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