Until Our Faces Have Been Blown Away

« 1 2 3 View All»

True fact: you will not find two writers as dissimilar as C.S. Lewis and Chuck Palahniuk so proximal as in this essay. You might be surprised at authors I list among my favorites. Yes, I appreciate the father of modern Christian apologetics, the genius behind Narnia, right alongside the man who gave us Fight Club and a short story about an adolescent who lost the better part of his lower intestine to an autoerotic pool vent incident. (Sorry, mom. Sorry, God.) I’m usually pretty bashful about it, though. The Palahniuk side, that is, because even if I’m not talking to good-loving Christians who (bless their souls) prefer not to read about a plane hijacked by a quasi-Anabapist terrorist, most everyone else has written him off for his gratuitous violence and generally unsavory characters anyway. But it’s his characters that keep me coming back, novel after novel. What I found when I read Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters is surprisingly the same thing I was so floored by in the C.S. Lewis novel Till We Have Faces: the imperfection of human love. Simply put, pare them down to their souls and you’ll find Lewis and Palahniuk both see humanity’s profound potential for love and hate as precarious sides to the same coin.

Most people who know C.S. Lewis know The Chronicles of Narnia, or sometimes The Screwtape Letters, but rarely Till We Have Faces, his final novel and the retelling of the classic Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, published in 1953. Moreover, these people will certainly not be likely to read a book by Chuck Palahniuk. In fact, your average population doesn’t recognize Chuck Palahniuk’s name, and much fewer know how to pronounce it. You’ve usually got to follow up with the guy who wrote Fight Club—and a brief lesson in phonetics—before people nod with a goofy sort of smile: I saw that movie. Brad Pitt was hot in it. ¹ As a bookseller, I’ve seen that look a lot, but I persist.

In 1999, somewhere between his novel about men who get their jollies from breaking bones and the one about the porn queen looking to break the record for serial fornications (and perhaps herself) in a single day, in a single film, Palahniuk published his only straight-to-paperback novel, Invisible Monsters. True to form, on this ride in the transgressive theme park that is Palahniuk’s mind, the narrative features an ex-supermodel with half a face (Shannon McFarland); the man she desperately loves and whom she is secretly feeding hormone supplements (Manus Kelley); and Shannon’s estranged, transsexual brother (Shane McFarland, a.k.a Princess Brandy Alexander); all together on a road trip to pump full of lead the rival supermodel, Evie Cottrell—who allegedly disfigured Shannon—at her own wedding.

I encountered Palahniuk’s work late into my junior year of high school. At the time, I was working at my hometown’s public library, stocking the books returned throughout the day. When new books came in, I was to place them on special displays near the entrance. This was a little while after the publication of Palahniuk’s sixth novel, Diary, and the stark book jacket caught my eye. For reasons I can only explain as my then-affinity for minimalist literature and a fascination with the man behind the motion picture Fight Club, I tossed the book back like my first—much later—drink of brandy, in a nervous hurry of morbid fascination. Next I read Lullaby, Diary‘s predecessor. From there, I was hooked. By my senior year of high school, I had nearly read everything Palahniuk had published up to that point, getting to Invisible Monsters sometime in the middle of February.

What fascinated me most, I think, was how bizarrely opposite all the characters seemed to me and my own experiences, and yet they remained so readily accessible. I grew up in rural quietude; Palahniuk’s people vibrated with aggression and angst I always associated with the urban underground I imagined existing in places like Seattle and Los Angeles, hipsters and rockers and entities of varying degrees of celebrity careening toward self-destruction. Even the placid island community of Waytansea in Diary reminded me of the incommunicable violence inherent to the expressionistic art movement its main character seemed to be evoking in her paintings. I remember lying on my bed one night, nearly catatonic but for my eyes racing along the pages of Invisible Monsters, and getting a phone call from my brother at college. When asked what I was doing, I tried to give him the rundown of exactly what it is I’d found myself inexplicably addicted to.

You see, there’s this supermodel who gets her face blown off by this other supermodel, and now she’s on a revenge road-trip across the country with a sort of transsexual Jiminy Cricket and this guy she keeps feeding hormones to make him fat and effeminate so he’ll love her again, stopping at estate sales along the way to dope up on whatever they find in the medicine cabinet.

All my brother said was, Oh. Uh, are mom and dad home?

I’ve never had an easy time explaining just why Palahniuk works as an author for me, when, on the surface, there is nothing particularly exceptional about his prose. He’s a postmodern novelist whose narrative voice hardly changes; every story is first-person, has refrain lines that tie the plot together, and relies on a knack for pushing the envelope. Every book seems to have a plot twist roughly two-thirds through, and every character seems to embody one dysfunction or another. While formulaic seems harsh, it’s the first word that comes to mind. While the circumstances vary, the story remains the same, requiring protagonist after protagonist to spiral in self-destruction until, at whatever last possible moment, they are saved from themselves–something readers sometimes miss.

In Fight Club, community (while eventually dissolving into its own destructive tendencies as a collective) serves the purpose of saving the narrator from his own depression and insomnia. Our narrator-protagonist in Invisible Monsters finally understands herself through the love and acceptance she’s found in the queen supreme Brandy Alexander.

To contrast Palahniuk’s arguably static—though deservedly successful—body of work, consider C.S. Lewis, whose catalog includes over 30 volumes ranging from children’s fantasy to theological exposition. He wrote allegory, essays, memoir, science fiction, letters, devotions, and on and on. There doesn’t seem to be enough variety in form for everything Lewis had to say. What he was saying, though, were variations on a theme: love. Obviously books like The Four Loves and A Grief Observed have their foundations in love. But even when he narrates the phantasmagoric events of Dr. Elwin Ransom’s travels to Mars and Venus in the Space Trilogy novels, love plays an important, though perhaps more implicit, role as the force of good that saves humanity and the universe from the destructive designs of Professor Edward Weston, whose plans compromise the environmental and spiritual integrity of the planets. To Lewis, the face of love seemed just out of reach, mutable, while spiritually it remained constant. Within his entirety of work, love takes the form of children in a magical realm, an interplanetary philologist, and angelic giants; it is examined philosophically; it is written tenderly; and it is wrung with anguish.

Lewis’s literature was introduced to me at a young age. My mother used to read my brother and me The Chronicles of Narnia on long road-trips, and I will not divulge here just how many times I watched the BBC mini-series broadcast of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; what I will say is that, special effects aside, the more recent production by Walden Media pales in comparison. I reread the Chronicles on my own in elementary school. By junior high, I was reading the Space Trilogy, and in high school, I had moved on to The Great Divorce and his apologist nonfiction Mere Christianity. What I did not discover until almost simultaneous to my obsession for Palahniuk, was what I consider Lewis’s greatest work: Till We Have Faces, perhaps his most vivid depiction of love. Sometime in that last year of high school, probably during a dry spell in which all the Palahniuk books I had not read were checked out, I looked across the library aisle to my old standby, Lewis, and found a curious title I had not until then seen before.

Beyond anything I knew previously of Lewis, Till We Have Faces provided insight into the concept of love exceeding any other depiction by any other writer. Love, to me—and Lewis, I would wager—exists on a much broader plane than the erotic, extending to the very nature of how human relationship might be understood. It is also one of very, very few books I have reread in adulthood. Fearless, Lewis attempts to relate a story of love—love of God, love of man—not in an overtly religious way. Indeed, he chooses a downright pagan model: the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche. For Palahniuk, love and humanity plays out among the lowest common denominator; Lewis takes it to the heights of mythology and monarchy, but to near identical results.

In the midst of famine and drought, the kingdom of Glome looks to its king and his daughters Orual, Redival, and Psyche. Orual is the story narrator Lewis chooses, eldest daughter, and heir to the throne, though she dons a veil to detract from the rude comments about her strong jaw and altogether mannish features that render her disgusting and unattractive to the men of her country. Redival is her beautiful and spiteful sister and plays a mere cameo throughout the tale. And Psyche is the fairest creature anyone in heaven and earth has seen, so who better for the king, before his death, to sacrifice to the jealous and cruel goddess Ungit? Ungit might only be appeased by the offering of perfection and innocence to be devoured by her bloodthirsty offspring, the Shadowbrute, who lives among the hills. Out of love and grief over her loss of Psyche, Orual is determined to find the remains of Psyche that they might be buried. From here, the conventions of the Cupid and Psyche tale take notable effect: Orual discovers Psyche living in the woods with the Shadowbrute who has forbidden her to see his likeness; Orual convinces her sister through both passive-aggressive and antagonistic coaxing to break that solitary rule, causing Psyche to be exiled from her god’s invisible kingdom, only allowed to return if she can complete vaguely pointless tasks for the goddess Ungit.

Altogether, Till We Have Faces is a (retold) myth about love—love between sisters, love between man and woman, and love between human and deity. Throughout the ancient story of Cupid and Psyche, Lewis twists together barbs designed to vivisect trite conceptions of romance and love. In her search for her sister, Orual enlists her captain of the guard, Bardia, whom she has grown fond of, to track the Shadowbrute, in effect stealing Bardia away from his wife and family. Not only because he is an expert warrior but also because Orual enjoys his company, she repeatedly requests his presence, advice, companionship. She thinks she loves him, but in order to maintain this feeling she must simultaneously destroy him—rob him of his family, his time, his health. She eventually realizes the depth of her requirement of Bardia but changes nothing. And when he is finally gone, his widow observes regarding the Shadowbrute but mostly in accusation of Orual, “They say the loving and the devouring are all one.”

Jump way ahead, 43 years (real time) and a couple millennia (narrative time), and you have Shannon McFarland, ex-supermodel and current candidate for reconstructive surgery and speech therapy, keeps the object of her affection so close she’s killing him. In fact, she blatantly states it: “I love [Manus Kelley] so much I have to destroy him.” She feeds him hormones to make his once rugged, handsome figure fat and homely. She needs him to be ugly because she still loves him but simultaneously hates him for trying to kill her. It’s complicated. She, like Orual, exists in a constant state of contradiction about her feelings. Both understand the toll they are taking, but neither is willing to relent.

What I find so compelling about both Lewis and Palahniuk is their violent take on love. Shannon McFarland wants to ruin the one she loves. To Orual, love is a devouring process. She watches as the Shadowbrute consumes her sister; she feels Ungit devouring her through the superstitious politics of her kingdom; she observes herself consuming the only people who have returned her love: Psyche, Bardia, her adviser. Nearly at parallel points in the novels, our two heroines experience the same epiphany that, once everyone is consumed or destroyed, there is no one left. To put it into Shannon McFarland’s words, “My inventory of people who can save me is down to just me.” In this process of elimination, jealousy, fear, and anger that both sets of characters are put through, they both realize their individual capacity for hate and spite, a reservoir they had once considered to be one for love. Here they both feel the heavy hand of God upon them. And it is this point where two drastically different writers find dreadful common ground: the human capacity for love is finite and easily swayed toward abhorrence.

The cliché states, “Expectations are resentments waiting to happen.” Sitting in the muggy English classroom one spring quarter of college, I experience my own epiphany. We, as a class replete with friends of mine from Christian ministries across campus, are reading Till We Have Faces, and I sympathize with Orual, trapped in the incense smog within the temple of Ungit with no way out. The classroom is stifling and even with open windows I am sweating. What I realize is the universal discussion that has found two of my favorite authors on the same side of an issue.

There comes a moment, near the end of Till We Have Faces, long after Psyche been exiled from god and husband, and longer still since Orual has last seen her. Orual’s demands have worn her guard Bardia to death, and she realizes that she devours everything and everyone she encounters, savoring those she loves most in the worst ways. It is at this moment—the moment Orual goes to offer Bardia’s wife her condolences and is berated with accusations—that she sees, as though in a mirror, her own disfigured face as that of the misshapen idol known to be the goddess Ungit. Ungit, whose house is filled with harlot priestesses and whose altar is stained with fountains of innocent blood, sacrifices in exchange for empty promises of good fortune and love. And in this, Orual realizes her own semblance: the blood on her own hands, demanded in return for her just ruling of the kingdom, all the while she is an unstoppable force of selfishness and destruction. The love she has looked for, the return she has expected was the very lives of those she desired, and when even that does not satisfy her, her mind spirals into hatred, bitterness, and resentment.

Through the lens of Lewis’s myth, I finally understand the innate magnetism I feel toward Palahniuk. In everything between them, the situations are reduced to the same paradox of humanity: love cannot be unconditional until we are made perfect, and perfection is unattainable without love. The love between Orual and Psyche was flawed, but only on Orual’s side because of her insatiable taking. Because of Psyche’s perfection, through sacrifice and kindness, both sisters become more than the sum of their parts. Shannon McFarland sees only that she must consume in order to feel love—she does her best to destroy the man she loves and eradicate the other woman he has loved, to take what she can get, ultimately attempting to destroy herself—but it is Brandy Alexander’s affection and self-sacrifice that eventually offers her a more complete transformation and the opportunity to redeem herself beyond any she could contrive on her own, a singular experience of real, unconditional love.

True fact: while cause and effect are disparate, the physical defects of the narrators in both stories are the catalyst by which the love-as-destruction deformity of their souls unites them. With her congenital deformity, Orual becomes hardened and cynical early, slowly growing more jaded over years of being reviled for her looks; and, Shannon McFarland’s self-hatred ultimately leads to her mutilation. She states, “What I really hate is me so I hate pretty much everybody.” And it is the common language of love-as-destruction that unites Palahniuk with Lewis. The alignment of ideas and equal recognition of the love paradox exposes similarity between these two authors. They are discussing the same condition—the human need for love and redemption—and it’s impediment—punishing the beloved for any perceivable refusal. The way I have experienced love, with specific circumstances aside, so much resembles that which Lewis and Palahniuk describe, frequently testing the limit of affection against jealousy and bitterness, only to find myself the solitary culprit.

It is obvious when I read Lewis, in all his multiplicity, that love is a theme he has been profoundly affected by. He, I’m sure, attributed this to God, and felt compelled to write about it to his death. My suspicion is that Palahniuk does not feel the same way. However, I do find it an interesting element to his story telling. Remember formulaic? Well, I’m beginning to see Palahniuk and Lewis not as argumentative men, but rather writers of exploration and experimentation. On the one hand, we have Lewis searching far and wide for the best way to speak of the unspeakable, to know the unknowable about such an intangible, indefinable experience as love. On the other, there is Palahniuk. He looks to the depths of human depravity to find that, yes, community, romance, and love are possible even there. He tests the formula again and again in the most debased situations imaginable and, still, it is all possible.

Someone once asked Palahniuk if he was a nihilist. He said no: he said his work is essentially about community. They are romances, and it took connecting Palahniuk to C.S. Lewis, whose work is more obviously connected to my own beliefs, for me to understand why I feel so inexplicably connected to Palahniuk’s despicable characters. True fact: C.S. Lewis and his willingness to step outside strict religious conventionality into the mind of a malicious matriarch and Chuck Palahniuk’s unflinching proclivity to shock his audience work together to expose the most relatable of human crimes, that of loving others less than they deserve, stripping away every possible excuse to prove that when love turns sour, only a purer version will suffice.

« 1 2 3 View All»