Faculty of Arts English Department Ljubljana, Literary Interpretations May 2004 ___________________________________________________________
Douglas Coupland’s
Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
Urša Primožič Mentor: dr. Mojca Krevel
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Content: 1. Introduction………………………………………………………………………..3 2. Biography of Douglas Coupland…………………………………………………..4 3. “Generation X” – the Term………………………………………………………...6 4. “Generation X” – a Summary……………………………………………………..7 5. Stories in “Generation X” ………………………………………….…………….11 6. “X” Characters ………………………………...………………………………….13 7. “Generation X” – Form and Language………………………………………..….15 8. Love and Light in “Generation X”………………………………………...………20 9. Avant-Pop and Postmodernity in “Generation X”……………………...…………22 10. Conclusion………………………………………………………………………..26 11. Sources…………………………………………………………………….……..27
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1. Introduction: Published in 1991, Douglas Coupland’s first novel “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture” was an immediate commercial success, a bestseller
fuelled by the release of Richard Linklater’s movie “Slacker” and the rising of grundge. “Generation X” was said to be the new “Catcher in the Rye”, and Coupland his generation’s Jack Kerouac. With this the author became a reluctant spokesperson for his generation, claiming, “I speak for myself, not for a generation. I never have. I was just writing about my own life, but my life is painfully average. I'm not surprised there was some overlap.” (http://membres.lycos.fr/coupland/coupbiog.html)
First edition of “Generation X” by Abacus, St. Martin’s Press, 1991
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2. Biography of Douglas Coupland: Douglas Coupland was born December 30, 1961 on a Canadian military base in Germany as the third of four sons. His family, he has said, was “unemotional” and “undemonstrative”. When Coupland was four, the family returned to Vancouver, Canada, where he, in 1979, graduated from Sentinel Secondary School. In 1984, after graduating in art and design, he travelled to Hawaii, then to the European Design Institute in Milan, Italy. Finally, in the year 1986, he attended Hokkaido College of Art and Design in Sapporo, Japan. There, he completed a twoyear course in Japanese business science along with fine art and industrial design. At this time he already enjoyed early success as a sculptor, including a solo show at the Vancouver Art Gallery entitled "The Floating World" in November 1987. After a postcard Coupland had written while living in Japan amused the editor of a local paper, the young artist was offered a writing job. He later described it as “bottom-ofthe-food-chain”, saying, “Our office cubicles were like veal-fattening pens. There was just no dignity.” The experience of working in an office, as well as the experience of living in Japan was eventually incorporated into his most famous work, the book “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture”.
Coupland's interest in generation X first emerged in 1988, when he wrote an article about it for “Vancouver Magazine”. That same year he and a friend started working on a comic book about generation X; the project, however, soon went under. In 1989, St. Martin's Press in New York asked Coupland to write a guide to generation X, something on the model of the “Yuppie Handbook”1. Coupland moved to Palm Springs, California, and, instead of a handbook, wrote his first novel, “Generation X”.
_____________________________________________________________________ 1. “Yuppie”, a word first used in this book in 1984, was the buzzword of the 1980s, denoting a young urban professional with a well-paid job and a blooming career.
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Coupland currently resides in West Vancouver in a house designed by Ron Thon. He refuses to own any furniture, and collects meteorites, art and letters, which are locked in a vault (this “no possessions” philosophy is also a feature that he and “Generation X” characters share). He also spends a lot of time in Los Angeles,
northern Scotland and other “psychically strong” places. To date he has written sixteen works, both fiction and non fiction: -
Generation X (1991),
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Shampoo Planet (1992),
-
Life After God (1994),
-
Microserfs (1995),
-
Polaroids From the Dead (collection of stories and essays, 1996),
-
Girlfriend in a Coma (1998),
-
Lara's Book: Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider Phenomenon
(non fiction, 1998), -
Miss Wyoming (1999),
-
City of Glass (2000),
-
God Hates Japan (2001),
-
All Families Are Psychotic (2001),
-
Souvenir of Canada (non fiction, 2002),
-
School Spirit (non fiction, 2002),
-
Hey Nostradamus! (2003),
-
Eleanor Rigby (2004),
-
Souvenir of Canada 2 (non fiction, 2004)
In addition to being an author and a regular contributor to The New York Times, the New Republic and ArtForum, Coupland is also a renowned artist. His on-going design experiments include everything from launching a line of furniture to Smirnoff vodka ads. In 2004 he even wrote a play “September 10” which was performed for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-on-Avon by the author himself.
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3. “Generation X” – the Term: Although the term “generation X” had existed before (it was even the name of Billy Idol’s 1970s punk band), it was Coupland who first defined it in his 1991 novel “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated culture”. The term was
originally used in “Class”, a book on American class structure, written by Paul Fussel. There, “X” was a category of people who wanted to escape a life of status, money and social climbing. Coupland extended the term – in his book it denotes a generation born in America in the late 1950s and the 1960s, a generation of then “twenty-somethings”, resigned to a bleak future. They are overeducated for their monotone jobs, disillusioned by greediness, exploitation and the pace of the modern world. Because there was no real war or actual crisis to influence their upbringing, and because they were the first generation to grow up with a TV set in every room, it was the mass media that left the biggest mark on their lives – it influences the way they process experience, the way they think and live. Growing up in the era of divorce, Ronald Reagan, political scandal and marketing, “X”-ers are desperate to find some sort of meaning in life. The nuclear threat, among other things, prevents them from seeing a future for themselves. The use of the term has since been adopted by the media, though it is generally used to describe those slightly younger than the protagonists of Coupland's novel. Interestingly enough, the term “generation X” is mentioned only once in the book itself – it is used as the American equivalent of “shin jin rui”, or “new human beings”, a term Japanese newspapers invented for people in their twenties working in an office: “We have the same group over here and it’s just as large, but it doesn’t have a name – an X generation – purposely hiding itself. There’s more space over here to hide in – to get lost in – to use as camouflage.” (Coupland, Douglas. “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture”. London: Abacus, St. Martin’s Press, 2002; page 63).
Today, generation X is many things: to some it pejorative, denoting “slackers”; some see “X” as white, middle-class kids who grew up in suburbia, went to college, searched for a career, but ended up working at malls; others claim “X” is a group of cynical and ironic “twenty-somethings”; some argue that “X” does not exist at all;
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some speak of the death of “X” (The New York Times even ran an obituary in 1995 under the headline “The Short Shelf Life of Generation X”, and that same year even Coupland himself announced its over commercialised death); some talk about “generation Y”; others say that “X” is the generation of grunge… Coupland, however, has said that generation X is not a chronological age but “a way of looking at the world." It seems that the whole point of “X” is that there never was or will be a definition.
4. “Generation X” – a Summary: “Generation X” describes a few days in the life of Andy Palmer (who is the
narrator), Dagmar Bellinghausen and Claire Baxter. Andy, Dag and Claire resent the older generation, the “embittered ex-hippies” turned capitalist, yuppies, for having “brand-new million-dollar homes while we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our own grimy little shoe boxes” (page 26). Instead of a land of opportunity, Andy, Dag and Claire were handed a land in which all doors once open were now closed, a land where everything worth having was already taken. In the desire to be free and escape the restrictive society they inhabit, all three leave their nofuture jobs and move to Palm Springs, to the desert. Here they live in adjoining bungalows, work at “McJobs”, and, in an effort to live a life free of possessions, fill their time by travelling, dreaming and telling each other stories. They become voluntary outcasts, observing the society from the outside, trying to find happiness. In way of plot not much actually happens in “Generation X”. First, Andy, Dag and Claire and Andy’s two dogs have a picnic at a failed housing development from the 1950s (we could say that the failed development illustrates the failed hopes for the future that America had in the “perfect” fifties) where they tell each other stories. The next day Dag disappears for five days (he “Daggs-out”, as Andy puts it), then the three friends get a visit from Claire’s friend, mysterious Elvissa, who has also left her old life behind in search of adventure. Claire’s “obsession” from New York, kind-of boyfriend Tobias also arrives. He is very good-looking, a sort of yuppie, although he 7
does not like to be called that (as he says, he is not rich enough). Dag and Andy are very suspicious of him, because they do not understand why he wants to be with Claire, and because he is “something that all of us can become in the absence of vigilance” (page 91). The company then hangs out by the pool, telling stories. Later Elvissa, hitching a ride from the departing Tobias, leaves in order to start a new, possession-free life in a kind of nunnery. A day later, while returning from his bartender job, Dag, who changes into a vandal when he sees a stupid bumper sticker on a car, accidentally sets a car on fire. He and Andy flee the scene. Andy then visits his family in Portland for Christmas, while Claire leaves for New York to see Tobias, who, she feels, has ended things with her. When Claire visits her flame in his apartment, she spots a bottle of pink nail polish, the same brand Elvissa uses, and even catches a glimpse of Elvissa in the other room, so she gets up to leave, now completely over Tobias. He angrily explains he was with her only because he thought she had some sort of secret insight on life, because he wanted to be sublime like her. Tobias, a “yuppie wannabe” (“A X generation subgroup that believes the myth of yuppie life-style being both satisfying and viable. Tend to be highly in debt, involved in some form of substance abuse, and show a willingness to talk about Armageddon after three drinks”; page 104), was jealous of Claire’s “freedom”, jealous on an intellectual level, as he knows that such freedom is not really possible. He does not want “little moments of insight”, he wants to “play the game”, he wants everything, and he wants it now. In Portland, Andy and brother Tyler are the only ones out of seven children to have come home for Christmas. The rest of the siblings simply stopped trying to live up to a picture-perfect family portrait hanging in their parent’s house. Andy has three brothers and three sisters who are also generation X. They, in different ways, are also trying to give their existence some meaning: sister Susan marries a boring yuppie and has a family (is, according to Coupland’s neologisms, a “Squire”), brother Dave sports a ponytail and wears only black (he is a “Black Hole”), one brother drinks, one sister is getting a divorce, while youngest Tyler chooses to pretend nothing is wrong. Back home, Andy first buys a lot of candles and lights them all in the living room, giving his family a feeling of something magical, a feeling of a “dream
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everyone gets sometimes – the one where you’re in your house and you suddenly discover a new room that you never knew was there. But once you’ve seen the room you say to yourself ‘Oh how obvious, of course that room is there. It always has been.” (page 171). But soon the candles burn out and the vision of life as it could be is gone, everything changes from magical back to ordinary. Later, Andy visits a Vietnam memorial. He interested in Vietnam, because he, though he was very small, remembers a bit of the Vietnam era, and that gives him a feeling of being part of real history. Today, he comments, history is a press release, a marketing strategy. When Andy returns to Palm Springs, he and Dag tend bar at a party, when, in the middle of the party, the police arrive and ask to speak to Dag. He leaves with them. It turns out he is not a suspect for the destruction of the car after all, and he is cleared. Andy, after working at the party all night, goes home, and the next morning finds a note on his front door from Claire. She and Dag talked, she writes, and have decided that “now is the time”. They took the dogs and are moving somewhere near San Felipe, Mexico, deeper into the desert, to open a little hotel, just like the one Dag always dreamed of. They want Andy to come as well, but they haven’t told him about the plan before, because he would have thought about it too much and consequently wouldn’t have come. So on New Year’s Day Andy drives to Mexico, a place of freedom, in order to distance himself even further from the modern civilization. While driving, Andy tells us something he wants desperately to happen to him: he would give everything to lie on the sharp rocks of Baja, silence all around him, dying, with a pelican landing at his side, offering him the gift of a small fish. Suddenly, driving across a hill, Andy sees a giant mushroom cloud stretching over the horizon and he panics. The day he was waiting for since he was five, the giant crisis, the day Dag told horror stories about is here – the atom bomb has dropped on America. But there are no sirens, no sign of fear anywhere. Intrigued Andy drives on, only to discover that the cloud is formed by the smoke of farmers burning off the stubble of their fields. He is relieved and stops to watch the fire. A group of mentally retarded children is watching the farmers as well, chatting away in excitement. Suddenly the children are silenced as a giant bird flies around them and grazes Andy’s head. As blood trickles from his cut, Andy is hugged by a retarded child, and then another, and
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another, until he finds himself, as he says, in a “crush of love, unlike anything I had ever known” (page 207), a love not of reason, but of instinct, a love free of “society”.
What sets Generation X apart from previous books in the “generation” genre is the fact that Coupland does not claim to have any answers for the world. All he has is fragments of stories. “I don't know,” says Dag, “whether I feel more that I want to punish some aging crock for frittering away my world, or whether I'm just upset that the world has gotten too big - way beyond our capacity to tell stories about it, and so all we're stuck with are these blips and chunks and snippets on bumpers.” (page 6). Even the book itself is a fragment of a story, a chunk, a few days around Christmas in the lives of Andy, Dag and Claire. We do not know what happens to them in the end. They drove deeper into the desert in the desire to open a hotel there, we read, but the book ends before we can see if the hotel dream came true or not. The ending is only implied – the chapter in which Dag tells the story of the atomic end of the world has the title “December 31, 1999”, and the final chapter of the book, the one where Andy thinks he sees a thermonuclear cloud, is entitled “Jan. 01, 2000”, suggesting that there is hope for the future. The uninhabited desert they drove to is the Promised Land, freedom, a place of no possessions, a place free of society. Here, we read between the lines, the thermonuclear cloud, the shadow over the future, is only smoke. Here Andy gets his encounter with his “pelican”. Here he is crushed by unconditional love. Here the capacity to tell real stories about the world may return. Life here will perhaps be magical. Or perhaps not – can you really escape yourself? For the pictures and neologisms in the book clearly illustrate that Dag, Claire and Andy are products of their mass media saturated upbringing. Will moving even deeper into the desert really cure all of their problems and frustrations? The culture they are trying to escape is part of them, it is in the way they think and perceive the world. Can they escape? We simply do not know - Coupland has no answers.
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5. Stories in “Generation X”: As already mentioned, Dag, Claire and Andy tell each other stories. This was instigated by Andy, who got the idea at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting – people there told horror stories of how they sunk in life, they coughed up “a bit of diseased lung for spectators”. For “how are people ever going to help themselves, if they can’t grab on to a fragment of your own horror?…That little piece of lung makes their own fragments less scary.” (page 15). The only rule in this storytelling is that no one is allowed to interrupt or criticize; for, as Andy puts it, “all three of us are so tight assed about revealing our emotions” (page 16). The stories told provide an emotional outlet for the three friends, but also serve as a commentary on contemporary consumerist society, showing, among other things, that many within the collective mass routinely and monotonously live similar lives, but are, due to the nature of society, powerless to escape (such is the story of Texlahoma). “We know that this is why the three of us left our lives behind and came to the desert – to tell stories and to make our own lives worthwhile tales in the process,” Andy comments (page 10). A few of the stories worth mentioning are the story of “Texlahoma”, the story of “Edward” and the “End-of-the-world story”.
Texlahoma story: This is the first story, told by Claire at the picnic. It is a “Texlahoma story”, a story set on a mythical asteroid orbiting the Earth, a “sad Everyplace where citizens are always getting fired from their jobs at the 7-Eleven and where the kids do drugs” (page 45), and where the year is permanently 1974. On this world the spaceship of Buck the Astronaut crashes. He develops space sickness (“space sickness” sounds very similar to “information sickness” that Mark Amerika speaks of), turning into a monster and falling into an almost permanent sleep, waking only once a day for half an hour. He is taken care of by Arleen Monroe and the two soon fall in love. Buck wants to leave the asteroid and turn back to normal, and because his spaceship is powered by the radiation waves of a woman in love, he asks Arleen to help him. There is just one catch – she will die because of the lack of oxygen, but he will later bring her back to life. Arleen declines. Her sister Darleen now takes care of Buck, and the same scenario happens; they fall in love, but Darleen does not want to die for
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Buck. So the middle sister, Serena, who wishes to leave Texlahoma, takes over Buck’s care. They fall in love, and she is willing to start the spaceship, die, and be resurrected by Buck. As the spaceship with Buck and Serena leaves Texlahoma, Arleen and Darleen feel jealous, even though they realize that “the whole business of Buck being able to bring us back to life was total horseshit”(page 52).
The story of Edward: Andy has never been in love, and when he admits to us, the readers, that he does not want to go trough life alone, he tells us the story of Edward, a story he won’t tell Andy and Claire, to illustrate this fact. Once upon a time there was a young man named Edward, he says, who lived by himself, dignified, following his own schedule. But soon he became sloppy in his ways; his life was losing its controllability. He knew a lot of words, and so he created for himself a private world made of words, a magic room only he and his faithful spaniel Ludwig could inhabit. In this room Edward spent ten years. But then his dog Ludwig turned against him, changing into a Rottweiler, forcing Edward to leave the room. Edward now entered a changed world, one where people built a city not of words but of relationships. He now had to learn all of the traps of this city with a ten-year handicap, but he knew he, having a fresh perspective, would survive. And once he made his way in this world, he would build the tallest tower of them all and sell maps in it.
End-of-the-world story: This is a story told by Dag at the picnic. Imagine, he says, that you are driving with a friend to a supermarket, and you have a fight because your friend claims you are too negative all the time. So you stand in a checkout line at the supermarket alone, pissed off, behind an obese man buying junk food, when suddenly there is a power surge. Your friend comes in, announcing that the radio died – something big is going on. Then the sirens begin, people start running away, terrified, and only you, your friend, the obese man and the cashier remain. The obese man insists that he will pay for his food, because he promised himself that when this moment came he would be dignified. Just before The Flash destroys everything, your friend kisses you on the mouth, saying, “I always wanted to do that” (This is something Dag actually does – just before the police take him from the party he kisses Andy on the mouth saying “There. I always wanted to do that”.). 12
6. “X” Characters: Andy Palmer: Andy Palmer, the narrator of the book, comes from Portland, from a “non-hugging” family of seven children. Not much is directly told about Andy: we know he is skinny, that he is almost thirty, that he studies languages, speaks fluent Japanese, that he used to work in Japan, but now works at Larry’s bar with Dag and does custodial work in the three bungalows, he mentions that he attended AA meetings, that he was in Milan, and that he once had a “fun with downers” phase. The rest, including the reason he moved to the desert where he first met Dag and Claire, is told indirectly trough stories, for example the story of “Edward”. Andy tells how he used to work in an office in Japan, but left his job after his boss, Mr. Takamichi showed him the most valuable thing he possessed, a black-and-white paparazzi photo of Marlyn Monroe lifting up her dress. Andy was horrified – Mr. Takamichi had somehow mistaken this photo for “the letter inside himself”, one that, according to Rilke, we will be able to read before we die if we stay true to ourselves. Andy, scared that he is on the road of making a similar mistake, leaves for home, realizing he needs less in life. A story later told, the story of “The Young Man Who Desperately Wanted to Be Hit by Lightning”, sheds even more light on Andy’s decision to move to Palm Springs:
there once was a young man, he says, later commenting that the young man is him, who desperately wanted to be hit by lightening, so desperately that he one day left everything, his career, his fiancée, just to travel in pursuit of storms. But nothing happened, says Andy; the young man is still out there, praying for a miracle.
Dagmar Bellinghausen: Dag is originally from Toronto, Canada, where he used to work in advertising. Dag himself says that he was not a likable guy back then, he was “one of those guys you see driving a sports car down to the financial district every morning with the roof down and a baseball cap on his head” (page 22) – but come evening he would listen to alternative rock and hang out in the “arty” part of town. In his office he kept a picture of a wooden ship crushed in the Antarctic ice, imagining the despair people who are genuinely trapped must feel. One day, after calling the public health inspector
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on his yuppie boss Martin, Dag got into an argument with his co-workers, claiming that they could not think of a person “in the entire history of the world who became famous without a whole lot of cash changing hands along the way” (page 29). When a co-worker thought of Anne Frank, Dag left the office never to return again. He dropped out of the system, changing into a “Basement Person”, drinking coffees “as strong as heroin” and smoking “brave little cigarettes” (page 32). But this life-style escape did not work, and so Dag had his “Mid-twenties Breakdown” (“A period of mental collapse occurring in one’s twenties, often caused by inability to function outside of school or structured environments coupled with a realization of one essential aloneness in the world. Often marks induction into the ritual of pharmaceutical usage”; page 33). He moved in with his brother Martin and was on, as he later says, automatic pilot, taking anti-depressants to fight his “black thoughts” (page 34). At one point he realized that he needed a clean slate, and so he drove out to the desert where he met Andy and Claire. His dream, he explains to Andy, is to own a little hotel in San Felipe, Baja, where only eccentrics and friends could stay, where money would be stapled to the wall and where stories would be told.
Claire Baxter: When she was little, Claire was immobilized by an illness that forced her to spend most of her childhood in hospitals, Andy tells us. He also says that she is small, with a black bob-cut hairdo, that she has great taste, horrible handwriting, that her family calls her “spinster”, and that she used to be a garment buyer in L.A. She moved to Palm Springs after meeting Andy while he was tending bar at a local spa. Claire was there with her family, a loud group of siblings, half-siblings and step-siblings, products of her father’s constant divorces. The whole family came to Palm Springs in order to avoid “certain doom in the city” (page 38), for Claire’s father and his fourth wife, both New Age2 converts, believed that this was the day Nostradamus predicted would be the end of the world. After meeting Claire, Andy is in heaven, and he knows that they will be friends for life. Andy and Dag admire Claire for coming to the desert – such a thing is harder for a woman to do, they comment. _____________________________________________________________________ 2. Unlike most formal religions, New Age has no holy text, central organization, formal clergy, dogma, etc. It is in fact a network of believers and practitioners who share somewhat similar beliefs and practices, which they add on to whichever formal religion that they follow. (http://www.religioustolerance.org/newage.htm)
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7. “Generation X” – Form and Language:
The first person narrator of the book, as already mentioned, is the character Andy Palmer. He tells the story of the book; everything we see, learn or experience as readers, we see, learn or experience trough Andy. We, like Andy, do not know what happens in the lives of Dag, Claire or any other character when Andy is not around – the whole moving deeper into the desert plan comes as a surprise to us as well as to Andy. However, despite being the narrator and commenting on life via stories and descriptions, Andy does not judge or make conclusions on our existence; we must make our own picture of things. The book itself is divided into three parts: Part One, consisting of eleven chapters, Part Two, twelve chapters, and Part Three, eight chapters. In the first part the
three friends have a picnic, and Andy tells us a bit about Dag, Claire and himself. In the second part, a day later, Dag disappears, later that week Tobias and Elvissa are introduced, and Dag destroys a car because the stupid bumper sticker on it annoys him. In the third part Andy goes to Portland, Claire to New York, Andy and Dag tend bar at a party and, finally, the three leave for the deep desert. All chapters in the book carry meaningful titles that comment on the content of the chapter: The Sun is Your Enemy; Our Parents Had More; I am not a Target
Market; December
31,
1999;
Shopping
is
not
Creating;
Purchased Experiences Don’t Count; Adventure Without Risk is Disneyland; Jan. 01, 2000… Sometimes the titles even contradict the content
of the chapter – for example, the chapter where Andy explains how he first met Claire closes with the sentence “I knew then that we were friends for life” (page 44), but the chapter is entitled ”It Can’t Last” – thus forcing us to read and perceive the book on multiple levels, and with that creating a hypertext. In addition to describing his characters’ lives, Coupland also incorporates into “Generation X” numerous definitions, called neologisms (neologism is a new
word or expression, or a new meaning for an existing word), printed along the margin
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of each page. In addition, comic-book-like pictures and pictures that (taking into account Dag’s vandalism and his frustration that all we are left with are “snippets on bumpers”) appear to be bumper stickers are also present. With such use of picture and words, all of which carry an equally important message, again creating a hypertext net of information, the author brings together Coupland the writer and Coupland the artist, creating a pastiche of book and comic, pop and elevated. The before mentioned neologisms sometimes, in addition to being printed on the margin of a page, appear also in the text itself – Andy, for instance, says that Dag was probably tired after “working his McJob” (page 6). Some neologisms, however, do not appear in the text, but only hint at it, creating, as before mentioned, a multi-level, hypertext way of reading. Such is the case of the neologism “Black Hole”: it does not appear in the text itself, but appears only on the margin of the page where Andy describes his brother’s tendency to wear black.
McJob: A low-pay, low prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service
sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one. (page 6)
Black Holes: An X generation subgroup best known for their possession of almost
entirely black wardrobes. (page 155)
Veal-fattening
Pen:
Small,
cramped office workstations built of fabric-covered disassemblable wall partitions and inhabited by junior staff members. Named after the small preslaughter cubicles used by the cattle industry. (page 24) Squires: The most common X generation subgroup and the only subgroup given to
breeding. Squires exist almost exclusively in couples and are recognizable by their
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frantic attempts to recreate a semblance of Eisenhower-era plenitude in their daily lives in the face of exorbitant housing prices and two-job lifestyles. Squires tend to be continually exhausted from their voraciously acquisitive pursuit of furniture and knickknacks. (page 156)
Bradyism:
A
multisibling
sensibility
derived from having grown up in large families. A rarity in those born after approximately 1965, symptoms of Bradyism include a facility for mind games, emotional withdrawal in situations of overcrowding, and a deeply felt need for a well-defined personal space. (page 154)
All of the neologisms in the book stem from our mass media jaded culture. Coupland takes images and ideas from the media that we are familiar with, and uses them, sometimes in a very ironic and amusing way, to describe real life. Such, for instance, is the case of the neologism “Bradyism”, originating in “The Brady Bunch”, a popular American TV show, featuring a perfect family with six children, but now describing a family less than perfect. Because there is no other reference frame that that of our mass culture, we are the ones that create the meaning of a neologism – if you do not know “The Brady Bunch”, then the irony of “Bradyism” will probably be lost on you. Since the publication of “Generation X”, Coupland’s newly coined words, like “McJob” and “Veal-fattening Pen” have become widely accepted by English
speaking audiences and have as such become part of our mass media culture.
The language of the book also follows the “artificial for describing nature” formula; Coupland uses examples from our “artificial”, man-made urban world in order to describe something natural. The rising of the sun is, for instance, described as “a line
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of Vegas showgirls bursting on stage” (page 4); Dag’s hair is described as having “the demented mussed look of a random sniper poking his head out from a burger joint and yelling, ‘I’ll never surrender.’” (page 82); the picnic Dag, Andy and Claire have is a “blue jeans ad come to life” (page 60)…
As mentioned, “Generation X” is also full of comic book pictures and “bumper stickers” that carry a meaning equally important to that of the text. In the picture below, for example, a man is reading a real estate paper, commenting to his father that “you can either have a house or a life… I’m having a life.” The picture clearly illustrates X’s frustration with the older generation that got everything, including houses, while it was still easy to get, that ruined the world and all options for their successors. This choice between the restrictive society that was handed down to them, and “a life” is typical for Coupland’s generation X.
A “bumper sticker” picture from “Generation X”: “Bench press your I.Q.”
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In his later fictional work (like in “God Hates Japan”) Coupland’s tendency to mix comic book type pictures and traditional literature is even more evident, while his non-fictional work would be best described as an exploration of imagery:
Fiction: “God Hates Japan” (2001), written by Douglas Coupland and illustrated by Michael Howatson
Non-Fiction: “Souvenir of Canada” (2002) by Douglas Coupland
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8. Love and Light in “Generation X”:
The book starts with Andy telling us how he witnessed a total eclipse of the sun when he was fifteen years old. As he watched the sky go out he experienced “a mood that [he] has never really been able to shake completely – a mood of darkness and inevitability and fascination” (page 4). It is under this unreliable, hot-buzzing, crops-killing, cancer-giving sun, that Andy, Dag and Claire live. Under this hot sun they have a picnic and fantasise that they inhabit a “more welcoming universe” (page 19), one with swimming pools and frosty drinks. The sun, we read, is nothing positive. Knowing this, Andy sets out to be “struck by lightning”, to find a storm, the opposite of the sun. And yet – typical of the “love-hate” relationship that Dag, Andy and Claire have with the world – when watching the sunrise, all three experience a feeling of beauty, they are overwhelmed, though they try to hide behind a shield of coolness. The sun makes Andy think of “the ecstatic drops of pomegranate blood seeping from skin fissures of fruits rotting on the tree branch next door – drops that hang like rubies from their own brown leather source, alluding to the intense ovarian fertility inside” (page 10), but he cannot bring himself to share these feelings with his friends. Later, when Andy visits his family and explains he does not want any presents for Christmas, his mother asks him if he’s mad, if he is “staring at the sun down there?” (page 166). This is exactly what Andy is doing in the desert – here, where the sun is most obvious, he is “staring at the sun”, our society, observing it from a distance, seeing it for what it is. It is nothing to be relied on, and so Dag, Claire and Andy, not trusting anyone or anything, are not able to express themselves without fear of being rejected – even the stories they tell are told under the condition that no one pass any judgements. He and Claire never fell in love, though they “both tried hard”, Andy tells us; what is more, he has never truly been in love. With some degree of relief he announces that “Dag and Claire never fell in love, either” (page 67). All three just ended up as friends. Love is a thing of society – because they do not trust the world, they do not truly trust others. Every relationship they have ends up as a friendship, or, as in the case of Tobias, an obsession. Love, the tool of “escape” from “Texlahoma”, the key to
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the “spaceship”, would require too great of a sacrifice, a giant, impossible leap of faith. Still, the three do want true relationships and cannot see themselves spending the rest of their lives alone. Andy wants to fall in love, he realizes that (the words are put in his alter ego Edward's mouth) “…the rest of humanity had been busy building something else - a vast city, built not of words but of relationships” (page 57). The first step on the road to this “city” is when Andy goes home for Christmas. He gets his family to look at their lives in a different “light” by lighting candles in the living room, transforming the familiar room into something entirely different, burning the family’s eyes with “the possibilities of existence” (page 171). In the light of countless candles the family, touched beyond words, comes together like never before. In the last chapter, when Andy is on his way to Mexico to join Claire and Dag, he receives the most important proof that love can be possible. The unexpected show of unconditional, instinctive love from an “instant family” of retarded teens is something Andy has never experienced before, not even in his own family, and he gratefully enjoys the embrace. He does not, as before, hide from the beauty of the moment. In the shadow of a giant fire, a fire so great that it leaves behind only black carbonised fields and a feeling so intense that everyone stops to stare, freedom, a frame of mind free of society, is possible. Escape is possible. Or is it?
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9. Avant-Pop and Postmodernity in “Generation X”:
“If you’re wondering where the future of modern fiction lies, well, look no further than Generation X. It is the ruler against which all future novels will be measured.” (http://www.pifmagazine.com/SID/137/)
The first child of the epoch we live in now, the one we believe will someday be known as the Postmodern Age, is the so called Avant-Pop, formed in the early 1990s, and of which Douglas Coupland’s “Generation
X” is a powerful
representative. The name “Avant-Pop” stems from the ambivalent relationship that its writers have with the mainstream. They realise that the way in which they write is connected to the avant-garde heritage, but they also realize that they are primarily influenced by the mainstream pop culture, influenced to a point where it almost irritates them; hence the “bad blood” between Avant-Pop writers and our mass media culture. This “love-hate” relationship can also be observed in “Generation X”: Dag, Claire and Andy do not wish to be part of the mass culture, but it is part of them, it is in the way they think and process life (as seen in the language and the neologisms of the book). This is possible because in the last fifty years the world has developed economically and technologically, creating mass media and marketing, thus making information the most important asset. Literature is now just one of the media, one way of passing information. Today’s individual is defined by the data that enter his network of information, making the subject fluent, ever changing – we, with the information we gather, create our own network of “me”. This is why Avant-Pop writers believe they can have an effect on the mainstream culture – by adding information to the complex information network that is our subjectivity, they are trying to change our value system from within. As the author of the “Avant-Pop Manifesto” Mark Amerika puts it, Avant-Pop wants “to enter the mainstream culture as a parasite… Avant-Pop artists … are now ready to offer their own weirdly concocted elixirs to cure us from this dreadful disease 22
(“information
sickness”)
that
infects
the
core
of
our
collective
life.”
(http://www.altx.com/manifestos/avant.pop.manifesto.html). In other words, by producing works that the reader will accept, thus infiltrating the mainstream, Avant-Pop will prevent our intake of information lacking in quality and meaning. This is exactly the goal
of
Coupland’s
enormously
popular,
anti-mass-consumerist
orientated
“Generation X”.
Consumerism today is no longer functional, but a way of building identity. Just like we compile information in a complex network that is “me”, we wear, eat, drive etc. products that convey a complex network of who we are. This creates the before mentioned mass identity, a way of experiencing the world in a similar fashion (as seen in Couplands neologisms), and the lack of “real” stories. According to Jean Baudrillard contemporary culture in the age of mass communication and mass consumption is virtual (“hyperreal”) and unreal (a simulation); we live in a world dominated by simulated experience and feelings, believes, and have lost the capacity to comprehend reality as it really exists (picnic as a “blue jeans ad come to life”). We only experience prepared realities, for example edited war footage (or, as Andy puts it, “history as a marketing strategy”). The stories that Andy, Dag and Claire tell are examples of this fact – the three can really feel and express themselves only via stories that they tell each other, via something unreal, via a simulation. “The very definition of the real,” says Baudrillard, “has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction… The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: that is the hyperreal… which is entirely in simulation.” (http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard.html). Literature, or better yet, the mass media culture of today provides information, thus shaping us and creating our reality and identity. The imaginary, “third order simulacrum”, a copy without an original, now forms the real – because there was a book “Generation X”, there was a generation X in real life.
In his manifesto Amerika says that the artists of the Avant-Pop are “the Children of Mass Media (even more than being the children of their parents who have much less influence over them)” This is very true of generation X Andy, Dag and Claire – as
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already mentioned they are products of the world they inhabit. They, just like it is said in Amerika’s manifesto, process experience under the influence of the mass media, and not under the influence of their families. As far as his family goes, Andy says they are not a “hugging” one, which sounds suspiciously similar to Coupland’s statement that his family was “undemonstrative”. Andy shares even more similarities with the author: he, like Coupland, lives in Palm Springs, lived in Japan and speaks Japanese, was in Milan, and even his appearance is such that it resembles Coupland’s. Bits of Coupland can be found in Dag and Claire as well; Dag, for instance, is Canadian. This is possible because in Avant-Pop the distinction between reality and fiction disappears – whatever we read helps create our reality, is another bit of information in our information network, and with this the difference between realistic and unrealistic literature is gone, there is no concept of (auto)biography.
This is not the only change in our understanding of literature that Avant-Pop brings; in Avant-Pop the way we read also changes. Reading is now hypertextual, hypertext, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, being “the linking of related pieces of information by electronic connections in order to allow a user easy access between them”(http://www.britannica.com/search?query=hypertext&submit=Find&source=MWTEX T). In other words, hypertext is a text stored in a computer system that contains links
that allow us to access other texts, which again contain links to other texts, and so on and so on. Such texts are no longer read linearly, from beginning to end, we now move from text to text by deciding which of the given links we will chose, and with that we ourselves create the text we read. Hypertextuality, a reading on multiple, nonlinear levels, is, however, not merely the domain of Internet pages, but is also present in encyclopaedias, dictionaries, in some traditional literature (in the Bible, for example), and, of course, in printed Avant-Pop books. Hypertextuality in “Generation X” is achieved with stories that are told by the characters, with the
use of neologisms, pictures and titles of chapters, all of which carry an equally important message, thus forcing us to perceive the book on multiple levels, as a net of information. With this we, the readers give meaning to the text, thus “creating” it, abolishing the distinction between the author and the reader. For though the information is provided by the author, it is given meaning by the reader, who connects
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the words to his own unique experience of the world. If you, for instance, do not know Zsa Zsa Gabor, then you will not understand Andy’s comment that the bar he works in is full of Zsa Zsa types, and your perception of the book will be different than that of somebody who knows the woman. The same goes for Coupland’s neologisms.
“Creating a work of art,” says Amerika, “will depend more and more on the ability of the artist to select, organize and present the bits of raw data we have at our disposal. We all know originality is dead.” Art in postmodernity is the recycling of culture. So Coupland, following the principle of postmodernity that the distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture is no more (how could it be in a post-Warhol world where art is a market, and where there is no distinction between a Smirnoff vodka ad and an artistic installation), combines “raw data” of comic book, high literature and mass culture neologisms. In the Postmodern Age stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles. “History” is represented through fantasies of the past, trough nostalgic pop images and retro styles and genres, recycled in new contexts. This is evident in “Generation X”, where Claire dresses in a retro way, and in which neologisms like “decade blending” appear (“In clothing: the indiscriminate combination of two
or more items from various decades to crate a personal mood: Sheila = Mary Quant earrings, 1960s + cork wedgie platform shoes, 1970s + black leather jacket, 1950s and 1980s”; page 17). A sense of history is disappearing; our entire contemporary social system is little by little losing its capacity to retain its own past, and has begun to live in a perpetual present. Andy says that history is now a “marketing strategy”, and he visits the Vietnam memorial to get a feel of “real” history. He, Claire and Dag live life as a series of “isolated cool little moments” (page 10), but they are trying to make their lives stories or “there is just no way to get trough them” (page 10).
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10. Conclusion:
Just like Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road”, J.D. Sallinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye”, and Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front”, etc.,
Coupland’s “Generation X” expresses the attitudes of a generation of young people of the time. Capturing the feelings of America’s middle class generation of Reagan, planned parenthood, TV, and low economy, the book, though now somewhat over-commercialised, is timeless.
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11. Sources:
Coupland, Douglas. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. London: Abacus, St. Martin’s Press, 2002 http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/5560/index.html http://www.coupland.com http://www.dmc.mq.edu.au/mwark/warchive/21%2AC/21c-genx.html http://membres.lycos.fr/coupland/coupbiog.html http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/technoculture/pomo.html http://www.altx.com/manifestos/avant.pop.manifesto.html http://www.pifmagazine.com/SID/137/
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard.html http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-simulacra-and-simulations.html http://www.britannica.com/search?query=hypertext&submit=Find&source=MWTEX T
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