Palahniuk’s “Invisible Monsters” and Esquivel’s “Like Water for Chocolate”

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Main body
Conclusion
Works Cited

Introduction

Charles Michael ‘Chuck’ Palahniuk, the author of Invisible Monsters, is an American transgressional fiction novelist. His genre of literature focuses on characters who feel confined by the norms and expectations of society and who use unusual and/or illicit ways to break free of those confines. Labeled as a shock writer by critics, some of his works have become a pop culture phenomenon. Laura Esquivel, the author of Like Water for Chocolate, is a Mexican fiction novelist cum screenwriter. She uses magical realism to combine the ordinary and the supernatural. The theme of romantic love, particularly love thwarted, appears repeatedly throughout her novels, as does the setting in Mexico. She is regarded as an author who has made a noted contribution to Latin-American literature.

Main body

The aforementioned authors, and books, have created a benchmark for modern-day literature. They have individual takes on human society – present and past, with vivid descriptions of how things were and how they are. They put forward the complexities of 19th-century Mexican society referred to in Laura Esquivel’s novel, as opposed to the complexities of the 21st century materialistic society described in Chuck Palahniuk’s novel. With the added supernatural by Esquivel, and the bizarre by Palahniuk, both novels are something out of the ordinary and predicaments that the characters are in rather differently than one would expect.

Chuck Palahniuk, better known for the abnormality of the situations he writes about, and the dark humor with which he treats his otherwise abnormal characters stays true to his genre in Invisible Monsters. Shannon McFarland, whose jaw has been shot away and taken by a bird while she was driving down the highway, is essential, the oppressed protagonist. After her accident, she becomes, what she calls, a monster. She is, as the book is called, an invisible monster to people around her. Looked at, and shunned aside, paid attention to only because of her disfigurement. She has become a mere object. Rather, an animal is kept captive in a zoo. Stared at, pointed at. Due to the fact that her appearance is no longer normal, she is an outcast. Kids, on noticing her, tug at their mother’s skirt and point at her, telling ‘mommy’ to ‘look at that monster’. Shannon is shocked at how people judge someone else without even knowing the person. All she wants is for someone to really know her, and love her for who she is.

Whereas Chuck Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters centers on a physically disfigured young woman, the core of Laura Esquivel’s novel, Like Water for Chocolate revolves around Tita De la Garza. The novel follows Tita throughout the course of her life and shows how she is tormented by her mother. Like Water for Chocolate, Esquivel’s first novel, released in 1989, is partly inspired by her own great-aunt, Tita, who was forbidden to wed. She never did anything apart from taking care of her own mother. Soon after the death of her mother, she passed away. The Tita in Esquivel’s novel is the youngest of three daughters. Her mother, Mama Elena, has forbidden her from marrying because, as a family tradition, the sole responsibility of the youngest daughter is to take care of her mother till the day she dies. Tita, under the ruling of her tyrannical mother, watches her love, Pedro, get married to her sister, Rosaura. Although Pedro promises Tita that his only reason for marrying her sister is so that he can be close to her, Tita and Pedro may never be together; that, especially because Mama Elena ensures that they are never ever close to each other.

Both Shannon and Tita share something in common — social constraints. If it is an age-old ‘stupid’ tradition that keeps Tita from marrying her true love, it is the fickle-mindedness of people that forces Shannon to wear a veil whenever she is in public. It isn’t odd that both characters look for solace elsewhere.

Esquivel’s novel shows the importance of the kitchen in her life. Esquivel believes that the kitchen is the most important part of the house and characterizes it as a source of knowledge and understanding that brings pleasure. From Tita’s birth, which took place on a table in the kitchen, to where she spends her time whenever she is in need of comfort, the kitchen, and food itself play a very integral part in her life. What she is unable to express in reality, be it sorrow or joy, she expresses through her cooking. This is where the magical element of the story comes in. Tita has the power to implant her feelings in the dishes she cooks. Hence, when asked for her recipe she mentions the key ingredient – “Make it with a lot of love”. To anyone that mind sounds like she simply does not want to give away her recipe, but that is not true. Tita cooks with a lot of heart. The emotions she experiences while cooking gets implanted in the food, and once eaten, into the individual devouring it. The only way she can communicate her true sentiments is through cooking. It is expected when Mama Elena accuses her of poisoning the food at Rosaura’s wedding, for on eating the cake, everyone apart from Tita started weeping, wailing about lost love. And then, in a matter of moments, nausea overtook them. Tita was the only one who did not join in the collective vomiting that was going on all over the patio. She was immune to her own spell. The spell she had cast by adding a few drops of tears to the cake mixture.

Tita De la Garza expresses herself through her cooking. Shut up from the inside by her mother, she does not have much of a choice. In Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters, Shannon is the sibling who is taken for granted by her parents who grieve the loss of their only son, Shannon’s brother, Shane. Truth is, Shane was a homosexual. When a can of hairspray blew up in his face, disfiguring him, he ran away from home. Home, where his parents disowned him and told him to ‘never return’. On hearing the news of his death from AIDS, his parents realize how wrong they had treated their son. Instead of supporting him, they had neglected him completely. What they were unable to do for him while he was alive, they do after his death. To compensate for their actions, they become supporters of people who are like Shane, unaccepted in society. They become obsessed with it. All they talk about, all they seem capable of thinking about, is Shane. They don’t seem to care that their daughter has come to visit them, they don’t seem to care about giving her proper presents for Christmas. Everything they do revolves around their long-lost son. Their depiction, although very extreme, is also very real, because they perfectly divide what is normal and what is insanity – an obsession in this case. The person suffering due to this is Shannon, who cannot tolerate the fact that all she gets to hear whenever she comes home is what new ‘support homosexuals organization’ her parents have become a member of, and what new signs they are willing to display on their front yard. Shannon loses her career as a model after her accident. Who’d want a girl with half a face anyway? She contemplates becoming a foot model, but her feet are too small. Her boyfriend dumps her. She is left nowhere; alone. All she wants is for someone to care, someone to ask her who she is, how her face is the way it is, what she used to do. She befriends a pre-operative transsexual, the reason being that she was the only one who cared enough to actually ask her whether an elephant sat on her face.

Tita expresses herself strongly through what she specializes in. Her cooking is sublime, ‘fit for the Gods’, as Pedro calls it. Since she cannot show her love for Pedro in person, she captivates him through her cooking. Her specially prepared dish, quail in rose petal sauce, which Mama Elena criticizes as ‘being to salty’, only so that she can distract Pedro from complimenting the preparation. Her dish, which Rosaura hardly even tastes before asking to be excused from the table. A show of jealousy, for Rosaura herself is a terrible cook and had overcooked the only meal she had ever prepared for the family. Her dish, which her other sister Gertrudis savors to the maximum. The meal is so delicious that Gertrudis cannot tolerate imagining herself in the arms of a lover. The meal is almost sensuous, exciting her senses as she starts emanating heat from her body as she showers, in turn setting the shower room ablaze. Tita uses Gertrudis as a medium to get to Pedro. Gertrudis experiences what Tita feels for Pedro. A deep, longing love. A want for closeness:

‘It was as if a strange alchemical process had dissolved her entire being into the rose petal sauce, in the tender flesh of the quail, in the wine, in every one of the meal’s aromas. That was the way she entered Pedro’s body, hot voluptuous, perfumed, totally sensuous. With that meal it seemed they had discovered a new system of communication, in which Tita was the transmitter, Pedro the receiver, and poor Gertrudis the medium, the conducting body through which the singular sexual message was passed.’

It sets Gertrudis free. She breaks free from her mother’s chains, escaping with her lover. Such is the effect of Tita’s cooking.

Shannon McFarland lacks a lower jaw. She simply cannot talk. All she says sounds like gibberish, unable to pronounce anything correctly. She writes things down when needed, but generally, she just keeps quiet. She deals with her problems rather differently. She doesn’t show it, simply because she cant. She thinks. She thinks and analyzes at her own will, with her own views, about everything she comes across. Whether she wants to pay attention to her part-transsexual friend, Brandy Alexander, or whether she is really listening to what her ex-boyfriend, Manus, is saying, or whether she is looking out the car window pretending to listen whilst actually thinking about the bushes and the billboard she just saw, is all put forward to us through her thoughts. All she has to do is nod her head in front of Brandy and Manus to tell them that she is listening. Nobody expects her to speak. This, in a way, is Shannon’s greatest power. She can do what she chooses whilst interacting with people. Not only are people unaware of what she really looked like when she had a full model-pretty face, nor do they know about her in complete detail. Her being handicapped lets her take people for granted. She owes no one explanation, the basic reason being that she can’t. She cannot talk. This, also, makes her invisible; invisible in a completely different sort of way.

Tita, however expressive she might be through her power over people through her cooking, is overshadowed by Shannon, who is more expressive, though not in reality, but in her mind. The fact that we have greater access to Shannon’s thoughts of how people are like consumer products than we have to Tita’s response to the news of her sister getting married to the man she loves is of great importance. How clearly Shannon states:

‘Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a Barbie doll. Erasing a computer disk. Burning a book. Probably that goes for killing anyone in the world. We’re all such products.’

Tita, however, is not as expressive. The only bit of raw emotion, without the presence of any kind of medium, we get bursting out of her is when on hearing the news of her nephew’s death she is restricted from crying by her mother:

‘Tita felt a violent agitation take possession of her being: still fingering the sausage, she calmly met her mother’s gaze and then, instead of obeying her order, she started to tear apart all the sausages she could reach, screaming wildly.

“Here’s what I do with your orders!” she said,” I’m sick of them! I’m sick of obeying you!”‘

Thus reflecting the name of the novel, which is a phrase meaning ‘boiling mad’.

How Shannon expresses her emotions as if she were facing a camera, and the photographer was giving her directions to pose for every shot:

‘Him yelling. Give me lust, baby.
Flash.
Give me malice.
Flash.
Give me detached existential ennui.
Flash.
Give me rampant intellectualism as a coping mechanism.
Flash.’

As opposed to how Tita expresses her emotions, when after yelling at her mother about how fed up she was with her, after getting a bleeding nose because her mother had smashed her across the face with a wooden spoon: ‘She ran from the room, wiping the blood that dripped from her nose. She took her pet pigeon and a pail full of worms and climbed up to the dovecote.’

Tita’s reactions and emotions are more physical in nature. Shannon’s, more silent. She keeps things to herself. Tita broods, cries, Shannon abuses society. That is where their differences in character lie. It is the way they treat their situations by the end of their respective stories. Tita, achieving peace by sacrificing herself in order to be with her true love; and Shannon, who sacrifices her own identity to do something humane for someone she loves, something that no one did for her; both achieving joy through sacrifice.

Conclusion

Both Tita and Shannon are individuals restricted from doing as they please. One is not allowed to weep, the other cannot show her face in public. One is stretched to the limit of her tolerance by her mother, the other is frustrated to all ends with the way her parents treat her. They are both the lead characters in their respective stories. Their views are given full flow. If one does not agree with age-old family traditions, terming them as stupid; the other criticizes the sheer heartlessness of people, labeling them as mere products. One symbolizes the suffering of a woman bound by social customs; the other, suffering from a lack of attention or care from people around her. Both, prevalent in their respective times. It is not a question of how different they are as people, or how different they are because of the time periods they were living in. It is a question of how similar they are when it came to their suffering, and how unexpectedly they dealt with their respective problems. It is about how magical and how bizarre their individual stories were.