An Essay/Article about Masculinity/Redemption in Fight Club/The Sun Also Rises by Chuck Palahaniuk/Ernest Hemingway

The first chapter of Chuck Palahaniuk’s Fight Club begins with the novel’s climax, set atop a skyscraper with its foundation columns wrapped in explosives, a loaded gun in the protagonist’s mouth. This opening, a psychological breaking-point set amid action-film drama, immediately gestures to the chaotic, violent nature of the hero’s journey and emphasises the significance of Tyler Durden, whose hyper-masculinity is clearly responsible for changing the course of the narrator’s life. Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, in contrast, opens with the narrator Jake Barnes’ relatively low-key recollection of Robert Cohn, a Jewish friend who was once ‘boxing champion of Princeton’.[1] While this detail indicates a world of male competition and violence, it is not directly involved in the timeframe of the narrative and remains detached from the experience of Jake, unlike the dominating influence of Tyler Durden upon Palahaniuk’s narrator. The reference to boxing becomes more relevant later in the novel, once heated masculine rivalry culminates in Robert asserting his physical superiority over the other male characters. However, Jake’s character-profile of Robert is more representative of his tendency to analyse the lives of others rather than his own. The digressive opening suggests his own process of self-discovery will be difficult, nuanced and predominantly subconscious, whereas the dramatic introduction of Fight Club’s unnamed narrator shows him at the end of a thrilling, destructive and ultimately life-changing journey.

     The traditional role of the hero as being the most important character, fighting against adversity, is complicated by both novels. While the two protagonists also act as first-person narrators, they are not the focal point of the action, nor do they appear to drive their own stories. Prior to the revelation that they are in fact one and the same, Palahniuk’s narrator lives in the shadow of Tyler Durden, an anarchic figure who kickstarts his disconnection from a life of passivity, meaningless work and consumerism. It is when the narrator is at his lowest - purposeless, plagued by insomnia, attending cancer support groups for relief – that he meets Tyler, who appears as his exact antithesis: ‘funny and charming and forceful and men look up to him and expect him to change their world’.[2] This description reads like a summary of the archetypal hero, which the narrator accepts is Tyler’s role and not his own; ‘Tyler is capable and free, and I am not’.[3] Instead, the narrator is guided by the rightful hero, allows himself to be manipulated by him, learns from him. Until his later moment of epiphany, the narrator’s self-definition is anchored to his perception of Tyler as the all-knowing, prevailing, masculine ideal, a man who possesses all the qualities he lacks. It is a dynamic reliant on a sense of inferiority; only once the narrator accepts he is less than Tyler can he make the steps to join him, to be ‘anywhere near hitting bottom’, which is ironically recognised as the summit of the novel’s nihilistic brand of masculinity. [4] The narrative is regularly interspersed with step-by-step instructions of illicit procedures such as the making of plastic explosives and the breaking of locks, often followed by the line ‘I know this because Tyler knows this’.[5] The phrase acts as a refrain, repeatedly demonstrating how much the narrator has been influenced by his counterpart and how far he has been corrupted.

     While Jake is not overshadowed by another character to the extent that Palahniuk’s narrator is, his validity as a traditional hero is compromised by his reserved nature and an inclination to observe others rather than to act. Hemingway presents his protagonist as a man content with the current pattern of his life, who, unlike Fight Club’s narrator, does not feel a sufficient need for change. This is evident in his blunt rejection of Robert’s offer in the second chapter, regarding a spontaneous trip to South America. Drawing parallels with many of Tyler’s rousing speeches in Fight Club, Robert asks ‘Do you know that in about thirty-five more years we’ll be dead?’.[6] Jake seems affronted by the morbidity of the observation, perhaps recalling repressed scenes of death he witnessed at war. He repeats ‘What the hell’, as if denouncing this reminder of mortality as a graceless persuasive tactic.[7] Jake’s following answer, ‘I’ve had plenty to worry about one time or other. I’m through worrying’, typifies his temperament throughout the novel, one of level-headedness and restraint which often comes at the cost of emotional suppression.[8] Rather than examining his feelings toward the transience of his own life, Jake judges Robert’s desire for change as the ‘result of two stubbornesses: South America could fix it and he did not like Paris’, assuming, rather patronizingly, that Robert ‘got the first idea out of a book and…the second came out of a book too.’[9] The narrator’s tendency to evaluate the behavior of his peers as opposed to looking inwardly, acts as a blockade to any clear insight into his self-definition and leads Earl Rovit to label Jake a ‘particularly opaque first-person narrator’.[10] It is not that Jake cannot access an understanding of himself, but rather that he appears reluctant to divulge personal details. This is perhaps a result of the stigma associated with male self-awareness, of acknowledging one’s flaws candidly and the vulnerability which follows.

     When Jake does delve into personal matters, it is often accompanied by a sense of ambiguity. A clear example occurs in the fourth chapter: ‘Undressing, I looked at myself in the mirror...Of all the ways to be wounded. I suppose it was funny’.[11] This is the first direct reference to Jake’s impotence, handled with the same everyday nonchalance as his preparations for bed. The brooding remark ‘Of all the ways to be wounded’, is a lamentation, a regretful acknowledgment that any other injury would not have resulted in such a pronounced loss of masculinity. The ambiguity of the passage lies in its circumvention of precise anatomical terminology; words such as penis or manhood are overlooked, perhaps too brash for such a delicate matter. Hemingway relies on the reader’s assumption that the worst type of mutilation for a man is that of his sexual being, that impotence represents both the practical and symbolic ruin of a masculinity legitimised only by its carnal, biological function. Even without direct reference to the details of Jake’s injury, its implications become obvious to the audience, meaning the ambiguity of the passage must serve a purpose other than shrouding the narrator in mystery. Jeffrey Hart suggests that while ‘Hemingway does not specify the nature of the wound…he requires the reader to infer it, to participate in imagining.’[12] This process of inference requires an interrogation of Jake’s attempts at concealment; first his resistance to using explicitly phallic words, followed by an attempt to trivialise his condition: ‘I suppose it was funny.’ The use of ‘suppose’ implies Jake is willing himself to see the comical side of his injury in vain, rather than confronting its traumatic impact directly. Through the use of faux-ambiguity, Hemingway necessitates the reader’s awareness of emotional repression, which Jake appears reliant upon to preserve a masculine self-image threatened by impotence.

     In contrast to the repression that works to protect Jake’s sense of masculinity in Hemingway’s novel, Fight Club presents the extreme expression of pent-up male emotion and the performance of self-abasement. While Jake attempts to detach himself from an injury he does not want to be defined by, Palahniuk’s unnamed narrator attempts to use pain as a way to escape a perceived lack of self-definition. The motivations of the two protagonists, therefore, can be seen as the inverse of each other – Jake appears to resist understanding himself in order to avoid further emotional suffering, while the narrator of Fight Club begins to view suffering as the very catalyst for self-understanding. As a prelude to the philosophy of Tyler, which views self-destruction as essential and epiphanic, the narrator fakes serious illness for therapeutic benefit early in the novel. His participation in cancer support groups can be seen as the opposite of Jake’s coping strategy in The Sun Also Rises, because it is the imagining of non-existent suffering as opposed to the repression of genuine trauma. This opposition signifies a wider difference between the two characters – to some extent, Jake has a fulfilling lifestyle he wishes to preserve whereas Palahniuk’s narrator feels a general aimlessness and an emotional void he needs to fill. His observation that ‘walking home from support group, I’d felt more alive than I’d ever felt’, works both as a testament to the cathartic nature of near-death experience and as an insight into a life devoid of true feeling.[13] Only when the narrator is surrounded by the dying and the hopeless is the value of his own existence reaffirmed.

     Despite the emotional release triggered by the support groups, Palahniuk’s narrator does not necessarily partake in worthwhile introspection any more than Hemingway’s protagonist. Participation in his unorthodox brand of therapy relies on deception and secrecy, behavior that seems antithetical to the process of genuine, progressive self-definition. The narrator boasts ‘I never give my real name’, a habit which acts as a barrier against true vulnerability, while also a mischievous nod to his anonymity throughout the narrative.[14] The narrator is not required to reveal intimate details in order to earn the sympathy of strangers: ‘If I didn’t say anything, people in a group assumed the worst’. Here, the use of concealment differs from Jake’s in The Sun Also Rises, as it is intended to heighten emotional response rather than to quell it. While there is a sharp contrast between the emotional needs of Palahniuk and Hemingway’s protagonists, they both seem resistant to frank self-analysis, or any overt exploration of male consciousness as a whole. Although there is an element of social critique in Fight Club, this primarily consists of a denunciation of consumerism, as opposed to a direct analysis of masculinity. Peter Middleton argues that ‘men have written plenty about themselves as men; little of it consciously’, an assessment which is applicable to the two narrators in question, who may demonstrate masculine issues such as aggression and sexual anxiety but do not actively dissect them.[15] Middleton suggests that an explanation for this perpetuation of ‘men’s silence’ lies in the ‘lack of a language for such reflection’; a communicative barrier founded upon the learnt masculine suppression of feeling; the ‘blocked reflexes [of] emotion.’ Palahniuk’s narrator attempts to re-stimulate these reflexes maladaptively, first at cancer support groups and then through amateur fighting, while Jake ensures his emotional reflexes remain blocked, and therefore, the trauma of his impotence is manifested in other ways.

     Middleton’s assertion that men lack the dialogical ability to analyse their own masculinity, suggests the emotional dysfunctionality present in both novels will be managed through action rather than discourse. The narrators’ attempts at redemption, therefore, can be viewed as being inherently wordless. While this is apparent in the non-verbalisation of Jake’s traumatic injury and the concealed identity of Palahniuk’s narrator, it is also evident in their participation in sports of a physical, violent nature. In the Sun Also Rises, Jake appears to aggrandise the virile bull-fighting of Pamplona as a way to redeem his perceived masculine inadequacy. Hemingway repeatedly uses the bull-fights as a symbol for sexual pursuit and conquest, a world which Jake can no longer access. His description of the bull-fighter Romero to Brett, emphasises the control and power Jake no longer possesses sexually: ‘She saw how…[he] saved his bulls for the last when he wanted them’ and how ‘he dominated the bull…while preparing for the killing’.[16] This prompting of Brett’s admiration for Romero foreshadows Jake’s later role in facilitating their relationship, leading to his lust for Brett being enacted through another man, who unlike him, is able to function sexually. Rather than confronting the emasculating emotions around his impotence through the discourse of introspection, they are manifested in an exaggerated fixation with the masculine, carnal action of bull-fighting.

     Fight Club similarly demonstrates an attempt at redemption rooted in the wordless machismo of violent sport. The narrator’s proclamation that ‘what happens at fight club doesn’t happen in words’ implies this world of aggression and pain provides a more direct experience than that of verbalised emotion.[17] This idea is echoed by Joyce Carol Oates, who states that boxing is a ‘highly condensed drama without words’; implying the emotion of the boxing ring is experienced via action unmediated by conscious thought.[18] However, Oates opposes the idea that boxing is ‘ “brute”, “primitive”, “inarticulate” ’, as she believes it is a ‘text improvised in action…a dialogue between the boxers’.[19] This notion of an intimate, unifying discourse between men is tangible within fight club, a place of comradery where ‘a lot of best friends meet for the first time’.[20] However, the ‘dialogue’ that Oates perceives is one of cathartic aggression, an exchange of raw, physicalised emotion that does not prompt self-analysis or a true sense of redemption. After all, the narrator observes that ‘most guys are at fight club because of something they’re too scared to fight’; like The Sun Also Rises, Fight Club presents problematic male emotion expressed in indirect and dysfunctional ways.[21]

     Despite the different life experiences of Palahniuk’s and Hemingway’s protagonists, the men are linked by a struggle to define themselves. Jake’s tendency to analyse his peers rather than himself, constitutes a state of emotional repression that prevents him from confronting the trauma of his impotence. The unnamed narrator of Fight Club, meanwhile, is characterised by an emotional void which is exacerbated by hollow consumerism and debilitating insomnia. Both characters’ failure to understand their respective emotional issues leads to a poor sense of self-definition. Jake loves Brett but does not know what he wants from the relationship, nor can he recognise the insecurities which lead to feelings of jealousy towards Robert Cohn. Palahniuk’s narrator suffers from a similar deficiency in self-awareness, demonstrated by his uncontrolled, self-destructive desire for any kind of genuine feeling and more significantly, a failure to realise that he is in fact the same hyper-masculine man he idolises. Both protagonists’ attempts at redemption are undermined by an inability to truly define themselves, as their emotional dysfunctionalities cannot be redeemed prior to being understood. This understanding may be reached by means of honest, introspective discourse; however, both novels suggest that masculinity often favours aggression and silence as ways of processing emotion.  


                                                                                                                                                                        

Bibliography

 

 

Carol Oates, Joyce, On Boxing, (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006)

Doody, Terence, ‘Hemingway’s Style and Jake’s Narration’, The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol.4, No.3 (Journal of Narrative Theory, Sept 1974) pp.212-225

Hart, Jeffrey, The Sun Also Rises: A Revaluation, The Sewanee Review, Vol.86, No.4 (The Johns Hopkins University Press, Fall, 1978) pp. 557-562

Hemingway, Ernest, The Sun Also Rises, (London: Arrow, 1993)

Middleton, Peter, The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992)

Palahniuk, Chuck, Fight Club (London: Vintage, 1997)

 

 

 

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[1] Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, (London: Arrow, 1993) p.1

[2] Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, (London: Vintage, 1997) p.174

[3] Ibid, p.174

[4] Ibid, p.70

[5] Ibid p.12

[6] Hemingway, p.10

[7] Ibid, p.10

[8] Ibid, p.10

[9] Ibid, p.10

[10] Terence Doody, ‘Hemingway’s Style and Jake’s Narration’, The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol.4, No.3 (Journal of Narrative Theory, Sept 1974) pp.212-225 (p.212)

[11] Hemingway p.26

[12] Jeffrey Hart, The Sun Also Rises: A Revaluation, The Sewanee Review, Vol.86, No.4 (The Johns Hopkins University Press, Fall 1978) pp.557-562 (p.558)

[13] Palahniuk p.22

[14] Ibid, p.23

[15] Peter Middleton, The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992) p.3

[16] Hemingway, p.145-146

[17] Palahniuk, p.51

[18] Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing, (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006) p.8

[19] Ibid, p.11

[20] Palahniuk, p.54

[21] Ibid, p.54