Aesthetic and Ethical Distortion in the Novels “Snuff”, “Tell-All”, “Beautiful You”, “The Invention of Sound”.

Abstract

The writer's fate of Chuck Palahniuk, a bright representative of the modern counterculture, is closely connected with the world of journalism, advertising and cinema. It was the film adaptation of his novel “Fight Club” that brought him worldwide fame and secured for him once and for all the fame of a cult writer among readers-admirers of transgressive prose. In his revealing and ironic novels “Snuff”, “Tell-All”, “Beautiful You”, “The Invention of Sound”, Palahniuk travests the notorious myths conceptualized in the idea of the “American Dream”, shows the processes of total standardization and depersonalization of consumer society through advertising preferences imposed by corporations, opens the veil to the repulsive backstage of Hollywood, each time the detective narrative twists into a fascinating plot. The purpose of the article is to convey the author's discourse, focused on exposing the modern secularized society with its commodity fetishism and deconstruction of ethical norms and categories, by using comparative and analytical methods. The social issues relevant to the writer's work as a whole and determining the plot collisions in the four novels discussed below determine the subject of the article. The novels presented in the article have so far been out of the focus of serious criticism, and thus the attempt to complement the overall picture of scientific research appeals to Palahniuk's texts determines the novelty of this study, revealing unknown aspects in the writer's work. The article contains quotes from modern criticism’s appeal to transgressive prose, but the main supporting texts of the article are the novels of Palahniuk himself and his non-fiction book-guide on writing “Consider This”, in which the popular author shares the secrets of writing mastery which are the keys to the artistic value of a book and its reader success as well. Correlating Palahniuk’s fiction with the theoretical principles he outlined in the manual helps to better understanding and diversify the writer’s texts.