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Fight Club and the Embedding of Delirium in Narrative

2009; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 43; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

2374-6629

Lars Bernaerts,

American Sports and Literature

When the representation of madness colonizes a fictional world, madness becomes tied up with an ideological background, aesthetic ideas, a perspective on humankind and society, and on the nature of fiction. Studying the theme of madness should therefore not be limited to intuitive questions such as what kind of madness is represented?, how does the madness of the character affect his own life and that of his entourage? A rhetorical and analysis of texts allows us to address the complex ethical and aesthetic questions that are conveyed by the representation of madness. What is more, postclassical narratology supplies useful instruments for the investigation of the structure and the effects of madness in fiction. In order to demonstrate this functionality, will focus on a particular manifestation of madness in fiction: the delirium. It arises when a character's or a narrator's extends to the progression and presentation. In Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club (1996) the of the anonymous protagonist assumes vast proportions. Tyler Durden, the other main character of the novel, turns out to be his projected alter ego. Even when the protagonist finally realizes he has been splitting up his personality into two separately acting subjects, the delusional figure is still pulling the strings. At the moment of full recognition, we witness this peculiar conversation between the two main characters: So, now know about Tyler, will he just disappear? No, Tyler says, still holding my hand, I wouldn't be here in the first place ir you didn't want me. I'll still live my life while you're asleep, but if you fuck with me, if you chain yourself to the bed at night or take big doses of sleeping pills, then we'll be enemies. And I'll get you for it. Oh, this is bullshit. This is a dream. Tyler is a projection. He's a disassociative personality disorder. A psychogenic fugue state. Tyler is my hallucination. Fuck that shit, Tyler says. Maybe you're my schizophrenic hallucination?' (Palahniuk 168) In spite of all the insights into his situation the experiencing self fails to get rid of his delusions. His still monopolizes his perception and cognition. And so, in a context of literary postmodernism, the is explicitly resisting reduction to a secondary state. It might even be more actual than the supposed real world, as it motivates the thoughts, utterances, and actions of the protagonist. In Fight Club, the products of the protagonist's sick mind are constitutive to the narrative. By representing the of the experiencing self without comment, the narrating self lures the reader into a delusional world. To stress the fact that the and the are fundamentally intertwined in this situation, will use the term narrative delirium for this kind of world construction. Trying to pinpoint the in narratives of madness is useful, precisely because the delusion becomes the engine of the textual dynamics. It produces the main tensions and instabilities (2) of the in question, as it implicates a continually fluctuating distance between mental representations of events and characters. Consequently, it also governs the reading experience, provoking different types of interest. (3) In Fight Club, the clearest instance of interest is the surprise engendered by the identification of the delirium. The interest, emanating from a tension between knowledge and ignorance, is introduced right in the first paragraph, when the autodiegetic narrator states: People are always asking, did know about Tyler Durden (Palahniuk 11). A definite curiosity is likely to arise from enigmatic utterances like this one, but the true identity of Tyler is only revealed in the second part of the text. It also turns out that the narrating self, who is telling after the events, has been in the know all along the time of the telling, but in the first part of the text, he does not enlighten the reader on this matter. …