Wednesday, March 28, 2001

Subversive Stationery: Techno Twinkle and Paper Cuts in William Gibson’s Neuromancer

                        A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway.
Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies,
at others the churned-up mud of the road.
– Stendhal

Joseph Tabbi, when discussing several postmodern, techno-writers, points out that “[t]hese writers carry on both the romantic tradition of the sublime and the naturalist ambition of social and scientific realism, but in a postmodern culture that no longer respects romantic oppositions between mind and machine, between organic nature and human construction, metaphorical communication and the technological transfer of information” (1).  In William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, there is an opposition between the ultra-modern society that Gibson is presenting and the presence of the past that is creeping just beneath the surface.  Gibson frequently uses the term “arcology,” and for the purposes of this essay I will define this term as a self-contained community where the parts harmoniously complement the whole and the whole naturally integrates with the surrounding landscape.  This essay will explore how the “shiny” exterior of the setting of Gibson’s new world is formed to mirror itself and its hopeful future and how this is countered by the underlying dystopia that inhabits the place of the denigrated past which becomes represented in a paper trail of violence, litter and failed intimacy.

Gibson describes for us a futuristic, hyper-modern, technological environment which is bright, electric and reflective: along with much of the Sprawl, Case’s hang-out, the Jarre “was walled with mirrors, each panel framed in red neon” (7).  The difficulty with such a shiny environment is that if you see nothing but yourself reflected in everything you see, and if everything you see is not representative of who you are, there is a certain resistance to compliance with the supposed arcology as defined above.  Gibson’s future society is one that flourishes at night and in neon, a time when the sky – “the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel” (3) – can be obscured by the lights of the city: “By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky” (6-7).  The human body, in Gibson’s constructed environment, reflects back the environment that has formed around it.  At one point in the text, Case describes Molly’s body as though it were machinery: “the sweep of a flank defined with the functional elegance of a war plane’s fusilage” (44).  The distinction of the human face disappears in the technological accoutrements.  A character, such as Molly, with her razor sharp fingers and her reflective mirror shades instead of eyes, seems to be the embodiment of the technological landscape which thrives on darkness and violence.  When Case looks into her eyes, he sees himself, and more than once, Case mentions that this bothers him; he is unable to “read” her face, to tell what she is feeling – “Her face was blank; the colours of Riviera’s projection heaved and turned in her mirrors” (140) – and even if she is sleeping or awake – “He was never sure, with the glasses” (133).  The formation of an intimate relationship with someone like Molly (someone who is so representative of this society) seems and is, eventually, an impossibility.  Case’s first glimpse of Molly is fleeting: “A head appeared, framed in the window, backlit by the fluorescents in the corridor, then vanished.  It returned, but he still couldn’t read the features.  Glint of silver across the eyes” (18).  His inability to read her features when he first encounters her persists throughout the novel; however, it is interesting that, later, Case has the ability to see through Molly’s eyes via a cyberspace link.  This cyber-connection simulates an intimacy that is unimaginable to Gibson’s readers; however, to Baudrillard, “[t]o simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have” (3).  The intimate connection between Molly and Case is, at best, one way:  Case can feel what it is like to be inside Molly’s body, and she can know when he is there, but they cannot communicate with each other directly.   This failure of intimacy is not limited to Case’s relationship with Molly.  His memory of Linda Lee is also representative of this reflective, technological environment.  He remembers her literally in the light of a video game, one of the major preoccupations in this society:

her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard’s Castle burned, forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon.  (8, my emphasis).

Rather than expressing her efforts or her actual participation, she reflects the results and the actions of the war game.  The situations with Molly and Linda are not the only times Case has difficulty interpreting human features.  This motif recurs when Case has been arrested by Turing; he notices “the bodies of bathers, tiny bronze hieroglyphs [...] (164, my emphasis).  The human body is an unreadable sign in Gibson’s world, or at least something as anciently readable as a hieroglyph.   Each of these instances – Molly, Linda, the bathers – is an example of the failure to connect with others around him, on a more intimate level with his lovers, and even on a basic, social level with his fellow humans.

As has already become evident, violence is also an inherent component to Gibson’s setting,  and this violence has a very strong link to the traditional notion of fate.  The sky has turned a poisoned shade of grey, and the constellations are either manufactured or not visible.  Gibson carries over the traditional literary use of stars as a sign of destiny or fate; however, just as with Molly and the environment in general, these stars are sheathed in violence.  Gibson refers to the “chrome stars” (11), the shuriken which is Molly’s gift to Case after their shopping trip – she gives the gift of a lethal weapon to her lover – she calls it a “souvenir,” something by which to remember her (44). This symbol of Case’s violent destiny disappears and reappears a number of times in the text.  At one point, Case “saw the shuriken on the bed, lifeless metal, his star.  He felt for the anger.  It was gone.  Time to give in, to roll with it [...]” (163).  The old notion of one’s fate being in the stars is problematised here; there are no more stars, and the only one that guides Case’s destiny is a violent weapon.  By the end of the novel, Case throws his star away

to bury itself in the face of the wall screen.  The screen woke, random patterns flickering feebly from side to side, as though it were trying to rid itself of something that caused it pain.
‘I don’t need you,’ he said.  (270).

What we can see thus far is that while there may be a resistance to the arcology that has been developed, there is also a level on which it takes over.  The intimacy that may have developed between these people is consumed by the continuous reflectiveness of the surroundings.

This becomes increasingly apparent in Freeside, where the Tessier-Ashpool family resides as the prime example of the corporate arcology.  This family – a very complicated corporate structure – is described by the “family terminal” (in the form of 3Jane’s adolescent essay) as “an old family, the convolutions of [their] home reflecting that age.  But reflecting something else as well.  The semiotics of the Villa bespeak a turning in, a denial of the bright void beyond the hull’” (173).  There is, of course, a very strong connection between the Tessier-Ashpool family and the dream Case has about an experience he once had with a hive of wasps.  He destroys the hive, but interestingly, he more or less reveals the inside, the “hideous [...] perfection” of this natural phenomenon (126).  Tessier-Ashpool strives for much more than reflection; it strives for the evolutionary perfection of the hive, the true arcology, the route to immortality (229).  As Wintermute says, “anyway it was supposed to work out that way.” (171).  But, perhaps the strength of the corporate drive, the act of “turning in,” has forced this arcology into an exclusionary stasis, which in turn, justifies the anxiety which rejects the environment this society forces on its residents.  The arcology is not working as the desired kind of “living wall” and appears more as a forcible construction rather than a natural or evolutionary process.

The element that appears essential to uncovering the hideous imperfection of the societal constructions in Gibson’s novel is paper, just as the hive is covered in “gray paper” (126).  Gibson's use of paper in this highly digitised future is minimal.  Reading appears to be an outmoded activity: virtual holidays and video games have usurped paper culture.  The disadvantage this may represent is never overtly in question in the novel – why “write” something on paper when you can save it to disk, view it on screen, access it by jacking into a database – however, it does illustrate a limitation to the information that is readable by artificial intelligence (AI).  There is a distinction made between “reading” information and “accessing” information.  Case asks Wintermute if he is able to read his mind.  Wintermute replies: “Minds are read.  See, you’ve still got the paradigms print gave you, and you’re barely print-literate.  I can access your memory, but that’s not the same as your mind” (170).  Wintermute – the AI who wishes to merge with another AI – cannot merge without the help of a few humans.  He needs their help in order to acquire the word that is the key to his potential merger with Neuromancer: this need can be seen as a manifestation of the need for the “flesh,” which will be discussed more below.  In Gibson’s novel, words and language seem to be two of the victims of the antiquation of paper culture.  By placing paper in the setting explored above – in terms of the technology and reflective, ultra-new world space it inhabits – we may be able to analyse some of the issues that surround the position language occupies in a culture in which the individual can, potentially, transmit information instantaneously.  The main concern with any use of language in Neuromancer is in Wintermute’s need for “the magic word” in order to amalgamate the two AIs.  When Case asks him for the word, Wintermute replies that he does not know:

‘You might say what I am is basically defined by the fact that I don’t know, because I can’t know.  I am that which knoweth not the word.  If you knew, man, and told me, I couldn't know.  It’s hardwired in.  Someone else has to learn it and bring it here, just when you and the Flatline punch though that ice and scramble the cores.’ (173)

They need the word in order to allow for the new beginning.  “In the beginning was the Word,” and in this new beginning is another Word, a password to create a new life form.  Just what the magic word is remains unclear.  We can fairly confidently surmise that it may be, in fact, “Neuromancer,” considering that later, when Case tells Wintermute the name of Neuromancer, he replies that “[h]is name’s not something I can know” (261).  This does present itself as a Rumpelstiltskin type of situation.  There are several fragmented, intertextual references to mythology, fairy tales and the Bible which may suggest the underlying importance these references still hold, even in the realm of the cyberpunk.  Again, this is a source of traditional information unattainable by the AIs, and perhaps this lost intertextuality with the past is part of Gibson’s project.  Just as Wintermute is “that which knoweth not the word,” we too are not told, evoking our immediacy to and participation in the lost knowledge, facing us with the inability to know. However, it is an issue of even greater ambiguity.  The environment which has been constructed has become as static as the television sky, and the desire for something better has been replaced by the desire for something different.  In Chaos Bound, Katherine Hayles briefly discusses the importance cryogenics plays in Neuromancer:

the corrupt and powerful clan of Tessier-Ashpool has for generations practised cryogenics, so that its members have virtually all become simulacra (as their replicated names and numbers indicate).  The prospect that human beings can become simulacra suggests that a new social context is emerging which will change not only what it means to be in the world but what it means to be human.  Within the context-of-no-context, the postmodern shades into the posthuman.  (276)

The older generations, in the act of recycling themselves to relive among the newer generations, are effectively contradicting the notion of a “new social context.”  The younger generation cannot mature, because there is no one to replace.  Nothing is renewed and nothing changes.  This fact is recognised when Case and Molly are attempting to obtain the password from 3Jane: Case argues that if she refuses to give them the word, nothing will change: “You’ll wind up like the old man.  You’ll tear it all down and start building again!  You’ll build the walls back, tighter and tighter....I got no idea at all what’ll happen if Wintermute wins, but it’ll change something!” (260).  The struggle is one of the new generation’s search for change against the old-world constructions.

Stemming from the old-world constructions appears to be the new craving to be rid of the flesh.  There is a constant desire, especially for Case, to escape into cyberspace.  The virtual world is one way of having the time pass without even noticing it.  When Case regains his ability to manoeuver in cyberspace, we are told that “[t]his was it.  This was what he was, who he was, his being.  He forgot to eat.  Molly left cartons of rice and foam trays of sushi on the corner of the long table.  Sometimes he resented having to leave the deck to use the chemical toilet they’d set up in a corner of the long table” (59).  He has a strong drive to shed his “meat puppet” or his flesh.  And yet, at the same time that Case wants to escape his flesh and as much as he likes escaping into the matrix, he is disturbed by the idea of Dixie Flatline “as a construct, a hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead man’s skills, obsessions, knee-jerk responses [...]” (76-77).  Dixie Flatline is several steps beyond recording human life on paper documents; here, his human personality is recorded to survive beyond death and paperwork.  The flesh is gone, the notion of time is gone.

I would argue that paper is the manifestation of many of Gibson’s preoccupations, and it also ties in very tightly with the themes that have been discussed thus far.  At any time that paper is mentioned, it is related to one of three things: litter, violence, failed intimacy (all representative of Gibson’s world).  Paper is no longer used for letters, it occupies the place of litter.  In Istanbul, Case notes that Turkey is “a sluggish country” where, during a rain storm, “[a] few letter-writers had taken refuge in doorways, their old voiceprinters wrapped in sheets of clear plastic, evidence that the written word still enjoyed a certain prestige here” (88).  In less sluggish countries, paper is disposed of in favour of digital and other forms of communication.  At the Finn’s, Case and Molly walk through a “tunnel of refuse,” of paper litter which was “cooking itself down under the pressure of time, silent invisible flakes settling to form a mulch, a crystalline essence of discarded technology, flowering secretly in the Sprawl’s waste places” (72).  Even in the home of Julius Deane – the 135-year old man who appears to be a link to the paper past – the time of the past is dusty, distorted and deceptive: “Neo-Aztec bookcases gathered dust against one wall of the room [...]”; “A Dali clock hung on the wall between the bookcases, its distorted face sagging to the bare concrete floor.  Its hands were holograms that altered to match the convolutions of the face as they rotated, but it never told the correct time” (12).  The time of the past is distorted, relegated to the dusty area of old, unused bookcases.  Not only that, but even though Deane’s desk is “littered with cassettes, scrolls of yellowed printout, and various parts of some sort of clockwork typewriter [...]” (34), we find that not all that is surface is revealing.  In his article, “Gibson’s Typewriter,” Scott Bukatman addresses the popular story that William Gibson composed his cyberpunk masterpiece on an antique typewriter.  His argument is that history was erased from the postmodern novel, and that “[s]ome attention to the typewriter may therefore be warranted in order to type history back into Neuromancer” (73).  Julius Deane’s typewriter is equally significant: this quaint old man, this supposed link to the past is, in fact, a violent man, who uses the typewriter to hide a gun, not to type letters or manuscripts.

We also see paper linked to other weapons: when Case cannot get a gun, he purchases a Cobra to defend himself at the beginning of the novel, and paper is used to wrap the cylinders of the Cobra (15).  Also, when Molly buys him the souvenir of their shopping trip, it is “origami-wrapped” in “recycled Japanese paper” (44).  The paper tears away from this souvenir to reveal the shuriken.  Molly is important to the role of paper and communication in this novel.  She is almost exclusively the character who handles paper of any informative importance, and she also has several modes of communication, including the silent language of jive.  She is the one who passes notes on stationery or paper napkins that are meant to convey information.: “She [Molly] drew a folded scrap of paper from her pocket and handed it to him.  He opened it.  Grid coordinates and entry codes” (76).  Case, on the other hand, is often unable to comprehend or communicate.  He does not understand any language other than English, nor does he understand the jive Molly uses to conduct business.  He consistently mispronounces names, and we are told that Case is barely print-literate.  In the same way that Case looks at travel as “a meat thing” (77), we can imagine that he also considers old forms of communication a meat thing as well.

Molly’s final “dear john” note to Case is the culmination of the categorical use of paper outlined above:

There was a note on the black lacquer bar cabinet beside the door, a single sheet of stationery, folded once, weighted with the shuriken.  He slid it from beneath the nine-pointed star and opened it.
HEY ITS OKAY BUT ITS TAKING THE EDGE OFF MY GAME, I PAID THE BILL ALREADY.  IT’S THE WAY IM WIRED I GUESS, WATCH YOUR ASS OKAY? XXX MOLLY
He crumpled the paper into a ball and dropped it beside the shuriken.  (267)

The note is a sign of the failed intimacy between Molly and Case; it uses a shuriken for a paper weight (a sign both of violence and destiny), makes reference to the way Molly is “wired” (a sign of her own destiny), and it is quickly crumpled and thrown away.  This suggests that words on paper are disposable and biodegradable, in fact so degraded as to become erasable even on a more permanent surface: “There was a brass plate mounted on the door at eye level, so old that the lettering that had once been engraved there had been reduced to a spidery, unreadable code, the name of some long dead function or functionary, polished into oblivion” (232).  The use of written language is so polished that the words disappear: this is reminiscent of the unreadable code of both Linda’s and Molly’s faces, and perhaps this is an accurate way to describe Gibson’s prose style – his language is so visual that the actual words themselves seem to be lost in imagery – but, it also suggests the inability to use words in any tangible, tactile form; that there is something less disposable about digital language, information and communication.  However, Gibson is also questioning this disposability: because Wintermute cannot participate in the now antiquated paper culture, he cannot acquire the necessary knowledge to complete his transformation alone.

Popular images of the future often waver between pristine chrome whiteness and dirty underbelly decrepitude.  William Gibson’s Neuromancer indulges in both of these representations of the future; however, the glossy world of neon and cybernetic beauty is subverted by the discovery that there is an amnesia chip which allows more women to become prostitutes by simply “renting the goods” without any psychological ramifications; that people live in homes the size of coffins; that Molly can spit instead of cry, and that neither we nor Case ever learn the colour of her eyes.  The tension between the past and the future is not the greatest tension in the novel.  The greatest tension arises out of the stasis of the present. And while the issues of violence, failed intimacy and the denigrated paper culture are not directly noticed by the characters in the novel, there is a prevailing sense of the need for change, that the future is not working and that a new age must soon enter.  Even if it is no better than the current situation, it can at least claim that it is new.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean.  Simulacra and Simulation.  Trans. Sheila Fraser Glaser.  Ann Arbor, U of Michigan P, 1997.

Bukatman, Scott.  “Gibson’s Typewriter.”  Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture.  Ed. Mark Dery.  Durham: Duke UP, 1994 (71-89).

Gibson, William.  Neuromancer.  NY: Ace Books, 1984.

Hayles, N. Katherine.  Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science.
Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.

Tabbi, Joseph.  The Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to
Cyberpunk.  Ithaca: Cornell UP.

Monday, March 12, 2001

the little death

it has been weeks it has been months and
the sentences pass like years, perhaps
she has seen the quiet desperation with which I write

alone, slow
interrupted delays
like an atheist masturbating

i don't really think that she smiles
as the little deaths which i have written
fall across the page without anger