What I Read on My Holidays #1

I thoroughly enjoyed Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby, with its witty plot, well-observed parodies of hyperbolic New Ageisms, and gentle darkness, so I was enthusiastic about beginning Diary, his story about struggling hotel maid whose husband lies in a coma and for whom she writes this diary, recounting events in his absence. Misty Wilmot, she who writes, is a once-aspiring artist in reduced circumstances, but as events unfold it transpires that her husband married her as part of a conspiracy by the locals on the island where she now lives, in order to rescue it and them by producing works of such sublimeness that they will induce in their viewers a form of hypnosis.

The book features all of Palahniuk’s usual bag of tricks, including his delight in displaying all of his research (we are presented with countless examples of artists through history whose suffering purportedly accounted for their talent or genius), but the premise of the plot, and its denouement, let the work down big style (spoiler alert!)

Maybe I’m being picky, but the islanders’ conspiracy centres upon Misty’s artworks inducing in its viewers what Palahniuk describes as Stendhal's Syndrome and recounts how Stendhal was so overcome by the works of art he visited in Florence that he was overcome, physically, by their evocative power.

In Diary, we are supposed to believe that all the wealthy outsiders who are ruining the island are so transfixed by Misty’s work that they don’t notice the hotel burning down around them and the fire that ultimately consumes them and rescues the island. I might quite happily have lived with that ending, although I might have felt a bit short-changed, had Palahniuk not specifically introduced Stendhal’s Syndrome and used it as an explanatory tool for the gallery viewers’ behaviour, since the usual understanding of the syndrome is that it is akin to neurasthenia, a sort of feebleness and nervousness. Indeed, just to cap the inappopriateness of Palahniuk’s trope, Stendhal himself recounts in his memoirs how, having being so overcome by the works of art in one particular church, he had to rush outside for fresh air and sit down on a bench to recover his senses. In other words, Stendhal’s Syndrome is a sort of vertiginous experience, a panic attack, the result of the senses being bombarded by overpowering images: The nearest we might come today to this is the uncontrollable excitement exhibited by kids watching consecutive toy adverts in the runup to Christmas.

Georg Simmel, sociologist and theorist of modernity, cited neurasthenia as one of the characteristic psychic states of the modern age but observed that individuals in modern societies had become largely immune to the constant bombardment of the senses from shop window displays, passing crowds, the rivers of traffic. As the novelty of the city wore off, we urban sophisticates got used to, and managed to tune out, this multisensory cacophony, an attitude exemplified by what Simmel referred to as the “blasé.” Thus inured to the exciting, he said, we have become people who are no longer able to be impressed by anything.

Palahniuk’s weekend visitors to the island were such people, people unlikely to be enraptured by anything: They were too urban. But more to the point, their response to works of such sublimeness would have been to rush outside for fresh air, not hang around transfixed in a burning gallery.

Which isn’t to say I don’t generally love Palahniuk's work, only that, this time round, he managed to subvert his own sophisticated air of nonchalance by exhibiting his own provinciality. And that’s a criticism coming from a Brummie who’s proud of his own.