Eng 199 :: Reading Response Five

First, feminism. There is plenty to be said about the idea of a fight club exclusively for men, and the fact that in Palahniuk’s book men feel the need to fight back against the emasculation forced upon them by “excessive feminism.” Which is a bit of an oxymoron in terminology anyways – ‘force’ and ‘feminism’, considering that being forceful is not a typical trait assigned to women in most cultures.

But let’s begin by examining the few female characters available to us, Marla and Chloe. The interesting thing about Marla, and Chloe to some degree, is that they are two of the characters which we get the most physical description about. On page 18, the narrator describes Marla for us – “Short matte black hair, big eyes the way they are in Japanese animation, skim milk thin, buttermilk sallow in her dress with a wallpaper pattern of roses…” Again, on pg. 36 the narrator talks about her “black hair and pillowy French lips…Italian dark leather sofa lips.” Why is it that Marla gets so much attention devoted to her looks, more so than any other character in this novel? Because we have the propagation that women are defined by their appearance. Neither the narrator nor Tyler appear to really like Marla at first, but it is not difficult for us to believe that they would sleep with her because she is initially created as a sensual character. In juxtaposition to this we have Chloe, a woman who seems to garner a great deal of respect from the narrator, perhaps a genuine degree of affection, and yet she cannot be seen as an individual worth initiating a relationship with simply because of her appearance. pg 20 “Our Chloe, however, is a skeleton dipped in yellow wax.”

Another interesting aspect to the construction of Marla’s character is the repeated mention of her wearing dresses. On pg 18 we hear about her wallpaper patterned dress, pg 67 she describes her bridesmaid dress, on pg 93 there is distinct mention of her Indiaprint skirt. Granted, some women still prefer to wear dresses but in today’s times it is far less common without a religious or cultural motivation. Why does Palahniuk feel the need to paint such a stereotypical picture of a modern woman?

Even with all her other hang-ups about life and society, Marla cannot seem to escape the obsession with youth and beauty that is pushed upon women in society today. She remarks on pg 91 that she is keeping the collagen from her mother in case of old age, the fear that it will rob her of her “Paris lips.” Also Marla and her mother relate best through the context of beauty – hence the continuous gifts of collagen from Marla’s mother, and that the only real contact they seem to engage in, via telegram, is appropriated by Tyler to read “Hideously Wrinkled – Please Help” (pg 89) which her mother finds nothing strange about.

Interestingly, although the men in Fight Club say that they are reclaiming their masculinity from an effeminate society that has robbed them, a society that has reduced gender roles to cookie-cutter dimensions, the narrator creates a character like Tyler. Confrontational, engaging in relationships purely for sexual motivation, the culturally-accepted stereotype of what it means to be a ‘man’ – merely bouncing from one preconceived notion to another.At the point in the book where we may imagine that Marla began to fight back against Tyler, to revolt against his imposed rules upon her of asking no questions and asserting herself after witnessing his commit a murder, Tyler reacts in a very stereotypically masculine way as well. On pg 195 – “‘You can suck shit’ Marla says and pushes her punched-out black eye at me. ’Just because you and your little disciples like getting beat up, you touch me ever again, and you’re dead.’” His inability to deal with a woman that doesn’t fit his ideal of obedience results in her physical punishment.

In regards to lesbian/gay theory, this story is ripe with innuendo that can be plucked out. Perhaps the biggest is the idea of moving into a home with a man you met on a nude beach – definitely not typical behavior. For many men, they would never even initiate a conversation with another man if he were naked while in a public place where women could also be. Perhaps it would be more acceptable in a locker room or gym, but not in a public area. 

Also, the branding of the disciples themselves. Earlier I talk about how much emphasis is given to Marla and her lips. This is carried out with the narrator and Tyler as well. Tylerbrands the narrator with a kiss, a burn that shows up as “swollen red and glossy as a pair of lips.” (pgs 77, 85) The purpose of lipstick for a woman is to draw attention to the lips, because swollen, red lips are a physiological sign of sexual arousal. What does this say that the narrator describes his brand as such, or that Tyler chooses such a means to mark his disciples instead of something more benign? 

Eng 199 :: Reading Response Four

In regards to how a Liberal Humanist would interpret Fight Club:

     First, tenet number one of the LH : The timeless significance of a piece of literature. If we assume that a text should speak to what is constant in human nature we have a perfect example in Fight Club. The driving forces of this story are emotions and concepts that are found throughout the spectrum of human existence: love, leadership, culture, history, violence, gender identities. Although the scope of the elements may vary from person to person, from society to society, they exist in one form or another. The questions posed by the narrator regarding family, obligations and duty to society, the roles of men and women and how they relate to each other, what it means to be a man or a woman, none of these are new themes or questions. These have been argued and struggled with since the earliest stories of man, in the dramas and epics of the Greeks, the Sumerians, the Anglo-Saxons, the first chapters of the Bible. The dichotomy of man, the struggle of the base against the elevated, the war within us to subdue what is bestial for the existence of culture is at the heart of all our conflicts. In this way, you can extract the basic elements of Fight Club from their rinds of culture and they would be no different than those first discussed by Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripides.

      Tied to this is the second tenet, that understanding of a work can be achieved through close reading, without the need to search outside of itself. If you were able to show this book to a room of ancient Greek philosophers, they may not be able to grasp the small details of what a film projectionist is, or what a car is, but the basic themes and elements would be easily identifiable and conveyed. The war of classes, emotions, the structure of authority and the individual, these are all things that even an ancient Aztecan would be able to understand, regardless of the context. The text is not so heavily ensconced in its culture that it would be able to be transposed into any setting or time and still have relevancy.

     Obviously Fight Club has no issues with tenet six, that a work must enhance life and propagate human values. The success of the story, and the move to film, have both shown that it speaks to people and entertains us effectively. And in a strange twisted way it does propagate human values. Although Tyler begins the story with lofty goals of things we would see as anti-value, all he ends up doing at the end is to highlight how important those things are to us as humans. A sense of self, the formation of meaningful connections with other people, reverence for life. Fight Club does its best to propagate human values by showing us where we are going wrong right now, so that we may have an opportunity to fix the problems that plague our society. This goes just as far to motivate us to the greater good as any fluffy story of heroics or after-school specials ever could.

      In Fight Club, Palahniuk shows wonderful adherence to the seventh and eighth tenets of LH, that form and content must serve each other and that literature should above all be sincere and free of cliche. Palahniuk seems to exemplify everything great about Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’, in that he takes the concept of showing and not telling to its extreme. So much of the emotion in this story is conveyed through action. While the narrative voice and first-person perspective rob the reader of some of the necessity to draw their own conclusions, most of the key plot and story points are left to the reader to deduce. This does not mean that Palahniuk necessarily leaves things open to debate, or leaves them horribly ambiguous. What he does is to set a stage and then, instead of giving the audience floodlights, puts us in charge of the spotlight and deciding what to highlight. At the same time, Palahniuk uses structure and the form of his novel to convey a specific set of emotions. The choppy sentencing, repetitive phrasing, all of these serve to convey emotions in ways as effective as any explicit description could.

     In another note not tied to a tenet, Palahniuk also adheres directly to Keats’ ‘negative capability’, the allowing of space for the silent workings of the mind and the unconscious. This story is as much a fantasy as anything else, and requires a certain degree of the suspension of disbelief for it to work. Do most of us honestly think that there are things like underground Fight Clubs and homegrown terrorists? To some degree yes, but on a conscious level we probably don’t. We continue to live our lives almost exactly as we did 10, 15, 30 years ago. Those things exist as bogeymen to us, isolated incidents and shapeless fears that are rooted in our subconscious. By teasing those fears out into the light, by asking us to set aside our illusions of safety in order to illustrate something greater than the everyday, Palahniuk is directly angling for the silent working of the mind.

Eng 199 :: Reading Response 3

Certainly the greatest thing about reading a book with others as opposed to yourself is the discussions that can ensue. I have really enjoyed getting to hear other people’s perspectives on the story, and to see how each reading of the book is influenced by personal experience. Some of us in the class comprehend working in the service industry, others understand the expectations placed on adults in society. I find that this time around I am also fascinated by the relationship in the story. In a strange way, it is a love story as much as it is anything else. The narrator’s life may have continued on in the same way, until he meets Marla and she shakes up his routine. He even states at one point in Chapter 28 “I know why Tyler had occurred. Tyler loved Marla. From the first night I met her, Tyler or some part of me had needed a way to be with Marla.” Of course, what does that say about a man who has become so emasculated that he needs to birth a separate personality in order to be able to pursue a relationship…

Obviously between my original reading and this one I have seen the movie many times, and some details of the movie had overtaken the book. I remembered that the ending in the book was different, but my memory was fuzzy as to exactly how it was different. Although I think the book ending fits a bit better, I did like the movie ending just for the emphasis on Tyler’s vision of the two of them becoming an Adam and Eve for the new society, the two of them alone atop a building surveying the ruination of our culture.

I think that no matter how many times you read a novel, it is always going to be different. Because so much of a book is based on a symbiotic relationship between author and reader, a book will change along with its reader. And as Heraclitus said, ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice.’ We as readers are in constant flux and our perspective is eternally changing, altering the novel along with ourselves.

Eng 199::Reading Response Two

This is the first time I have read Fight Club since having started writing myself, and I can already see how differently I am interpreting it. I notice much more about the style and the techniques used by Palahniuk than I ever did the first time reading it. I find myself more and more curious about the writing process that went into this book as well, and about the circumstances which inspired it. In the interim between my first reading of Fight Club and this one I have seen Chuck Palahmiuk at a few readings, which also serves to shift some of my focus to the author and the writing process as well as the work. He himself is a very charismatic person, and I can see bits of Tyler in him and his ability to inspire admiration.

This is also an interesting read for me because of the difference in myself between the first reading and now. When I first read the book in 1998, just before the movie came out the next year, I was seventeen. If anyone ever doubts the duality of a reader/author relationship, try going back and reading books that you had first picked up as a teenager…when you were smart enough to understand, but didn’t have the life experience to interpret. When I was a teenager, I was entangled in my loathing for authority and interpreted Fight Club almost entirely as a struggle against the powers-that-be. Now that I am much older, Fight Club’s ideas of materialism, gender, and the search for identity ring truer. In some ways I am better able to understand the narrator, because I am him. When I was seventeen, the culture was still whispering to me that I could be a rock star, a movie star, I could be someone. Now that I am 26 I understand the pain and confusion of the narrator when you begin to realize that you have been lied to all along. 

Eng 199 :: Week One Response

Very few children are able to get into trouble for reading too much, but somehow I managed it. Sitting in my windowsill until all hours of the night, reading by the light from my neighbor’s porch as it shone through the hedge in our front yard because I had already had my lamps and flashlights removed for previous nocturnal bibliophilism, I am sure I posed a puzzling picture to my parents. The one upside for them was that there never had to be ugly, drawn-out scenes of childhood rebellion; one threat to remove the book collection in my room and I was quickly reduced to sullen obedience. I was a very fit child, because I regularly missed my bus stop while engrossed in the adventures of Ramona Quimby, Robinson Crusoe, or one of a thousand other characters and often had to walk home from a few stops past my own. Even as an adult with a job, school, and a son I still read around 2-3 books a week, and the collection that weighs down my poor groaning bookshelf numbers in the 300’s. The books have changed over the years, but the motive remains the same; I love stories. I love when an author can engage my sympathy, can make me forget for a moment that the crystallized image of a character in my head is a person that has never existed, and will never exist. I love to imagine the author laboring over their work, and wonder how much of themselves is in the writing. Books are our easiest, and best, shots at immortality.

I cannot claim any particular genre or type of book as favorite, despite having just lauded the abilities of fiction to birth nonexistent people. I do read a lot of fantasy…consider it my literary junk food. Guilty, satisfying, but filled with empty calories. The realm of creative nonfiction has sparked my interest a lot recently, and I have been reading as much of that as I can get my hands on. I try to keep a running list of ‘classics’ in my head, and mark a few of those off a month whenever possible. And there are always my comfort foods…Jane Austen, Chuck Palahniuk, and Daniel Quinn.

As far as the purpose of literature, it should act as a mirror. Literature should reflect the priorities, the qualms, and the issues facing any culture. Especially when dealing with works of history, the only window into the inner workings of a society is through its stories. The archaeologist can tell you the what, the how, the when, and the where. But the why is in the myths, the poems, the novels. It’s in every folktale and campfire story, every poem and penny dreadful. Long after a culture passes on, its rotting cities dessicated by the winds of time, one can find its soul with all aspects of good and evil living on in the literature. If you want to understand the morality of a society, or the problems marring its harmony, read its stories. Dickens will teach you more about Victorian England than the History Channel. Ovid will not show you the cities razed by Romans, but he will tell you why they were moved to imperialism, and how they justified it. Literature motivates, captivates, and titillates us.  Literature shows us the beauty of a culture, and with our analysis we are capable of forcing it to lift its skirts and expose the soft underbelly, satisfying the voyeur within us all.

Some may disagree, or find that only certain ‘classics’ should be deemed literature. Their idea of literature is often pretentious and elitist, and I would beg to differ. Every word recorded has literary value, from the greatest of epic poems to the shaky paragraphs of a child diary, because each of these manage to capture exactly how the world is being interpreted at a single moment in time. These fragments are necessary to form a whole, because history is written by the victor and too often relative, while life is merely syntax.