#1726 - Chuck Palahniuk

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Chuck Palahniuk (0:13)

Hey, welcome back.

Joe Rogan (0:15)

Welcome back to you, too. I was very excited to talk to you because it's been about three years, and during those three years, it seems like censorship issues and issues of what you can and can't say and what isn't is unacceptable, they seem to be ramping up. And you are, in my mind, one of the more interesting and dangerous writers out there because you tap into these super uncomfortable stories and you are willing to explore areas in writing that I think a lot of people would avoid.

We talked about this the last time you were here, some of the more dangerous stories that you had workshopped and people had gotten upset at you for. But I really wanted to talk to you because I wanted to know how this is affecting you, how this weird climate of hypersensitivity and purity tests is sort of affecting your writing.

Chuck Palahniuk (1:23)

This is the dead air part.

Joe Rogan (1:25)

Scooch up to the mic.

Chuck Palahniuk (1:28)

I don't want to shoot my wad with a big term, but have you ever heard of absurdist existentialism?

Joe Rogan (1:37)

No, I haven't. I can piece the two words together.

Chuck Palahniuk (1:42)

When I look back at the books that I really loved growing up, I see that they are now under the big umbrella of the very small phenomenon called absurdist existentialism. Do you remember the book Geek Love?

Joe Rogan (1:54)

Yes.

Chuck Palahniuk (1:55)

Geek Love. Could Catherine write Geek Love right now? It is about a man and a woman who own a failing circus, and they decide the way to save their circus is to have deformed babies. So they take insecticides, they expose themselves to radiation, and they give birth to ultimately a whole crew of severely deformed children, plus a whole crew of children that don't live, that are in the circus culture, they're called pickled punks, those kind of deformed babies and formaldehyde.

Catherine wrote that book, it was the first banner book under the new director at Knopf, Sonny Mehta, it was one of the top selling books of the 20th century, it was a huge success, and it really is absurdist existentialism.

And the general idea is that life is so messed up, so unfixable, that we might as well go right to the crazy, and Vonnegut wrote it, Tom Robbins wrote it throughout the 70s, still life with Woodpecker and Matches, even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Nathaniel West wrote it, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it in the 20s, these people who had survived the Spanish Flu and survived the First World War, and that there is a kind of a tipping point in the culture where things seem so messed up and so unfixable that you just sort of tip into this absurdist existentialism, and there's a fantastic joy and freedom in that. And so my goal is always to try to write the kind of book I want to read, and I want to write Geek Love because I want to read Geek Love, regardless of whether or not Katherine could write it, because even if she wasn't dead, she could not write that book anymore.

Joe Rogan (3:50)

There's something about writing and reading that kind of stuff where you really, you can never capture it in any other medium.

And I think in some ways even audiobooks don't do justice to some of the darker ideas because you kind of want to piece them together in your own mind. And as you're reading it in silence and the author's ideas are coming to life inside your head, you know, your own creativity and imagination are intertwined with the work of the artist to try to fill in the visuals of the work. It's a place where that's the only way you can truly get the most out of those really really twisted ideas.

Chuck Palahniuk (4:41)

And because also to be made literal enough to film or even to be said out loud kind of destroys that intimacy where it only occurs in your mind. It occurs in the kind of sub-vocalization and in the kind of sympathetic neural phenomenon that's happening when you read a verb, studies have shown that your body thinks that you are running, your body thinks that you are doing what the verb is saying.

And you lose that when you hear it out loud and you lose it, especially when it has to be made literal enough to be filmed. Another absurdist, existentialist book, Confederacy of Dunces. You know, John Goodman, God bless him, he has had that book optioned for decades. And that will never be a movie because it is filled with racist humor. It is filled with misogynistic humor and it is filled with homophobic humor. It is completely an unfilmable book. But people adore Confederacy of Dunces and it won the Pulitzer Prize.