Domestic Exchange

Chuck Palahniuk finds his voice in Germany.

by Molly Eichel

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Published: May 5, 2009

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In his latest novel, Pygmy (Doubleday, $24.95), prolific, perplexing Chuck Palahniuk looks at American culture through the eyes of the titular foreign exchange student — who happens to double as a terrorist mole for an unnamed country. In broken English, Pygmy writes in dispatches, describing his fat cat, adopted family and an anal rape scene in the bathroom of a Wal-Mart. City Paper caught up with Palahniuk from his home in the Pacific Northwest.

City Paper: I read that you were keeping the Pygmy promotional tour small because you were burnt out from your last novel.

Chuck Palahniuk: Yes, and my mother died in February.

CP: I’m sorry to hear that.

Palahniuk: I spent most of last year taking care of her. So this is kind of a laid-back year.
 
CP: Do you think that experience of taking care of her has influenced what you’re working on now?

Palahniuk: It will influence the one that's two years out.

CP: What's it about?

Palahniuk: It'll be the novel for 2011. It’s kind of a parody of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. It's about an 11-year-old girl who finds herself dead — she has to come to terms with being in hell and being 11 and also kind of recalling how she came to die. I can't write from the perspective of someone who has lost both parents, so it's written from the perspective of a dead child who has basically lost both of her parents. It's funny. 

CP: This theme keeps popping up. Is there a reason you've been attracted to a child narrator recently?

Palahniuk: I like a character who has a lot information but doesn't have the wisdom that would go with that information, kind of a hyper-educated character who doesn't have the maturity to do anything but hide behind their huge education.

CP: Were you like that as a kid?

Palahniuk: Oh yeah.

CP: I was like that, too. All about the facts and a little too smart for my age.

Palahniuk: And that's why you're now a writer.

CP: It's a shared experience, being pain-in-the-ass children.

Palahniuk: [laughs] Did you used to correct your teachers?

CP: I used to, and then I stopped because I saw other kids do it and I thought they were annoying. Were you a corrector?

Palahniuk: I was, and boy, I really feel for my teachers now. What a pain in the butt I must've been.

CP: Let's talk about Pygmy. How did you come up with the idea?

Palahniuk: The ideas always come from different directions. I would say first, the idea of the voice came a couple years ago. I was supposed to go on a tour of Germany, and I really wanted to speak German because I had two years of German in college. So I took private lessons from a friend and I studied for months and months, and I still went to Germany and said the most appalling, atrocious things in public and on the radio. Eventually, I found myself having to make an entire language out of the three dozen words that I understood. I thought it would be kind of fun to write in the voice of Pygmy in the same sort of grasping way, trying to make an entire fluency out of a very small vocabulary of totally inappropriate words. Pygmy's voice came from trying to speak German for three weeks on tour.

CP: The language in Pygmy is so striking. I read the first chapter and thought to myself, "He can't keep this up the entire time." Did you have a rule book when it came to writing in Pygmy's voice?

Palahniuk: Yeah, there were certain deliberate, intentional things that I did consistently. I had to make a long list of them for the copy editor, because there's nothing harder than convincing the copy editor that you have intentionally made the same mistake over and over. Their job is to make everything perfect. So, for example, Pygmy doesn’t know the construction "and," so everything is "with": "pepper with salt," "hot with cold." Pygmy also uses a lot of redundancy: "arm limb," "leg limb," "baby chick," "yellow color." He also doesn't know "always," so he uses "forever": "forever seeking." There were dozens of Pygmy rules I had to follow.

CP: Did you find yourself struggling to describe something because of these rigid rules?

Palahniuk: Maybe in the first draft. But I would reread, because Pygmy couldn't say something like "gingerbread." He would have to say "bread of ginger." He would have to say "street of Sesame." He couldn't use a modifier next to a noun. He'd have to use some sort of — I'm not even sure of the word. It had to have something between it. … By the second draft, everything was pretty much Pygmy-ized.

CP: I understand that the plot came from being a stranger in a strange land and not comprehending the colloquialisms. But why make the characters foreign exchange students? Why give them this nefarious purpose?

Palahniuk: I always like a character who's kind of a cypher, who doesn't present themselves readily at the very moment they're introduced. "Hi, my name is John and I'’m an alcoholic." I much prefer a character who just steps into a scene and allows everyone around them to [unload] their worst selves, their bigotry, their prejudice onto this person who is not immediately explained. In a way, Pygmy is that foil. That allows all the people around him to present their worst American selves or their bourgeois selves or their worst cultural selves on this sort of thing that is not explaining everything about itself. Really, that's just so appealing.

CP: How'd you get inside the head of a non-American who hates America? The satire comes out right away as soon as you meet the Cedar family.

Palahniuk: A lot of what I did was reading 20th-century history of all of the failed experiments of fascism and totalitarianism — whether you want to call it communism or socialism — the language that was used, the propaganda they used in those different experiments. For example, they seemed to use animals a lot — this story of strange attachment to the previous natural world. And so people had to be presented as, kind of, with an animal counterpart. The mother is a chicken, the father is a cow, the sister is a cat, the brother is a dog. Sort of falling into this former propaganda language of Communist China or the Soviet Union was a big, big part of that. I love that language.

CP: It would have been easy for you to use current crises. You think of communism, you think of the Cold War, and it’s not the threat that it was once. Why did you decide to use communism instead of contemporizing it?

Palahniuk: Because in order to present it as a comedy, you have to present a vehicle that has lost a certain amount of its power and immediacy. In a way, George Orwell's 1984 is so out of date and so far back, it's safe enough to use that language that I have. A lot of the language that I used was based on Orwell's language from 1984 and also the Cold War has cooled off so much, it's safe to refer to that in a comedy in such a way that people could find a way to laugh. It'd be pretty much impossible to make a comedy out of anything that's going on right now. You just couldn't. You'd be like that comedian who started to make a joke about 9/11. It was in that documentary The Aristocrats.

CP: Gilbert Gottfried?

Palahniuk: Right, and he said, "I'm sorry I'm late, I missed my connection at the Empire State Building." And the whole crowd starting booing him and saying, "It's too soon! It's too soon!" So really you can’t make a comedy out of things that are still on the news because they are weighted with the immediacy and the drama of right now. That’s why it only works if you go back a generation or two.

CP: Your books always have comedic elements. Why do you pair them with these decidedly uncomic images?

Palahniuk: On one level, I think it's because they define each other. You can't have something that's entirely comic or it quits being comic; you can't have something that’s entirely dramatic or people shut down. In this weird tantric way, you need to play with creating tension and then relieving tension by having comedy. Then you create even more tension so that people don’t take something too lightly or they're not overwhelmed by the drama of it. I think I can get people to a much more extreme place by periodically wrestling the tension with comedy.

CP: There’s definitely a symbiotic relationship there. When I read the book jacket, I immediately thought of the Simpsons episode where Bart goes to France and the Simpsons get an Albanian student who turns out to be a mole. Have you seen that episode?

Palahniuk: I’ve seen it now but I hadn’t seen it at the time I was writing. But yeah, I know the one you’re talking about.

CP: You can definitely see the satire of American culture in both. Are there other pop cultural reference points that you looked at?

Palahniuk: Not really, I haven’t seen anything that has a dark, comic school shooting in it. I haven’t seen anything with the Wal-Mart anal rape scene in it that’s a comedy [laughs]. The only kind of attachment might be the real extreme comedy of South Park. There’s really nothing from South Park that’s a direct correlation, either.

CP: You have this rabid, cult-like fan base. What is it about your writing that draws people in so intensely?

Palahniuk: Boy, I'm not sure. I'll just speculate, that's all I can do. … I tend to write stories in a way such that people might be overwhelmed by the extreme nature of the story. The only way we have of assimilating extreme events in our lives is to discuss them with other people. We talk about either the very good things or the very bad things have happened to us. In a way, that's how we break down and digest those events. And accepting this part of our identity, we have some sort of control over those extreme events. Again, things that have really brought us joy or really brought us despair. And I think maybe people feel a need for kind of a debriefing after my books. And maybe that drives them with connection with other people — so at least they have this way of discussing and coming to terms with something they’ve experienced.

(molly.eichel@citypaper.net)

Chuck Palahniuk reads from Pygmy, Fri., May 8, 7:30 p.m., free, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, freelibrary.org.

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