Postmodern Narratives: Nietzsche with Deleuze

[more to come]

Postmodern Narratives: Douglas Coupland

Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X provides some examples of the different functions of the "little narrative". The subtitle Tales From An Accelerated Culture already informs the reader that there will be a variety of different narratives, or tales, taking place in the novel. In one of the opening passages of the book we find the protagonist, Andy, speaking about an Alcoholics Anonymous meetings he’s been attending:

At meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, fellow drinkers will get angry with you if you won’t puke for the audience. By that, I mean spill your guts – really dredge up those rotted baskets of fermented kittens and murder implements that lie at the bottom of all our personal lakes. AA members want to hear the horror stories of how far you’ve sunk in life, and no low is low enough.

In this example we find the little narrative acting as a “confessional” – a largely invented personal account from an individual’s life. An individual is able to create his or her own personal narrative, but they do not remain in the sphere of the individual as they are directed towards a wider audience. Essentially, the confessional functions as a means for the individual to find belonging in a larger group. The members of the AA have to exaggerate their own faults in order to find acceptance. This drive towards a group belonging heightens the need for the individual to be creative, rather than factual, in constructing their narrative of confession. While Coupland uses the AA as his example, we can easily find it in other settings – for instance, take the Evangelical Church, where the little narrative takes shape as a “personal testimony”. A narrative is recited in front of others in order to find acceptance in the wider group of the church. This essentially means that the little narrative attempts to find inclusion in a wider, larger narrative and we can go as far as claiming that it is directed towards a grandnarrative. In this sense the little narrative can be read as an attempt to return to what postmodernism has lost – the secure and all-encompassing comfort of the grandnarrative. If this return to the grandnarrative is an inherent feature of the confessional then a question must be asked: “Are grandnarratives ever the same upon return?”. This is something we cannot answer now but will have to address later.
Added to this, the confession not only accounts for an individual’s attempt to belong to a group, but also allows the group to pass judgement on the individual. With the confessional or personal testimony we encounter a contradiction where the individual creates a highly personal narrative in order to find acceptance and belonging in group which will in turn will exclude anything that is outside its grandnarrative - in other words anything that is too individual. In the words of Gilles Deleuze: ‘Be yourself as long as it is the self of others’.
But this is not the only type of little narrative that we find in Coupland’s novel as Andy uses the AA meetings as a resource from which to develop other narrative forms:

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. The only rule is we’re not allowed to interrupt, just like in the AA, and at the end we’re not allowed to criticize.

Here the little narrative is a “storytelling” which functions as a coping mechanism for Andy and his friends. These characters find themselves living at both extremities of the employment spectrum – as high paid employees working for amoral and ultimately vacuous companies, or as low-wage, no-benefit Mcjob workers. The results in a constant search for meaning and throughout the novel each character recites their own tales to their friends. The fables told by Andy and his friends are used as mechanisms to deal with the displacement and insecurity of their lives, or in a more philosophical reading they are used to fill the gaps in meaning that are left after the collapse of the grandnarratives. These 'storytellings' are simple and imaginative uses of narrative to invent new ways of understanding a world in which they find themselves morally and socially marginalized. What stands out in the storytelling narratives is that, while being attempts to create meaning, they never attempt to be all encompassing accounts. In other words, they resist all attempts to become grandnarratives or be incorporated into grandnarratives. Instead, they continually operate at an individual level. This means that the narratives are deeply personal and require a constant creative action on the part of the storyteller. With the highly personal functions of these narratives we begin to see that each individual, in a sense, is able to create their own meaning.
Despite the apparent gratification found in creating your own personal narrative of meaning, Coupland’s novel is invested with a feeling of pathos. It is at once a regretful look to the past where there was a lack of any meaningful actions and choices that could have been made - there was no way of avoiding this situation. At the same to it is a desperate look to the future where the only hope of meaning is found in ‘fairy tale’ narratives that are too fantastic and are forever out of reach. Whether or not Coupland deliberately leaves us with narratives that never manage to provide a fulfilling response to the problems encountered in the postmodern condition is open to question. Whatever the case, the novel does express the difficulties in responding to postmodernism – either an attempted return to the grandnarratives (which is only a return to the problems that postmodernism was trying to avoid) or a storytelling that leaves us with a feeling of regret and desperation.
These problems are amplified further in another work of Coupland’s – Life After God. This novel is a series of fragments – memories, feelings, experiences, stories and dreams – told by four different narrators. Like Generation X, a thread of pathos and regret runs through the novel (possibly to a greater degree). However, at first glance the penultimate fragment seems to provide an escape route. In this fragment the narrator reveals a secret – “My secret is that I need God”. This would seem to be the ‘personal testimony’ or confession that we encountered in Generation X as it directs us back towards the grandnarrative, or God. However this can only ever be a surface reading as this fragment never expands beyond its single page of text and is only ever a fragment amongst other fragments. There is no attempt made to initiate an all-encompassing grandnarrative nor an attempt made to be incorporated into one. This can mean two things: either the fragment is a fleeting glimpse of the narrators original regret – the loss of God, or that the narrator is revealing a new understanding of God, one that is not attached to modern knowledge or dependent on any grandnarrative. However, Coupland never expands on this different approach to God and instead we are presented with one last fragment – the narrator submerging himself into a cool mountain pool. We once again return to the level of the purely individual and are left with a paucity of adequate response to the fragments left behind in the collapse of the grandnarrative.

Postmodern Narratives: Intro

In a previous post we presented Lyotard’s account of postmodernism as being a continuation of modernism under the new terms provided by capitalism. However, this overlooked the issue of narrative presented in Lyotard’s On The Postmodern Condition.
Narrative plays a central role in any account of postmodernism and with a closer look at narrative we can further shape our understanding of this difficult subject. This examination will include discussing the writer Douglas Coupland and the two philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Gilles Deleuze.
One of Lyotard’s most significant claims is that the grandnarratives have lost their credibility. Those all encompassing modern worldviews, including Communism, Christianity, and any national myths, have become irrelevant in our world. The collapse of the grandnarrative is in no small part due to the horrors of the Twentieth Century, although they were already under attack philosophically in the Nineteenth Century. Lyotard writes that “the grandnarrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses”, and that “we no longer have recourse to the grandnarratives”.
As the loss of the grandnarrative is regarded as a prominent feature of postmodernism, postmodernism has often been accused of descending into a moral and epistemological relativism as meaning and truth seem to disappear with the collapse of the systems which once determined them and propped them up. But for Lyotard this is not at all the case: ‘‘Lamenting the “loss of meaning” in postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact that knowledge is no longer primarily narrative. Such a reaction does not necessarily follow”. Instead Lyotard re-emphasises the continual role narrative plays in postmodernism as he states, “The little narrative remains, the quintessential form of imaginative invention”. Narrative itself survives the collapse of the grandnarrative in the new form of le petit récit or “the little narrative”.
For us, it is not the collapse of grandnarrative that is the most significant feature of postmodernism, but instead it is the way in which narrative continues to play a crucial role both in culture and philosophy. It might be useful to think of it this way: Grandnarratives do not simply disappear – they are smashed and broken apart fragmenting into smaller pieces. These remaining fragments are the “little narratives” Lyotard speaks of and they all have their own unique functions and meanings. If we want to understand postmodernism we need to understand the role of the “little narratives”. We should now examine a few examples . . .

Matt's Homework Assignment: Handed In

Jobs:

1) Gallery Steward, Urbis Manchester - My current job involves standing around Manchester's very own "Millenium Dome".
2) Subway, Piccadilly Station Manchester - My first McJob. Trade Unions are so behind the times when it comes to this area of employment.
3) Royal Mail, Manchester - Probably the only place I'll ever hear someone openly shout "Strike! Strike!" from the shop floor.
4) Gardener/Maintenance Assistant, N.T.C. - John Edgar's left NTC now. That must be the end of an era or something.

Films:
1) The Big Lebowski - It's all about The Dude's carpet.

2) Ghost Dog – There is this lone African-American assassin who is hired out by members of an Italian-American Mafia. But there is much more to it than just being a good action film. It draws on the Hagakure, a layered text of aphoristic wisdom from 16th century Japan which outlines the Way of the Samurai. Although the book itself maintains a strong sense of Japanese Identity and sexism, the film Ghost Dog breaks down the cultural and sexual barriers without lessening the strengths of the book. It's an intelligent and witty film about cross-culturalism.

3) Time Regained – Raoul Ruiz translates Proust’s final volume of In Search of Lost Time into film. Marcel returns to the decadent and vacuous upper classes of French society only to discover the essence of literature. The film mixes Marcel’s immediate experience with his long forgotten memories and fictionalised creations. Stirring sugar into your tea will never be the same again. Who would have known that John Malkovich speaks fluent French?

4)

Vacations:

1) California in 1993 - My dad told us that it was his favourite family holiday. We told him that it was our only family holiday.

2) Germany/Albania, 2002 - After I graduated from MMU, I spent 3 weeks in Canada and then headed off to Germany for 5 weeks and Albania for 2 weeks. I stayed with Sabine and her family in Gelnhausen near Frankfurt. Apart from just hanging out with friends and building a wall in the basement of the Gelnhausen church, Sib took me on tours of Eisenach, Mainz, Koblenz and the Rhine Valley. I am eternally grateful to Sabine for this oppurtunity and for her hospitality. The 2 weeks spent in Albania with the German youth team was amazing as well.

3) Budapest/Prague, 2001 - It was a university trip and my friends and I took the oppurtunity to head off to central Europe. I would explore each city during the day before spending all night in different jazz clubs, cafes and cellar bars. The next morning it would all begin again. It was an exhausting 7 days. I returned to Prague in 2005 with Tomoko. The atmosphere of the city had changed to me, but we had a great time. It was our first trip together.

4) Rome 2004 - I spent 13 days in Rome with my friend Ruben. I couldn't have had a better or more thorough guide. I would spend each morning running around the city to different parts of the city with Ruben and then each afternoon relaxing with a game of chess, some esspresso and some Heidegger.

Places I've Lived:

1) Vancouver - I was born there but my parents moved to Alberta 2 weeks later. We did return for a year when I was 6.

2) Innisfail, Alberta

3) Manchester, England

4) The University of Warwick, Coventry, England.

Places I'd Rather Be:

1) On top of the Schilthorn in Switzerland

2) Sitting in a cafe

3) On a 3 a.m. walk around the University of Warwick with Simon.

4) In Edale with Tomoko

Foods:

1) Any of the following cooked by Tomoko: Gyoza, Sushi, noodles, sandwiches etc. . .

2) Li's Szechuan ribs

3) Peggy's home-made soups.

4) My mum's Lasagne and Cesar salad meal.

Writers

1) Dostoevksy - He asks the essential questions.

2) Marcel Proust

3) Jack Kerouac - On the Road isn't my favourite, but it never lost its grip on me.

4) Ismail Kadare