SOURCE: “Generation X and the End of History,” in Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 58, Spring, 1996, pp. 229-40.

[In the following essay, Lainsbury examines the philosophical and cultural context of Coupland's Generation X.]

Douglas Coupland's Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture is an example of that rarest of literary phenomena—a “serious” novel that has achieved widespread popular recognition. According to the perverse logic of the literary establishment, the novel's popularity calls into question its validity as a literary text. And yet this is a novel worth looking at seriously, if only for the influence it has had on contemporary culture. Generation X achieves its effects by taking aim at concerns close to the heart of middle-class, North American life, an intention dismissed by contemporary critics obsessed with the appeal of the marginal, the ethnic, the oppressed—anything but the kind of relatively comfortable, suburban, middle-class existence that most book-reading North Americans live, no matter how much they might protest against it in the subversive space of their private lives. As Andrew Palmer, the novel's central character, puts it: “You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied” (147).

What is characteristic of most of the literary writing being done in Canada at this time is its inwardness, its emphasis on the liberation of individuals within the private sphere allowed them within late capitalist reality. As Brian Fawcett points out in an essay entitled “Something Is Wrong with Alice Munro,” the kind of low-modernist approach that has become the unofficial CanLit orthodoxy takes too small a bite into “the enormously enlarged complexity of the human condition” as it manifests itself in the late twentieth century (69). Fawcett's argument centres on the assertion that this kind of fiction is an ineffective medium for the promotion of social change, “that private liberation doesn't create a liberated world” (71). Fawcett proposes that literature can reclaim the kind of effectiveness it had in the pre-television era by adopting some of the assemblage techniques used in other art forms—combining “Historiography, reportage, philosophical analysis and a massive influx of data … along with a dose of murderous scepticism concerning the word ‘fiction’”—and by determining the contexts in which “printed literature remains more effective and efficient than any other medium” (73), describing “the full vertical density of human reality” (74). Fawcett is talking about a literature that is willing to confront that area where public and private interests meet, a literature in which writers acknowledge that there is more to being a human being in the late twentieth century than the gratification of obscure, élitist, aesthetic impulses.

What Fawcett outlines in his essay are some possibilities for a renewed Canadian literature, a literature that recognizes the postmodern as a moment in “the perpetual ‘revolution’ and innovation of high modernism, … a cyclical moment that returns before the emergence of ever new modernisms…” (Jameson xvi),¹ and that pursues with vigour the problem of the cosmopolitan self of the Enlightenment metanarrative of emancipation, the subject of Eurocentric history. It appears to me that Coupland was intuitively responding to such a challenge when he set out to write Generation X .²

There can be little doubt that Generation X is intended to be a text that tests a reader's preconceptions as to what a novel should be. On the most obvious level this is apparent in its embracing of technological innovation and its appropriation of techniques from other media. The infoblip sidebars are indicative of a joy taken in the sheer profusion of terminology—they are a mutant crossbreed of the continental aphoristic tradition and the pragmatic considerations of magazine journalism in an era of declining print literacy. The reader is aware at all times of being inside a constructed thing rather than inhabiting the capitalistic dreamspace of contemporary realism, where the experience of fictional others is offered up as yet another mode of consumption. Coupland's training in the visual arts influences his construction of the book. Even its size and shape serve to defamiliarize the reader. It just does not look like a novel. Then there is a bizarre juxtaposition of the bland homogeneity of the well-groomed, white, middle-class cartoon characters and the flip iconoclasm of their utterances, not to mention a hip reference to the American pop art tradition of Roy Lichtenstein et al. Finally, there are the omnipresent paragraph symbols and the cloud-motif “openings” at the start of each chapter—a stylistic tic that calls attention, through their absence, to the conventions of the literary presentation of material.

Generation X is a novel that addresses both public and private issues of concern to the cosmopolitan self trying to make its way through the confusion of a late capitalist world. That the novel will address the economically emancipated private self of bourgeois individualism is made clear in the opening scene, where the young Andrew Palmer travels into the heart of the North American prairie to witness a total eclipse of the sun. He comes not as a young scientist but as a precocious philosopher concerned with authenticity. There, at the moment of singularity, he experiences the mood that will thereafter define his existence, “a mood of darkness and inevitability and fascination—a mood that surely must have been held by most young people since the dawn of time as they have crooked their necks, stared at the heavens, and watched their sky go out” (3-4). Of course, what separates the experience of the generation of young people to which Andrew Palmer belongs from all preceding generations is the ontological status of the sun. The sun is still the life source, but it no longer occupies the unambiguous central and positive position it has had in virtually all human symbologies; now it is also a potentially lethal entity. The first chapter of Generation X is thus called “The Sun Is Your Enemy.”

The parts of the novel that concern the private experience of the individual deal with phenomena such as transcendent moments, what one character calls “takeaway,” the one moment that “defines what it's like to be alive on this planet” (91), and magical gestures such as the Christmas morning candlefest scene (145-47), where all the witnesses to Andrew's pyrotechnics experience distortions in their experience of time and space, partaking in something bordering on the mystical. The novel ends on another such note, when Andrew is touched by the forces of randomness, singled out from the crowd of tourists who have stopped to witness the “supergravitational blackness” of a stubble field by a “cocaine white egret” (177), which grazes his head with its claws, cutting his scalp. This gesture signals with infallible, theological logic to the dozen or so mentally handicapped teenagers who witness it that he is a holy man, one to pay obeisance to, and they bury him in a “crush of love” (179) in an attempt to express their sense of love and wonder. These parts of the novel contain most of its lyricism, but can only achieve their full resonance within the context of the novel's public aspects.

Coupland has stated in various interviews that his novel was originally intended to be a nonfiction handbook of Gen X behaviours and attitudes. This original intention accounts for the inclusion of the statistical appendix and the essayistic nature of the many acute observations about those who come before and after the shin jin rui³; the naïveté of the parents who “take shopping at face value” (68); the babyboomers, whose stranglehold on the social, economic, and psychic agenda of North American life provides the hegemony against which Gen X struggles in vain; and those perky, postliterate global teens who “embrace and believe the pseudo-globalism and ersatz racial harmony of ad campaigns engineered by the makers of soft drinks and computer-inventoried sweaters” (106). Coupland documents the lifestyle options open to postboomers, from basement suite subculture to conspicuous minimalism. In a world that “has gotten too big—way beyond our capacity to tell stories about it” (5), Coupland creates a number of interlocking narratives in an attempt to confront the largeness and complexity of the postmodern world, rather than creating either a high-modernist, self-referential monument, or a work based on a “realistic epistemology, which conceives of representation as the reproduction, for subjectivity, of an objectivity that lies outside it” (Jameson viii).

Generation X is a meditation on the end of history. The year 1974 is assigned occult significance as “the year after the oil shock and the year starting from which real wages in the U.S. never grew again” (40). These are the events that mark the great divide between the historical and posthistorical eras—the profound structural changes in the world economy that mark the emergence of late capitalism as a distinct stage in the evolution of how human beings organize their existence on the planet.⁴ The optimistic spin put on the prevailing reductive orthodoxy is that the world has been saved from history by the free market.

Coupland's decision to write a novel rather than a work of nonfiction is interesting. In his foreword to Jean-François Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Fredric Jameson notes that Lyotard argues that the “revival of an essentially narrative view of ‘truth,’ and the vitality of small narrative units at work everywhere locally in the present social system, are accompanied by something like a more global or totalizing ‘crisis’ in the narrative function in general” (xi). The crisis of legitimation is the result of the lack of validity assigned to the teleological metanarratives of emancipation, those world-historical narratives that justify the sufferings and injustices of the present in terms of a better future, in the various postmodern perspectives.

This is the end of history that Francis Fukuyama talks about in his influential essay in the National Interest, the end of an era of global ideological conflict that called upon individuals to display romantic virtues such as “daring, courage, imagination, and idealism” (18) in the pursuit of competing visions of utopia. Fukuyama proposes that the grand march of history “will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands” (18).⁵ According to Fukuyama, Western liberal ideology has won the world-historical game of Hegelian dialectic, but at a cost. With the end of history as it has been known up until now, mediated by the metanarratives of European metaphysics, comes a loss of a sense of the possibility of the meaningfulness of a commitment to something larger than the self or the economic extensions of the self. As Lyotard explains, capital “does not need legitimation” (Postmodern Explained 59). Ideas such as political commitment are radically undermined by the new world order of boredom and economics. Distinctions are meaningless in the posthistorical global village; everywhere is the same because the same stores are found in minimalls anywhere (Coupland 4). Members of Gen X are addicted to “newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts,” and yet “nothing [of any real consequence ever] seems to happen” (7). Crisis is everywhere, omnipresent and perpetual, but it all seems to fail to add up to anything more significant than the psychic state of panic itself. There is no middle ground between Historical Under- and Overdosing (7, 8). “Spectacularism” itself, “a fascination with extreme situations” (50), is the birthright to those suckled under the sign of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The most extreme of all possible situations is nuclear conflagration itself, and it has always been taken as a given by members of Gen X that this is how their world will end. Thus, it should come as no surprise that a good part of Gen X imagination is devoted to the idea of apocalypse.⁶ Coupland shows how the imagination deals with the unimaginable when he coins concepts such as “Survivulousness: The tendency to visualize oneself enjoying being the last remaining person on earth” (62), or “Mental Ground Zero: The location where one visualizes oneself during the dropping of the atomic bomb; frequently, a shopping mall” (63). The end of the cold war is an anticlimactic end of history for the characters in Generation X, because they had always taken for granted that the end of history and the end of the human species would be synchronous events. Now they have to try to reconcile themselves to living in an era where they will die alone and where their deaths will signify nothing.⁷

The Vietnam War, an ironic, last-gasp attempt to reengage state action and the historical metanarrative of emancipation, was a staple in the television diet that helped to form the consciousness of Gen X. It was part of the “background color” of a Gen X childhood. As Andrew Palmer says, “they were ugly times. But they were also the only times I'll ever get—genuine capital H history times, before history was turned into a press release, a marketing strategy, and a cynical campaign tool” (151). It is ironic that the only history Gen X ever knew firsthand was also centred on the only war that America ever lost outright (the war of 1812 is usually considered a draw). There is a pervasive sense among members of Gen X that Henry Luce's “American Century” is already over, that the most ambitious political and social experiment in the history of the world peaked with the official optimism of the late fifties. Members of Gen X gird themselves for this new reality with philosophies such as “Lessness: A philosophy whereby one reconciles oneself with diminishing expectations of material wealth” (54). It is by now a truism among economists that young North Americans can no longer count on surpassing their parents' standard of living, that, in fact, they would be lucky just to equal it. Raised in a level of material comfort heretofore unknown to human beings on a mass scale, members of Gen X mask their sense of betrayal and hopelessness with cynicism.⁸ Everything is a joke when the master narratives of European history no longer serve to legitimate the way things are. Party politics are “corny—no longer relevant or meaningful or useful to modern societal issues, and in many cases dangerous” (80). Distrust of politicians is nothing new, but widespread distrust of the whole democratic process, of the system itself, is.

The cynicism of Gen X might be usefully compared to what Arthur Kroker, Marilouise Kroker, and David Cook call “a carnivalesque mood of bitter hysteria at already living on borrowed time after the catastrophe, with nothing to lose because one is cheated of life anyway” (444). The future only exists as commodity, onto which people project a putative sense of ownership. In the novel, Andrew knows he has found a kindred spirit when Claire starts talking about “what it's like when everyone starts carving up the future into nasty little bits. … [P]eople start talking seriously about hoarding cases of Beef-a-Roni in the garage and get all misty-eyed about the Last Days …” (37). The Last Days are now, and strange compensations are required to reconcile this knowledge with the blunt fact of natural process. Ergo “Strangelove Reproduction: Having children to make up for the fact that one no longer believes in the future” (135). The end of history and the accompanying lack of belief in the future is the liquidation of the project of modernity, which engraves in European consciousness an “irreparable suspicion … that history does not necessarily have a universal finality” (Lyotard, Postmodern Condition 51), a transcendental historical idea as its terminus.

Throughout the novel, the characters engage in a kind of therapeutic, oral story-telling regime. Most of the stories concern alienated individuals who feel a profound need for integration into either a social or spiritual order; in other words, they all feel a need for their existence to be legitimated by reference to a narrative that would make sense of it. While discussing the relationship between legitimation and narrative, Lyotard proposes an interesting paradox, that narrative is about forgetting the past rather than remembering it: “a collectivity that takes narrative as its key form of competence has no need to remember its past. It finds the raw material for its social bond not only in the meaning of the narratives it recounts, but also in the act of reciting them. The narrative's reference may seem to belong to the past, but in reality it is always contemporaneous with the act of recitation” (Postmodern Condition 22). Jameson characterizes this forgetting as “a way of consuming the past” (xii), and this formulation helps us to understand the chapter of Generation X entitled “Eat Your Parents.” Dag advises Andrew to forget the past, to “eat” his parents: “Accept them as a part of getting you to here, and get on with life” (85). Andrew is advised to consume the narrative of his individuation, which has as its origin the territorialization of the family, to make a conscious effort to forget his microhistory in order that he might enable himself to act in the present more effectively.

The focal point of Gen X consciousness, its producer and product, its medium and message, is television. By default, television becomes for Gen X a replacement for the discredited master narratives of western civilization. While religious and political ideologies that attempt totalizing interpretations of human existence fall by the wayside, the fragmentary, anecdotal method of television is in ascendancy. Television becomes the medium in which members of Gen X see their situation reflected most clearly, complete with regular breaks for consumerist fantasy or attendance to the needs of the body. As master narrative, television becomes the reference tool for all moral questions. Thus the phenomenon of “Tele-Parablizing: Morals used in everyday life that derive from TV sitcom plots” (120). Knowledge of the names of characters from certain seventies situation comedies is the password for inclusion in Gen X culture. As children, members of Gen X might watch after school, and then watch the fall of Saigon on the news with their parents over dinner. Each seemed equally real or unreal, each had the same truth content.

This inability to draw distinctions, the lack of a sense of the hierarchical, is one of the effects of electronic culture on the psychic development of Gen X. It is the Kierkegaardian “levelling process” taken to new, unheard of extremes. People live in places such as Palm Springs, where there is no weather—“just like TV” (10). Absurdist tourists go “Historical Slumming,” “visiting locations such as diners, smokestack industrial sites, rural villages—locations where time appears to have been frozen many years back—so as to experience relief when one returns to ‘the present’” (II). History is now only a sanitized theme park⁹ that members of Gen X enjoy vicariously, comfortable in the knowledge that they can just step back outside into the familiar flatlands of their existence at any time.

The ironic pilgrimage is all about the flattening of cultural distinctions. In the novel a character visits “the grave of Jim Morrison at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.” It is “super easy to find. People had spray painted ‘This way to Jimmy's’ all over the tombstones of all these dead French poets” (88). The nihilistic delight that the speaker takes here in the ascendancy of the values of popular culture (free of historical context) over those of traditional, high culture (loaded down with history) is the triumph of form over content, of the consumerist self over the self as defined by the historical entity of the state.¹⁰

Coupland addresses the futility of the search for meaning in the posthistorical era with the concept of “Terminal Wanderlust: A condition common to people of transient middle-class upbringings. Unable to feel rooted in any one environment, they move continually in the hopes of finding an idealized sense of community in the next location” (171). But these hopes will never be fulfilled for members of Gen X because there is no transcendence of place, only stops on the remote control, the channel-changer of location. The mall is the television version of place—it represents the victory of commerce over utopian ideology. Everywhere is now a mall. According to Kroker and his coauthors, “Shopping malls are liquid TVs for the end of the twentieth century. A whole microcircuitry of desire, ideology, and expenditure for processed bodies drifting through the cyberspace of ultracapitalism.” Malls are “the real postmodern site of happy consciousness. Not happy consciousness in the old Hegelian sense of a reconciled dialectic of reason, but happy consciousness, now, in the sense of the virtual self—a whole seductive movement, therefore, between a willed abandonment of life and a restless search for satisfaction in the seduction of holograms” (449). According to this line of thought, the mall is the natural habitat of posthistorical human beings, virtual beings looking for evidence (traces) of their virtual selves reflected in the objects of their desires.

Throughout this essay I have been arguing that the novelGeneration X is a challenging fictional text that, through the conflation of happy circumstance (timing, market penetration, et cetera), has become a pop-culture phenomenon. I certainly do not mean to give the impression that I believe Coupland meant to outline a codification of Gen X life-style choices. Although many readers have interpreted the book as prescriptions for healthy living in the posthistorical era, this is obviously a failure to read critically, a failure that lies with the reader rather than with the writer. Neither do I mean to suggest that Coupland consciously set out to construct the kind of critique of posthistorical society that my reading of the novel entails. But intentionality is irrelevant here. As a good bricoleur, Coupland has assembled from the fragmentary experience offered Gen X human beings a fictional construct that is all of these things and more. One must not forget that this is a work created in the spirit of play—irony is the dominant mode. Surely the hotel on the Baja peninsula to which the characters are heading at the novel's end is another ironic comment on lost utopianism; that “guests who told good stories” (116) will be allowed to stay for free deflates the kind of hippie wisdom that was the currency of other, earlier utopian communities. And then there is that final scene—Andrew coming over the crest of a hill to find a huge, black mushroom cloud rising out of the supernatural lushness of California's Imperial Valley. Careful readers will recognize this scene as an ironic reworking of a scene from John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath. There, the Joads, coming over a crest very much like the one that Andrew crosses, if not the exact same one, stop their truck to stand “silent and awestruck, embarrassed before the great valley” (236). The richness that the valley suggests is the promise of America, the embodiment of the Enlightenment dream of a history in which all will be free and all will prosper. But Coupland's Imperial Valley, although still rich, has now been transformed by the business of agriculture into a food factory; its abundance chemically stimulated by various technologies, it no longer holds out any promise for the collectivity. The realities of living in a postindustrial, posthistorical, late capitalist world have eroded belief in the state as entity, as organizing principle.

In conclusion, we can see just how well Coupland's novel fulfils the requirements for a practical, forward-looking literature that Fawcett proposes. Although Generation X does take into account the private experience of its characters, this is seen to be subsumed by the larger, public issues that the novel evokes through its use of assemblage techniques and a wide range of cultural allusion. Generation X challenges its readers to avoid the dangers of reduction, of trying to bring the many things that the novel does into agreement with a preexisting worldview. It is necessary to try to practise what Lyotard calls a “resistance to simplism and simplifying slogans, to calls for clearness and straightforwardness, and to desires for a return to solid values” (Postmodern Explained 84). A return to simpler times is clearly impossible; instead, people must learn to live in the complexity of a world that they have inherited, regardless of whether they participated in its creation. Complex artworks such as Generation X can help them to do this. The complexification entailed in avant-garde artistic praxis “bears on the sensibilities … not on expertise or knowledge” (84). The thoughtful confrontation of reader with avant-garde text helps to shape a sensibility that can appreciate complexification, rather than seeking escape in modernist fantasies of individual fulfilment and closure.

Notes

1. “Postmodernism … is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant” (Lyotard, Postmodern Condition 79).

2. This is not to suggest that Coupland actually used Fawcett's essay, or even that he was aware of it. However, in a reader's report on an earlier version of my essay, Fawcett pointed out that he thought Coupland was influenced by the opening statement in Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow, where Fawcett talks about making subtexts visible in order to communicate ideas to a general public, a goal that “contemporary artistic theory and practice … discourages” in favour of private communication between members “of a new kind of privileged class” (4).

3. “[N]ew human beings,” the Japanese name for Gen X (56).

4. Lyotard begins The Postmodern Condition by stating that “the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age. This transition has been under way since at least the end of the 1950s, which for Europe marks the completion of reconstruction” (3). Lyotard locates this rupture or moment of transition slightly before the first members of Gen X are born; whereas Coupland, whose methodologies are more intuitive and artistic than scientific and analytical, locates it during the childhood of the generation.

5. In The Postmodern Explained, Lyotard states that capitalism “calls for the complete hegemony of the economic genre of discourse” (58).

6. Coupland's fascination with nuclear apocalypse is again addressed in the second part of the story “The Wrong Sun” in his third book, Life after God.

7. Life after God takes this pervasive sense of meaninglessness as its starting point. The narrator in “Thinking of the Sun,” the first part of “The Wrong Sun,” says: “When you are young, you always expect that the world is going to end. And then you get older and the world still chugs along and you are forced to re-evaluate your stance on the apocalypse as well as your own relationship to time and death. You realize that the world will indeed continue, with or without you, and the pictures you see in your head. So you try to understand the pictures instead” (108).

8. Lyotard calls the postmodern “a period of slackening” (Postmodern Condition 71).

9. The main character of Coupland's second novel, Shampoo Planet, seriously proposes sanitized historical theme parks as a business scheme (199-201).

10. In an essay on constitutional narratives, Jerald Zaslove identifies the plight of Carl Schmitt as “wanting to equate the legal state with ‘the cultural edifices built by the European spirit’ whose ‘significance is no less than that of those great works of art and literature usually identified as the sole representatives of the European spirit’” (70).

Works Cited

Coupland, Douglas. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. New York: St. Martin's, 1991.

———. Life after God. New York: Pocket-Simon, 1994.

———. Shampoo Planet. New York: Pocket-Simon, 1992.

Fawcett, Brian. Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1986.

———. “Something Is Wrong with Alice Munro.” Unusual Circumstances, Interesting Times and Other Impolite Interventions. Vancouver: New Star, 1991: 68-74.

Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History?” National Interest 16 (1989): 3-18.

Jameson, Fredric. Foreword. Lyotard, Postmodern Condition vii-xxi.

Kroker, Arthur, Marilouise Kroker, and David Cook. “Panic USA: Hypermodernism as America's Postmodernism.” Social Problems 37 (1990): 443-59.

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Theory and History of Literature 10. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. 1984.

———. The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence, 1982-1985. Trans. Don Barry et al. Ed. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking, 1939.

Zaslove, Jerald. “Constituting Modernity: The Epic Horizons of Constitutional Narratives.” Public (1994): 63-77.