A Year in Fight Club

“With a gun stuck in your mouth and the barrel of the gun between your teeth, you can only talk in vowels.” (Palahniuk 13)

Fight club is one of my favorite books. It weaves together the modern problem of masculinity and femininity. It’s like reading brilliance in simplicity. I don’t even think Palahniuk consciously understood what he was writing. The deep unconscious stuff all coming together, and the author is the vessel by which the stuff flows out of, this is the essence of brilliance, not a negation of it.

When I tell people it’s my favorite book, they usually tell me they have seen the movie. Brad Pitt is so hot. Is that the one where the guys just beat the shit out of each other? I roll my eyes, and think don’t get me started. Years ago, when I first read it, I used to talk about it all the time. I talked about it so much, my best friend read it just so she could keep up with what the hell I was referencing.

One of Carl Jung’s basic premise in terms of theory of the self, is that we are born with all the potential one could ever fathom. Then we start living. Then we run up against ideology, culture, our parents, and so on. We are told what we can and cannot be. We are programed to think in certain ways. As a result, parts of our self or soul split off. Parts dissociate and we stuff them as far as we can into the unconscious, so we don’t have to think about them. Jung says to live, is to integrate these parts over the course of one’s lifetime.

Dissociation happens with gender, with gifts, and with all kinds of parts. The shadow parts then linger in our unconscious mind, haunting us in our dreams and in waking life but we can’t quite grasp an understanding of them without doing the work.

The narrator reaches a critical point where his unconscious either needs to be recognized or the narrator will die. So, to save himself, Tyler is created. But this is also sets him on a course to his own destruction or salvation.

The book starts off at the end of the story and works backwards.

The narrator is hum drumming along in life, working at a soul-less job. He reads consumption magazines on the toilet, like they are pornography. His life reaches a fever pitch and creates Tyler. Before Tyler the narrator is passive, accepting life as is. The narrator is a fucked-up version of femininity, just as Tyler is a fucked-up version of masculinity. And instead of being yin and yang, the two are in a power struggle, just like modern -inities.

Three pages into the book has the narrator with a gun in his mouth, he’s trying to kill Tyler but not himself. Not himself or so he thinks.

“You can only talk in vowels.”

Self-violence, this desire to kill parts of ourselves we don’t like, or we think are bad puts us in a state of only uttering sounds babies make. These are simple, the building blocks. We are unable to articulate, to string complex ideas or words together because we stunt ourselves. We think violence to and at these parts is the answer. But we also know it’s a desperate cry.

It’s a long shot because we could easily blow our own brains out in the process. Still, the struggle ensues.

Instead of trying to kill these bad or shadow parts, we need to love the shit out of them. Love them into integration. We need to hold compassion. We need to thank them for protection. After all, they split off for the sake of survival. This process of love starts with little steps, like acknowledgment.