I was reminded of one of my favorite movie lines from the mouth of Tyler Durden, conjured anti-hero of Fight Club. That movie in general and those lines in particular resonate because I think it is a sound bite that tries to encapsulate the zeitgeist of the American Gen-X male and posits that they have no essential conundrum, unlike previous generations before them. On a certain level, I am sympathetic to this.
Yet reading those lines, I was reminded of a passage from Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Chip, a 30-something non-tenured professor of Cultural Criticism at an elite private College is arguing with one of his students about the moral validity of Pizza Hut promoting Cancer Awareness by placing testicular self-exams by the hot pepper flakes. She retorts:
“What is bullshit?” Chip said.
“This whole class, ” she said. “It’s just bullshit every week. It’s one critic after another wringing their hands about the state of criticism. Nobody can ever say what’s wrong exactly. But they all know it’s evil. They all know ‘corporate’ is a dirty word. And if somebodys having fun, or getting rich! disgusting! Evil! And it’s always the death of this and the death of that. And people who think they’re free aren’t ‘really’ free. And people who think they’re happy aren’t really ‘happy’. And it’s impossible to radically critique society anymore, although what’s so radically wrong with society that we need such a radical critique, nobody can say exactly.”
I see this passage as a character retort to the sort of nihilsm expressed through Tyler Durden about the emptiness of modern life and the cultural criticism his character so eloquently expresses about the non-spirituality of modern living through IKEA and The Gap. Melissa’s quote, on the other hand, is more a splash of cold water than anything else and for me, is a reminder to not takes things so seriously and to snap out of it sometimes. The ‘it’ in question is what’s usually called Yuppie Navel Gazing.
By the way, it’s a marvelous passage and The Corrections is a really great book, but it should be noted that I think Franzen is just playing Devil’s Advocate at this point in his novel because he is every bit the critic and intellectual in real life and much closer to Tyler Durden (in sentiment only) and every bit the ass if you’ve ever heard him speak. Thought provoking for me nonetheless.
