Durden's Slamposium

I think it's a little too easy to do a homoerotic reading of Fight Club. A little too easy, and a rather misleading.
Yeah, I know, early on in the book, page 14, the nameless protagonist (and we'll come back to this nameless thing) says, "We have sort of a triangle thing going here. I want Tyler. Tyler wants Marla. Marla wants me." "I want Tyler"--you could base an entire homoerotic argument around those three words, if you wanted. Oh, and you could base another argument around the "triangle thing" idea, too--relate it to what Anne Carson says about triangulated jealous relationships in Eros the Bittersweet. In "The Ruse," Carson writes "Desire moves. Eros is a verb." "Want" moves in the Fight Club triangle, yes, yes. I won't delve into this, though. Not here. Not now.
No, in Fight Club, eros is self-eros. Narcissism--love for one's self, one's image. I hope I don't spoil anything for anyone who's unfamiliar with the book or the film, but Tyler Durden and the nameless protagonist are two minds inhabiting the same body. A split mind. Ah, but this makes things a bit more difficult. Is it really narcissism?
Can there be narcissism between ego and ego ideal? An ego ideal is what Durden represents. Durden is "funny and charming and forceful and independent, and men look up to him and expect him to change their world. Tyler is capable and free, and I [Mr. Nameless Protagonist] am not" (174). An ego ideal. Methinks the case so.
(And, going into Mulvey territory, casting Brad Pitt as Durden in the film adaptation reinforces ego ideal status for male spectators to establish "recognition/misrecognition" with, specifically when contrasted against the casting of the rather rodentlike Edward Norton in the nameless insurance claims role)
Durden has the knowledge, too--the knowledge to make napalm and soap and exploding computer monitors. Durden has the knowledge and the ideas. Durden is the teacher, too. Durden leaps from the pages of Plato's Symposium, embodying (as much as a one half of a split mind can embody) one half of the student/teacher relationship the ancient philosophers pondered.
(And, if you wanted to see a genuine homoerotic undercurrent in Fight Club, don't Durden and the nameless protagonist reflect a split mind variant of Halperin's "superordinate/subordinate" relationship?)
Narcissism for a self-image projection brought around through a split mind? Alright, this is trickier to sum up than I'd thought. I've got an idea linking this self-image projection idea to Debord's 'The Commodity as Spectacle," but it's in the early phases right now. Maybe in the following blog.
Before I go, there's the nameless thing I said I'd come back to
It involves everybody's friend, Lacan.
"I asked Tyler what he'd been fighting."
"Tyler said, his father."
"Maybe we didn't need a father to complete ourselves." (53-4)
Ah, here we go, the name-of-the-father. It runs all through Fight Club.
A nameless protagonist? Is his namelessness a result of his father's indifference toward him? Does his father's indifference negate the idea of a name? Is namelessness another form of lack?
Durden springs from the nameless protagonist's mind. A radical father? Durden teaches anarchy, instructs pranks.
And Durden wants to "blast the world free of history" (124), and usher in "the complete and right-away destruction of civilization" (125). Durden wants to break down everything given a name by the father. Radical fatherhood--you don't need a father to complete yourself.
And perhaps this breaking down and destroying everything given a name by the father is the central theme of Fight Club. After a fight, smashed noses and cracked jawbones and ruptured lips render the name-of-the-father moot. Misshapen and rearranged, you are far from the thing given a name by the father, far from something recognizable by the father. Rebirth.