’s writing fi nds a moment of redemption and recuperation of authentic existence.
