Maya Genis

"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 Strine green stripe pattern. Mine fell fifteen stories, burning, into a fountain...It took my whole life to buy this stuff...You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple of years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you...The police think maybe it was the gas. Maybe the pilot light on the stove went out or a burner was left on, leaking gas, and the gas rose to the ceiling, and the gas filled the condo from ceiling to floor in every room. The condo was seventeen hundred square feet with high ceilings and for days and days, the gas must've leaked until every room was full. When the rooms were filled to the floor, the compressor at the base of the refrigerator clicked on. Detonation." (43-44)
-Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

Environmental crisis, the slow and steady kind, seems particularly frightening when we think of residence. Our space, our demarkated portion of the earth, is just as vulnerable to damage as the overall ecosystem within which we dwell. For this reason, I think modern consumerism is a manner in which we try to stave off destruction, or at least calculate how we can become better prepared for the onset of an apocalypse. Humans believe that they have control over their immediate space and that it is impervious to harm simply because it is we who pay the rent, we who choose the potted plants, and we who chose the neighborhood next to Trader Joe's. This excerpt from Palahniuk's text was especially emblematic of contemporary dwelling within crisis. The narrator, seemingly sequestered from endangerment because of his highly cultivated condo and its many furnishings, epitomizes the modern consumer, in that he is aware of impending doom, but "at least [he's] got [his] sofa issue handled." Home projects and purchases then seem to be elixirs prolonging our lives (because clearly IKEA exists so that we die only after our perfect bedroom set is in place). New generations, distanced from post WW2 rationing, are hankering to build the ultimate dwelling, and as they are free from geographical or economic limitations, they find themselves engulfed in choice. The problem becomes when the illusion of limitless choice becomes a mode of living, especially considering that each purchase carries with it more exhaustion of resources and higher risk (radiation, chemical emissions) within the home. The detonation of the ideal condo in this text is the moment in which the narrator moves from dwelling in a post-apocalypse to enacting a real apocalypse (i.e., beginning "fight club" and planning larger scale detonations). We see the same unravelling of materialistic stupors in Delillo's White Noise, at the point in which Jack Gladney follows his colleague's advice and turns his fear of death outward as violence towards others. The pattern in both of these texts indicates that fear of a slow, impending death is much more insidious than a large scale end. We can see this as the protagonists from Fight Club and White Noise emerge from their satiated shells, restless and amped, products of a society which constantly pushes crisis to a later horizon by providing more catalogues, more signs that all's well. Palahniuk's narrator and DeLillo's Jack consciously observe themselves drowning in comfortable surroundings until they confront actual risk: an aparment fire and exposure to an "airborne toxic event." These mini apocalypses shake the two men out of their secured lifestyles (and I clearly do mean lifestyles and not lives) and produce new visions of cryptic risk in the mundane. We are left with a warning to be very observant of the ways in which danger impinges on everything; furniture, real estate, modern conveniances are only mirages of a renewed Eden.