Architecture - Andrew Ballantyne [13]
The lofty walls of his uncarpeted room were free from pictures. He had himself bought every article of furniture in the room: a black iron bedstead, an iron wash-stand, four cane chairs, a clothes-rack, a coal-scuttle, a fender and irons, and a square table on which lay a double desk. A bookcase had been made in an alcove by means of shelves of white wood. The bed was clothed with white bedclothes and a black and scarlet rug covered the foot. A little hand-mirror hung above the wash-stand and during the day a white-shaded lamp stood as the sole ornament on the mantelpiece. The books on the white wooden shelves were arranged from below upwards according to bulk. (James Joyce, from ‘A Painful Case’, in Dubliners, first published in Great Britain 1914: London: Minerva, 1992, p. 93.)
In Fight Club, the nameless protagonist’s total immersion in consumer society is demonstrated by the care with which he furnishes his apartment:
Everything, including your set of hand-blown green glass dishes with the tiny bubbles and imperfections, little bits of sand, proof that they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous aboriginal peoples of wherever, well, these dishes all get blown out by the blast . . . .
Something which was a bomb, a big bomb, had blasted my clever Njurunda coffee tables in the shape of a lime green yin and an orange yang that fit together to make a circle. Well they were splinters now.
My Haparanda sofa group with the orange slip covers, design by Erika Pekkari, it was trash now.
And I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.
We all have the same Johanneshov armchair in the Strinne green stripe pattern. Mine fell fifteen stories, burning, into a fountain.
We all have the same Rislampa/Har paper lamps made from wire and environmentally friendly unbleached paper. Mine are confetti. . . .
It took me my whole life to buy this stuff. (Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, New York: Norton, 1996, pp. 43–4.)
In David Fincher’s film of the novel the point is driven home quickly and effectively by having the nameless character, played by Ed Norton, look round the apartment and, before our eyes, the furniture materializes, a piece at a time, complete with its catalogue description, so we can see that everything in the room has been valued, selected, and paid for. The point to be made here is that the furniture goes beyond being functional, and is described in each of these examples precisely because it does go beyond the functional. A chair in a film is never just a chair, it is an insight into character. Likewise, in a novel if a chair is described, it is always more than a place to sit. Of course the character has chairs in his apartment. If no mention were made of it then we would take it for granted. The character in Fight Club is morbidly self-aware, and asks himself a question that sane people do not ask themselves, but which advertisers and novelists ask of others all the time: ‘What kind of dining set defines me as a person?’ The question is not absurd, but it is not usually asked in this way of oneself. It sounds neurotic, certainly, but it isn’t nonsensical. The sort of dining set that defines a president or an emperor is different from the mass-produced dining set that defines an insurance clerk as a person. But the questions that the insurance clerk would ask would normally tend to be either more practical or more vague: ‘Will it fit in my apartment? Would I be happy to have this furniture around? Does it feel right?’ If I am an emperor then the question is less concerned with a personal taste, and is more