ABSTRACT
One of the persistent targets for satire in Chuck Palahniuk’s writing is the increasingly commercial nature of contemporary American society. His novels frequently examine the materialist and dehumanizing conditions engendered by late-stage capitalism and the continuing effects this has upon the individual. Palahniuk’s debut Fight Club (1996) was met with a wave of critical acclaim for what many saw as its anti-capitalist message, being variously deemed “the fi rst stage of his plan to wage war on capitalist America” (O’Hagan 1), a novel that “rails against consumerist conformity” (Kavadlo 11) and a “Swiftian attack on our consumerist, designer-labelworshipping society” (Taubin 16). Among these more general plaudits, several critics suggested that Fight Club could be seen not only as an anticapitalist tirade but a more complex analysis of the logical eventualities of a system predicated on a fascist desire to move towards the complete homogenization of the individual, reducing “workers to drones and all personal identifi cation to brand names and commercial transactions” (Kavadlo 13). In this chapter, we extend this neo-Marxist reading of Fight Club to the novels Survivor (2000) and Haunted (2005), by exploring their correspondence with Adorno and Horkheimer’s notion of “The Culture Industry” and demonstrating how these are related to his larger anti-capitalist critique. Though it is important to recognize Palahniuk’s dual status as a writer who operates within a mass, popular market as well as one who comments upon that industry, we suggest that these texts explore what it means to be an authentic individual or true to oneself in a contemporary American landscape dominated by the distorting artifi ciality of pervasive cultural forces such as the mass media and advertising.
