La parola-immagine e l'immagine in parole : pubblicità, serie tv, fumetti, pop art in Generation X di D. Coupland

Dismissing the traditional binary contrast between «word and image», the Canadian writer and artist, Douglas Coupland, shapes his debut novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991), with a series of fragmented “messages”, i.e. infoblip sidebars, cartoons, framed slogans. Coupland turns W.J.T. Mitchell’s critical reading of the word-image relationship into a dynamic and Xtra-ordinary play, that same «dialectical trope» that is a «relay between semiotic, aesthetic, and social differences» (1984). Similarly to a conceptual artist, using a “collage technique”, Coupland works both as a writer and as a designer and editor, constantly reminding the reader of the coding/decoding process, manipulating rules and working within a realistic setting and time frame – i.e. America in the 1980s – as well as a fictional plot and three imaginary characters. Narrative and stylistic devices are intertwined with unusual typographic solutions, designed to make the text inter-act with its margins as if expanding the socio-historical potential of the novel and offering a time-capsule exhibition. This essay aims at foregrounding the conceptual and intermedial nature of this novel: an hybrid work of art that reframes various communication means – such as advertisement, TV, cartoons, pop art, political and social propaganda – in order to critically rethink the way written and iconic messages work alongside the human need for story-telling and ultimately “history” as the tale that can no longer be told because of Barthes’ Mythologies and Fukuyama’s statement (1989).