Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club



Introduction

Fight Club has received a fair amount of critical attention by analysts of popular culture, who have noticed and Chuck Palahniuk's novels obvious relevance to issues of gender and masculinity. The majority of these interpretations of the book have examined Fight Club as an ode to the crisis of traditional conceptions of manhood in the post-industrial society, or as a crypto-reactionary response against the disempowerment of men in the late capitalist situation(Urban pp. 268-335).

This line of analysis zeroes in on the “structural feminization” of the traditional (working class) masculine figure as men become part of the contemporary service society and its attendant consumerist machine. From this point of view the book's unabashed glorification of violence and concomitant exaltation of virile resistance to pain and punishment as an ultimate value are seen as a desperate attempt to re-conquer a space and recuperate an activity that is purely masculine, that is, as masculinity is traditionally conceived, and premised on the radical exclusion of women. The book is in this manner interpreted as a portrayal of an essentialist gender-coded rebellion against the effeminizing and emasculating influences of the culture industry and attendant advertising complex, and the white-collar pencil-pushing rut of modern bureaucratic labor. This reading is bolstered by the fact that images of literally feminized men abound in the book.

The primary example in this regard is anchored by the tragic- comic portrayal of the character Robert “Bob” Paulson who, endowed with “bitch tits” and literally deprived of his testicles (he suffers from testicular cancer and has enlarged breasts due to chemotherapy) goes during the course of the book from over-sensitive cry-baby to hard-nosed soldier/martyr. His death towards the end of the book can be interpreted as a displaced symbolic effacement of what Paulson represents: the sensitive “new man” that was made so much of in the mid 1990s; one deprived of “his substance” and who is consequently nothing but a soft, effeminized and castrated version of the traditional working class “breadwinner” archetype inherited from the 1950s.

In this sense, Paulson's character is nothing but a parody of the “touchy-feely” version of the new masculinity, endowed with ability to cry and express his feelings, and even to serve as an odd quasi-maternal presence in Jack's (the focal character and voice-over narrator throughout the book) life, as in the support group scene in which we see Paulson embrace Jack while he seems to almost fall asleep nestled in his bosom. While this attention to the gendered context and content of the book does in fact capture a large portion of the relevance that Fight Club has for the contemporary situation, a closer reading suggests that this exclusive attention to the gendered and (homo)sexual dynamics present in the book may obscure as much as they reveal(Lee 418-423).

Discussion

From the Protestant Ethic to the Psychedelic Bazaar One of the key insights to be gleaned from Contradictions concerns Bell's analysis of the fate of the old ethic of discipline and restraint ...