Ideology for the Lost and Directionless
Ever had those days when you just can’t seem to make heads or tails of anything? You go to work or to school and all the input you receive the entire day doesn’t mean anything to you? How do you use the knowledge that a has to be be the semimajor axis of the orbit of one body about the other, P its period, m and 0MTn be the masses of the two bodies and G the constant of gravitation to come up with PP/aaa = (piG (m + n) to cope with the truth that each day the peso value depreciates, unemployment grows like Jack’s beanstalk, and that the incumbent illegitimate and corrupt government is shelling out $700,000 a month for a US-based lobby group for its Charter Change agenda?
On those days, it’s best to read the books of Douglas Coupland — brain candy, soul therapy, and how-to-cope-manuals between tree derivatives bound by airplane glue. (Please suspend disbelief. For people clumsily crossing the difficult border such as myself, the likes of Coupland, JD Salinger, Helen Fielding, Jun Cruz Reyes are my shrinks at varying times).
In 1991, Coupland, a 30-year old intellectual from Vancouver, Canada came out with a book that detailed the lives/non-lives of twenty-somethings Andy, Claire, and Dag.
These three souls, weary of the consumerist culture that has dictated the directions of their lives, ditch their respective jobs in the cities and move to the middle of the desert just outside Palm Springs. There, in their run-down but still livable bungalows, the three of them weave and tell stories to each other about life, perceptions about life, and the complications that crammed even the crevices of both.
Within the central story - that of the friendship between the three - are other mini-fables: surrealist landscapes littered with spacemen; recluses who inhabit round libraries; and failed porno-stars with missing testicles. The book is “Generation X - Tales For an Accelerated Culture.”
Since the book’s initial publication and reprint (20 times or so in the last decade), the book has since become a sort of bible for the shin jin rui, or new people : members of a new generation searching for its own identity.
Containing 183 pages divided into 31 chapters interspersed with Lichtenstein drawings (after Roy Lichtenstein, the pop artist known for his painted enlargements of banal comic strips that transpose the simplified violence and sentimentality of pop culture into huge, almost abstract, images) and 90s hippie/techie/preppie argot -definitions, Generation X is a novel that has captured and described the essence of 90s living for a young First World people who have inherited a society characterized by massive but useless consumption, MTV, job ennui, virtual reality, and emotional angst.
As Andy, Claire, and Dag narrate bits and pieces of what they call their “small lives on the periphery,” they also reveal their cluelessness about what life is, and how exactly they should live it. Serving as each other’s cheering squad, they hold each other up against attacks of personal emptiness.
“We live small lives on the periphery; we are marginalized and there’s a great deal in which we choose not to participate. We wanted silence and we have that silence now. We arrived here speckled in sores and zits, our colons so tied in knots that we never thought that we’d have bowel movement again. Our systems have stopped working, jammed with the odor of copy machines, Wite-Out, the smell of bond paper, and the endless stress of pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause. We had compulsions that made us confuse shopping with creativity, to take downers and assume that merely renting a video on Saturday night was enough. But now that we live in the desert, things are much, much better." -Generation X, page 11.
But Generation X is only the first of five Coupland books that run along the same theme - young lives exhausted by an exhausted society pumped full by dispensable, hyper-culture. His five other books, Shampoo Planet (1992), Life After God (1993) Microserfs (1995), Polaroids from the Dead (1996) and Girlfriend in a Coma (1998) also carry the same thesis that life is a continuing and difficult search for personal meaning — that it is the continued struggle to find reasons to get up in the mornings, get out that door, and cope with eveything that happens between your exit and your return the following evening.
What is interesting and compelling about Coupland’s books, however, is how clearly they situate themselves in the physical reality of the now: science and art, politics and economic form the pilLars of the stage wherein the lives of the characters are played out, with their interior journeys shaped by the macrocosmic developments in the world.
The last two decades of the 20th century has witnessed the birth and evolution of many a discovery in the areas of science, literature, religion, and economics. They also saw the unfolding of tragedies that will take centuries to erase from humanity’s collective memory. In the same decade that harbored the postulation that life exists in Mars, was also the discovery of the lymphadenopathy-associated virus (LAV) — now officially called the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or AIDS that continues to claim the lives of thousands on a daily basis.
At a time when the concepts of gender sensitivity and political correctness was being introduced in massive information campaigns, racism once again reared its ugly head, causing Serbs to butcher Croates, and Neonazis leading rallies in European state capitals.
It is against this international backdrop of history that Coupland tenders his stories. The Coupland books introduce the ideology of the fast-paced 90s - a systematic but slightly hay-wire set of principles that link perceptions of the world and the moral/immoral/amoral standards of the day; an ideology which takes off where the existentialist philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Jean Paul Sartre finished.
If Heidegger interpreted 20th century existentialism and applied it to more personal problems–questions about how human beings should live, what they are, and the meaning of life and death, Coupland describes how the people of his generation and culture live, what they are, and how they realize the almost-meaninglessness of their lives, and even the more cryptic eventuality of death.
"Now - here is my secret: I tell it to you with an openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God - that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem be- yond being able to love. page 359, Life After God
And if Sartre developed his existentialism as an analysis of self-consciousness in relation to Being, Coupland, through his characters, analyzed the 90s psyche functioning continuously, but without deriving actual meaning from its formal function.
"I suppose there’s nothing wrong with my not having a life. So many people no longer have any lives that you really have to wonder if some new mode of existence is being created which is going to become so huge that it is no longer on the moral scale - simply the way people ARE. Maybe thinking you’re supposed to “have a life” is a stupid way of buying into an untenable 1950s narrative of what life *supposed* to be. How do we know that all these people with “no lives” aren’t really on the new frontier of human sentience and perceptions? " Microserfs, page 187
All six Coupland books — most particularly the treatise-like “Life After God” wherein various voices describe the inchoate dissatisfaction they experience in their lives, dissatisfaction they cannot pinpoint to any root cause — are discussions on the essential structures of individual experience.
Day-day events become scattered moments of either epiphany, or sudden personal devastation. Each narrative, though full of insights regarding various aspects of human existence, aim not really towards any specific or profound commentary on humanity, but perhaps towards the general direction of, perhaps, being able, in the words of American poet and communist Adrienne Rich: “To find in this uncertain world a stay that cannot be undermined.”
Generation X and the subsequent Coupland books have also birthed the label for an actual generation of First World youth who will inherit nations wracked by various crises - economic, political, and moral. In Shampoo Planet, 17-year old Tyler Johnson goes to Europe on money he has made from selling fake Ray-bans shades and Rolex watches.
His and his friends’ dreams all revolve around securing jobs where they are guaranteed pension plans and death benefits. In Microserfs, the central characters leave Bill Gate’s Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington and move to Palo Alto to put up their own computer outfit. Why exactly do they leave? One, because they want their creative energies freed from the brain-numbing routine of their coding jobs; and two, because they realize that giants like Microsoft, Apple, and IBM can no longer take care of their employees the way corporations of their stature used to only a decade ago (downsizing, massive retrenchment - the impact of capitalist technology on employees who become redundant; the effect of competition posed by cheap labor in third world coutries with brilliant workers such as, say India).
In all his books, Coupland creates characters who are perpetually seeking answers to the questions "who am I, and where the heck am I going?!" Within the characters’ respective spheres of existence are their families with whom they can feel no affinity (except an often vague or indifferent kind of love); their friends who are as equally, however secretly, bewildered by their own lack of direction; and finally their physical environment — the world at large which is threatened by the evils of ozone layer-depletion; non-recyclable materials, animal poaching; and the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe of global proportions. (Destruction cause by rapacious capitalist greed, ladies and gents.)
Coupland, to whom the term “slackers” ( a class of young individuals who are employed in jobs well below their intellectual capabilities) is attributed, is Canadian, but the settings of his novels are in the United States. Both Canada and US are superpowers - monopoly-capitalist states that have begun to lose their footholds on the world economy during the last decade, thus resulting in sudden leaps in the unemployment and social security dependency.
At the same time that technology has achieved a level of almost science fiction, standards of living for millions of American and Canadians have plummeted. And the young people, the inheritors of these First World societies, are not exempt from the effects. Through all his novels, Coupland alludes to these effects, and the affected: “And everybody’s so poor these days, too. It was so popular for decades to bash the middle class, and then suddenly, pffft, the middle class evaporated, and now Ben misses it dreadfully. Nonetheless, just because other people are poor doesn’t mean one shouldn’t try to hang on to one’s own wealth…Just when and how did the world become so polarized?” -Polaroids from the Dead page 47
Coupland is the Paul Zindel of the 90s. Zindel, author of such works as “My Darling, My Hamburger,” “Confessions of a Teenage Baboon,” “Pardon Me, You’re Stepping on my Eyeball”, as well as the award-winning one-act play “The Effect of Gamma rays on man-on-the-Moon Marigolds” described how late 70s and early 80s was like for the children of underemployed America. The issues Zindel brought out were adult as experienced by adolescents: teenage abortions, drug addiction, low self-esteem, awakenings into a world whose dark side was more than just the effect of a 30-minute eclipse.
Zindel’s portrayal of American youths and their coping mechanisms shattered the genre of typical young adult novels (the likes of Hardy Boys or Sweet Valley High were every conflict resolves itself in a pleasant and justi-in-time manner) and raged against the middle-class’ refusal to acknowledge the widening gap between the American dream and everyday reality. Coupland’s fiction, however, is more introspective. His works are case analyses of the formation of a subculture, that of Generation X - that is purely an unconscious but inevitable response to societal maldevelopments. He describes the workings in the in the interior lives of a generation, and how its belief systems evolve/mutate within the context of the here and now. #
Postscript: This omnibus review has not taken into consideration Douglas’ last three novels "Hey, Nostradamus!", "Miss Wyoming" and "My family is Psychotic." Hint, hint — I don’t have a copy of Nostradamus and Psychotic. Am not above begging for copies of said books, harhar. Please send copies to Room 602, South Wing, House of Representatives. Kahit pahiram lang.
Post-postscript: After all the whining and angst, what then?
Of course, for national democrats such as myself (bwaharhar, the most serious label on myself to date!), what’s the best kind of ideology and philosophy but the kind that does not stop at merely questioning the world or trying to define it but more importantly and in such a grand and profound way, change it, transform it for the good of the exploited majority.
Up next (sana, kung tamaan ng inspirasyon): review of literature in the Movement.
