Generation X, Avant-Pop and Heading into the Desert where “Things are much, much better”
Walter Benjamin, in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of its Reproducibility”, argues how art is able to bring about agency due to the fact that it “ [seeks] […] to tackle the most difficult and most important tasks wherever it is able [so] [as] to mobilize the masses” (120). The Avant-Pop movement exemplifies Benjamin’s argument with it ability to tackle binary opposites so as to change the way we view art. While other art movements have seen consumer goods simply as the opposite of art, as “mainstream boorishness” (Olsen 199), the Avant-Pop movement turns these ‘mainstream boorishness’ into artistic objects of agency through “combin[ing] Pop Art’s focus on consumer goods and mass media with the avant-garde’s spirit of subversion and radical formal innovation” (Olsen 200). Thus, with Avant-Pop texts, readers are able to obtain “a fresh complex of reading strategies and languages with which to discuss the new kinds of textuality and narrativity it finds itself confronting” (Olsen 27).
I believe that in our ‘accelerated’ culture of consumer capitalism, we often find ourselves confronting “a world in which time has been restructured by countless labor-saving devices and a mechanized desire for efficiency” (52), according to Andrew Tate in his book Contemporary American and Canadian Writers: Douglas Coupland. I seek to argue in this essay how Generation X, by being an experimental Avant-Pop form of literature, allows us to experience time differently—be it Generation X’s time, be it our present time. I will examine how Coupland constructs Generation X’s thematic structure, characters, and overall vision in relation to different aspects of time. With this different experience regarding time found in Generation X, I assert that we are motivated to change our present attitude—to engage with and subvert the different forces that threaten to commodify our culture.
Generation X’s Pop-Art influence can be seen in the way the first piece of narrative in the novel is in fact “a Lichtenstein-like cartoon of a young woman, with perfect hair and a vast cup of coffee, dispensing a cynical piece of relationship wisdom” (Tate 11), With Generation X being a novel consisting of a juxtaposition of Pop-Art cartoons characters with their ironic utterance and a series of narratives titled “The Sun is Your Enemy” and “Our Parents Had More”, Coupland appears to be carrying out Avant-Pop’s radical formal innovation through incorporating the visual into the verbal in Generation X, thus redefining the novel genre. G.P Lainsbury, in his essay “Generation X and the end of history”, notes how Generation X is “a text that tests a reader’s preconception to what a novel should be” (3). I seek to take G.P Lainsbury’s note one-step further by asserting how Generation X is an Avant-Pop novel that tests a reader’s preconception to what time should be.
Modern day capitalist societies, with their “econom[ies] that rel[y] on a ceaseless flow of images—on television, on billboards, on the Internet, and more insidiously, in the movement of these images in the subconscious of every consumer” (Andrew 53), have created individuals who are distracted in the present. They are unable to think differently and are only capable of “casual noticing, rather than attentive observation” (Benjamin 120). By spreading out its various “paratextual material—including a witty postmodern glossary and acerbic cartoons” (Tate 11) throughout the entire novel, Generation X is able to fulfill Avant-Pop’s requirement for “readers to have an oscillating combination of both [deep attention and hyper attention]” (Olsen 207) when it comes to reading. This is seen from how Dag uses the terminology “Mid-twenties Breakdown” (Coupland 33) in his story “I am not a target market” (Coupland 20). Readers are not sure what the term “Mid-twenties Breakdown” and have to read the glossary below to find out. Through the glossary, readers are informed of the crisis Dag went through during his twenties and how this crisis shaped his decision to move to the desert with his friends, Andy and Claire. Dag’s “Mid-twenties Breakdown” is also referenced to in the later part of the novel by a Lichtenstein-like cartoon in the story “It can’t last” (Coupland 37). Readers reading Generation X are forced to pay close attention to what and where they are reading and looking for fear of missing out an important reference or word that would lead to a failure in understanding the novel.
Just as how capitalist societies are constructed by images from the mass media, they are also very much built on the basis of exploitation. Through its incorporation of past influences such as Pop Art as well as the way the way it is structured around a series of flashback narratives, Generation X seeks to convey that in order for one to create of a better future free from exploitation, one, must at present, learn from the past. Generation X asserts that the past is found in personal history and political history. Personal history is exemplified by Andy’s account of his past working experience in Japan. Andy recalls how his female coworker, Miss Ueno, talks about the oppression women face on a daily basis in a capitalist society like Japan: “She said she wasn’t stressed but angry. She was angry because no matter how hard she worked she was more or less stuck in her little desk forever” (Coupland 55). Hearing Miss Ueno’s anger has informed Andy on how the capitalist system is very much a system of inequality. Andy is now aware that economic progress under the present capitalist system is very much brought upon by the exploitation of laborers, specifically female laborers. Furthermore, through the figure Mr. Takamichi, Andy’s boss, that Andy describes as a “a tiny old man in a black Balmain suit […]. He was wearing a baseball cap and […] [was] [an] Americaphile renowned for bragging about his golf scores in Parisian brothels and for jogging through Tasmanian gaming houses with an L.A. blonde in his arm” (Coupland 55), Andy realizes that capitalism’s system of inequality, by upholding white as a privilege opposed to Asian, have corrupted the way in which race is publicly viewed in present-day capitalist Japan. Japanese people like Mr. Takamichi, are deluded into believing that being whiter is the only way to reach and become the top. Capitalist consumerism has taken this delusion one step further by telling Japanese that consuming Western products in the present will make them whiter. Regardless of how he is the head boss of the Andy’s company that produces magazines, Mr. Takamichi, by being a figure of consumption, “a cartoon version of an American” (Coupland 56) embodies how vicious the cycle of capitalist consumerism is—you simply produce to consume more.
This need to learn from political history emphasized in the chapter “Welcome Home from Vietnam, Son” (Coupland 149) in which Andy visits the Vietnam memorial with his younger brother, Tyler. Tyler belongs to the generation after Andy and is definitely not interested in the past that is found in political history: “Andy, I don’t get it. I mean, this is a cool place and all, but why should you be interested in Vietnam. It was over before you’d even reached puberty […]. You wouldn’t want to [remember any of it]. They were ugly times” (Coupland 151). Tyler is only interested in consumption and seeks to forget the ugly past by happily consuming in the now, as seen from how he breaks “out into spontaneous fits of song and dance […] at the Clackamas County Mall” (Coupland 151). Tyler epitomizes how capitalism, with its various commercial and advertising narratives, has duped us into believing that consuming in the present is all that matters.since “our world has been saved from history by the free market” (2), as put forward by G.P. Lainsbury. These various commercial and advertising narratives have further installed in Tyler the notion of consumption being the only way that will lead us to achieve happiness and fulfillment. “Tyler [is] happy to exchange personal independence […] for the monetary thrill of buying the coolest current merchandise.” (Tate 13).
Unlike Tyler, Andy seeks to confront the mistakes we made in the past by remembering the ugly times making up political history. He is aware that the Vietnam memorial is not simply a “remarkable document and an enchanted space” (150). Instead, he is aware that the Vietnam memorial is a reminder of ugly truth regarding how the Vietnam War was “turned into a press release, a marketing strategy, and a cynical campaign tool” (Coupland 151). Andrew J. Rotter, in his essay “Causes of the Vietnam War”, speaks of how the United States participated in the Vietnam War with the aim of opening up markets and resources so as to propagate its idea of capitalism to the entire world: “Truman also hoped that assisting the French in Vietnam would help to shore up the developed, non-Communist nations, whose fates were in surprising ways tied to the preservation of Vietnam and, given the domino theory, all of Southeast Asia. Free world dominion over the region would provide markets for Japan, rebuilding with American help after the Pacific War. U.S. involvement in Vietnam reassured the British, who linked their postwar recovery to the revival of the rubber and tin industries in their colony of Malaya, one of Vietnam's neighbors” (1). By portraying Andy as “need[ing] a connection to a past of some importance, however wane the connection” (Coupland 151), as conscious of the destruction capitalism has inflicted on the past through his remembrance of the Vietnam War, Generation X makes an urgent call for action on our part before we are too late in time.
Dag’s last line of “There. I’ve always wanted to do that” (Coupland 64) best embodies this notion of being too late in time in Generation X. Just as how Dag is late to realize that he is in love with Andy after the police takes him away in the last story “Await Lighting” (Coupland 197), he is also late to realize that to change the present is not to destroy it with “occasional acts of consumer sabotage [that] are at best, comically ineffective because they do not belong to a bigger narrative social action” (Andrew 43). Changing the present requires us to live in it by listening to the past found in stories, as seen from Andy’s narration: “I don’t think Dag was listening. He should have been. But he just wanted to hear a voice” (Coupland 195). Furthermore, Generation X allows us to experience time differently through redefining it. Time in a capitalist society has always been linked to progression brought upon by consumption. Generation X’s first story is an apocalypse story titled “The Sun is your Enemy” (Coupland 3). In this starting story, instead of the sun being a symbol of life to the world our characters belong to, it becomes a symbol of death that “kill[s] crops” (Coupland 7), causes “keratosis lesion” (Coupland 8) and brings drought to “this place in Antarctica called Lake Vanda, where the rain hasn’t fallen in two million years” (Coupland 8). Moreover, the last story in Generation X, “Jan. 01, 2000” (Coupland 203), is a story about a new start. In this ending story, Andy is driving to Mexico to start a new life with Dag and Claire in which they are owners of a hotel in San Felipe. By having an ending for a beginning and a beginning for an end, Generation X is able redefine time as a form of regression. With our sense of time disrupted, we are now unable to simply “sit still and accelerate information past/ through ourselves by means of various interfaces [or] […] travel relatively unmediated through tangible space” (Olsen 203). Instead, we have to look for different ways to give meaning to our present time like what our characters, Dag, Andy and Claire are doing through storytelling: “to tell stories and to make [their] own lives worthwhile tales in the process” (Coupland 10).
I seek to reiterate here that Generation X certainly does not let us to return to a simpler time of straightforward clarity and preexisting definition. With its use of various assemblage techniques and allusions, it is certainly an experimental work that seeks to preserve the past, present and future of time. It refuses to let time become a static moment that is shaped by artificial, commercial stories. Instead, it encourages us to live in this complex world we have inherited and to make the most of out the time we have left.
Works Cited:
1. Coupland, Douglas. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. New York: St. Martin's, 1991. Print.
2. Lainsbury, G.P. "Generation X and the End of History." Essays on Canadian Writing; Spring 96.58 (March 1996): n. pag. Ebsco Host. Web. 29 Apr. 2016.
3. Olsen, Lance. "Avant-Pop." The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature (2012): 199-209. Print.
4. Rotter, Andrew J. "The Causes of the Vietnam War." The Causes of the Vietnam War. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2016. <http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/vietnam/causes.html>.
5. Tate, Andrew. Contemporary American and Canadian Novelists: Douglas Coupland. Manchester, UK: Manchester UP, 2007. Print.
