Complicated Geographies: Douglas Coupland's North America
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COMPLICATED GEOGRAPHIES: DOUGLAS COUPLAND’S NORTH AMERICA A Thesis Submitted to the College of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the Department of English University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon By JESSICA MCDONALD © Jessica McDonald, December 2019. All rights reserved. PERMISSION TO USE In presenting this thesis/dissertation in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Postgraduate degree from the University of Saskatchewan, I agree that the Libraries of this University may make it freely available for inspection. I further agree that permission for copying of this thesis/dissertation in any manner, in whole or in part, for scholarly purposes may be granted by the professor or professors who supervised my thesis/dissertation work or, in their absence, by the Head of the Department or the Dean of the College in which my thesis work was done. It is understood that any copying or publication or use of this thesis/dissertation or parts thereof for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. It is also understood that due recognition shall be given to me and to the University of Saskatchewan in any scholarly use which may be made of any material in my thesis/dissertation. Requests for permission to copy or to make other uses of materials in this thesis/dissertation in whole or part should be addressed to: Head of the Department of English 9 Campus Drive University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5A5 Canada OR Dean College of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies University of Saskatchewan 116 Thorvaldson Building, 110 Science Place Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5C9 Canada i ABSTRACT Starting with his breakout novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture in 1991, Canadian writer and visual artist Douglas Coupland has published more than twenty works of fiction and non-fiction. Coupland’s prolific writing career has helped him achieve popularity across diverse reading publics, including mainstream or general book-reading publics, as well as scholarly circles. One recurring feature of his work that makes it compelling to read and rich to study is what this project terms complicated geographies. That is, his writing features dynamic textual renderings of space that are complicated in two senses: first, they are sometimes complicit in reinforcing conventional notions of space at the same time that they are often complex, subversive, and resistant to reading practices that try to fix them in meaning; and second, these renderings work to complicate easy, and oft-used, narratives about space. In other words, the complex textual “maps” provided by Coupland’s writing often trouble how public discourse views particular spaces. To study these complicated geographies, I examine depictions of North American space in short- and long-form fiction and non-fiction written by Coupland, from Generation X (1991) to Bit Rot, released in 2016. While North America is the broader frame of reference for this project, I focus in particular on five key spaces from Coupland’s oeuvre: the American Southwest desert region, Vancouver suburbia, British Columbia wilderness, Mexico, and the road. Pairing traditional literary analysis of individual texts with the work of contextualization, in which I discuss how the texts align with or alter popular geographies of North American space, this dissertation argues that Coupland’s works demand that readers rethink how they consume landscapes. His writing provokes individuals to consider how their give-and-take relationships with place influence ecological and social justice. By grappling with and itself embodying both the “good” and “bad” ways of consuming the world that surrounds us, Coupland’s written work exposes the charged ethical issues at stake in the everyday acts of understanding and inhabiting space. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful for the funding received for this project from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), as well as from the Department of English and the College of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. My sincere thanks to the members of my committee for their valuable suggestions, mentorship, and support: to my supervisor Dr. Lindsey Banco for the unparalleled quality of his feedback, his guidance in my professional career, and for being confident in my success even in my times of uncertainty; to Dr. Wendy Roy for her expert work as the specialist examiner and for her above- and-beyond approach to mentorship and student support; to Dr. Nancy Van Styvendale for her critical insights as the departmental reader and for consistently pushing me to be a stronger scholar; to Dr. Bram Noble for bringing his expertise and valuable perspective as the cognate examiner from the Department of Geography and Planning; and to my external examiner, Dr. Kit Dobson, for generously sharing his time in the midst of a busy season and for posing questions that will greatly help to strengthen the project in its future form. I would not have been able to complete this program and dissertation without the love and support of many people. To my family of friends, thank you for packing the last several years with plenty of wild times, and for filling the days with such warmth. To all the lovely folks in the ECC, thank you for having my back even and especially in the tough moments. To my parents, I am held up by your unfailing faith in me. And to Chad, thank you for bringing so much love, silliness, and sweetness into my life. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS PERMISSION TO USE i ABSTRACT ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii TABLE OF CONTENTS iv Introduction 1 “Nope, still not Canadian”: North America’s Douglas Coupland 8 Theorizing Space: As Process, Relations, and the Stories-so-far 17 Dominant and Popular Geographies in Conversation with Coupland’s Work 23 Chapter 1 Desert Space in Generation X and “In the Desert” 27 Introduction: Dominant Geographies of the American Southwest Deserts 27 Generation X: Encounters with the Desert as Tabula Rasa 34 “In the Desert”: Engaging the Desert as Post-Spiritual Wasteland 46 Conclusion: The Trouble with Blank Space 54 Chapter 2 Suburban Space in “1,000 Years (Life After God)” and Girlfriend in a Coma 57 Introduction: Locating Suburbia 57 Perceptions of Suburbia’s Lack 61 “1,000 Years (Life after God)”: A Tale of Two Pools 64 Girlfriend in a Coma: A Tale of Suburban Apocalypse 76 Conclusion: Why Suburbia Matters 85 Chapter 3 Wilderness in Souvenir of Canada, City of Glass, and Polaroids from the Dead 89 Introduction: Ecocriticism and the Many Shapes of Wilderness 89 Wilderness and Canadian National Identity: The Souvenir of Canada Series 95 Vancouver’s Wildernesses: City of Glass and Polaroids from the Dead 113 Conclusion: Notes Toward the Future 127 Chapter 4 Browsing the Texts of Consumable Mexico 131 Introduction: Placing Mexico in Coupland’s Map of North America 131 Food and Drugs in Coupland’s Fiction: Featuring All Families Are Psychotic 137 Travel, Hospitality, and Cannibalism: Generation X Enroute to Mexico 150 Conclusion: On the Dangers and Possibilities of Coupland’s Mexico 162 iv Conclusion: Where do all roads lead? Exiting Coupland’s North America by Way of the Road 166 Works Cited 179 v Introduction In a 1996 published postcard from the Bahamas, Canadian writer and visual artist Douglas Coupland proclaims, “‘Place’ is a joke” (Polaroids 112). Thirteen years later, with similar aplomb, he announces in his biography of Marshall McLuhan, “Geography has become irrelevant” (Marshall McLuhan 15). The subtitle of his first-ever major solo art exhibition, Douglas Coupland: everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything, at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2014, expresses the same sentiment: place can no longer be taken seriously in a globalizing world seemingly characterized by placelessness, by the encroaching influence of a homogenizing “McNugget culture” (Coupland, Polaroids 23), by the transformation of everywhere into “Nowhere” via a “complete obfuscation of differences” across space (Augaitis 25).1 From the 1990s to present day, across the three decades of his writing career, the perspective that place is increasingly irrelevant has been tacitly and overtly present in Coupland’s written work. His widely popular first novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) inaugurated this sentiment in his fiction. Set primarily in Palm Springs, California, where the transient protagonists find more a reflective stop on their lifelong itinerary than a permanent home, the novel is populated by characters who appear to have only provisional, shallow relationships to particular cities; who move across countries and borders without being especially affected by differences in location; and who face the realities of a globalizing, “accelerated” world with what is presented as a generation-defining mix of apathy, irony, and nostalgia. These features of the novel are likely what made it relevant to include in a graduate class on North American Literature, where I first encountered it and where the seminar 1 Coupland offers a notably different reading of the art show title, as he understands it, in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist. He explains, “It’s a reflection of how these days everyone has to become a jack of all trades, everyone has to know everything. It’s about the simultaneousness of today’s world” (38). While his explanation of the title does not concern place in literal terms, it approaches a similar meaning to my own reading of the subtitle: just as specific places are ushered toward becoming “everywhere” (or so the story goes), people are ushered toward being “everyone.” Contemporary social and economic pressures can seem to exert a homogenizing force on both place and people. 1 discussions trended toward how difficult the novel is to locate—how it seems detached from a specific sense of place.