Steve Bannon’s “Fight Club” self-reference is quoted and repeated without explaining it is the title of a book and movie about someone with multiple personality.

“We call ourselves ‘the Fight Club.’ You don’t come to us for warm and fuzzy. We think of ourselves as virulently anti-establishment, particularly ‘anti-’ the permanent political class. We say Paul Ryan was grown in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation. We hire people who are freaks. They don’t have social lives. They’re junkies about news and information.” — Steve Bannon (1).

Bannon’s self-reference to “the Fight Club” is mentioned in a new article in The New York Times (2), but no explanation is given about multiple personality.

1. https://quotecatalog.com/quote/steve-bannon-we-call-ourselv-lawEGg7/

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/opinion/steve-bannon-fight-club.html

My two past posts explain what “Fight Club” means:

June 25, 2017

“Fight Club” by Chuck Palahniuk: Protagonist has “split personality,” but author’s Afterword about writing novel does not mention multiple personality.

There are two major issues in this novel: the protagonist’s multiple personality and the fight clubs.

The author’s Afterword does discuss the fight clubs. Palahniuk says, “The whole idea of a fight club wasn’t important. It was arbitrary…The fighting wasn’t the important part of the story” (1, p. 213). Which would leave multiple personality as the basic reason that this novel was written.

The novel is explicit about the protagonist, who ultimately says: “I’m not Tyler Durden. He’s the other side of my split personality. I say, has anybody here seen the movie Sybil?”(1, p. 196). Why, then, is the issue of multiple personality not even mentioned in an author’s Afterword about why and how the novel was written? It is a remarkable omission.

In many past posts, I have used the terms “gratuitous multiple personality” and “unacknowledged multiple personality” to refer to multiple personality that was present in a novel for no apparent reason except that it probably reflected the author’s own psychology. However, since multiple personality is integral to Fight Club and is explicitly acknowledged in the text, those concepts would not apply here. Will I have to coin another term for Palahniuk’s omission in his Afterword? Maybe not.

It is as if the person who wrote the Afterword were not the same person who wrote the novel: the former a person who does not think multiple personality worth mentioning, the latter a person with a great interest in it. The omission in his Afterword implies the author’s multiple personality.

1. Chuck Palahniuk. Fight Club [1996]. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2005.

“Fight Club” by Chuck Palahniuk (post 2): Public, Filmmaker, Publisher all try to ignore or minimize protagonist’s explicit, pivotal, multiple personality.

The Wikipedia entry for the novel makes relatively brief reference to alternate personalities, and does not mention multiple personality by name, except for a link at the bottom of the page to dissociative identity disorder (formal name for multiple personality). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club_(novel)

The Wikipedia entry for the film version makes only passing reference to “dissociated personalities” and does not discuss multiple personality by name. Moreover, the casting of two different actors for the protagonist’s alternate personalities (they share the same body) shows the filmmakers’ attempt to minimize the issue of multiple personality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club

Even the novel’s publisher tries to ignore the protagonist’s multiple personality. The title of the novel, obviously, makes no reference to it. But there is also the copyright page’s list of subject headings under which the novel should be indexed. It makes no reference to multiple personality: 1. Millennialism—United States—Fiction. 2. Young men—United States—Fiction. 3. Apocalyptic fantasies. I. Title.

In short, even when multiple personality is an explicit, pivotal issue in a novel, many people try to minimize or ignore it, especially when the author does (see previous post).

Chuck Palahniuk. Fight Club [1996]. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 2005.