This blogpost is about Chuck Palahniuk’s untitled “Woke Western” work in progress.

Woke Western

On his substack Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, openly contemplated writing a Woke Western. This is of coarse a very stupid idea, but it is worth examining because it reveals a lot about modern cultural production in America in the year of our Lord 2026.

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First, he notes that there have been attempts to write a Post-Modern Western, like King’s Dark Tower series for example. He doesn’t actually give a reason for dismissing those books other than that they are in the Fantasy as well as Western genre and he apparently doesn’t like that. So, what’s his idea? What’s his twist?

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His twist is to add some humor. Specifically, he says he wants to do something like “Cormac McCarthy, but funny, really funny.” I think he might be selling McCarthy a little short here, because Suttree can be, at times, really funny. Nevertheless, Mr. Palahniuk is capable of some humor so I guess the suggestion isn’t completely outrageous.

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The interesting point to me isn’t the humor but the Wokeness. He says he wants the book to have “a woke-ish awareness of the damage being done to the Wild West”. One objection to this is that it has already been done. Blood Meridian absolutely has a “woke-ish awareness of the damage being done to the Wild West” sentiment.

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It starts with The Kid leaving home at an early age and turning his back on his father and where he came from. To be divorced from all tradition is a woke thing to do. The book ends with a man inserting posts in the ground, which signals the end of the Wild West because now with fences there’s no freedom to roam.

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This shows how the American experience in the frontier ended the Wild West, which is similar to Palahniuk’s “awareness of the damage being done to the Wild West.” So, there’s really no reason to write this book. Making it funny wouldn’t change anything. Mr. Palahniuk’s novel would be proving a point that’s already been proved. And the Novel is just one long argument isn’t it? The reader is a jury, after all.

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I’m sure Mr. Palahniuk feels quite smug and superior to a writer like Louis L’Amour. Mr. Palahniuk wants to take something someone else has built (the Western genre) and make a few snide woke comments to show how superior he is to those old Western writers. But L’Amour at least L’Amour was earnestly building something. What Mr. Palahniuk wants to do is a teenager’s fantasy: live in Dad’s house and eat Dad’s food but crack some wisecracks at Dad to feel morally superior. Absolutely childish.

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That aside, which character Mr. Palahniuk would select as the main character is revealing. He picks a veteran of the Confederate Army. This is a dead ringer clue that the whole project is about being smug and morally superior to his characters (and their modern-day analogues) then actually trying to depict what those characters who inhabited that world were really honestly going through.

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He says he wants the main character to be the veteran of the Confederate Army because he wants the man to be burdened by his “poor choices.” This just proves my point. Palahniuk wants to believe that he (and the standard issue liberal reader reading this book) would make better choices. That’s a fantasy. Mr. Palahniuk would have made the same “poor choices” that his Confederate Army character made.

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Thinking that you’d be the ONE GUY who didn’t give the Nazi salute is a comforting fantasy. But just that – a fantasy. You are actually not morally superior to people from the past. Just like people in the future aren’t morally superior to us, even though I’m sure there are things we did that will look just as bad as slavery and the rest.

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He ends with a quote from one of these old Westerns where the writer depicts an Asian shopkeeper as a guy who’s owned a shop for 20 years but can’t figure out the impenetrable ways of the White man. Mr. Palahniuk says, “Yeah, this genre is ripe for some reinvention.” He seems to think – and assume his reader will think – that such a description of the Asian shopkeeper is so obviously wrong that the only path forward is reinvention. He doesn’t even consider that the description is true, even necessary.

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The description to my ears seems true because obviously there is a large difference between the Asian guy and the White guy in the Wild West. The Asian is just there to run a business and make a profit off of the White guy. He sees the Wild West as just an economic zone. But the White guy is there for exploration and adventure. There really is no comparison. The two different men, with different outlooks on life are the result of two different civilizations. So, of course the Asian will find the White guy impenetrable.

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By scoffing at this distance between the White man and the Asian man, Palahniuk is saying, “We’re all one human race, so of course there’s nothing impenetrable here.” But that is not the attitude that the people who made the Wild West took. They were racist to the core. They had to be. If they hadn’t been the Wild West would have never existed. And Mr. Palahniuk wouldn’t get a chance to earn a healthy paycheck by doing nothing but taking a genre someone else invented and inserting some standard issue Wokism. I hope he writes the book. It will be very difficult to prove me wrong.

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