There are two new novels—one by an author of some fame, and one by a first-time novelist—that are difficult to write about because they are expressions of an undercurrent that is moving so swiftly that it just might escape the forces of commodification and arrive at the place of Rebellion before there is an antidote. If that sentence sounds absurd or incoherent, it is because it describes an incoherent time. That is to say, it describes the present.
Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey (by Chuck Palahniuk) and The Raw Shark Texts (by Steven Hall) are two sides of the same coin. One side has a smiling face, and one side has a monster face. But they are both the same coin, and that coin is being passed around and touched and right under our noses there is perhaps something happening that we are not seeing, or refusing to see. But what is it? In the Shark Texts, one way to evade the conceptual shark is to confuse it with information: the protagonist does this by surrounding himself with books, or letters, or in one case by throwing a “letter bomb” made up of “anything solid with printed language” such as “old typewriter key arms and printing block letters.” In Rant—a novel about the deliberate spreading of rabies among other things—one of the characters says that in “my classroom, I tried to impress on the students that reality is a consensus.”
Now, the chickens have come home to roost, but just what this means is unclear. There are always proper critics who will—in the pages of places like The New York Times or The New Yorker, etc.—continue to dismiss books like Rant, and this is, really, a form of perilous ignorance. It is ignorant because it cannot see what is in front of it. It is perilous because what is in front of it might very well be dangerous. The dangerous thing that both of these novels are about is distance, is the collapsing of distance and space among human beings, and the feeling of catastrophic claustrophobia that that breeds. We are not all of the myspace / facebook / social networking generation, but we are close enough to see something and wonder. What does it mean, we wonder, to be connected all the time, to grow up connected all the time, across so many mediums? It could be said that irony was a first response to the post-McCluhan global electronic village. And that was an answer, yes. And it was an answer that had some identifiable shape to it, because it made sense. Once it became clear that the sixties were over and very little had changed (as punk would say, the “revolution” was a sick joke!) the proper response was irony.
But irony is really a highly formalist stance: it recognizes patterns (the movie Scream remains a fine example) and then transforms that pattern recognition into narrative. Palahniuk’s novels are saying something not because they are ironic, but because they are responding to irony with something darker and faster. “It was Thomas Jefferson who warned us that any nation would always need a frontier as an escape valve or a place to store the perennial tide of lunatics and idiots,” one of the characters in Rant says. It is not that technology has made us less human, but rather that is has made us too human. The perpetual connection between people will be corrected, and visions of that correction are imagined in books like Rant, Raw Shark Texts, Notable American Women, and Remainder.
“I tried to impress on my students that reality is a consensus.” The words of the Theorists have, like a virus, spread. As yet, there are no social movements akin to the ones described in Palahniuk’s novels. Why not? Because they are novels, and social life is not a novel. Fair enough. In 1968 John Sinclair, founder of the White Panther Party and manager of the MC5, announced that 'rock and roll music is the spearhead of our [White Panther Party] attack because it is so effective and so much fun. We have developed organic high-energy guerrilla bands who are infiltrating the popular culture and destroying millions of minds in the process. With our music and our economic genius we plunder the unsuspecting straight world for money and the means to carry out our program, and revolutionize its children at the same time."
Whether these are the ravings of a lunatic, or a Very Sophisticated Theorist, they were Real statements that likely had Real effect on some people. Novels like Rant are not recognized as manifestos because they are called "novels," but that name does not lessen their social meanings. These are books of social disaster, far darker than we would like to acknowledge. Perhaps a book like Rant is the frontier that acts “as an escape valve” and if there is one thing that social networking tells us it is that everything is "okay." No need to worry. You have scores of “friends” who have written on your facebook wall. Perhaps hundreds. They are all over this country; they are all over the world. Your computer has remembered your password for you; all you need do is click to see all your friends, and read their comments. No one has to guess how you feel anymore. You even feel the need to apologize or, at least, offer explanation for why you might be “offline” for a few days. As long as the darkness in novels like Rant remains in novels there is no need for your inquiry. You can, as Janet Maslin did in her New York Times review in May 2007, dismiss a novel like Rant as suffering from “a whiff of desperation.”
Precisely.
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