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Abstract
Article adopts Jacques Lacan’s concept of the “mirror stage” to study the mechanisms of the way the Author’s identity evolves in W. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and Ch. Palahniuk’s Fight Club . Evolution of the Author is set against general process of personal growth. The study is primarily concerned with features of the Author’s evolution within transgressive fiction, as Chuck Palahniuk and William Burroughs are the key figures of this genre. Transgression presupposes addressing social taboos by explicating them, thus creating strong reactions within the readership. We argue and find evidence that Burroughs and Palahniuk in the process of facing their perfect images of the Author digress from what Lacan would consider normal development. When they are given a chance to produce a unified body of text, the writers chose unconscious strive for fragmentation instead. Fragmented images invade Naked Lunch and Fight Club . However the mirror stage in the case of Palahniuk and in the case of Burroughs differ. While Burroughs in the myth of the Interzone ends up rejecting the notion of unique Author as such, Palahniuk accepts the fact that he managed to form a new niche for transgressive fiction and stays true to this niche, continuing similar aesthetics in the works that follow.
Highlights
As for Palahniuk the author of Fight Club admitted in an interview given to Lightspeed Magazine that what he writes can be most accurately described as transgressive fiction in a sense that he sometimes counts “how many people would faint on his readings” [13, p. 40]
In this article we suggest, that in order to reach for the limit of allowed utterance Palahniuk and Burroughs had to go beyond their personal limits first
We can point out, that in the case of Naked Lunch we enjoy the aftereffect of the writer’s failure to develop a unified image of the author. It is an important characteristic of transgressive fiction, Burroughs let his Unconscious fragmented body of work invade the text in a form of Interzone, a concept that Harris described as “a point where three-dimensional fact merges into dream and dreams erupt into the real world” [4, p. 210]
Summary
S. BURROUGHS’S NAKED LUNCH AND CHUCK PALAHNIUK’S FIGHT CLUB As for Palahniuk the author of Fight Club admitted in an interview given to Lightspeed Magazine that what he writes can be most accurately described as transgressive fiction in a sense that he sometimes counts “how many people would faint on his readings” [13, p. This was exactly what Burroughs and Palahniuk achieved in their first major works, Naked Lunch and Fight Club.
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