Formal #3: Cooking for Schizophrenics

Choosing a topic to analyze in Fight Club is not an easy task. As I sit here, I am confronted with 218 pages of hard-core material that could be analyzed for an entire semester; materialism, support groups as therapy, terminal illness and identity, the connection between sex and violence, search for identity, self-actualization, self-destruction, how to retain your masculinity with bitch tits, to name just a few. We could analyze how under-paid banquet workers defile food (see chapter 10). One could even spend an entire semester focusing on Palahniuk’s writing style alone; blunt.

Upon researching background information on Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, I came across an interview on dvdtalk.com (see link below). Because I was only reading this for my own enlightenment and entertainment, I did not go through the necessary steps to validate the interviewer or the web site, but in it, Palahniuk talks about his thought process while writing the novel. So, in an effort to get inside his mind a little and possibly gain some insight into where Fight Club might have come from, I read on.

I am told that Palahniuk is unassuming and soft spoken, not the type of guy you would expect to create a fight club, or be in the midst of researching material for his next book about sex addicts (Choke). His fiction is filled with personal material, gathered throughout his own life and experiences. His work as a hospice volunteer, for example, transporting terminally ill patients to their support groups, provided the impetus for the characters we meet; Big Bob, Marla, and Chloe. He would sit in on the meetings, waiting to drive his patient back to the hospice center, and he would feel guilty sitting amidst the group, healthy. This led to the idea that someone could conceivably “fake it.” What if someone just sat in on the meeting for the intimacy and the honesty that it provides? It could provide a sort of cathartic emotional outlet, which is precisely what it does for the narrator and Marla. This is part of what they are seeking; honesty and intimacy.

The article goes on to give us a glimpse of Palahniuk’s life experiences and how he translates them into his work. What I found most amusing, however, was how we spend so much time and energy analyzing a piece of work, cover to cover. We assume, after all this analyzing and dissecting, that we know what the author is trying to tell us by the style they use, the words they chose, the events that take place. Sometimes, it’s a personal feeling that becomes a bit of a comical twist that just works in the story. Simple.

On page 12, we are given a “recipe” for nitroglycerin. This is what was cooked up as Tyler/narrator prepared to blow up the Parker-Morris Building. On page 13, we are told how we can make napalm. On pages 68-71, we are taken through the process of making soap. Lye, we are instructed, is the perfect ingredient in a self-destructive breakfast, as it burns nicely on the skin. We could spend a semester dissecting and analyzing these violent, unstable men, apparently raised in a home without a male father figure, creating recipes that cause massive destruction. Palahniuk gives some insight: “In Fight Club I used the bomb recipes because so much cute fiction was being written with food recipes in it, like Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, Like Water for Chocolate. It got to be so you couldn’t pick up a novel anymore without feeling like you were reading a cookbook. So I thought, why not a novel with like, guy recipes? So that’s why I started doing that.” Go figure. I think Palahniuk could take Emeril in the basement.

http://www.dvdtalk.com/interviews/chuck_palahniuk.html

Formal #2: Grief as Mental Illness

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion spends a great deal of time pondering the idea that grief is a form of mental illness, manifested as temporary insanity. She rejects the idea that grief is simply intense sadness by demonstrating how grief leads to extreme denial, delusional wishful thinking, the belief in individual ability to control outcomes, reduced functioning, and a shaken sense of self. She believes that magical thinking, the central theme of the memoir, is the childlike belief that we are able to control outcomes and change the world around us through the intensity of our wishes and desires.

Didion begins her memoir with the first thoughts that came to mind as she sat down at the computer for the first time, five months following her husband’s very sudden death; Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. On December 30, 2003, Didion and her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, were about to sit down to dinner after spending the day visiting their only child, daughter Quintana, who lie in a hospital in a clinically-induced coma due to septic shock, when John, in mid-sentence, with hand in the air making a point in conversation, fell dead over the table. He suffered a “sudden massive coronary event”, a heart attack. This book, she wrote, was “my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself” (p7).

Once the initial shock wore off, and she was able to resume caring for her daughter, she realized that her grieving mental state resembled that of the clinically insane. She recognized that through the winter (John died in late December) and spring, there had been occasions on which “I was incapable of thinking rationally. I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome” (p35). She was unable to read the obituaries as they came out, just as she was unable a few months later to view John’s picture as it flashed across the television screen during the 2004 Academy Awards “In Memoriam” montage. These disturbed her because they proved John was dead, and she did not yet believe this. She let other people believe it, but if she herself believed it, he might not come back. While packing up his clothes to give away to charities, she was unable to give away all of his shoes. “I stood there for a moment, then realized why: he would need shoes if he was to return” (p37). She comes to believe, in her state of grief/mental illness, that if she controlled certain aspects of her circumstance, she could bring John back.

She was unable to focus on topics of conversation with friends. She was unaware of day or time. Sights, scents, street corners; everything seemed to bring on memories of the past, of her time spent with John and Quintana. Didion quoted Melanie Klein’s 1940 Mourning and it’s Relation to Manic-Depressive States. “The mourner is in fact ill, but because this state of mind is common and seems so natural to us, we do not call mourning an illness. . .to put my conclusion more precisely: I should say that in mourning the subject goes through a modified and transitory manic-depressive state and overcomes it” (p34). Obviously, the overcoming it was what Didion was striving for and could not seem to achieve. Following John’s memorial service, a few months following his death so that Quintana could take part, Didion noted the feeling of emptiness following it. After all, she had gone through the motions, did what she was expected to do to mourn, and he did not come back.

After a year of waiting for John to return, enduring floods of memories that overwhelmed her and removed her from her surroundings, avoiding places and situations that reminded her of life with John and Quintana, she was able to come to some resolution. “I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves, there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water” (p226).

Just 18 months following John’s death, as Didion began to live life again and let John be dead, Quintana died.