Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

Many out there are not going to understand the fascination with William Gibson, because history will remember him as the coiner of cyberpunk as a genre, writer of two quality novels, Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition, and otherwise relegate him to the bin where they place over-intellectualized stoners who didn’t just get nose to grindstone for a “serious” job when they were in their 20s, like everyone else.

I think there’s more to him than that. Neuromancer, for example, is science fiction of that darker calibre that produces works like Blade Runner and is hinted at in Naked Lunch. The story is simple: humankind travels through technology to find its soul, only to see it nakedly missing and so to seize whatever spiritual sustenance it can from endurance and hoping for a better day. It’s an apocalyptic story in anticlimax, one where most natural species are dead and the earth is wrapped in concrete and steel, littered with plastic and the plastic remnants of human beings. We could read Gibson’s exuberance with this world as an endorsement, or as a way of finally getting us the reader engaged with what it might be like to want to battle an imaginary but probable future before it occurs.

Pattern Recognition could be seen as the prototype and parent for this year’s Spook Country, a journal of ratified paranoia in which Gibson looks at a new America he considers to be completely out of touch with reality, and living on a symbolic or emotional level that represents fear not rationality. This theme was illustrated most clearly in Neuromancer through the cheery “Freeside: Why Wait?” posters that promised a better life to those trapped in dreary industrial hellholes. He took things further in Pattern Recognition where he directly attacked brand names as Soviet in an Orwell-inspired symbolic juxtaposition between the clarity of mind found in Cayce Pollard, and the neurotic nastiness of her ad-agency tormentors.

“Politics has, like, jacked itself up to my level of weirdness,” Gibson acknowledges. “I can work with this,” he says, thinking of recent turns of events. “I like the sheer sort of neo-Stalinist denial of reality. That’s what makes it work. It’s interesting. I’d like to see it get less interesting. But I don’t know that it necessarily will.” ^{^}

Gibson sort of hops on the anti-Bush, maybe-progressivism-will-work bandwagon for Spook Country, but his heart’s not in it. Like his heroes Burroughs and Pynchon (and probably DeLilo), Gibson speaks from an entirely outsider’s voice, with the gravely tones of someone looking in at a disaster that will go unrecognized until it’s too late. He is Vonnegut’s canary in a coal mine, but how do you sing to people deaf to that one warning sign? A theme of Spook Country is the proliferation of signals meshing into noise, a warming of chaos and a consequent intensity of paranoia. Who do you trust, when everyone has an agenda outside of the acknowledged roles we serve in society?

A few gems:

A friend of mine was mining YouTube last month and he came up with footage shot in the street in New York on a particular day, in the evening. And he knew that this footage was shot the day before broadcast television began in New York. So this footage is of the last night that streets in New York were the way they were before everyone started staying home to watch television. All the footage that he’s been able to find afterward is dramatically different. It changed. It changed the night they turned it on. The night they started to broadcast television in New York, New York ceased to be what it had been before. Because everyone stayed home to watch television.
…
I think a lack of concern about virtual and real maybe telling us as much about what we used to call real as it is about what we now call virtual. I think that everything we’ve been doing since we sat around camp fires telling stories and started making cave paintings, everything we’ve been doing as a species seems to me to be part of this [desire and ability] to create prosthetic aspects of the self that are capable of surviving the death of the individual or indeed the death of an entire society. Other animals don’t do that. And we’ve been doing it forever.
…
You know, the Internet, for the first 25 years of its existence, has been almost exclusively text based. And so [people] are writing with frequency unseen since the Victorian heyday of the British Empire, when there were three mail deliveries a day, and people wrote and communicated constantly. We went back to it. It wasn’t new. Very few things in the last 45 years have caused me to go ‘Whoa! That’s new!’”
^{^}

Although Spook Country isn’t my favorite Gibson work, it’s not bad. Like those works by famed authors Pynchon and Burroughs that came later in their lives, it is aimless. It makes its points with its “the medium is the message,” by being chaotic and yet having all paths lead to a Mecca which points to an undiscovered reality in the sea of messages including the book itself, but then can’t tie the plot it’s glued to into something resembling a shape, so the novel deteriorates into loose string that ends in an almost Boolean yes/no to all the components of the book. But if you find meaning in Gibson’s work, it makes sense to study his body of work, including the two highly perceptive interviews linked here.

Outsider art is art that sits outside any known idiom. It is art created from an entirely new language. It is not for sale. And it is marked by obsession.

To some who are weary of the increasing commercialisation of art, outsider works are unpolished jewels, and the people who make them are the purest artists of all. ^{^}

If you go into the arts, as a hobby or a living, the question of commercialization will haunt you between dreams of stardom. Of course you want to productify your art to some degree, so that it can reach its audience and you can hopefully stop shelving books during that mundane, soul-draining day job you took so at night you could be free among the paints, or words. But when have you gone too far, and gone from being a successful author to a bitter-souled Lars Ulrich?

Outsider art is an organic response to this situation. It is people who are entirely disconnected from the art community and have no way to productive their art, or those who behave as if that were the situation while after production, productizing their art. As I read more of what is lauded as “the best new fiction,” only to watch it disappear after a few weeks of hippity hype, I can only think that they’re onto something.

I did some searching, and found a wonderful resource. Head on over to Burroughs, Naked Lunch and the Beat Generation at the University of Bremen’s Literature in English section.

Burroughs has always been a favorite of mine because he has fewer preprocessor directives than other people. All of us have these directives to some degree, like remembering not to pick our noses in public or talk about death around the elderly. Burroughs lived as an outsider, being both a conflicted sexual abuse victim and an abuser who shot his wife to death “accidentally,” in addition to his habits of using drugs, living outside the law, and evading day jobs. Highly intelligent, he was either too disorganized or too deeply planning to write his book until age 39, at which point he unleashed it fully formed on the world.

Naked Lunch is a book without preprocessor directives; it is the ultimate techno-punk, in that it like sci-fi it looks into our future based on the inherent but not visible trends of our technology. It is a cold, calculating, cynical look that is also playful and spirited, extremely human. Burroughs chucked out the instruction manual and wrote his book as a series of overlapping radio plays that in their revelations of philosophical concepts resemble computer code, with parentheses scattered throughout the novel. It is also devastatingly funny, if your funny bone has a cold heart and a warm soul.

Naked Lunch has given its author a permanent place in literary history because of its formal innovations, its powerful attitude of revolt, and the controversy surrounding its publication. The censorship trials, of course, attracted publicity, but also attracted the attention of serious readers because of the authors and critics who testified on behalf of the novel. Critical attention was further drawn to Naked Lunch when Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer praised the book highly at the Edinburgh International Writer’s Conference in 1962.

Mailer proclaimed Burroughs “the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.” Mary McCarthy defended her statement at the conference with an influential essay on Naked Lunch, first published in 1963 and still the best single critical piece on Burroughs. Grove Press was able to obtain testimonials for Naked Lunch by Mailer, Robert Lowell, Terry Southern, and John Ciardi, among others, for a publicity pamphlet in 1962.

As a result of the high praise by well-known literary figures, Naked Lunch was widely reviewed in the United States and England. Many reviewers praised the book for its power and serious purpose, and Burroughs was compared to other avant-garde writers in the modernist tradition. But Naked Lunch received strongly negative reviews as well. Some reviewers thought the novel morally offensive, artistically worthless, and revolting to the sensibilities of most readers. The most notable of these protests, because of the correspondence they generated, are those of John Wain in the New Republic, William
Phillips in Commentary, and an unsigned review entitled “Ugh” in the Times Literary Supplement.