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.