Excerpt from his introduction Irvine Welsh for his new job Chuck Palahniuk.
[…] After this long (but necessary) preface, we come to the work of one of the most important writers of our time, Chuck Polanik. His writing is primarily aimed at the first generation (and following) of Americans who are poorer than their parents. It's hard for a Western European of my age to understand that the (white) American Dream ends up like this: Old, rich, ruddy men, with wrinkled, typical good housewife wives, and with some kind of plastic anthropomorphic mistresses who keep an eye on everything, while at the same time they hate the (melancholy, black, yellow) newcomers, who supposedly went to that country to liberate themselves. The Fight Club generation was the first army of young working- and middle-class Americans to be exploited and sold out by a business system that benefits the super-rich. Being an American today means that it will take your whole life to pay off your debt to the banks because they loaned you out to get the useless degrees required to work as a salesman for an ever-lower wage that tends to zero, while the tax contributions of 1% return in the same direction from which they came. The other option – not going to university to study – usually now involves continuing to engage in illegal activities on the fringes of society and unconstructive involvement in fewer and fewer petty scams, until the gluttony and heartiness of youth is exhausted and the sad metamorphosis is complete. to a broken down, desperate homeless man. Otherwise, the fate of youth is slavery: Your value lies in being a device to guilt your parents into parting with the wealth they worked so hard to acquire. And then you have to take care of zombies who will live forever, thanks to the products of the big pharmaceutical companies, but will spend the last fifty years of their lives as bags of bones, in near-total anesthesia, swallowing pills.
Tyler Durden and Balthazar were forced into this world as amateur martial artists who lose teeth and perfect their technique along the way. They resonated widely in a troubled America that wasn't quite comfortable with itself, then went viral and penetrated places where the culture of violence was unknown or repressed and condemned by hierarchies or, in some cases, in locations, where it was endemic in the social fabric. The United Kingdom, for example, has had its own wooden clubs for several generations, in the form of what are graphically referred to as "football hooligans". These clubs still exist today, albeit on a limited and highly specialized scale, despite the efforts of hysterical politicians and police authorities. In today's Britain, if you hold hands with someone on a Friday night, you will receive a warning from the police. At worst, you might end up in a cell for a night, with concussion, pain and regret simmering inside you, until you fall asleep and the drunkenness wears off. If you do the same thing on a Saturday afternoon near a football pitch, chances are you'll get five years in prison.
However, the economic, technological and social crisis that characterizes the neoliberal period of late capitalism has been captured in fiction in more or less the familiar way: As the tragedy of a white, middle-aged, educated, well-to-do American man. It is taken for granted that his concerns are shared by women, blacks and, importantly, members of the working class who are of white, European descent.
Fortunately, Chuck Polanik and a few other writers like him don't put up with that kind of thing. Fight Club brought to the fore the group of politically disaffected American youth who are the debt helot. Polanik did not humbly look away from the mess of our society while the images of his fictional creations stared us in the mirror in anger, frustration, despair and terror. But it also featured ample samples of the weapons of human resistance, which meant engaging in all of it was incredibly fun: The dark humor, the animalistic rage, the not giving a damn, the rampant egotism, the disorienting game of roles, mischief, things we all resort to from time to time. And above all, the undermining of the vanity and whims of the powerful, the arrogant, and the proper, as vividly displayed in Chuck's heroes. That's why Tyler Durden, who resembles Pana, becomes the type. Yes, it was indeed a literary glorification, but it glorified an entire generation of people who felt alienated from its traditional themes.
The run of Fight Club was a truly underground phenomenon, a daring novel that had the fervent support of a visionary editor (Jerry Howard) at an independent New York publishing house. At first, Thomas' persistent naysayers seemed to be vindicated, as the book sold only to a small but devoted circle of fans. The film suffered the same fate and Fox, faced with lukewarm receipts, kept David Fincher's film adaptation in theaters for two weeks. But then the film was resurrected on DVD and cemented through discussions in online chat rooms, and so the "cult" of Fight Club was born. At this point, Chuck did exactly what he needed to do, a move that no author who faces such success does: He kept writing, building that legacy in his own church and producing amazing, incendiary works of fiction, forming a movement. not only through his vast body of writing, but also through his highly original and thorough promotion. I've had the privilege of attending events with him over the years in the US and UK and I can say that I don't know another author who works so tirelessly and hard to connect with his audience. And I know a lot of writers who work like dogs.
Fight Club 2, in its graphic novel form, is a characteristically bold, but perfectly fitting step forward. It takes place ten years after the first, and the novel's narrator, now a burned-out middle-aged man, remains married to a still-hurting and searching Marla. Starting from such a prosaic, archetypal starting point, the story begins to unravel with the expected provocation and madness that accompanies Tyler's reappearance, at a time when art is struggling to come to grips with a reality in which those who hold the keys to the asylum are now so vain and so psychopathic that they don't even bother to hide their insanity. Fight Club 3 then launches itself in the only direction one can go from that point: Ending it all. Depending on where you stand, these works will come across as "we fucked her" type proclamations or just cautionary tales. Seen as a whole, the Fight Club trilogy depicts a queer America that was once fringe, but now seems more or less conventional.
When I talk to grown-up members of the Fight Club tribe, they all say the same thing: This was the book that introduced them to literature. Immersion in monomania and addiction, as well as the need to punch holes in an increasingly restrictive world full of daily horror and confusion, are the elements that fuel their enthusiasm and passion for Chuck's work. Yes, they've read other writers since then, and liked them too, and some of them do well and persist in loving the self-preservation cocoon of the middle-class novel, with its sweet, reassuring delusions. Certainly, if everyone wrote like Chuck Polanick or William Burroughs, then the world would be an even more troubled place than it is today. However, the key point is that some people feel the need to write like this, and we have them to thank for that, because literature and art exist not only to entertain us blissfully while glorifying the status quo, but also to they challenge us and activate us. If we lose the strong urge to rebel against authority, then right now we're screwed worse than ever. The new first rule of Fight Club is that we absolutely must talk about Fight Club.