Fight Club, an insight into contemporary potlatch

When Johan Huizinga explains the relationship between the play and humanity in his book, Homo Ludens, he uses ritualistic potlatch as a particularly interesting cultural example of play affecting humanity (Huizinga 58). The concept of potlatch, along with the agon associated with potlatch, intrigues me, and it is an idea that I wish to extend and explore. Given the dated publication year of Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, potlatch begs for a contemporary second look, a modern reworking of the ritual, adapting its practice to something anyone in the now can easily relate to. I find that Chuck Palahniuk illustrates the modern potlatch extremely well in his 1996 novel, Fight Club, as the book’s protagonist basically progresses through the storyline sacrificing a piece of himself at every plot turn. Since I am turning to Palahniuk’s Fight Club as a lens to look at modern potlatch, I must limit my definition of a modern contemporary society accordingly. The setting of the book limits my location and culture to that of urban American culture before the turn of the century. The contents of the book, on the other hand, limit my discussion to men of a less privileged class. Thus my modern, contemporary society shall be the collection of men ranging from the lower social classes to the middle class, living in pre-turn-of-the-century urban cities of the United States.

Potlatch, a Native American custom most commonly found in the Kwakiutl tribe, is held whenever a significant event occurs, to “prove one’s superiority” (Huizinga 58). The custom takes the form of a feast attended by two different clans. The hosts of the feast gives away and destroys the clan’s material wealth during the feast, daring the clan on the receiving end to give an even grander and more extreme potlatch feast. Huizinga highlights that the following is “always” the case in a potlatch: the action “takes the form of a contest”, “there are two groups standing in opposition but bound by a spirit of hostility and friendship combined”, and the groups contend for “the pleasure of parading their superiority—in a word, for glory” (59). Thus the potlatch can be described as a contest, an agon, between two opposing groups, where there is mutual self-destruction and redistribution of material wealth for the prize of glory.

With these four elements of potlatch, one can easily connect at least one potlatch element with Fight Club points, the most apparent being the self-sacrificial element. The narrator of Fight Club, who I will now refer to as Joe, undergoes multiple stages of self-destruction. Joe blows up his apartment full of possessions, things he spent his “whole life to buy”, with a homemade explosive effectively destroying his “worldly possessions”, “car”, and home (Palahniuk 44, 64). The founding of the Fight Club institution began with Joe beating himself up in a parking lot, a destruction of his bodily health through self-mutilation. The Fight Club institution itself also enables Joe to continually mutilate his own body weekly, by participating in fights with no clear purpose or reward other than to avoid dying “without a few scars”, a mark of self-destruction (48). The story progresses from the self-destruction of possessions, to the self-destruction of the body, and even to the self-destruction of morality with the formation of Project Mayhem. Members of Project Mayhem have weekly homework assignments that order the members to assault, destroy, and vandalize the public and its properties. Since participation in Project Mayhem is voluntary, and actually discouraged by the selection process, the violation of laws both of the government and the conscience are self-motivated. Interestingly enough, during the Project Mayhem members’ assignments of moral self-destruction, if a member is “arrested” or they “laugh” during an assignment, they’re “off the committee” (120). This parallels Huizinga’s description of invalidated potlatch ceremonies where “the slightest blunder invalidates the whole action. Coughing and laughing are threatened with severe penalties” (Huizinga 60).

The next three elements of potlatch, however, take a longer line of reasoning to come to, and are also somewhat modified to better fit the modern times. The Fight Club to potlatch connection is lacking a key foundation that would allow the rest of the points to settle properly, Fight Club’s potlatch lacks a clear opposing side. The book initially attempts to set Marla as the opposition, having her burn “the inside of her arm with a clove cigarette” and “calling herself human butt wipe” in a manner similar to the self-destruction of body and mind that is along the same lines as Joe’s sacrifices (Palahniuk 65). But as the narrative unfolds, Joe is revealed to have been the person to start the self-mutilation trend on his own, only later recruiting others like Marla into the same mentality through the Fight Club institution and his philsophies. Marla, as well as the other members of the Fight Club institution, are also not directly opposed to Joe, in fact, they follow him. In fact, the only real opposition Joe ever meets is from his alter ego Tyler. In the beginning and end of the book, it is Tyler holding a gun in Joe’s mouth, threatening death. It is Tyler who Joe constantly asks, “did we hit bottom, tonight?” (94). An obvious point must be emphasized though; Tyler and Joe are the same person. The two opposing sides in this modern potlatch are contained in the same person, they are two opposing personalities trying to each inflict as much self-sacrifice as possible; Joe’s potlatch opponent is himself.

It is a contest of sorts between the two personalities, and Joe is testing two different personas and trying to determine which one is superior. Which ego would succeed better in life, what would make Joe’s life more fulfilled? Of course, given Joe’s starting position in life, wandering from support group to support group, makes any change, a change for the better. Change is what Joe truly craved, to break out of the system that held him in the role of a space monkey, plugging and chugging the recall formula (30). To break out of the system, is to go in the opposite direction, running away from “being perfect and complete” (46). Since it is Tyler who starts Joe on the path towards self-destruction, Tyler is initially the superior persona. When Tyler goes too far, and Tyler attempts to go to extremes that are undesirable, Joe becomes the superior persona, the one opposed to suicide and martyrdom. In the end, Joe is the winner of this contest regardless of which persona wins, because Joe and Tyler are the same person.

Consequently, in this modern potlatch, there seems to be a lack of real tangible opponents. Whether this be from a general avoidance of confrontation, how “A man on the street will do anything not to fight”, or a matter of personal choice, this is a change that must be looked into (119). Could this be a result of what Huizinga regards as the decline of agonistic play in contemporary society? The potlatch ceremony has been adapted by the modern American culture that Fight Club appeals to.

The modern American man living in the urban city, however, has no use for the prize Huizinga terms glory (Huizinga 59). The pleasure of parading superiority over a man in modern times can more easily be achieved through the attainment of more possessions, rather than the destruction of those possessions. This is simply what the capitalistic culture of America has ingrained into popular belief. First appearances are what a person judges another with, and these appearances are supplied by the clothes a person wears, the car a person drives, and even the level of education that can be determined from mannerisms and speech patterns. Thus there is no practical reason to destroy your own possessions to prove how much better you are than another person, merely possessing would result in envy and jealousy. Instead the type of glory that the modern wishes to achieve runs more along the lines of recognition and fame. Joe, in participating in a potlatch with himself, gains not only an idea of which alter ego is more successful, but also a large amount of this new modern glory. A walk into a diner, and Joe is treated with free food, the title of “sir”, and nods from multiple men (171). All participants of the Fight Club institution recognize Joe as Tyler Durden, a legend. In fact all members also recognize each other as participants in the potlatch that is the Fight Club institution. When a Fight Club member sees the wounds and scars on another member’s face, there is instant recognition, they “nod to each other” (54). And there is satisfaction in that recognition, a feeling of belonging to something bigger than them. This feeling is what most modern men in America want. Man wishes to form associations, to connect to the rest of the world, be it electronically via the internet or psychically through common interests and thoughts. The Fight Club potlatch can obtain that type of connection, the type of recognition from the fellow man, the glory.

Fight Club is a narrative that tells of Joe’s potlatch. Through Joe’s eyes, it is a potlatch that consists of a contest between two sides of his mind, to determine which side is the superior one. Looking at the Fight Club institution within the narrative, Fight Club is a potlatch against one’s self with the prize of glory being a prize of recognition amongst fellow men. These two versions of modern potlatch differ slightly but significantly from Huizinga’s original description of the ceremony. The potlatch remains a contest of self-sacrifice, though Fight Club extends the sacrifice beyond worldly possessions into bodily health and conscience morality. But the opposing sides are no longer as well defined, and glory has been reshaped into a different form. Opposing sides no longer have to be two tangible groups in opposition; they can be two opposing parts of a person’s mind. The modern man has no use for a path to false superiority through self-destruction, instead self-destruction aims to achieve a different kind of glory, recognition. If all undergo a similar mode of destruction, in this case potlatch, they will have formed associations with bonds that are downright hard to obtain otherwise.

Works Cited

“Agon, n.” OED Online. June 2002. Oxford University Press. 18 Mar. 2008

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Boston: The Beacon Press, 1938

Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York. W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 1996