CRIME AND DISLOCATION
WILLIAM GIBSON’S MODERNITY
Rereading William Gibson thirty-five years after Neuromancer was published, it’s easy to get stuck on the startlingly accurate predictions, even those that haven’t come true yet, or to be caught in the scintillating micro-images of many possible futures. Indeed, my memories of the novels before going back for this reread were mainly vivid details: mirrored glasses fused to ocular bones and spit from rerouted tear ducts; 3D holograph vagina tattoos on the wrists of young women skittish as giraffes; fake tans on fake French teenagers; an idoru spun out of a device like a cocktail shaker; a customizable, beautiful computer that looks nothing like my laptop, although I’m not sure exactly what it does look like; River Phoenix dying invisibly and continuously on the street where he collapsed.
I am not sure whether this retrospective reduction of complexly plotted books to a few anecdote-level, non-load-bearing details is a function of how my brain works or of the way Gibson’s writing works, and it’s possible that the difference is academic in any case, because they may both be symptoms of a mutual condition: modernity.
These moments feel unprecedented and inevitable because they anticipate the technology they require but nail the human nature that is going to use that technology to create them as soon as it becomes possible. Of course nonverbal flirtation and increasingly risqué physical accoutrements are eventually going to evolve to the point of 3D vagina tattoos.
It’s a kind of science fiction rooted in sociological observation along with technological savvy. The story is less about the amazing kinds of technology we will invent—and when I say “amazing,” try to cast your mind back to the world before the sea-change that is the internet, making Neuromancer ’s matrix no less amazing than space travel—than the bizarre ways we use those technologies. Corrupt, hedonistic, bad-ass, ritualistic, artistic, self-aggrandizing, righteous, mystical: Gibson shows us the range of human motivations through technological appropriation, from the elite who make their own innovations to the marginal who bricolage the unexpected by-products.
Many of these insights, like the ones I mentioned at the outset, come across not as revelations or turning points but as non-plot-bearing character details or pure asides with no relevance to the rest of the story other than thickening the world it takes place in. Yet those scintillating details, with their precision and prescience, often stick in the mind and captivate even in the moment, even as the movement of the story draws you unfailingly from one to the next. The sense is of a net of tangentially connected images—or in the more current parlance, GIFs or Vines—held together by the strands of an unerring, action-driven plot. It’s tempting to use the image of a kaleidoscope or a collage, but consider a page, maybe the fourth or fifth page, of Internet search results: windows into different landscapes, some commercial, some artistic, some nonprofit, many only loosely connected to the original terms and all liable to change over time and with tweaks to the algorithm, yet all together offering a multidimensional compilation image, possibly incomplete and wrong but still powerful.
On rereading more of Gibson’s books en masse, the details are still arresting but it is easier to see their overall, collective effect and refocus on the persistent theme of the author’s work: dislocation, disorientation, disubication. This sense of upheaval and disconnection, more than Gibson’s acuity for technical speculation, is what makes his books so apt for the modern world. They inhabit our feelings of change and uncertainty, the awareness of always being slightly behind the curve of innovation, the thrilling and relentless proliferation of perspectives that is the modern experience. Yet they manage to hover on the cusp of modernity without tipping over into postmodernism, the dislocation in time, space, class, humanity, scale, identity, culture, and reality tempered by our awareness of being safely strapped into the confines of that most modern of plots, the suspense novel, mystery, or thriller.
When I say “modern” here, I’m using it in a broad sense, for the age of speed and change rather than just the Internet age. The railroad and the telegraph, when they appeared and then rapidly became normal in certain contexts, compressed time and space in much the same confusing way that the airplane and the Internet have, and dissociative fugue states surged (in documentation, at least). The sense of being slightly unhinged from the self, if not from reality, evolved as the concept individual became disassociated from social roles, much at the same time that science fiction emerged to look at the present through the lens of the future.
Dislocation of self as a function of modern movement and introspection is a theme hardly limited to science fiction. Take this passage from Proust’s Swann’s Way :
For me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at first who I was . . . For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything revolved around me through the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would endeavour to construe from the patterns of its tiredness the position of its various limbs, in order to deduce therefrom the direction of the wall, the location of the furniture, to piece together and give a name to the house in which it lay. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, its knees, its shoulder-blades, offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept, while the unseen walls, shifting and adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirled round it in the dark. 1
How many Gibson characters wake up this way: in an unfamiliar room, unsure of where they are and who they are? Whether because air travel has left their souls floating behind, or because their professional identity has become suddenly fluid, or because someone has modified their face into someone else’s as they slept, Gibson’s characters regularly find themselves in a partially understood, fragmented world that reflects their inner confusion. Internal and external conditions can change while they are unconscious; the past, present, and (unevenly distributed) future are all available options when they wake.
This unexpected change is the experience of modernity. We wake up and check our phones (phones!) to find out what kind of world we are living in today, aware that nations may fall, new colors may be discovered, and aliens may visit while we sleep. Our waking hours are often fragmented into bits of information from scattered sources: an email from work, a message from a friend, a conversation with the person across the table, a tweet from the other side of the planet, a photo from a celebrity. Our identities have become fragmented or fluid or both, and when we wake in the night we are likely to have many more remembered rooms to choose from than Proust did, from dorm rooms to Holiday Inns to Airbnbs.
Asked about the sense of temporal dislocation in his work in a 2012 interview with The Verge , Gibson responded,
I think that part of my experience of growing up in the American South in the early ’60’s was one of living in a place unevenly established in the present. You could look out one window and see the 20th century, then turn and look out another window and see the 19th. . . . It provides a sort of parallax. If you only have one eye, you don’t have depth perception. If you’re able to look at things with one eye in the 21st century and the other eye in the 20th century (or possibly even the late-19th), it provides a kind of perspective that otherwise wouldn’t be available. 2
The dislocation we feel through Gibson’s fiction is both a reflection of the dislocation we feel in modernity and a kind of tool for dealing with it, or for comprehending it more broadly. Our times are too precarious and changeable to be understood in isolation or—one of the risks of seeing them without that perspective—assumed to be permanent.
The dislocation in Gibson’s novels is not limited to the temporal. It is multiple, iterative, and complex. In addition to time, his characters tend to suffer from cultural dislocation. This comes most obviously from international travel, most often in Japan. In Mona Lisa Overdrive , Kumiko flips that, viewing the West from an (imagined) Japanese perspective. Naturally in this postmodern, self-reflective world, perspective is mirrored back and forth for further disorientation: “The decor of the bar induced a profound sense of cultural dislocation: it managed to simultaneously reflect traditional Japanese design and look as though it had been drawn up by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.” 3
In Pattern Recognition , Cayce finds mirror worlds in London and Russia as well as Japan. For her, the small physical-industrial differences are both confusing and anchoring, confirmation that one is elsewhere; she is reminded that the kind of globalization practiced by companies like Blue Ant, “more post-geographic than multinational,” threaten that “no borders, pretty soon there’s no mirror to be on the other side of. Not in terms of the bits and pieces, anyway.” 4
In some cases, the act of movement itself triggers disorientation, as with Cayce’s soul-delaying jet lag. On her arrival in London, “in spite of the Jaguar’s speed, Kumiko felt as if somehow she were standing still; London’s particles began to accrete around her” (Mona Lisa Overdrive , 5). In Spook Country , Tito’s trip across the country in an anachronistic plane, literally under the radar of modernity, is entirely different from his personal, traumatic definition of air travel.
Gibson reminds us that geographical travel is not the only way to encounter culture shock. Different classes within the same city can be oceans apart: their experiences of life incompatible, their reference points unmatchable, identical words holding entirely different meanings:
“‘It’s not the Ritz,’ he said, ‘but we’ll try to make you comfortable.’
Mona made a noncommittal sound. The Ritz was a burger place in Cleveland.” (86).
Mona might as well be in a foreign country: meaning is slipping by and she is disoriented by incentives, artifacts, and behaviors that make no sense to her.
The disorientation of the characters is typically paralleled by that of the readers, as the quick-cut scenes and multiple point-of-view characters yank them into a dislocation that mirrors that of the plot. For many readers, it may not be easy to separate what is science fiction and what are unknown but current details in, for example, Case’s descriptions of Japan early in Neuromancer . But Gibson’s books also manufacture their own culture shock or jet lag in the reader with their jumps among settings and points of view. We move between perspectives, registers, knowledge bases, and cultural framings constantly and without warning or explanation. As with Kumiko and Mona in Mona Lisa Overdrive , most of the books toggle between extremely wealthy segments and the quite poor. Most of our points of view are confused, but they are confused about different things, as in Spook Country , with the case of Hollis, confused about Blue Ant and her career; Tito, who is completely sure about his role but faces mysteries about his history and his future; and Milgrim, lost in addiction and at the mercy of a stranger. Shuttling between such viewpoints enforces that disorientation on the reader while giving us a sense for the immense variety of existences in the world.
We occasionally get landmarks for navigating these worlds, but the landmarks have to be recognized through their different perceptions by different characters: the New Suzuki Envoy in Mona Lisa Overdrive , the critical building in The Peripheral , Tito’s room, the bridge. These touch-points offer some orientation for the reader and remind us that real artifacts are subjective and changeable.
Modern dislocation goes far beyond culture shock. Many of Gibson’s characters—often the ones we most identify with—are lost in ways that have nothing to do with the people around them. Some, like Case and Milgrim, are distracted by addiction. Case and Hollis struggle with losing a part of their identities. Most powerfully, Cayce offers a picture of a person deeply affected by an indirect trauma that goes unmentioned for half the book and is eventually contrasted with the direct physical trauma experienced by Nora, the maker of the footage. Cayce wonders whether the strangeness she experiences during the story is because “the world had gone in such a different direction, in the instant of having seen that petal drop, that nothing really is the same now, and that her expectations of the parameters of how life should feel are simply that, expectations, and increasingly out of line the further she gets from that window in the SoHo Grand” (Pattern Recognition , 195). The world around Cayce—and around the rest of us—has changed so profoundly that it is little wonder we have trouble finding our bearings.
These characters all suffer from a disconnection to others, whether because of addiction, trauma, or simply changing their professional lives. We learn of largely absent friends, reconnections after long gaps, and isolation in the midst of crowds. Technology sometimes seems to worsen this, but for the most part it mitigates it, often in direct contrast to unmediated contact. In the opening scene of Pattern Recognition , for example, the “real” environment is sterile and empty: “Damien’s new kitchen is as devoid of edible content as its designers’ display windows in Camden High Street. . . . Very clean and almost entirely empty. . . . Nothing at all in the German fridge, so new that its interior smells only of cold and long-chain monomers” (1). “Whatever faintly lived-in feel the place now has, Cayce knows, is the work of a production assistant” (2). The space is beautiful but anonymous, devoid of character and contact to the point that even the smell of a nonlover’s body in the sheets is welcome: “it’s not unpleasant; any physical linkage to a fellow mammal seems a plus at this point” (2).
But if Cayce can’t, at that moment, get a closer physical linkage than a fading smell, she can get warmth and connection on the Internet. “The front page opens, familiar as a friend’s living room. . . . She enters the forum itself now, automatically scanning titles of the posts and names of posters in the newer threads, looking for friends, enemies, news.” The Internet, and for Cayce specifically this chatroom, “is a way now, approximately, of being at home. The forum has become one of the most consistent places in her life, like a familiar café that exists somehow outside of geography and beyond time zones” (4). Later in the book we are treated to a creepy physical variant of that concept in the form of a London Starbucks with “exactly the same faux-Murano pendulum lamps they have in the branch nearest her apartment in New York” (207). Unlike the dynamic and interactive familiarity of the Internet forum, this version is static and sinister. The Starbucks is part of the global flattening that Cayce senses from Blue Ant, a calculated erasure of difference and anger alike: “The decor somehow fosters emotional neutrality, a leveling of affect” (207). For all its personality snags and even spies, the virtual world is not stale in the same way as corporate replicas.
None of this is science fiction—Internet forums and identical Starbucks were common when the novel was released in 2003—but Gibson captures the very modern feeling of living in a futurized present, in which change has occurred too quickly and along too many axes to be fully assimilated or known. The book is crammed with the disorienting weirdness of living in the present, from the unevenly distributed nature of technology to the all-too-believable catfishing (before that term was popularized) of an otaku , to the collision of virtual and real effects. This gets supercharged with prose even more truncated than usual and a point-of-view character still occasionally in the throes of traumatic dissociation, adding to the sense of disorientation.
In the more futurist novels, the dislocation gets more existential. Gibson chips away at our concepts of identity, first through cyberspace and then, as avatars and online personalities became part of our mundane present, through peripherals. He challenged the reader’s ideas on what is human with Kumiko’s ghost and the idoru. With The Peripheral , he mind-bends reality with the idea of stubs.
Although Gibson’s books are an experience of disorientation for characters and readers, they are never formless or directionless. In fact, the novels tend toward the most plot-driven of literary forms: the mystery, detective story, or thriller. Gibson has said in an interview with Salon that “Detective fiction and science fiction are an ideal cocktail, in my opinion.” 5 This is fitting, as detective stories are also the most modern of genres, coming into existence—if you take Poe as the originator—some two decades after Frankenstein . Gibson agrees with the interviewer that crime fiction is one way to follow a prescription he heard from Samuel R. Delany: “If you want to know how something works, look at one that’s broken.” 6
Indeed, while The Peripheral is the exception in being a literal murder mystery (and still more of a thriller than a mystery in Todorov’s typology 7 ), most if not all of Gibson’s novels contain not only mysteries but strong elements of crime fiction. There are smugglers, assassins, Mafia families of various nationalities, and of course the more respectable and devastating crime of the rich and powerful. In fact, almost anyone with any significant power in the books is, if not an outright criminal, certainly comfortable with the shady side of the law. If the kleptocracy of twenty-second-century London described in The Peripheral is unusually explicit, it is echoed in what we see of the hierarchies in the other books.
The primary function of the detective story is the search, and many of Gibson’s characters are driven by something specific, if undefined: a mystery they need to solve. Cayce follows the mystery of the footage. Laney, particularly in All Tomorrow’s Parties , is driven to guide or catalyze a moment of change that he cannot define. In Mona Lisa Overdrive , Gentry is searching for a shape that defines cyberspace in some coherent way. None of these characters are certain there is meaning in what they are doing, much as Flynne is unsure of the reality of the murder she saw for a long time.
These characters often act through means that they don’t fully understand: Cayce’s brand sensitivity and Laney’s drug-triggered obsession, its specific origins lost to his powerlessness as the child subject of testing. Tito understands his relationship to the Orishas but cannot explain why they do what they do. Nora Volkova creates in ways that the ones around her cannot explain or decipher, yet her creation resonates with thousands of others. The method is almost as much a mystery as the objective. Notably, for Nora and Laney, and in a more oblique way, Cayce, their special ability or insight is a side effect of the violence of modernity. The way to this abstract insight, Gibson suggests, is nonlinear and possibly requires a different sort of intelligence, a reliance on the intuition that often derives from the very damages committed by the modern world.
Even when the characters don’t fully understand what, why, or how they are seeking, they feel compelled to continue the search; those actions, directed toward something, push the plot forward. Todorov’s “second story, the story of the investigation” 8 pulls us unerringly along with the books. Something has happened, changed, been broken, and we, along with the characters, need to understand why, or how, or at least what. For all the dislocation in the world we are asked to inhabit, the need to figure out what happened is enough to give shape to the unnerving, perspective-shifting narrative. Like the characters, we are searching for something that might or might not be interpretable, might or might not provide meaning for the whole experience.
It is reminiscent of how a character in A. S. Byatt’s Possession explains their fascination with literary criticism: “I suppose one studies—I study—literature because all these connections seem both endlessly exciting and then in some sense dangerously powerful—as though we held a clue to the true nature of things?” 9 Gibson’s characters study technology, and its intersections with art and celebrity and commercialism, subtextually, searching for the unstated, unintended, improbable connections that hint at the shape of the society and maybe the species that created them.
Many of Gibson’s characters are sensemaking, in Karl E. Weick’s sense: in the crisis that is modernity—a time of confusion, dislocation, and crime—they struggle to find a narrative or an image that will re-create a worldview of some kind, even if it isn’t the same one they started with. Moreover, this is enacted sensemaking: “To sort out a crisis as it unfolds often requires action which simultaneously generates the raw material that is used for sensemaking and affects the unfolding crisis itself.” 10 Perhaps the clearest example of this is Laney, working to bring about a crisis moment without understanding what that moment is or will mean until it happens (and, Moses-like, not even then). Cayce’s leap-of-faith flight into Moscow is similar: she doesn’t know what she will find, and her presence there and contact with Stella changes the situation she has come to explore. In the Sprawl trilogy, those who seek to understand the matrix must enter it and, necessarily, affect its overall shape and evolution.
Readers are asked to follow the plots of the novels in almost the same way: confused, not quite understanding the connections we are being asked to make, but possibly trusting that there is a meaning behind it all. It might be a meaning of our own collective or individual making, or an illusion created by the author. It might help us understand something we already know about the world we live in. As has been suggested, if reading literature builds the skills needed for empathy, 11 then Gibson’s work provides us with the relief of seeing our peripatetic modern experience represented in prose and with a kind of practice in continuing that existence more aware and more alert to the new ways we fall apart and fit together.