Soap and human sacrifice go hand in hand

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When the narrator first meets Tyler, Tyler declares that he is a soap salesman, although Tyler has various other occupations including a night-time movie projectionist and a waiter. Tyler, however, most identifies himself with the job of selling soap, thus lending weight to the symbolic importance played by soap in the movie. Tyler calls soap “the foundation of civilization” and tells the narrator that “the first soap was made from the ashes of heroes”. He also uses lye, a chemical ingredient of soap, to introduce the narrator to the pain of “premature enlightenment.” In this role, soap is a symbol of purification and cleanliness, of a culture lacking the hypocrisy and fraudulence of contemporary culture.

During this time Tyler has also begun to teach Jack the art of soap making. Jack and Tyler begin making soap from human fat that they have obtained from the discard bins of liposuction clinics and selling this ‘primo’ soap to the upper class department stores in their city. Both Tyler and Jack find delight in ‘selling rich women their fat asses back to them’. Soap is a very important symbol in Fight Club, as Tyler explains that soap ultimately symbolizes heroism, and human sacrifice. This becomes known in the following excerpt (page 76/77/78):

“In ancient history…human sacrifices were made on a hill above a river…The sacrifices were made and the bodies were burned on a pyre…After hundreds of people were sacrificed and burned…a thick white discharge crept from the alter, downhill to the river…Rain fell on the burnt pyre year after year, and year after year people were burned, and the rain seeped through the wood ashes to become a solution of lye, and the lye combined with the fat of the sacrifices, and a thick white discharge of soap crept out from the base of the altar and crept downhill toward the river…Where the soap fell into the river…after a thousand years of killing people and rain, the ancient people found their clothes got cleaner if they washed them at that spot…It was right to kill those people…You have to see…how the first soap was made of heroes…think about animals in product testing. Think about the monkeys shot into space. Without their pain and sacrifice…we would have nothing.”

Tyler shows how soap was obtained through the suffering and sacrifice of humanity and that this is ultimately how all human progress is obtained. He wants Jack to realize that even though this may be disturbing, it is a fact of life.

Rather than being made from the “ashes of heroes”, soap is made from “selling rich women their own fat asses.” The fact that Tyler is a salesman for this product represents Jack’s subservience to this culture. Fight Club is founded as a way for men to regain their primitive instinct that culture tries to wash off. In that soap represents both the purifying and effacing tendencies of civilization.

sources:

1. http://www.freeonlineresearchpapers.com/analysis-of-fight-club
2. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090821173734AAoTB4G

Very important historical analysis can also be read in http://www.suite101.com/content/soap–the-story-of-how-the-world-cleaned-up-its-act-a236903

The date of soap’s discovery is unknown. It may have been some time during the Late Bronze Age, the 12th century B.C., in Mycenaen Greece, or pre-Republic Rome, circa 700 B.C., or sometime in the 9th century B.C. when Hinduism originated in the hill country of India. It is known that mankind stumbled upon soap in an age when animal and possibly human sacrifices represented a form of worship. The pivotal event likely took place on a hilltop near a lake or river.

The discoverers were filthy and vermin-ridden, and yet they liked clean clothes. They were also very devout. Their devotion expressed itself in ritual sacrifice of a prized animal, a captive enemy, or a member of the tribe who had committed a crime. Human or animal, the victim was trussed up and carried beneath poles as the group climbed to the top of a hill. At the summit, worshippers lowered the luckless wretch on to a makeshift altar surrounded by kindling wood that was set ablaze. The throat of the burning creature was slit so that its blood could flow into the flames, generating a crimson steam that wafted its way heavenwards to the gods. The history of animal and human sacrifice has been told before and at greater length. Only two byproducts of this sanguine piety concern us here: the fat and ashes produced by the flames.

These crucial ingredients left behind at the altar of some long forgotten deity would turn out to be, if not a gift from the gods, a result of man’s belief in them. The mixture of burned fat and wood ash is what distant heirs of that devout tribe today call soap. While men placated angry gods at the hilltop altar, their women folk down below washed clothes on a river bank at the base of the hill. Rainwater carried the fat and ashes down the slope and into the water.

Prehistoric washerwomen experienced the same thing that happens every time we pour detergent into the dishwasher or soak in a bubble bath. The ladies who laundered didn’t realize the enduring significance of their discovery, but they did notice that their clothes and hands soaked in rainwater containing fat and ash were exponentially cleaner. By-products of animal sacrifice created the first soap. Although the ingredients and method of manufacture have been improved upon over millennia, the same chemical reaction (called saponification) that occurred on the most important wash day of unrecorded history provided the cleanser the civilized world has used ever since.