SOURCE: Huntington, John. “Newness, Neuromancer, and the End of Narrative.” Essays and Studies 43 (1990): 59-75.

[In the following essay, Huntington argues that the alienated characters who populate Neuromancer represent a form of resistance to dominant cultural mores.]

I

The dynamic by which science fiction discovers and defines the ‘new’ has been depicted by the practitioners of the genre itself as a triumph of rational art. In fact it is a much less rational process than is pictured. In addition to the usual sources of conflict that enliven any group or genre—personal envy, political disagreement, generational rivalry—science fiction, by its very nature, must create disagreement about what it is and why it is important. This special level of disagreement is particularly resistant to discussion because the rational terms by which the genre usually formulates its own importance obscure essential social dynamics of the argument and of science fiction's appeal. The argument within the genre about what is the ‘new’ was recently revived by the success of William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer, which has come to typify what is now known as the ‘cyberpunk’ movement.¹ The novel has attracted discussion less for its plot—which tells of how Case, a dejected and self-destructive computer hacker, with the help of an extremely competent gun-for-hire, Molly Millions, breaks through the Tessier-Ashpool computer defences (‘the ice’)—than for its hectic imagery and its graphic vision of a world in which one can plug one's mind directly into a global computer network. Those who find the novel significantly new seem to want to read it as a serious meditation on the reality that computers will create, but their enthusiasm is not dampened when they find that Gibson does not know very much about technology. One has to suspect that Neuromancer's aura of newness derives from something deeper than its explicit ideas about the future.

If science fiction were as rational as it sometimes claims to be, it might make sense to argue that we cannot interpret or evaluate any claim to newness until the future depicted (whether generated by prediction, extrapolation, or some other less precise mode of foresight) has revealed itself. Such an idea contains its own refutation, for by this logic we could never discuss most science fiction, and we could never identify authentic newness until it was old. Science fiction is a literary genre whose value has little to do with any privileged insight into the actual future. But as soon as we have dissolved this level of paradox, we find it necessary to begin to construct anew what distinguishes science fiction from other genres. Science fiction may not be predictive, but it still engages the idea of the ‘new’, what Darko Suvin, following Ernst Bloch, calls the ‘novum’. As Suvin carefully and exactly puts it, ‘An analysis of SF is necessarily faced with the question of why and how was the newness recognizable as newness at the moment it appeared, what ways of understanding, horizons, and interests were implicit in the novum and required for it.’² Science fiction is less a prediction than a rendering of somebody's possibilities of hope. In interpreting science fiction we are in part analysing what an author sees as the age's potential. By interpreting the significance and the perception of newness in a work of science fiction we are entering a debate about the present historical situation. We are thinking about and debating what it is important that we think about.

We can approach this paradox-prone situation a number of ways. We can, at the simplest level, inquire about the explicit ideas in the text. Insofar as this means discussing the feasibility of machines or social organizations, such an approach quickly reaches its limit and becomes simply an assertion of political opinion. We can, however, probe deeper structures of coherence in the work. Most obviously, we can criticize the ways in which the work fails to see just how much it merely recapitulates that which it claims to transcend. In Suvin's terms, we are then showing it to be the creation of a false novum. Thus, utopias that claim gender equality but which are riddled with unconscious discriminations can be shown for what they are. Much modern science fiction, just as it has become too sophisticated to be accused of extrapolation or anticipation, seems to guard itself against such an approach by implicitly disavowing any utopian purpose and claiming futuristic play as an end in itself. We need to be suspicious of such a claim, however, for, as recent literary criticism has taught us, no text is simply disinterested; there is some kind of meaningful and pleasurable construct, some kind of defence, or some kind of rationalization at the heart of all fantasy. Since the text itself tries to conceal its arbitrariness and even convince itself that what it describes is natural, we can never understand this level of meaningfulness by simply accepting what the text itself says, but we must seek out the moments of strain or the irrationalities that betray repression or resistance.

Suvin asks ‘why and how was the newness recognizable as newness?’ To put this query in different terms, part of the difficulty we have interpreting and recognizing ‘newness’ derives from our inability to see the limits of our own ideologies. All writers, readers, and critics of science fiction are defined and limited by what Pierre Bourdieu calls ‘habitus’ and Raymond Williams calls ‘structure of feeling’.³ These are the values, expectations, and assumptions shaped by class, gender, and race, that determine our later understandings, evaluations, and actions. Bourdieu and Williams would argue that the main source of newness is the acceptance of a voice speaking out of a previously unacknowledged habitus, the introduction of new class or group values into the hegemonic canon. It is not important that new classes become the subject of the new literature, but that some essentially new class awareness make itself felt.

While making ‘newness’ its defining subject, science fiction has tended to conceal its present social interests. The technological and scientific innovations, as has already been observed, are rarely accurate to the actual future, and even if they were, they still serve mainly as rationalizations for a social fantasy. Suvin's honouring of ‘valid’ science fiction for its ‘cognitive estrangement’⁴ similarly dignifies conscious rationality without a sufficient appreciation of the political unconscious, to use Jameson's term, which underlies all literature. To return to the issue of Neuromancer, it seems likely that its enthusiasts find the cyberspace idea plausible, not because of any insight into future technology it entails, but because they find the ‘structure of feeling’ of the novel ‘true’ to their own sense of reality, and, by a back-formation, so to speak, they justify that feeling by finding the technology convincing.

To sketch how such a social analysis might take place, let me turn back to the beginnings of science fiction and H. G. Wells. The Time Machine (1895) is most revolutionary, not because it uses a scientific gesture (that Wells himself would later debunk as science) in fiction, but because it marks a small but significant shift in class allegiances. To be sure, the horror of the Morlocks can be linked to an aversion to the working classes. But that horror is somewhat of a ruse; Wells is attempting, desperately and unconsciously, to sound like a solid bourgeois. Under this superficial horror lies a more basic hostility to middle-class culture as represented by the Eloi. In all his early work Wells differs from other writers of the time and in related genres—such as Grant Allen or Arthur Conan Doyle—in his eagerness to imagine the destruction of ‘civilization’. This is the expression of an anger that Wells derives from his own lower-class habitus. Thanks in large part to his confused class allegiances, Wells brings a new structure of feeling to canonic literature.

The argument for the recognition of such a deep-structural innovation is always problematic and becomes more difficult to make and to document in the case of more contemporary works. It is one thing for us to reconstruct the historical significance of Lyrical Ballads or The Time Machine, and quite another for us to evaluate a literary situation in which our own immediate structure of feeling is at risk. And any critic, in defending or resisting the work, needs to be aware that, quite apart from an evaluation of the literary or scientific ‘ideas’ that the work pushes to the fore, he or she is participating in the social struggle the work itself has initiated by its claim to newness. In the long run, the critic's own discussion and analysis play some role in the historical understanding and placing of the work, that is to say, in the success or failure of its social voice.

Finally, though social issues may lie at the heart of the perception of newness, we cannot begin with them. Because class is an area of struggle which literature negotiates, it is in the literature's rhetorical interests to conceal its class allegiance. Certainly Neuromancer does not seem explicitly concerned with class. Despite the Rastafarian connection which strongly links the novel's world with that of contemporary British punk, the world of Neuromancer is missing surface class dynamics. There is the Tessier-Ashpool aristocracy, of course, but that is a grotesque fantasy of incestuous isolation outside the class system altogether. The underworld that Case, Molly, and the others inhabit is a parasite to the largely invisible corporate world that produces the computer-saturated environment. The class-generated structure of feeling that we seek to uncover reveals itself, not in the concrete surface references, but in the formal structure of the work.

II

Experience in Neuromancer is a kind of Berkleyan sensorium in which all any character can really know is sensation. In cyberspace one senses just as profoundly as one does in ‘real’ space. Characters are intensely invested in events that they also recognize as arbitrary. Such an awareness, combining involvement and disengagement, is characteristic, not of life, but of the experience of narration. All plots are gratuitous. The Flatline construct (Case's companionable and mentoring program) puts the matter succinctly and ironically when Case tells it that he must physically invade the Tessier-Ashpool Ice, ‘Wonderful … I never did like to do anything simple when I could do it ass-backwards’ (p. 221). Behind this joke lies a recognition of the gratuity of the plot complications that follow. To be sure, in all adventure stories the narrative is both gratuitous and a source of pleasure, but few acknowledge the former aspect so unabashedly. Wintermute, the AI, disguised this time as the bartender Ratz, says to Case, the protagonist, ‘Really, my artiste, you amaze me. The lengths you will go in order to accomplish your own destruction. The redundancy of it!’ (p. 234). This remark, while part of the diagesis, expresses an insight into the whole experience of the novel. This passage links the arbitrary plot to the puzzle of death, which underlies all plots. Peter Brooks, in an essay called ‘Freud's Masterplot’, developing ideas in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, explains narrative itself as a compulsive repetition leading toward death (in the case of the novel, the end, closure) and at the same time holding off death (ending, closure).⁵ The double dynamic of narrative, simultaneously progressing and retarding, and its relations to the death instinct and to art are all formulated by Neuromancer. In pointing to the superfluity of a narrative that is also in its very superfluity engaged in a matter of life and death, the line makes clear that the meaningful and intensely contradictory relation to plot that narration usually forces on the reader in this novel belongs to the characters as well.

The equivalence of ‘real’ and ‘matrix’ experience inverts the conventional metaphors by which the mental world is understood. A number of times Gibson explains a ‘real’ experience by giving its equivalent in the matricial realm. What happens is an elevation of matricial hallucination and of computer competence to the level of conventional physical sensation and ability. Heroic and skilful action for Case takes place at the computer keyboard. At one important moment Molly's extraordinary athleticism is validated by being compared to the activity of a skilful computer operator: ‘She went in just right, Case thought. The right attitude; it was something he could sense, something he could have seen in the posture of another cowboy leaning into a deck, fingers flying across the board. She had it: the thing, the moves’ (p. 213). What is remarkable about such a passage is its exact inversion of the usual metaphors of physical grace. This subordination of the physical, and therefore of the ‘real’, is central to the theme of the novel.

We need to appreciate how uncommon this theme is in the science-fiction genre. The triumph of brain over brawn, the victory of genius is, of course, a theme that has a long history in science fiction. But the complementary theme, the monstrosity of mind without body, has just as long a tradition. Neuromancer's pointed emphasis on hallucination and on artificial experience would ordinarily involve this latter theme. But in this novel the empirical moralism that would denounce purely mental experience does not appear. The novel revels in surrogate experience. The computer matrix, the images of the AI, Case's reconstructed memories, even the hallucinations projected by Peter Riviera are at one level equivalent to physical experience. In such a situation ‘fiction’ loses its meaning because all events are fiction.

Just as the hallucinatory freedom the novel depicts renders the empirical narrative pointless, time, the dimension of tragic necessity, becomes gratuitous, merely a complication. The discrepancy between the time that Case experiences and that which the Flatline, which is unconscious when off and instantaneous when on, experiences is a recurring joke. At other times Case will experience a long adventure in the matrix and then be told by Maelcum that he has been away only five minutes (p. 245). And at another time we hear, as Case experiences the AI's facade: ‘Time passed. He walked on’ (p. 235). This laconic moment, by ignoring the details of duration and space that have intensely occupied the narrative's attention, reveals the artificiality and the exhaustion of the narrative itself.

One might explain such a moment as simply the failure of hack writing, but the novel is too alert, too aware of its own devices to be seen as just sloppy. The game signifies that, just as the cyberspace deck renders all experience equally artificial, the novel itself, while narrating this artificial experience from a realistic perspective, has become, by a back door, so to speak, a narrative about narrative. Though, we should hasten to add, because it posits an empirical, narratable reality, the computer matrix, as the limit of such self-reflection, the novel never becomes simply a ‘postmodern’ play with narrative. Wild as it is in some respects, Neuromancer remains true to the strong realistic narrative traditions of science fiction.

Yet even the realistic narrative here leads towards an anxious double relation. Like Stephen King, Gibson gains a kind of realism by invoking brand-names and identifying the nationality of all his technology. Unlike Stephen King's, many of Gibson's brand-names are yet to be. But, like King's domestic consumer references, which have the effect of horror just because they so anchor the reader's unnatural experience in the quotidian, Gibson's are a constant reminder of the dominated world in which the cowboy must play. Yet at the same time, these names offer pleasures, powers, and knowledges to the sophisticate. One of the deep paradoxes of high-tech consumerism is clearly apparent here: while multinational production renders us victims, there is nevertheless a cachet simply to knowing the technological catalogue.

An intentionally produced narrative confusion contributes to this contradiction. Gibson repeatedly refers knowingly to a futuristic machine, concept, or situation before it has been explained. Like a student in a class a little too hard, the reader finds the language being spoken always just a bit beyond comprehension, though never incomprehensible. This is, to be sure, a common science-fiction device, though it seldom occurs as regularly or as essentially as it does in Neuromancer. In Van Vogt, to invoke one of the first masters of the technique, we usually know when we do not know what is being talked about. Gibson puts us in a more nervous position: we usually have the anxiety that we have missed an explanation somewhere earlier. One thematic effect of the device is to imply that the reader has never grasped more than an edge of the whole reality. Such an anxiety is different from that which the characters themselves feel: they do not know some plots, but they are completely at home in the technology. This is an important discrepancy: the reader's confusion expresses a form of helplessness; the character's competence expresses a form of mastery.

Here is the central paradox of the novel: just as the novel's characters are aware of the fictional nature of their own experiences, Neuromancer delights in the characters' technological competence and in their (and its own) stylistic flamboyance in the midst of, perhaps even in the service of a totally dominating system. This paradox is evident in many layers of the narrative and in the theme, and one may surmise that the novel's success derives from the structural coherence that its readership experiences at this level. Stylistically, it creates anxiety about an ambiguous and oppressive reality and at the same time revels in the increased possibilities the ambiguity allows and the anarchy the oppression justifies.

III

In Neuromancer we are seeing evidence of a new, perhaps the final, stage in the trajectory of science fiction. If we contrast Gibson's book with the products of the genre years ago, we see a significant change in the role of the accomplished technocrat. The heroes of writers such as Heinlein or Asimov used their managerial competence to dominate their worlds. Even Van Vogt's paranoid vision allowed for mastery and triumph at the end. By contrast, Case and Robin do not dominate their world. If they pull off a caper, it is according to someone else's plan, and its consequences are not what they expected. Of course, Neuromancer is by no means new in its doubts about the social efficacy of technological mastery. The technological optimism of Golden Age science fiction had begun to disintegrate as early as the 1950s, and by the 1960s what is now termed the new wave challenged the dominant faith in technological solutions and tended to see us all as victims of the technocratic system. In works such as J. G. Ballard's ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964) or Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration (1968) the scientists and technicians despair, not only about controlling or guiding their worlds, but about the very possibilities of meaning itself. The symbolic richness of the imagery of ‘The Terminal Beach’ is ironically empty. The protagonist's attempts to construct a symbolic centre, a concrete mandala in the desert, is trivial and vain against the onslaught of images of entropic decline (countdowns, increased sleeping time, de-evolution, dryness, depression, loss of affect). The few hints of epiphanic meaning—enigmatic messages from space voyagers, Kaldrin's mastery of multi-dimensional forms, the low-keyed erotic energy of Coma—turn out to be indecipherable and useless. Neuromancer shares the new wave's dark sense of the overwhelming and self-destroying system, but at the same time it breaks with new-wave pessimism by finding a positive value in the alienation of technological competence. The hacker and the game player, far from disavowing technology, glorify it and use it to compensate for the overwhelming power of the world symbolized by multinational corporations.

Such an acceptance enables a kind of guerrilla activity in the belly of the beast, but at the same time the more ecstatic its activity, the more it tends to obscure any political solution. It depicts alienation (which is something different from resistance) as a stable and permanent state. Such an attitude is indifferent to the actual politics of the system. It has resigned itself to survival on the edge, in the cracks. This is a common enough approach in life itself, but it signifies a remarkable moment in a genre which has traditionally been apocalyptic. Ironically, beneath the wild technological fantasy, we are here moving towards a kind of cynical realism.

The double consciousness of the narrative voice, aware of the artificiality of the complex plot that absorbs it, both involved and distanced, bears witness to this attitude which enjoys engagement in the wonders of technology even as it acknowledges the utter uselessness of effort. Such doubleness, which earlier phases of science fiction would have difficulty appreciating, signifies the genre's entry into a new structure of feeling. It is here, in its sympathy with the attitudes of a dominated and alienated subculture, not in its insight into actual technology or its consequences, that Gibson's novel is new. It is hard to say if the novel expresses exactly the kind of class anger that Dick Hebdige observes in British punk, but in other respects the novel sympathizes with punk's outlawry and its claim that it has chosen alienation as a significant response to the system. What appears to the science fiction tradition as political evasion may show up from this different perspective as a wise expediency. If to some readers such a road may seem a deadend, to others it directs us to the only way to survive. A question which only time will answer is whether such narrative has a future, or whether Neuromancer by its success marks the end of this line of narrative exploration and thought.

Notes

1. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York, 1984). The positions concerning Neuromancer that are sketched in this paper are generally derived from conversation with students and with fellow participants at the conference on ‘Fiction 2000’ at the University of Leeds in June 1989.

2. Darko Suvin, ‘SF and the Novum’, in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven, 1979), p. 80.

3. ‘Habitus’ is a key term for Bourdieu and occurs in much of his work. See especially Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), p. 101 et passim. Similarly, ‘structure of feeling’ is part of Williams's vocabulary in his early work, but see especially Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973).

4. Suvin, ‘Estrangement and Cognition’, in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, pp. 7-8.

5. Peter Brooks, ‘Freud's Masterplot’, in Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer (eds), Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies. (New York and London, 1989), pp. 287-99.