T-T-Talkin’ About
Voices of a Generation
How the Phrase “Voice of a Generation”
Conquered the Zeitgeist
by Julia Wick
1.
Was David Foster Wallace the Voice of His Generation? The mantle, bandied about during his life and damn near inextricable since his death, is both trophy and trap. And the answer is definitely, probably, maybe, or does-not-apply, all depending on whom you ask. But I’m not here to debate the Voice of a Generation (VOAG) merits of any one author, least of all David Foster Wallace (for that there is already an entire Reddit thread, with well over 200 comments). I want to talk about the expression itself, what it means, and how it found its peculiar place in our common parlance.
2.
America, 1882: Jesse James was shot; James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt were all born; and The Yale Literary Magazine proclaimed the wandering hero of Alfred Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” to be “the voice of a generation.”
Tennyson may not have been the first VOAG, but this was the very first time those words in that particular order appeared in a national newspaper, magazine or scholarly journal.
After Tennyson, we don’t see “voice of a generation” used to describe another literary voice until 1927, when the The Baltimore Sun called Booth Tarkington “the genial voice of a generation.” Tarkington (best known for his 1918 novel The Magnificent Ambersons) is by no means a household name, but it would be remiss not to mention the fact that he is one of only three writers who have ever won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once.
In the half century between the Tennyson and Tarkington mentions, the phrase is employed a smattering of times, and more often than not in the most literal of senses: Meaning a voice — i.e. the thing you sing with — of a caliber that comes along once in a generation, as opposed to being in any way representative of said generation. That’s how it first showed up in The New York Times, when an Italian operatic tenor was described as having “the most glorious and perfect voice of a generation” in 1919.
The phrase [Voice of a Generation] has been applied to so many people, places and things and that it’s done more than just grow long in the tooth;
it’s now almost entirely lacking in teeth.
The New York Times didn’t break out the VOAG-guns in a book review until 1934, when John Chamberlain described the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay as “the young girl of Vassar and Greenwich Village, the voice of a generation.” The phrase is used another handful of times during ‘40s and ‘50s, but the term as we know it today simply doesn’t infiltrate the popular lexicon, let alone become a trope, until the 1960s. So what happened?
3.
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan is what happened. Dylan surely wasn’t the first person to voice a generation’s discontent, but it wasn’t until the 1963 release of his second album that the press — and by extension the public — began using that phrase en masse. It’s with Dylan that “voice of a generation” became “Voice of a Generation,” and truly entered the zeitgeist as a label. And it’s in the discussion around Dylan that we first see publications doing the VOAG workaround that’s so common today (“hailed as,” “called by many,” etc).
4.
Since Bob Dylan, the phrase has been applied to so many people, places and things and that it’s done more than just grow long in the tooth; it’s now almost entirely lacking in teeth.
The New York Times has entire subgenres of type-specific VOAGS: Bruce Springsteen is the “voice of a generation of working class Americans”; James Baldwin, “the voice of a generation of black people”; Gunter Grass, “the voice of a generation of Germans who came of age in World War II”; Robert Bolano, the “Latin American literary voice of his generation”; Sam Shepherd, the “theatrical voice of his generation”; and David Grossman, the “Israeli literary voice of his generation”. After the sixth or seventh page of “voice of a generation” results on The New York Times website, one can’t help but wonder who hasn’t been called the voice of their generation, and if it might not actually be easier to get dubbed a VOAG by the Paper of Record than it is to get your wedding featured in Vows. On a side note: Michiko Kakutani, to her great credit, does not appear to have ever called anyone the voice of a generation.
5.
As bloated as the category may be, the VOAG-mantle (similar but by no means interchangeable with its cousin-sibling phrase-title the Great American Novel), it’s still our go-to literary pin-up of choice, our favorite accolade for that which we bow before but can’t always name.
There exists a (more or less) commonly accepted canon of twentieth century American VOAG-writers, a pantheon that is exceedingly straight, white and male, and can be separated into two categories. There’s the old guard: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, J.D. Salinger, and to some degree Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut. The so-called second wave kicked off in earnest with the 1984 publication of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, quickly followed by Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, picked up steam with Douglas Copeland and then continued straight on into the oft-cited literary cohort to which Wallace belonged — Dave Eggers, the Jonathans of Brooklyn (Franzen, Lethem, and Safran Foer, respectively), et al.
Why draw a line in the sand beginning at McInerney and Ellis? Because members of the old guard certainly gave voice to their respective generations, but no one foisted the VOAG-label on them — at least not in those words — until well after the publication of their books. And I’m talking years, not months. That very first VOAG reference to Tennyson’s “Ulysses”? It was written a full forty years after the poem’s publication. The very first in-print record of J.D. Salinger being called the voice of his generation in a national magazine, newspaper or journal came in 1967, nearly two decades after the 1951 publication of Catcher in the Rye. This stands in stark contrast to the old guard’s successors, many of whom saw reckless, breathless VOAG-hype before their books had even made it into paperback.
The VOAG-coronation machine really sprung into action in the mid-1980s, a phenomenon that the ever-prescient Wallace himself noted at the time. Writing for the Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1988, Wallace saw the success of McInerney, Ellis, and the rest of the so-called “literary Brat Pack” as emblematic of a “a veritable explosion of good-willed critical and commercial interest in literary fiction by Conspicuously Young writers,” that had sent publishers and critics scrambling for a position “to proclaim their own beardless favorite ‘The first voice of a new generation.’”
The Brat Pack’s fame also helped pave the way for the rapid-cycle coronation process we see today: “It’s like having a gun held to your head,” one editor told the Los Angeles Times in 1987. “It used to be you’d look at someone’s proposed first novel and say, ‘Let’s work on it for awhile and then I’ll see if I can give you a contract.’ Now one realizes one has to snap up these people with what is in front of you, essentially.” Dylan may have been what pushed the VOAG-label into the zeitgeist, but it was the Brat Pack-ers who made it truly pervasive.
6.
Fiction, Wallace told us, reminds us what it means to be a human being. That’s what every great novel is somehow telling us, a different version of what it means to be alive today, here on earth. The ineffable thing that characterizes almost every VOAG-narrative — and by extension the so-called generation itself — is a certain disillusionment. The narrator as rough beast, slouching towards answers in a world where the old rules no longer apply. The eternal, sudden revelation that human skin alone is not sufficient protection for our nerve endings, and that if the world doesn’t hurt you aren’t paying attention. There is of course a German word (bildungsroman) for this particular genre of literary, spiritual, coming of age, but it is also not too far off from Milan Kundera’s concept of litost: “a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.” Writing about VOAG’s for Time in 2006, Lev Grossman posited that “the paradox of every Voice novel is that it brings a generation of readers together around the idea that they alone are the single badass misfit truth teller in a world full of phonies.”
And therein lies the irony: if the moniker still means anything at all, it means a person speaking for their specific generation, and yet, as Bayard Hooper wrote in Life Magazine in the spring of 1967, “The despairing sense that unhappiness was born in one’s own generation is actually a persistent theme through history.” But that’s the trick of truly great VOAG-writing — it somehow manages to deliver our own tired disillusionment in a manner so fresh and heart-wrenchingly intimate that the oldest of truths still feel like news.
7.
In conclusion, a short passage from an anonymous Egyptian scribe, dubbed by Hooper as “the world’s first alienated man,” a proto-VOAG whose musings were first jotted on papyrus more than 4,000 years ago:
“Robbers abound… No one ploughs the land. People are saying: ‘We do not know what will happen from day to day.’…The country is spinning round and round like a potter’s wheel…No more do we hear anyone laugh …No public office stands open where it should, and the masses are like timid sheep without a shepherd.”
Julia Wick lives in Los Angeles and is an editor at Longreads.
