Novel Module 8 : Fight
Club
You've been raised on television to believe we'll all be millionaires
and movie gods and rock stars--but we won't.
"A good man is hard to write: Hemingway-tough or Fitzgerald-sensitive?
Today's novelists scramble for a masculinity that doesn't seem fake."
Jonathan Miles. Salon. Dec. 2, 1999 | An interesting, thought-provoking
essay. Here are some excerpts relevant to our class discussions on Fight
Club:
"The Stuff"
In the June/July 1999 issue of Men's Journal
, under the rubric "MJ's Annals of Masculinity," a cartoon . . . shows
four species of American man -- oldster, aging hipster, square-jawed broker-type
and a short toothy fellow who I must assume is intended to represent my own
generation, which, for pesky want of an acceptable sobriquet, we'll call
20-something. The cartoon reads, "A Generational Thing," and above each specimen
of man floats a thought balloon: "the war," muses our oldster; "the drugs,"
our ponytailed hipster; "the bucks," our '80s-ish broker; and, finally, from
our youngster, "the stuff."
It's an interesting, if not very funny, cartoon.
I'm curious, for one, about what delineates "stuff" from "bucks," besides
the obvious: bucks is money, and stuff is ... stuff. Maybe cartoonist Mueller
means gadgetry, snowboards, pet robots, things of that ilk; I don't know.
But my suspicion is that he's alluding to the blasé sense of lazy
excess that has enveloped my generation throughout the '90s -- the blithe
and not entirely incorrect assumption that anything and everything is for
sale (literally, but mostly figuratively, I mean).
Quotes from Chuck Palahniuk:
On Identity as an American Theme
"I think that the central, most American literary theme is the invention
of self. We see it in Henry James's Bostonians; we see it in
The Great Gatsby; we see it in Breakfast at Tiffany's. People
who move to the city from the country and reinvent themselves, or move to
the frontier and reinvent themselves. It's the poor person becoming the
rich person. You know, the nobody becoming the celebrity. It's such an American
genre, this whole idea of reinventing and creating your self based on your
dream, or how you perceive yourself to be, or not to be, whatever. And I've
always seen that as the most American literary device or literary theme,
so I really wanted to play with that.
"Maybe it's only at this point that I've become comfortable with who
I am, so that theme no longer appeals to me. Plus, four books based on
that! Fight Club is based on what you are not; Invisible Monsters
was based on recreating yourself based on fashion and fantasy; Survivor
was based on creating yourself in the face of immortality; and Choke
was based on creating yourself out of a purpose, out of something that you
stake your life on, that you commit to. So they're all about creating identity.
But it's time to get past that."
--from "Author Interviews at Powells.com"
O: Like all your books, it has a character who's constructed
a new identity for himself. Why are manufactured identities and identity
crises such a strong touchstone for you?
CP: Maybe in a way because I don't perceive that we have a lot
of rituals for establishing adulthood in our society. It seems for me that
it's been about the impulse to rush out and buy a lot of stuff so I feel
like a grownup, or commit to a relationship at age 17 so I feel like a
grownup. It's about trying to, in a way, arbitrarily complete myself with
a rite of passage, because there is no rite of passage that says, "Okay,
now you're an adult." That idea of identity is always an issue for me. Personal
identity seems like it's just such an American archetype, from Holly Golightly
re-inventing herself in Breakfast At Tiffany's to Jay Gatsby in
The Great Gatsby . . . . If you're given the freedom to be
anything, or be anyone, what do you do with it? --
from Onion Interview with Palahniuk November 13, 2002