Tyler Durden is Homo Ludens: or, Johan Huizinga is the Narrator

Johan Huizinga wrote Homo Ludens nearly sixty years before Chuck Palahniuk published Fight Club. However I would not be surprised if early twentieth century Dutch culture featured its own form of the secretive bare-knuckle boxing community. Huizinga’s description of play and its importance within the individual and public human being is epitomized by the focus of Palahniuk’s novel. Not only does the Fight Club follow the organization of Huizinga’s definition of play, it has the same functions. This discovery either implies that one inspired the other somehow or that both authors describe a truth about human beings in their respective texts.

Firstly the arrangement of the Fight Club endeavor is identical to that described by Huizinga. “Rules. . . are a very important factor in the play-concept. All play has its rules. They determine what ‘holds’ in the temporary world circumscribed by play. The rules of a game are absolutely binding and allow no doubt.” (11) Huizinga states the necessity of stern rules that control the bounds of the play and the players themselves. Fight Club, too, has its rules. On pages 48-50, the narrator describes the community’s rules to the audience, us, while explaining it to his audience, the new members in the story. The rules are crucial to the maintenance and development of the Club. “Play demands order absolute and supreme.” (10)

The rules, in fact, address some of Huizinga’s other criteria for play. Rules one and two, “you don’t talk about fight club,” (48) are cornerstones of the secrecy of the play-concept. “The charm of play is enhanced by making a ‘secret’ out of it. This is for us, not for the ‘others.’” (12) The third rule, “when someone says stop, or goes limp, even if he’s just faking it, the fight is over,” is essentially Palahniuk’s response to Huizinga’s fear of a “disenchantment” (21) of play or even the concept of a “spoil-sport.” (23).

The nature of the fighting in Fight Club always offers the risk of permanent damage with its brutal violence, and this risks an interruption of the game. “At any moment, ‘ordinary life’ may reassert its rights either by an impact from without, which interrupts the game, or by an offence against the rules, or else from within, by a collapse of the play spirit, a sobering, a disenchantment.” (21) Injury serves as the possible reassertion of “ordinary life,” while faking it serves as the collapse of the play spirit. (We see an interruption of the play of Project Mayhem, to be addressed later, when Big Bob dies on page 177. “Ordinary life” reasserts its rights.) The rule is even followed by directions, “every time you see this kid, you can’t tell him what a great fight he had” (49) to help discourage the “collapse of the play-spirit.”

Rules four, five, six, and seven are basically maintenance rules. Their function is primarily to facilitate the consistent upkeep of the play atmosphere. However, there is something to be said for the primal environment created by shirtless, shoeless men fighting mano-a-mano until one can go no further. This helps the assertion that play is at the core of human nature. It swims among our basic needs along with survival and procreation.

Rule eight (though Tyler calls is the seventh rule in his speech), “if this is your first night at fight club, you have to fight” (50) has two primary effects. First, it helps to replenish the ranks and spread the gospel (though it is against the rules) of Fight Club. Secondly, it demands the play spirit from all of its participants. It eliminates Huizinga’s spoil-sports. This is another way to keep Fight Club insular and apart from the “real world,” as Huizinga refers to it.

The “secludedness” and “limitedness” that Huizinga notes as imperative is also successfully captured by Palahniuk. “It is ‘played out’ within certain limits of time and place.” (9) Palahniuk addresses this within the same pages he sets up the rules of fight club, as though he were checking off Huizinga’s criteria for the play-concept. “Fight club only exists in the hours between when fight club starts and fight club ends.” (48) Palahniuk uses repetition to stress the importance of time-limited existence. “Except for five hours from two until seven on Sunday morning, fight club doesn’t exist.” (52)

Huizinga later stresses the importance of physical separation. “One of the most important characteristics of play [is] its spatial separation from ordinary life. A closed space is marked out for it. . . hedged off from everyday surroundings. Inside this space, the play proceeds, inside it the rules obtain.” (19) Palahniuk responds directly again. Fight club is held in “the basement of a bar. . . after the bar closes on Saturday night.” (50) Few places are emptier than a closed bar after a Saturday night.

This separation from society enables Palahniuk to create Huizinga’s play-community. “The feeling of being ‘apart together. . .’ of mutually withdrawing from the rest of the world and rejecting the usual norms, retains its magic beyond the duration of the individual game.” (12) This tight brotherhood created by fight club does not exist once its members crawl out of the bar basement steps, but the experience lasts with the individuals permanently.

The experience of play, described by Huizinga, and the experience of fight club, described by Palahniuk, hardens the uncanny similarity between the two depictions. First, the outcome is irrelevant. “The whole point is the playing.” (17) The results are yielded to the participants through playing, not through winning. “The action begins and ends in itself, and the outcome does not contribute to the necessary life-processes of the group.” (49) As he has consistently before, Palahniuk parallels Huizinga’s statements with his story’s. “You aren’t alive anywhere like you’re alive at fight club. . . Fight club isn’t about winning or losing fights. Fight club isn’t about words.” (51)

What is gained through these experiences is illustrated by Huizinga through reference to the works of Leo Frobenius. Frobenius refutes that it is purely an innate “play instinct.” (16) Instead, “the experience of life and nature. . . takes the form of a seizure.” (16) Frobenius says, “Man is seized by the revelation of fate.” It is a “necessary mental process of transformation.” (17) The Huizinga-Frobenius philosophy of seizure and fate-revelation is paralleled by Tyler and the lye-kiss in the story. Though this scene occurs outside the framework of the actual fight club, it reflects the same ideologies. Tyler urges the narrator to accept the pain. “Come back to the pain.” (75) Tyler explains, “Someday. . .you will die, and until you know that you’re useless to me.” (76) Tyler steers the narrator towards a “revelation of fate.” (I admit the “useless to me comment” corrupts the purity of the moment, but it does so in the same fashion that Project Mayhem corrupts the play of fight club for a “real world” purpose.)

Lastly, Homo Ludens and Fight Club discuss the differing appearances of the playing participants in the real world and in the play-world. Huizinga refers to it as “dressing up.” “The disguised or masked individual ‘plays’ another part, another being. He is another being.” (13) The narrator in Fight Club reflects this as he comments on the same topic within the club. “Who guys are in the fight club is not who they are in the real world. Even if you told the kid in the copy center that he had a good fight, you wouldn’t be talking to the same man. Who I am in the fight club is not someone my boss knows.” Huizinga finds this third type of separation, the personal, as the most significant. “Here the ‘extra-ordinary’ nature of play reaches perfection.” (13) The narrator in Fight Club agrees. He finds pride in his distinctively different personalities in one realm compared to another (and distinctively different are his personalities ever!).

Through all of Huizinga’s pseudo-scientific, uncited, psychological analyses, he does summarize his description of play cleanly in one paragraph on page 13. Palahniuk fulfills each of the various components of Huizinga’s definition of play. “Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside the ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious’, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly.” The members of fight club pursue it out of their true freedom as individuals. It is consciously perverse to societal expectations for it exists in direct opposition to society. It completely enraptures its player; it is why they keep their hair short and trim their nails. “It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it.” The winners of fights garner no more respect than the losers. All members seek the fight, hitting and being hit, not the knockout. “It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner.” From two to seven on Sunday mornings in the basement of the bar, the club meets, and at no other time and in no other place does it even exist. Rules are the foundation of the club, and the particular rules create an order that facilitates the desired play. “It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.” The club’s first and second rules shroud it in secrecy. It is openly and aggressively counter-culture, and it relies on its members becoming different human beings at the set hour and location.

The key-and-lock match of the Huizinga theories and the Palahniuk story offers two possible explanations. Somehow one drew inspiration from the other, or something like it. Or they have both found a truth in the human spirit. They both have seen similar patterns in the human behavior of and need to play, albeit Palahniuk describes a much more violent, scandalous method. Nonetheless, I think the film credits may have well as rolled “Edward Norton – Johan Huizinga, narrator.”