Violence and Masculinity: Fight Club - Essay Example

?Violence and Masculinity: Fight Club. Introduction. The debut novel Fight Club (Palahniuk, 1996) relates the experiences of a man who starts out suffering from insomnia and sets out on a long journey of self-discovery as he tries to come to terms with this devastating affliction. At first the reader is drawn along by the convincing and at times very dramatic dialog but over the course of the novel a very interesting dynamic develops between the narrator and character known as Tyler. Nothing is quite what it seems, and the gradual drift of the main character into a nightmare of violence and strange mental states makes for very gripping, and at times disturbing reading. One of the key points that the book makes is that the main character is somehow incomplete until he finds some sort of group identity. He attends self-help groups for sufferers of cancer, and fakes illness himself, in order to belong to the group. This is not normal behaviour. Through the mysterious character Tyler Durden he participates in the setting up of a semi-secret “Fight Club” where otherwise normal and well-adjusted men fight beat each other with bare fists. The message of the book appears to be that men in modern Western societies are unable to function well unless they indulge in an extreme and violent kind of male bonding. The book has a kind of ultra-male cult following and this raises some interesting questions about masculinity and violence in contemporary Western societies. Gender theory and masculinity. From the middle of the twentieth century there has been a gradual redefining of what it means to be a man in modern western societies. Instead of a straightjacket of male and female roles, fixed by biology and rigidly maintained in a patriarchal social order, there is a more nuanced and flexible social order. Feminism and a drift away from conservative values have eroded old certainties. (Kimmel, 1997, p. 261) People act on the principle that gender is socially constructed, and draw upon a wider range of strategies to define themselves in day to day life. For many people the loosening of gender boundaries has been liberating but for the characters in this book, there is a dark side to modern pluralist society. The narrator in Fight Club perceives that the stereotypes of the strong and dominant male are no longer required, and the book shows how many men struggle with the need to adjust to this situation. The novel presents a number of artificial mechanisms for dealing with this. One mechanism is mimicry of the ideal sensitive male role, which the narrator manages to do in the support groups, and another is the manufactured battle between men for heroic status and the self-respect that comes from the old notions of duelling opponents. The fight club is a retrograde step, and the men who belong to it know that they must creep into the venue quietly and above all remain silent about what happens there, lest this last piece of their dying culture be removed from them. It is a form of resistance: “Fight Club is structured to rescue men of honor from the dishonorable offices to which contemporary American culture has relegated them.” (Boon, 2003, p. 270) The motivation is ultimately nostalgia for a past that is disappearing. Violence and Masculinity: inevitable or open to change? It is clear that there is something unusual and disturbing about the first person narrator in Fight Club. A clue to this is in the scene with Bob where he experiences at second hand the tragedy that Bob has suffered in having testicular cancer: “Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash.” (Palahniuk, 1996, p. 17) The narrator knows that his presence at the group is based on lies, that his grief is not authentic, and that he does not deserve the kindness of the men he meets there, but nevertheless the faked emotion that he expresses is an outlet of his own despair. He sees no hope for himself, or for others: “On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero.” (Palahniuk, 1996, p. 17) The narrator recounts later that he cries when he is being beaten. (Palahniuk, 1996, p. 201) Ironically, it is victimhood that brings forth the cathartic tears, and a desire for death, and this just goes to prove the fallacy of the book’s fundamental proposition that violence and mayhem are essential components of masculinity. To read this into the novel is to mistake its purpose. The narrator’s nihilistic perspective is clearly ironic, and modern readers can deduce from the opening pages that the story is not going to have a happy ending. It is not a blueprint for young American males to follow, and if anything it is a warning against the adoption of semi-organized violence as an expression of manhood. The moral implications of the book are deliberately scary. In more than one way the narrator abuses Bob, first by feeding on his genuine emotions, and a second time by leading him to his violent death via the Fight Club. The book shows a caricature of masculinity, in which latent tendencies are brought to their logical conclusion, with all the attendant disasters that are bound to follow. It is to be read as satire, and readers sense that the main character is out of control, and in need of help rather than adulation. Fight Club: a certain type of masculinity. The Tyler Durden character is a cryptic figure that the reader does not quite know how to interpret. As it becomes increasingly obvious that he is the narrator’s alter ego the reader can see that the tensions in the narrative are in fact the tensions within a certain type of man’s head. The narrator, and by implication the reader also, cannot navigate in a world where he is expected to be strong and at the same time refrain from violence. The Fight Club is a construct that releases this tension and brings back the old training grounds of patriarchy where men hone their skills of self-confidence, and the ability to physically and mentally dominate others. The fiction of the fight club is an explanation for the fact that America is full of men who beat each other up: “Every bar I walk into, every fucking bar, I see beat-up guys.” (Palahniuk, 1996, p. 156) It could be said that the notion of the Fight Club is just a metaphor for the normal socialization of working class white American men who cannot adapt to the materialist “new man” ideal of modern society. Critics have been swift to point out the echoes in this novel of older genres like Gothic horror, and parallels with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein character are made. (Tuss, 2004, p. 95) In the postmodern world of Fight Club it is not the power of the arrogant scientist that creates the monster, but the “negative impact and alienation from the culture of the 1990s.” (Tuss, 2004, p. 96) The prevailing ideology is that of “alienated and angry white men” (Tuss, 2004, p. 97) who find themselves increasingly marginalized in a society where women are advancing into more and more traditionally male areas, and men are forced into roles that they find uncomfortable or demeaning. The purity of aggression and violence are therefore a release for these men from the burden of having to conform to a value system that they instinctively reject. Intensity of emotion, whether grief or anger, is the only thing that these men can relate to with any sense of purpose. An interesting feature of the novel is that it lends itself to cinematic adaptation and appeals to a wide range of people, including women and non-working class men as well as the demographic group that features in the fight club venues. The narrator shows considerable awareness of social and political issues, describing the illnesses of poor people at a run-down clinic in graphic detail and commenting: “This is where you end up if you don’t’ have health insurance.” (Palahniuk, 1996, p. 108) The book appears to suggest that American society is sick, and that the consequences for women and children, lacking the support and protection of strong men, will be disastrous. It also illustrates that there are many systems at work to produce a character like the narrator of Fight Club, including social, cultural, biological, personality and economic. (Bowker, 1998, p. 3) Conclusion The novel Fight Club blends fact and fantasy and this gives it great power to provoke thought and debate. The surface narrative can be read as a celebration of violence, and a manifesto for the violent young man who just wants to destroy everything in his path out of resentment at his own inability to gain power and prestige. Repeatedly the narrator says “Everything is falling apart” and backs this up with the line “I know this because Tyler knows this.” (Palahniuk, 1996, 112 etc.) By the end of the novel it is clear that the narrator is deluded, and this negates all of the previous arguments. The book becomes a warning against too easy a linkage of masculinity and violence and the author implicitly invites the reader to reflect on the text with this message in mind. References Boon, Kevin Alexander. “Men and nostalgia for Violence: culture and culpability in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club.” Journal of Men’s Studies 11 (3) (2003), pp. 267-276. Bowker, Lee H. (Ed.). Masculinities and Violence. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998. Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: The Free Press, 1997. Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club: A Novel. New York: W.H. Norton, 1996. Tuss, A. “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), pp. 93-102. Available online at: http://michael-miller.wiki.uml.edu/file/view/Masculine+Identity-Ripley%26Fight+Club.pdf Read More