93 Udk 821.111(73)–3.09"195/20" Generation X in Slovenia(N
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UDK 821.111(73)–3.09"195/20" GENERATION X IN SLOVENIA(N) Romi Češčut Abstract Addressing themes of family, interpersonal relationships, historicity, jobs, religion, and apocalypse Generation X narrative includes works by young American writers in the 80s and 90s of the twentieth century. The search for one’s identity in urban landscape is heavily influenced by mass media, pop culture and consumerism. Slovenian press and professional literature provided only scarce response to Generation X fiction which is also influenced by the ambiguity of the term Generation X and the essence of its culture and literature, which is also true for American literary criticism. The paper aims to explore the reception of novels by Douglas Coupland, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jay McInerney and their analyses with emphasis on narrative, themes of consumerism and mass media, characters, and style of writing. Key words: Generation X, American generations, brat-pack, Douglas Coupland, Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney I. GENERATION X FICTION Generation X literature was mainly produced by the younger generation of American authors in the 80s and 90s of the twentieth century. The sole term ‘Gen- eration X’, though itself ambiguous in essence and meaning, became widely used after the release of the first novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991) by Canadian writer Douglas Coupland. It is an account of three people that move to a Californian desert suburb to escape consumerism and pop culture, and tell each other stories to make their lives meaningful. The same year, the first film by a young American director, Richard Linklater, Slacker, with similarities to Coupland’s novel introduced jobless young people that rejected the norms and rules imposed by society. As soon as media found the third phenomenon – a new kind of music, ‘grunge’, that expressed contemplation, looked for extremes and meaning of life beyond one’s striving for success and profit, a stereotype about Generation X was born. Thus, Generation X became synonymous with a group of young people and later on with a whole demographic group born approximately between 1960 and 1980 in the USA. 93 So far, literary criticism has not provided adequate criteria for placing authors and works into the Generation X fiction. With the exception of Douglas Coupland, there has been partial agreement on the essence of Generation X as a term, demographic group, its literary characteristics and list of authors. My criteria for selecting Generation X authors and characteristics are based on the following critical thought: firstly, Eric Liu in the editorial to the first anthology on Generation X Next: Young American Writers on the New Generation (1994) believes that Generation X authors have the same and unique worldview, they are a “postboomer” generation, and know and understand media (Liu viii)1. Similarly, according to David Foster Wallace the “Conspicuously Young writers” share “the new and singular environment in and about which [they] try to write fiction” (Wallace 3) which is more important than the same age group2. Douglas Rushkoff, editor of the next anthology The GenX Reader (1994) stresses self-reference, self-reflexiveness and ironic distance of the works3. Moreover, James Annesley in Blank Fictions (1998) thinks the group does not represent a literary movement but a spirit of age reflecting an “atomized nihilistic worldview” (Annesley 3) with themes of sexuality, violence, media and consumerism (Annesley 1-2)4. Kenneth Millard in Contemporary American Fiction (2000) states that Generation X works “are self-consciously aware of their own status as market commodities, to be merchandised, advertised, promoted, packaged, and shifted as so many units of ‘product’”5 (Millard 146). They display “the new freedoms and perils of American corporate enterprise and the sometimes violent personal alienation that can accompany it” (Ibid.) and the depthlessness of the American society in the twentieth century, its satire and its crisis of values. Next, Daniel Grassian in Hybrid Fictions: American Literature and Generation X (2003) defines Generation X narratives as ‘hybrid fictions’ which describe the empty lives of the young white Americans in urban parts of the USA and express a critique on the effects of popular culture on them6. Finally, the doctoral thesis Ameriško literarno gibanje avant-pop (2002) by Mojca Krevel, states that growing up in the 80s, adulthood in the 90s, subversion and characters’ distance to mass media (Krevel 83) are important features of avant-pop which I believe can also be ascribed to Generation X7. 1 Liu’s anthology includes essays by the following authors: Jenny Lyn Bader, Stephen Beachy, Paula Ka- men, Ian Williams, Naomi Wolf, Paul Beatty, Cathy Young, David Greenberger, Ted Klein, Karen Lehrman, Lalo Lopez, Robin Pogrebin, and Elisabeth Wurtzel. 2 In his 1988 essay ”Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young” Wallace mentions Ellis, McInerney, Janowitz, Leavitt, Simpson, and Minot. 3 Rushkoff’s anthology incorporates fragments of works by Douglas Coupland, Walter Kirn, Bruce Craven, Darius James, and Marc Laidlaw and Rudy Rucker. 4 Annesley classifies works by authors Donna Tart, Susanna Moore, Douglas Coupland, Sapphire, Kath- erine Texier, Mark Leyner, Ray Shell, and Evelyn Lau as ‘blank fiction’ and its authors as successors of the literary ‘bratpack’. Its main representatives are Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, whose works from the 80s of the twentieth century thematize discontent, decadence, brutality, violence, sexual experimentation and drug abuse of young Americans. 5 The characteristics refer to Kathy Acker’s In Memoriam to Identity, Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, Douglas Rushkoff’s Media Virus, and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. 6 Grassian’s idea of ‘hybrid fictions’ refers to works by David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Neal Stephenson, William Vollman, Douglas Coupland, Sherman Alexie, Michael Serros, and Dave Eggers (Grassian 12). 7 Mark Amerika, avant-pop artist and its founder, considers two of the aforementioned authors Mark Leyner and William Vollmann to be avant-pop authors (Krevel 27, 28). Larry McCaffery in his avant-pop 94 My research was focused on Coupland’s novels Generation X, Shampoo Planet (1993), Life After God (1995), Miss Wyoming (2001), All Families Are Psychotic (2002), Hey Nostradamus! (2004) and essay collection Polaroids from the Dead (1997), Ellis’s novels Less Than Zero (1986) and American Psycho (1991), McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984) and Story of My Life (1989), Hornburg’s Bongwater (1995) and Downers Grove (1999), and Gomez’s novel Our Noise (1995). Generation X narrative displays poorly developed characters without moral values, alienated, aimless and indifferent jobless white young people who oppose the norms and expectations of the society. Besides taking place in natural environments (forest, primeval forest and desert) the novels are set in urban (metropolitan) areas in the USA in the present day. Driven by the search for one’s own identity and meaning in the American society at the end of the twentieth century, which is marked by consumerism; and mass media; and culture and history that became commodities, they address the themes of family, interpersonal relationships, jobs, religion, historicity and apocalypse. The theme of family displays an extended family, bringing together partners and children from different marriages, in which children miss their parents’ love and education. As a result, they resort to media and pop culture and later on either become media savvy, their victim or enemy. Aiming at escaping the influence of the omnipresent media and consumerism some characters move back to nature or mythological places, yet their attempts fail in the end. Being brought up without religion, many discover a need to believe in something and consequently find their own source of belief in nature, self, friends or mistake it for consumerist activities. Religion helps characters overcome personal distress caused not only by poor interpersonal relationships but also lack of jobs. Most opt for a ‘McJob’, “a low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector” (Coupland 1991: 6), as they have no other possibility or want to flee from responsibil- ity. Living for the present, suffering from ‘information overload’ and with experience mediated through mass culture and media, the characters do not address history as an important issue. It is reduced to a commodity and connected with one’s search for his or her own roots, or to a thematic park. Lastly, drugs, present in private and public life and easily attainable, together with death, illnesses, and disasters give the narratives an apocalyptic character. Predominantly composed in prose in form of a novel, Generation X fiction is fragmented and loose in structure, and written mainly in the first person singular in the present tense. Coupland’s early works (Generation X, Shampoo Planet and Life After God) are unconventional for their use of hypertext. The author has created a system of footnotes in the form of illustrations, comics, comments and catchwords that break the narrative and distract the reader. Yet, this way a frame or context for the text is created which is as equally important as the text itself. Generation X narratives are rich with anthology After Yesterday’s Crash (1995) places ‘bratpack’ authors and ‘slackers’ into the youngest genera- tion of avant-pop (Ibid. 81). Leyner’s My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, Et Tu Baby, and Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog, Coupland’s Generation X, Shampoo Planet, Microserfs, and Girlfriend in a Comma, Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, Great Expectations, Don Quixote, Empire of the Senseless, Pussycat, King of the Pyrates, and In Memoriam to Identity, Darius James’s Negrophobia, David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System are classified as avant-pop. DeLillo’s White Noise and Mao II, Ellis’s American Psycho and newer short stories by Marc Laidlaw, authors William T.