The Cynical Generation

Graham J. Matthews (bio)
Nanyang Technological University

A review of Mandel, Naomi. Disappear Here: Violence After Generation X. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2015.

The idea that the people who make up a generation share certain characteristics dates back to the mid-nineteenth century French lexicographer and philosopher, Émile Littré, whose authoritative Dictionnaire de la langue française (1863–72) defined a generation as all people coexisting in society at any given time. Descended from the Latin word generāre meaning “to beget,” the word had primarily been used to signify the relationship between fathers and sons. However, the concept’s utility emerged later through the process of dividing contemporaries into different age groups; this inaugurated the notion of social generations and led to claims about shifts in aesthetic taste. Robert Wohl wrote: “The division of society into age-groups occurred because the mass of active and productive adults changed totally and regularly every thirty years. With this change in personnel came a change in sensibility” (19–20). The social generation model studies the intangible development of human sentiments and beliefs. Consequently, the term “generation” has come to demarcate the decline of an old culture and the rise of a new one that remains in place for approximately twenty-five years, occurring with a rhythm whose logic is unknown. Nevertheless, when one generation and its dominant cultural norms are replaced with another, it is typically presumed to be for historically specific reasons. For instance, the Lost Generation, named by Gertrude Stein and popularized by Ernest Hemingway’s epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926), defines a generation of people born 1880–1900 who lived through the First World War. Traditional literary fiction appeared ill-equipped to capture the trauma of mechanized violence on an industrial scale as its audience irrevocably changed; the implication is that the link between a generation and culture is not accidental and that each generation is defined in relation to a seismic event. The G.I. Generation (meaning either “General Issue” or “Government Issue”) was born during the years 1901–1924 and fought during the Second World War. The Silent Generation (1925–1942) grew up during the Second World War, and many fought in the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, the Baby Boomers were born in the wake of the Second World War and were defined by a substantial increase in the birth rate due to returning soldiers. Generation X was the first generation to be defined not by world wars or other seismic historical events but by the bonds that arise between individuals through exposure to social and cultural change. Karl Mannheim’s 1927 essay, “The Problems of Generations” argues that the rhythm in the sequence of generations is far more apparent in the literary realm than in institutions: “the aesthetic sphere is perhaps the most appropriate to reflect overall changes of mental climate” (279). With its specific aesthetic and moral preferences, Generation X is a generation defined more than any other by an assemblage of media-focused historical and political events, television shows, films, and music that function as common frames of reference.

Naomi Mandel’s Disappear Here: Violence after Generation X develops further the themes of suffering, identity, and ethics explored in her earlier book, Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America (2007), to demonstrate the ways in which Generation X’s particular attitude towards violence has been formed by developments in home media, personal computing, and reality TV. Typically characterized as anomie, boredom, and supine defeatism, Generation Xers’ fixation on negation, ambivalence and multiplicity is presented by Mandel as a revitalization of the hermeneutics of suspicion that is simultaneously antagonistic towards yet disseminated by popular culture. Rather than amoral and disaffected, Xers’ ethical center is integral to their complex and counter-intuitive attitude towards violence and its representation. Unlike previous generations, Xers’ experience is defined by paralysis, menace, and complicity, surrounded by the blurring of the image and the physical world through the saturation of home media, CNN, reality TV and video games, coupled with a heightened cynicism towards authority, media, nationalism, and utopian ideals. Mandel’s scintillating analysis traverses the works of seminal Generation X authors including Bret Easton Ellis, Douglas Coupland, Don DeLillo, and Chuck Palahniuk. Although these writers exhibit a broad range of styles, they are united by the concerns of their generation and linked by changes in politics, culture, and technology in the 1980s and 1990s. Mandel adopts a range of approaches, delivering a historical overview, an author study (on Ellis), a reading of post-9/11 novels, a theoretical critique of violence, and a sustained analysis of one text (Fight Club) that has become a generational touchstone. Each approach offers a partial view on a complex and variegated array of thinkers, writers, and artists, brought together through the central claim that Generation X “refuses traditional fidelities and alliances and points the way to a future, after X” (6). As Mandel traces the vanishing mediators that comprise Generation X across our globalized, media-driven, and connected world, X emerges as an attitude or outlook rather than simply a demographic; one that, superficially at least, is linked to a commitment to creative and critical impulses in society, economics, and ethics.

Fight Club, in both its novel and film incarnations an emblematic text for Generation X, depicts men from a variety of classes and ethnic backgrounds as disaffected, disillusioned, and drawn to the experience of violence. By joining the titular fight club they find community and a sense of affirmation otherwise lost to them within the corporatized, global system of capitalist exchange. In the twist ending, it is revealed that the unnamed everyman narrator and the seductive leader of the fight club, Tyler Durden, are dissociated personalities within the same body, thereby blurring the boundary between representation and reality. For Generation Xers, Mandel notes, “the line between fiction and fact is permeable, fungible; the relationship of violence to action is characterized by complexity, giving pause to ethics; ‘reality’ is produced for television and marketed for consumption, and fiction … assumes an important role in the creation, construction, and preservation of ‘real violence’” (211–12). Whereas Millennial writers have sometimes struggled to articulate the real effects of the virtual and invisible systemic violence produced by the 2008 financial crisis, Generation X writers have long traced the shifting grounds of representation, the distinction between perception and materiality, and the dissolution of reality. Whereas Sam Goodman and I previously argued in Violence and the Limits of Representation (2013) that violence often signals the limitations of representational strategies since it is either too abstract or too concrete, Mandel suggests that violence is subject to representation and hence to misrepresentation, distortion, and denial. We claimed that these distortions are all we can represent of violence —the ripples rather than the impact itself —but Mandel convincingly demonstrates the ways in which representation can operate at a higher level while also delivering a subtle conceptualization of violence’s effects on the distinction between representation and reality: “violence is real, though its reality is hard to find, and is ultimately indistinguishable from fictions” (216). Generation X thinks it needs to determine what is true (while remaining mindful of the contingency of truth) and to act with social and ethical responsibility. Unfortunately, that impulse is not immediately apparent in most Xers’ work, and the ironic delivery favored by these writers, artists, and film-makers lends itself to accusations that cynicism is itself a problematic ideological position; their philosophy is predicated on laying bare the fictive qualities of political statements, emphasizes the limitations of rigid codes of ethics, and threatens to evacuate collective discourse of affect.

Chapter one entitled “Why X Now?” historicizes the literature and culture of a generation defined by the representation of violence without opposition, critique, or remedy. Generation X’s defining sense of detachment, atomism, and disaffection was initially articulated in Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero (1985) and Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (1991), both of which display profound ambivalence towards violence and present characters who ostentatiously distrust commitment and responsibility, valuing instead interruption, fragmentation, and cynicism. These attitudes are reflected by the novels’ form. Nevertheless, Mandel discovers value in the Generation X refrains of “whatever” and “nevermind.” Rather than reading them as the apathetic cries of disaffected youth, Mandel sees in these phrases an important renegotiation and articulation of the complex relationship between violence and the real. Instead of seeing violence and images of violence as things to be avoided, Xers were the first generation to determine their proximity to real violence and its mediated image. Vilified by conservative media outlets, who tended to link the music of Metallica and Marilyn Manson, the novels of Anne Rice and Stephen King, and video games such as Doom (1993) and Grand Theft Auto (1997) to criminality and violence, Mandel’s analysis shows that Generation X’s attitude constitutes a refusal to draw simplistic causal links between the representation of violence and violence in reality. As a consequence, Generation X’s “whatever” and “nevermind” redirect critical attention away from immediate displays of subjective violence towards more thoughtful contemplation of pervasive systemic violence.

In “Nevermind: An X Critique of Violence,” Mandel tackles the paradox of violence —that it is simultaneously self-evident and invisible —and the ways in which it is used to stake a claim on the real. In a world in which many of the old certainties are clouded by irony and cynicism, the idea that there is truth to be found in suffering and that trauma conveys authentic experience has gained critical currency. Mandel explains that violence always appears as a problem or issue of urgent concern and therefore brings with it political value and ethical weight at the level of representation. With the caveat that the nature of reality is tenuous, Mandel focuses her attention on the “reality associated with violence” (42). Generation X is said to offer privileged insight into violence precisely because of its ambivalence towards the relationship between representation and its object within a world saturated by film, media, and popular culture. Rather than reading violence as a trauma to which literature responds, Disappear Here shows that Generation X writers conceptualized violence as a means by which reality is constructed. In place of a direct correlation between things and words, with a dark reality waiting to be discovered beneath appearances, the referent is constructed in the wake of the representation. With the wide availability of filmmaking equipment, Generation Xers came to possess a keen awareness of the ways in which media content can be edited, re-visioned, and revealed, thereby demonstrating new potentialities for the dissemination of both truth and lies, revelation and maleficence. The generation’s knowing attitude and cynical reason are exemplified by Coupland’s novel, which is interspersed with asides that mimic and subvert advertising discourse.

In developing a conceptual framework that situates Generation X’s attitude towards violence and representation, Mandel draws on Alain Badiou’s theory of the event. For Badiou, people must commit themselves to an event, a disruptive excess that erupts from within the current structure and that makes possible new truth-procedures. In Disappear Here, Mandel notes that Generation Xers’ preference for indeterminacy and ambivalence risks leading to the diminishment of facts. However, Badiou’s conception of fidelity, truth, and the event offers a fresh way of understanding the ethics of Generation X writers. Mandel identifies three key points from Badiou’s ontology: fidelity is a way of thinking that emerges from an event, not the subject; fidelity can be identified only in what it produces; fidelity assembles truths rather than reflecting them. Because an event compels the subject to create in previously untrammeled directions, Generation X’s seeming abdication of agency could then be interpreted as a willingness to be faithful to an event when it emerges. In Badiou’s materialist and logical conception of the world, relativity is not an excuse for indeterminacy of meaning, but is both coherent and deducible. Whereas Generation X is frequently characterized as having no cause to fight for, this conception suggests that there is a logic to “whatever” and “nevermind.”

In the chapter on Bret Easton Ellis, Mandel analyzes the major novels, focusing on his depiction of aimless youth and the hazards of unlimited freedom. Mandel identifies in Ellis’s oeuvre a recurrence of negation and an aesthetics of subtraction; characters and events are defined by what is removed or absent in order to foreground Generation X’s sense of loss, anomie, and blankness. Ellis’s fiction treads the fine line between complicity and critique common to many postmodern texts, and his novels, ranging from American Psycho (1991) to Imperial Bedrooms (2010), have attracted criticism for their graphic descriptions of violence. But perhaps the most chilling aspect of these texts is the characters’ cynicism and apathy in the face of such acts. Unable to distinguish between representations and reality, these characters languish in a twilit realm of surfaces and cynicism, unable to commit to their feelings or to each other. Mandel argues that Ellis’s novels “trace the disappearance of the sign of the real and document a subtraction of reality from representation” and consequently convey the exhaustion of this generation (212).

Turning to fiction written in the wake of the September 11 attacks by Generation X authors, Mandel identifies a recurrent fascination with the mediated quality of reality. Through intricate readings of Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007), Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World (2005), Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006), and Jess Walter’s The Zero (2006), Mandel explores how events that appeared as if they had emerged from a disaster movie catalyzed reflection on “the relation of reality to image and the preeminence of spectacle in the discursive construction of truth” (116–17). Despite proclamations that the shock of 9/11 would initiate a turn away from cynicism and invigorate the slacker generation with a more concrete identity and sense of purpose, Mandel convincingly shows that Generation X writers remained committed to negotiable definitions, contingent truths, and fluid identities. This section is followed by analysis of Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006) and Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006). Although these authors were born in the 1950s, they feature Generation X protagonists and reflect on the ways in which 9/11 troubled the boundary between representation and reality. Whilst not denying the material reality of the September 11 attacks, all of these writers were stimulated to question the kind of truth claims that surrounded the event. Rather than shoring up certainties and erasing ambivalence, Mandel demonstrates that 9/11 reinforced epistemic uncertainty within Generation X novels and foregrounded the mediated nature of violence and reality.

Mandel treats Jonathan Safran Foer’s 9/11 novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), in a separate chapter alongside his earlier Everything is Illuminated (2002) in order to question the ethics of fictionalizing historical traumas. Mandel sees in the controversial ending, which takes the form of a flip-book of a figure falling from the World Trade Center in reverse, the predilections of a Generation X readership accustomed to the edited, rewound, and manipulated image filtered through Photoshop and the television screen. The images have stimulated a great deal of disagreement regarding their veracity, sentimentality, aesthetics, and ethical import, but for Mandel they attest to the fundamental fragility of reality. Critical responses to the flip-book tend to fall into one of two categories: either an insistence that the images are fictional, thereby maintaining the division between fiction and reality, or a demand that the novel engage explicitly with the causes and consequences of 9/11. Mandel evades this false binary by drawing on the Generation X refrain of “nevermind” to set aside value judgements concerning the novel’s adherence to truth or political utility. Instead, her analysis presents Foer’s oeuvre as a persistent engagement with real, historical violence that is fictional in nature. In the conclusion to this chapter, Mandel highlights the tendency to strive for accuracy in the face of violence but cautions that this approach denies our ability to engage constructively with the mechanisms that produce and sustain the violence of reality and the reality of violence. Her claim is that if violence problematizes our conception of reality, then fiction, which fully embraces its status as untrue, helps us to conceive of the world as a shifting set of fidelities and contingencies. In the light of Mandel’s cogent analysis, Generation X novels safeguard the ability to conceptualize truth in tandem with its fabrication.

Having witnessed first-hand real violence and its very real effects on minds, bodies, buildings, and national identities, Mandel delivers a complex reading of violence as simultaneously affirmed and disavowed, displayed and erased. Disappear Here constitutes a skillful negotiation of the value of X as a time, a style, an experience, and a signature, all united by the sense of multiplicity, erasure, and contingency. Whilst inscribing X as the place of simultaneously crossing out and marking the spot, this book provides thoughtful groundwork for further engagement with a generation’s credo of affectlessness, apathy, and cynicism.

Works Cited

• Mannheim, Karl. “The Problems of Generations.” Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952.
• Wohl, Robert. The Generation of 1914. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979.