My Animosity For Palahniuk's Fight Club

Palahniuk is a 21st century writer and a conundrum. Don’t try to compare Palahniuk to Dan Brown to a fan of Palahniuk; they might attack you with any nearby pointy object.

Yet, seeing as how I am not currently in the vicinity of any Palahniuk fan, I can easily make the comparison. Palahniuk and Dan Brown are authors that I think epitomize the 21st century novel.

The 21st century novel is a novel that could not have existed in any preceding epoch; and so it is with Palahniuk’s novels.

Palahniuk could not have met major success without the movie that was based on his novel, “Fight Club.” I don’t say this to diminish the value of the author, I say this to explain his success: Palahniuk writes in such a way that he’s treating the mind like a cinema. Fight Club was always meant to be a movie, and a clever one at that.

This style evolved out of the 20th century popular novelists and was directly successful in relation to new media formations, where the media formations of television, film, and eventually the Internet. When Stephen King write The Shining, and then was influenced in his writing by the Kubrick film The Shining, I think is actually probably one of the defining moments of this transformation. The alienation an author experiences when he sees his own work translated by another artist provoked the transformation, with visible results:

The novelist in the 21st century treats the novel more like a screenplay. Just as Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” involves a script that cannot handle improvisation, where the dialogue’s intended effect is so interwoven with the very staging of the play, so is it that Palahniuk’s novel assumes the imagination of the jump cut, the flash frame. He interweaves flashback so prominently, and the stream of consciousness is so interwoven with discontinuities in space and time, that you almost get the impression that he is writing a novel because he did not have the technical skill and charisma to direct a feature film.

It’s unsurprising that so many modern novelists lack a critical appraisal by the academic field. Palahniuk tries to understand his own success and fails. Palahniuk thinks that his novel succeeds because it introduces a new means of social interaction. Modes of human interaction is necessary to any novel; that Palahniuk thinks his novel is revolutionary or successful because of this only demonstrates a modicum of ignorance.

Palahniuk is successful because his text is flashy. “Losing all hope was freedom,” the narrator says on page 22. The reader doesn’t really understand this, and yet they do; it seems to imply a deeper meaning yet the text does not—and can not—explore the deeper richness of what it might mean. It does not because to do so would be to break the flashy narrative. It can not because the sentiment is nonsensical bullshit.

Calling Palahniuk’s text bullshit isn’t really a jab. Another element (hardly the essence, but an element) of Palahniuk’s success is his humor. “Never, ever say the dildo accidentally turned itself on,” says the airport security task force guy on page 42. He’s the airport security task force guy because no one, narrator, author, nor audience, cares about the identity of this guy. He’s a Palahniuk character, thus meaning that as soon as you get him alone all he wants to do is tell you his dirty secret about sexual activity. Very hush hush.

“Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you,” comes the narrator on page 44, in probably the second most memorable line from the book (short of, of course, the ten rules of fight club itself). It’s memorable and poetic sounding because it has a resonance of Marxism but with a spin; a new commodity fetishism now directed toward the hipster IKEA shoppers of the 21st century. Of course this, as is every other sentiment in the novel, is never complicated, never explored. To do so would be to jeopardize the poverty of the novel, which is essential to its appeal. It is never complicated because if it were taken analogically, to reflect the actions that Tyler et al. perform in the rest of the novel, then they would realize how superficial either this sentiment is, or how superficial their lives are even after the protagonist’s apartment blows up. If it is true, that the things you own eventually own you, then what of the kiss-scar that Tyler demands his people apply to their bodies? What of the rules of fight club? What of the soap?

The novel takes this sense as true, and that is why the novel as much as anything is about Tyler owning the people around him. The novel’s main selling point, the real appeal (the real appeal that Palahniuk has incredible difficulty reproducing in his other works), is the illusion, the dream, the boy’s fantasy of owning the people around you—of being the boss, of wearing the pants (after all—no shirts, no shoes in fight club. Only pants.) Of being the big man in a place for men.

The reason the narrator cannot accept that he himself is Tyler is not because of the superficiality of a neural disease, but instead the superficiality of his own cowardice. The novel’s progress it the same as the progress of the protagonist in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. It is a buildingsroman of a young man trying to overcome his own cowardice; the main point being the overcoming of a desire for a superficial display of courage (such as a red wound/badge—exactly what the narrator spends so much time focusing when he discusses that wounded lip). The reason the novel and movie are successful (aside from Edward Norton and Brad Pitt… ahem) is not because of the rules (which Palahniuk admits were the driving force for the narrative), but because of the destruction of those rules. The appeal in the rising action of the novel is Palahniuk’s selling of a world where such a set of rules could possibly exist; that is the appeal. The resolution is the destruction of those rules, the point where something deeper might be experienced. Where maturity and courage might emerge.

On the other hand, this is disconnected from what the clever reader takes out of the text. The clever reader takes out the metaphorical landscape of the novel, which is the analogical framework presented whereby the everyday landscape of the protagonist’s world mirror and refract the metaphysical landscape of their emotions. This is the line by line, page by page work that has allowed Palahniuk to develop such a devoted fanbase online, and the real essence of what makes him a successful artist, and not just a complete hack.

When the narrator says, “I know, I know, a house full of condiments and no real food” on page 45, Palahniuk teaches the reader to understand the soul of the individual as based on the contents of their refrigerator. That is a line that helps to take the edge off the $14 cover price for a 217 page book that begins on page 11 and includes an afterward in the page count.

“My dad, he starts a new family in a new town about every six years. This isn’t so much like a family as it’s like he sets up a franchise,” says the narrator on page 50. Once again, the analogical landscape is further expanded by the adjusting of the simile in the second sentence.

But the real drive of the novel will always be its flashiness. “The night before last, Tyler sat up alone, splicing sex organs into Snow White.” Palahniuk doesn’t dare explain Snow White. This is a skillful use of the namedrop, because one doesn’t even have to have an awareness of Snow White, or have seen the movie—so long as the audience has some idea that Snow White is a children’s movie where sexual organs are unacceptable, the humor comes through. Yet, there is an even greater appreciation for it if the audience has seen Snow White—as Palahniuk almost certainly expects his audience to have—because, once again, in the movie the cackle is so much more pronounced if you can actually imagine a little kid in a movie theater watching Snow White at the wishing well, only for there to be a momentary flash of an engorged penis. The audience of the movie begins to cry, not knowing why. The audience of the novel laughs, being in on the joke.

As an aside, let me apologize for leaving the lengthy notes on Snow White up in the post below; just try to ignore them until I can convert them into some sort of coherent thoughts.