The Individual Against Self and Society Through Chuck Palahniuk's ...

The Individual Against Self and Society Through Chuck Palahniuk‟s Fight Club Colleen Ortegón

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In his debut novel, Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk succeeds in creating an all too plausible dark side to our everyday world; one in which the office mail-room clerk or the waiter who serves you lunch could be, and probably is, privy to a plot to break up civilization. The heart of this novel, though, has little to do with such grandiose schemes, instead revolving around one man‟s attempt to extricate himself from the meaningless life in which he has found himself trapped. When the reader meets the nameless narrator of Fight Club, the man has the barrel of a gun in his mouth. This is the culmination of the narrator‟s attempt to attain a sense of self-empowerment and independence from the forces which had heretofore shaped his life. In his quest the narrator has revolted against both the consumer society which had previously dictated the array of commodities he must own in order to be „fulfilled‟ and the job which has forced him to reduce his fellow human beings to nothing more than numbers in an equation. The narrator‟s rebellion against being “too complete” and “too perfect” according to the standards dictated by society, however, initiated itself with little conscious decision (Palahniuk 173). The themes of class struggle, anti-consumerism, and alienation which are prevalent in this work ensure that Fight Club lends itself to a Marxist reading. This first-person narrative accomplishes more, though, than simply depicting a member of the working class revolting against the repressive capitalist society to which he

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belongs, instead employing Marxist themes to explore humankind‟s struggle and desire for an ideal self. Though the division and classification of literary works into genres is, in itself, possible to debate in terms of Marxist criticism, as is discussed in Raymond Williams‟ 1977 Marxism and Literature (182-85), Fight Club as a work seems to best fit into that category of Marxist reading called the strike novel. Characterized by the temporary or partial breakdown of capitalism, novels of this genre are meant to call an irresistible attention to class. In Fight Club in particular, the reader can gain a sense of the beginning experience of solidarity between workers which is fostered by, while not particularly a strike in this instance, the „fight club‟ itself as well as Project Mayhem, the club‟s secondary incarnation. This solidarity has been described as “a foretaste of the experience of classlessness” (Markels 53). The novel Fight Club, while not specifically a novel of a strike, is a work depicting the stirrings of „revolution‟ (as defined by Gajo Petrović in his article “Philosophy and Revolution: Twenty Sheaves of Questions”) as, in attempting to resolve his own inner conflicts with the constraints capitalist society has placed on him, the narrator finds other men who have the same desires he does, but need more external prompting to realize their dissatisfaction with their way of life. Petrović argues that, for Marx, praxis (the philosophy of which conceives humans as “free creative beings who shape [themselves] and [their] world through [their]

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activities” (245)) achieves its highest form in the act of revolution. The “radical negation of the self-alienated society and person” accomplished through revolution, Petrović further contends, culminates in the establishment of a “truly human community composed of free human beings” (246). This consideration of Marx‟s philosophy of revolution comes to the conclusion that “the true revolution would radically change people and society, creating a new, higher mode of Being” (Petrović 247). Of the three principal Marxist themes previously mentioned – class struggle, anti-consumerism, and alienation – class is the least clear and most needs to be experienced through a process of abstractions and a leap of imagination (Markels 109). Marx explained class in economic terms, stating that the source of class conflict came from the fact that one class owned the means of production, while the other owned nothing but labor power to be sold to the former as a necessary means of survival (Day 6). Thus, in literature, Marxism establishes itself as an ideal which makes it possible to imagine and explore the freedom promised by the abolition of class (Markels 12). Fight Club accomplishes this through its narrator and his rejection of the stilted life he leads in which days are differentiated only by the colors of the tie his fellow employee wears (Palahniuk 96). Overtime, however, class grew to be increasingly perceived in cultural, rather than economic, terms. The depiction of the relationship between the

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individual and society, which had been a major theme of the nineteenth-century novel, has since morphed into the depiction of the relationship between the individual and his/ her class; specifically the individual‟s struggle to escape from the class to which he/she belongs (Day 185). The main reason for this shift of emphasis was the decline of the manufacturing industry and the growth of the service economy. As this change blurred the old class boundary between manual and non-manual labor, the measurement of class according to occupation became more complicated than before. As such, other factors, such as social attitudes, cultural aspirations and lifestyle, had to be taken into account. The development of the consumer society further dissolved traditional links between class and culture by “appropriating elements associated with different groups and combining them into a commodified form” (Day 188). This commodification can be seen through the narrator‟s, a member of the working class, exposition of the contents of his condo, among which are “hand-blown green class dishes . . . crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous aboriginal peoples of wherever” (Palahniuk 41). Like the evidence of the commodification of culture in Fight Club, there is also apparent the “socially created „need‟ to „behave properly,‟ to „show respect,‟ to be a dutiful daughter‟, a „providing‟ husband and father, or a „good mother‟” (Leonard 44). In describing the course his life has taken, the narrator speaks of following his father‟s instructions: “My father never went to college so it was real

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important I go” (Palahniuk 50). Similar to the previously mentioned commodification of culture and certain aspects thereof, this “internalized repression upon which societies are based” becomes difficult to combat due to its embedded presence in the daily activities and rituals of both individual and family life in the working class (Leonard 44). The instinctual repression required of capitalist production, moreover, has particularly detrimental effects upon the individual. In direct relation to his or her class position, the capitalist division of labor leads to a division of the individual. The separation of labor power from the worker, which is then transformed into an object for sale in return for wages, has been the focus of an argument concerning castration anxiety as a „mental representation.‟ Wage labor can be seen as „castrating‟ in that it alienates the worker from both himself/herself and the work which he/she has produced (Leonard 59). The new consumerism has affected traditional working class sensibility by focusing on the individual struggle against the “extensive and sometimes harsh pressure to conform” that has been imposed on the members of the working class by the class itself (Day 184-85). Where earlier in capitalist development, emphasis was placed on the “necessity for accumulation and delayed gratification,” in late capitalism both consumption as well as production took on the trappings of determining or representing some aspects of individual personality. Thus, the

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results of “the lifelong compulsion to perform wage labour” become unnoticed due to the “‟perverted capitalistic pleasure principle‟ of a totally unfettered mania for buying” (Leonard 62). Resistance on the part of the working class, consequently, seems to disappear entirely when faced with the impetus towards “compulsive consumption” (Leonard 62). In late capitalism this same “re-moulding” of the working class personality and ideology away from the aforementioned tendencies towards accumulation and retention and instead in the direction of a member of the working class who is a compulsive buyer, becomes prevalent. The “highly variable commodity fetishest” becomes one such account of compulsive consumption meant to satisfy the manufactured false „needs‟ of the working class (Leonard 63). As consumption is mediated by wage, it becomes difficult to identify the form of consumption that distinguishes the dominant from the dominated. Consumption does, however, have the power to serve as a basis for making distinctions. Though it has become common to translate „upkeep‟ into its monetary equivalent, in so doing the crucial distinction between a wage and “retribution in kind” has been abolished (Delphy 261). This difference is at the heart of the difference between “self-selected and forced consumption” (Delphy 261). In the face of the capitalist encouragement of the working class to compulsively consume, though, „forced consumption‟ begins to include even those commodities

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which might have previously been considered „self-selected.‟ When seeing the narrator‟s life as it was in the beginning of his retrospective tale, the inclination towards this compulsive consumption of manufactured goods is easily identifiable. The need to consume, and in doing so identify oneself by the products which one owns, is a noticeable ideology in the consumerist world to which the narrator belongs. The ultimate futility of such a system, however, is apparent in that, although all individuals are identified with what they consume in different ways, they are equal in that they are still on all counts identified with the general. In quoting Marx‟s declaration that “in capitalist society, „culture . . . is a mere training to act as a machine,‟” Day in his work Class notes that this is reinforced by the fact that the differences between one consumer good and another “classify „individuals‟ but also confer on them a „psuedo individuality‟” (192-93). These differences, meant to make the consumer appear unique, in fact emphasizes only that they are “mere variations of the „totality‟” (Day 192-93). Thus, such an industry meant to sell culture through products can be said to take the apparent “value of individualism” from middle class ideology as well as the “value of the group” from the ideology of the working class and in doing so abolish any tension between the two so that “each becomes a mirror of the other” (Day 192-93). Because in the manner of exchange this „culture industry‟ replaces what is individual with what is

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general, it represents the triumph of the bourgeoisie over the lower classes of the modern day proletariat (Day 192-93). The generalization of culture and suppression of individuality accomplished by the combination of both the culture industry as described by Day and Leonard and the repression and separation of the worker from his labor‟s product as discussed by Leonard, when combined can be seen to take on certain aspects of Marx‟s concept of alienation. In Marx, the concept of alienation was an exceptionally complex one. Human beings are viewed as alienated from four things, these are first, nature; second, themselves (as the process of labor offers no satisfaction beyond the act of selling it to someone else); third, their “speciesbeing,” “that is, their essential „humanness‟ in having created the social world, but experiencing it as something separate”; and fourth, other people, who, as all are alienated beings, “experience each other as estranged” (Leonard 78-9). This alienation is evidenced in Fight Club through the narrator‟s struggle to connect with other human beings on a meaningful level and to express a level of emotion which had, until the artificial freedom found in his ventures to support groups, been repressed and impairing his ability to sleep. In integrating these ideas, those of class struggle, anti-consumerism, and alienation, with the primary text Fight Club, the continued consideration of these themes may allow a deeper look into the narrator‟s struggle against the dictates of

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his society and his ultimate triumph over the ideologies which had been ingrained in him. The novel approaches the narrator‟s tale in a retrospective manner, beginning seconds from the climax of the story. In what he believes might be the final moments of his life, the narrator ostensibly thinks back on the circumstances which have brought him to this impasse in which he is being held hostage by his own alter-ego, the projection of his desire to break free from his “routine and inconsequential life,” who has culminated into this destructive individual (Hock Soon Ng 116). The narrator at the beginning of his story is adrift his compartmentalized life with no real connections to other human beings and “with nothing more to guide him than the catalogues that prescribe for him the socially acceptable accoutrements for his filing cabinet high-rise” (Tuss 99-100). The narrator‟s rebellion against the world in which he is contained begins without his conscious decision. This rebellion takes place against a world that rather crassly “supplies him with the externals for life,” while “ignoring the values and conscience needed for a young man to grow up and succeed” (Tuss 100). These „externals for life‟ are soon destroyed, however, by “a bomb, a big bomb” (Palahniuk 43). The narrator‟s fixation with the commodities prescribed for him is readily apparent when, upon discovering the destruction of his condo, he lovingly details every aspect of what had been within. This description begins with

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his “coffee tables in the shape of a lime green yin and an orange yang” and goes on to his “sofa group with the orange slip covers,” “armchair with the Strinne green stripe pattern,” and his refrigerator with “shelves full of different mustards . . . fatfree salad dressing . . . and seven kinds of capers” (Palahniuk 43-5). At the same time as this takes place, however, the narrator also reveals his own sense of helplessness against his “nesting instinct,” commencing his descriptions of his striped armchair and “environmentally friendly” paper lamps with the declaration “[w]e all have the same . . .” (Palahniuk 43). The exhaustive depiction of the narrator‟s destroyed possessions concludes with the ominous statement that “the things you used to own, now they own you” (Palahniuk 44). This instance in which the narrator reveals to the reader his seeming drive to consume, is the first sense the reader gets of the narrator‟s feeling of insignificance which appears to be “intimately tied to his role as modern consumer and producer” (Jordan 372). Similar to this feeling of insignificance is the narrator‟s sense of isolation, evidenced by his willingness to allow others to believe anything they want about him in order to feel connected to other human beings: “Bob loves me because he thinks my testicles were removed, too” (Palahniuk 17). This impression of “monotonous isolation is reinforced by the consumer items he buys,” which are blatantly shown to “standardize rather than individualize him” (Jordan 373) even though he has “wrapp[ed] his identity in his acquisitions (Boon) .

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The narrator‟s desire to escape from his prevailing sense of isolation and the things that own him is brought to the fore as a consequence of his ruined condo. It is immediately after this incident that he realizes the beginning of his potential freedom, the statement of his possessions owning him is almost instantly followed with “[u]ntil I got home from the airport,” (at which time he discovered the destruction) (Palahniuk 44). Shortly thereafter the narrator turns to Tyler, the charismatic and ostensibly free individual who embodies everything the narrator wishes he could be, explicitly requesting deliverance: “Oh, Tyler, please rescue me” (Palahniuk 46). After the destruction of his high-rise condo, which was filled with the “assorted trappings of capitalist comfort” (Boon), the narrator moves in with the enigmatic Tyler Durden. The rescue Tyler provides stands a stark contrast to the lifestyle to which the narrator was previously accustomed, as implied by his condominium and the brief mention of his Audi. Tyler‟s house on Paper Street is described in as much detail as had been used previously to describe the narrator‟s destroyed possessions. An amalgam of wood that shrinks and swells when it rains, nails that “inch out and rust,” and “stacks of the National Geographic and Reader’s Digest . . . that get taller every time it rain[ed],” the house stands as a monument of opulent decay, also containing “a cedar-lined, refrigerated fur closet,” “tile in the bathroom . . . painted with little flowers nicer than most

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everybody‟s wedding china,” and “stained glass windows” (Palahniuk 57). Surviving in the house on Paper Street, where “you don‟t dare turn on the lights” when it rains, is only the beginning of the narrator‟s radical rejection of the consumerist world, however (Palahniuk 57). The invention of Fight Club by both the narrator and Tyler has been described as a further result of the dehumanization of the capitalist practices against which they are fighting. The narrator and Tyler “turn to violence precisely because they find it humanizing rather than dehumanizing” (Bennet 69). Begun as a fight against, as explained by Tyler “everything [the narrator] hate[d] in [his] life” (Palahniuk 167), Fight Club became the initiating force behind Tyler‟s Project Mayhem. The first fight having been between Tyler and the narrator, the club soon spreads to attract many of the disillusioned men either character encountered. The men who are attracted to Tyler and the narrator‟s creation are just as lost and discontent with their lives in capitalist society as the narrator himself. A nameless mechanic who has been embroiled in first the club and later in Tyler‟s Project Mayhem describes himself and his fellows as “a class of young men and women [who] want to give their lives to something” but who “don‟t have a great war in [their] generation, or a great depression, but [who] do have . . . a great war of the spirit” (Palahniuk 149). First through Fight Club and later through Project Mayhem the men who follow Tyler come into a sense of empowerment, even

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going so far as to “[i]magine . . . a strike [where] everyone refuses to work until [they] redistribute the wealth of the world” (Palahniuk 149). As the novel progresses, not only the (mostly) nameless men of Fight Club and Project Mayhem acquire a growth of character, but the reader can also see the narrator‟s further realization of the repression advanced by the capitalists who control industry. While in the beginning of the work the narrator is obviously discontent with his job and the practices with which he must comply, the reader never gains a sense of the narrator‟s true work environment until much later in the novel when the workplace is described in the repetitive “everything is . . . floor-toceiling glass . . . everything is vertical blinds . . . everything is industrial low-pile gray carpet . . . everything is a maze of cubicles boxed in with fences of upholstered plywood” (Palahniuk 137-38). This monotonous tone, which conveys the hopelessness of the capitalist practices, is only outstripped by the imagery called up by the further description of the “tombstone monuments where the PCs plug into the network” (Palahniuk 137). This environment coupled with the narrator‟s title as a “recall campaign coordinator for an insurance company,” the narrator‟s “complain[ts] about how his job requires him to reduce human life to mere mechanical „formula[s],‟ „simple arithmetic,‟ and „story problem[s]‟ (Bennet 73) give the reader a stark picture of what the narrator‟s everyday life had been before the rebellion exercised through the Fight Club.

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When Fight Club morphs from only an outlet for relieving the stresses of alienation and compulsive consumerism, into Project Mayhem, Tyler Durden “starts his „great revolution against the culture,‟” which is also “a rebellion against the commodification of life and health,” (Casado de Rocha 110-11). Though the “aim of Project Mayhem . . . is to foster a sense of individual power” (Jordan 374), Tyler, who up until this point in the novel has been the model of the freedom from constraint which the narrator has coveted, begins to change into, instead of the great inspirational leader who declared that “nobody should be the center of fight club . . . except the two men fighting,” (Palahniuk 142), a man who, as the narrator sees it, “dumped” him, just as his father “dumped” him (Palahniuk 134). Though Fight Club “endlessly circles around issues of individual freedom,” and “attempts to peel back the many facades of our postmodern consumer society” (Bennet 71-75), Tyler Durden, is still, ultimately, “the prototypical little man resisting the corporate realities of the consumerism of the late twentieth century” (Tuss 101). As such, it is not surprising that when “he is ‟to everybody . . . Tyler Durden the Great and Powerful . . . God and Father,‟” (Hock Soon Ng 116), the ideals which had made him desire the equality of all have led to a pseudodespotism. As he first refers to “his colleagues in Project Mayhem as „spacemonkeys,‟” the reader can first almost believe that such a title is meant to evoke

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the first step in a world changing venture, but eventually Tyler‟s dictatorship “reveal[s] them still to be slaves” (Casado de Rocha 110-11). Tyler, created to bring about a cathartic outlet in which the narrator was not a passive participant, as he had been in both his occupation as a recall coordinator and in the support groups in which he would say little and still receive the benefit of the emotional release provided by the dying, in the end becomes one more force with which the narrator must contend. In discussing the men embroiled in the Project Mayhem project with the narrator, Tyler instructs: “‟Don‟t bother them. They all know what to do . . . No one guy understands the whole plan, but each guy is trained to do one simple task perfectly‟” (Palahniuk 130). Tyler has, in turn, become that which he was created to rebel against. His statement on the tasks each man has been trained to perform is almost word for word a description of the alienation which capitalism has fostered and which drew Tyler‟s followers to him in the first place. This act of perpetuating the cycle of capitalism‟s alienation and castration of the worker on Tyler‟s part can be seen as the beginning of the narrator‟s disillusionment with what Tyler and his rebellion have come to be. The narrator ultimately achieves autonomy from both his alter-ego, as evidenced by his will triumphing over Tyler‟s when his mixture of nitroglycerin and paraffin fails to explode, and the consumer driven capitalist culture to which he belonged, evidenced by his ultimate withdrawal from both mainstream society

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and the underground society which he helped to foster. The conclusion to the narrator‟s struggle is described a place in a mental institution he calls heaven. Whether the narrator has been driven to true madness or has simply risen above the demands placed upon him to find refuge and solace apart from all society is a matter for debate. Ultimately, regardless of the narrator‟s leadership, the forces Durden unleashes in the novel continue to work their way toward the destruction of the world that so minimizes Tyler Durden and those like him (Tuss 101).

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Works Cited Bennet, Robert. “The Death of Sisyphus: Existentialist Literature and the Cultural Logic of Chuck Palahniuk‟s Fight Club.” Stirrings Still 2.2 (2005): 65-80. Freely Accessible Arts & Humanities Journals. Web. 10 October 2009. Boon, Kevin Alexander. “Men and Nostalgia for Violence: Culture and Culpability in Chuck Palahniuk‟s Fight Club.” The Journal of Men’s Studies 11.3 (2003): 267-76. Gale. Web. 21 November 2009. Casado de Rocha, Antonio. “Disease and Community in Chuck Palahniuk‟s Early Fiction.” Stirrings Still 2.2 (2005): 105-15. Freely Accessible Arts & Humanities Journals. Web. 10 October 2009. Day, Gary. Class. London: Routledge, 2001. Print. Delphy, Christine. “Patriarchy, Domestic Mode of Production, Gender, and Class.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Urbana: U Illinois P, 1988. 259-67. Print. Hock Soon Ng, Andrew. “Muscular Existentialism in Chuck Palahniuk‟s Fight Club.” Stirrings Still 2.2 (2005): 116-138. Freely Accessible Arts & Humanities Journals. Web. 10 October 2009. Jordan, Matt. “Marxism, Not Manhood: Accommodation and Impasse in Seamus

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Heaney's Beowulf and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club.” Men and Masculinities 4.4 (2002): 368-379. Electronic Collections Online. Web. 10 October 2009. Leonard, Peter. Personality and Ideology: Towards a Materialist Understanding of the Individual. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1984. Print. Markels, Julian. The Marxian Imagination: Representing Class in Literature. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003. Print. Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: Norton & Co., 1996. Print. Petrović, Gajo. “Philosophy and Revolution: Twenty Sheaves of Questions.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Urbana: U Illinois P, 1988. 235-48. Print. Tuss, Alex. “Masculine Identity and Success: A Critical Analysis of Patricia Highsmith‟s The Talented Mr. Ripley and Chuck Palahniuk‟s Fight Club.” Journal of Men’s Studies 12.2 (2004): 93-102. Academic Search Complete. Web. 8 October 2009. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.