Marxism,Not Manhood

Despite their different immediate contexts of production and cultural affiliation, Seamus Heaney's Beowulf and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club participate in a larger problematic concerning the fate of masculinity in the modern world. Heaney knowingly casts his task as a translator in terms of a test of manhood in which he strives to claim a place for an ancient, implicitly masculine wisdom in contemporary world culture. Palahniuk dramatizes a situation in which contemporary culture is made responsible for a crisis in masculine identity. However, although Fight Club's take on its protagonist's attempt to resolve this crisis is surely ironic, its logic implies that action is required against the effects of globalized capitalism, which should be understood not as emasculating but as dehumanizing and as requiring a response that goes beyond the merely cultural.