Dear Listener,
With the Chuck Palahniuk event just around the corner (October 20, don’t forget!), I wanted to discuss what CP means to me. When I was thirteen or fourteen, I started reading Palahniuk. I started with Choke, continued with Fight Club, moved on to Lullaby, found Survivor, and finished Invisible Monsters. As a teenage boy, I became simply engrossed with the intricacies to which Palahniuk goes to utterly disgust his reader. I loved being thoroughly shocked by the last five pages of the book. Nothing made me happier than finishing a book and immediately starting from the beginning to try to piece together what exactly it was that had just happened. As I grew older, I started reading classics, and was unable to keep up with Palahniuk’s quick production of novels. At some point in that regression of obsession, I picked up his 2007 novel Rant. That is when everything changed.
Along with most men of my generation, time travel, to me, is a revered philosophical discussion. Granted there is never a right answer, only illogical logic, I can have a conversation about time travel for hours and hours. When you consider the different types of time travel (i.e. Back to the Future Time Travel, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure Time Travel, Terminator Time Travel, etc.), and the paradoxes that ensue through those types, the discussion can become complex and heated. In Chuck Klosterman‘s most recent book of essays Eating The Dinosaur (2009) there is an essay that deals entirely with time travel in pop culture. (And if you think about it, time travel really wouldn’t exist without pop culture, right?) In this essay (titled “Tomorrow Rarely Knows”) Klosterman covers several classic works like H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and a 1733 novel by Irishman Samuel Madden called Memoirs of the Twentieth Century. 
He goes on to discuss the 2004 movie Primer, which looks at time travel from a very realistic standpoint. (i.e. the inventors are actually engineers, they use the machine to make money, there is technical mathematical jargon in the dialogue, etc.) He also discusses several time travel paradoxes. At this point in the essay Klosterman actually mentions our hero Palahniuk in reference to Rant. Klosterman writes:
“In his fictional oral history Rant, author Chuck Palahniuk refers to the Godfather Paradox as this: ‘The idea that if one could travel backward in time, one could kill one’s own ancestor, eliminating the possibility said time traveler would ever be born — and thus could never have lived to travel back to commit the murder.’ The solution to this paradox (according to Palahniuk) is the theory of splintered alternative realities, where all possible trajectories happen autonomously and simultaneously.”
Even after reading Rant more than a dozen times, there are still facts and thoughts that pop into my head. Every read through the book shines light on a different hypothesis on who the characters are. Several of the characters may or may not exist as one person who has allegedly (maybe) killed several of his relatives and infected the entire world with some sort of un-treatable rabies. In Rant, these kinds of events may or may not take place, but they are definitely told through the eyes of his friends and colleagues. As mentioned earlier, the entire book is written as a fictional oral history. Rarely do I pick up Palahniuk anymore, unless it is Rant.
If you want to hear more about time travel, here is an excerpt from a footnote from Klosterman’s essay:
“Before [Michael J.] Fox plays ‘Johnny B. Goode’ at the high school dance [in the 1985 movie Back to the Future], he tells his audience, ‘This is an oldie… well, this is an oldie from where I come from.’ Chuck Berry recorded ‘Johnny B. Goode’ in 1958. Back to the Future was made in 1985, so the gap is twenty-seven years. ”
Klosterman goes on to explain that no one would refer to Back to the Future as an oldie today, even though the time spanned is very nearly the same. He points out that “as culture accelerates, the distance between historical events feels smaller. This, I suppose, is society’s own version of time travel.”
In this scene from Back to the Future, Chuck Berry’s cousin Marvin Berry calls him to give him an example of the “new sound he’s been looking for.” If this happened, and Chuck Berry stole his own song from Marty McFly, who wrote “Johnny B. Goode”?
For The Chucks, Part 1, click here.
cpcp
by Simon
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