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7. Postwestern Generations? Douglas Coupland's "Plastic Radiant Way"
- University of Nebraska Press
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269 7. POSTWESTERN GENERATIONS? Douglas Coupland’s “Plastic Radiant Way” This is why the imaginary and the real must be, rather, like two juxtaposable or superimposable parts of a single trajectory, two faces that ceaselessly interchange with one another, a mobile mirror. Thus Australian Aborigines link nomadic itineraries with dream voyages, which together compose “an interstitching of routes,” “an immense cut-out [decoupé] of space and time that must be read like a map.” At the limit, the imaginary is a virtual image that is interfused with the real object, and vice versa, thereby constituting a crystal of the unconscious. Gilles Deleuze The Double West Mike Davis writes of how the belief of Native American prophet Wovoka in the Ghost Dance as an apocalyptic reminder of the instability of a white West is still alive and evident as one surveys the “artificial world” of L.A.’s “neon landscapes”—“Turnerian history . . . stripped down to its ultimate paranoia,” he calls it. But as he reminds us, in the Ghost Dance tradition “this end point is also paradoxically the point of renewal and restoration.”1 This association of apocalypse and renewal, of ending and beginning, has a curious resonance for this chapter as I continue my efforts to show how westness is figured in a range of texts. For here I wish to consider how urban writers associated with “blank generation” or Generation X, whose work is often seen as nihilist, might be seen as contributing greatly to a rhizomatic rereading of what constitutes the West. The epigraph from Deleuze suggests my approach here, charting “the imaginary and the real” Wests as “juxtaposable or superimposable parts of a single trajectory, two faces that ceaselessly interchange with one another, a mobile mirror.” Thus, juxtaposed with the apocalyptic is always something else shadowing it, a “ghost dance” of the “virtual,” some potential within the destructive that for Douglas Coupland, the central focus of this chapter, is always associated with the multiple implications of westness. TheLedZeppelinepigraphtoBretEastonEllis’sL.A.novelLessThanZero (1985) reads, “There’s a feeling I get when I look to the West,” directing postwestern generations? 270 us to its acute observations of an excessive, self-obsessed, consumerist culture where life is defined less by relationships and memories than by billboards, designer labels, and mtv. The utopian hopes and dreams of the “Sunshine” region have been broken, wasted, or rewritten as “Noir.” The novel’s first words are “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles,” a comment that both sets the tone for what is to come and pays homage to Ellis’s major influence, Joan Didion, and her Play It as It Lays.2 In the first of a series of stunning motifs that conclude the novel, Ellis writes of “a street called Sierra Bonita in Hollywood” where “people saw ghosts; apparitions of the Wild West” haunting the wealthy suburbs, with Indians on horseback, carrying tomahawks, intruding, like the return of the repressed, into the self-obsessed lives of these “new frontiersmen.”3 In L.A.’s new frontier, history has been forgotten in the headlong rush into the future, where environmental destruction and genocide are simply the price paid for the good life experienced by the book’s young characters. Yet the past will not “disappear here” (a recurring slogan in the novel), for it remains, haunting the mind of Clay, the central character, and the streets of Los Angeles like these ghostly Indians, or the “covered wagon” that caused a man to crash his car into a palm tree. The West, in all its real and imagined pervasiveness, cannot be evaded, becoming translated here into the Indian and covered wagon intervening into the glossy, gridlike order of suburban streets and lives like the return of the repressed. The turmoil of Ellis’s West, torn between past, present, and future, is reflected in the landscape that intrudes into the fragile human environment, like a sinister reminder of that past, of “houses falling, slipping down the hills in the middle of the night,” of “little girls” singing of destruction—“Smack, smack, I fell in a crack . . . Now, I’m part of the debris”—all mirrored in the novel’s atmosphere of careless, human brutality, “of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children.” The apocalyptic present and the repressed past erupt into the novel as a wake-up call to those, like Clay, living within the contradictory, simulated spaces of this...