THE DIALECTICS OF EMPTINESS:

DOUGLAS COUPLAND’S AND VIKTOR

PELEVIN’S TALES OF GENERATION
X AND P
THE DISAFFECTION OF THE MIDDLE CLASS is a common subject for contem-
porary 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 materi-
alistic 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 dis-
traction 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 com-
mercialism 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 market-
eers 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

Forum for Modern Language Studies Vol. 42 No. 3 doi:10.1093/fmls/cql010

# The Author (2006). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
240 SALLY DALTON-BROWN

Shampoo Planet (1992), endorse the commodification even of history (he develops
the concept of HistoryWorldÔ, 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 increas-
ingly 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 pres-
ident Igor’ Shaitanov as a form of computer virus designed to destroy cultural
memory.19
 TALES OF GENERATION X AND P 241

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 commer-
cial21 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 paradoxic-
ally 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 counterpoin-
ted 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.
242 SALLY DALTON-BROWN

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 apoca-
lypse. 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 ideo-
logy, 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 sol-
ipsism 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 perpetu-
ates 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
 TALES OF GENERATION X AND P 243

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 nomen-
clature 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 reli-
gious 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 self-
deluding 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 trans-
formation 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
244 SALLY DALTON-BROWN

self-absorbed, solipsistic lifestyle of the characters appears to negate. In his end-

ing 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, genu-
ine 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 clichéd 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 transcend-
ental. 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.
 TALES OF GENERATION X AND P 245

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 con-
clusion 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 self-
worship, 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
246 SALLY DALTON-BROWN
59
their gods’’, 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 subjec-
tifications 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 sep-
arate 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 Žižek:
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.
SALLY DALTON-BROWN

Trinity College
University of Melbourne
Royal Parade
Melbourne 3052
Australia
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.
 TALES OF GENERATION X AND P 247
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 à Go-Go’’ (review), The New York Times Magazine 23 January 2000. Online
edition at: <http//www.nytimes.com.library/magazine/home/20000123mag-cowley7.html>.
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: <http//books.guardian.co.uk/deperatments/generalfiction/story/0,600>. Critic
M. Sverdlov, ‘‘Tekhnologiia pisatel’skoi vlasti’’, Voprosy literatury 4 (2003), suggests that it could
stand for ‘‘Pi’’ (p. 18); online edition at: <http://magazines.russ.ru/voplit/2003/4/sver.html>. 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: <http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3763/is_200409/ai_n11849876>.
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: <http://magazines.russ.ru/voplit/1998/3/>. See also his ‘‘Proekt Pelevin’’, Voprosy literatury 4
(2003); online edition at: <http://magazines.russ.ru/voplit/2003/4/>.
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: <http://query.
nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01EEDE1330F93BA35750C0A9649C8B63>; 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: <http://magazines.russ.ru/
zvezda/1997/12/>; E. Pronina, ‘‘Fatal’naia logika Viktora Pelevina’’, Voprosy literatury 4 (2003), online
edition at: <http://magazines.russ.ru/voplit/2003/4/>; A. Nemzer, ‘‘Kak by tipa po zhizni: Generation
‘P’ kak zerkalo otechestvennogo infantilizma’’, Vremia MN (1999), No. 4, online edition at: <http://
pelevin.nov.ru/stati/o-nemz2/1.html>, 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: <http://us.geocities.
com/coupland.geo/sp19.html>. 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 à Go-Go’’.
248 SALLY DALTON-BROWN
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:
<http://books/guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfictionstory/0,600>.
38
W. Blythe, ‘‘Doing laundry at the end of history’’, Esquire, March 1994, notes the ‘‘sappy’’ endings;
online edition at: <http:www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/5560/crit1.html?200517>. 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: <http://books.
guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,212846,00.html>.
51
‘‘Gogol à Go-Go’’.
52
R. Clarke, ‘‘A Shot of New Russian Spirit’’, The Independent on Saturday 29 April 2000; online edition
via <http://www.marsh-agency.co.uk/>.
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., <http://www.kuzbass.ru/moshkow/lat/
PELEWIN/bibliography.txty>. 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. Žižek, Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (London, 2004), pp. 83–4.
63
Coupland, Life after God, p. 247.