Michael Kroger, Overcoming Irony: The Creative and Destructive Forces of Chuck Palahniuk's Choke

In Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke, Victor, like his mother, participates in a sort of extreme literal realization of Jacques Derrida’s idea of deconstruction and play as he describes these concepts in “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences."  That is to say, whether switching the color in hair dyes or choking to create false heroes, the two characters are altering and widening the relationship between the sign and its signified.  The problem with Victor and his mother is that in their actions they fail to recognize the potential of this play.  The position that Victor and his mother take is described by Derrida as “one [who] seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile” (1125).  Because of this they use deconstruction as a tool for the destruction of a reality that is seen as an oppressive force.  Victor’s mom says “My generation, all of our making fun of things isn’t making the world any better […] We’ve spent so much time judging what other people created that we’ve created very, very little of our own” (111).  Victor fails to realize that with the destruction of meaning comes the freedom and ability to create meaning.  Victor only sees himself in opposition to reality, as a victim of it, and feels he must attack the accepted signs in that reality in order to escape them.  Lewis Hyde says in “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking,” that “Irony has only emergency use.  Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage” (90).  Victor is that voice in the cage, trapped by his method of assault against it.  Victor is only able to use deconstruction in the destructive mode of irony and only when he abandons that irony and embraces the constructive side of deconstruction (whether through the memories of his maps in his mother’s diary or in building with Denny’s stones) that Victor seems liberated from his position as victim.

Victor is keenly aware that signification is not inherent or natural in signs, a concept he seems to acquire from his mother.  When Victor’s mother teaches him things like how announcements made over PA systems are actually code for emergencies and disasters, she wants Victor to be aware that meaning and signification are only defined by the system that they exist in.  In “A Short Course in Post-Structuralism” Jane Tompkins writes that signs are “definable only by [their] dissimilarities to other beings” within a system and, therefore, are “inscribed in a chain of signification that is always being reborn” (74).  Victor’s mom responds to this overwhelming concept by attempting to escape the system.  Victor remembers his mother sniffing “trichloroethane,” a chemical used in industrial cleaning supplies and says “For one flash the Mommy had seen…the mountains without the framework of language.  Without the cage of associations.  She’d seen it without looking through the lens of everything she knew was true about mountains” (148-49).  Her actions are an attempt to eradicate her own subjectivity by physically destroying her brain with a chemical solvent in order to examine the world outside of a system.  This viewpoint is nihilistic, where meaning becomes a subterfuge to be avoided, because this creation is unachievable for Victor’s mother.  She is even incapable of the most innate and natural form of creation, the ability to conceive a child.  

Victor’s viewpoint differs from his mother’s however, and he does not try to escape these systems of meaning.  Instead, he uses this knowledge that his mother instilled in him to his advantage.  Victor’s failed profession of doctor is a product of this notion.  He says “This is the world we live in […] I went to the USC School of Medicine long enough to know that a mole is never just a mole. That a simple headache means brain tumors, means double vision, numbness, vomiting followed by seizures, drowsiness, death” (103).  Victor is aware of this never ending list of significations inherent in symbols, but, at the same time, he takes advantage of this insight.  The danger he is in when he chokes in restaurants and the that heroes he creates to rescue him are merely simulations.  In “The Precession of Simulacra” Jean Baudrillard says that simulations are “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (253).  Furthermore, Baudrillard proposes that in present day simulations precedes reality and in fact have actually replaced known experience of the real (253-54).  Victor exploits this knowledge in the hyperreal situations he creates, using the power of signs to fool people into recognizing a signification that is not actually present.

The problem with Victor’s approach is its mode, irony.  When Victor chokes he says “People will jump through hoops if you just make them feel like a god” (51).  He is aware of the play possible with signs and the power of simulation in his world and he takes advantage of, ridicules, and dupes those who are unaware of such play.  Victor’s mother says “Language…[is] just our way to explain away the wonder and the glory of the world. To deconstruct. To dismiss…people can't deal with how beautiful the world really is. How it can't be explained and understood” (151).  Victor’s mode of irony is a naturally destructive one and he must situate himself in opposition to these people to dismantle the integrity of the accepted, static signs of their world.  In this opposition, Victor must position himself as victim in order to maintain the validity of his supposed oppression.  He says “how many times can everybody tell you that you’re the oppressive, prejudiced enemy before you give up and become the enemy” (118).  Even when he is taking advantage of people, Victor always sees himself as a victim and as subjected to the interpretations of others that he sees as overwhelming.  In his victimization, Victor remains passive, static and unable to escape his perceived status and the necessity of his destruction.

Victor is only able to get past being a victim towards the end of the book when he begins to take a proactive role in defining himself and, in turn, moves from a destructive mode into a creative one.  Victor says, “We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are.  Sane or insane.  Saints or sex addicts.  Heroes or victims…or we can decide for ourselves.  And maybe it’s our job to invent something better” (292).  In this moment, Victor is able to escape the confines and fallacy of the binary oppositional roles he has been trapped defining himself in because he becomes aware that destruction is not necessary.  Instead, as Barbara Johnson describes in The Critical Difference, “[i]f anything is destroyed” in deconstruction it is “the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another” (5).  This is the key to Victor’s transformation and now he is not only aware of the fallacy of those oppositions but that he also must invent ways to remove himself from their demarcation.  This move towards creation and reinvention is not solely in the realm of Victor’s own identity.  Victor remembers his childhood, when he drew maps, creating mountains and rivers “Not with words he already knew, but [with] new words that didn’t already mean a bunch of other stuff” (284-285).  These maps are the essence of what deconstruction is capable of doing, and it is what Victor and Denny are doing with the rocks at the end of the novel.  They are creating without the necessity of meaning rather than just participating in the destruction of that meaning as Victor had been doing before.  This creation liberates Victor from his perceived role as victim and also the actual oppression that the confines of language and signs and meaning held in his life.

At the end of the novel Victor is no longer a victim and is no longer defining his life by the opposition that he saw in it.  His destructive attempts at freeing himself from these restrictions are ineffective.  It is only when he takes a positive, creative approach to rebelling against these forces that he is able to overcome them.  This is the lesson Victor’s mother claims that she wanted to teach him--to free him from the impossibility of creation in her own life.  She says “I don’t want you to just accept the world as it’s given…I want you to invent it.  I want you to have the skill.  To create your own reality.  Your own set of laws” (284).  Victor’s mother only saw herself in antithesis to reality, a position that requires and supports reality as implicitly as those who accept it.  Victor’s mother wants him to be free from her position, and only by being able to create is he capable of escaping the confines of the given.  When Victor accepts this idea, he is finally embracing Derrida’s idea of “the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming,” that comes with the positive awareness of the possibility of deconstruction (1125). 
 

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