Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones

Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones,

But Words Can Really Hurt Me:

A Review of The Mantra, Dmitrv Radyshevsky and Lullaby, Chuck Palahniuk

Radyshevsky, Dmitrv. ¦The Mantra. ¦New York: Jove, 2002. 473 p.

Palahniuk, Chuck. ¦Lullaby. ¦New York: Doubleday, 2002. 260 p.

In a world where silence and the self contemplation it fosters is so unappealing a prospect that it must be constantly combated with a barrage of media, and where very few words have the power to shock us any more, language seems to have lost much of its power. ¦So the prospect of words having physical power over the listener is truly frightening. This is the idea behind two recent novels, The Mantra and Lullaby.

In The Mantra, popular DJ Tune Ra releases a song created from industrial and urban noise and embedded with a powerful Buddhist mantra. Ra's ditty is an overnight success, and is suddenly heard in major cities worldwide as well as remote areas of the globe. But this mantra is not meant to bring about inner peace for the listener, nor is it a mere ambient element in a soundscape. Rather, Tune Ra's song has more in common with those heavy metal records of right wing urban legend, the ones which, when played backwards issue Satanic messages that cause the listener to commit suicide. Ra's tune also has sinister effects on its listener, and ultimately has the power to transform the world.

Rudi, a Buddhist graduate student in religious studies whose dissertation is about the mantric principles in rock music choruses, recognizes the seemingly nonsense syllabus in ¦Tune Ra's song as actually being dangerous, with disastrous consequences to himself. Almost immediately, people around Rudi begin to die.¦ A deranged man attacks him in the subway station before jumping under an oncoming train, making it appear that Rudi pushed him. Next to die is Rudi's major professor, who perishes in a mysterious house fire that ignites moments after he leaves his teacher's house. And Rudi's girlfriend inexplicably leaps from the window of their high rise apartment building. Now he's wanted for questioning in these cases, and must flee the country to avoid prosecution as well as stop the mantra at its source before it does any more harm. ¦But the mantra is no mere incantation unleashed on the world to kill the unwary. It's far more powerful than that, and can literally change the world as we know it by causing the tectonic plates to shift, flooding entire continents, causing mountain ranges to appear in the middle of what once was the sea, and changing tropical climates into artic ones.

Words have similar power in Chuck Palahniuk's novel Lullaby.¦ An African culling song meant to euthanize the very young and the enfeebled during times of famine when the tribe couldn't support everyone is reproduced in a book of children's poems.¦ And now parents, innocently reading the ancient lullaby to their children at bed time, induce the big sleep in their offspring. The lullaby's lethal effect is discovered by Carl Streator, a reporter doing a story about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, who notices the same volume of poetry, open to the same page, in the homes of several SIDS victims. Streator wishes to find and burn all existing copies of the culling song before anyone else accidentally kills with it, but along the way, he discovers just how intoxicating it can be to have truly powerful words at your disposal.

While both novels are thoughtful and well written, Lullaby is the better of the two in that it examines how we've come to live in a world where words have lost much of their power. ¦The Mantra is full of fascinating details about Buddhism, in particular the use of meditation in this religious tradition, but it becomes tedious at times. The detailed attention paid to Rudi's mental torment and subsequent spiritual journey doesn't combine well with the largish body count, and the potentially interesting story line is lost in numbingly long descriptions of the protagonist's journey through Russia and Tibet where he encounters mountains, goats, snow, and, egads, yak butter.

The deadly culling song at the heart of Lullaby is particularly ironic set in the modern American landscape of sounds so numerous as to render all words meaningless.¦ Walking down the street necessarily means "someone's always spraying the air with their mood," as music thumps from passing car stereos. Even sitting in your own apartment is no guarantee of protection from other people's vapid and jarring background noise. These sounds aren't the spontaneous noises of daily human interaction, but instead, canned, predictable sounds calculated to transform the listener from being an active participant his/her own life, dull as it might seem, to a passive voyeur of someone else's unreal adventures. The television laugh tracks that penetrate thin walls aren't the spontaneous outburst of a live studio audience, but instead, the recycled guffaws and chuckles originally recorded in the 1950s from people now long dead. ¦This state of affairs makes the human race particularly vulnerable to the culling song, which can kill whether or not the listener is paying attention.

Palahniuk's four main characters who all seek to control the culling song, all provide commentary on this brave new world which is itself ripe for culling. Reporter Carl Streator writes features stories that don't cause people to question the world around them so much as they provide infotainment. His search for the source of the culling song puts him in contact with real estate agent Helen Boyle, someone whose bread and butter is exploiting the modern world's disbelief in things that can't be explained by science.¦ She specializes in selling haunted houses to unsuspecting buyers who very shortly become extremely motivated sellers when the invisible spirits in their new homes aggressively suggest that they should get out. Helen's secretary and her boyfriend meanwhile take out ads in newspapers across the country soliciting plaintiffs for spurious lawsuits against providers of consumer goods and services that have allegedly caused seemingly impossible injuries: A chain of clothing stores goods might have harbored genital herpes transmitted to unsuspecting customers trying on outfits. A sushi restaurant is purported to have given its customers intestinal parasites, resulting in rectal itching. An expensive salon allegedly gave facials that caused severe bleeding and scaring. The point of these ads isn't to get people to sue, but rather to get them to doubt the safety and wholesomeness of consumer culture itself, which is ultimately responsible for diminishing the power of words in our world.

Much like Radyshevsky's mantra, the culling song can profoundly reshape the world. But this reshaping won't so much reinvent geography as it has the power to transform popular culture as we know it: "Imagine a world where people shun the television, the radio, movies, the Internet, magazines and newspapers. People have to wear earplugs the way they wear condoms and rubber gloves.¦ . . . Imagine a plague you catch through your ears . . . This new death, this plague, can come from anywhere. A song. An overhead announcement. A news bulletin. A sermon. A street musician. You can catch death from the telemarketer. A teacher. An Internet file. A birthday card. A fortune cookie."

The droning soundtrack of modern life is itself some sort of sinister mantra that discourages introspection and connection with others. People need to hear the constant reassurance of television and radio in the background because the alternative, silence, threatens to make self-examination inevitable.¦ The lullaby can ultimately cause people to stop tuning into this sinister "mantra," the one that gives people the illusion of community as they are increasingly isolated and compartmentalized by modern life, making them realize just how truly alone they really are and how the consumer goods they've worked so hard to acquire cannot fill this void.

Lullaby succeeds where The Mantra fails in that like any truly frightening monster, the culling song can't be stopped.¦ After all, people are much more likely to remember, and then use, the words to a simple lullaby then they are the random tonalities of a Buddhist mantra.

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