Yuppie Postmodernism

DAVID KAUFMANN Yuppie Postmodernism Keep reminding yourself that the commentary on reality . . . calls for a method completely different from that required for a text. In the one case theology is the basic science, in the other philology. —Walter Benjamin The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes. —T W. Adorno Downward mobility has virtually no ritual face . . . there is no equivalent to Horatio Alger stories for the downwardly mobile. —Katherine S. Newman hat are we t? make of the '80s ? If, as Habermas has argued , we assume that a crisis only deserves the name if it is experienced as such, how do we account for the commercial success of crisis narratives during the longest period of sustained economic growth in the history of the United States?1 If things were really going so well for the upper classes during the Reagan years, how can we understand the taste among those classes for stories of anomie, weightlessness and apocalypse? In this essay, 1 will investigate one aspect of this problem by looking closely at the convergence of two important but often overlooked cultural phenomena of the last decade: the coming to consciousness ofa new character type, the Yuppie, and the unprecedented expansion of trade paperback fiction. I shall maintain that one of the most salient features of this literature has been its use of parataxis, a disjunctive style marked by its avoidance of grammatical subordination. For the sake of my argument, 1 will take Raymond Carver as a synechdoche Arizona Quarterly Volume 47 Number 2, Summer 1991 Copyright © 1991 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004- 1 6 10 94David Kaufmann for a wide range of predominantly white, frequently male, and consistently paratactic authors. It will be my contention that this style and this fiction enact a thorough-going naturalization of modernist aestheticism and, along with the creation of the ideal type of the Yuppie, mark the literary expression of a larger, critical socio-historical realignment. According to a rather lengthy spread in Newsweek, 1984 was the year of the Yuppie.2 It produced the first Yuppie ads, the first Yuppie products and the first Yuppie presidential candidate. The driven professionals whom Newsweek featured in its report were remarkable for their youth, their apparent sophistication and their commitment to the pursuit and ostentatious display of wealth. It is important to remember, though, that Newsweek did not invent Yuppies, nor did it discover them. The magazine's canonization of this new class within the New Class signals instead the acknowledgment and dissemination of a new ideal type. It cannot be a coincidence that the Year of the Yuppie dovetailed neatly with America's emergence from the recession of 1982—83. As the Newsweek article pointed out, these young professionals were trying to buck the tide. At a time when the median income for families in the 25-to-34 age bracket was declining, Yuppies were beating out other members of their age cohort by taking home 23% of the nation's net income.3 And what they took home, they spent. If Yuppies seemed at the time to embody the glamour of wealth in the age of a newly triumphant Reaganomics, they also marked a reaction to what seemed like the renewed threat of downward mobility. As Katherine S. Newman has noted in Falling from Grace, a study of the experience of defeated economic expectation, the median income ofAmericans declined 14% between 1972 and 1982. In the last four years of that period, 56% of the population had incomes that fell behind inflation.4 Depending on the parameters one uses, at least 1/5, and perhaps 1/3, of all Americans have fallen from the economic and social positions they held in 1973.' These figures point to a crux in Newman's argument: blue collar workers are not the only ones who suffered in the last fifteen years. In 1985 alone, 600,000 middle management jobs evaporated as a result of corporate mergers.6 But even in the face of widespread déchssement, Yuppie Postmodernism95 "the culture of meritocracy," that is, the dominant ideological presuppositions that bind together the managerial classes, seems unable to lay the moral burden of...