Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk, represents the rebellion against order facilitated by the threat to masculinity among a specific class of American men. Promoted by violence and the desire to revert back to primal instincts, its members partake in a cultural and primitive form of play theorized by Johan Huizinga. The narrator in Fight Club, unnamed in the book but who the movie refers to as Jack, is a single middle-class white man who, in the absence of a father figure, never pursues the path of traditional manhood. He is an unmarried “30 year old boy,” and in his adult years, fails to find self-fulfillment with superficial material possessions. He becomes “a slave to the IKEA nest egg instinct.” In an attempt to relieve his chronic insomnia, Jack attends various support group meetings. However, the emotional release he discovers by visiting these support groups does not resonate with the primal and traditional views of masculinity. As a result he develops a split personality, Tyler Durden, a hyper-masculine superego bent on replacing the disempowered “generation of men raised by women.” The direction of masculinity in Fight Club towards violence becomes a crucial function to reaffirm the traditional characterization of men in modern society.
Since the earliest human societies, man’s primal impulse to reproduce is one of the most basic instincts for survival. Man evolved assets designed to attract at mate. For instance, large muscles may have signaled a man’s proficiency as a hunter and defender. However, men could not rely on strength alone. To be successful, men also had to show that they were creative and dependable providers, cleaver enough to find food and shelter for their families in hostile environments. Although these physical attributes have little meaning in modern societies, where most people work in offices and buy food at the local grocery store, they still hold a powerful sex appeal, an image that is constantly advertised to consumers to fuel their consumption.
Jack’s emotional emasculation results from the cultural consumerist consumption, as Tyler simply says, “The thing you own end up owning you.” Jack becomes addicted to the social groups as his only means of an intimate emotional release from the pains of feminization. Fight Club stages the fight against corporate consumption as a fight against all that is feminine, in which the idea of individualism is a marketing ploy designed to convince people to buy things like “the clever Njurunda coffee tables in the shape of a lime green yin and an orange yang” in order to express themselves (43). This is the domestication of masculine identity Jack is absorbed in, and the only release of his dissatisfaction is to pretend he is dying at various support groups. The support group for men with testicular cancer, “Remaining Men Together,” allows men to freely confide in each other their fears and humiliation as a result of their testicular cancer. One of the members, Bob, a former body builder who juiced up on steroids, lost his testicles to cancer and developed “bitch-tits” as a result of hormone replacement therapy. After the requisite sharing of stories, it is time to hug; it is a process that is clearly mocked as a feminized approach in therapy for men. Yet the therapy they seek involves the reconciliation of their loss by saying “we’re still men.” Fight Club contains numerous references to castration as the epitome of loss of masculine identity. For example, after Jack’s condo is blown up, Tyler tells him that it could be worse: “A women could cut off your penis while you’re sleeping and throw it out the window of a moving car.” Also, castration is used as a threat to various enemies of Project Mayhem. These men have lost not only their manliness, but also their capacity to reproduce future generations. They have lost a major part of their primal instinct for survival. While Tyler is emotionally emasculate, Bob represents the physical manifestation of emasculation by having his testicles removed. But even Bob with his “bitch-tits” is able to reaffirm his masculinity through the violence of fight club.
Violence is portrayed as a sport in Fight Club. Fight club provides the basic structure for men to vent their aggression with the contempt they find in society around them. In primitive man (as well as other carnivorous animals), it would seem that the primal emotion inciting combat with other fellow humans was the instinct to survive. Generally speaking, since they must eat to live and kill to eat, when they were driven by hunger they had two options: to hunt other animals less mighty then themselves, or combat their own kind by either stealing from them, or in the stress of famine, devouring them for food. While the men in fight club are not fighting to satisfy their desire for food, the warrior mentality of the individuals who participate in the ritual of fight club are engaging in a form of play theorized by Huizinga. Like animals, men participate in play, an action that “is more than a mere physiological phenomenon or a psychological reflex” (Huizinga 1). This basic instinct for survival is fundamental to the simplest forms of play; possibly to satisfy some primal necessity to prove one’s dominance. Huizinga summed up the formal characteristic of play to a “free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious’, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly” (Huizinga 8). Each man is allowed the chance to fight an opponent in a testosterone-fueled bare-knuckled brawl until one becomes limp or yells “Stop!” War in Fight Club is seen as a cultural function. The one-on-one battles are “waged within a sphere whose members regard each other as equals or antagonist[s] with equal rights” (Huizinga 89). This camaraderie allows the members to fight each other so fiercely and remain loyal friends after. The participants are “convinced that the action actualizes and effects a definite beatification, brings about an order of things higher than that in which they customary live” (Huizinga 14). Each fight becomes an endurance of pain, a test of who can last the longest and achieve a heightened state of what it means to be alive. The glorification that comes from this blend of combat and play intertwined to form war as “the most intense, the most energetic form of play and at the same time the most palpable and primitive” (Huizinga 89).
War as a game resonates in fight club the same way that Huizinga proposed: “all fighting is bound by rules of play” (Huizinga 89). The rules of Fight Club adhere to this formal characterization of play, allowing the men to engage in physical contact “within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner” (Huizinga 89). The setting of fight club allows for this form of play to exist. The first two rules of fight club, “You do not talk about fight club,” are designed to encourage all men to follow in the newly established counterculture. Under the illusion of secrecy, fight club existed “only when fight club started and fight club ended.” The basement arena of fight club provides a space, “a playground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally,” where each man has the opportunity to transcend reality and rise above the lifestyle that corporations have cast upon them, essentially saving their masculinity (Huizinga 10). Violence, as play in this setting, “promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world” (Huizinga 46). We can clearly see the regression of masculinity in the all male members of fight club towards violence in a gruesome spectacle of bare-knuckled brutality and stylistic gore, in which fighting becomes more than a ritual, it is the source of their release of inhibitions.
Fight Club becomes a self-destructive method of self-discovery that frees men from emasculation. Each male in fight club turns to violence in an attempt to reawaken the senses. Fight Club turns violence into a traditional notion of masculinity, and enables men to engage in a heterosexual style of brutality and male bonding. It becomes a place where men can experience a true admiration of the now, a sense of being in the present. They are searching for a type of freedom that doesn’t come until one has nothing to lose. “You weren't alive anywhere like you were alive here,” Jack says, because, “who guys are in fight club is not who they are in the real world” (51, 49). Fight club “isn’t about winning or losing fights” or “about looking good” (51). Unlike the commercial image of men, to which Tyler remarks “self-improvement is masturbation”, Jack understands fight club to be a rebirth through violence. He remarks that after fight club “when you wake up Sunday afternoon you felt saved” (51). For the members of fight club “self –improvement isn’t the answer…self-destruction is the answer” (49).
In fact, Jacks manifestation of an alter ego is primarily the result of his desire to escape. Tyler is composed of all the traits he wished he had, “I look like you want to look, I fuck like you want to fuck. I’m smart, capable and most importantly I am free in all the ways you are not.” Tyler often questions Jack’s motives towards a feminized sense of consumerism by asking if it is “essential to our survival in the hunter-gatherer sense of the world.” Tyler wants to revert back to minimalism, which brings up the issue of primal necessities. Unlike Jack who is concerned with material goods and the status they would bring him, Tyler lives on mere necessities. The house he lives in is a basic shelter, and a leaky one at that. He stops watching television and rarely showers. Tyler’s aspiration towards primalism is clearly evident when he describes his vision of the world around him. “In the world I see,” he says, “You are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you'll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.” Tyler’s persuasion for an instinctive primal direction leads to the creation of fight club and eventually Project Mayhem.
Violence in Project Mayhem is used as a tool to attack corporations which hinder grey-collar masculine identity. Through fight club, the practice of minimalism, and the destruction of various aspects of white-collar society, the members of Project Mayhem construct a new identity where they abandon commercialized individuality in favor of their own counterculture. The members of Project Mayhem are told: “You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake.” Rather, “You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.” This theme is constantly repeated in order to escape capitalist society, where image is everything. Tyler instructs that "You are not your bank account. You are not the clothes you wear. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your bowel cancer. You are not your Grande Latte. You are not the car you drive. You are not your fucking khakis.” In addition, Tyler sends each member various homework assignment. For example, one of the assignments was to pick a fight with a stranger, but to lose. The homework assignments Tyler hands out exemplify the crisis portrayed in America and the need for violence as radical change. Jack says that “most people, normal people, do just about anything to avoid a fight.” By using violence against total strangers, the members of Project Mayhem are reaching out and expanding the thrill of violence as a means of redefining masculine identity. Jack also uses self-inflicted violence to blackmail his boss. Ironically the “corporate sponsorship” he received is used to wreak havoc on the rest of corporate society.
The overwhelming spectacle of violence in Fight Club plays a key role in providing the audience with a primal understanding of masculinity. Violence in Fight Club progresses out of Jack’s dissatisfaction with corporate consumption into a massive counterculture army bent on demolition as a means to freedom. It is this physical aggression that serves as the crucial element of male bonding. In terms of Huizinga, fight club as play involves each participant into a state of higher being. Just as each step, from therapy support groups, to the creation of fight club, to the widespread destruction in Project Mayhem, is packaged as an attempt to reestablish masculine identity.
4.14.2008
“Dogfight” in terms of Huizinga: What happens when a game ends?
In “Homo Ludens” Huizinga characterizes play as limited; as an act “played out” in the confines of a specific time and place. He says play has its own course and meaning. “Play begins, and then at a certain moment it is “over”. It plays itself to an end” (9). Unfortunately, Huizinga does not take the player into consideration, who has invested himself in the act of play, which inevitably will end. What then is the player to do? Like a junkie, the player must wait for his next fix; his existence is purposeless until he can resume his game of fancy or find a new game to sink his teeth into.
In Gibson’s “Dogfight”, all the characters experience a “what then?” moment, where the game they play spirals to an end. They are left in a transition period, with one game over and another yet to begin. Huizinga describes each game as “temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart” (10). When a temporary world ends how does it affect the player in the real world?
Deek, the protagonist of “Dogfight” begins the novel in limbo, inhabiting an empty existence until he is introduced to SPADS&FOKKERS, a flight simulator game. Deek hones his skills and refines his program in hopes of defeating the ultimate player, Tiny. When the two finally battle, Deek takes the illegal drug hype in order to maximize his chance at victory. Deek’s dreams of triumph materialize and he narrowly defeats Tiny. However, the means Deek uses to attain success leave him ostracized from everyone he knows. Gibson ends “Dogfight” with, “A starry old night like this called for big talk. But standing there with all of Jackman’s silent and vast and empty around him, he realized suddenly that he had no body left to tell it to. Nobody at all.” (167). Deek is in the same situation as in the beginning of the story; living an isolated, purposeless existence.
What is purpose? “The American Heritage Dictionary” defines purpose as, “an object toward which one strives or for which something exists; an aim or a goal”. This all depends on which perspective the word purpose is looked at from; biological or spiritual? Huizinga would argue that play cannot be looked at soli from a biological perspective, because play is more than merely a biological function. Huizinga asks, ““Why is a huge crowd roused to frenzy by a football match?”” (2). He continues, “This intensity of, and absorption in, play finds no explanation in biological analysis. Yet in this intensity, this absorption, this power of maddening, lies the very essence, the primordial quality of play” (2). To Huizinga play is above biological purpose because a key element of play is fun. Huizinga says, “…the fun of playing, resists all analysis, all logical interpretation” (3).
I agree with Huizinga that play serves more than a biological purpose; I would argue that this purpose is a self-realizing one. A key aspect of play is the capacity to put ones abilities to the test and to discover something about the self in the process. This self realization is the safety net which prevents the player from losing purpose when a game ends. Deek may be physically alone in his moment of victory, but his solitude will not take away from the self realizations he made while playing the game. These realizations or spiritual discoveries are not always positive, and in Deek’s case are quite negative. At the end of “Dogfight” Deek realizes that his selfish antics led to his exclusion and has a better understanding of his morality. These realizations will stay with Deek, till his death, through memory. They can be learned from or discarded, but could only arise through the decision to participate in a form of play. In relation to play and memory Huizinga says, “Once played, it endures as a new-found creation of the mind, a treasure to be retained by the memory” (10). Deek’s treasures (aka realizations) will guide him until he finds his next type of play where he can expand on them and form new realizations.
Similar to Deak, Nance plays the game of student as an engineering major at William and Mary University. The purpose of her game is to ace a job interview with I.G. Feuchtwaren. “Dogfight” ends with the reader never knowing whether or not Nance passes the interview, but odds are she does not, because Deek uses her second hit of hype. Without hype Nance will lack the ability to produce the same quality of work that she was able to muster for her final project. Even in the slim chance that she does pass the interview without hype, she will still lack the ability to consistently perform in the spirit of her final project, and her hirers will discover her fraud. Let us assume that Nance does not pass the interview and has to continue her schooling. Nance faces a game-over situation, and like Deek is presented with a “then what?”
Even though Nance has been denied a programming job, she is left with two options; to continue pursuing the job or to give up and move on to another game. Huizinga believes that the ability to repeat a game until one is victorious at it is one of the most essential qualities of play. He says, “In nearly all the higher forms of play the elements of repetition and alternation (as in the refrain), are like the warp and woof of a fabric” (10). I agree with Huizinga that repetition is essential to play, but repetition is not always a possible alternative. For example, in 1988 Tim Dagget, a member of the U.S. Gymnastics team, had to withdraw from the Olympic Games because he had broken his leg and severed an artery competing in the World Championships in October of that year. In a New York Times article Dagget gave a comment about his condition; “I had reached a point it wasn't possible to do any more”. Just as Dagget cannot repeat the 1988 Olympic Games, Tiny can never restore the prestige the kickers at Jackman’s had for him. Tiny lived for the esteem of being the best SPADS&FOKKERS player, and Deak’s one-hit wonder changed Tiny’s life purpose. Ironically Deak’s victory over Tiny leaves him in the same situation as Tiny. Deak knows that he would never be able to defeat Tiny again, especially without the use of hype. Deak is left with a game in which the same results can never be reproduced. At the end of “Dogfight”, both Deak and Tiny are forced to create a new purpose for SPADS&FOKKERS, or find an entirely new game to play.
The game-over puts Deak (the winner) and Tiny (the loser) into the same situation. The winner and the loser are brought back to ground zero; the winner must find a way to keep on winning, while the loser must find a way to start winning. This parallels with Huizinga’s statement, “In the sphere of sacred play the child and the poet are at home with the savage” (26). The child and the poet are as the winner and the loser, and the savage or drive to win is the core purpose for both.
Some games cannot be repeated; in this case the winner and the loser are forced to find a new game. For instance, Australia’s swimming legend Dawn Fraser, winner of eight Olympic medals, twenty-seven individual and twelve relay world records. In 1964 due to inappropriate conduct, she was banned from competition for ten years, and spiraled into depression. Dawn recalls, “I wanted to die…I felt I had no friends, which was wrong, but I pushed away anyone who tried to help me….” (bluepages). She claims that pursuing another sport, golf in her case, brought her out of depression and near suicide. For some starting up a completely new game is an affective way to rekindle the spirit of play. Who knows, maybe Deak and Tiny might take up golf and be saved from the emptiness of their transition from one game to the next.
Unfortunately, not all players can successfully transition from game to game as Dawn Fraser could. For example, Austria’s ex-cross-country-skiing coach Walter Mayer attempted suicide, after he was relieved of his job because of a doping scandal he was part of. In this case, Mayer could not successfully transition from one game to the next, and felt that death was his only escape. Suicide is another option for both Deak and Tiny, and I consider it the antichrist of play. Suicide is the abandoning of play; it is a conscious choice to exterminate all forms of play, especially the solo form of play, the imagination. When the mind is abandoned, play cannot exist. Huizinga says, “But in acknowledging play you acknowledge mind, for whatever else play is, it is not matter” (3).
When a game ends ones mind is taken back to reality, and one is able to reflect on the choices made during game-play. In many instances the “absorption” or “maddening power” of a game will result in unintentional, yet severe outcomes for individuals involved with the player. An example in “Dogfight” is Deak taking advantage of Nance’s brainlock, and exploiting it to steal hype from her. After Deak had attained his victory, he had to come to terms with this unscrupulous act that enabled his success. This parallels to Huizinga’s example; “A Kwakiutl father in British Columbia killed his daughter who surprised him whilst carving things for a tribal ceremony” (23). The Kwakiutl father and Deak were both so involved in the “pretend” aspect of their play, that they were able to commit these devilish acts, which would never have been enacted outside the sphere of game-play.
The end of a game marks the beginning of another; for life consists of moving from game to game, self-actualizing in the transition period, and applying new found realizations to novel pursuits. Players cannot always cope with their realizations, or let go of previous games. In such situations, a player may be found in limbo, the heaven of a previous game out of grasp, and the hell of starting a new game to hard to bear. A Players life is comprised of an ongoing cycle of game-play, game-over, and start-over; only through death will one be relieved of such an existence. Or will one? Maybe death is just a form of game-over that enables us to reflect in transition and then be born again, able to continue our play. Huizinga was correct in saying, “…It seems to me that next to Homo Faber, and perhaps on the same level as Homo Sapiens, Homo Ludens, Man the Player, deserves a place in our nomenclature” (97).
In Gibson’s “Dogfight”, all the characters experience a “what then?” moment, where the game they play spirals to an end. They are left in a transition period, with one game over and another yet to begin. Huizinga describes each game as “temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart” (10). When a temporary world ends how does it affect the player in the real world?
Deek, the protagonist of “Dogfight” begins the novel in limbo, inhabiting an empty existence until he is introduced to SPADS&FOKKERS, a flight simulator game. Deek hones his skills and refines his program in hopes of defeating the ultimate player, Tiny. When the two finally battle, Deek takes the illegal drug hype in order to maximize his chance at victory. Deek’s dreams of triumph materialize and he narrowly defeats Tiny. However, the means Deek uses to attain success leave him ostracized from everyone he knows. Gibson ends “Dogfight” with, “A starry old night like this called for big talk. But standing there with all of Jackman’s silent and vast and empty around him, he realized suddenly that he had no body left to tell it to. Nobody at all.” (167). Deek is in the same situation as in the beginning of the story; living an isolated, purposeless existence.
What is purpose? “The American Heritage Dictionary” defines purpose as, “an object toward which one strives or for which something exists; an aim or a goal”. This all depends on which perspective the word purpose is looked at from; biological or spiritual? Huizinga would argue that play cannot be looked at soli from a biological perspective, because play is more than merely a biological function. Huizinga asks, ““Why is a huge crowd roused to frenzy by a football match?”” (2). He continues, “This intensity of, and absorption in, play finds no explanation in biological analysis. Yet in this intensity, this absorption, this power of maddening, lies the very essence, the primordial quality of play” (2). To Huizinga play is above biological purpose because a key element of play is fun. Huizinga says, “…the fun of playing, resists all analysis, all logical interpretation” (3).
I agree with Huizinga that play serves more than a biological purpose; I would argue that this purpose is a self-realizing one. A key aspect of play is the capacity to put ones abilities to the test and to discover something about the self in the process. This self realization is the safety net which prevents the player from losing purpose when a game ends. Deek may be physically alone in his moment of victory, but his solitude will not take away from the self realizations he made while playing the game. These realizations or spiritual discoveries are not always positive, and in Deek’s case are quite negative. At the end of “Dogfight” Deek realizes that his selfish antics led to his exclusion and has a better understanding of his morality. These realizations will stay with Deek, till his death, through memory. They can be learned from or discarded, but could only arise through the decision to participate in a form of play. In relation to play and memory Huizinga says, “Once played, it endures as a new-found creation of the mind, a treasure to be retained by the memory” (10). Deek’s treasures (aka realizations) will guide him until he finds his next type of play where he can expand on them and form new realizations.
Similar to Deak, Nance plays the game of student as an engineering major at William and Mary University. The purpose of her game is to ace a job interview with I.G. Feuchtwaren. “Dogfight” ends with the reader never knowing whether or not Nance passes the interview, but odds are she does not, because Deek uses her second hit of hype. Without hype Nance will lack the ability to produce the same quality of work that she was able to muster for her final project. Even in the slim chance that she does pass the interview without hype, she will still lack the ability to consistently perform in the spirit of her final project, and her hirers will discover her fraud. Let us assume that Nance does not pass the interview and has to continue her schooling. Nance faces a game-over situation, and like Deek is presented with a “then what?”
Even though Nance has been denied a programming job, she is left with two options; to continue pursuing the job or to give up and move on to another game. Huizinga believes that the ability to repeat a game until one is victorious at it is one of the most essential qualities of play. He says, “In nearly all the higher forms of play the elements of repetition and alternation (as in the refrain), are like the warp and woof of a fabric” (10). I agree with Huizinga that repetition is essential to play, but repetition is not always a possible alternative. For example, in 1988 Tim Dagget, a member of the U.S. Gymnastics team, had to withdraw from the Olympic Games because he had broken his leg and severed an artery competing in the World Championships in October of that year. In a New York Times article Dagget gave a comment about his condition; “I had reached a point it wasn't possible to do any more”. Just as Dagget cannot repeat the 1988 Olympic Games, Tiny can never restore the prestige the kickers at Jackman’s had for him. Tiny lived for the esteem of being the best SPADS&FOKKERS player, and Deak’s one-hit wonder changed Tiny’s life purpose. Ironically Deak’s victory over Tiny leaves him in the same situation as Tiny. Deak knows that he would never be able to defeat Tiny again, especially without the use of hype. Deak is left with a game in which the same results can never be reproduced. At the end of “Dogfight”, both Deak and Tiny are forced to create a new purpose for SPADS&FOKKERS, or find an entirely new game to play.
The game-over puts Deak (the winner) and Tiny (the loser) into the same situation. The winner and the loser are brought back to ground zero; the winner must find a way to keep on winning, while the loser must find a way to start winning. This parallels with Huizinga’s statement, “In the sphere of sacred play the child and the poet are at home with the savage” (26). The child and the poet are as the winner and the loser, and the savage or drive to win is the core purpose for both.
Some games cannot be repeated; in this case the winner and the loser are forced to find a new game. For instance, Australia’s swimming legend Dawn Fraser, winner of eight Olympic medals, twenty-seven individual and twelve relay world records. In 1964 due to inappropriate conduct, she was banned from competition for ten years, and spiraled into depression. Dawn recalls, “I wanted to die…I felt I had no friends, which was wrong, but I pushed away anyone who tried to help me….” (bluepages). She claims that pursuing another sport, golf in her case, brought her out of depression and near suicide. For some starting up a completely new game is an affective way to rekindle the spirit of play. Who knows, maybe Deak and Tiny might take up golf and be saved from the emptiness of their transition from one game to the next.
Unfortunately, not all players can successfully transition from game to game as Dawn Fraser could. For example, Austria’s ex-cross-country-skiing coach Walter Mayer attempted suicide, after he was relieved of his job because of a doping scandal he was part of. In this case, Mayer could not successfully transition from one game to the next, and felt that death was his only escape. Suicide is another option for both Deak and Tiny, and I consider it the antichrist of play. Suicide is the abandoning of play; it is a conscious choice to exterminate all forms of play, especially the solo form of play, the imagination. When the mind is abandoned, play cannot exist. Huizinga says, “But in acknowledging play you acknowledge mind, for whatever else play is, it is not matter” (3).
When a game ends ones mind is taken back to reality, and one is able to reflect on the choices made during game-play. In many instances the “absorption” or “maddening power” of a game will result in unintentional, yet severe outcomes for individuals involved with the player. An example in “Dogfight” is Deak taking advantage of Nance’s brainlock, and exploiting it to steal hype from her. After Deak had attained his victory, he had to come to terms with this unscrupulous act that enabled his success. This parallels to Huizinga’s example; “A Kwakiutl father in British Columbia killed his daughter who surprised him whilst carving things for a tribal ceremony” (23). The Kwakiutl father and Deak were both so involved in the “pretend” aspect of their play, that they were able to commit these devilish acts, which would never have been enacted outside the sphere of game-play.
The end of a game marks the beginning of another; for life consists of moving from game to game, self-actualizing in the transition period, and applying new found realizations to novel pursuits. Players cannot always cope with their realizations, or let go of previous games. In such situations, a player may be found in limbo, the heaven of a previous game out of grasp, and the hell of starting a new game to hard to bear. A Players life is comprised of an ongoing cycle of game-play, game-over, and start-over; only through death will one be relieved of such an existence. Or will one? Maybe death is just a form of game-over that enables us to reflect in transition and then be born again, able to continue our play. Huizinga was correct in saying, “…It seems to me that next to Homo Faber, and perhaps on the same level as Homo Sapiens, Homo Ludens, Man the Player, deserves a place in our nomenclature” (97).
Fight Club as Voluntary Play
Among Huizinga’s ideas on the concept of play, he says at one point that all play “is in fact freedom” (8), and “play is superfluous” (8). Paradoxically contrary to this, Huizinga later makes the statement that “all play has its rules (11). Even going further, he solidifies this by saying, “The rules of a game are absolutely binding and allow no doubt” (Huizinga, 11). For example, if children are playing, pretending they are airplanes, running around with their arms spread, that is a completely free game. Even in that, there is a rule, though unsaid, that one child should not stop short and say ‘no, we are not airplanes.’ This child would then be a characterization of Huizinga’s “spoil-sport” (Huizinga, 11), having broken the rule fundamental in all games: the game itself cannot be denied its own reality. So, the addition of rules such as those of a game of tag, played by the very same children, does not actually complicate the reality of the game or play any further. In Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, there is a dichotomy between Tyler and Marla along the very same lines; Tyler makes many rules, while Marla makes none and follows none.
Tyler, throughout the course of the story, attempts to spread his view that we should not be bound by the rules of society. His way of doing this, however, involves making up many rules of his own, in essence just creating a new society of different rules. Tyler’s rules of fight club, as well as those of Project Mayhem, both reinforce and contradict Huizinga’s thinking. Having created a rule for almost everything, including that the narrator is not to talk about him, Tyler’s behavior shows Huizinga’s thinking about the universal presence of rules in games. However, the thinking of Tyler and Huizinga split at the point where, “The rules of a game are absolutely binding and allow no doubt” (Huizinga, 11). Many of Tyler’s rules, such as: “The first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club. The second rule about fight club is you don’t talk about fight club” (Palahniuk, 50), are clearly meant to be broken. Tyler wants more people to show up, to get more of a following. On the other hand, some of Tyler’s rules are “absolutely binding” (Huizinga, 11), while others are simply vague. One could say that if it is not absolutely binding, it is not actually a rule, especially if, as with the first two rules of fight club, they are designed for the very purpose of being broken.
Marla Singer lives in a perpetual state of free play. She has no agency, lives by no rules, but as a result, never does anything with her life. The narrator does not know Marla before she realizes that she might have cancer: “Marla started going to the support groups after she found the first lump” (Palahniuk, 107). So, this freedom of hers may be a result of the cancer and nothing more. The narrator says, “The morning after we found her second lump, Marla hopped into the kitchen with both legs in one leg of her pantyhose and said, ‘Look, I’m a mermaid’” (Palahniuk, 107). Marla has everything Tyler is promoting. Marla is not afraid to die; Tyler meest Marla because Marla tries to lackadaisically kill herself, saying, “This wasn’t for-real suicide, this was probably just one of those cry-for-help things” (Palahniuk, 59). She is pure play, and free of the rules of any game, including life itself. When Huizinga says that play “is in fact freedom” (8), he is right for the purposes of Marla Singer.
So if indeed Tyler’s existence is based around this woman, he is the part of the narrator’s mind who is attracted to her. The narrator’s statement, “Without Marla, Tyler would have nothing” (Palahniuk, 14), would indicate this. Coupled with the fact that Tyler becomes apparent in the narrator’s life at about the same time that Marla does, would indicate that Tyler is a direct result of Marla. Tyler, for the purpose of his creation, is trying to relate to Marla is some way, being the part of the narrator that is attracted to her. At least from the perspective of Huizinga’s writing, though, he is her complete opposite.
Tyler’s rules are made to impose his idea of freedom upon others. As contradictory as that may be, this works to a limited degree. With Project Mayhem, Tyler himself points out, “No one guy understands the whole plan, but each guy is trained to do one simple task perfectly” (Palahniuk, 130). So, despite creating a master plan with elaborate rules and complexity, he keeps every single person completely out of the loop, in the aimless moment. Tyler, however, knows and plans all of it: “The rule in Project Mayhem is you have to trust Tyler” (Palahniuk, 130). So, in essence, Tyler keeps all of the members of Project Mayhem in a state of simple perpetual play. The narrator notices, “There are guys whose job it is to just boil rice all day or wash out eating bowls or clean the crapper. All day” (Palahniuk, 131). As menial as these tasks sound, and may be, they fit into Huizinga’s conceptions of what play is. Huizinga says that “play is a voluntary activity” (7), “play is superfluous” (8), and that play is “an interlude in our daily lives” (9). All of the “space monkeys” are there voluntarily, and do not need to be involved in fight club or Project Mayhem at all. Also, all of them presumably have their old lives, as empty as they may find them, to return to. This world of Project Mayhem and fight club is completely separate from their real lives. Fight club, fit Huizinga’s definition of play perfectly, in that it is outside of daily life. Project Mayhem, on the other hand, is practically a new life. They leave their old lives behind to come and join, separating Project Mayhem from their real lives, and it becomes their play-world.
In that way, Tyler’s destruction of the narrator’s home did much more than to destroy the narrator’s belongings. Tyler destroyed the narrator’s “‘ordinary’ life” (Huizinga, 9), in which play must be separate from. The narrator is stuck in the perpetual play world of fight club and Project Mayhem. He could not leave. Not because he was not allowed to, but because he can not return home from the game Tyler has him wrapped up in.
However, to the best of our knowledge, the space monkeys’ old lives are not destroyed in the way the narrator’s was. They are choosing to join up, as Huizainga says that “Play to order is no longer play: it could at best be put a forcible imitation of it” (7). So the problem with this is, of course, that there are rules to fight club and Project Mayhem, ordering how things are to be done. Both groups are entirely voluntary, but being told to do things voluntarily. Excluding possibly the narrator, all of the space monkeys want to be there; they had to wait three days to be allowed to enter the house. They willingly submit themselves to Tyler, which itself, is one of the rules: “The rule in Project Mayhem is you have to trust Tyler” (Palahniuk,130).
So these men are willingly submitting and choosing to do what they have been ordered to do. This proves true in many situations of play in our society. Children are required to play sports by their schools or their parents, yet they are still choosing to play. At an even more basic level children are told to play at recess, and there is never a second’s thought to questioning why. Even in the adult world the narrator is living in at the beginning of the story, the narrator willingly buys into the game of consumerism. As he says, “The Alle cutlery service, Stainless steel. Dishwasher safe. The Vild hall clock made of galvanized steel, oh, I had to have that” (43), it shows that he is tied up in that game. Tyler, in order to break away from similar things that all these men are frustrated with, falls into the same pattern that they were living in before. He has them living the same game, with a façade of difference to it. Huizinga calls this “Puerilism” (Huizinga, 205), being a false play only trying to imitate. Considering the jobs Tyler orders the space monkeys to do around the Paper Street house are the equivalents of real jobs, only in his fake society, this parallel becomes especially clear.
This paradox that choice is and is not being made is contrasted by Marla. Marla does not do things because she is told to. Nor does she choose to do them. She has an absolute lack of agency, so life just happens to her. For example, when Marla was playing at being a mermaid, she said afterwards, “This isn’t like when guys sit backward on the toilet and pretend it’s a motorcycle. This is a genuine accident” (Palahniuk, 108). Likewise, when a space monkey was not letting her enter the house, for not following the rules of Project mayhem, she simply left: “And I hear the front door slam shut. Marla doesn’t wait the three days” (Palahniuk, 133). This portrayal of Marla’s refusal to follow the rules, further identifies her as the “spoil-sport” (Huizinga, 11). Her impatience also shows how she aimlessly lives in the moment. Despite Huizinga’s definition that “all play has its rules” (11), Marla plays and does not have any rules and will not follow any. However, the distinction between Marla’s character and Huizinga’s assumption is that Huizinga assumed that all people have a deterministic choice.
Huizinga’s way of responding to this problem causes him to make a distinction away from “child and animal play” (8). One could easily say that animals and children do not have the freedom to be able to choose this for themselves, that “they must play because their instinct drives them to it and because it serves to develop their bodily faculties and their powers of selection” (Huizinga, 7-8). This ignores the fact that although we would not say that adults must play, the instincts of any human operate in the same way Huizinga describes here. If we are to make this division, Marla is certainly be grouped with Huizinga’s considerations of children and animals: Child and animal play because they enjoy playing, and therein precisely lies their freedom” (Huizinga, 8). Marla’s spontaneity of her life shows this quite well. Marla has no plans or aspirations for the future.
The larger problem, however, is that although Huizinga excludes children and animals as having a different kind of voluntary play, he does not specify who to include as having real choice. In Fight club, we see adults acting the same way Huizinga describes children and animals acting. The space monkeys want to do the things they are doing for Project Mayhem, just as much as a child or an animal, “they enjoy playing, and therein precisely lies their freedom” (Huizinga, 8). They were not forced.
Pushing aside any grand debate about free will or determinism, this divide between voluntary as in choice and voluntary as in desire becomes especially weak. The narrator in the story continuously plays along with Tyler’s games when he sees it most desirable, and then reverts to being the spoil-sport as he sees that most desirable. Yes, Tyler destroys his life which he would go back to, but it is when he realizes this that he chooses to be the spoil-sport. The space monkeys join because Project Mayhem is desirable to them.
Tyler, on the other hand, shows no desire whatsoever. Being the only character involved in Project Mayhem who knows what is happening, he is also the only one making voluntary choices as opposed to just responding to desire. For all the humor of some of Tyler’s statements, Tyler never laughs. Not once does he show enjoyment of what he is doing. So for all intents and purposes, Tyler’s way of playing is Huizinga’s explanation of human play. The problem with this, of course, is that Tyler is not actually a real person. The agency and choice he has comes from the mind of the narrator, and thus the desire that motivates his agency comes from that too. He is a person without desire but with choice and agency, which almost intrinsically is a nihilist.
Even with Tyler, however, this form of voluntary play according to choice does not work. Tyler as an independent person does not have any desire of his own, yes. Yet, Tyler more or less is the subliminal desires of the narrator, and thus exaggerates the desires of the narrator in order to fuel his choices. The other thing to keep in mind is that Tyler creates the game and its rules, and thus is overseeing it more than actually partaking in it. Not being real, it would make sense.
Tyler, throughout the course of the story, attempts to spread his view that we should not be bound by the rules of society. His way of doing this, however, involves making up many rules of his own, in essence just creating a new society of different rules. Tyler’s rules of fight club, as well as those of Project Mayhem, both reinforce and contradict Huizinga’s thinking. Having created a rule for almost everything, including that the narrator is not to talk about him, Tyler’s behavior shows Huizinga’s thinking about the universal presence of rules in games. However, the thinking of Tyler and Huizinga split at the point where, “The rules of a game are absolutely binding and allow no doubt” (Huizinga, 11). Many of Tyler’s rules, such as: “The first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club. The second rule about fight club is you don’t talk about fight club” (Palahniuk, 50), are clearly meant to be broken. Tyler wants more people to show up, to get more of a following. On the other hand, some of Tyler’s rules are “absolutely binding” (Huizinga, 11), while others are simply vague. One could say that if it is not absolutely binding, it is not actually a rule, especially if, as with the first two rules of fight club, they are designed for the very purpose of being broken.
Marla Singer lives in a perpetual state of free play. She has no agency, lives by no rules, but as a result, never does anything with her life. The narrator does not know Marla before she realizes that she might have cancer: “Marla started going to the support groups after she found the first lump” (Palahniuk, 107). So, this freedom of hers may be a result of the cancer and nothing more. The narrator says, “The morning after we found her second lump, Marla hopped into the kitchen with both legs in one leg of her pantyhose and said, ‘Look, I’m a mermaid’” (Palahniuk, 107). Marla has everything Tyler is promoting. Marla is not afraid to die; Tyler meest Marla because Marla tries to lackadaisically kill herself, saying, “This wasn’t for-real suicide, this was probably just one of those cry-for-help things” (Palahniuk, 59). She is pure play, and free of the rules of any game, including life itself. When Huizinga says that play “is in fact freedom” (8), he is right for the purposes of Marla Singer.
So if indeed Tyler’s existence is based around this woman, he is the part of the narrator’s mind who is attracted to her. The narrator’s statement, “Without Marla, Tyler would have nothing” (Palahniuk, 14), would indicate this. Coupled with the fact that Tyler becomes apparent in the narrator’s life at about the same time that Marla does, would indicate that Tyler is a direct result of Marla. Tyler, for the purpose of his creation, is trying to relate to Marla is some way, being the part of the narrator that is attracted to her. At least from the perspective of Huizinga’s writing, though, he is her complete opposite.
Tyler’s rules are made to impose his idea of freedom upon others. As contradictory as that may be, this works to a limited degree. With Project Mayhem, Tyler himself points out, “No one guy understands the whole plan, but each guy is trained to do one simple task perfectly” (Palahniuk, 130). So, despite creating a master plan with elaborate rules and complexity, he keeps every single person completely out of the loop, in the aimless moment. Tyler, however, knows and plans all of it: “The rule in Project Mayhem is you have to trust Tyler” (Palahniuk, 130). So, in essence, Tyler keeps all of the members of Project Mayhem in a state of simple perpetual play. The narrator notices, “There are guys whose job it is to just boil rice all day or wash out eating bowls or clean the crapper. All day” (Palahniuk, 131). As menial as these tasks sound, and may be, they fit into Huizinga’s conceptions of what play is. Huizinga says that “play is a voluntary activity” (7), “play is superfluous” (8), and that play is “an interlude in our daily lives” (9). All of the “space monkeys” are there voluntarily, and do not need to be involved in fight club or Project Mayhem at all. Also, all of them presumably have their old lives, as empty as they may find them, to return to. This world of Project Mayhem and fight club is completely separate from their real lives. Fight club, fit Huizinga’s definition of play perfectly, in that it is outside of daily life. Project Mayhem, on the other hand, is practically a new life. They leave their old lives behind to come and join, separating Project Mayhem from their real lives, and it becomes their play-world.
In that way, Tyler’s destruction of the narrator’s home did much more than to destroy the narrator’s belongings. Tyler destroyed the narrator’s “‘ordinary’ life” (Huizinga, 9), in which play must be separate from. The narrator is stuck in the perpetual play world of fight club and Project Mayhem. He could not leave. Not because he was not allowed to, but because he can not return home from the game Tyler has him wrapped up in.
However, to the best of our knowledge, the space monkeys’ old lives are not destroyed in the way the narrator’s was. They are choosing to join up, as Huizainga says that “Play to order is no longer play: it could at best be put a forcible imitation of it” (7). So the problem with this is, of course, that there are rules to fight club and Project Mayhem, ordering how things are to be done. Both groups are entirely voluntary, but being told to do things voluntarily. Excluding possibly the narrator, all of the space monkeys want to be there; they had to wait three days to be allowed to enter the house. They willingly submit themselves to Tyler, which itself, is one of the rules: “The rule in Project Mayhem is you have to trust Tyler” (Palahniuk,130).
So these men are willingly submitting and choosing to do what they have been ordered to do. This proves true in many situations of play in our society. Children are required to play sports by their schools or their parents, yet they are still choosing to play. At an even more basic level children are told to play at recess, and there is never a second’s thought to questioning why. Even in the adult world the narrator is living in at the beginning of the story, the narrator willingly buys into the game of consumerism. As he says, “The Alle cutlery service, Stainless steel. Dishwasher safe. The Vild hall clock made of galvanized steel, oh, I had to have that” (43), it shows that he is tied up in that game. Tyler, in order to break away from similar things that all these men are frustrated with, falls into the same pattern that they were living in before. He has them living the same game, with a façade of difference to it. Huizinga calls this “Puerilism” (Huizinga, 205), being a false play only trying to imitate. Considering the jobs Tyler orders the space monkeys to do around the Paper Street house are the equivalents of real jobs, only in his fake society, this parallel becomes especially clear.
This paradox that choice is and is not being made is contrasted by Marla. Marla does not do things because she is told to. Nor does she choose to do them. She has an absolute lack of agency, so life just happens to her. For example, when Marla was playing at being a mermaid, she said afterwards, “This isn’t like when guys sit backward on the toilet and pretend it’s a motorcycle. This is a genuine accident” (Palahniuk, 108). Likewise, when a space monkey was not letting her enter the house, for not following the rules of Project mayhem, she simply left: “And I hear the front door slam shut. Marla doesn’t wait the three days” (Palahniuk, 133). This portrayal of Marla’s refusal to follow the rules, further identifies her as the “spoil-sport” (Huizinga, 11). Her impatience also shows how she aimlessly lives in the moment. Despite Huizinga’s definition that “all play has its rules” (11), Marla plays and does not have any rules and will not follow any. However, the distinction between Marla’s character and Huizinga’s assumption is that Huizinga assumed that all people have a deterministic choice.
Huizinga’s way of responding to this problem causes him to make a distinction away from “child and animal play” (8). One could easily say that animals and children do not have the freedom to be able to choose this for themselves, that “they must play because their instinct drives them to it and because it serves to develop their bodily faculties and their powers of selection” (Huizinga, 7-8). This ignores the fact that although we would not say that adults must play, the instincts of any human operate in the same way Huizinga describes here. If we are to make this division, Marla is certainly be grouped with Huizinga’s considerations of children and animals: Child and animal play because they enjoy playing, and therein precisely lies their freedom” (Huizinga, 8). Marla’s spontaneity of her life shows this quite well. Marla has no plans or aspirations for the future.
The larger problem, however, is that although Huizinga excludes children and animals as having a different kind of voluntary play, he does not specify who to include as having real choice. In Fight club, we see adults acting the same way Huizinga describes children and animals acting. The space monkeys want to do the things they are doing for Project Mayhem, just as much as a child or an animal, “they enjoy playing, and therein precisely lies their freedom” (Huizinga, 8). They were not forced.
Pushing aside any grand debate about free will or determinism, this divide between voluntary as in choice and voluntary as in desire becomes especially weak. The narrator in the story continuously plays along with Tyler’s games when he sees it most desirable, and then reverts to being the spoil-sport as he sees that most desirable. Yes, Tyler destroys his life which he would go back to, but it is when he realizes this that he chooses to be the spoil-sport. The space monkeys join because Project Mayhem is desirable to them.
Tyler, on the other hand, shows no desire whatsoever. Being the only character involved in Project Mayhem who knows what is happening, he is also the only one making voluntary choices as opposed to just responding to desire. For all the humor of some of Tyler’s statements, Tyler never laughs. Not once does he show enjoyment of what he is doing. So for all intents and purposes, Tyler’s way of playing is Huizinga’s explanation of human play. The problem with this, of course, is that Tyler is not actually a real person. The agency and choice he has comes from the mind of the narrator, and thus the desire that motivates his agency comes from that too. He is a person without desire but with choice and agency, which almost intrinsically is a nihilist.
Even with Tyler, however, this form of voluntary play according to choice does not work. Tyler as an independent person does not have any desire of his own, yes. Yet, Tyler more or less is the subliminal desires of the narrator, and thus exaggerates the desires of the narrator in order to fuel his choices. The other thing to keep in mind is that Tyler creates the game and its rules, and thus is overseeing it more than actually partaking in it. Not being real, it would make sense.
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