We’re Totally Unprepared for What Comes Next
An Interview with Douglas Coupland by Heidi Greco
Douglas Coupland is one of Canada’s best-known writers and artists. His first book, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized the term “Generation X” and he has been called “... possibly the most gifted exegete of North American mass culture writing today.” To date, Coupland has published thirteen novels, two collections of short stories, and seven non-fiction books, as well as numerous articles and screenplays. His visual art installations can be seen around Canada, and he was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in late 2013.
Heidi Greco: So many of your books have Vancouver — or, more specifically, North Vancouver — as their setting. And, perhaps more than any other author who comes to mind, not only the geography, but the weather always plays a role in your fiction. Would you please comment on this?
Douglas Coupland: Growing up, Vancouver was never a real place in the world. It was far away and undiscovered and I liked that. When I went to art school here it was in a tiny school in the middle of nowhere and I think there’s a freedom that came with it, too, a freedom to explore I wouldn’t have found at, say, RISDI or Parsons. And when it came to writing, it just seemed (and seems) natural to set it here. Having said that, Vancouver is now a real place in the global consciousness, and I dislike this. It used to be magic and now we’re just a board game with mountains attached.
Greco: Because your writing, like your art, seems to demand that we “enter”/interact with it, it’s been called “installation writing.”
Coupland: I actually don’t know what that means … is installation writing a new category? Could you tell me what it is? I did installation work in art school — and still do it. So … I guess there’s some kind of connection. I’m unsure.
Greco: I’m sure all that term means is that your work, unlike just about anyone else’s, requires readers to immerse themselves in the “experience” presented by the book. Although this is most evident in a work like The Age of Earthquakes with pages that actually appear to offer choices (e.g., Would you vote for someone who had photos of themselves on Facebook puking onto a snow bank?), it seems that readers are frequently given the offer to “participate” in your books.
Coupland: Hmmm. I don’t think reading should be passive on the reader’s part. With- out engagement, a book is just escapism — which is fine — but I always want people to exit something I’ve done feeling that they have, even in some tiny way, changed. Age of Earthquakes is, even by my own experimental tendencies, pretty way out there, but that was because the book was produced collectively with Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Shumon Basar, and is a love letter to Marshall McLuhan fifty years after the release of The Medium is the Massage. It’s not for people who want to sit back and veg.
Greco: When you’re creating work — I’m thinking both of physical art and written art — do your creative thoughts in the separate genres run parallel to each other or are they completely unrelated?
Coupland: Unrelated. My life falls into four quadrants: Art / Public art / Fiction / Nonfiction. They almost never communicate with each other … or so I think … and then I realize ten years too late that it’s all interconnected.
Greco: Reviews don’t always seem to do justice to your books. Do you believe this has more to do with the nature of your writing — that it serves the critic more as a starting point for thought than as a place for analysis?
Coupland: Once more I’m unsure what this means. Could you flesh it out? I thought I do analyze the world — almost nonstop, actually. So inasmuch as I (sort of) understand the question, I … help me out here.
Greco: Yes, I certainly agree that you (and in your work) analyze the world — almost non- stop, indeed — much the way, dare I suggest, Kurt Vonnegut did. It seems that reviews of your books deal more with those ideas than with the more traditional analysis of character development, credibility of plot, etc. Does that help?
Coupland: I think so. I came to writing in my late twenties after doing many other things — which is something I’ve noticed in people who end up writing actual books. I’ve also deliberately never read lit theory or anything else that might skew or homogenize my thinking process. It’s the one thing any creative person has, their own voice. Once it’s erased by too much osmosis you become just another standardized person writing within what can seem to be a surprisingly narrow set of constraints disguised as freedom. Which is to say I’m unsure how, technically, critically, historically characters are supposed to be created and operate. There are books and writers I came to love as an adult, whose style I instinctively love, so I suppose my education came from them. In Munich, Germany last year I did a restaging of a sculpture I first did in 1996 at the SFU Fine Art Gallery. It was titled Fifty Books I’ve Read More Than Once. It takes the covers of fifty books I’ve (yes) read more than once and appends them to horizontal blocks; the more important the book was to me, the longer the block. It goes chronologically from the present, at the bottom, upwards to the past. The fact that I’d approach my reading list like this probably says more about how I think than anything I could say.
Greco: I often think of the books we read in childhood as providing a kind of ‘background database’ for who we become and how we think in adulthood. As a child, I read broadly. The breadth of your work suggests to me that you did as well. Which works were favourites for you when you were very young, especially as inspiration for later in life?
Coupland: I grew up only with these old clunky paperback jumbo novels in the 1970s: Leon Uris, Arthur Hailey, James Clavell. I don’t even know how they got into the house. I can’t imagine either of my parents either buying them or reading them. But it’s all there was. There was zero literary anything in my life growing up. Nothing. I do remember The Book of Lists and the Guinness Book of World Records and that kind of thing. They were the internet before there was an internet. I pretty much read anything in front of me without pre-judgment and continue to do so. I’ve always believed that good ideas emerge from the collision of two unlikely ideas or pieces of information.
Greco: Do you have a kind of regimen for accomplishing as much as you have?
Coupland: No. Every day is different. I have almost no habits.
Greco: A number of your public art pieces have called Vancouver home — the Terry Fox Memorial, the Infinite Tire, the Digital Orca. But the one that puzzles me most is the forty-three-foot-tall golden stump outside the building at Cambie and Marine. Although I realize it commemorates the famous Hollow Tree in Stanley Park, I’d love to hear why it’s covered in gilt?
Coupland: I was quite involved in saving the old tree in Stanley Park, but I don’t know if you’ve been there lately. It’s disintegrating and despite all efforts, it’s utterly doomed. The gold tree is a mirror image of the real tree (compare in photos!) and the gold is about being reborn and becoming something numinous. Someone also pointed out to me that at this point in time, more people have now seen the gold tree than the real one. That’s something to think about.
Greco: We couldn’t have a conversation without my raising your fascination with Lego …
Coupland: No, not Lego. Not in a piece about writing.
Greco: Did we say this is a piece only about writing? I thought we mentioned the Hollow Tree piece, etc. Besides, subTerrain is about more than just writing; art plays a role there ... Even if we’re only talking about writing, what about Microserfs? Surely, “Oop!” has its basis in Lego. JPod as well?
Coupland: You make good points. I told you I often miss obvious things about myself. I wished I’d followed up on Oop!. It became Minecraft and made people billionaires. I’m not the best person for self-analysis, but I do like modularity, which probably has much to do with growing up in middle-class culture in North America in the 1970s. But then musicians still have to work with discrete notes unless they’re using a Theremin, so … modularity is everywhere, except maybe painting, where I obviously prefer hard-edge painting which is the Lego of painting … so there you go.
Greco: The smell of meat in meteorites. Should their name be changed to meateorites?
Coupland: (Insert appreciative golf clap here.)
Greco: The work exhibited in the Souvenir of Canada show still resonates — especially now in 2017, as we observe 150 years since Confederation. If you could select only three pieces from that exhibit, which ones would you suggest as quintessentially Canadian?
Coupland: It’s been seventeen or eighteen years now since I started looking at Canadian identity, and I’m not really sure why it became such a thing. I do remember getting trashed for it at the beginning. The conventional wisdom then was that Canadianness had been permanently codified and wrapped up in a big bow. And who would want to investigate national identity, anyway? It didn’t really fit into any theory system or polemic, but then the fragility of nationality is, globally, in a way, the number one issue of 2017.
Back to your initial question, I don’t think I’d reduce it down to three of anything — it all fits together in a matrix in my head.
In 1999, I staged a show in an abandoned house in Vancouver called ‘Canada House.’ It was my first foray into investigating Canadian identity, and photos of it are in the book Souvenir of Canada 2. The show then went on to appear in Canada House in London’s Trafalgar Square. And this week I’m in Toronto to commence the artworks for new 60- and 70- storey towers which are together called Canada House. It’s been a long trip.
Images from Souvenir of Canada 2, Douglas & McIntyre, 2004. Used with permission of the author.
Greco: Since the focus of this issue of subTerrain is interviews, who would you love to interview, and why would you choose that person(age)? Living or dead, whoever/whatever you wish.
Coupland: I interviewed Morrissey once in 2006 and it was a flaming mess. I’ll never interview anyone ever again.
Greco: And since this is the fall issue, when people are looking (we hope) for absorbing books to read, can you offer any recommendations?
Coupland: I like anything done by Seth who’s published by Fantagraphics. He did two books on the work of Doug Wright which are gems of books. Check them out! »