Interview with Douglas Coupland

CultureWatch editor Tony Watkins interviewed Douglas Coupland on 3 September, 2003, about his latest book, Hey Nostradamus! which was published in the UK on 1 September.

You can download or listen to the interview from the Damaris online store. We don't recommend this unless you have a fast internet connection.

Transcript

Part One, transcribed by Richard Dimery, March 2004

TW: Damaris is all about relating Christian faith and contemporary culture, so we've had our eye on you since Generation X. In fact, we have a network of study groups that get together and Generation X was one of the first books that the first group ever looked at - so you got us on the road!

It was a fascinating book because it was that wonderful snapshot of a culture as it was then. And so many people said, 'Douglas Coupland - he has caught the zeitgeist of the late 80s/early 90s.'

How do you perceive that things have shifted between then and now? What would your analysis of today's situation be?

DC: Well, I can only speak about my own life, really. The moment you try and speak for anyone else, it's not going to work. I think that the best way to look at this kind of question is: imagine if you were to take someone from 1989, which is when I actually wrote the book, and transport them fourteen years in the future - what would be striking, and what would not be striking?

I think, and I'm not alone in thinking this, that the porosity of information right now is just shocking. I remember watching Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World [1991] . . . it was set in 2000 and people were sending each other moving text or moving images, and I thought, 'That's ridiculous, that could never happen.' And of course, it's everywhere - it defines our era.

I think that you're talking about something else here: how does it feel to be inside the head and the soul now, as opposed to then? I look back on that and I think how naïve we were about so many issues . . . Between then and now - boy, we're not naïve any more, that's for sure.

TW: What's made the difference over those years, to make us less naïve than we were?

DC: The over-availability of information and, obviously, events in the wider world. There's a little bit less sense now that the centre is going to hold than there was back then. And that . . . suicide-bombing mentality certainly defines our era.

And certainly, as we saw with the power outage in the Eastern states and Ontario last year (70 million people: no power because one line outside a city in Ohio dipped down and hit a tree! And we had the ice storm in Eastern Canada where within two days all the transmission lines in Quebec were like, literally, crushed), things are very fragile. The interconnectedness of the world is far more evident now than it ever was.

TW: Do you think we think that life is more fragile now than we did back in the days of Generation X?

DC: I think that people worry about their children more than they did in the past. It used to be just, 'Don't accept candy from strangers,' and now it's like, you know, 'Look out for the entire world the rest of your life.'

TW: And with Hey, Nostradamus! watch out for your own schoolmates, as well . . .

DC: In Canada things aren't so bad, but I go to Los Angeles a lot on business . . . you drive past the elementary schools there and they've got barbed wire and armed guards. In elementary school? And it's not just that school, it's every school. I was in Alaska about two months ago, in Anchorage, and you drive down the streets where it says 'School Zone', and it's in America so it's like, 'Drug-Free School Zone'. And I think, how do you respond to all this and not make a psychotic break? Or how do you experience all this and not feel schizoid? And how do you just manage to have some sort of serenity? Serenity's kind of an over-used word.

And I've been thinking about this. You know, what is it that's going to make you be able to cope not only with what's going on now but whatever tsunami it is that's coming toward us in the future.

There's a few things, I think. One is very occupational - it's simply the best insurance you have against the future, as well as the best advice for the future (it works both ways) - is figuring out what it is you like to do, what you like. And that's the one thing schools don't really train people for. My brother's a taxidermist and after years and years of trying to do other things, I was, 'Look, Tim, for gods' sakes, you love taxidermy, do it', and he does it, and he's Canada's champion. I'm kinda proud of him.

The people I know - forget money, it's not part of it - the people I know who are, by and large, happy, are the ones who are doing what they enjoy doing. And that's a very simple thing.

Number two is, figure out what it is you don't do well, and then don't do it. I learned that four years ago. Boy, did that change my life - I wish I'd known that a long, long time ago . . .

TW: What was it you worked out that you shouldn't be doing?

DC: Cleaning - in any form! Picking things up - I just completely gave up on that, and now I don't do it. I have other people to help me, and life is just - wow! I feel reborn, almost. So those are very practical - things your guidance counsellor never told you.

TW: And are those things sufficient for you to feel that you can cope?

DC: Oh God, there's loads more than that. Those are occupational; those are almost like - the Government should be taking care of that. Just as an addendum to that, I have this rule which is that, if it feels like homework, don't do it - just don't, don't, do it. And of course you say that, and you have responsibilities . . . sometimes you just have to deal with the fact that it's homework.

In terms of [Hey Nostradamus!], there's the passage from Corinthians1 which I originally found on the tombstone of one of the kids that was killed in Columbine . . . (Andy Warhol, who was painting just before he died . . . Heaven and Hell are Just one Breath Away!) and to me, I read that passage, and it just - wow! What it's saying, I think, is that heaven and hell are just a breath away, but at any moment something startling could happen to you, something amazing, suddenly - no matter what you're feeling, the world would become charged with meaning and the feeling of something better . . . You have to be aware of the fact that that could happen at any moment, and yet at the same time, you turn the next page and you're listening to Cheryl, and Cheryl is saying that at any moment any of us are capable of all sins . . .

I'm sitting here with you - I could pull out a knife and stab you to death, I could steal your machine, I could blaspheme, I could attack any of those people over there. The whole list of sins that you can commit are infinite . . . The alternate polarity of light is between that passage from Corinithians, which is a visitation from beyond, and this - you could call it ultra-sin, or hyper-sin . . . and that to me sort of defined the book and that's why we place things there.

And then you read the book and there's Cheryl who's . . . there's a purity to Cheryl. And then you meet Jason and Heather who are, for various reasons - just life, or attrition, or whatever - are screwed up. And then there's the coda at the end which is Reg, and he's a miserable bastard who you hate, hate, hate, who must die, die, die - and yet he's the one who actually ends up being humanised . . . not in a humanism sense, but he becomes . . . the moment he dropped all his . . . he had to lose everything - all his valuables in this world, sort of like Job, and like, the moment he lost everything, the moment he shatters a legalistic doctrinaire thinking and began actually questioning things for himself, suddenly he became real. Then, 'I can't believe I'm liking this guy'. Like, this is so shocking.

TW: Was that a surprise to you, writing this? Were you expecting to . . .

DC: Oh no, you never start a book without knowing the ending. I think anyone who's ever started a book without knowing the end has never finished a book, you have to know that.

TW: It was Philip Pullman last year who was saying how he finds himself surprised by what his characters end up doing.

DC: Oh, well, in that sense . . . I mean say you're going, driving from Vancouver to Montreal - you know roughly the road you're going to take, and how long you have to take to get there, but along the way, you know, your car breaks down, you go to a theme park, you pick up a hitch hiker, who you know . . . God knows what. And so there are those surprises along the way, but you still have to get to the end because you're writing to communicate with other people - you're not writing just to fill up space.

TW: Why did you put Reg at the end? Is it because you couldn't have worked that transformation in him without having those other three characters expressing their thoughts first?

DC: I think so, I think . . . see I believe that there's something to believe in, I believe that people are more good than they are bad, and I think that . . . let's break out a Microsoft pie chart and look at the way I spend my day thinking. I think there's a big, pizza-shaped slice of my life that I spend thinking about God, and I think that might be more than most people, or maybe it's small, I don't know . . . Maybe we should all have little pie-charts in our chests that show what we're thinking in the day - it'd be really neat.

I think about this a lot and what I'm learning is that, OK, your relationship with God . . . the moment you think, 'OK, well I've figured that out - next!' is like the moment it ends. And it's not something you renegotiate once a week at church, or even every day - it's like, every moment of your life you should be renegotiating that. And that's largely part of the experience that's, amongst other things, just gonna help you stay alive and capable of dealing with the world as it's playing out. All that is to get Reg to the point where he realises, 'OK, now that's the point you have to get to . . . '

Footnotes

1. 1 Corinthians 15:51-52: 'Behold, I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.' Coupland quotes these verses at the start of his book. [back]

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