what do you want?

I just remembered that me and my mum participated in an art project ages ago. To link in with Tracey Emin’s ‘Love is What You Want’ exhibition at the Hayward, artists from Visual into Social were asking passers by what they wanted. Find the responses (including mine and my mother’s) here: visualintosocial.wordpress.com/category/activities/what-do-you-want/

Charity (Shop Talk) Starts at Home

It was a bitterly cold Tuesday evening, clumps of snow still stubbornly lining the kerb. I stood outside a block of flats in Hackney, clutching an address scrawled on a scrap of paper with my gloved hand. I wasn’t sure who lived there, yet I pushed the intercom and waited. I was buzzed wordlessly through two gates and nervously found my way up four floors to number 25. The door was opened…

Once I’d been flooded with warmth and the relief that I’d found the right place, I was able to take in my surroundings. It felt oddly like home. Whoever lived in this flat had remarkably similar taste to me, from the books and CDs to the artwork. I was soon introduced to her: her name was Deborah. She handed me a glass of wine and I was told to help myself to the delicious spread of food laid out on the table.

I was here for ‘Universettee’, a series of mobile lectures which has been running for five years, organised by a lovely, welcoming lady named Janice. Every month (or so), a ‘lecture’ is given by somebody who has an interesting subject they want to talk about. Enthusiasm is the main qualifier here. Past topics have ranged from ‘The Theology of Tom Waits’ to ‘The Sacred Art of Obituary Writing’, from ‘Who the Heck is Zizek?’ to ‘‘It was not my intention to take the biscuit’ - rumination on tea-party etiquette with some delightful suggestions for what to do with crumbs.’ The ‘students’ meet in a different living room each time, taking turns to host. It’s free and open to all; this evening there were twelve of us in the audience, mostly women, of varying ages. I’d seen this month’s Universettee advertised in the Rowan Arts email and the topic had caught my eye: ‘If I Go Suddenly…Charity Shop Stories’. It sounded right up my street!

Our speaker for the evening was Priscilla Robinson, a bubbly Irish writer and performer with a passion for the cheap and cheerful, muddled, old-dear type of charity shop. Her talk was a light-hearted celebration of the bargain basket and the colourful assortment of volunteers and customers who inhabit this ramshackle world. She worries that this type of shop is dying out in favour of a more corporate, streamlined operation, like the type promoted by Mary Portas in her ‘Mary Queen of Charity Shops’ series on the BBC. I wholeheartedly share her lament. Ever since St Luke’s shop shut down in my home town of Heywood, going back to visit my parents is less fun. I used to enjoy the opportunity to go to this endearing little haven, where paperbacks cost 30p and you would never find a dress for more than about £3.50 (which seems to be cheap in so many of the big charity shops these days). I was genuinely sad when they closed. Over the course of 40 minutes, we were treated to a slide show of charmingly handwritten quotes and lots of photos of shops and their contents. I thought about my own pictures of charity shop finds and wanted to cry ‘Yay, I’m not the only one who does this!’

I love charity shops and I loved Priscilla’s enthusiasm. I love the way she has taken a personal passion and turned it into something so widely entertaining, much like a Danny Wallace style ‘stupid boy project’. In 2010, she opened her own unique charity shop during the Absolut Fringe Festival in Dublin called Help Me! Help Me! As part of this, she gave away over 600 of her things - many originally bought in charity shops - in exchange for people’s help. Her website http://helpmehelpme.com/ documents the experience and will definitely delight any hoarders and second-hand aficionados out there.

At the end of the talk, a raffle was drawn (shambolically, out of an empty pizza box), where a dazzling array of charity shop tat was up for grabs. This sort of thing makes me very happy; I still have an Ordinance Survey map of Scunthorpe which I ‘won’ in a raffle at a friend’s party. I was not disappointed this evening either, becoming the proud owner of a robot shaped notebook and a cupcake shaped magnetic memo board…

After this, more eating, more chat (topics: second hand clothes, cats in bread, toast in the post— all the best things!) and even a lift home. It really was my kind of evening. Unfortunately, Universettee is now on hiatus for a few months (as Janice is due to give birth soon) but when it restarts I’ll definitely be there, whatever the weird and wonderful subject is.

http://www.universettee.com/

Eating Cake at the Death Cafe

When a friend hesitantly mentioned that she was attending ‘Death: Southbank Centre’s Festival for the Living’, a whole weekend of talks and events centred around the subject of death, I smiled and replied that I’d love to go too. It’s always nice to find a kindred spirit.

So on an overcast Saturday, I found myself waiting in a queue for a poet to write me a personalised poem about death. There was an exhibition of coffins from Ghana. The Samaritans were on hand.  It was that kind of day. As I waited, my friend was approached by a beaming woman wearing a badge which invited us to ask her about the Death Cafe. The name alone was intriguing. After weighing up our options about whether to go to a talk about children and death (grim), or to go to the Death Cafe event (equally grim, but with free cake), we reeled off Eddie Izzard’s ‘Cake or Death?’ routine and declared: ‘CAKE PLEASE!’

We were ushered into a conference area and seated round a circular table with eight other ‘guests’. There was a black table cloth and black napkins. A small vase of carnations made a forlorn centrepiece. Our table was hosted by a psychotherapist named Sue, who explained that Death Cafe has been running as a pop-up event in a house in Hackney. It is influenced by the ideas of Swiss sociologist Bernard Crettaz who set up the ‘Café Mortalis’. The premise is simple: strangers come together to discuss death and eat delicious food. Their objective is ‘to increase awareness of death with a view to helping people make the most of their (finite) lives’.

So where do you begin with such a vague, vast subject? There was no formula to the discussion, which made for an awkward start as people struggled to break the ice. Indeed, there was no real cohesion or direction to the stories and thoughts throughout the hour, just strangers tentatively sharing their own experiences of something which inevitably touches us all in one way or another. Questions weren’t directed towards individuals and nobody was forced to share anything. People simply volunteered what they wanted, which led to some uncomfortable silences.  Fortunately, an articulate anthropology student who studied burial rituals was forthcoming in sharing interesting information from articles she’d read. This rescued the conversation and led to discussions of fascinating subjects, such as the practicality of keeping the bones of your cremated relatives and the modern dilemma of what should happen to your Facebook page when you die.

Bringing together strangers to talk about death is a brilliant way of learning about traditions that are different to your own. I found out about Jewish funerals and the mourning period in Caribbean cultures. I also discovered things from my own culture that I’d never even thought of. For instance, I had no idea that you don’t have to be buried in a cemetery: your own back garden is a perfectly legal place to lay your loved one to rest, right beside the petunias and long-gone pet hamsters.

Amongst the other attendees were a lady whose mother had donated her body to medical science and a funeral director who envisaged funeral parlours which look more like high-street shops, with shiny glass display cases in the window to show off the coffins. The event had attracted some decidedly odd characters, such as ‘Crudgie’, a man with a wild explosion of facial hair and a leather biker helmet, who ate his cake using the fork attachment on his Swiss army knife. He didn’t say much, except to crack a few jokes about things people were saying, which seemed out of place.  That isn’t to say that the discussion was entirely morbid and humourless though. We all raised a smile at a story about a woman who’d bought herself a wicker coffin and was using it as a laundry hamper before she died, in order to get her money’s worth.

Halfway through we were indeed served the promised cake with ginger, honey and lemon tea. I have to say, it wasn’t especially as twee as you might imagine; more like politely accepting the refreshments forced upon you by an insistent elderly relative at a wake. The beverage choice only seemed to enhance the peculiarity of the situation; evoking memories of trying to stave off colds during the winter, as if to remind us that we are all ultimately frail and mortal.

The last part of the session shifted focus and was spent discussing life, presumably so we wouldn’t leave the table with heavy hearts. It seemed surprisingly difficult though for anyone to think of things they’d like to do before they died. Our hostess vowed to write letters to two women she hadn’t spoken to for years due to some feud, but the rest of us were struggling to find things to say. Whether we were already living lives of no-regrets, or whether we just unable to stop thinking about death by that point, who knows?

Overall, the discussion was disjointed yet eye-opening. Even with my limited experience of death and loss I found it fascinating. Understandably, I don’t think it’s a subject most people want to dwell on all the time and I can imagine people thinking that it’s a strange way to spend an afternoon. However, in a forum such as this and made cheerier with tea and cake, there is no reason why we shouldn’t be more open and progressive about discussing  a universal subject which remains something of a taboo in our society. Death Cafe has plans to branch out from their Hackney home and encourages people to hold their own meetings. So if you ever get the opportunity to attend one of these dark tea parties, I urge you to give it a try. You’ll be almost guaranteed to meet a weird and wonderful selection of people and it’ll certainly give you food for thought.

http://www.deathcafe.com/

Found my MA dissertation…

‘My relationship with my body has gone all weird’:

The Significance of the Body in the Work of Douglas Coupland

Introduction

This dissertation will examine the significance given to the human body in the work of the novelist and artist Douglas Coupland. In the main body of this thesis I intend to elucidate three fundamental narratives of the body in Coupland’s work which show that the body functions as a significant site upon which Coupland is able to write a multiplicity of fluent identities and meanings, as his work contemplates what it is to be human and to possess a body in the historical and theoretical moment of the late twentieth-century. This essay considers some of the social, cultural and historical contexts with which Coupland’s work engages, and how the body is situated within this ‘experiential ground’.[1]

The first chapter argues that by examining ways of conceiving the body as a culturally produced sign, it is possible to see the corporeal body as emblematic of late twentieth-century America. Coupland’s work intervenes in specifically contemporary debates centred in an environment which is largely found to be synthetic, damaging, and apathetic to bodily suffering. In Coupland’s work, this results in the amorality of postmodern society being visited upon the body in various guises of decay. It will be shown that this aspect of the contemporary moment as Coupland conceives it results in any potential visions of the future tending towards dystopia.

Chapter two proceeds to complicate this view, however, arguing as it does that Coupland seemingly conversely imbues the bodies he constructs in his fiction with a capacity for healing, re-connection and transformation. To show this it considers how illness is turned into a ‘reconnection’ opportunity, followed by looking at a politics of the ‘body for others’ and finally considering the impact of the experience of the body in nature. I contend that without the motifs of decay expounded in chapter one, there would be no opportunities to surpass the contemporary condition and approach the twenty-first century with a more optimistic perspective, which Coupland cautiously does.

In the final chapter, my work looks at the ways in which Coupland responds to the dynamics between body, machine and future in an increasingly technological era. I contend that whilst he is socially aware enough to address some of the controversies surrounding modern technologies such as cloning, his overall attitude is one of optimism in the potentials of technology. Amongst other things, he admires its capacity to extend life, cure diseases and enable new and exciting forms of inter-personal contact.

***

amnesia, android, anorexia, blood, body ownership, bones, detox, diet, drugs, dying, fashion, flesh, Frankenstein, genetics, the gym, hair, immune system, memory, neocortex, Prozac, robot, sex, shampoo, starvation, steroids, technology, virus[2](Shampoo Planet, 1992)

When reading Coupland’s novels, one cannot help but observe that the ‘body’ has become an increasing concern, recurring time and again as both a source for central plotlines and constitutive of the novels’ background detail. Once identified, the prevelance of body-imagery in Coupland’s fiction demands investigation and interpretation and this paper intends to contribute to that project. This dissertation then may be seen as significant for several reasons.

Reading the body in literature has been viewed as an important endeavour because, as Burroughs and Ehrenreich argue, ‘one may also read fictional bodies for insights into the sociocultural structures that their authors resist or embrace’.[3] By examining the way Coupland constructs the individual bodies in his work, it is possible to gain an insight into the way he views the North American and Canadian social body, as he criticises and embraces the postmodern techno-cultures that shape it. Therefore, an examination of the significance of the body for Coupland complicates and deepens our understanding of his conception of the contemporary, historical moment.

This dissertation is also concerned with contributing further scholarship to the under-developed field of material which engages with the work of Coupland. Despite his engagement with social issues, academic scholarship on his work is at present somewhat limited. By emphasizing his importance as a writer and cultural commentator, I am making a case for critically reading texts by Coupland more often and more seriously and this essay contends his relegation to the margins of the literary world.  In this respect, my work builds upon, and extends the research interests of Andrew Tate, who is one of the few academics to have written extensively about Coupland, in his book Douglas Coupland (2007).[4]

There are, however, many gaps and omissions in Tate’s hypotheses. His work does comment upon bodies in Coupland’s fiction, but his comments are fragmented throughout the broadly-themed chapters of his book and he does not attempt to advance any sustained, cohesive theories about the significance of the body. This essay, therefore, departs from Tate’s work which does not neglect the body, but does emphasize in depth its significance either. Instead I intend to engage with similar subject matter but in a different way, expanding upon Tate’s initial identifications but re-centring the body so that it is brought to the fore as a vehicle of enquiry.

This dissertation will be strongly based on original primary source research, analysing relevant works by Douglas Coupland. The focus is on Coupland’s novels, but also draws upon some of his other creative forms, such as non-fiction, and sculpture where it is appropriate to my argument. The decision to make a broad examination of Coupland’s work across the trajectory of his literary production enables me to locate common themes and recurring motifs which run throughout it, as well as affording me the opportunity to note any contrasts and different outlooks the books take. Certain works are selected for a more isolated, focused discussion, or analysed to a greater extent depending on their relevance. Due to the concentration on one author and my research around his life and the information he discloses in interviews, there are instances where the essay takes an almost biographical approach. Not only does the reader start to gain a sense of his critical attitudes through the ideas the works share, but it is also possible to read the novels in light of what is known about the author. The impact of his niece’s birth defect and how it inspired his work is an example of this way that his exploration of social conditions works within a personal framework.

The interdisciplinary nature of the subject matter necessitates a somewhat sociological approach, as it relates literary works to the societies in which they were written. In places, this essay will suggest ways in which Coupland helps the reader to rethink the position of the human body in the cultural landscape at the turn of the twentieth-century. It is important to outline in this introduction the key theories of the body which inform the essay. My arguments are informed by the theorists who consider the body as a ‘cultural construction rather than a “natural” biological entity, which may be analyzed as a text for the embedded messages of culture’[5] and ‘as a vehicle of social inquiry’.[6] This way of conceiving of the body has been seen by many theorists to originate with Foucault in the 1960s and 1970s. Here Armstrong, whose work is also influenced partially by Foucauldian theory, summarises one of the key ideas:

For the later Foucault, the body is the site of a ‘bio-politics’ which operated both at the level of the individual and the population, constructing the body- and the subject- as a set of interlinked discursive practices, with their attendant institutional sites of intervention.[7]

Armstrong’s own work agrees, finding that the body is a cultural construct, defined by the values and meanings each individual, and each culture, ascribes to it so that ‘the body serves as a metaphor for social formations and cultural processes, while also being the object of those relations’.[8] In relation to this essay, as Burroughs and Ehrenreich point out, emphasizing the body in literature is certainly a feasible and useful analytical structure: ‘one may also read fictional bodies for insights into the socio-cultural structures that their authors resist or embrace’.[9] This essay, then, sets out to investigate what kind of bodies Coupland constructs and the conditions of the socio-cultural worlds they inhabit, in order to examine the relationships between the two.

Chapter One

The body decaying

Why are we all so hopeless with our bodies?[10] (Microserfs, 1995)

The first chapter of this essay will focus on images of the body in a state of failure and decay which form recurring motifs throughout Douglas Coupland’s writing. This ‘decay’ takes many different forms, from disease, wounding and senescence, to eating disorders, substance abuse, and infertility. These disruptive bodies not only structure or act as a catalyst for many of the main narratives, but they also make up a considerable presence in the background text of the novels. The fear and threat of illness is omnipresent, as is the sense that nuclear annihilation or senseless massacre is just around the corner.

Annesley argues that in literature, ‘images of the violated human body (…) reflect an environment that is (…) being brutalized and objectified’,[11] which is applicable to Coupland’s conception of the body. I shall argue that the forms of affliction and deterioration he deploys are located precisely within their historical and cultural location, in postmodern American society at the turn of the twenty-first century. Here, disease is used as a metaphor whereupon the result of living in the postmodern, amoral, chemically dependant era is expressed through the bodies of the characters.

Caught up with this is the wider issue which this essay seeks to address, that of Coupland’s views on the state of society and the speculations about the future which he expresses through his work. In this section of the essay I suggest that there is evidence to show that Coupland frequently explores the harsh realities brought by technological progress; an ominous, potentially futureless dystopia which is ‘an extrapolation of contemporary fears and concerns of current perceptions of rot and decay’.[12]

***

What kind of society, then, does Douglas Coupland convey in his narratives? Despite the intrusion of fantastical and supernatural events into Girlfriend in a Coma, Coupland’s settings are so saturated with era-specific mass cultural imagery that he is undoubtedly chronicling American and Canadian society at the turn of the twentieth-century. His work revels in a Pop art sensibility, resembling a contemporary Rosenquist collage of astronauts, eBay, and cyber-sex with Ronald McDonald. Many of Coupland’s characters have a desperate yearning to witness the future and its seemingly limitless synthetic pleasures: ‘I wanted to see progress- electric cars (…) the new Talking Heads album’.[13]

Yet throughout the course of his work runs a darker, more ambiguous relationship to the postmodern world and our future in it as corporeal beings. For alongside this celebration of ‘progress’ he also examines the nuclear, chemical, genetic and ecological hazards generated by modern advances that threaten and damage real human bodies. When examined, risks are found to be ‘located anywhere and everywhere’ which has brought about the emergence of what has been hailed by some critics as a ‘new regime of disease’.[14]

When Coupland writes about the diseased, contaminated, and manipulated body in his literature, he not only responds to real life suffering and the proliferation of certain diseases in the late twentieth century, but the subject of disease is also used as a symbol of social ills. This is a useful means of representation favoured by many writers. As Meyers observes in his book on the subject, Disease and the Novel, 1880-1960 (1962):

In all these novels illness isolates, exposes, intensifies and transforms character; structures the work as we follow the progress of the diseased heroes to recovery, remission, invalidism or death. These works portray what Freud calls the “pathology of cultural communities”, the sickness of society. For the effect of disease on a victim is both the realistic subject of the book and the symbol of moral, social, or political pathology; the illness of the hero, who is both an individual and a representative of his epoch, is analogous to the sickness of the State.[15]

Therefore, when Coupland wrote ‘It was a good health day for Jeremy [who is suffering from Multiple Sclerosis], and to look in from the outside you’d never know he was falling apart’ he may well have been writing about contemporary society itself.[16] Whilst the plastics, metals and chemicals of the consumerist, technocratic world may appear enticing and progressive, they both conceal and generate social disintegration. As Williams and Bendelow argue, ‘the powers, dangers and risks of the social body are symbolically mirrored and reproduced in small on the human body’.[17]

Certainly the diseases Coupland chooses to discuss may be considered ‘modern’, removing any doubt about his critical targeting. His interest lies in comas which are ‘as modern as polyester, jet travel, and microchips’ (GC, p. 62) and the experience of ‘yuppie flu’- defined by its mysterious, ungraspable nature, beyond the comprehension of medical ‘authority’:

“After every test in the book came back negative, I resigned myself to it.”

“It? Describe it.”

“Waking up, feeling good for maybe ten minutes, and then feeling like a dying houseplant for the rest of the day. No energy. No nothing. I blamed everything- dairy, yeast, mineral deficiencies, lack of sunlight, too much sunlight, alcohol, Epstein-Barr.”

“What happened?”

“It just stopped one day. No reason. It just stopped.” (ER, p. 134)

Disease in the writing is indiscriminate: ‘One person in a hundred will experience clinical depression. One woman in sixteen will experience breast cancer. One child in 30,000 will experience a serious limb deformity’.[18] It is a universal experience: ‘We’ve all had cancer thousands of times’ (AFAP, p. 6) and creates uncertain futures: ‘The thing is, Dr. Vogel doesn’t know what, if anything, is going to happen to me. No one does. Symptoms could take months or years to occur, if ever (…) an overall sense of never quite knowing for sure if the end is really the end’ (ER, p. 194).[19] Indeed, Armstrong argues that illness such as this is ‘central to the experience of postmodernity [consisting of a] mobile set of symptoms through which the individual’s relations with rapidly changing social and historical circumstances could be expressed (like hysteria a century before)’.[20] Whilst Coupland often creates dramatic images of nuclear apocalypse, a more realistic underlying sense of end times is found in this constant state of illness. It is a ‘slow disintegration rather than a violent eruption’, which is ‘the typical form of apocalypse for the postmodern age. The apocalypse here is a surrender to chaos’ which ‘spells immanent disaster and final doom (…) In a world without centres, without higher Authority, resistance against chaos has become impossible’.[21]

Another related theme found throughout Coupland’s fiction is the experience of growing older and increasingly disillusioned with the world, because the 1970s rhetoric concerning promises of a progressive future has not come to fruition. For example, in Girlfriend in a Coma there is a sense that ‘The seventies were over. With them left a sweetness, a gentleness. No longer could modern citizens pretend to be naive. We were now jaded; the world was spinning more quickly’ (GC, p. 45). This is expressed time and again in Coupland’s writing and as always may be read through the embodied experiences of the characters. In Generation X, Andy’s sister Deirdre who was once considered the ‘Best Looking and Most Popular’ girl in his family, but is now ageing badly and taking antidepressants, says ‘“The world seemed so shiny and new then, Andy, I know I sound cliché.”’ In this metaphoric structure, her youthful body is caught up with freshness and promise, but the veneer of innocence and immortality has faded: ‘“God- I’d suntan then and not be afraid of sarcomas”’.[22] The increased scientific knowledge gained over the past three decades cannot preserve her body; it only contributes to an atmosphere of paranoia and a failure of enchantment. The enjoyment of the physical experience of being-in-nature has also been lost here, relegating the body to the enclosed environments of the shopping mall and office cubicle.

Burroughs and Ehrenreich state that ‘what is ordinary or common about the spheres that we inhabit as human beings often needs to be revealed as extraordinary and anomalistic in order that we might learn from it’.[23] In Coupland’s writing, arguably mirroring real life, the workplace is an ordinary, dull sphere. Yet when it is viewed in terms of the effect it has on the body, the workplace (in its various incarnations) is perhaps the most dystopian environment in the novels and ultimately contributes to Coupland’s fatalistic mood. In particular, offices with cubicles like ‘veal fattening pens’ (GX, p. 20) encapsulate the banal, quotidian environment of the late twentieth-century, which restricts agency over the body and confines it within an often harmful space.

This is discussed in Generation X when Dag recounts the horrors of his old corporate work ‘performing abstract tasks that indirectly enslave the Third World’ (GX, p. 22) before he made the decision to leave his body and soul-destroying job and move to the desert. The environment of the office makes employees feel ill:

The windows in the office building where I worked didn’t open that morning (…) I was getting sicker and more headachy by the minute as the airborne stew of office toxins and viruses recirculated- around and around- in the fans (GX, pp. 22-3).

The paranoia surrounding the effects of extensive use of technology in the workplace even leads one of Dag’s colleagues to wear a lead apron ‘to protect her ovaries while she was doing her keyboarding work’ (GX, p. 24). When Dag calls the health inspector in, his boss is angry because ‘architectural changes, and alterations are ferociously expensive- fresh air ducts and the like- and health of the office workers be damned, cash signs were dinging up in Martin’s eyes, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth’ (GX, p. 24). The economic logic of the corporation renders the value of the body of the individual as insignificant when compared to the wealth of the company as a whole.  The comparison made to the Bhopal disaster is apt, as the Union Carbide Corporation was accused of putting profit before employee and public health (GX, p. 27).[24]

The body subjected to the controls of multinational corporations and the resultant damage suffered by the individual body is found elsewhere in Coupland’s work. The Microsoft portrayed in Microserfs, for instance, treats its employees as not only a hive mind, but a hive body too. The company is depicted as only caring about its employees’ minds, as extensions of the computers they use. It is unconcerned with the individual embodied needs of their staff. In comparison, Apple is suggested to be more conscious of its employees’ needs, providing bathrooms where the ‘dispensers of tampons (…) are free. Now that’s corporate intrusion into employees’ lives that I could live with’ (MS, p. 286). The ‘serfs’ are given seemingly impossible deadlines to meet and are forced to live a ‘sensationless existence’ where the ‘body was ignored, year in, year out, in the pursuit of code, in the pursuit of somebody else’s abstraction’ (MS, p. 90). In Shampoo Planet, the alternative to ‘Work and money; money and work’ (SP, p. 24) is to evade this social entrapment through the use of drugs, where ‘physical excess’ is ‘concerned with bodily pleasure in opposition to morality, discipline and social control’.[25]

I’m not quite able to discount the fact that in some way, what they’re doing with their lives is not entirely wrong. I’m talking about the hopeless druggies, lunching on methadone and orange juice, Diazepam and placebos, Dilaudids and Tunials (…).They don’t seem entirely unhappy (SP, p. 71).

Yet this is merely a different form of destruction which does not pose a viable or sustainable future. When it comes to the workplace in Coupland, with the exception of Microserf’s (limited) success, there is little compromise to be reached. The sense of bleakness even intensifies in Coupland’s more recent work. In a ludicrous turn of events in JPod, one plotline finds the mafia-boss Kam forcing Steve to become addicted to heroin before padlocking him to a machine in a factory in China full of ‘solvents robbing my brain, dendrite by dendrite, of the ability to make Scrabble words longer than four letters’.[26] In this era of globalization, Coupland seems to display increasing social awareness, in his satirical version of a completely immoral industry in which the destruction of the human body itself is the price which is paid for the American desire for ‘fake Nikes’ (JP, p. 273).

The vast multinational corporations may be traced back to being the perpetrators of the creation of a toxic society:

“Darling, all aspects of the Lodge Corporation are malignant…Children raised on Lodge baby formula quickly sicken and die. (…) Untold thousands of Lodge factory workers routinely become emphysemic by breathing the solvents used in the making of Lodge footwear which, I might add, invariable render their wearers unstylish, lame, and beset by fungus infections”.[27]

Coupland frequently challenges the apathy which society seems to have developed towards the chemical culture that has come to define the twentieth-century, the postmodern consumerist logic which says ‘Why not pump food through with chemicals to make it taste better, take Prozac to make yourself happier?’[28] Again the reader is made aware through the damage Coupland inscribes on his characters that ‘modern risks (…) are increasingly “manufactured” through human intervention of many different sorts- something which is systematically intensified as a consequence of the globalising process’.[29]

In All Families Are Psychotic, Janet’s contraction of AIDS and the resultant awareness of her body cause her to realise that she is:

Diseased. She felt a lifetime of chemicals washing through her body’s fibers and bones; vaccines, the Pill, pesticides, Malathion, sweeteners, antibiotics, swimming pool chlorine, sulfa drugs…God only knows what else…So this is the future- it’s not the future I expected (AFAP, pp. 225-6).

This is casual, quotidian ingestion of chemicals, which everyone partakes of without knowing, or thinking about the effects until it is too late. Chemicals that seem to heal may in fact end up causing harm: ‘I took so many antibiotics and sulphas for zits in my teens that I’m going to be felled by the first postmodern virus to walk down Camino Real. Doomed’ (MS, p. 189). Characters can only look back and guess at what aspect of contemporary life has damaged them, not even understanding what the damage has been: ‘“Accident? Who gives a shit…ozone (…) one hour too many in front of a Russian-built VDT (…) the damage…the whateverthefuck it is. It’s moles gone bad. Maybe they’re gone forever and, well, maybe they’re not”’ (MS, p. 168).

Coupland wrote in Polaroids from the Dead ‘there aren’t deformed babies born anymore. Ever notice? All aborted, I guess. Imagine a world without midgets. Do you ever worry about biotechnology?’[30] The character who speaks these words is ‘exhausted by the future, by options. Exhausted by risk’ (PD, p. 23) and voices a concern about the direction modern science is taking, calling a halt to questionable ‘progress’, in itself a pessimistic view of a supposedly more ‘perfect’ aesthetics of the body. Interestingly, five years later Coupland was inspired by a real life incident to produce the novel All Families Are Psychotic and the sculptural installation Spike[31] which complicate this negative attitude. Coupland’s niece was born without a left hand, part of a mysterious but definite ‘spike’ of birth defects in Vancouver in the late 1990s, symptomatic of the seemingly random ‘forces out there in the world that can scramble us at any moment’[32]; the effect the incident had upon him was ‘deep and ongoing’.[33] The sculptures in Spike depict giant toy-soldiers with deformed limbs which ‘give them an oddly disconcerting biological instability (…) evoking broader cultural themes that explore where popular culture overlaps with toxicity’.[34] They are interspersed among enlarged plastic bottles, depicting the ecological battlefield of the twentieth century. To Coupland, this represents the paradoxical situation, whereby:

Plastic bottles are all about the hand, and with no hand, a bottle is useless, really, and the punch line is that it’s precisely the bizarre chemicals inside these things that might damage a baby in the 6th or 7th week of fetal development. Bingo.[35]

In All Families Are Psychotic, the daughter, Sarah, is also missing a hand, though her deformity was caused by thalidomide. Coupland’s stance here on the damage caused by modern chemicals is in many ways demonstrative of his ambiguous worldview. Whilst he damns the experience as a traumatic one: ‘Teratogens? (…)It means “monster forming”. A horrible word, but then the world can be a horrible place’ (AFAP, p. 10), he also suggests a cautiously optimistic vision for the future. These ‘spikes’ caused by social and scientific ignorance provide a useful lesson, as Sarah and those like her are ‘the canaries in the coal mine’, and without them there could be no social progression: ‘as a species we’re smarter as a result’ (AFAP, p. 10). Indeed, the thalidomide which caused so much damage is seen in the novel to now be used, ironically, to prevent the loss of limbs in leprosy sufferers.

            Even so, Coupland’s latest novel, The Gum Thief returns to the dystopian imagery of the relationship between chemicals and the body:

Then I’ll probably go through the aisles and look at all the plastic crap we sell and wonder about the chemicals in it, and what leftovers were flushed into the water system during manufacturing. I sometimes get the feeling that we’re having full-time one-on-one unprotected sex with the twenty-first century, exchanging fluids with the era: antibiotics, swimming pool chlorine, long-chain molecules, gas fumes, new car smell- all of it one great big condom-free involuntary love-in.[36]

This insistent return suggests that the optimistic view of the chemical world and social progression is unsustainable in the face of biological reality; the trade-off is judged to be too great.

To draw this chapter to a conclusion, a brief consideration of Coupland’s short story Fire at the Ativan Factory (1998)[37] looks to tie all the themes I have discussed together. This millennial vision captures the outlook of his fiction perhaps more succinctly than any of his novels. Wyatt and his wife have been unable to conceive a child; somehow their bodies are damaged, infertile, but medical tests have been unable to identify the cause(s) of this. This forces Wyatt to become aware of his body and all the substances it has come in contact with throughout his life:

Vaccinations as a child; antibiotics, sulfa drugs and antifungals as a teenager; the car exhausts breathed the two years he worked as a mechanic; food additives, recreational cannabis, cocaine, amphetamines and recently (and just once, ecstasy).[38]

He has been surrounded by chemicals every day in his job constructing prosthetic bodies (‘Shit: the chemicals he uses for his models (…) toluene, xylene, resins’) and his own body has in turn been moulded and shaped by the society he inhabits. This environment has frustrated his vision of the idealized future he is now unable to bring forth, symbolized by the desire for a child and its connotations of new life. Wyatt has become addicted to Ativan, a drug he takes to fix his depression at his inability to have a child- which may well be aggravating a vicious circle. Ironically, a 1987 poster advertisement for Ativan proclaims: ‘IN A WORLD WHERE CERTAINTIES ARE FEW…No wonder Ativan is prescribed by so many caring clinicians’.[39] On the eve of the new millennium, he realises the true, dystopian extent of ‘the body in decay’ in the twentieth-century:

A hundred years of extremeness. A hundred years of molecules never before seen in the universe. A century of action and progress and activity and destiny. A century that had slowly infiltrated Wyatt’s system (…) a century now pulsing within him - a century with which he is unable to detach himself. (…) Wyatt fills the cup from the cafeteria tap and looks at its contents - clear and harmless. Or maybe not. Copper. Chlorine. Bacteria. Viruses.[40]

The latter half of this cautionary tale shall be picked up in the next chapter of my essay, as it encapsulates the themes to be discussed; the ways in which Coupland uses the body to offer up alternative, more positive narratives of the contemporary moment and beyond.

Chapter Two

The body re-connected

“My body has never felt so…alive- I wasn’t even aware I had one until you woke it up today. Life’s too good.” (MS, p. 92)

The resolution of Fire at the Ativan Factory acts as a useful introduction to the issues to be discussed in this chapter. The second half of the story marks a change in the attitude and life of the protagonist. Wyatt comes to believe that his body has been damaged by a lifetime of ingesting damaging substances and he lays the blame with the social trends of the twentieth century. He makes the decision that he wants ‘every damn bit of that hellish century out my system. I want it clean. Whatever the twenty-first century brings me, that’s fine, but I want the twentieth century out of my system now’. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Wyatt is outdoors, alone except for sounds of the natural world as his body detoxes from its Ativan addiction in ‘an act of purification’.[41]

The previous chapter argued that Coupland’s work is fixated with the trend of social amorality, disintegration and an entropic veering towards apocalypse and the ‘possibility that there is no future’[42] in postmodern American society. This is a theme which he inscribes upon the bodies in his work, predominately in the form of illness.

However the essay now turns towards another, seemingly contradictory discourse

which may be found in his fiction. Whilst the young protagonists of Shampoo Planet revel in synthetic pleasures (‘we can’t eat enough chemicals: “Caffeine- caffeine- caffeine,” I chant to the waitress’) in order to escape the primitive world of Tyler’s hippie father; ‘Now we just want to see the future. Any future’ (SP, p. 215), we have already seen that this ‘any future’ is ultimately not likely to be a sustainable or positive one. Tyler and his girlfriend are anomalies though in Coupland, where the dominant theme is closer to making re-connections through bodily purification: ‘I’ve asked the waitress to keep bringing me water so I can flush everything poisonous from my body, the residual alcohol and the residual pills that made me bigger and smaller’.[43] Like Wyatt’s attempt to cleanse his ‘system’ in the introductory passage, the body for Coupland  acts as a site of possible resistance to the de-humanised, damaging techno-culture of the late twentieth-century which alienates people from their own bodies, and offers up in the process the possibility of a more positive future.

Whilst there are multifarious narratives which Coupland constructs to prove that (re)connections can be made which reject the dystopian world view, I shall now discuss the threeI feel to be the most significant. Firstly, the notion of illness as a source of opportunity for healing: ‘The object of healing is not elimination of a thing (an illness, a problem, a symptom, a disorder) but transformation of a person, a self that is a bodily being’.[44] I would add to this that the ‘bodily being’ is also a representation of opportunity for change in society at large. A second, associated concept is that of ‘a space of shared hope in what Bauman, after Emmanuel Levinas, might call a moment of ‘being-for-the-Other, going towards the Other through the twisted and rocky gorge of affection’.[45] whereby a newfound openness of physical contact with other human bodies produces therapeutic effects and a restoration of sanguine expectations. And finally, Coupland shows that the body is a site of physical and spiritual re-connection to the organic environment, which represents an optimistic alternative to the urban spaces that symbolize a consumerist, simulated (re)producer of destructive substances and behaviours in American culture.

***

As illness has already been shown to be a key signifier of personal and cultural pessimism, I begin here by examining how Coupland habitually transforms the experience into a more optimistic outlook, and how illness becomes a ‘reconnection’ experience. Many theorists have written about how illness forces the afflicted to become attuned to their own body. [46] Sharp writes that ‘whilst in one sense the body is the most abiding and inescapable presence in our lives, it is also characterized by absence’.[47]Thomson shares this view of embodied absence, ‘except under circumstances when it fails’[48] such as illness, which acts as a catalyst in bringing an immediacy of the body to the fore. This passage by Woolf eloquently describes the sensation: 

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels.[49]

Disease opens up unexpected possibilities in life, or as Coupland phrases this, ‘the modern sex/death formula; mysterious lumps; the mental illness of friends; the actual death of loved ones- all of life’s painful gifts’.[50] They are gifts because, as the spectral figure of Jared says in Girlfriend in a Coma, ‘I believe that unless a person passes through some Great Experience, that person’s life will have been for naught’. For Jared, his leukemia provided that opportunity: ‘my bout with cancer was my Great Experience’ (GC, p. 3). Without the bodily afflictions discussed in the previous chapter, the characters would not have been afforded the opportunities to re-evaluate and change their lives and their positions in society.

The illness or death of a character often changes the attitude towards life and the future of those around them. A brush with death in the novels leaves characters feeling ‘infinite- immortal’ (ER, p. 24), ‘knowing death exists, yet not fearing it’ (PD, p. 102). The knowledge of death and end times makes people more determined to enjoy life and its possibilities: ‘I have yet to equal the sense of mastery over my destiny I had during that experience (…) God help whoever stood in my way. It was supreme. I was alive! I was not a corpse!’ (ER, p. 26) and a reconnection to the world:

I try to imagine the sensation of being dead- not breathing, turning off my mind- nonexisting. But this imagining never works. Life always wins. I emerge from these bouts triumphant and overflowing with energy, gulping the wind, reaching for birds, feeling so vital I can hardly breathe. (SP, p. 103)

Coupland was drawn to the true story of Terry Fox, a cancer victim who was inspired to run across Canada raising money after seeing others ‘stripped of hope, liveliness, personality and a future’ in order to fund cancer research, which is ‘what actually changes the world and what gives hope to the hopeless’ (T, p. 23). This attraction is unsurprising, considering that his fictional characters have used their bodies as ‘platform[s] on which people could hope’ (GC, p. 71), even if this may seem somewhat callous, as it initially does to Liz in Eleanor Rigby after her dying son makes her feel less lonely: ‘a taste of life on the other side of the mirror, with Jeremy, caring and being cared for. (…) What was I thinking? What sort of sicko person would find hope in the suffering of somebody else?’ (ER, p. 237). In Girlfriend in a Coma, After Karen enters her coma, the lives and bodies of her friends disintegrate as they age in a disenchanted world:

Megan- my daughter- she didn’t even believe in the future before the world ended. She thought the future was death and crime and lawlessness. And as soon as the future actually did end, she took it in her stride. She had a daughter, Jane, born blind and brain defective- probably because of all the crap in the air these days- and she simply assumed that’s the way life should be. Actually, nobody believed in the future: Richard, Wendy- it’s like they expected the end (GC, p. 215).

Ultimately, it is through Karen’s body that her friends are offered a way to change. Not only is her re-awakening from the coma used to help them:  ‘“Hamilton and Pam are really sick, but they’ll be okay soon enough. They need something to give them hope”’ (GC, p. 129), but at the end of the novel it is Karen’s decision to sacrifice her body and return to her comatose state that enables her friends and the rest of humanity to be reincarnated in their own bodies and have the opportunity to ‘start again from scratch’ (GC, p. 268).

‘Arthur Frank (1995) has drawn on experiential accounts of the prominence of the body during illness in analysing how “a pedagogy of suffering” can result in a new ethics of relating to others’.[51] Indeed, in All Families Are Psychotic, part of the final reconciliation of the dysfunctional family members occurs through a shared experience of illness: ‘their shared medical sagas bound them more closely together than might have any joyful experience’ (AFAP, p. 212). Janet especially uses internet support groups to meet new people:

But then, with her viral diagnosis came a deluge of people from a surprisingly broad and emotional slice of the culture. The accelerated perception of death quickly eroded many of the traditional barriers between her and others, and she found she had a talent for organizing group discussion dinners (AFAP, p. 123).

Here then, the diseased body can actually be salvaged through the experience of connection to others.

Contemporary society has for Coupland, as for many others, is typified by a distancing effect which seems to prevent people to make connections, either emotionally or physically. Baudrillard expressed this lack of this lack of immediacy of bodily contact in Simulacra and Simulation (1981): ‘People no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contactotherapy’.[52] Coupland highlights several barriers which preclude intimacy, such as the (misguided) fear of infection from diseases such as AIDS: ‘You win. Touch my cuts. Jesus, you’re a monster. Infect me’ (AFAP, p. 111) and technological advances which are incompatible with the biological instabilities of the body: ‘Sorry- we can’t touch people this close to takeoff. Colds and flus and all that stuff’ (AFAP, p. 41). The breakdowns and distancing within families perpetuates this fear of intimacy:

‘we were never a “hugging family.” I, in fact, have no memory of having once been hugged by a parental unit (frankly, I’m suspicious of the practice)’ (GX, p. 155), and again,

I come from one of those “zero-kidney” families (…) we all made this agreement once (…) that if anybody else in the family needed a kidney it was going to be, “Well, sorry…Been nice knowing you.”

I think that’s why it’s so hard for me to understand my body. Because our family was so zero-touch (MS, p. 190).

This is not an uncommon experience. Indeed it is symptomatic of society at large as Shilling explains:

Pasi Falk for example, argued that the boundaries of the late modern self had become detached from the bonds of collective physical rituals, and centred around individualizing consumption acts focused on the ‘bodily surface and its sensory openings’; a development clearly associated with the rising influence of consumerism.[53]

Yet Coupland’s fiction envisions a route out of this. As metanarratives are no longer credible in postmodernism; ‘Truth has been replaced by truths, uncapitalized and in the plural’,[54] the characters take the opportunity to forge new, unconventional ‘communities’ where the world may be known and redeemed by small, personal truths found through the embodied experience of inter-personal contact. By following Young’s argument that: ‘stunned by years of postmodernism and all the endlessly circulating codes and signs and signifiers there is a sense of the body being the last frontier, an actuality that no amount of theory can disperse’,[55] it can be seen that the body remains a site through which meanings can be constructed, a site of fundamental truths: ‘And yet we know in our hearts that we learn the greatest and most profound things by breathing, by seeing, by feeling, by falling in and out and in and out of love’ (LAG, p. 153). The novels ‘generally give unexpected spirit a voice and pit nuclear paranoia and corporate apocalypse against a stunned instinct for kindness’.[56] In Coupland’s work, even the smallest human gesture can be a transformative action in someone’s life: ‘He then shook her hand in a parody of heartiness, but secretly savored how cool her palms were, like a salve on a burn he didn’t even know how he had’ (MW, p. 7). In more than one novel, characters are restored through embraces and the quotation ‘the healing effect of skin on skin’ (GC, p. 148) is a crucial one to note, as evidenced below.

In both Girlfriend in a Coma and Microserfs, Coupland sees the reciprocal potential of healing; the body for ‘each other’. In the first instance:

Megan enjoys visiting her mother at the hospital, where she helps her flex her arms and legs and fingers. She has never been able to help others, and the sensation is as though she had opened her bedroom door and found an enormous new house on the other side full of beautiful objects and rooms to explore (GC, p. 137).

Similarly, in the latter, Dan says ‘Karla stores her tension in her rhomboid muscle, the up-and-down muscles of her spine, and I remove it. This is making me feel good. That I can do this’ (MS, p. 192). These images are in stark contrast to the self-centredness of the cannibalistic ‘Global Teens’ in Shampoo Planet: ‘How selfish is Stephanie? In bed I ask her to scratch my favorite place, just behind my ears, but she won’t scratch even once because then scratching would become just one more task she would have to execute on a routine basis’ (SP, p. 109).

In Generation X, Curtis is burnt out from the grim realities of a life where he has seen his best friend killed in a war and is reliant on trying to sell his body for money. Dehumanised, he has ‘become a slightly freaky robot’ (GX, p. 118). Seemingly beyond help, the only thing his childhood sweetheart is able to do is offer up the healing power of her soul through her physical embrace:

I was left staring at his poor, battle-scarred body, under the birthday candle lighting. I tried to think of something, anything, I could do for him (…) I put my chest on top of his, and kissed him on the forehead, grabbing onto his tattoos of trains and broken hearts for support. And I tried to empty the contents of my soul into his. I imagined my strength- my soul- was a white laser beam shooting from my heart into his (…) Curtis could take or leave this strength that he so obviously lacked- but I just wanted it to be there for him as a reserve (GX, pp. 118-9).

Of all the novels, Microserfs is perhaps the one where the body is discussed to the greatest extent and offers one of the most positive narratives of change, as Tate has succinctly written:

Microserfs, in spite of its ostensible focus on the remote, chilly field of new technologies, is the most sensuous and embodied of Coupland’s novels. (…) the restoration of physical sensitivity is a vital counterpoint to the broader narrative of unchecked cultural and economic change stimulated by artificial, disembodied intelligence.[57]

This is one element of a dual narrative at work in Microserfs, as I shall argue in the final chapter of this work. (In the other part, technology offers up its own connection experiences). Here though I wish to illustrate Tate’s argument with an example from the novel.

            There is an instance in the novel where Ethan asks Dan to change his dressings after he has had some cancerous moles removed from his back. Ethan has distanced himself somewhat from the others in the group and nobody else who he can entrust with this intimate task. He describes himself as ‘a PowerBook dropped onto a marble floor from a tenth-story balcony’ (MS, p. 169), thereby aligning himself with a technological society which is precarious and destructive. He represents the result of this ‘broader narrative of unchecked cultural and economic change’. As Dan believes, ‘he does not realize that there is a deeper aim and an altruistic realm of technology’s desire. He is lost. He does not connect privilege with responsibility; wealth with morality’ (MS, p. 170). Dan’s actions provide the counterpoint to this, initiating the ‘restoration of physical sensitivity’ and way to create an improved quality of life. The way Dan makes the connection is, of course, through the use of their bodies by embracing as a channel through which to restore his inner self:

I grabbed him as gingerly as I could from behind and he moaned, but it wasn’t a sex moan, just the moan of someone who has found something valuable that they had thought was lost forever (MS, p. 169).

This is certainly effective as ‘He’s spending far more time around the Habitrail these days since The Hug. We all hug Ethan a lot now because suddenly he’s human’ (MS, p. 178). Certainly it contributes to the overarching feeling of increased embodiment in the novel and its heartening outlook.

Finally then, in this era of ‘artificial, disembodied intelligence’, postmodern society has been seen to reduce the ontological primacy of the human body:

Marshall McLuhan heralded this world in the 1970s, when he announced the end of nature, and the appearance of “discarnate man” - a being whose sense of physical self and private identity is eroded by the relentless presence of the electronic media.[58]

In reference to this society, Tate poses the question: ‘Where does this heavily mediated reality leave the possibility for originality or authenticity, for what Ralph Waldo Emerson once described as the desire for an “original relation to the universe”?’[59]  The answer for Coupland seems to be in the body’s reconnection to nature, which is one of the most important instances of embodied reconnection in his work. It is important because nature and the wilderness are traditionally viewed as the antithesis of culture and especially of the ‘wholly manmade world’[60] which has already been shown to have a damaging effect on the body. Where these images of nature as a separate sphere are able to be imagined, they provide the possibility of a space free from the trappings of contemporary American ideologies. The body as a cultural construct is able to be re-created and embody a different meaning created by these alternative surroundings. In Generation X, for example, the central protagonists all move away from physically and spiritually damaging urban spaces and all their consumerist, work-orientated connotations to live out in the desert:

We live small lives on the periphery; we are marginalized and there’s a great deal in which we choose not to participate. We wanted silence and we have that silence now. We arrived here speckled in sores and zits, our colons so tied in knots that we never thought we’d have a bowel movement again. Our systems had stopped working, jammed with the odor of copy machines, Wite-Out, the smell of bond paper, and the endless stress of pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause. We had compulsions that made us confuse shopping with creativity, to take downers and assume that merely renting a video on a Saturday night was enough. But now that we live here in the desert, things are much, much better (GX, p. 14).

Their description of the desert is akin to that of Baudrillard’s in America(1986):

The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity’s language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity’s disappearance.[61]

The desert is seen in Generation X as an atavistic escape from contemporary society, approximating a source of the authentic versus the reproduced experience, a blank slate which permits the possibility of personal inscription. Against the ‘used up-ness’[62] which characterises the postmodern, the primal experience of intimate sensory contact with nature offers the opportunity for the new:

“So I came down here, to breathe dust and walk with the dogs- to look at a rock or a cactus and know that I am the first person to see that cactus and that rock. And to try and read the letter inside me” (GX, p. 66).

Again, though, Coupland is sometimes ambiguous. He realises that the state of society has makes it increasingly difficult to gain the elusive connection experience. In Shampoo Planet, Tyler and Anna-Louise feel a pressing need to spend some time in a particular forest, but they arrive there to find it has been felled. ‘We just missed it. The forest is gone and there are no words I can say (…) The loss is absolute’ (SP, p. 85). Later in the novel, Tyler again has an urge to make a physical connection with the natural world after he hears a TV announcer say that ‘the universe is unforgiving and cold, and I don’t want to believe this’. This bleak sense of the world resonates with his mood, as he sees life turning out differently to how he would desire it to (‘Why am I becoming this human being I am?’) and has to prove the TV is wrong and that his future has the potential to change for the better. He needs the physical evidence for this:

I see Jasmine’s compost box (…) I walk over and kneel down before the compost, sweeping away the top layer of grass clippings, the season’s last, and sigh as I stick my hands deep into the hot, living breathing pulp- up to my elbows, staining my jacket- all to feel the heat generated by the planet- by Earth (SP, pp. 126-7).

Whilst he is vindicated and able to make the important connection, the experience is only partially a success. The fact that Coupland uses the image of an enclosed compost box rather than the wilderness shows that Tyler’s experience was only a simulated one. The final moment of the novel attempts another enchantment experience where the ceiling of Anna-Louise’s flat collapses and the two of them are covered in water and animals that have fallen in from the room upstairs. Tyler points out that ‘All of the technology in the room is wrecked, but it seems beside the point’ and he ends optimistically, blue bird of hope on shoulder, saying ‘“Wake up- the world is alive”’ (SP, pp. 298-9). This is supposed to convey a sense that the period of his life where he was spiritually empty and preoccupied only with pursuing money and image, as represented by Anna-Louise’s stereo, is over and instead replaced with the innocence of the natural world. Again, though this occurs not out in the ‘real’ wild but within the urban comfort of their bedroom and the residual trappings of contemporary life. Bilton draws the conclusion that ‘Coupland himself seems aware that his longing for virgin space will never ultimately be satisfied’ and that ‘Even at his most stridently affirmative, a faint whiff of depression is never far away in Coupland’s work’.[63] I would argue, though, that the tone remains optimistic. Rather than conceding these parodies as complete failures, by including these postmodern transcendental experiences seems to say that even the mediated experience is better than none at all if it produces the same sense of wonder.

This chapter has shown that Coupland’s tone moves beyond one of despair to hope. As Smith wrote, ‘He’s still the chronicler of our times, and of the damage done to us by them, but here he’s the chronicler of our potentials rather than our losses’.[64] Whilst his outlook may at times seem beyond redemption, as several writers point out ‘Yet the idea of apocalypse has traditionally implied hope. The elements of apocalypse (…) form a triad of judgement, catastrophe and renewal’.[65]

Then, from behind me I felt another pair of hands as one of her friends joined in. Then another pair. Suddenly I was dog-piled by an instant family, in their adoring, healing, uncritical embrace, each member wanting to show their affection more than the other. They began to hug me- too hard- as though I were a doll, unaware of the strength they exerted. I was being winded- crushed- pinched and trampled.

The man with the beard came over to yank them away. But how could I explain to him, this well-intentioned gentleman, that this discomfort, no this pain, I was experiencing was no problem at all, that, in fact, this crush of love was unlike anything I had ever known (GX, p. 207).

In Coupland, as the above passage shows, this renewal is found in bodily reconnection experiences; to nature and to each other.

Chapter Three

Techno-culture and the body in the future

We emerge from our mother’s womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. (PD, p. 122)

The epigraph to this chapter suggests that in the techno-culture epoch of the late twentieth-century, humans are always already destined to become machines. At one point in Microserfs, Coupland calls the younger workers ‘the Microsoft generation’, as they were the first to grow up with computers as an everyday reality. In 2008, the image of a ‘diskette’ has already become obsolete. This final chapter considers Coupland’s conception of the ways that the body ‘has its being-in-the-world altered’[66] in the technological environment, examining as it does the relationship between the body, technology and the future. It begins by exploring the dynamic between the body and machine. I argue that this occurs on three levels in his work; that bodies are described with the language of machines and vice versa; that this progresses a step further when the interfaces of the body and machine are integrated; finally the experience of the body online. The work then proceeds to look at technologies of the body and an overall sense of what it means to be human in an age of technology. For Coupland, I argue, the experience is for the most part a positive experience which provides opportunities for a progressive, optimistic future.

***

This section of the essay examines the changing dynamic between the body and machine in American culture at the end of the twentieth-century and the ways in which Coupland integrates this into his fiction. In Shampoo Planet, Tyler’s ex-girlfriend Anna-Louise succumbs to the pressures placed on her (and all her female peers) to lose weight and work out after he spurns for in favor of the thinner, more attractive Stephanie. In the society she inhabits, that of the shopping mall, video game and endless product, the only way to increase her feelings of self worth and the value others place on her is to ‘upgrade’ herself. So she must become Version 2.0, ‘a spare, stripped-down, fuel-injected version of Anna-Louise, reduced and more efficient, like a new generation of microchips. Not a speck of fat, all swathed in Lycra’ (SP, p. 294).

            Coupland deploys this machine-centric imagery in several novels, particularly Microserfs, where the only vocabulary available to the characters is derived almost exclusively from their techno-centered environment. This is a trope he shares with several of his contemporaries:

As a number of writers have commented, computer technology at the turn of the century has become inextricably intertwined with the identities and destinies of human beings: a process which computers have been thoroughly “anthropomorphised”, whilst humans have been portrayed as “organic computers”.[67]

Everything human in the Microserfs’ world appears to have a technological equivalent: ‘Yes, Karla moved in (…) she installed herself in our house (“Think of me as a software application”)’ (MS, p. 56). This is particularly true of body-centric activities where the distinction of flesh and machine seems to blur. When Dan is ill, he can only describe the sensation using computer language: ‘I felt like my system was getting ready to shut down’ (MS, p. 220). A gym visit intended to ‘add more megs to [his] hard drive’ (MS, p. 261) takes its toll on his long-neglected body, and instead of the futuristic result he desires, the most fitting comparison is to that of outdated machinery being destroyed: ‘my body feels like an East German Trabant car running on linseed oil crashing into a stack of burning televisions’ (MS, p. 263).

Bilton argues that the way Coupland ‘replac[es] all biological metaphors with their computerised equivalents: ill bodies ‘crash’, emotions are ‘rewired’ by mood-enhancing drugs, bad memories deleted’[68] is an extreme example of the extended metaphor parodying any notion of the virgin real. So time and again Coupland presents these metaphors until not only is the human body replaced by the simulated image of the machine, but also there seems little hope of the characters experiencing life away from the machine. When another character, Ethan, is alienated from the natural world it is because the antidepressants he takes chemically mediates his experience to the point where he has become photosensitive. Instead of spending time outside, engaging in physical activity and  gaining the same sense of reconnection and happiness that his colleagues experience, he is confined to the indoor environment of the computer; this divorce has effectively rendered him a machine, whose ‘retinas’ll get etched like a microchip’ outside of the protective office environment (MS, p. 147).

Indeed, in the novels which are so evocatively set in a contemporary American culture which makes itself concerned with ‘Songs about robots- written by cash registers’ (PD, p. 50) and the inability to be ‘a truly modern person’ without ‘Tetracycline’ and ‘Steroids’ (SP, p. 190), it is hardly surprising that Coupland would also have his characters attributing human qualities to machines.

The linguistic relationship between machine and human in the fiction is interchangeable, so that technology suffers the same maladies as the human body. In Shampoo Planet, Tyler’s car is ‘having a CAT scan and Thorazine injections at a local garage. My poor baby is sick- coughed, then passed out at a Chevron station’ (SP, p. 195). In Miss Wyoming, a particular piece of software ‘sucks up so much memory that all the in-office computers develop Alzheimer’s while it’s in use’ (MW, p. 255), and in Microserfs Michael’s computers are ‘sleeping, dreaming machines’ (MS, p. 42).There is a particularly violent moment in jPod as Kaitlin expresses her wish for:

“(…) a key called FUCK OFF. You press it every time your computer does something annoying- in turn this would somehow force your computer to experience pain. And if you pushed SHIFT/FUCK OFF, you’d end up with FUCK OFF AND DIE, the computer equivalent of a razor being raked across your nipples” (JP, p. 386).

This extreme imagery is perhaps not so very innovative however. Here Coupland draws on long tradition of writers imagining the machine/body relationship in literature which is in fact ‘characteristic of Modernist emphases’.[69] The continuity is evident as Ward illustrates by using this quotation from 1928:

Our time just loves poems about the internal organs of the body, the mechanisms of sex, abortion, fecal processes, etc. It’s like looking inside the hood of an automobile, or watching the shafts and gear sprockets in a factory.[70]

This is one of the two dominant bodily paradigms of the twentieth century which Armstrong identifies in the introduction to American Bodies (1996). For Armstrong, the early twentieth century is defined by a ‘more dynamic conception of the body’ which is conceived in terms of energy and work, as well as being regulated in terms of Taylorism, manifest, for example, in the discipline of exercise movements and eating regimes.[71]

With the advent of film, television and mass advertising culture, the body became rendered as pure image and commodity, taking ‘on the burdens of modernity itself, of the circulation of image, desire, and ultimately of capital’.[72] With the onset of Postmodernism then, Armstrong identifies a shift in the ways that the body is situated within society:

In the postmodern world, the body has again been re-positioned: in terms of the discourses of control generated by cybernetics and genetics, which focus on biological, chemical and psychological or electronic programmability.[73]

With this shift, real and imagined bodies move beyond mere metaphorical alignment to technology; not only are bodies similar to machines, but they are often in a process of becoming machines, an integration of flesh and gadget. Sterling describes this as a ‘theme of body invasion: prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery, genetic alteration’.[74] Yet in Coupland, this trend is more often seen as a welcomed benefit, not an ‘invasion’. There is a photograph of Terry Fox’s prosthetic leg in Terry, next a photograph of a similar-looking piece of metal called ‘Canadarm 2’, which is seemingly part of a spaceship. The juxtaposition certainly celebrates the advances made in technology which enable people to overcome their bodily limitations (T, p. 34, 35).

            This integration of body and machine creates cyborgs, in the sense that ‘we are cyborgs whenever our bodily capacities are technologically altered or enhanced’.[75] Coupland’s imaginings are often grounded in his savvy observations of real, yet somehow flippant social trends:

Todd’s almost cybernetic relationship with his answering machine (…) seems a precursor of some not-too-distant future where human beings are appended by nozzles, diodes, buzzers, thwumpers, and dingles that inform us of the time and temperature in the Kerguelen Archipelago (MS, p. 321).

At other times the connection of body and machine provides a more sensitive and empowering social optimism. The most notable example of this occurs in Microserfs, where Dan’s computer geek friends have somehow hooked his paralyzed mother up to a Mac computer through which she is able to communicate: ‘at the centre of it all was Mom, part woman/part machine, emanating blue Macintosh light’(MS, p. 369). Tate sees this as restorative fusion as ‘a sign of hope rather than a warning of human obsolescence’.[76]

            In Microserfs again, Karla recounts how her childhood dream where she wanted to be a machine (“I honestly didn’t want to be flesh; I wanted to be ‘precision technology’­- like a Los Angeles person; I listened to Kraftwerk and ‘Cars’ by Gary Numan”) came ‘true’ during an illness:

“They injected all sorts of isotopes into me and I found myself part of a literal body/machine system- being bodily radioactive- and inserted like a fuel rod into a body-scanning machine. I remember saying to myself, ‘So this is the feeling of being a machine” (MS, pp. 72-3).

She says she ‘felt glad to be no longer human’ (MS, p. 74), in its way an experience of disembodiment and release from the prison of the flesh which, in another way, his characters experience when they go online.

            As Bilton writes:

If one could pluck one’s brain out from its poor mortal shell, plug it into an endless virtual reality system, leave behind the ordinary and mundane to experience an endlessly stimulating simulation: well, who could resist?[77]

The possibilities of the Internet’s mode of disembodiment to ‘transcend[…] existing bodily boundaries’[78] is especially pertinent in the new communities and relationships which are formed in the click of a mouse. This essay has already discussed the importance of connection experiences to Coupland, and cyberspace provides one of the most progressive forms. There may be drawbacks to talking to people anonymously[79] and the notion that ‘corporeal interaction is now beside the point’ (PD, p. 180) is a worrying one, but:

The advent of cyberspace carries with it a range of potential benefits, including new (digital) forms of emotional trust, intimacy and sharing. Certainly for many groups, particularly the chronically sick and the physically disabled, computer networks […] provide a potential antidote to the contemporary decline of our sense of ‘publicness’ and the nature of life in an increasingly ‘atomistic’ age. In particular, a number of ‘virtual’ support groups are beginning to emerge- a development succinctly captured by the term ‘cyber-recovery’.[80]

In All Families Are Psychotic, Janet uses websites such as these and they provide her with social connections: ‘Janet’s computer made her feel connected in a manner TV never did’ (AFAP, p. 37). The optimistic view is vindicated in Microserfs when Michael and Amy fall in love over the internet, knowing only each other’s screen names (‘Kraft Singles’ and ‘Bar Code’), not even the other’s gender. Michael worries that when she sees his body she will reject him, but of course she doesn’t as she fell in love with his disembodied being, not his looks (MS, p. 324). For Dan, ‘seeing them together is like seeing the future’ (MS, p. 334). What other potential then does Coupland find in new technologies of the body, and how does this shape the feelings about society and the future in his work?

Perhaps the most interesting concept here is that of technology’s ability to rise above the mortality of the frail human body. In Microserfs he writes’ If we were machines, we’d have the gift of being eternal’ (MS, p. 150). Mortal as we are though, Peter Jukes still identifies optimism in Coupland’s vision of technological progress, where people can ‘return from their forays into the real world, back to their computers, to transform themselves into digits that avoid decay and death’.[81] Coupland is also interested in the progress of science: ‘The dream of an immortal society is the dominant engine powering the bulk of most 20th-century research in countless areas including medicine, pharmaceuticals, surgery, and life extension techniques’.[82] In Miss Wyoming, Eugene writes a list of things which would astound somebody living a hundred years before him. One of these is ‘Thousands of diseases are quickly and easily cured with a few pills’ (MW, p. 94). Wade also realises this in All Families Are Psychotic: ‘If it were a hundred years ago instead of right now, both of us would be dead. You from that burst appendix in grade three- or an infected cut’ (AFAP, p. 70). Coupland uses something the reader takes for granted, their daily health and very being in the world, and makes it seem anomalistic and miraculous. If so much progress has been made in only a hundred years, where can the accelerations in  bio-technology take society to in the future?: ‘Stem cells now offer genuine hope, but as recently as seven years ago- zip. (ER, p. 220); ‘in a few years- as inexorably as CDs replaced vinyl records, it’s going to be almost pathetically simple to clone mammals- any mammals- from somatic cells (AFAP, p. 242).

            However, there is a fine line between redeemer and destroyer. Advances in the treatment of AIDS enable her to enjoy a good quality of life, and yet she also believes that science caused AIDS in the first place: ‘Some geeks from UNESCO making vaccines out of mashed monkey brains in Africa. We’ll never really know’ (AFAP, p, 119). And whilst technology can change the way human bodies experience the world, the juxtaposition of Tyler and his friends assembling simulated jigsaw puzzles of bikini blondes using ‘CyberGluv®’ (SP, p. 147) in the mall with the sad figure of Eddie who is suffering with AIDS is a stark reminder that ‘we would do well to remember that we are, for the foreseeable future, “here to stay” in these bodies, on this planet, and that our responsibilities are located precisely here, not in some parallel digital universe’.[83] In many respects, this murky ground concerning the ‘right’ moral and progressive directions for science to take, especially where the human body is concerned, is inescapable and irresolvable. Heise summarizes some of the problems:

But the possibilities of human genetic manipulation and cloning continue to provoke the most violent controversies, with advocates expressing hopes for much more effective cures for human diseases, and detractors pointing to the dystopian scenario of “designer humans” that would turn sociocultural prejudices into biological realities and degrade human life to yet another commodity that can be produced at will.[84]

Coupland takes a humorous approach to the issue of cloning in his short story ‘Clone, Clone on the Range’ (1997).

Back when the first news of successful human cloning was announced, humanity split into two irreconcilable camps: those who said, “How demonic!” and those, like myself—beloved and durable film star Corey Holiday—who said, “Hey! Where do I send my money?”[85]

The clones are stolen and trained from birth to sell real estate (‘It’s fun. I just traded Amy’s air rights in exchange for altering my TV networks’ 9 o’clock slot’). Although completely farcical, Coupland nevertheless manages to light-heartedly include these important moral issues:

Cloning is old news now. We all live with the new reality: blackmailers holding hairbrushes hostage (“Give us your money or we’ll make 10 of you”)…grandmothers reading bedtime stories to 118 baby grandmas…captains of industry rearranging their wills, deeding everything to themselves down the line forever and always. [86]

Coupland enjoys this style of playful fiction, envisioning surreal futures which are not all that very far removed from our present.

            Coupland then understands the ambiguities inherent in the postmodern, post-human condition. His work appreciates the reconfiguration of the body/machine relationship over the past few decades. Though he knows both the potentials and failures of this relationship, his work revels in technological imagery, its impact on the body, and the positive futures it so often promises. In All Families Are Psychotic, Sarah is still able to go into space despite her handicap: ‘Space knows no limitations’ (AFAP, p. 6). Finally, technology, the body, and the future all collide to create a wonderfully optimistic message for society:

In fourteen hours she and Gordon would couple, but the act itself wasn’t what thrilled Sarah. What thrilled her was the knowledge that if everything worked out, she’d conceive a child during the flight, the first child ever conceived up among the stars. A child conceived in space would be a god. The child’s very existence would be proof of human perfection- proof of human ability to rise above the cruel and unusual world- flawless, golden, curious and mighty.

She looked out the window at brave, blue Earth. She put out her hand and squinted her eyes, and briefly, before her mission duties claimed her, she held it in her palm (AFAP pp. 277-8).

As Tate says, ‘the future is dynamically open. A comforting vision of the past holds no temptation for this writer of the ambiguous, dangerous, beguiling present and possible future: “Nostalgia’s dead.”’[87]

***

Douglas Coupland’s fiction is not brimming with imagery, rhetoric and narratives about bodies by happenstance. As this essay has observed, the body serves as a metaphor for social processes, and enhancing the centrality of the body has facilitated my examination of the messages about American culture at the end of the twentieth-century that Coupland chooses to promote. Throughout this essay a clear link has emerged which connects the body to Coupland’s visions of the future, too.

            Examining images of the diseased body in Coupland’s work has shown that he recognizes and explores the prospect of decay inherent in the contemporary condition which is harmful and frustrates optimistic visions of the future. However, this is counteracted by both an ability to transform this suffering into positive experience, and by narratives of body-centric reconnection experiences, where being-in-nature and being-for-others suggests that the new millennium is an arena full of promise and potential miracles, despite the seemingly terminal state of the world. The relationship between body and machine also causes creative tensions and, I would argue, an irresolvable sense of both hope and despair. Whilst technology (as with the reconnection experiences in chapter two) offers opportunities for progress and the perfectibility of the human body, it is also a double edged sword as technological progress is not always unambiguously beneficial (the harmful experiences in chapter one proved).

Douglas Coupland, then, is fascinated with chronicling a real sense of both the potentials and the failures of American society. Where the future looks bright, there is often a nuclear disaster or modern day plague on the horizon. But his fiction is at its most successful and heartening when it recognizes the dystopian elements of society, but importantly offers up a site of resistance and the means by which a person and a society are able to change.

Bibliography

Work by Douglas Coupland:

Novels (in order of publication; editions listed are those cited)

Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (London: Abacus, 1992).

Shampoo Planet (London: Simon & Schuster, 1993).

Life After God (London: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

Microserfs (London: Flamingo, 1995).

Girlfriend in a Coma (London: Flamingo, 1998).

Miss Wyoming (London: Flamingo, 2000).

All Families Are Psychotic (London: Flamingo, 2001).

Hey Nostradamus! (London: Harper Perennial, 2004).

Eleanor Rigby (London: Forth Estate, 2004).

JPod (London: Bloomsbury, 2006).

The Gum Thief (New York: Bloomsbury, 2007).

Short Stories

Fire at the Ativan Factory (1998),

Electronic Version archived at The Barcelona Review

 as visited at http://www.barcelonareview.com/eng/dc_07.htm, accessed on 23   July 2008.

Non-Fiction

Polaroids from the Dead (London: Flamingo, 1996).

Terry (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2005).

Uncollected Non-Fiction by Coupland

‘Seven Wired Wonders on Senior Citizens’ Wired Magazine, (January, 1994).

Sculpture

‘Spike’ (New York: Totem Gallery, 6 September- 7 October 2001)

Images archived at http://coupland.com/art/art06.html, accessed on 11 June 2008.

Secondary Sources:

Annesley, James.

‘Commodification, Violence and the Body: A Reading of Some Recent American Fictions’ in, Tim Armstrong (ed), American Bodies- Cultural Histories of the Physique (New York: New York University Press, 1996).

Armstrong, Tim (ed).

American Bodies: Cultural Histories of the Physique (New York: New York University press, 1996).

Baudrillard, Jean.

—-Simulacra and Simulation (trans. Sheila Faria Glaser; Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1981).

—- America (trans. Chris Turner; Verso: New York, 1988).

Bertens, Hans and Theo D’haen.

‘Apocalypse Now: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Postmodern American Fiction’, in Rob Kroes (ed), Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Apocalyptic Imagination in America (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Free University Press, 1985).

Bilton, Alan.

An Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002).

Burroughs, Catherine B. and Jeffrey David Ehrenreich (eds).

            Reading the Social Body (Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1993).

Csordas, Thomas J.

Body/Meaning/Healing (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

Fiske, John.

Understanding Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1989).

Hamacher, Werner.

‘Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity- Language and Derrida’s Spectres of Marx’, in Michael Sprinker, Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (London: Verso, 1999).

Heise, Ursula K.

‘Science, Technology, and Postmodernism’ in Steven Connor (ed), Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Hutcheon, Linda.

The Canadian Postmodern: A Study of Contemporary English-Canadian Fiction (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Jukes, Peter.

‘Get a (Digital) Life’, in New Statesman and Society, Vol. 8, No. 378, (November 10, 1995).

Kroes, Rob.

‘Introduction: Orwell and America’ in, Rob Kroes (ed), Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Apocalyptic Imagination in America (Amsterdam: Free University Press, 1985).

Levine, Paul.

‘Surviving the Apocalypse’, in Rob Kroes (ed), Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Apocalyptic Imagination in America (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Free University Press, 1985).

McCaffery, Larry (ed).

Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1991).

Meyers, Jeffrey.

Disease and the Novel, 1880-1960 (London: Macmillan, 1985).

Sharp, Lesley A.

Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies: Death, Mourning, and Scientific Desire in the Realm of Human Organ Transfer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

Shilling, Chris.

The Body in Culture, Technology and Society (London: Sage, 2005).

Snider, Mike.

‘The X-Man Douglas Coupland: from “Generation X” to spiritual regeneration: Ironic voice softened by need for faith’, USA Today (7 March 1994).

Tate, Andrew.

            Douglas Coupland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

Thomson, Rosemarie Garland .

Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

Ward, Geoff.

The Writing of America: Literature and Cultural Identity from the Puritans to the Present (Oxford: Polity, 2002).

Williams, J. and Gillian Bendelow.

The Lived Body: Sociological Themes, Embodied Issues (London: Routledge, 1998).

Woolf, Virginia.

‘On Being Ill’, in Collected Essays Vol. 4 (The Hogarth Press, 1967).

Young, Elizabeth. and Graham Caveney (eds).

Shopping in Space: Essays on American “Blank Generation” Fiction (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1992).

Selected Reading:

Armstrong, David.

‘Public Health Spaces and the Fabrication of Identity’, Sociology, 27 (3): 393-410.

Bauman, Zygmunt.

Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).

Emerson, Ralph Waldo.

The Complete Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (London: Ward, Lock, 1898).

Falk, Pasi.

The Consuming Body (Sage: London, 1994).

Foucault, Michael.

—-The Birth of the Clinic, An Archaeology of Medical Perception (London: Tavistock, 1973).

—- The History of Sexuality (3 vols; trans. Robert Hurley; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981-88).

Freud, Sigmund.

Civilization and Its Discontents (trans. James Strachey; London: Hogarth Press, 1963).

Geyh, Paula, Fred G. Leebron and Andrew Levy (eds).

Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology (New York: Norton 1998).

Giddens, Antony.

 The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984).

Kovel, Joel.

The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (London: Zed Books, 2002).

Rasula, Jed.

The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940-1990 (Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996).

Turner, Bryan S.

Medical Power and Social Knowledge, 2^nd edn (London: Sage, 1995).

Internet Sources:

Online articles

Monte Clarke Gallery.

‘Author Biography’, as visited at

http://www.monteclarkgallery.com/artists/DouglasCoupland/Main.html, accessed on 24 July 2008.

Random House.

            ‘Author Interview’, as visited at

http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780679311836&view=auqa, accessed on 24 July 2008.

Smith, Ali.

‘Amazing grace’, The Guardian (Saturday 9 October 2004), as visited at

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/oct/09/fiction.alismith, accessed on 6 July 2008.

Totem Design.

‘Douglas Coupland: “Spike”’, as visited at http://www.totemdesign.com/exhibitions/2001/spike/index.html, accessed on 24 July 2008.

Websites

Ativan Advertisement,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:AtivanAd.jpg, accessed on 23 July 2008.

Appendix

Figure One.

Douglas Coupland

‘SPIKE’
(6 September - 7 October 2001)
Totem Gallery

Image archived at:

http://coupland.com/art/art06.html

Accessed on 11 June, 2008.