The Mailer Review/Volume 9, 2015/The Beatster, the White Negro, and the Evolution of the Hipster in Fight Club: Difference between revisions

{{DISPLAYTITLE:The Beatster, the White Negro, and the Evolution of the Hipster in ''Fight Club''}}

In the wake of the industrial revolution, the men who had once stewarded nature began to wreak havoc upon it by dumping waste and chemicals into the environment. Palahniuk’s hipsters fantasize and romanticize a violent return to the primitive, imagining hunting wild game in a post-apocalyptic Times Square, just as Wenke claims that the White Negro’s “romantic rejection of society” signifies “a liberation of instinct to regain for oneself an identity of Adamic innocence.”{{sfn|Wenke|2013|p=72}} Here, though, we need to draw on Bly’s crucial distinction between the wild man and the savage man because the members of Fight Club and Project Mayhem seem to devolve from one to the other. Bly writes that the wild man, who has examined his wound, resembles a Zen priest or a shaman, he is fierce and confident, but, as Bly says, fierceness does have to be expressed as dominance or exploitation. The White Negro fights or kills as a means of achieving “catharsis which prepares for growth,”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=355}} and while the Fight Club members fight to win, what they feel after fighting is not boastful machismo, but enlightenment, an existential transcendence won through violence, purging, but only temporarily, those violent impulses civilized man cannot act upon. Contrasting the wild man to the savage man, however, Bly says that the latter “does great damage to soul, earth, and humankind; we can say that though the savage man is wounded he prefers not to examine it.”{{sfn|Bly|1992|p=x}} Tyler casts the narrator’s shadow, that part of himself he has suppressed but is still savage enough to wreak total destruction on the earth and on all human institutions.{{sfn|Palahniuk|2005|p=123}}  The narrator says, “that’s how I felt. I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn’t afford to eat. . . . I wanted the whole world to hit bottom.”{{sfn|Palahniuk|2005|p=124}} This apparent nihilism is really a thinly-veiled Romantic yearning for a return to an uncorrupted natural world. Project Mayhem ups the ante, redirecting the hipster’s violent impulses from fist-fights with each other to the destruction of property and the propagation of mass fear and confusion. What Mailer says about African-Americans being a “cultureless and alienated bottom of exploitable human material,”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=348}} Tyler says about the members of Project Mayhem being the “crap and slaves of history.”{{sfn|Palahniuk|2005|p=123}} By extension, they too are White Negroes, and, as Mailer’s hipster does and the Weathermen did, they vent their rage against the capitalist system. In another cruel irony, however, despite Tyler’s identification with the white male proletarians who subordinate themselves to Project Mayhem, this anarchoterrorist group mutates into a form of totalitarianism, against which Mailer wrote and fought for his entire career; further, Tyler, now assuming dictatorial powers, devalues their lives as inconsequential to the greater goal of reinventing the world and thus dehumanizes them. Once Tyler takes over, he increasingly distances himself from the narrator, or rather, the narrator, learning that Project Mayhem led to the deaths of both his boss and of his friend Bob and then being threatened himself with castration, distances himself from Tyler.

{{refbegin|40em}}

* {{cite journal |last=Boon |first=Kevin |date=2003 |title=Men and Nostalgia for Violence: Culture and Culpability in Chuck Palahniuk’s ''Fight Club''. |url=https://doi.org/10.3149%2Fjms.1103.267 |journal=The Journal of Men's Studies |volume=11 |issue=3 |pages=267–276 |access-date=2019-05-08 }}

* {{cite AV media |people=Fincher, David (Director) |date=1999 |title=Fight Club |trans-title= |medium=Motion Picture |language=en-US |url=https://amzn.to/2VSOdsg |access-date= |archive-url= |archive-date= |format=DVD |time= |location= |publisher=Fox 2000 Pictures |id= |isbn= |oclc= |quote= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Friday |first=Kirster |date=2003 |title=A Generation of Men without History: ''Fight Club'', Masculinity, and the Historical Symptom |url=http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/issue.503/13.3friday.html |journal=Postmodern Culture |volume=13 |issue=3 |pages= |access-date=2019-05-08 }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History |location=New York |publisher=The New American library |author-link=Norman Mailer |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1975 |title=The Fight |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1959a |chapter=The Homosexual Villain |title=Advertisements for Myself |url= |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam's Sons |pages=222–227 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=1959 |chapter=The White Negro |title=Advertisements for Myself |url= |location=New York |publisher=G. P. Putnam's Sons |pages=337–358 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite journal |last=Petigny |first=Alan |date=2007 |title=Norman Mailer, 'The White Negro,' and New Conceptions of the Self in Postwar America |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07peti |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |pages=184–193 |access-date= }}

* {{cite journal |last=Shuman |first=Michael |date=2010 |title=Norman vs. Ernest: Influence and Identity |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |pages=90–103 |access-date= }}

* {{cite book |last=Solotaroff |first=Robert |date=1973 |title=Down Mailer's Way |url=https://archive.org/details/ert00robe |location=Urbana; London |publisher=University of Illinois Press |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Wenke |first=Joseph |date=2014 |orig-year=1987 |title=Mailer's America |url= |location=Hanover, NH; London |publisher=University Press of New England for University of Connecticut |isbn=0874513936 |author-link= }}

* {{cite book |last=Woolfe |first=Tom |date=1969 |title=The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test |url= |location=New York |publisher=Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}