What the world needs is another blog post about Fight Club. The book by Chuck Palahniuk, not the film by David Fincher, that is. I read the book after I saw the film, so I was 18. Like Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, it defined my teenage years. I was kind of rebellious and these transgressive books of drugs, death and self-destruction keyed into that perfectly. I was an angry young man and the idea of fighting everything that was wrong with society, the dark, glistening glamour of it was exactly what I wanted to hear. These days, I don’t read it like that. Whether that’s because I’m not so angry, or because I’m not so young is up for grabs.
There’s not a whole lot of point to reviewing books like Fight Club. Everyone’s seen the film or read the book and if you haven’t and want to find out if you should, then there’s over 600 reviews on Amazon. So this isn’t a review. If I were writing a review, though, I’d point to Palahniuk’s minimalistic style and the way it condenses a novel into a series of quotable sections. I can flip to a random page and come up with some phrase or paragraph that could be slapped onto a fridge magnet and sold at a profit. Or stuck in a film and endlessly repeated by students on media courses:
Only after disaster can we be resurrected.
“It’s only after you’ve lost everything,” Tyler says, “that you’re free to do anything.”
Another reason that Fight Club hit such a deep nerve with me when I was 18 is that it’s all about growing up, rebelling and rejecting authority. The novel constantly equates fathers, God and authority figures, initially covertly, but eventually explicitly: “If you’re male and Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God.” And the lack of these things, God, fathers and authority figures is the cause of the malaise that leads to the formation of the fight clubs. The men there are “a generation of men raised by women.” The fight clubs, with their vaguely homoerotic grunting and noise and hyper-masculinity are, like the testicular cancer support group the narrator attended, about remaining men together; fighting against a world where men like the narrator have substituted IKEA furniture catalogues for pornography.
The narrator’s problem is that he can’t grow up. Because he has no father, no God and no effective authority figures, he has nothing solid to rebel against to establish his adulthood. Ever since college he makes friends, his friends get married, he loses friends. They grow up and he isn’t able to follow them into adulthood. The closest thing he has to a father is his boss - “sometimes you find your father in your career.” The death of the narrator’s boss is the end of the second act of the novel and the start of the third. The murder of his substitute-father allows him to finally start to progress beyond the angstful rebellion of Tyler.
Tyler is a seductive figure and the narrator’s relationship to him is similar to the way I reacted to the character when I first read the book. Tyler exemplifies outsider masculinity, free from the encumbrances of society. He inspires the men who join the fight clubs and Project Mayhem by sheer coolness.
I love everything about Tyler Durden, his courage and his smarts. His nerve. Tyler is funny and charming and forceful and independent, and men look up to him and expect him to change their world. Tyler is capable and free, and I am not.
But at closer examination, Tyler’s philosophising is empty. Like the advertising that he criticises - “as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says” - he’s selling an image to the guys who follow him. His cobbled-together philosophy, a taped-together conglomeration of nihilism, anarchism, Marxism environmentalism and Zen is self-contradicting dogma. He has guys saying things like. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost heap.” At the same time, Tyler thinks the goal of Project Mayhem is to “teach each man in the project that he had the power to control history. But look at Project Mayhem’s links with Taylorism. Taylor’s ideas about “scientific management” are the key principles behind modern work and led to the assembly-line work of Fordism. It may be significant the the nameless narrator works for an equally nameless automotive company. Compare this extract from Taylor’s 1911 monograph, The Principles of Modern Management to the way that Tyler organises Project Mayhem:
Perhaps the most prominent single element in modern scientific management is the task idea. The work of every workman is fully planned out by the management at least one day in advance, and each man receives in most cases complete written instructions, describing in detail the task which he is to accomplish, as well as the means to be used in doing the work.
Project Mayhem isn’t about achieving anything. It’s about being bad. It’s about acting out: “Unless we get God’s attention, we have no hope of damnation or redemption [...] Only if we’re caught and punished can we be saved.” These are Tyler’s words, and hence they are also the narrator’s. That’s the reason that Tyler exists: To be noticed. The book charts the escalation of the badness, from the initial violence of the fight club, to the “complete and right-away destruction of civilisation” that forms the goal of Project Mayhem.
Eventually, after rejecting Tyler, the narrator finds himself in heaven (AKA a psychiatric hospital) where he meets God (AKA a psychiatrist). The narrator has finally found a way out of his predicament. He’s found his father-figure and is able to respond to him as an adult rather than a child. Rather than the adolescent rebellion that Tyler represented, he is able to disagree. He doesn’t need to be bad to get attention any more - he has God’s attention.
I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God’s got this all wrong.
We are not special.
We are not crap or trash, either.
We just are.
We just are, and what happens just happens.
And that’s how I’ve changed since I was an angry young man of 18 approaching the book for the first time. You realise that Tyler’s an asshole and you grow up.