Douglas Coupland

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Douglas Coupland

Born December 30, 1961 (1961-12-30) (age 47)
CFB Baden-Söllingen, West Germany
Occupation Writer, Artist
Nationality Canadian
Literary movement Postmodernism, Modernism
Notable work(s) Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, Microserfs, & JPod
Official website

Douglas Coupland (born December 30, 1961) is a Canadian novelist. His fiction is complemented by recognised works in design and visual art arising from his early formal training. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularised terms such as McJob and Generation X. He has published twelve novels, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. A specific feature of Coupland's novels is their synthesis of postmodern religion, Web 2.0 technology, human sexuality, and pop culture into an avant-garde "Christian post-Christian" sensibility.[1]

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] The beginning

Douglas Coupland was born on December 30, 1961 at a NATO base in Baden-Söllingen, West Germany, second of four sons to Dr. Douglas Charles Thomas Coupland, a medic in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and homemaker C. Janet Coupland, a degree holder in comparative religion from McGill University. In 1965, the Coupland family relocated to West Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada where the father opened private family medical practice at the completion of his military tour.

Coupland describes his upbringing as producing a "blank slate".[2] "My mother comes from a sour-faced family of preachers who from the 19th century well into the 20th scoured the prairies thumping Bibles. Her parents tried to get away from that but unwittingly transmitted their values to my mother. My father's family weren't that different."[2] As a result, Coupland was raised without orthodoxies. This upbringing provided Coupland freedom to arrive at his own conclusions on matters of world and religion: a characteristic condition of his fictional creations.

Coupland discovered the world of fine art in 1970 at age 8 when, idly browsing an encyclopedia, he read the article for pop art. "It showed a tomato soup can by Andy Warhol and a Roy Lichtenstein exploding jet that said, "Whaam!" My brain just kind of melted. The "TOMATO SOUP" and the "Whaam!" told me that the everyday world and its documentation is just as aesthetic and as important as any other realm. Those words, those two little images, are largely why I ended up in art school. And it's why I approach writing differently than do most people. The words themselves have to look like art as well as, one hopes, be art."[3]

This early awakening matured through a more direct interaction with pop art during his first year of university. Graduating from Sentinel Secondary School in West Vancouver in 1979, Coupland went to McGill University with the intention of studying, like his father, the sciences; specifically physics.[4] Coupland left McGill at year's end, and returned to Vancouver to attend art school.

At the Emily Carr College of Art and Design (now the Emily Carr University of Art and Design) on Granville Island in Vancouver, in Coupland's words, "I … had the best four years of my life. It's the one place I've felt truly, totally at home. It was a magic era between the hippies and the PC goon squads. Everyone talked to everyone and you could ask anybody anything."[3] Coupland graduated from Emily Carr in 1984 with a focus on sculpture, and moved on to study at the European Design Institute in Milan, Italy and the Hokkaido College of Art and Design in Sapporo, Japan.[3] He also completed courses in business science, fine art, and industrial design in Japan in 1986.

Established as a designer working in Tokyo, Coupland suffered a skin condition brought on by Tokyo's summer climate, and returned to Vancouver[3]. Before leaving Japan, Coupland had sent a postcard ahead to a friend in Vancouver. The friend's husband, a magazine editor, read the postcard and offered Coupland a job writing for the magazine.[3] Coupland began writing for magazines as a means of paying his studio bills.[5]

[edit] Generation X to Life After God

From 1989 to 1990, Coupland lived in the Mojave Desert working on a handbook about the birth cohort that followed the baby boom.[6] He received a $22,500 advance from St. Martin's Press to write the nonfiction handbook. Instead, Coupland wrote a novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.[7] It was rejected in Canada before being accepted by an American publishing house in 1991.[8] Not an instant success, the novel steadily increased in sales, eventually attracting a following behind its core idea of "Generation X". Over his own protestations, Coupland was dubbed the spokesperson for a generation.[9] Terms popularised by Coupland in the novel, including Generation X and McJob, ultimately entered the vernacular.[10]

His second novel, Shampoo Planet, was published by Pocket Books in 1992. It focused on the generation after Generation X, the group called "Global Teens" in his first novel and now generally labeled Generation Y.[7] Coupland permanently moved back to Vancouver soon after the novel was published. He had spent his "twenties scouring the globe thinking there had to be a better city out there, until it dawned on [him] that Vancouver is the best one going".[11] He wrote a collection of small books, which together were compiled, after the advice of his publisher, into the book Life After God. This collection of short stories, with its focus on spirituality, initially provoked polarised reaction before eventually revealing itself as a bellwether text for the avant-garde sensibility identified by Ferdinand Mount as "Christian post-Christian".[12] As Coupland was widening his literary focus, the Generation X market branding was intensifying and, in Coupland's opinion, had ceased to be a valid voice of disaffected youth.

Eventually, Generation X marketing was taken too far. When Generation X icon Kurt Cobain killed himself, Coupland realized that the idea he had created was officially dead. He announced this in Details magazine in 1995, arguing that over-marketing had created a commercial identity that, like Hyde to Jekyll, had annihilated the original. With this mature awareness, Coupland's art likewise began to deepen and mature, becoming capable of engaging another nascent cultural moment: the digital age.

[edit] Microserfs to All Families are Psychotic

1994 found Coupland working for Wired, the newly-formed techno-utopian magazine that would do much to shape and interpret the eventually-dominant digital revolution.[13] While there, Coupland casually wrote a short story about the life of the employees at Microsoft Corporation. This short work provided the inspiration for a novel, Microserfs. To research the culture that the novel depicted, Coupland had moved to Palo Alto, California and immersed himself in Silicon Valley life.[14] By coincidence, Coupland released Microserfs in the same week that Microsoft released its transformative Windows 95 operating system. The novel was instantly a critical and cultural success which elevated estimation of Coupland beyond Generation X spokesmanship to the level of substantial novelist.[citation needed]

Coupland followed this fiction success by releasing his first collection of non-fiction pieces in 1996. Polaroids from the Dead is a manifold of stories and essays on diverse topics, including: Grateful Dead concerts; Harolding; Kurt Cobain's death; the visiting of a German reporter; and a comprehensive essay on Brentwood, California, written at the time of the O. J. Simpson murder case and the anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's death.

That same year, Coupland intensively toured Europe to promote Microserfs, but the high workload brought on fatigue and mental strain.[15][16] Nonetheless, he continued working on his next novel, exploiting his depression as a source of artistic material and a stimulus along his literary trajectory toward secular-spiritual depth. Girlfriend in a Coma thematically develops from Life After God, using a Canadian high school setting to locate the religious and spiritual messages that an outwardly material culture has re-encoded. Coupland noted that this was his last novel to be "…written as a young person, the last constructed from notebooks full of intricate observations".[17]

Out of this dark period, Coupland moved on to the writing of a satiric representation of a vigorous pop culture re-orienting itself around the rise of the internet and its twin possibilities of fraud and freedom. Miss Wyoming places direct emphasis on the notes of personal identity, self-discovery and faith sounded in each of Coupland's novels of this period.

Adding to his literary output, Coupland published his photographic paean to Vancouver, City of Glass. This non-fiction work was meant to serve artistically as a guidebook to the unique aspects that comprise Vancouver and its environs. The book incorporates sections from Life After God and Polaroids from the Dead into a visual narrative, formed from photographs of Vancouver locations and life supplemented by stock footage mined from local newspaper archives.

Coupland's next novel, All Families Are Psychotic, tells the story of a dysfunctional family from Vancouver coming together to watch their daughter Sarah, an astronaut, launch into space. Although immediate reading suggests the title is a blanket depreciation of family, the statement that "all families are psychotic" can also be read as a word of comfort assuring otherwise isolated individuals that their domestic challenges and frustrations are common to human life. This doubleness and stance against cynicism together mark the position of Coupland's fiction as he prepares to see the digital age, having been made the more comprehensible by his artistic efforts, now turn millennial.[original research?]

[edit] Souvenir of Canada to The Gum Thief

The promotional rounds for All Families are Psychotic were underway when the September 11 attacks took place. In a play called September 10 performed later at Stratford-upon-Avon for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Coupland declared that this was the last day of the 1990s, and the new century had now truly begun.[18][19] Correspondingly, Coupland began to alter the trajectory of his fiction.

The first book that Coupland published after the September 11 attacks was Souvenir of Canada, which expanded his earlier City of Glass to incorporate the whole of Canada. There are two volumes in this series, which was conceived as an explanation to non-Canadians of uniquely Canadian things. Souvenir of Canada begins an experiment in fictional form that Coupland aims to provide an interpretive framework for the post-9/11 world by simultaneously referring backward while progressively moving forward.[original research?]

Coupland's second book in this millennially-orientated period, Hey Nostradamus!, implicitly frames September 11 by returning to another, earlier, massacre of innocents: the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999.[20] Coupland adds a further level of distance to his re-framing of 9/11 by relocating the Columbine events to school in North Vancouver, Canada. Hey Nostradamus! places the focus not on the killers but on victims; dead, alive and half-alive: the existential states, in other words, of the post-9/11 millennium.

Coupland followed Hey Nostradamus! with Eleanor Rigby. Similarly to the titular original written and sung by The Beatles, the novel examines loneliness, with Coupland looking back to his own lonely life during his twenties. [21] The appearance of the Comet Hale-Bopp in the story heightens the novel's millennial undertones and, again, frames cultural present against historical past.

Another moment from the past tapped by Coupland in this period was that of Terry Fox. Using the format of City of Glass and Souvenir of Canada, Coupland released a book for the Terry Fox Foundation called Terry. It is a photographic look back on the life of Fox, the result of Coupland's exhaustive research through the Terry Fox archives, including thousands of emotional letters from Canadians written to Fox during his one-legged marathon across Canada on Highway 1. Terry amounts to another counter to cynicism, by its portrait of an individual capable of re-directing undeserved suffering for general uplift.[original research?]

The third work of fiction in this period is another re-envisioning of a previous book. jPod, billed as Microserfs for the Google generation, is his first Web 2.0 novel. Coupland uses the form of the novel to reconstruct the experience of a novel's content when it is read, not in a Gutenberg text, but in Web 2.0. The text of jPod recreates the experience of a novel read online on a notebook computer. Coupland deliberately makes the plot ephemeral in order to foreground the meaning of the online medium: a literary interpretation of the Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan. jPod was a popular success, giving rise to a CBC Television series for which Coupland wrote the scripts.

Coupland's most recent novel, The Gum Thief, is also a treatment of past and future coming together. Many pairings of young and old characters break generational gaps in order to converse. For instance, the main characters Roger and Bethany come from two very different time periods, yet together their generationally specific thoughts and ideas enrich each others lives.

Coupland continues to increase his diverse encounters with modern culture. Besides the television series of jPod, a documentary called Souvenir of Canada was made about his life, his Souvenir of Canada books, and his art installation, Canada House. His first film, Everything's Gone Green, featured Vancouver prominently as post-Postmodern Vancouver.

Coupland currently lives in West Vancouver, British Columbia, in a house designed by Ron Thom, and is working on multiple overlapping projects: another novel, an updated release of City of Glass for 2009, a book of nonfiction on Marshall McLuhan in the "Extraordinary Canadians" book series, and a new television series. Many of his novels have been optioned into movies, some of which are now in the pre-production stages.[22]

[edit] Sexuality

The representation of human sexuality throughout Coupland's fiction is noteworthy for being unabashed but private. The novels uniformly avoid explicit depictions of sexual acts, but give nonetheless frank portrayals of various characters as sexual beings. Coupland thus places his literary emphasis on the effects that sexuality has on development and inter-relationships of individuals. In 2005, Coupland discussed his own sexuality in The Advocate in a characteristically unabashed yet private manner.[23]

[edit] Spirituality

Belief in God and attempts toward the Christian religion are conspicuous recurrent elements of Coupland's fiction. The author remains publicly silent on his own relationship to the religious question, aside from affirmations of his personal non-orthodoxy.[24] The texts themselves warrant the conclusion that the artistic position is a refusal to side as a belligerent in the cultural battle over God, considering instead the existential and explanatory advantages of spirituality under the present state of culture. The title of Coupland's third work of fiction, Life After God, is definitive in this context. Common to several of his books, the title is bidirectional. Immediately it invokes the death of God, declared by German Existentialist Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882. The second sense, evident only after meditative reflection, is that life is a search after—i.e., "toward"— God.

This avant-garde literary treatment of spirituality does not reject but positively exists in the impedimenta of pop culture: it can be said that Coupland's novels precisely map the materials of mass consumer culture into a spiritual dimension. This is exemplified by the title of Coupland's 2003 novel Hey Nostradamus!, a phrase taken from the book itself. At first reading, the phrase illustrates the postmodern re-appropriation and de-privileging of a figure of historical importance—here, the 16th century French sage Nostradamus—into a saleable item of pop argot. Simultaneously, however, and again only after meditative study, the phrase appears as a strict and direct translation into modern vernacular of the biblical annunciation "Hail Mary!" Thus, Coupland's literary art considers, without asserting, the possibility, not the certainty, of the numinous.[24]

The artistic sensibility evident in Coupland's work can be identified by a term applied by belletrist Ferdinand Mount to the 19th century novelist George Gissing: Christian post-Christian.[12] A Christian post-Christian is one who denies the ontological and historical truth of Christianity while affirming it to be efficacious socially, institutionally, intellectually, psychologically and artistically. As expressed by the Christian scholar C.S. Lewis, the position is that "… Christianity itself is very sensible 'apart from its Christianity'". Significantly, given Coupland's artistic engagements with Japan, this sensibility has an illuminative analogue in the manner in which Zen Buddhism functions within present-day Japanese society. It can also be argued that it is an application in the Web 2.0 Age of negative theology: a literary explanans for understanding Coupland's unique fictional environment.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Fiction

[edit] Non-fiction

[edit] Drama and screenplays

Announced on 9 February 2006, based on the novel of the same name. It is currently in pre-production.
  • jPod (2008) (TV series)
Premiered January 8, 2008 on CBC. Canceled on March 7, 2008. Final airing April 4, 2008.

[edit] Criticism and interpretation

[edit] Essays

  • Dalton-Brown, Sally. "The Dialectics of Emptiness: Douglas Coupland's and Viktor Pelevin's Tales of Generation X and P." Forum for Modern Language Studies 42.3 (2006): 239-48.
  • Forshaw, Mark. "Douglas Coupland: In and Out of 'Ironic Hell'." Critical Survey 12.3 (2000): 39-58.
  • Katerberg, William H. "Western Myth and the End of History in the Novels of Douglas Coupland." Western American Literature 40.3 (2005): 272-99.
  • McGill, Robert. "The Sublime Simulacrum: Vancouver in Douglas Coupland's Geography of Apocalypse." Essays on Canadian Writing 70 (2000): 252-76.
  • Tate, Andrew. "'Now-here is My Secret': Ritual and Epiphany in Douglas Coupland's Fiction." Literature & Theology: An International Journal of Religion, Theory, and Culture 16.3 (2002): 326-38.

[edit] Books

  • Tate, Andrew. Douglas Coupland. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Solomon, Robert. Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life. Oxford UP, Oxford, 2002.
  2. ^ a b Wark, Penny."Trawling for Columbine". The Times, September 12th, 2003.
  3. ^ a b c d e Jackson, Alan. "I didn't get where I am today without..." The Times, June 17, 2006.
  4. ^ Colman, David. "Take a Sharp Turn at Fiorucci". The New York Times, September 30, 2007.
  5. ^ "The week in ReviewS:Talkin' about his generation". The Observer, April 26, 1998.
  6. ^ Barker, Pat. "Behind the Lines". The Times, October 9, 2007.
  7. ^ a b Dafoe, Chris. "Carving a profile from a forgotten generation". The Globe and Mail, November 9, 1991.
  8. ^ McLaren, Leah. "Birdman of BC". The Globe and Mail, September 28, 2006.
  9. ^ Muro, Mark. "'Baby Busters' resent life in Boomers' debris". The Boston Globe, November 10, 1991.
  10. ^ Gilbert, Matthew. "Life after 'X'". The Boston Globe, March 16, 1994.
  11. ^ Coupland, Douglas. City of Glass
  12. ^ a b Mount, Ferdinand (2008-03-05). "The downfall of a pessimist". The Spectator. http://www.spectator.co.uk/print/the-magazine/books/539756/the-downfall-of-a-pessimist.thtml. Retrieved on 2009-01-03. 
  13. ^ McClellan, Jim. "The Geek Factory". The Observer, November 12, 1995.
  14. ^ Grimwood, Jon Courtenay. "Nerds of the cyberstocracy". The Independent, November 13, 1995
  15. ^ Smith, Stephen. "Dictators and comas". The Globe and Mail, March 14, 1998.
  16. ^ "Dealing with the X factor". The Age, July 30, 2005.
  17. ^ Wheelwright, Julie. "Talking About Which Generation?" The Independent, February 12, 2000.
  18. ^ Gill, Alexandra. "Mirror, mirror on the page". The Globe and Mail, December 30, 2004.
  19. ^ "A slacker hero hits the stage". The Globe and Mail, July 31, 2004.
  20. ^ Anthony, Andrew. “Close to the Edge”. ‘’The Observer’’, August 24, 2003.
  21. ^ ”Dealing with the X factor”. ‘‘The Age’’, July 30, 2005.
  22. ^ "Extraordinary Canadians". http://extraordinarycanadians.ca/authors/coupland.html. Retrieved on 2009-01-04. 
  23. ^ Duralde, Alonso (2005-02-01). "All the lonely people: artist and Generation X novelist Douglas Coupland talks about disaster movies, Google, and his new book, Eleanor Rigby. Oh, and he comes out". The Advocate. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/All+the+lonely+people%3a+artist+and+Generation+X+novelist+Douglas...-a0128102013. Retrieved on 2009-01-03. 
  24. ^ a b Doig, Will (2007). "Q&A with Douglas Coupland". Nerve. http://www.nerve.com/screeningroom/books/interview_douglascoupland2/. Retrieved on 2009-01-03. 

[edit] External links

Sister project Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Douglas Coupland
Persondata
NAME Coupland, Douglas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION American novelist, short story writer, playwright, and graphic designer
DATE OF BIRTH December 30, 1961 (1961-12-30) (age 47)
PLACE OF BIRTH Baden-Söllingen, Germany
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Coupland"
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