Tall Tale and Anti-Capitalist (Post) Western Storytelling in Douglas Coupland's Generation X

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Tall Tale and Anti-Capitalist (Post) Western Storytelling in Douglas Coupland's Generation X
• Junwu Tian (bio) and Yingjie Duan (bio)

In an interview with Contemporary Literature, Jon McGregor, an award-winning British novelist, mentioned Douglas Coupland as an influence on the use of storytelling as a pivotal narrative device in his own fiction: "when I read Generation X, it seemed obvious to me that it had been completely misconstrued by most people, and rather than being this very hip survey of a generation it was actually all about storytelling and the importance of storytelling and the function of storytelling in a society" (Edwards 221–22). Storytelling is indeed a conspicuous yet largely unacknowledged feature of Coupland's Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991), a novel all-too-often labeled as a literary manifesto of the post-baby boom generation. In the novel the first-person narrator Andy and his partners, Dag and Claire, have left middle-class life to take up low-rent service industry jobs in Palm Springs, California, where they share autobiographical or whimsical stories. This oral story-sharing practice near a western desert is reminiscent of the extravagantly humorous "tall tale," a form of orally transmitted literature common to the writings of the US frontier during the nineteenth-century westward expansion.

Clearly, the vital and irresistible thrust of the frontier storytelling tradition persists in Coupland's novel as its fictional characters also revel in exchanging satirical or fantastical stories, but their white middle-class identity in the highly capitalist context of the 1990s is quite distinct from those western pioneers. The US West that Coupland confronts and contemplates has been shaped and colored by corporate capitalism, technocapitalism, and [End Page 249] postmodern conditions or, in William H. Katerberg's more specific words, by "Hollywood, and Silicon Valley . . . military bases, atom bombs, trailer trash, dysfunctional families, designer kitsch, TV preachers, cookie-cutter suburbs, Microsoft, and plastic surgery" (274). Coupland's West does cohere with what Neil Campbell has termed the "American New West" or the "postmodern West" rife with "rampant technologies, extreme commodification, cosmetic surgery, nuclear landscapes, pollution, and simulation as well as the persistent, traditional stories of 'freedom,' 'choice,' and new starts associated with the region" (275; emphasis original). In other words, the US West or the Postwest in the late twentieth century (and possibly in the ensuing decades) is at the same time laden with the historical, regional myths of Edenic agriculturalism, expansionism, and upward mobility, and troubled by the fresh, complex, and multivalent discourses about post-industrialism, late capitalism, mass media, and globalization. In this light, this article is intended to explore how Coupland's return to an oral storytelling practice in Generation X infuses fresh postwestern interest into the American tall-tale tradition, as well as the purposes and ramifications of this literary appropriation.

Tall Tale Tradition

For an inveterate reader of western American literature and history, it is not difficult to find that in Generation X the oral story-sharing practice near a California desert bears a resemblance to the tall tale. This oral storytelling genre dates back to the apocryphal scene in nineteenth-century US westward expansion when the rough frontiersmen of the bleak US West gathered in bragging contests to spin yarns featuring excessive humor and exaggerations of actual events. According to James E. Caron, the prominent elements of tall tales include "first-person narrator; deadpan delivery; exaggeration; climactic development; concrete, realistic details; fantasy; anecdotal length; comic intent" (36). An excerpt from Mark Twain's "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" can explain how the tall tale uses fantasy to execute the hoax:

He ketched a frog one day and took him home and said he cal'lated to educate him; and so he never done nothing for three [End Page 250] months but set in his back yard and learn that frog to jump. And you bet you he did learn him, too. He'd give him a little hunch behind, and the next minute you'd see that frog whirling in the air like a doughnut—see him turn one summerset, or maybe a couple, if he got a good start, and come down flat-footed...