Back to Index
Vietnam ended America's Grand Narrative. The Grand Narrative, as conceptualised by Jean-Francois Lyotard, legitimises an ideology by reference to a telos, or ultimate end. Lyotard believes this end is the emancipation of the people, as it is formalised in many different discourses: the Enlightenment, Marxism and Christianity. For America, the attainment of liberty is omnipresent in its cultural politics. The image of the democratically free man led to the American self-identification as the emancipator of the world. This ideological expansionism is evident in America's Cold War narrative. That 'good' will always prevail.
The move to a postmodern episteme is characterised by Lyotard as due to 'The grand narratives [becoming] scarcely credible' . Lyotard believes the development of grand, or meta, narrative ideology led to its own delegitimation. He argues Auschwitz 'is the crime opening postmodernity' . The enlightenment belief that all that is real is rational is violently refuted by the holocaust. For America, the belief that all that is American is good, and that all that is good will prevail, was destroyed by the inconclusive nonmeaning of the Vietnam war. The debate ranges as to the outcome of America post-Vietnam . Obviously, the question of Vietnam is complex and wide ranging. All I wish to do is to posit Vietnam as an epistemological break in American grand narrative ideology. This leads me to the question: What happens now?
The rise of the New Right in American politics can be seen as a reaction to this collapse of the 'Americaness' of America. Alan Crawford in "The New Right" argues, 'The New Right feeds on discontent, anger, insecurity and resentment' . New right rhetoric reduces America's problems to the period 1965-1975. The period of the Vietnam war also saw the rise in second wave feminism, the counter-culture of the late sixties, and Watergate. For the New Right, America had lost its way.
The reaffirmation of Americanism is evident in Ronald Reagan's political rhetoric. Reagan's elevation to President was indebted to The New Right, economically and ideologically. If we consider Reagan's state of the union address (1985), we hear of an America 'stronger, freer and more secure than before' . This is an America 'poised for greatness' . Such greatness would bring the "second American revolution". Such a revolution is not isolationist, it is a revolution 'that carries beyond our shores the golden promise of human freedom' . How does Reagan legitimise such expansionist rhetoric? 'History is asking us, once again, to be a force for good in the world' . Reagan's pioneerist language is explicitly in the style of the grand narrative. He calls for universal human freedom, using history as a referent. Vietnam, for Reagan and the New Right, was merely a blip on America's linear trajectory toward a teleologic end.
To support the hyperbole of Reagan's 'defender of global freedom' ideas, the largest increase in military expenditure in peacetime history was mobilised. The 157 billion spent in 1981 soared to 273 billion by 1986. Paul Boyer summarises the reason for this: 'Smarting over the Vietnam defeat ... [the people] welcomed the boost to morale that came from pouring billions into military hardware' . Reagan wanted to show that America was still prepared to intervene for the cause of 'freedom'. Intervention was rife in the 1980s, giving such welcomed (but ridiculously imbalanced) victories as the restored government in Grenada. Intervention also had negative outcomes. In Nicaragua, the CIA trained and funded Contras did not receive Grenadaesque public support. This resulted in the Boland amendment banning aid to the Contra's. The conflict between the ban and the covert government's desire to support to cause in Nicaragua led to the notorious Iran-Contra affair. The first part of this complex operation was the arms-for-hostages deal. Despite the government's policy of non-negotiation with terrorists, an agreement was struck, whereby Israel would supply weapons to Iran in exchange for American hostages. Israel's weapons would be replaced by America. Iran was overcharged for the weapons and the excess profits were diverted to the Contras.
When the affair was discovered, Reagan was cleared of any incriminating knowledge. What this signifies is perhaps more sinister. If Reagan was cleared of knowledge, the image of the omniscient President was fallacious.
I am suggesting America, post metanarrative delegitimisation, moved into the cultural and political stage of the simulation proper. As Jean Baudrillard believes, 'we are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reasons' . For Baudrillard, the postmodern era represents an implosion of meaning. This implosion effects the real, in that the real can now only be proven by reference to the image. The lack of a self-present reality thus marks the undifferentiation of the image and the real. Baudrillard demonstrates this by discussing Disneyland. Disneyland presents itself as image, fantasy, make-believe. This is in order to affirm that outside its gates must be real. But such codependency of inside/outside and image/reality is so confused that distinction is elusive.
Baudrillard discusses this hyperreality in relation to the reproductive economy of late capitalism: 'The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction' . This mass reproduction has imploded the real to the level of not only what is possible to be reproduced, but what is always already reproduced. This image without a referent signifies a Baudrillardian simulacrum.
Baudrillard, in America, considers the countries 'ravishing hyperrealism' . In this text is Baudrillard's analysis of the Vietnam war, which I find highly relevant to my study. He says:
That is why the war was won by both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if one side won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world' .
What I have defined as the collapse of the grand narrative, Baudrillard believes represents the precession of the simulacra in America. Though the grand narrative has failed, America is reaffirmed in simulation.
We have seen how the Iran-Contra affair highlighted evidence of a hyperreal president. The blurring of image and reality is what William H. Chafe believes accounts for Reagan's popularity: Reagan's fixation on simple ideas and his ability to communicate them. I have demonstrated how Reagan's ideas are in the same style of the grand narrative. This is supported by Chafe's account of these ideas: 'As items of faith, they were infallible, impervious to argument, evidence, experience or reality' . What Reagan's rhetoric demonstrates then, is a dissolution between the style of the message (the image) and the reality. As this replicates a grand narrative style, I think it is fair to call this the new American hypernarrative.
Congrugent to this is Reagan being, as Boyer writes, 'above all a creature of the media' . The media dominated politics of the 80s has been fiercely criticised as detracting from the real issues of the American experience. The new form of soundbite politics dominated. Even the soundbite is reduced: from 45 seconds in 1980 to 9 seconds in 1988.
The media is key in analysing the Baudrillardian implosion of boundaries. Its more present than presence dissolves the division between the public and private, such as the Iran-Contra affair, but also Reagan's cancer and Nancy's astrological preferences. Such previously private affairs are over visualised in the media, which in tern, Baudrillard believes, implodes the traditional separateness of private and public. Douglas Kellner summarises Baudrillard's position on the media:
Baudrillard uses here a model of the media as a black hole of signs and information that absorbs all contents into cybernetic noise which no longer communicates meaningful messages in a process which all content implodes into form .
This proliferation of information in the media, the over affect of messages, creates an apathy and cynicism in what Baudrillard refers to as 'the masses'. Too much information has imploded any plausible meaning. The result: hypermeaning.
What I am concerned with is how recent American fiction is in dialogue with this dissolution of meaning. The modernistic grand narratives provide no transcendental reference in post-Vietnam America. The succession of image politics and the dominance of infomedia has displaced meaning far out of reach. I believe many examples of contemporary American fiction are concerned with this situation.
One of the first things we notice in Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country is its positioning in consumerism. The passive commentary of the predominance of consumerism is evident on the first page: 'At the next exit, Exxon, Chevron, and Sunoco loom up, big faces on stilts. There's a Country Kitchen, a McDonald's and a Stockey's' . It is within this context that the protagonist, Sam, attempts to discover the 'real meaning' of Vietnam. For Sam, 'Everything means something' . Her search is for an authoritative meaning, but in attempting to find it, she assumes such a thing can be found.
There is a play between the reality/image of the television in the text. We are told Sam 'knew very well that on TV, people always had the words to express their feelings, while in real life hardly anyone ever did' . Yet despite this distinction, we are told, 'Years ago, when Colonel Blake was killed, Sam was so shocked she went around stunned for days. She was only a child then, and his death on the program was more real to her than the death of her own father' . The image is more real than the real.
This hyperreality effects Sam's interpretative analysis of Vietnam. When Sam attempts to cognitively recapture the essence of Vietnam, we are told she 'can't really see it .. All I can see in my mind is picture postcards. It doesn't seem real' . The problem is that in the new age of the media, meaning is replaced by the image. Added to this is the inherent nonmeaning of Vietnam. Vietnam cannot mean, cannot signify, because it is the antithesis to America's metanarrative. The negative outcome of this is the incommutablity surrounding the Vietnam experience. Pete tells Sam, 'Stop thinking about Vietnam, Sambo. You don't know how it was, and you never will. There is no way you can ever understand' . Because the grand narrative can only signify victory, the failure of the Vietnam war cannot be a shared. It cannot be communicated. The new American hypernarrative can be seen as responsible for the temporary cultural amnesia. Though an attempt at closure and communication is made late in In Country (and indeed, late in American cultural politics), this does not fully resolve the problems I have raised. There was even a late attempt to realign this feeling of incommutability. When Pol Pot's mass genocide was uncovered, the intervention could be placed within the ideology of the hypernarrative, and the Vietnam war was elevated to a 'just and noble cause' .
Vietnam is the delegitimisation of the metanarrative: America will not always prevail. This represents the culmination into image. The practise of such predetermined conflicts as Grenada demonstrates a new hyperreal narrative. Because failure at war began the accent of the image, it is interesting to consider the following major conflict. Jean Baudrillard, in The Gulf War did not take place, believes the new techno war represents, 'war stripped of its passions' . The new age of virtual war shows the dominance of technology as predetermining the outcome. Baudrillard writes, 'No accidents occurred in this war, everything unfolded according to programmatic order, in the absence of passioned disorder' . A conflict based on simulated events, disinformation, and electronic warfare, gives the ability to manipulate signals to those who have technological dominance. This demonstrates the new hyperrealism of war. George Bush believed 'we've licked the Vietnam syndrome' , which by the new praxis of the image, they had. Baudrillard believes this eminence of the image is moving toward a New World Order. He sees the crucial stake of the conflict in the Gulf as being the reduction of Islam to the global order. Baudrillard writes, 'All that is singular and irreducible must be reduced and absorbed. This is the law of democracy and the New World Order' .
The hypernarrative is America using the same language games but playing by different rules. The negative outcome of this is that for those who seek an old style authoritative meaning, articulation is limited, due to the new dominance of hypermeaning. Rejection of this leads to a profound sense of silence.
Douglas Coupland's Generation X functions as a counterpoint to In Country. From early on we realise the three main characters are attempting to get outside consumer America. What this means, though, is a divorce from meaning. As structuralism and post-structuralism have decreed, meaning is only possible in terms of signification: being a part of the 'system'. Contrary to In Country and the need for ultimate meaning - which is only attainable in signification - the characters of Coupland's text realise the new hypermeaning in post-grand narrative America is now simply the media proliferation of information, thus only the simulacra of meaning. The narrator states, 'We live small lives on the periphery ... we wanted silence and we have that silence now' .
Their quest for nonmeaning is evident in the treatment of history. Andy has the realisation: 'I knew even then that there was still too much history there for me. That I needed less in life. Less past' . There is some confusion as to whether Andy wants less history or if there simply is no history left to refer to. Andy isolates Vietnam as the last event of history. This is before 'history was turned into a press release' . As Andy says, 'I arrived to see a concert in history's arena just as the final set was finishing' . The wish for less meaning, less reference is also geographically evident. The desert is the extermination of meaning-as-reference, the vast depthlessness referring to nothing. For Baudrillard, 'the desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance' . In mass culture everything signifies, everything means. What the characters want is to escape this relentless hypermeaning of contemporary culture.
We are told, 'the world had gotten too big - way beyond our capacity to tell stories about it, and so all we're stuck with are these blips and chunks and snippets on bumpers' . This demonstrates the concern with the proliferation of information that has led to this implosion of meaning. Meaning is only attained now in a hyperrealist narrative, where true reference is erased. Reference is now encoded. Baudrillard considers the media's coding as limiting meaning. This coding is reliant on 'the test'. The test is based on a question/answer binary logic. This logic negates any contemplation or radical choice, in that the answer is always regulated by the question. The best example I can give is the Pepsi challenge. Here, the question forces an answer, and even if you manage to reject Pepsi, you are forced into choosing another cola. The binary system of the Pepsi challenge, and of the test in general, thus silences any radical option, or any opting out of the game. Meaning is only available if we play by the rules of the test; are opinion only counts if we take the Pepsi challenge. Thus, there is no real meaning at all: it is hypermeaning.
To be situated outside this hypermeaning led to the theme of incommutability of In Country. That is the negative outcome. In Generation X, the attempt to transcend encoded meaning is achieved in moments that, through the shear weight of their poetic ambiguity, resist totality and encodement. Here, I am referring mainly to the ending scene of Andy's experience, of the burning fields, the egret and the handicapped children . I am not going to offer a detailed interpretation, because for me, this scene represents the postmodern sublime: it cannot be encoded.
I am implementing hypermeaning as either a recourse to encoded infomedia, which Baudrillard believes implodes meaning and reality - fusing it with the image, or as reference to the grand narrative. But as Lyotard explains, 'We no longer have recourse to the grand narratives' , they have lost their legitimate properties. For Lyotard, because universal consensus can now never be reached, which would insure legitimation, new legitimation is available on the level of the language game - small narratives. This is the favouring of parole - the individual speech act - over langue - the rules of the game. Lyotard believes this localised level of legitimation is what will re-establish meaning. This is 'the quest for paralogy' .
This is what I believe the characters of Generation X are attempting to achieve. As Claire states, 'Either our lives become stories or there's just no way to get through them' . The end of grand narration represents the end of authoritative discourse, but this opens the way for the small narrative, self-authorised meaning. Sam in In Country rejects the small narrative in a quest for authorial meaning. Because the grand narrative cannot offer this, any attempt to appeal to authorised meaning is deferred. This is the negative postmodern condition.
Generation X sees the attempt to bury the corpse of the grand narrative, and seeks rejection of encoded hypermeaning, in favour of the authenticity of the small narrative. This is reflected in the style of the book, where one complete story is debunked in favour of many small stories. Though complete transcendence of contemporary hypermeaning is impossible (see the implosion of consumerist infospeak in their own language) - those small moments of the postmodern sublime offer a transcendence, as they cannot be signified, comodified, or coded by hyperrealism. This denies the nihilism of a rejection of (hyper)meaning. The ambiguous scenes in Generation X mark the rejection of the new American hypernarative. This is the first step toward the affirmation of the Lyotardian small narrative. For them it signifies, and this is beyond the encodement of a hypernarrativist culture.