Title:
The Exit of a Generation: the `Whatever' Philosophy. By: Delvaux,
Martine, Midwest Quarterly, 00263451, Winter99, Vol. 40, Issue 2
THE EXIT OF A GENERATION: THE `WHATEVER' PHILOSOPHY
Contents
1. We don't even have a name <#AN0001555091-2>
2. Screenplays <#AN0001555091-3>
3. Whatever. <#AN0001555091-4>
4. Nowhere. Now here. <#AN0001555091-5>
5. The Pill That Makes One Not Sad <#AN0001555091-6>
6. Inside the margin <#AN0001555091-7>
7. The End <#AN0001555091-8>
8. BIBLIOGRAPHY <#AN0001555091-9>
OUR PARENTS WERE REBELS of the sexual revolution and Vietnam War
veterans, hippies now turned yuppies, but this paper is about "us,"
their kids and how "we" are being defined, as they once were and still
are. This paper examines processes of generational definition through
one example, "ours," that is the study of those named the "generation
after" (Nancy Smith in Howe and Strauss, 7), defined as the "High-Tech
generation" of "computer babies." They say that we live through
talk-shows, sit-coms and email, condoms, and anti-depressants; that we
are too aware and disillusioned, engaged in a profound disengagement.
For some, River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain have become the icons of our
young times, objects of pity and symptoms of a generalized state of
depravity or deprivation; for others, they are innocent victims of
disillusionment, symbols of integrity. We are said to live in our own
private Idahos, our chemically induced nirvanas of slack. We are said to
be a number of things. However, nobody knows exactly who we are. This
article is not an attempt to find an ultimate answer to this enigma, but
rather manifests a desire to question the recent phenomenon of
Generation X, the descriptions that have been formulated in order to
define this age-group, and the processes by which its so-called members
have chosen to react to such tales.
The "I" writing this paper is paradoxical: a member of this
exed-Generation, I appear to suffer from a generational depression. Yet,
I am trying to succeed inside academia, responding to calls for papers,
wanting to be published, to be heard, but mostly, wanting to be able to
care. A few months ago, I would not have been drawn to inscribe myself
inside this discourse: Generation X remained a strange land. But today,
after some trecking on the job market, the neurotic symptoms associated
with Genexers are not foreign anymore.
As I am writing these lines, I am listening to the Canadian national
news on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I hear the words: "There
may not be any room left for the younger generation." That is us. Ten
years ago, my mother voiced her anxieties about my younger sister's and
my future. I remember reassuring her, with my adolescent strength, about
our prospective lives. I then felt strongly, in the pit of my stomach,
an excitement for the future. The pit is slowly turning into a void. (Am
I whining yet?)
We don't even have a name <#toc>
In his introduction to the GenX Reader -- entitled "Us, by Us" -- and
his presentation of the concept of Generation X, Douglas Rushkoff
borrows the vocabulary popularized by the media in its description and
creation of the GenX category: the members of this "despondent
`thirteenth' generation" are, he writes, "the hopeless mutant children
of a society temporarily gone awry." These children these
"twentysomethings"--are "illiterate, unmotivated, and apathetic" (3). An
object of fear and hatred, a dark continent of generational history,
GenX has been reduced to "at best, a market segment and, at worst, the
downfall of the Western world" (4).
In order to capture the image that is being produced of this category of
people, it appears necessary to examine the tendency in public discourse
to represent this generation both as the result and as the cause of a
"downfall," the decline of Western civilization. For GenX is said to be
a "nightmare" (4). In an angry essay written for Newsweek, David Martin
characterizes GenX as the "whiny" generation, "a handful of spoiled,
self-indulgent, overgrown adolescents" (in Rushkoff, 235). These eternal
youngsters are the product of a history, or as he ironically underscores
in his case study, of a "horrible fate" that, he seems to suggest, may
be changed if one chooses to adopt the following prescriptions: "If you
want more than that, move out of your parents' houses, start working,
and for heaven's sake, stop whining" (237).
I moved back in with my parents at the beginning of my twentysomething
years, after having moved out at eighteen and signed a form which
released them officially of their duties as purveyors for my well-being.
My parents then feared that I would never move back out. Today, when I
see the twentynothing character on the comedy "Madman of the People,"
the incarnation of grunge and slack, the job-less philosophy graduate in
his daily slouch on the sofa or the armchair, I start to perceive the
myth that parents are growing afraid of in this mediatic conspiracy
against young people whose lives are invariously read through the lens
of the GenX discourse. Through this lens, we become one. We are all the
same, and suffer from the same ridiculed psychological afflictions. But
I wonder how different Genexers are, in view of their elders, from how
they were at the same age? That may be where the problem lies, in the
mirror image they see in us: the then romantic now frightening vision of
what they were, and the horrific revelation of what they have become. . . .
Controlled through conceptualization and excluded through
stigmatization, the fin-de-siecle Generation X has been injected with a
psychiatrized language and become the object of a mediatic
psychotherapeutic practice. It seems to have become necessary for the
media, in order to counter the fears that this generation generates, to
draw a psychological portrait and to establish various diagnoses
concerning what are presented as behavioral inadequacies. As Neff Howe
and Bill Strauss put it in their 1993 13th Gen. Abort, Retry, Ignore,
Fail?:
For the past decade, 13ers have been bombarded with study after story
after column about how bad they supposedly are. Americans in their teens
and twenties, we are told, are consumed with violence, selfishness,
greed, bad work habits, and civic apathy. (17)
In this era of AIDS and of mediated relationships, Generation X is the
object of sociological and medical discourses produced both by witnesses
to this group of young people as well as by themselves. The various
diagnoses made from inside and outside this class of individuals are
symptomatic of a need to define and categorize, label and stigmatize
those who refuse to engage themselves in an act of definition. The
psychiatrization of this young Prozac nation counters the emphatic
dismissal of the problem, the refusal to answer that we find in the
emblematic response, "whatever": "Yes, this is a generation with a PR
problem" (9).
The creation of the category of X is symptomatic of a commercial need to
delimit target audiences, to define them by setting borders for their
understanding. This so-called Generation X appears to be the product of
an act of nominalization similar to the making of a medical diagnosis
which contains in itself an act of storytelling, the skeleton which
creates a link between various behavioral symptoms and inscribe them
into a coherent narrative: the telling creates the story as the
diagnosis invents the malady. This narrative of mental illness, in order
to be justified as one, is put forth against the backdrop of a normative
standpoint constituted by a standardized terminology that allows for a
hegemonic understanding of people, actions, situations. As Dorothy Smith
suggests in relation to diagnoses of mental illness, the individual "is
encountered in the form of a case history already written and through
forms of interview that disclose only those pieces of her life that fall
into slots" (127). In describing Generation X, a process of
standardization takes place: the definition, as is the case in
psychiatry or other fields of social sciences, inscribes its object in
the realm of a pseudo-scientific discourse and thus transforms it into a
valid ground for exploration, analysis, and diagnosis. Thus, the
description may act as a stigma and become a "semantic straight jacket"
(Szasz, 28).
It is important to draw a parallel between the media representation and
creation of the Generation X syndrome and a psychiatric construction,
for in this particular case the story being told about this group of
individuals is one of mental illness defined as a neurotic or even
psychotic condition which stands in opposition to a mentally healthy,
socially active but mainly productive normative group: in this case, the
required foil is the successful boomer generation.
Hence, Kurt Cobain's suicide becomes the emblem of a generational
malaise and the act of violence that he perpetrated upon himself
referred to as "the bullet that shot through a generation" (308). From a
similar perspective, Linda Wells writes that the women hired to model
the grunge look, reappropriated and commercialized by famous fashion
houses, look "anorexic, clinically depressed, or headed for a mental
institution," as if the creators of the worlds of Vogue and Glamour
"were all in desperate need of Prozac" (qtd. in Wurtzel, 310). One can
see in the advertising for The Gap clothing store an example of this
representation of underweight young women. More than a representation of
its clientele, Gap advertising participates in the construction of a
generational look: the "gap" look of the disappearing body, of the
fashionable societal void.
Along the same lines, Elizabeth Wurtzel's novel, Prozac Nation, has been
described by Ken Tucker as a "litany of woe," the reading of which may
eventually bring the reader to "riff[e] the pages of the book in the
vain hope that there will be a few complimentary Prozac capsules tucked
inside for one's relief" (The New York Times Book Review, September 25,
1994). The anti-depressant Prozac, the pill "that doesn't make you happy
but does make you not sad" as Wurtzel herself describes it (301), is
waved as the favored metaphor for a genexed psychological condition; one
could even suggest that it epitomizes it. (Matt Groening's comic strips
surely exemplify this tendency.) Prozac is the solution to the general
unhappiness diagnosed in the "twentynothings" age group.
Screenplays <#toc>
"Just as our parents quieted us when we were noisy by putting us in
front of the television set," writes Wurtzel, "maybe we're now learning
to quiet our own adult noise with Prozac." We are, apparently, the MTV
generation, used to bites of reality, rapid sound-images, moving
features, changing stars and heroes. We take lessons from commercial
slogans. We see ourselves in the specularity of our screens. And better
there than nowhere.
The first image to appear on the commercialized videotaped version of
Reality Bites, the first story that we as audience are told before
launching into the viewing, comes from the program "America Responds to
AIDS." We read: "Latex condoms prevent the spread of AIDS." Do not make
love nor war: the double negation feeds disillusion, apathy; from
leukemia to acquired-immuno-deficiency-syndrome, Love Story has become
the Story of HIV. "I'm the HIV-AIDS character on `Melrose Place,'" says
Vickie, the being-tested-for-HIV character in the movie. There is but a
small step between the pastel building inhabited by glamorous
advertising agents and doctors, and the grunge apartment housing
unemployed occupants. Soap opera life is as real, if not more so, than
what has been defined for us as such. As Lelaina profoundly says:
"`Melrose Place' is a really good show."
"Melrose Place" has, quite paradoxically, become one of the icons of
Generation X. These weekly tales about a group of young, hip, and yet
successful twentysomethings sharing an apartment complex, a swimming
pool, and bedside dramas, have been associated to the Busters by the
media and a number of GenX writers. References to "Melrose Place" are
scattered throughout GenX productions such as Reality Bites and Next.
Young American Writers on the New Generation. Comparing the success of
the sixties to the nihilism of the nineties, David Greenberg says: "They
had communes; we get Melrose Place. They had Apollo; we get the
Challenger. They had the Pill; we get AIDS" (72). And Elizabeth Wurtzel
writes:
Critics complained that archetypal twentysomething movies like Singles
or television shows like "Melrose Place" seemed to revolve around such
mundane concerns that the characters were all wandering in a haze,
looking for love and approbation in every person and every crevice of a
person, looking for the next small fix to make the next few days
bearable--above all, they complained that none of the Jennifers and
Jasons seemed able to get out of their own heads long enough to take a
look at the big picture. (206)
Television is our own little bell jar, our electronic brand of insanity,
the perfect substitute for actual communication: there is no need for
safe sex on t.v., no need for condoms when all one wants is to "fondle
the remote-control" (Reality Bites). Television offers user-friendly
relationships which make up for the biting edge of reality.
The character of Lelaina, who carries the narratorial voice in Reality
Bites, records her friends' daily life with her video-camera in order to
transfer reality onto television, listening to and filming the story of
their despair. In the world of Generation X, a bachelor's degree in
philosophy or English literature leads directly to a singing career in
an amateur band or to the management of a Gap franchise: folding clothes
as folding up one's own life, what Hillary Rodham Clinton called a
"sleeping sickness of the soul." In ads for The Gap clothing stores,
alongside the black and white photographs of Luke Perry ("Beverly Hills
90210") and Julie Delpy (starring beside Ethan Hawke in Richard
Linklater's most recent production [after Slackers], Before Sunrise),
life appears serene, in sharp contrasts, aestheticized in its
simplicity. Inside a television screen, it becomes negotiable,
controllable. Lelaina's bites of reality are documents of a generational
anxiety, a paratext of storytelling juxtaposed to the grand narrative of
mainstream media culture through cable television. With the help of
Michael, the lover and young successful t.v. exec for an MTV clone
called "In Your Face"-- where "real programming" is on the air --, the
bites of reality are cut into further pieces and pasted together with
the help of titles and fluorescent colors, translated into the boomer
language of marketing and success. The filmed bits of her friends' lives
become the bites of a dancing pizza topped with sex, lies, and
videotape. In Michael's "real" world Lelaina's "meaning of life"
collapses: "You don't get it. You just don't get it," she screams.
People don't "get" GenX, and Genexers are not getting anything.
Marketing strategies have soiled modes of communication, and GenX has
been confined to the realm of virtual interaction: a cylindrical piece
of rubber, a luminous screen in a plastic box ....
Whatever. <#toc>
"What is GenX?," asks Mark Saltveit. "You can't define this generation
in a paragraph or an article. The best you can do, I think, is give
examples .... It's easier to say what GenX isn't" (qtd. in Rushkoff,
51). The definition of Generation X lies in the oxymoronic X which both
eliminates it semantically and signifies its existence, the X that makes
this generation's presence a thing of the past, the X that crosses it
out, deems it dangerous or obsolete, as in the ex-generation, the
residue of an old love affair: the way we were .... "To some," writes
Douglas Rushkoff, "belonging to GenX is a cop-out. To us, it is a
declaration of independence. We exist" (3). The X expresses both a need
to define and a refusal to do so: the Busters are members of an "X"
generation, an unknown, indefinable, incomprehensible group, a mystery
dressed in black, an x-rated production worthy of a serious market
analysis: "We are a marketing experiment gone out of control" (4).
However, in spite of the "X," this generation shows a need to talk about
itself, to create self-definitions through the staging of acts of
storytelling and the creation of various storylines. The Generation X
phenomenon seems determined by a need, felt by those identified as its
members, to tell stories about themselves, to tell the story of a
Generation which can only exist vicariously through words and whose
existence requires some form of mediation, an act of witnessing. Amidst
the confusion, the function of storytelling is located at the point of
junction. It stages the romanticism ("the thing called love") that lies
at the crossroads of the X, right there, where we get our lines crossed.
For, whatever they say, Genexers (we) are capable of love. Our anorexia
nervosa is a symptom of our longing for affection and understanding. If
this were understood, the GenX fantasy might die of starvation. The X
that is being tattooed on us is hard as rock. We are not.
Various members of Generation X offer another answer to the narrative
put forth by the media. They tell another story (an other's story), that
is a story that describes how they perceive their own lives, outside the
eternal diagnoses of which they are the victims. As Julie Epstein writes,
the tension in a case narrative derives also from the necessary
incomplete relation between objective data and subjective complaints:
the case historian's representation of disease rarely duplicates the
patient's sense of inhabiting a symptomatic body, and generic
nosological description rarely mirrors in an exact way the experience of
given suffering human beings. (35)
The Busters engage in an act of self-definition that attempts to counter
the Boomer tendency to read the world through the lens of various `isms'
and nosological categories. It is in reaction to an "inclination for
paralyzing moral self-examination" that members of what is recognized as
the thirteenth generation answer: "whatever." This X Generation doesn't
signify the void of the X but the complexity of the lines that cross
each other: the ambiguity of the "what," and the everlasting "ever."
This is what we emphatically answer to comments that are made about our
situation, to analyses of our generational trauma. We answer "whatever"
without points of suspension. We are suspended enough as it is: "when
faced with a trend, slackers are more likely to shrug and dismiss it
with one word: Whatever" (Saltveit, 52). This "whatever" philosophy, the
wisdom of the undecidable, the indecipherable, the disengaged, is
symptomatic of a refusal to question as a whole as it dismisses
explanations, intellectual constructions and follow-ups. It goes as far
as to eliminate feelings of anger, the need for accusation: "So -- what
is GenX?" asks Saltveit. "There's no answer, because that's an ignorant
boomer question. Who knows? Who cares? Whatever" (53).
The creation of the category of X both inscribes and eliminates in one
single gesture the group it designates; it labels and stigmatizes,
defines and rejects what has been defined. Life stops when we say that
we are Generation X: "Dead at 30 Buried at 70" (Coupland, 29). Or does
it? "Until now," writes Douglas Rushkoff,
Generation X has been explained to the public by the people who fear and
detest us most .... But we, the members of Generation X, reject this
categorization, and our own writings tell a story very different from
those of our elders. A story that hasn't been told before. A story that
deserves telling. (4)
The magical phrase appears to interrupt movement, to break contact. It
puts an end to the discussion: "whatever" epitomizes the empire of
slackness, GenX's governing slackdom. One may find in this infamous word
the meaning of the X, the expected reaction on the part of a group
always already absent, crossed out, X-executed: the inescapable act of
dismissal.
Nowhere. Now here. <#toc>
However one may also read in this gesture of dismissal the refusal of a
closure, of a monologic discourse, of a unique answer, and rather
perceive the quest for a perpetual movement, the desire for a
neverending story of which you would be the hero. The telling of tales
works against the rhythm of an accelerated culture, infiltrating the
interstices that are left when time goes by. It counters the multiple
narratives that succeed in streamlining those whose lives they weave.
Like Sheherazade, Genexers tell-tale their life hoping to survive. With
each story they take a step further away from death. One needs Douglas
Coupland's "policy of storytelling" in order to reach into one's own
misery in order to own it: "How are people ever going to help themselves
if they can't grab onto a fragment of your own horror? People want that
little fragment, they need it. That little piece of lung makes their own
fragments less scary" (13). Rather than constituting a means of
escaping, the act of storytelling represents a way to keep reality in
check:
I'm still looking for a description of storytelling as vital as this.
Thus inspired by my meetings of the Alcoholics Anonymous organization, I
instigated a policy of storytelling in my own life, a policy of "bedtime
stories," which Dag, Claire, and I share among ourselves. It's simple:
we come up with stories and we tell them to each other. The only rule is
that we're not allowed to interrupt, just like in AA, and at the end
we're not allowed to criticize. This noncritical atmosphere works for us
because the three of us are so fight assed about revealing emotions. A
clause like this was the only way we could feel secure with each other.
(14)
In Generation X, this policy of bedtime storytelling provides Claire,
Dag, and Andrew with a safe house, a space which allows for a freedom of
speech, that is, just as in meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous,
uninterrupted and uncriticized discourse in the spirituality of pain and
addiction. No Xs allowed. In that safe house, fragments of horror are
woven into narrative threads to be shared with friends, in all security,
away from the streamlining stories of media malevolence. The policy goes
against the monovalence of the official discourse on Generation X, a
discourse which dismisses its need for interaction, dialogue, security.
The act of storytelling that is found in speaking to friends or
therapists, in writing novels or making documentaries serves as a
substitute for intimacy, or maybe makes up for its loss, to which
Elizabeth Wurtzel associates the problem of depression:
In the world that we live in, randomness does rule. And this lack of
order is a debilitating, destabilizing thing. Perhaps what has come to
be placed in the catchall category of depression is really a
guardedness, a nervousness, a suspicion about intimacy, any of many
perfectly natural reactions to a world that seems to be perilously
lacking in the basic guarantees that our parents expected: a marriage
that would last, employment that was secure, sex that wasn't deadly. It
is a cliche at this point to make reference to the economic and social
insecurity that is said to characterize a mass of people that's been
known collectively as Generation X or twentynothings, but obviously
there is a lot of unhappiness going around in this age group .... (302)
Storytelling takes place inside the gaping wound of the whatever
philosophy, within the space of the indefinite and the indeterminate,
between the all and/or nothing of the pronominal expression, inside the
eternal "what?" As in the case of a child, the nightly bedtime
storytelling serves to push ghosts away, to clear the path under the bed
and inside the closet. Stories and friends are the antidote to the
generational angst, to the clinical nervousness lying behind the X: "and
it is this nervousness," writes Wurtzel, "this lack of trust, that makes
this generation seem ineffectual to many older people on so many fronts.
But we are trying our best to take care of one another" (1994,215).
The Pill That Makes One Not Sad <#toc>
In the cauldron of pop culture, Elizabeth Wurtzel has been granted the
title of spokesperson for the "young and depressed in America." She is
us by us, the people in the middle of the X and along the Z in Prozac
(of which 650,000 orders of Prozac are now filled each month). Wurtzel
speaks against the manufacture of a discourse that mainstreams
depression, renders it trendy and consequently ignores the actual
suffering of those who experience it. Depression has become associated
with a group of bright and educated young people, those, as Wurtzel
writes, "who have so much to look forward to and to hope for, who are,
as one might say of a bright young thing about to make her debut into
the world, so full of promise" (200). But are the "walking wounded"
associated with Generation X a symbol of a more generalized state of
depression? Have we become the symptom of a Prozac nation where forever
homesick youths are lost "in a reverie for an enchanted place they've
never known" (201)?
If one follows Wurtzel and others' criticism of the Boomer generation,
how they gave birth to children of divorce who quickly became the agents
of their own surrogate parenting, one has to wonder if the act of
discrimination that is operated on the members of the so-called
Generation X is not the result of a guilt trip (much different from the
sixties' high): "I've got the whole life cycle backwards," writes
Wurtzel, "all grown-up and running a household at ten and all set to
jump on the seesaw and slip down the slidding pond at twenty-five" (209).
In her "memoir," Elizabeth Wurtzel intersperses italicized
autobiographical bites, bits of reality that seem to differ from her
narrativized life-line. In those slanted lines lie the screams, the
pain, the tiredness of depression, the biting of the real. Within them
resides the home of the Prozac nation. Alternating between the normal
font of the storyline and the italics of her own analysis of the events,
Wurtzel stages the dialectics of her experience as well as the
ambivalence of representation. She moves us from the pleasure of a
realistic drama to the unpleasure, the boredom, the whining of
depression. She carries us on the waves of her moods, seduces us into
accompanying her inside an act of testimonial necessary to the end of
her malaise. In this hyper realistic drama for a cyberspace youth,
Wurtzel's reader is given the role of a psychiatrist in whom she finds
an ideal interlocutor who, while being seduced into the act of listening
reserves for him or herself the diagnoses and prescriptions she does not
wish to hear. Wurtzel makes her "illness" her own through an act of
storytelling that undermines the dehumanizing tendency to "mainstream" it:
Depression strikes down deep. The fact that depression seems to be "in
the air" right now can be both the cause and result of a level of
societal malaise that so many feel. But once someone is a clinical case,
once someone is in a hospital bed or in a stretcher headed for the
morgue, his story is absolutely and completely his own. Every person who
has experienced a severe depression has his own sad, awful tale to tell,
his own mess to live through. (311)
Hence, the use of italics in her novel Prozac Nation is symbolic of a
desire to "live in-between" (293). The crooked lines are used to suspend
time, to stop the velocity of the narrative and to stage the viscosity
of depression (to borrow Susanna Kaysen's words [1993,75]). They serve
as quotes, live comments, bits of direct discourse that make present
pieces of the past, that stage the childhood, the teen years, the
college days, everything that is the depression. They delay reactions,
put a damper on things, slow down the rhythm. They are a sign of fatigue:
These days, the slacker kids just draw a blank. And this abandoning of
the straight-and-narrow path is not some sixties-style attempt at
nonconformity, it is not about a search for greater spiritual truths, it
is not about getting back to nature or basics or anything like that --in
fact, as far as I can tell it's about one simple thing: fatigue. How on
earth are we ever going to run the world and behave like responsible
adults when we're all just so fired? (211)
Inside the margin <#toc>
As for Generation X, it is institutionalized inside a McClinic, within
the walls of a discourse that firmly states the answers to "the problem
with your generation" (302). The Busters are a paratext to the
Boomer-narrative. They are forever lying in the shadow of the
fortysomethings who accuse them of a perpetual whining. They are eternal
children, still-born adults. But, as Douglas Rushkoff explains,
"contrary to popular opinion, GenX refuses to mourn. We are not
complaining, get it" (5)? The GenX story lies in the space that it has
been conceded: inside the margins of reality, in that space between the
bites, along great strands of italics and marginal lexicons, inside the
capsules of fluoxetine hydrochloride. The substance may not be where one
expects to find it; it is elsewhere, it is nowhere: "A couple of
cigarettes, a cup of coffee and a little conversation. You, me and five
bucks" (Reality Bites).
This marginalization of genexers is symptomatic of the unhomeliness that
characterizes children of divorce, computer kids, babies of mediated
interaction. Their story is written inter-dictum, between the lines of
the available realities. It is interrupted and forbidden. Genexers show
a need to be in-between things, in a nowhere that is a space, where they
create a world of their own, if not forever at least, temporarily. The
videoclips with which Reality Bites's main storyline is interspersed are
morsels of reality, uncensured exclamations and explanations, pure
dreams, aphorisms that are being put "in your face." The parentheses of
videowork interrupt the flow of daily life, the vivisection of a job
search, the anxiety of an AIDS test or the dreariness of a jean-folding
seminar. And it is through these interruptions that life acquires its
meaning, its biting reality, that of the dreams that remain in the
margin: inside the lyrics of a song, the colors of an outfit, the layers
of a Snickers bar. And that is where we find freedom, in
counter-examples set against the mainstream storyline. Generation X is
nothing else but Generation X: its essence lies in the creation of a
trademark, in the iconization of a fiction. And we deserve to say that
reality bites, in our own words, in our own way; GenX or not, whatever.
Because, whatever we are, "whether you like it or not, we are the thing
that will replace you" (Rushkoff, 8).
The End <#toc>
I am sitting in the sun, editing this paper, making sure that my
references are accurate. The warmth of Spring makes the ba(l)dness of
the world disappear, at least temporarily. Even in the shadow of the X,
we are able to enjoy the sun. No one can take that feeling away.
Everytime I type Generation X, my finger falls on the C. But the X isn't
random: it is symptomatic of a constant need to make other whoever
escapes our immediate understanding. The X is a sign of death; we try to
keep on living through storytelling.
I chose to write on Generation X to get away from the dreariness of my
daily chores. I tried to inscribe myself within the parentheses of the
italics, inside the slanted signs. There, I encountered a great sadness,
and an incontrollable fear: it was mine. I once believed, somewhat like
Mr. Bona (I am so ashamed . . .) that I would escape the fate of the X,
that I could remain outside of the contingencies which determine members
of my age group. In writing this piece, I have shattered the illusion. I
entrenched myself between the lines of the Generation X narrative, and
created my image along its media-produced storylines.
My partner reads a first draft of this article. I hear: "It's good, But
where are you in there?" My answer? I am lost, caught inside an elision,
the stuff that dreams are made of How does an "exer" write an academic
text about the story that creates her, through the shaping of her
generation, a story that she both rejects and sanctions, excises and
generates? The I printed here is paradoxical, split, maneuvering within
the margins, attempting to cross a mirror. I want this writing to be
done with. Now. I can't stand the split and fear the magnetism of this
"whatever philosophy." I am one line away from dismissing everything
that I have written. I am now at the end.
BIBLIOGRAPHY <#toc>
Coupland, Douglas. Generation X. Tales for an Accelerated Culture. New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1991.
Epstein, Julia. "Historiography, Diagnosis, and Poetics." Literature and
Medicine, 11:1 (Spring 1992), 23-44.
Howe, Neff and Bill Strauss. 13thGen. Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? New
York: Vintage Books, 1993.
Liu, Eric, ed. Next. Young American Writers on the New Generation. New
York/London: W.W. Norton and Company, 1994.
Reality Bites, A Comedy About Love in the '90s. Written by Helen
Childress. Directed by Ben Stiller. 99 min. 1994.
Rushkoff, Douglas. The GenX Reader. New York: Ballantine Books, 1994.
Smith, Dorothy E. The Conceptual Practices of Power. A Feminist
Sociology of Knowledge. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990.
Szasz, Thomas. A Lexicon of Lunacy. Metaphoric Malady, Moral
Responsibility, and Psychiatry. New Brunswick/London: Transaction
Publishers, 1993.
Wurtzel, Elizabeth. Prozac Nation. Young and Depressed in America. A
Memoir. Boston/ New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994.
~~~~~~~~
By MARTINE DELVAUX
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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