A Lullaby for Madness
A Lullaby for Madness

Love and Madness in Transgressive Fiction

Summary/Abstract: The alienated characters of Chuck Palahniuk and Kurt Vonnegut cannot embrace either the passing of time, or the weakening of their powers, their mental fragility growing by the day. They go through life with power and delirium, but they are only aimlessly strolling towards disappointment, decay and, ultimately, death. They share a sympathy for strangeness, a passion for the odd, a savage foolishness regarding life; the absurd of their lives in hidden behind their respect for ignorance, and when their utopian, consumerist dreams dissolve, the Postmodern characters find themselves in an abyssal gap between wishes and truth, between having and being, needing and wanting. Mistaking need for want is the core of the consumerist mechanism; love is the fetichized enemy of the transgressive, Postmodern individual, giving him the illusion of control and satisfaction. The phantasm of power and control is, however, shattered by the impossibility to transcend the patriarchal subjugation of women, and consequently, transgressive protagonists become products of consumerism and of male conspicuous consumption. Trying to escape themselves and their bodies, women in transgressive fiction lose touch with reality and slip towards the edge of madness. The erotic rituals the fine, female body forces the individuals to follow, preach an indifference towards a possible eternal sensuality and mysticism of the body. The eroticized, fetishized images of the body give an illusion of emotional – but not only – comfort, or an ephemeral and fulfilling sense of satisfaction.

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