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Anti-Nihilism Device

I’ve been reading The Opposite of Loneliness by the late Marina Keegan. She was a Yale grad who died in a car accident shortly after her graduation. The book is a collection of her short stories and essays.

One thing that stands out about her essays is the sense of isolation she felt. But I won’t go there in this post. Instead, I want to share a line that struck me in her little essay, Putting the ‘Fun’ back in Eschatology. You can read the whole thing online HERE.

She is wrestling with things she’s learning in her science classes – mainly with the ‘fact’ that the sun is eventually going to burn out and die. She comforts herself with thoughts that NASA will eventually perfect space travel and come up with solutions for living in a sunless galaxy. Here’s the quote:

It’s natural selection on a Universal scale. “The Origin of the Aliens,” one could say; a survival of the fittest planets. Planets capable of evolving life intelligent enough to leave before the lights go out. I suppose that without a God, NASA is my anti-nihilism.

In his novel Generation X, Douglas Coupland coins the term “anti-victim device.” An anti-victim device, according to Coupland, is “a small fashion accessory worn on an otherwise conservative outfit which announces to the world that one still has a spark of individuality burning inside.” Think of a conservative Southern girl with a lower-back tattoo or a nose ring. She may be straight laced in a lot of ways, but watch out. She’s got a wild side too. She’s taking jiu-jitsu lessons too.

Keegan saw NASA as her anti-nihilism device. That’s different from an anti-victim device, but kind of similar too. An anti-nihilism device says, ‘Yeah, I know the sun is going to burn out and everything’s going to freeze, but I’ve got hope.’ And notice she qualifies this with the key phrase – “without God.”

Without God, everyone has to have anti-nihilism devices. Christians tends to call these things idols. An anti-nihilism device is the thing you go to for ultimate hope when you realize there’s really nothing to live for. No reason not to be an anarchist, a nihilist, to just fall into total despair and do whatever you want.

Chuck Palahniuk has started calling himself an ‘optimistic nihilist.’ That’s a nihilist with blinders on. King Solomon was right folks. Without God, life under the sun doesn’t make sense. And the sun eventually burns out anyway. Some folks need to turn NASA into God. Others turn their their careers, their families, their favorite sports team, whatever into gods. They have to have something to brighten their day when the sun is burning out.

52 Novels (14): Girlfriend in a Coma

My goal is to read a novel a week in 2015. I’ve made it to 14.

-Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma

Ah, postmodern stories. Girlfriend in a Coma starts out as a moving narrative about a young woman who falls into a 17 (or so) year coma. Strangely, she had foreseen that something was going to happen. The first half of the story chronicles the lives of her friends during the time of the coma. Her boyfriend, as he floats from job to job and battles alcoholism, seemingly numbing himself as he hopelessly waits for her to wake up; her child being born while she lay unconscious in the midst of the coma; another becomes a supermodel; another a doctor; two are drug addicts who eventually take up heroine; another is a vagabond who floats across the United States in search of who knows what.

And then the narrative turns into zombie apocalypse. Well, not exactly. People simply start falling asleep and dying, leaving this group of friends to watch the world die; leaving them as the only remaining survivors on the earth; leaving them to be guided by the ghost of a departed friend who will point out their emptiness and lead them on the right path, or something.

It’s an interesting story about a fragmented and meaningless world; like Ecclesiastes, except everybody dies at the same time. Karen, the girlfriend in the coma, awakes to find this soulless world; and she, as an outsider, as it were, has a more acute sense of it because of the distance in time afforded by the coma:

“Okay, but answer me this: Would you have believed in the emptiness of the world if you’d eased into the world slowly, buying into its principles one crumb at a time the way your friends did?” She sighs. “No. Probably not. Are you happy now? Can I have my body back?”

A few choice quotes:

“The future’s not a good place, Richard. I think it’s maybe cruel. I saw that last night. We were all there. I could see us—we weren’t being tortured or anything—we were all still alive and all … older … middle-aged or something, but … ‘meaning’ had vanished. And yet we didn’t know it. We were meaningless.” “What do you mean, ‘meaningless’?” “Okay. Life didn’t seem depressing or empty to us, but we could only discern that it was as if we were on the outside looking in. And then I looked around for other people—to see if their lives seemed this way, too—but all the other people had left. It was just us, with our meaningless lives.

Next,

He sat on the bed. “Don’t you understand, Richard? There’s nothing at the center of what we do.” “I—” “No center. It doesn’t exist. All of us—look at our lives: We have an acceptable level of affluence. We have entertainment. We have a relative freedom from fear. But there’s nothing else.” I felt I was getting the bad news I’d been trying to avoid for so long.

Next,

“I know—I remember when I first woke up how people kept on trying to impress me with how efficient the world had become. What a weird thing to brag about, eh? Efficiency. I mean, what’s the point of being efficient if you’re only leading an efficiently blank life?”

Next,

“I thought back in 1979 that in the future the world would—evolve. I thought that we would make the world cleaner and safer and smarter, and that people would become smarter and wiser and kinder as a result of all the changes.” “And …?” “People didn’t evolve. I mean, the world became faster and smarter and in some ways cleaner. Like cars—cars didn’t smell anymore. But people stayed the same. They actually—wait—what’s the opposite of progressed?” “In this case, devolved.” “People devolved.

Next,

“Hamilton,” Richard says, “tell me—have we ever really gotten together and wished for wisdom or faith to come from the world’s collapse? No. Instead we got into a tizzy because some Leaker forgot to return the Godfather III tapes to Blockbuster Video the day of the Sleep and now we can’t watch it. Have we had the humility to gather and collectively speak our souls? What evidence have we ever given of inner lives? Karen perks up: “Of course we have interior lives, Richard. I do. How can we not have one?” “I didn’t say that, Karen. I said we gave no evidence of an interior life. Acts of kindness, evidence of contemplation, devotion, sacrifice. All these things that indicate a world inside us. Instead we set up a demolition derby in the Eaton’s parking lot, ransacked the Virgin Superstore, and torched the Home Depot.”

Interestingly, the idea in the end is like a reverse It’s a Wonderful Life (or like a reverse A Christmas Carol). The apocalypse has allowed them to see life without the world:

“Uh-huh. You’ve all been allowed to see what your lives would be like in the absence of the world.” Silence while everybody bites their lips. “This is like that Christmas movie,” Pam says, “The one they used to play too many times each December and it kind of wore you down by the eighteenth showing. You know: what the world would have been like without you.” “Sort of, Pam,” I say, “but backwards. I’ve been watching over the bunch of you ever since Karen woke up, to see how different you’d be without the world.”

It’s not, How different would the world be without you? but, How different would you be without the world? The apocalypse allows them to see what life is like without neighbors. And in the end they’re afforded a second chance to actually try to have a positive impact upon the world.

What does such a transformation look like? I love this line:

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.

I love the idea of opening a door into the same house, but finding that the house is different than you remembered it. I’ve felt like that almost every day since I became a Christian.

52 Novels (11): Generation A

My goal is to read a novel a week in 2015. I’ve made it to 11.

– Douglas Coupland, Generation A

One of Douglas Coupland’s many claims to fame is that he likely coined the term ‘Generation X.’ 20 years later, he finally decided to do a little play on that title with Generation A. He says that he got the term from a quote by Kurt Vonnegut given at a commencement address in 1994:

Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media do us all such tremendous favors when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago.

I believe this is essentially Coupland’s term for the group that has become known as the Millenials, but I could be wrong. It certainly refers to a group that has grown up in the midst of full blown post-modernity.

Anyhow, I have to confess that I have become an all out fanboy of Douglas Coupland (due in part to a common interest in Media Ecology). This is the second Coupland novel I have read this year and I’ve already purchased two more to read in the near future. I thought this particular novel was spectacular on a number of levels.

The story takes place in the not-so-distant future in a world in which bees have become extinct. This makes is quite astonishing when suddenly, within months of each other, five random people find themselves stung. Each of the five then find themselves in sterile rooms having gallons of blood drawn from their bodies in the name of science. What attracted the last remaining bees in the world to these five? Do they have anything in common? Is there a physiological answer?

It turns out there is an answer, and it is directly related to the hottest pharmaceutical product on the planet. It’s reminiscent of Huxley’s ‘Soma’ from A Brave New World in some ways. Ultimately, these five people find themselves drawn together, and then forced together, to find that they have a common narrative. They all, they find, have the same questions about the world. They all long, in the midst of the connectedness of an internet world to find the solitude in the midst of conversation that comes from reading a good story. They are longing to know if their lives are a story.

Is there a meta-narrative? Do our lives make sense? Is there a sense of story? Is there an arc to our lives? Those are the types of questions they are asking. And as they find that, indeed, there is some sense to be made, they end up alone on an island together.

The novel is told in a rotating fashion in which each character shares his or her own perspective on the events. At first, as you’re getting to know the characters, this can be a little difficult; but, after a while it makes the book more compelling in some ways. You find yourself needing to keep reading in order to get through the next series of chapters to get back to the character you were interested in. There is also a lot of humor along the way. Plus, you get the overarching idea that ‘Generation A’ is, above all, a generation looking for significance; looking to be part of a greater narrative.

Brilliant stuff. Great book.

52 Novels (9): Generation X

My goal is to read a novel a week in 2015. I’ve made it to nine.

-Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991)

I grew up in the 90s. Even though I wasn’t old enough to be a part of it, I remember the term ‘Generation X’ being thrown around quite a bit. Did you ever wonder where that term comes from? Some say that Coupland actually coined the term. He certainly coined the term ‘McJob;’ he even defines it in the margin on page 5:

MCJOB: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice by people who have never held one.

Once upon a time, McDonald’s even unsuccessfully sued the company responsible for The Oxford English Dictionary to try to get the term taken out. But I digress.

Generation X is a picture of young adults in the early 90s. These were the days of Nirvana and Grunge. The days described so wittily by Portlandia in The Dream of the 90s.

A couple of highlights: First, the definitions in the margins are priceless. I’ve already mentioned ‘McJobs.’ Some of my favorites include:

  • Personal Tabu: A small rule or living, bordering on a superstition, that allows one to cope with everyday life in the absence of cultural or religious dictums (p. 74).
  • Cafe Minimalism: To espouse a philosophy of minimalism without actually putting into practice any of its tenets (p. 107).
  • Air Family: Describes the false sense of community experienced among coworkers in an office environment (p. 111).
  • Anti-Victim Device (AVD): A small fashion accessory worn on an otherwise conservative outfit which announces to the world that one still has a spark of individuality burning inside…(p. 114).

Second, Coupland’s description of 90s Yuppies is interesting:

He embodies to me all of the people of my own generation who used all that was good in themselves just to make money; who use their votes for short-term gain. Who ended up blissful in the bottom-feeding jobs – marketing, land flipping, ambulance chasing, and money brokering. Such smugness. They saw themselves as eagles building mighty nests of oak branches and bullrushes, when instead they were really more like the eagles here in California, the ones who built their nests from tufts of abandoned auto parts looking like sprouts picked off a sandwich… (p. 81).

Finally, the stories told by the characters are great. At one point, Elvissa calls on the central group of the story to tell their own stories:

‘What one moment for you defines what it’s like to be alive on this planet. What’s your takeaway?
There is silence. Tobias doesn’t get her point, and frankly, neither do I. She continues: ‘Fake yuppie experiences that you had to spend money on, like white water rafting or elephant rides in Thailand don’t count. I want to hear some small moment from your life that proves you’re really alive (p. 91).

One of the more memorable stories is this:

‘I know my earth memory. It’s a smell – the smell of bacon. It was a Sunday morning at home and we were all having breakfast, an unprecedented occurrence since me and all six of my brothers and sisters inherited my mother’s tendency to detest the sight of food in the morning. We’d sleep instead…
I remember very clearly standing by the stove and frying a batch of bacon. I knew even then that this was the only such morning our family would ever be given – a morningwhere we would all be normal and kind to each other and know that we liked each other without any strings attached – and that soon enough (and we did) we would all become batty and distant the way families invariably do as they get along in years.
And so i was close to tears, listening to everyone make jokes and feeding the dog bits of egg; I was feeling homesick for the event while it was happening… (p. 95).

Anyhow, I really, really like the book. It has to rank as one of my favorite novels at this point. You’d have to read it for yourself. I can’t really describe it. Coupland is a great writer. He is also very interested in Marshall McLuhan and Media Ecology, which is a plus in my book. I’ve already added two more of his books to the list of novels I plan on reading this year.