Article. *THE DIALECTICS OF EMPTINESS: DOUGLAS COUPLAND'S AND VIKTOR PELEVIN'S TALES OF GENERATION X AND P*

*THE DIALECTICS OF EMPTINESS: DOUGLAS COUPLAND'S AND VIKTOR PELEVIN'S
TALES OF GENERATION X AND P*
/Sally Dalton-Brown/. *Forum for Modern Language Studies*. Oxford: 2006.
Vol. 42, Iss. 3; pg. 239, 10 pgs

*Full Text* (5304 words)
/Copyright Oxford University Press(England) 2006/

THE DISAFFECTION OF THE MIDDLE CLASS is a common subject for
contemporary writers; few, however, have captured their sense of
failure, of loss of the profound, with the facility of Viktor Pelevin
and Douglas Coupland in their tales of generation X. Depicting those
born in the early sixties as inevitably becoming either brainwashed or
marginalised during the materialistic nineties, they have sought to
comprehend not only the causes and process of disaffection, but its
eschatological consequences.

Defining the effect of capitalism on consciousness as one of
simultaneous distraction and subjugation through culture, which under
capitalism becomes so commodified that it "amalgamates with
advertising",1 Pelevin and Coupland chart a process of
Deleuzian/Guattarian deterritorialisation,2 leading to a state that can
most simply be defined as living with(in) emptiness. As the consumer
adapts to the increasingly restricted social conditions of the
capitalist "open air prison",3 his consciousness is increasingly
distracted by media saturated in commercialism and determined both to
encourage the mass need to "say yes"4 and to conceal the illusory nature
of commodities themselves. The worship of that which is "without
territory", i.e. without content, namely, capital,5 creates a
deterritorialised or hollow culture of autoreferentiality.

The desire to transcend such a state of cultural passivity and emptiness
attracts generation X paradoxically to concepts of apocalypse, of the
annihilation of both body and consciousness in an ultimate process of
deterritorialisation. The antidote to spiritual emptiness, therefore, is
to be found through emptiness itself, rather than within opposing
plenitude. However, the erosion of consciousness under the forces of
capitalist ideology, reification and deterritorialisation engenders an
eschatological hesitation, expressed through ambiguously contextualised
images of emptiness. Rather than offering simple models of
transformation, of eschatology plus renaissance, Coupland and Pelevin
explore whether a dialectics of emptiness is feasible; whether the
character can awaken from the de-animated state of reification in which
void is hidden under commodity and attain a non-commodified existence,
or "antithetical void", an opposing, more free state of emptiness.

Vancouver writer Coupland's labelling of his peers (he himself was born
in 1961) as generation "X" in his eponymous novel of 1991 suggests that
the group lacks identity, that this is a generation "purposefully hiding
itself"6 from marketeers eager to target such a demographic and persuade
it to "collect more things".7 Whereas certain of Coupland's characters,
such as Tyler Johnson in Shampoo Planet (1992), endorse the
commodification even of history (he develops the concept of
HistoryWorld(TM), theme parks where visitors can dig through landfill
sites in search of more "old things to own"),8 usually his protagonists
are desperate to escape their materialist milieu with its inevitable
"reification of consciousness".9 The question of whether the shopping
mall that typifies 1990s Northern America does in fact possess an exit
(rather than merely margins inhabited by the disaffected) is posed in
every text; whether there is the hope of liberation from the wasteland
of Life After God (1994), or from life as computer game (Microserfs,
1995), life as coma (Girlfriend in a Coma, 1998), life as beauty pageant
(Miss Wyoming, 1999), or life as low-budget 1970s sex comedy (All
Families Are Psychotic, 2001).

The theme of escape runs in tandem with that of brainwashing, of
void(ed) consciousness, in the work of so-called "genius temporis",10
Muscovite author Viktor Pelevin. His "Pepsi generation" in Generation
"P" (1999), a novel perhaps inspired by Coupland,11 could also be
labelled the X generation, given that Pelevin has suggested several
additional interpretations of the P other than that of Pepsi.12
Pelevin's characters in their thirties living under glasnost' do not
realise that advertising has merely taken the place of propaganda; most
of the populace, one suspects, swallow the saccharine sentiments of
Stalinism, or soda, with equal passivity,13 choosing "Pepsi in just the
same way as their parents chose Brezhnev".14 The penetration of
advertising, television and the media throughout society has caused
historical amnesia, with the informational function of the media being
"to help us forget".15 Pelevin's characters do not even realise that
they are imprisoned now within capitalism, not Soviet ideology.

Describing an advertising campaign for the GAP clothing chain, Pelevin
notes that Russia's interstitial culture has now become completely
hollow, owing to its worship of self-image:

Russia was always notorious for the gap between culture and
civilisation. Now there is no more culture. No more civilisation. The
only thing that remains is the Gap. The way they see you.16

The hollowness of such a culture of amnesia is aided by cultural
relativism. The campaigns of copywriter protagonist Babylen Tatarskii
demonstrate an increasingly risible and inappropriate yoking of the
trivial and the profound; his idea for the Lefortovo confectionery
combine, for example, displaying images of the rise and fall of
civilisations.17 Such pastiche is intrinsic to his style, as it is to
that of Coupland. Yet whereas the latter gives us beauty pageants, high
school shootings, Microsoft and Princess Diana, Pelevin offers
werewolves, computer games, Buddhism, the space race, Mexican soap
operas and Schwarzenegger. Appositely, during the debate about whether
to award Pelevin the Russian Booker Prize (the Booker-Smirnoff) in 1997
for his novel Chapaev i Pustota (The Clay Machine-Gun/Buddha's Little
Finger),18 his work was referred to by jury president Igor' Shaitanov as
a form of computer virus designed to destroy cultural memory.19

Pelevin's characters, living in the gap or void created by cultural
amnesia, require new ways of seeing, not of "being seen", a new
cognitive structure with which to combat capitalist ideology. So do
Coupland's characters, who seek new metanarratives with which to combat
their world of cultural pastiche.

Yet how does one escape the self-absorption and solipsism encouraged
under capitalism, of a culture that "tends to turn upon itself and
designate its own cultural production as its content"?20 So, too, do
capitalism's subjects turn inwards, into their private world. It is
interesting to note that, according to Coupland, irony is the dominant
mode of the 1990s, a mode arguably derived from relativism. (Critics who
have denigrated Pelevin's novels as too commercial 21 miss such irony,
calling Generation "P", for example, "perfunctorily glossed with druggy
stream-of-consciousness ruminations" or "infantile".)22 Coupland's
portraits of popular culture are consciously witty, cutely ontological
definitions tripping off the pages of Generation X like marketing
slogans: "mental ground zero", for instance, or the "McJob".23
Coupland's "self-conscious cleverness",24 his slickly packaged
pseudo-philosophy, is used to counterpoint the search for new
metanarratives on which his characters in Generation X embark in their
search for escape and epiphany.

Metanarratives, myths, parables, all require temporal understanding, a
broader and more teleological perspective than can be found in the
relativism of the here and now. Pelevin's and Coupland's characters'
sense of living in the illusion of territory, created out of, and
existing over, a void, catalyses their sense of rootless emptiness, and
their questioning of the future: what happens after the end of history,
once consumerist culture has consumed itself in millenarianist frenzy?
Living within the void of consumerism brings increased vulnerability to
the eschatological fear of "final" consumption (by death), leading
paradoxically to a desire to take refuge in the amnesia ("mini death")
such a consumerist culture also encourages. When Coupland suggests that
"we are blessed and cursed with an amnesia that is so large it frightens
us while it protects us both while we sleep and while we dream,"25 he
encapsulates the dilemma.

In Generation X, one of his trio of drifting and disillusioned
narrators, Dag, offers an eschatological tale of shoppers facing
apocalypse. The nameless "you" at the centre of the story is standing in
a supermarket line behind an obese man with a cart piled high with junk
food when the holocaust sirens start, and a nuclear blast turns
everything to liquid flame. His (or her) companion kisses her hurriedly,
for the first time, and then "that's that. In the silent rush of hot
wind [. . .] it's all over: kind of scary, kind of sexy, and tainted by
regret. A lot like life, wouldn't you say?"26

Coupland's apocalyptic moments, such as the above, are usually
counterpointed by hints at rebirth, hints, however, often undermined by
narrative irony engendered by his ambiguous presentation of the theme of
sacrifice. Rebirth comes at a cost (just like materialistic everyday
life), and requires annihilation, an embracing of the void of death. In
Girlfriend in a Coma,27 for example, the world ends, and the characters
are given the opportunity to live a more meaningful life. Yet in order
to bring about this second chance, the protagonist's girlfriend, Karen,
must be the sacrifice; she has to go back into the coma from which,
ironically, apocalypse has wakened her. Does she "dream" the new world,
and is she thus required to return to her state of living death, which,
paradoxically, is the powerful centre of the lives of her friends and
family, the still point of their moving world?

Is such a sacrifice so hard? Coma was Karen's way of fleeing
apocalypse,28 of withdrawing, and may in fact represent an extreme
solipsism. Yet retreating from those who love her, to save them, into
one's inner world seems to indicate both self-sacrifice and selfishness.
Why? In Life After God (1994), Coupland suggests that the instinct for
self-preservation inevitably leads to self-absorption:

When [. . .] you get older [. . .] you are forced to re-evaluate your
stance on the apocalypse. You realize that the world will indeed
continue, with or without you, and the pictures you see in your head. So
you try to understand the pictures instead.29

In Pelevin's depictions of a postmodern so-called reality increasingly
mediated through marketing and TV, much as it was previously through the
Soviet ideology, he constantly focuses on the ability of the Russian,
when he believes in something, to call it into being, make it "manifest
itself".30 Such powerful solipsism paradoxically engenders
vulnerability: if you are used to escaping "the evil of the state by
withdrawing into the private spaces of your own head",31 then your sense
of reality can easily be manipulated. In Generation "P", a novel of
"virtual invention",32 Pelevin shows Babylen Tatarskii, a copywriter
driven by lust for money and status, as a powerful man able to brainwash
the public into buying commodities. His power increases exponentially
when he becomes the consort of Ishtar, the hidden ruler of Russia, of
Moscow, the new Babylon (or Babel).33

As consort of the goddess, of that which "all people desire", the "idea"
of money, Tatarskii is theoretically "sacrificed", given no choice in
the matter; yet as Marduk, the consort, he dreams the world: "all of our
world, including all of us, and even the goddess, are apparently his
dream."34 Unsurprisingly, we discover that the corporation
Tatarskii/Marduk will now head has been creating digitised politicians
for some time; the entire government of Russia is a virtual entity.

The power of solipsism indeed; yet the irony is that Tatarskii's power
perpetuates a new form of Soviet hegemony. Thus Pelevin suggests
simulacrum engendered by false ideology, void created from void in a
seemingly eternal process of recapitulation of past decadent
civilisations. Russia is inherently attuned to such recapitulation,
cultural appropriation or imitation; the novel contains brief references
to the concept of the Russian idea, a nineteenth-century philosophical
debate on the nature of Russianness, with particular emphasis on the
problem of her innate links to either West or East. Petr Chaadaev,
Vladimir Solov'ev and Nikolai Berdiaev, attempting to define the essence
of Russia, referred to its emptiness, its lack of national identity,
concluding that its culture is one of hollow imitation of the West. This
debate resurfaced prominently in 1997 when a special commission to
define the national idea came up empty-handed.35

Pelevin does hint at an antithesis to the hollow culture of imitation
and virtuality, both in his references to Buddhism in his overall work
(see, for instance, his Chapaev i Pustota), and in terms of the theme of
desire that the novel Generation "P" develops. The latter theme can be
interpreted in the context of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of
disembodied desire.36 In this he goes further than Coupland, whose
eschatology remains within the bounds of conventional religious images,
with a certain narrative subversion ensuring that the reader understands
that such visions of post-apocalyptic transformation demonstrate the
limited consciousness of those who build their religions "like Lego".37
Coupland's "sappy" endings indicate that his characters' epiphanies may
be "debased and compromised".38

Coupland's eschatological endings can be of the jaunty type one finds in
the cheerful "the world is alive" statement at the end of Shampoo
Planet, a statement, however, embedded in dream imagery, or the belief
at the end of Microserfs that the "children" (Coupland's protagonists
often suffer from delayed adolescence) have emerged from "life's cartoon
holes [. . .] fully awake".39 The reference to a childlike medium in
order to discuss epiphany makes the statement ring naively; the
microserfs, despite gaining their freedom from Microsoft, still use the
nomenclature of their infantile years, conceiving of the future in terms
of a database, a game, a cartoon.

Coupland's Eleanor Rigby (2004) uses and undermines more conventional
religious imagery in the tale of a woman apparently redeemed through the
discovery of her lost son (an MS sufferer with a remarkably Christ-like
disposition and visionary power). Waking from a world that is "one big
corpse factory",40 Liz Dunn is raised from her dead life of extreme
loneliness by the "Son" and, after his death, achieves a conventionally
happy ending. Yet the reader, knowing that Liz has a habit of sorting
out "those sharp and nasty bits"41 that cause grief in order to make her
life into a more palatable story, may fail to see true redemption. At
the end we see Liz dying of cancer while married to the man who raped
her as a teenager, and pregnant, highly improbably, in her late forties.
Renaissance implies not transcendence through Christlike suffering, but
a selfdeluding sacrifice, death (void) denied through the wish to be
pregnant ("filled").

Coupland is masterful at depicting the desire for transformation, with
humans "perpetually casting themselves into new fires, yearning to burn,
yearning to rise"42 in moments "bordering on the mystical".43 Yet the
desire for epiphany, as expressed by Cathy in Life After God, is caused
by "poverty, fear of death, sexual frustration and the inability to
connect with others"; the passion for transformation is paralleled by a
paradoxical inability to feel,44 suggesting that it may be too late for
consciousness to transcend the de-animation of reification. Their hunger
for life has been replaced by a simulacrum of hunger - that of greed for
empty commodities. To attain Passion - for Liz to die, like her
Christlike son, for example - requires a corresponding passion, which
the self-absorbed, solipsistic lifestyle of the characters appears to
negate. In his ending to Miss Wyoming, Coupland describes humanity as
"always starving, always believing that whatever came to them next would
mercifully erase the creatures they'd already become as they crawled
along the plastic radiant way."45

Was the price of consumerism (the "price we paid for our golden life")
"an inability to fully believe in love"? For instead "we gained an irony
that scorched everything it touched. And I wonder if this irony is the
price we paid for the loss of God."46 Coupland's depicted relationships
appear sterile or deceptive, genuine passion leached from the text both
by the pressure of commodification and by the characters' own inner
void. Coupland's constrained decadence suggests a superficial and
disillusioned pleasure-consumption. Without real desire, there is in
fact no dialectic of emptiness, but merely a failed attempt at opposing
emptiness, often slightly risible. In Generation X, Claire's story of
the heiress Linda, who seeks transcendence through seven years of
fasting and meditation, for example, envisages Linda becoming a "piece
of light"; but even this image is slightly undercut. Linda will be
sitting "like a small yellow bird that can sing all songs - on the right
hand of her god";47 the soul becomes a pet canary.

Andy's discussion of the epiphanic experience he would most like to have
is of a pelican offering him a fish. This is visualised in powerful
terms; the offering is to be given to him as he lies like a human
sacrifice, bleeding, on sharp rocks, hearing wings (which in another
story are the wings of an angel of death). Yet he, as sacrifice, accepts
the sacrifice of the fish, indicating perhaps an endless chain of
consumption; this attempt at a scene of the Passion indicates a passive
desire for death and for pity, for the pelican to feed his hunger, for
the angel to carry him away, and for himself to be the object
worshipped, or sacrificed to. For Coupland's "generation Xers",
withdrawing into their own heads in flight from consumerism and
apocalypse may mean entrapment, the kind of solipsism that results in
self as god of one's own world: how then to displace that idol for a
"real" God?

The harshness of the image of Andy on his rock is echoed in a final
scene in which Andy describes the burning of stubble, creating a
mushroom cloud that makes him think immediately of Armageddon, yet with
a white egret circling against the black smoke. This clichÈd image of
the white bird (presumably) of hope is replaced by a more complex image:
the bird scrapes Andy's head as it flies past, leaving a scalp wound,
and causing a watching group of teenagers with emotional difficulties to
rush forward to offer him a group hug. The juxtaposition of blood with a
circle of love offers an ending that seems potentially transcendental.
Yet this form of worship, or paradoxically of sacrifice (as they hug him
hard enough to crush him), may be no more than an expression of mindless
possessiveness, for the teenagers hug Andy as if he were a "doll".48 It
seems that Coupland's characters remain reified, objects such as dolls,
clinging to their inner illusions presumably in opposition to such
reification; for Coupland there is no dialectic of emptiness, but a
dialectic between consumerism and the fear of being consumed.

Pelevin's eschatology, like many postmodern writers who admit to nothing
outside of simulacrum, is equally ambiguous; he depicts life as
simultaneously a reverse train journey in Zheltaia strela (The Yellow
Arrow, 1993) and a "sequence of thoughts",49 as eternal sleep in stories
such as "Spi" ("Sleep") and "Sinii fonar' " ("The Blue Lantern"), or as
hermetically sealed in "Ukhrab" ("Ukhriab", 1991) and "Prints Gosplan"
("Prince Gosplan", 1991), in which life is a computer game, each ending
merely leading to another level in the game. In "Ukhriab", Maralov
believes that this strange (and untranslatable) word "ukhriab" has the
potential to be a word of liberation, but realises that it is only a
symbol that has both swallowed the universe and yet is its substance. No
wonder that Maralov jumps into the hole of the "ukhriab" and dies, an
act without meaning in a meaningless world of empty symbols.

Despite his time studying Buddhism in a Korean monastery,50 and his
acknowledgment of Hermann Hesse and Robert M. Pirsig (author of the cult
novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974) as favourite
authors (alongside Kafka and Bulgakov),51 Pelevin prefers to remind the
reader of the subjective nature of his philosophical standpoint: "I am
interested in what I am, rather than in Zen Buddhism - that is, the
source of awareness."52 Yet there may be in fact a "Buddhist way of
watching TV"53 in Generation "P" that translates brainwashing into
satori (epiphany), that allows the attainment of that "sublime emptiness
of the absolute"54 which possibly occurs in his novel Chapaev i Pustota.
Critics Pavlov and Kozhevnikova have noted, however, that the ending to
the latter is disappointing from a Buddhist perspective;55 the empty
bottle with a yellow rose at the conclusion of Chapaev is not
necessarily a symbol of "enlightened acceptance" (less a symbol of the
absolute than of Absoluut, of drunken vacuity?).56

While Coupland focuses on the Passion with its hints at self-deluding
selfworship, in Generation "P", Pelevin focuses on empty desire. All
human life, Tatarskii discovers, is subject to three dominant cravings
(oral, anal, and wow, apparently), all of which centre on the desire for
money. The Sumerian painting depicting the god Enki holding humanity
strung on cables that enter at the mouth and exit at the anus refers to
the power of the advertiser/Tartarskii/ Marduk, adept at creating desire
(wow, oral stimulus, that is hunger), leading immediately to voiding
through the anus, that is to a sense of lack. In this, Pelevin's view of
desire can be appositely contextualised by Deleuze and Guattari's view
of capitalism as deliberately creating what can be termed desiring-lack,
of manufacturing need to assist the market economy through an empty
commodification that never satisfies but leads to increased craving.57
Desire is "not internal to a subject, any more than it tends towards an
object: it is strictly immanent to a plane which it does not pre-exist,
to a plane which must be constructed",58 in other words is a virtual
concept, not "owned" by the individual, but used to disempower him.

Yet, as the consort of Ishtar, Tatarskii enters a sexless union with the
concept of money; as Enki he holds the strings of desire. Perhaps he
transcends desire? Deleuze and Guattari describe a nomadic subject
becoming "races, cultures and their gods",59 just as Tatarskii, a
virtual "nomadic, deterritorialised" subject, translates into Marduk, a
virtual presence with immense power. Deleuze and Guattari imagine the
state of being a "body without organs", occurring beyond solipsism,
brainwashing, ideology, occurring "when you take everything away. What
you take away is precisely the phantasy, and signifiances [sic] and
subjectifications as a whole."60

However, the body without organs, it must be noted, is ambiguous; it is
"a functioning multiplicity one moment, a pure, unextended,
zero-intensity substance the next, in a constant oscillation such that
the states coexist as separate entities," as one critic has put it.61
Arguably, the body without organs is no more than the state of being an
organ without a body, as argued by Slavoj Zizek: a castrated state that
sustains our ability to transcend, to enter the realm of the immaterial,
yet simultaneously hinders it.62

Does our hero transcend? The final, liberated image of Tatarskii walking
in open countryside, towards a blue sky, is after all no more than an
advert for Tuborg.

Like Coupland, Pelevin cannot form a complete dialectics of emptiness,
but presents the reader with protagonists nervously examining their own
processes both of consumption and of being consumed with a consciousness
aware of its own susceptibility to illusion. As is stated in Coupland's
Life After God, "Lost means you had faith or something to begin with and
the middle class never really has any of that. [. . .] [W]hat exactly is
it we end up being then - instead of being lost?"63 The answer would
seem to be, in limbo, neither fully lost nor found, between the small
death of a commodified life and the greater death of apocalypse.

*[Footnote]*
NOTES
1 M. Horkheimer & T. W. Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as
Mass Deception", in Dialectic of Enlightenment (London, 1979), p. 161:
"Culture is a paradoxical commodity. So completely is it subject to the
law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly
consumed in use that it can no longer be used. Therefore it amalgamates
with advertising."
2 Deleuze & Guattari suggested the notion of deterritorialisation in
Anti-Oedipus (1972), refining it further in A Thousand Plateaus (1980)
to suggest the loss of content in the search for form, signified by the
worship of that which is "contentless" and lacking in territory, such as
money.
3 T. Adorno, Prisms, trans. S. Weber (Cambridge MA, 1981), p. 34.
4 "The amusement supplied by the culture industry is simply a
distraction; it is used "to defend society [. . .] [because] to be
pleased means to say Yes" ("The Culture Industry", p. 144).
5 F. Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern
1983-1985(London & New York, 1998), p. 153.
6 D. Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (London,
1996), p. 63.
7 Ibid, p. 14.
8 D. Coupland, Shampoo Planet (London, 1993), p. 199.
9 T. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London, 1973), p. 95.
10 G. Yuzefovich, "Genius temporis: Viktor Pelevin", Russian Life 47
(Nov.-Dec. 2004), 11-18 (p. 16). Note that Pelevin's popularity is such
that Russia's Green Party tried to enlist him as its candidate for prime
minister in 2000.
11 J. Cowley, "Gogol a` Go-Go" (review), The New York Times Magazine 23
January 2000. Online edition at: [left angle
bracket]http//www.nytimes.com.library/magazine/home/20000123mag-cowley7.html[right
angle bracket].
12 The P, Pelevin has stated, may not only stand for Pepsi but also
perhaps for the obscene term "pizdets", or "whatever you like". See his
interview in The Observer 30 April 2000, "I never was a hero"; online
edition at: [left angle
bracket]http//books.guardian.co.uk/deperatments/generalfiction/story/0,600[right
angle bracket]. Critic M. Sverdlov, "Tekhnologiia pisatel'skoi vlasti",
Voprosy literatury 4 (2003), suggests that it could stand for "Pi" (p.
18); online edition at: [left angle
bracket]http://magazines.russ.ru/voplit/2003/4/sver.html[right angle
bracket]. It could also refer to "pustota", or emptiness.
13 One might use Mironenko's term "alcoholic consciousness". See Z.
Abdullaeva, "Popular Culture", in: Russian Culture at the Crossroads:
Paradoxes of Postcommunist Consciousness, ed. D. N. Shalin (Boulder CO,
1996), pp. 209-38.
14 V. Pelevin, Generation "P" (Moscow, 1999). The novel has been
translated into English both as Babylon (London, 2001) and as Homo
Zapiens (New York, 2002).
15 The Cultural Turn, pp. 19-20.
16 Generation "P", p. 85. Note that this appears in English, not
Russian, in the original.
17 The "demise of the intelligentsia" is perhaps concealed by even such
trivial usage of cultural knowledge, indicative of a feeble attempt at
adaptation. See L. Parts, "Degradation of the Word or The Adventures of
an Intelligent in Viktor Pelevin's Generation II", Canadian Slavonic
Papers (Sept.-Dec. 2004); online edition at: [left angle
bracket]http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3763/is_200409/ai_n11849876[right
angle bracket].
18 The Booker was eventually given to Anatolii Azol'skii instead.
However, Pelevin had already been awarded the "Little Booker" in 1993
for Sinii fonar' (The Blue Lantern), a short-story collection.
19 I. Shaitanov, "Booker-97: Zapiski 'Nachal'nika' premii", Voprosy
literatury 3 (1998); online edition at: [left angle
bracket]http://magazines.russ.ru/voplit/1998/3/[right angle bracket].
See also his "Proekt Pelevin", Voprosy literatury 4 (2003); online
edition at: [left angle
bracket]http://magazines.russ.ru/voplit/2003/4/[right angle bracket].
20 The Cultural Turn, pp. 22-3.
21 A. Minkevich, "Pokolenie Pelevina", Russkii zhurnal (1999), No. 4
applauds (unusually for critics) Pelevin's ability to write bestsellers.
22 "Tekhnologiia pisatel'skoi vlasti", p. 15. See also: M. Kakutani,
"Russia's New Appetite (for those who think young)", New York Times Book
Review 28 March 2002, online edition at: [left angle
bracket]http://query.
nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01EEDE1330F93BA35750C0A9649C8B63[right
angle bracket]; A. Gavrilov, "Strashnyi sud kak strashnyi sud",
Nezavisimaia gazeta 11 March 1999; A. Genis, "Beseda desiataia: Pole
chudes Viktora Pelevina", Zvezda (1997), No. 12, online edition at:
[left angle bracket]http://magazines.russ.ru/ zvezda/1997/12/[right
angle bracket]; E. Pronina, "Fatal'naia logika Viktora Pelevina",
Voprosy literatury 4 (2003), online edition at:[left angle
bracket]http://magazines.russ.ru/voplit/2003/4/[right angle bracket]; A.
Nemzer, "Kak by tipa po zhizni: Generation 'P' kak zerkalo
otechestvennogo infantilizma", Vremia MN (1999), No. 4, online edition
at: [left angle bracket]http://
pelevin.nov.ru/stati/o-nemz2/1.html[right angle bracket], and R.
Glintershchik, Sovremennye russkie pisateli-postmodernisty: Ocherki
novoi russkoi literatury (Kaunas, 2000), p. 135.
23 Mental ground zero: "the location where one visualizes oneself during
the dropping of the atomic bomb; frequently, a shopping mall"
(Generation X, p. 70).
24 E. Lenhard refers to his self-conscious cleverness in "Coupland's
Shampoo Planet is just too, too, clever", The Atlanta Journal and
Constitution (20 September 1992); online edition at: [left angle
bracket]http://us.geocities. com/coupland.geo/sp19.html[right angle
bracket]. H. Mallick called him "the smartest young man in Canada" in 1994.
25 D. Coupland, Polaroids from the Dead (New York, 1996), p. 197.
26 Generation X, p. 71.
27 "Girlfriend in a Coma" is the title of a song by The Smiths, just as
Coupland's "Eleanor Rigby" takes its title from a Beatles song - more
hints by Coupland that all culture is "borrowed" from a general pastiche?
28 D. Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma (London, 1998), p. 178.
29 Coupland, Life After God, p. 84.
30 V. Pelevin, "Deviatyi Son Very Pavlovny", Sinii fonar' (Moscow, 1991)
p. 147.
31 "Gogol ‡ Go-Go".
32 N. N. Schneidman, Russian Literature 1995-2002 (Toronto, 2004), p. 94.
33 It is an apposite reference, given that Babylon historically
epitomises both materialism and apostasy. Note that there is a possible
link to N. Stephenson's seminal cybernovel Snow Crash (1992), in which
Stephenson defines reality as the creation of the Babylonian god Enki, a
neurolinguistic hacker who creates modern linguistic divisions.
34 Generation "P", p. 288; p. 292.
35 M. Epshtein, "The Origins and Meaning of Russian Postmodernism", in:
Re-Entering the Sign: Articulating New Russian Culture, ed. E. Berry &
A. Miller-Pogacar (Ann Arbor MI, 1995), pp. 25-47, sees Russia as a
country in which models of reality have replaced reality itself. See
also I. Kabakov's "On Emptiness" in the same volume.
36 Deleuze & Guattari suggest that desire is "not internal to a subject,
any more than it tends towards an object: it is strictly immanent to a
plane which it does not pre-exist, to a plane which must be constructed"
(G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, Dialogues [Paris, 1977], p. 108).
37 P. Daoust, "Generation ZZZZzzzzz", The Guardian 22 April 1998. See
also Ekow Eshun's interview with Pelevin, "Generation games", The
Observer 27 February 2002; online edition at: [left angle
bracket]http://books/guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfictionstory/0,600[right
angle bracket].
38 W. Blythe, "Doing laundry at the end of history", Esquire, March
1994, notes the "sappy" endings; online edition at: [left angle
bracket]http:www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/5560/crit1.html?200517[right
angle bracket]. The idea of debased epiphanies is from J. Annesley,
Blank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture, and the Contemporary American
Novel (London, 1998), p. 119.
39 Microserfs, p. 371.
40 D. Coupland, Eleanor Rigby (London, 2004), p. 27.
41 Ibid., p. 3.
42 D. Coupland, Miss Wyoming (London, 2000), p. 311.
43 G. P. Lainsbury, "Generation X and the End of History", Essays on
Canadian Writing (1996) No. 58, pp. 229-42 (p. 232).
44 Life After God, pp. 25, 143.
45 Miss Wyoming, p. 311.
46 Life After God, pp. 220-1.
47 Generation X, p. 148.
48 Ibid., p. 207.
49 S. Laird, interview with Pelevin, in Voices of Russian Literature:
Interviews with Ten Contemporary Writers (Oxford, 1999), p. 190.
50 S. Poole, "The Wow-factor", The Guardian 22 April 2000; online
edition at: [left angle bracket]http://books.
guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,212846,00.html[right angle
bracket].
51 "Gogol ‡ Go-Go".
52 R. Clarke, "A Shot of New Russian Spirit", The Independent on
Saturday 29 April 2000; online edition via [left angle
bracket]http://www.marsh-agency.co.uk/[right angle bracket].
53 Generation "P", p. 221.
54 E. Pavlov, "Judging Emptiness: Pelevin's Chapaev i Pustota", in:
Russian Literature in Transition, ed. I. Kelly & H. Mondry (Nottingham,
1991), pp. 89-104 (p. 94).
55 Ibid., p. 100. See also E. Kozhevnikova, "Buddizm v zerkale
sovremennoi kul'tury: osvoenie ili prisovoenie?", Buddizm Rossii (1998),
No. 27, quoted in, e.g., [left angle
bracket]http://www.kuzbass.ru/moshkow/lat/
PELEWIN/bibliography.txty[right angle bracket]. Aleksandr Genis has
discussed the concept of "creative emptiness", a form of weakness, of
passivity, leading to growth and transcendence, in "Onions and Cabbages:
Paradigms of Contemporary Culture", in: Russian Postmodernism: New
Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture, ed. M. Epshtein, A. Genis & S.
Vladiv-Glover (Oxford, 1999).
56 J. Mozur, "Viktor Pelevin, Post-Sovism, Buddhism and Pulp Fiction",
World Literature Today (Spring 2002), pp. 58-67 (p. 63).
57 G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem &
H. R. Lane (Minneapolis, 1977), pp. 35-6.
58 G. Deleuze, Dialogues (Paris, 1977), p. 108.
59 G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, 1987), p. 151.
60 Ibid., p. 189.
61 R. Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari (London, 1989), p. 93.
62 S. Zizek, Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (London,
2004), pp. 83-4.
63 Coupland, Life after God, p. 247.


*[Author Affiliation]*
SALLY DALTON-BROWN
Trinity College
University of Melbourne
Royal Parade
Melbourne 3052
Australia


*Indexing (document details)*
*Author(s):* Sally Dalton-Brown
*Document types:* General Information
*Publication title:* Forum for Modern Language
Studies. Oxford: 2006. Vol. 42, Iss. 3; pg. 239, 10 pgs
*Source type:* Periodical
*ISSN:* 00158518
*ProQuest document ID:* 1112400761
*Text Word Count* 5304
*Document URL:*
http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=0000001112400761&Fmt=3&cl
ientId=43168&RQT=309&VName=PQD


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