Masculinity, Consumerism, and Workplace Culture in Chuck Pulahniuk's Fight Club
Ben Parsons
Abstract:
In this essay, I explore the question of whether or not Pulahniuk's concern with masculinity is subordinate to his concerns with workplace culture and consumerism. I see these three concepts as something of a triad, and that the altered, post-industrial 21st-century workplace paradigm has become inherently demasculised, if not feminised. I argue that the unnamed narrator's alter-ego, Tyler Durden, is a rejection of this paradigm, and his creation is an attempt to reassert that lost masculinity. As a footnote, I see Tyler Durden as something of a modern-day take on Herman Melville's classic Bartleby, the Scrivener
In this essay, I explore the question of whether or not Pulahniuk's concern with masculinity is subordinate to his concerns with workplace culture and consumerism. I see these three concepts as something of a triad, and that the altered, post-industrial 21st-century workplace paradigm has become inherently demasculised, if not feminised. I argue that the unnamed narrator's alter-ego, Tyler Durden, is a rejection of this paradigm, and his creation is an attempt to reassert that lost masculinity. As a footnote, I see Tyler Durden as something of a modern-day take on Herman Melville's classic Bartleby, the Scrivener
Introduction
Chuck Pulahniuk’s Fight Club paints a bleak and dystopian picture of today’s corporatised, post-industrial society where traditional jobs in mining and manufacturing have been replaced by office jobs in sectors such as finance, insurance, legal and real estate. Men who would have earned their living through blood, sweat and tears wielding an axe or sledgehammer now wield a briefcase. They have traded the greased overalls and hardhats for pristine white shirts and black ties, and sit in spotless office cubicles performing emasculating, menial tasks such as copying legal manuscripts or, in the case of Fight Club’s narrator protagonist, calculating the cost-effectiveness of a product recall on motor vehicles. Fight Club’s protagonist and unnamed narrator is one of these men: fed up with the gradual erosion of his manhood at the hands of the post-industrial, feminised corporate world, he creates his alter-ego, Tyler Durden, and together they set about reasserting their manhood through first the creation of an underground ‘fight club,’ and later a full-fledged counter-corporatism insurgency called ‘Project Mayhem.’ In Fight Club, this reassertion of manhood cannot be considered subordinate to workplace culture and consumerism: it is clear that workplace culture and consumerism are responsible for the perceived loss of manhood, and therefore the two share equal concern. However, the novel seems to suggest that reasserting that manhood through violence remains a poor option.
The Narrator as Inhuman, Feminised, "Everyman"
In recent times, the definition of ‘manhood’ and ‘masculinity’ have changed significantly and many men, particularly the ‘white, straight male’ such as Fight Club’s narrator, are struggling with their identity in a feminist, post-industrial society. Various civil rights movements in the late 20th century such as feminism and racial reform had the effect of removing the straight, white male from his position of power in society, profoundly changing the way these men are not only perceived, but how they perceive themselves (Boon 1). According to Boon (1), this power loss means that men have clinged to masculine behaviours and traditions such as aggression privately, yet at the same time rejected them publicly, resulting in a complex, skewed identity. The narrator-Tyler persona in Fight Club is one of these men, and his existential identity crisis causes his unhappiness, his insomnia, and eventually the appearance of his alter-ego Tyler who becomes an outlet for that aggression.
The unnamed narrator leads a dehumanised existence where he is reduced to both abstractions and objects, such as the mathematical formula he uses at work, or the consumer products he buys for his home. By withholding his name, Pulahniuk reduces him to an identity-less, dehumanised ‘everyman,’ or the archetypal “American male at the end of the 20th Century” (Boon 1). Further, the non-linear plot adds a sense of confusion and distortion for the reader, and the final scene’s placement at the beginning of the narrative serves to confer a sense of inevitability and inescapability from this paradigm: there is seemingly no way for the boxed in narrator to escape his ‘everyman’ identity. His corporate job as a recall campaign coordinator for a motor vehicle company requires him to perform the typical ‘everyman’ role of travelling endlessly and pointlessly around the country attending meetings his boss refuses to (Pukahniuk 330), in order to decide whether a safety fault in a vehicle warrants a full recall by inhumanly balancing the cost of the recall against the potential cost of a lawsuit in the event of loss of life:
It’s simple arithmetic. It’s a story problem. If a new car… burns with everyone trapped inside, does my company initiate a recall? You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), the multiply the result by the average cost of an out of court settlement (C) . A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don’t initiate a recall. If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt. If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don’t recall. (330-45, my emphases)
Wherever the narrator goes, “[he’ll] be there to apply the formula” (329) and foreseeably any individual could attend the meeting and perform that role, and a machine would arguably perform it more efficiently. The narrator does not simply apply the formula: the formula dictates his decisions, he is objectified by it, his role is defined by it, and he inevitably becomes it. The narrator’s banal existence is not only a result of his workplace situation: his personal life and slavish addiction to consumer products contribute to his disillusionment. His condominium is described as a “sort of filing cabinet for widows and young professionals” which he fills with useless consumer products:
You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes, The rug. Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you. (557, my emphases)
Like the mathematical formula, the narrator does not own these items: he is consumed by them as he gains more of them, is defined by them, and therefore becomes them.
The narrator in Fight Club lives not only a dehumanised existence but an emasculated, feminine one, and he continually attempts his escape. When staying at hotels, he laments the “tiny soap, tiny shampoos, single serving butter, tiny mouthwash and a single-use toothbrush” (Pulahniak 303), Freudian symbols that represent small, emasculated, feminine objects he is forced to use, eroding his masculinity. When on the plane, even his “Alice in Wonderland legs” (303) are feminised, and despite his large, manly shoulders, he is again forced into a small, feminine space with his feet touching other passengers’ feet, almost as if he is flirting with them. He is forced to eat a small, feminine meal and even perform the traditionally feminine task of preparing it: “Dinner arrives, a miniature do-it-yourself Chicken Cordon Bleu hobby kit, sort of a put-it together project to keep you busy” (303). In a desperate attempt to escape the tiny, feminine world, the narrator attends a support group for men survivors of testicular cancer, ‘Remaining Men Together.’ Other members of the group are facing the same, in cases more serious problem of emasculation, especially Bob, who “cries because six months ago, his testicles were removed. Then hormone support therapy. Bob has tits because his testosterone ratio is too high. Raise the testosterone level too much, your body ups the estrogen to seek a balance” (120). The narrator and other members of the support group are literally feminised men walking around without testicles, and even in spite of their attempts to reassert their manhood, they fail and in the case of Bob, become even more feminine.
The unnamed narrator leads a dehumanised existence where he is reduced to both abstractions and objects, such as the mathematical formula he uses at work, or the consumer products he buys for his home. By withholding his name, Pulahniuk reduces him to an identity-less, dehumanised ‘everyman,’ or the archetypal “American male at the end of the 20th Century” (Boon 1). Further, the non-linear plot adds a sense of confusion and distortion for the reader, and the final scene’s placement at the beginning of the narrative serves to confer a sense of inevitability and inescapability from this paradigm: there is seemingly no way for the boxed in narrator to escape his ‘everyman’ identity. His corporate job as a recall campaign coordinator for a motor vehicle company requires him to perform the typical ‘everyman’ role of travelling endlessly and pointlessly around the country attending meetings his boss refuses to (Pukahniuk 330), in order to decide whether a safety fault in a vehicle warrants a full recall by inhumanly balancing the cost of the recall against the potential cost of a lawsuit in the event of loss of life:
It’s simple arithmetic. It’s a story problem. If a new car… burns with everyone trapped inside, does my company initiate a recall? You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), the multiply the result by the average cost of an out of court settlement (C) . A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don’t initiate a recall. If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt. If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don’t recall. (330-45, my emphases)
Wherever the narrator goes, “[he’ll] be there to apply the formula” (329) and foreseeably any individual could attend the meeting and perform that role, and a machine would arguably perform it more efficiently. The narrator does not simply apply the formula: the formula dictates his decisions, he is objectified by it, his role is defined by it, and he inevitably becomes it. The narrator’s banal existence is not only a result of his workplace situation: his personal life and slavish addiction to consumer products contribute to his disillusionment. His condominium is described as a “sort of filing cabinet for widows and young professionals” which he fills with useless consumer products:
You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes, The rug. Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you. (557, my emphases)
Like the mathematical formula, the narrator does not own these items: he is consumed by them as he gains more of them, is defined by them, and therefore becomes them.
The narrator in Fight Club lives not only a dehumanised existence but an emasculated, feminine one, and he continually attempts his escape. When staying at hotels, he laments the “tiny soap, tiny shampoos, single serving butter, tiny mouthwash and a single-use toothbrush” (Pulahniak 303), Freudian symbols that represent small, emasculated, feminine objects he is forced to use, eroding his masculinity. When on the plane, even his “Alice in Wonderland legs” (303) are feminised, and despite his large, manly shoulders, he is again forced into a small, feminine space with his feet touching other passengers’ feet, almost as if he is flirting with them. He is forced to eat a small, feminine meal and even perform the traditionally feminine task of preparing it: “Dinner arrives, a miniature do-it-yourself Chicken Cordon Bleu hobby kit, sort of a put-it together project to keep you busy” (303). In a desperate attempt to escape the tiny, feminine world, the narrator attends a support group for men survivors of testicular cancer, ‘Remaining Men Together.’ Other members of the group are facing the same, in cases more serious problem of emasculation, especially Bob, who “cries because six months ago, his testicles were removed. Then hormone support therapy. Bob has tits because his testosterone ratio is too high. Raise the testosterone level too much, your body ups the estrogen to seek a balance” (120). The narrator and other members of the support group are literally feminised men walking around without testicles, and even in spite of their attempts to reassert their manhood, they fail and in the case of Bob, become even more feminine.
Tyler Durden and the Reclamation of Masculinity
Unable to reassert his manhood through support groups, the narrator creates his alter-ego, Tyler Durden, who allows him to shed the superficial “red tie with blue stripes… [and] blue tie with red stripes” (347), withdraw from post-industrial, feminist corporate world and thus regress to an industrial, pre-feminist state where his lost manhood is regained. The narrator claims he first met Tyler at a “nude beach” (Pulahniuk 359), representing the natural state of man free from the superficial, corporate etiquette of ties and business shirts. Here, Tyler is the pure, industrial, masculine, and yet ironically animalistic man: “naked and sweating, gritty with sand, his hair wet and stringy, hanging in his face” (359). As opposed to performing dehumanising, banal, office tasks such as attending pointless meetings and regurgitating rote mathematical formulae, the manly and industrious Tyler goes to work “pulling driftwood logs out of the surf and dragging them up the beach… he’d already planted a half circle of logs so they stood a few inches apart and as tall as his eyes” (359). After proudly creating his log structure, the Tyler-narrator persona finds peace, and sits Buddha-like in “the palm of a perfection he’d created himself” (389). Tyler’s manual labour work and subsequent satisfaction symbolise his break free from his emasculating, post-industrial, feminist, corporate prison into a natural, industrial, pre-feminist, masculine state.
With the masculine Tyler now unleashed, the Tyler-narrator persona sets about freeing other men from the post-industrial, feminist prison, and they do this first by establishing underground fighting clubs throughout the country. When a man enters a fight club, he “is not who [he is] in the real world” (635): “a kid who works in a copy center… who can’t remember to three-hole punch an order or put colored coloured slip sheets between the copy packets” joins fight club and “becomes a god for ten minutes when you saw him kick the the air out of an account representative” (635). Fight club turns its participants from soft, feminised, depressed “thirty-year-old boy[s]” into real, industrial men who again feel alive and masculated:
You aren’t alive anywhere like you’re alive at fight club. When it’s you and one other guy under that one light in the middle of all those watching… You see a guy come to fight club for the first time, and his ass is a loaf of white bread. You see this same guy here six months later, and he looks carved out of wood. This guy trusts himself to handle anything. There’s grunting and noise at fight club like at the gym, but fight club isn’t about looking good. There’s hysterical shouting in tongues like at church, and when you wake up Sunday afternoon you feel saved. (676-89, my emphases)
Fight club allows its participants to escape the post-industrial, corporate, feminist world where they are simply white dough, and regress to where they are again hardened, real, masculated men.
With the masculine Tyler now unleashed, the Tyler-narrator persona sets about freeing other men from the post-industrial, feminist prison, and they do this first by establishing underground fighting clubs throughout the country. When a man enters a fight club, he “is not who [he is] in the real world” (635): “a kid who works in a copy center… who can’t remember to three-hole punch an order or put colored coloured slip sheets between the copy packets” joins fight club and “becomes a god for ten minutes when you saw him kick the the air out of an account representative” (635). Fight club turns its participants from soft, feminised, depressed “thirty-year-old boy[s]” into real, industrial men who again feel alive and masculated:
You aren’t alive anywhere like you’re alive at fight club. When it’s you and one other guy under that one light in the middle of all those watching… You see a guy come to fight club for the first time, and his ass is a loaf of white bread. You see this same guy here six months later, and he looks carved out of wood. This guy trusts himself to handle anything. There’s grunting and noise at fight club like at the gym, but fight club isn’t about looking good. There’s hysterical shouting in tongues like at church, and when you wake up Sunday afternoon you feel saved. (676-89, my emphases)
Fight club allows its participants to escape the post-industrial, corporate, feminist world where they are simply white dough, and regress to where they are again hardened, real, masculated men.
Project Mayhem & Bartleby: Smashing the Corporate, Feminist, Post-industrial Paradigm
Fight club alone, however, does not give Tyler and his crew the satisfaction they need: unable to rescue every man to fight club, they “move on to something bigger” (1738) and invent ‘Project Mayhem,’ a communist, anti-industrial, quasi-apocalyptic movement that aims to bring about “the complete and rightaway destruction of civilisation” (1738). ‘Destroying civilisation’ is most probably a metaphor for smashing the corporate, feminist, post-industrial paradigm, thereby freeing the men Tyler perceives to be enslaved by it and teaching them they “had the power to control history … [and] take control of the world” (1724). Seeing that the hierarchical, corporate class system perpetuates man’s post-industrial, feminist imprisonment, Tyler sets out on what is now a quasi-Marxist mission to “redistribute the wealth of the world” (2196), and reorganises fight club to remove all hierarchy and semblance of a class structure. The only extant ‘leaders’ are the individuals performing the industrial ‘work’ which according to the rules, everybody must do: “nobody should be the center of fight club… nobody’s the center of fight club except the two men fighting” (2058). Fight club is now the Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat, and the men fighting are the proletarians, free from their corporate, feminist overlords and apparently answerable to no one.
While the reassertion of masculinity in Fight Club is not subordinate to its concern with workplace culture and consumerism and the two remain equal, the novel seems to suggest violence is a poor way of attempting that reassertion. Over a century ago, Herman Melville authored the short story, Bartleby the Scrivener, whose protagonist, like Tyler, responds to a dehumanising workplace situation. Like Tyler, Bartleby is forced to perform mundane, tedious and dehumanising tasks, in this case performing the “perfectly reasonable... [and] according to common usage and common sense” (Melville 11 – 14) task of reproducing ad nauseam copies of legal manuscripts. Instead of creating the violent Project Mayhem as a response, Bartleby simply replies “I would prefer not to” (10). Ironically, his preference for non-violent resistance is branded as “violently unreasonable” by his manager, when it could be argued the reverse is true. Notwithstanding, Bartleby’s resistance ends up being arguably more successful, or at the very least, less unsuccessful: despite his death, there are no other casualties, and he seems to actually make a difference to his manager’s perspective at the end of the novel with his lament, "Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!" (39). Despite its ambiguous ending, Fight Club’s narrator ends up unequivocally worse off than Bartleby: most probably dead, or at least critically maimed and injured, anything but ‘masculine’, most of his group dead, and virtually no dent made in the post-industrial, corporate, feminist regime.
While the reassertion of masculinity in Fight Club is not subordinate to its concern with workplace culture and consumerism and the two remain equal, the novel seems to suggest violence is a poor way of attempting that reassertion. Over a century ago, Herman Melville authored the short story, Bartleby the Scrivener, whose protagonist, like Tyler, responds to a dehumanising workplace situation. Like Tyler, Bartleby is forced to perform mundane, tedious and dehumanising tasks, in this case performing the “perfectly reasonable... [and] according to common usage and common sense” (Melville 11 – 14) task of reproducing ad nauseam copies of legal manuscripts. Instead of creating the violent Project Mayhem as a response, Bartleby simply replies “I would prefer not to” (10). Ironically, his preference for non-violent resistance is branded as “violently unreasonable” by his manager, when it could be argued the reverse is true. Notwithstanding, Bartleby’s resistance ends up being arguably more successful, or at the very least, less unsuccessful: despite his death, there are no other casualties, and he seems to actually make a difference to his manager’s perspective at the end of the novel with his lament, "Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!" (39). Despite its ambiguous ending, Fight Club’s narrator ends up unequivocally worse off than Bartleby: most probably dead, or at least critically maimed and injured, anything but ‘masculine’, most of his group dead, and virtually no dent made in the post-industrial, corporate, feminist regime.
Conclusion
The world presented in Fight Club is that of a post-industrial, feminist, corporate dystopia in which men such as the Tyler-narrator persona are forced to ritually perform emasculating and dehumanising tasks in order to survive. As a response to this, the Tyler-narrator persona attempts to regress to an industrial, masculised, pre-feminist utopia where lost masculinity is regained through underground fighting clubs and eventually an anti-industrial, masculist, quasi-Marxist movement that aims to smash the corporate paradigm that supports the post-industrial, feminist, corporate dystopia. Therefore, the reassertion of masculinity exists only in response to workplace culture and consumerism, and these relationships are equal. The novel wrongly suggests, however, that violence is the only response to a dehumanising situation. The reassertion of masculinity and the concern with workplace culture and consumerism are both valid concerns but can be better addressed without the use of violence, as in the case of Bartleby, the Scrivener.
Works Cited
Boon, Kevin. "Men and Nostalgia for Violence: Culture and Culpability in Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club." The Journal of Men's Studies 11.3 (2003): 267-76. Print.
Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Selected Writings of Herman Melville: Complete Short Stories, Typee, Billy Budd, Foretopman. New York: Modern Library, 1952. Print.
Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. London: Vintage, 1996. Print.
Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Selected Writings of Herman Melville: Complete Short Stories, Typee, Billy Budd, Foretopman. New York: Modern Library, 1952. Print.
Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. London: Vintage, 1996. Print.
