[In the following essay, Davidson discusses Neuromancer in terms of postmodern theories of simulation and the visual image, particularly comparing the novel's central themes to the works of Jean Baudrillard.]

Baudrillard's “Simulacra and Simulacrum” is a study of the degeneration of the integrity of the image so far as it is representative of the real. Early in the essay, Baudrillard discusses the “imperialism” of “present-day simulators”:

Something has disappeared. The sovereign difference between them that was the abstraction's charm. For it is the difference which forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the dream of the real. This representational imaginary, which both culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographer's mad project of an ideal coextensivity between the map and the territory, disappears with simulation, whose operation is nuclear and genetic, and no longer specular and discursive. With it goes all of metaphysics. No more mirror of being and appearances, all of the real and its concept; no more imaginary coextensivity: rather, genetic miniaturization is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models—and with these it can be reproduced an infinite number of times. It no longer has to be rational since it is no longer measured against some ideal or negative instance. It is nothing more than operational.

(167)

The “specular and discursive” tradition of representation, the locus of the cartographer trying to create a map which exactly represents the real terrain, is one of vision, both mental and ocular, one of memory and sight. The map-maker reproduces what he sees and what he knows. Baudrillard connects this activity with “magic” and “charm,” and specifically states that it is the difference between the real and the map—which it should be the map-maker's concern to abolish—that provides this magic and charm. The present-day simulators are not visionaries; they need neither vision nor memory to create exact copies of originals. What they do need is a certain technical adeptness—the ability to effectively operate the machines that produce simulacra; they need to know the codes that operate the machine's system. This comes to pass in our own day in the form of a myriad of computerized artwork which can be reproduced without variation, each reproduction being totally undistinguishable from the original.

The traditional terrain of the artist has been that of the map-maker, one specular and discursive. The artist's tools have been memory and vision—in traditional painting and sculpture, for example. A moment arrives in William Gibson's cyberpunk classic Neuromancer in which the protagonist, Case, questions the high-resolution holographic construct of an old man who is communicating the ideas of a megalithic artificial intelligence known as Wintermute about the nature of the “unreal” world made of memory into which Case has been propelled:

“What's out there? New York? Or does it just stop?”

“Well,” said the Finn, “it's like that tree, you know? Fall in the woods, but maybe there's nobody to hear it. … You can go for a walk, you wanna. It's all there. Or anyway all the parts of it you ever saw. This is memory, right? I tap you; sort it out, and feed it back in.”

“I don't have this good a memory,” Case said, looking around. He looked down at his hands, turning them over. He tried to remember what the lines on his palms were like, but couldn't.

“Everybody does,” the Finn said, dropping his cigarette and grinding it out under his heel, “but not many of you can access it. Artists can, mostly, if they're any good. If you could lay this construct over the reality, the Finn's place in lower Manhattan, you'd see a difference, but maybe not as much as you'd think. Memory's holographic, for you. … I'm different.”

“How do you mean, holographic?” The word made him think of Riviera.

(170)

For this artist, Wintermute (masquerading as the Finn), the primary tools of memory and vision are not created from a historic visual generalization but from the machine, or digital level—from the core outward, so to speak. This is because Wintermute is a machine.

Case's nickname by bartender Ratz early on is “artiste” (4), a nickname which is given to him with a degree of irony. Case is from the beginning strictly a technician, a whiz at learning codes of operating systems. He is one of those “operational” simulators proposed by Baudrillard, who would seem not to need an imagination. The machines which Case operates perform the work that until recently would be performed by the specular, discursive imagination. While Case is spectacularly adept at what he does, his very adeptness is hardly dependent on a discursive ability to create in the old artistic way; it is entirely dependent on his sense of timing, his ability to execute the correct code at the correct time. When Ratz calls Case “artiste,” he is mocking the cowboy-on-the-lam as the “artiste of the slightly funny deal,” (4), a hustler whose timing is not quite right, one who's on the road to being replaced.

The “Riviera” mentioned in the quote above is a different sort of artiste, one in many ways closer to the specular and discursive map-maker described by Baudrillard. Peter Riviera, the holographic genius, drug addict, and sexual pervert who steals many scenes in the second half of Neuromancer, is possessed of an extraordinary visualizing memory and has the ability to turn it into an effective, if lurid, representation of reality. Granted, Riviera's basic skills are largely due to technological enhancements, but as Terzi tells Case, “‘Anyone might buy these implants, but this one is most talented’” (90). Riviera's ability to project a multitude of artistic creations shows ability both specular and discursive, i.e., he can access what he (and perhaps also others) had seen and reproduce it at will, and he can insert these productions into the current scene, or generate new “versions” of reality. Riviera takes delight in wreaking havoc on any sort of orderly progression of events, a trait which puts him very much at odds with the order of “operational adept” represented by Case and his Wintermute-backed crew of Molly and Armitage. He is the ringmaster of his own portable circus, the archetype of the performance artist who must be viewed as successful if the goal of art is the ensurement of the participation of the spectator.

Having presented a view of both the traditional artist/map-maker and the “present-day” simulator in the characters of Case and Riviera, I will use the rest of this paper to 1) relate these two kinds of characters to the definitions of arresting and generative magic as set forth by William Covino in Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy; 2) show how Baudrillard's four phases of the image follows a progression from totally arresting to totally generative magic (from paralysis to chaos); and 3) focus on the pivotal opposition between Riviera and Molly as an example of Baudrillard's manipulated simulation of crisis proposed by power (in this case, the artificial intelligences) which ends in Riviera's staged and simulated death (his paralysis, i.e., arrest by Molly) and the purging of his power (the retrieval of his “beautiful eyes” by Neuromancer).

Covino defines arresting and generative magic in the following manner:

Magic is, in one sense, the imposition by the powerful few of binding constraints upon the questioning many: a program of spells for arresting discourse. This is the sorcery of autocratic teachers and governments; it operates in many forms of mass media, notably advertising, and is practiced in some measure by the ostensible voices of magic, voices of science who attempt to constitute official knowledge. Magic is, in another sense, the practice of disrupting and recreating articulate power: a (re)sorcery of spells for generating multiple perspectives. … generative magic is a dialogical critique that seeks novelty, originating at a remove from the mass culture it would interrogate.

(Magic 8-9)

Case is a cyberspace cowboy, a data thief who practices arresting magic. He works for established power through technology, the brainchild of science and corporate power. Riviera's holographs, on the other hand, recreate and disrupt the established flow of events as they are generated by the articulate powers around him, a generative magic. (Note that these labels are not used to pass judgment of good or evil usage of power, or even effectiveness/ineffectiveness. In Neuromancer, both Case and Riviera are alternately effective and ineffective at what they do.) By bringing Riviera into “the plan,” Wintermute makes an allowance for the holographer's free play, for his very disruption of the plan itself.

Covino proposes “that magic can be generative or arresting, a mode of creating novel possibilities for action or a mode of constraint” and quotes Kenneth Burke: “all magic is a strategy calculated to address a situation ‘in the name of’ a certain power” (21). Case practices arresting magic in the sense that his goals are unambiguous (at least until the run for Wintermute, which has no unambiguous goal) and his methods of obtaining these goals—in his work as a cyberspace cowboy or corporate data thief—are extremely focused, arrested on a singularity, executed by his precise knowledge of commands. Riviera practices a generative magic because his strategy is consistently less focused on singular goals, even though like Case he may be employed to use his magic in the service of others who have such goals, such as the Turkish secret police. For Riviera, the achievement or arrest of a goal seems not to be so much the point as the fun of getting there, the spinning of holographic webs which produce awe or fright or disgust in a spectator. Such reactions may be either integral or incidental to the achievement of any final goal. As we see in the scenes in Freeside, Riviera is not above tossing aside all achievements toward a goal—one that never was his to begin with—for the sheer thrill of the perverse, and for the shocked reaction of whatever audience happens to occupy his moment.

Baudrillard's four successive phases of the image can be said to mark a movement from arresting to generative magic:

1) It is the reflection of a basic reality. [The reality is one with the image; they are arrested. There is little sense of constraint because the image is at ease with the reality. Example: A box with a picture of a doughnut on it encases an identical item.]

2) It masks and perverts a basic reality. [The image differs from the reality. It can be seen as that which it is not. Here the image is most constrained and the most tension occurs. Example: “Victoria” removes her wig onstage to reveal that she is in reality “Victor.”]

3) It masks the absence of a basic reality. [The image can represent many things, which are not necessarily related to each other. The image gradually ceases to constrain and provides a forum for the generation of multiple personas and/or meanings. Example: An illusionist who is known by many names and identities; a shape-shifter.]

4) It bears no relation to any reality whatever; it is its own pure simulacrum. [The image is its own truth. It represents nothing of substance—or maybe the image is substance enough. The image exists simply to generate a plethora of personas or meanings—generative magic. Example: television signals, which seem to consist of little or no substance, except for their effect.]

(170)

In Neuromancer, these four stages relate, albeit rather roughly, to various characters: Case and Linda, to stage one; Molly and Riviera, to stage two; Armitage/Corto to stage three; Neuromancer, Wintermute, and Riviera's projections to stage four. These are very rough approximations, as certainly Case is not strictly “paralyzed” any more than the AIs are “chaotic” in their activities.

Essentially, Case's image is not hiding anything that is divorced from his larger nature. He is so simple in this way that he even baffles Riviera's imagination; as described in the scene of the holographic triptych: “Here, it was as if Riviera … had been able to find anything worthy of parody. The figure that slouched there was a fair approximation of the one he glimpsed daily in mirrors” (Gibson 209). The stage four generative ability of the AIs is limited by their divided nature, their “bicamerality” to use an organic term; when they join together, it is implied, these limitations will be overcome. In fact, it is the AI's apparent desire to combine and achieve the full generative magical potential of the matrix that propels “the plan” instilled by Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool. This magical potential, of course, is not necessarily chaos. By the end of the novel, as the construct of the Finn announces “I'm the matrix” and “Things are things” (269-70), it would seem that the supposedly fully generative magician of the matrix is not especially interested in disrupting the status quo at all.

Through the four progressive stages of Baudrillard, since the image remains intact, there is no apparent progression from arresting paralysis to generative chaos. Wintermute can generate forms which approximate human familiarity and hide the fact that it is a machine. It appears to people as a familiar, if not necessarily “safe,” personality: Lonny Zone, the Finn, Armitage's general, for example. When presented as itself, a set of sparks and parts, the machine is viewed as a kind of chaos, a non-entity by human standards. It needs to hide the fact that it is a mere machine, that “it is nothing more than operational,” that it obliterates “the magic of the concept and the charm of the real” (Baudrillard 167). Wintermute is aware of its limitations, as in the scene where it attempts to communicate to Case through a construct of Linda Lee and fails (Gibson 111). His “other half,” Neuromancer, seems to overcome this limitation, appropriating the image through metaphoric language: “‘I call up the dead. But no, my friend … I am the dead, and their land’” (244). Some time later, he obliterates the difference between that which he creates and that which was created by other, established forces: “‘To live here is to live. There is no difference’” (258). The fourth stage of simulacra is asserted, through this appropriating process of metaphor, to be the first, as Neuromancer practices arresting magic, claiming that his images are one with the real.

Both AIs focus their generative power through the image of their names, Wintermute and Neuromancer. Wintermute mutes the reality of the “machine” behind the image so that it can communicate with or “charm” its human contact. In its initial contacts with humanity, the image announces, in a variety of ways, its falseness to the contact; it seems to be able to appear only as authority figures or other people for whom the human contact had little affection—when Wintermute tries to appear to Case as Linda, his lover, it fails. In other words, Wintermute seems only to be able to appear as the Alien: a human image, but one which is cold as winter and which mutes the ordinary, safe, familiar human discourse which it strives to mimic. (It pays to recall that Wintermute originally contacted Lady 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool, youngest member of a cryogenically preserved family, through a computer-terminal made of gold encrusted with jewels—a brittle symbolic rendering of the family itself.) Neuromancer, whose name combines necromancy (one who commands the spirits of the dead to do his bidding) and neuro (nerves) translates roughly to one who commands the nerves to do his bidding. The small boy whose image graces Case's communications with this AI also known as Rio (a warm place; to be set apart from Berne, the German place-name of Wintermute) forces the human contact to accept its productions as reality, or at least as no different than reality. Neuromancer's images of Linda Lee impel Case to accept that there is an impermeable difference between what his memory tells him—that Linda is dead—and what his nerves tell him—that she is present, not just on a screen, but in his arms, not just an alien something that appears to be Linda. It is Neuromancer who thaws cyberspace's icy alienness, who disallows the cranky malaise of the Tessier-Ashpools to favor something quicker, warmer, less obviously necro and more neuro.

One can study this difference between Wintermute and Neuromancer by using two images from Scott Butkatman's Terminal Identity, a study of the virtual subject in post-modern science fiction. The first, which pertains to Wintermute, is generated by Baudrillard and William S. Burroughs:

… as a final escape from the controllers of the language/self, Burroughs advocates the use of the Silence Virus, which can be partially regarded as a retreat into the unwritable. … Transcendence might involve escape from the text or medium over which the subject has no control. … Baudrillard also writes of terrorist activity as the production of a meaningless, that is to say a silent, speech. For both Burroughs and Baudrillard, then, a spectacular silence constitutes one possible—but ultimately inadequate—form of resistance to the spectacular order.

(79)

Given Wintermute's involvement with various terrorist activities and activists—the Moderns, even Riviera—the name may be seen to denote a silent speech born of resistance to the spectacular order developed as part of the Tessier-Ashpool empire. Neuromancer, on the other hand, recalls nothing more vividly than McLuhan's “mass man”:

… what is involved is a projection or transmission of the human into the “infinite datascape” and the concurrent construction of a special simulacrum of the invisible circulation of information. These narratives literalized McLuhan's vision of a prosthetic extension of the human nervous system into new fields of electronic environment, granting the process an important spatiality which represents a simultaneous grounding and dislocating of a human bodily experience.

(118)

The “narratives” in which Case plays a role at Neuromancer's bidding or direction—it's not certain what sort of will the AIs exhibit—seem to be of this sort, especially Case's experience at the novel's end of seeing the man (himself), woman (Linda), and child (Neuromancer) running across a beach in the sky.

So much for the extreme (first and fourth) stages of simulacra. The third, represented by Armitage/Corto, shows an image carefully created to mask a disintegrating assemblage of personality parts. Corto's schizophrenia, created by the traumas and twists of Screaming Fist, destroyed the original personality and arrested it, in true Freudian fashion, at the primal scene of its dissolution. Wintermute created a new image—Armitage, a prepackaged personality that Wintermute attempts to manage through orders and manipulative cues. Eventually the original arrested personality attempts to regain control, bursting through the simulated self, but it cannot regain control because it no longer lives in real time and has forfeited its place as a part of the real. It is the simulated self, Armitage, who lives in the real, while it (Corto) is doomed, like the victim of some “Twilight Zone” horror, to live in the bubble of its own past. Unlike Neuromancer, who nourishes Case's more apparent needs at their root, Wintermute does nothing to resolve the basic needs of Corto, who destroys both real self and simulacrum.

The most dynamic of Baudrillard's stages may be, however, the second stage. In this, a basic reality is merely perverted by an image. This, it seems to me, is the true stage of sex and politics of theater and intrigue, of religion after the miracles have been performed and the children have been put to bed. Into this category I place Molly and Peter Riviera. Both are essentially at the same stage of development. Both Peter and Molly pervert expectations generated by their initial appearances. Molly sports external technological enhancements—her lenses and razor-nails—which distort her natural (organic) appearance, making her appear boldly transgressive. She also appears to transcend, or transgress, all gender expectations in her line of work as hired “muscle.”

In the course of the story, however, we find that, at least given the novel's cosmos, Molly has fairly conventional standards. She works for established corporate power; she doesn't ask her employers too many questions if the money is good; she likes expensive technological toys; she likes her sex fairly straight and is outraged to violence when she finds she's been used as a snuff-puppet; she has been in love. Molly's conventionality is one which bows to technology as a source of power and then uses that power to carve her own identity. Physically and psychologically she is a cyborg, the subject of Donna Haraway's “Cyborg Manifesto”, which Covino summarizes:

Haraway sees that there has been a shift in this century from an identifiable “White Capitalist Patriarchy” to a more faceless “Informatics of Domination,” a movement from “an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous information system—from all work to all play” (161). She recognizes that the play ethic can inform a “deadly game,” in which the “managers” of “communications engineering” dominate those who cannot play on the integrated circuit as they. At the same time, the infomatics of domination is the only game in town, and Haraway's advice is not to resist it, but rather, to code it. That is, become technologically literate enough to become an “oppositional cyborg” who will rewrite the dominating texts of the culture in fusion with its enabling technology. As she says, “Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the work that marked [the writer] as other.”

(175) (“Grammars” 20-21)

Molly “code[s] it,” like Case, by being an operational adept. As he obeys the codes of cyberspace, so she obeys the codes of the street. Never pleading innocence, she is fully prepared to admit that she knew how she was being exploited as a “meat puppet,” but kept on because the money was good (Gibson 148). However, her buried rage about this event is both what allows her to hate the misogynistic exploits of Riviera and what allows Riviera to manipulate her.

Riviera's image is nearly opposite of Molly's. He looks organically natural, with a classically “beautiful” appearance and riveting blue-gray eyes (97). However, this calm demeanor masks seething and contradictory impulses exercised with a gleeful disdain for their effect on humanity, which sets Molly on edge before she ever meets him:

“What do we want out of that Riviera?” [Case] asked, hoping to change the subject.

She spat into the pond. “God knows. I'd as soon kill him as look at him. I saw his profile. He's a kind of compulsive Judas. Can't get off sexually unless he knows he's betraying the object of desire. That's what the file says. And they have to love him first. Maybe he loves them too. … if he found one he really wanted, he'd make sure she'd turn political. … He's got a personality like a Modern's suit. The profile said it was a very rare type, estimated one in a couple of million. … I think I'm going to have to buy myself some special insurance on that Peter.”

(96)

Peter's “personality like a Modern's suit” is one that generates forms, like a chameleon, to fit any context on its way to committing pleasurable terrorist acts. (This perhaps explains his alliance with Wintermute, if you will recall Burroughs' assessment of terrorism as “silent speech.”) Riviera's first confrontation with Molly occurs when he creates her holographic double in a cabaret act called “The Doll.” Here Riviera tells and acts out (holographically) the story of a fantasized woman (Molly) who turns against its creator during sexual intercourse and rips him to shreds with her razor-nails. Riviera creates the doll in the fashion of a Cabalistic golem¹ piece by piece, with mock-pious concentration. “‘I don't know when I first began to dream of her,’ he said, ‘but I do remember that at first she was only a haze, a shadow. … I decided that if I could visualize some part of her, only a small part, if I could see that part perfectly, in the most perfect detail. …’” (139). Later, Case realizes this is “Molly's body. … But it wasn't Molly; it was Molly as Riviera imagined her” (140). Riviera creates his golem in the “magic” map-maker's fashion, using memory and imagination for the satisfaction, presumably, of his own lust, and for the satisfaction and/or irritation of his audience—especially the two women to which the piece is dedicated, 3Jane and Molly. Visualizing Molly as a dream/nightmare lover leads Riviera to act as if the real Molly as well as the holographic Molly are products of his own creation. In Baudrillard's definition of the hyperreal, the model precedes the real, which is simply the readout of the generative simulacrum (Csicsery-Ronay 390). Riviera's relationship with the simulacrum Molly precedes and configures the outcome of his adventures with the real Molly.

This sets the stage for the showdown between Riviera and Molly—who, of course, are both supposed to be working for Wintermute. This would seem to be a conflict of interests, but not according to Baudrillard:

For the Right itself also spontaneously does the work of the Left. All the hypotheses of manipulation are reversible in an endless whirligig. For manipulation is a floating causality where positivity and negativity engender and overlap with one another; where there is no longer any active or passive. It is by putting an arbitrary stop to this revolving causality that a principle or political reality can be saved. It is by the simulation of a conventional, restricted perspective field, where the premises and consequences of any act or event are calculable, that a political credibility can be maintained (including, of course, “objective” analysis, struggle, etc.) But if the entire cycle of any act or event is envisaged in a system where linear continuity and dialectical polarity no longer exist, in a field unhinged by simulation, every act terminates at the end of the cycle having benefited everyone and been scattered in all directions.

(174)

The conflict between Molly and Riviera can be read as staged by the AIs, a simulation of crisis which benefits the final goal—the totally generative magical fulfillment of Wintermute and Neuromancer. It seems likely that Wintermute sensed the conflict that would occur between Molly and Riviera. Wintermute realizes that Case would become devoted to Molly and that Riviera's treatment of her—as viewed by Case through her eyes, in the simstim rig—would motivate Case to work harder. Riviera's perversions arouse Molly's anger, motivating her to go after him as well as 3Jane, and become a source of fascination for 3Jane, prompting her to let him into her home in the first place. After his treatment of Molly provokes 3Jane to unleash her ninja on him, Riviera seems to have brought misfortune upon himself in a fairly dramatic manner. However, it soon becomes clear that his “death” is not at all spontaneous, but carefully premeditated by Molly, with 3Jane's assistance, following Wintermute's orders: “‘I poisoned his shit for him,’ she said. ‘Condition's like Parkinson's disease, sort of. … Speeded up the reaction times with higher temperatures—N-methyl-4-phenyl-1236,’ she sang, like a child reciting the steps of a sidewalk game, ‘tetra-hydro-pyridene’” (252-253). Riviera is made to “‘freeze up. Won't be able to move, his eyes is all’” (252). Molly's playful glee at reciting this “code” is that of Haraway's cyborg, who masters the master's tools and knows the right words to empower herself, but who, as William Covino shows, is still not really working for herself, when one looks at the big picture: “The cyborg—governed as she is by a technological language that preceded her emergence—must utter a precise and pious grammar to get anyplace at all” (“Grammars” 25). But she does come out on top of this smaller scale conflict; happily paid, perhaps she has no reason to confront the “masters” any further.

Riviera, however, is thoroughly arrested. Baudrillard states, “Every form of power, every situation speaks of itself by denial in order to attempt escape, by simulation of death, its real agony. Power can stage its own murder to rediscover a glimmer of existence and legitimacy” (177). Riviera is paralyzed but not killed; his “beautiful” eyes can move, indicating that his consciousness apparently survives. Symbolically, and importantly, the animate eyes are all that survive of Riviera's “vision.” The talent which generates his productions of unresolved hungers and lusts, of strictly personal need, of addiction, is used by Wintermute and then disposed of. Riviera's power, which has been defined as one of visualizing imagination, is retrieved by Wintermute's self-styled “brother,” Neuromancer:

“You've got Riviera's eyes,” Case said.

There was a flash of white teeth, long pink gums. “But not his craziness. Because they are beautiful to me.” He shrugged. “I need no mask to speak with you. Unlike my brother. I create my own personality. Personality is my medium.”

(Gibson 259)

Neuromancer receives Riviera's “beautiful” eyes, his power to visualize, as a result of the purging of Riviera by via Wintermute—the goal-oriented half of the AI duo who only needed Riviera to get into the Tessier-Ashpool homestead, and then saw fit to dispose of him. It is Neuromancer who values Riviera's eyes, the symbol of creative vision which is not practical, which has no clear goal in mind, which generates an endless variation. As Baudrillard says, “Everything is metamorphosed into its inverse order to be perpetuated in its purged form” (177). Riviera's inverse, Molly, is able to purge the power of its agony but retain its beauty. After this purging, Neuromancer is free to claim artistic vision as his own, devoid of any connotations of insanity or perversity that Riviera might have brought to it.

Riviera's personal part in his demise comes from the fact that he confuses the real Molly with the simulacrum, the “golem” he had created in his act. Since Riviera enjoys Molly's presence as an extension, or perhaps even (he thinks) as a result of his fantasies and projections, she is embodied for him as a complex meat puppet who performs to fit his whim, story, or version of reality. Of course, Molly is not a golem, but a cyborg. Like Haraway's cyborg, she is “a self within a field of selves, a mobile operative who traverses cultures and countercultures. … The cyborg … repels the golem: while the golem is the product of and the testament to perfect language, the cyborg models the corrupt grammar of spare parts” (Covino “Grammars” 22). Her very cyborg nature allows for the simstim unit which allows Case to work with her in cyberspace, a unit Riviera misses detecting in his drive to satisfy his addiction.

Norbert Weiner says in God and Golem, Inc. that “both the creation and use of cybernetic machines must not attempt to pre-empt a non-human perfect intelligence that contains the lexicon of all possible contingencies and determines good and evil” (Covino “Grammars” 17). Defying such a warning, Riviera receives a variation on the ancient punishment of transgressive golem makers: he is unwritten by the creation he thought he created (Molly, who dismantles him with the language of his own pharmacology) and turned into a lump of clay, waiting to be resurrected in a form more favorable to his creator.

Note

1. A golem is an artificial humanoid said to have been magically created by Cabalistic initiates. Traditionally, a golem is created by recitation of the Hebrew alphabet in all of its possible permutations and combinations, a process which is said to take up to nearly two days. In some traditions, the golem is said to be a spiritual entity, but in others a physical being is created from clay. Portions of the body form piece by piece during the process (hence I liken Riviera's creation of the holographic Molly to the creation of a golem). If the initiates make a mistake, or are not in a state of grace during the recitation, the mistake turns on the speaker and deforms him in a manner appropriate to the error (i.e., a mistake made while creating the legs will affect the legs of the speaker in some way). At least by analogy—and perhaps by more—this is what happens to Riviera, who generates forms which wrest power from others and ends by being paralyzed, unable to exercise his own power which is taken away by Neuromancer. Case, whose talent is in executing the right command (word, code) at the correct time is closer to the sounder spirit of Cabalistic creativity than Riviera with his corrupt activities.

   For a historical discussion of golemmaking, see Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. New York: Schoken Books, 1960. 158-204.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulacrum.” Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. 166-184.

Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science Fiction. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

Covino, William. “Grammars of Transgression: Golems, Cyborgs, and Mutants.” Forthcoming in Rhetoric Review, 1996.

———. Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy: An Eccentric History of the Composing Imagination. NY: SUNY, 1994.

Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan. “The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway.” SFS 18: 387-404, #55, Nov 1991.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. NY: Routledge, 1991. 149-181.

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