If the chaos of the nineties reflects a radical shift in paradigms of visual literacy, the final shift away from the Lascaux/Gutenberg tradition of a pre-holographic society, what should we expect from this newer technology, with [its] promise of discrete encoding and subsequent reconstruction of the full range of sensory perception?

—William Gibson, “Fragments of a Hologram Rose,” Burning Chrome

Author of the acclaimed, award-winning novel Neuromancer, as well as of Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive and the short stories collected in Burning Chrome, William Gibson has been greeted as a vital new voice on the science fiction scence.¹ Gibson has been heralded as a postmodern “New Wave” Romanticist,² and a leader of the “Cyberpunk” movement—a coterie of writers steeped in the conventions of the science fiction genre, but departing in essential respects from that genre's familiar fascination with “Big Science.” Earlier science fiction reflected a “yawning cultural gap” between the sciences, on the one hand, and literary culture, on the other, writes “cyberpunk” booster Bruce Sterling, for science itself was “safely enshrined—and confined—in an ivory tower.” But in our era, science and technology are no longer remote from the everyday life of the culture; they are palpable presences influencing every aspect of life:

For the cyberpunks … technology is visceral. It is not the bottled genie of remote Big Science boffins; it is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; often, inside our minds.

Technology itself has changed. Not for us the giant steam-snorting wonders of the past: the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the nuclear power plant. Eighties tech sticks to the skin, responds to the touch: the personal computer, the Sony Walkman, the portable telephone, the soft contact lens.³

The “technolatry” of earlier science fiction—what Sterling calls “scientification”—was more than a love affair with Big Science, however. Mutatis mutandis, it was also a modern re-enthronement of the Enlightenment Goddess of Reason, in her aspect of scientific and technological advance, as the monarch of a utopian world order. Beneath the fast-paced, hard-edged surface, in opposing that technolatry Gibson's deepest literary roots are to be found, like those of many modern novelists, within late eighteenth and nineteenth century Romanticism.⁴ In a seminal story, “The Gernsback Continuum,” Gibson suggests that though the dream of an ideal social order constructed on the principles of abstract reason continues to haunt the mass unconscious of the contemporary psyche as a kind of “semiotic ghost” (BC, 29), that dream belies reality and is in its essence insidiously dangerous. Like Blake's Urizen fantasizing “a joy without pain … a solid without fluctuation,”⁵ scientification's ideal world was, for Gibson, born of a “dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuels, or foreign wars it was possible to lose” (BC, 32). And like Urizen's totalitarian impulse in forging “One King, one God, one Law” (Urizen, K 224), Gibson considers such a world order perilously evocative of the fascist nightmare unleashed in the 1940s:

… I knew, somehow, that the city behind me was Tucscon—a dream Tucscon thrown up out of the collective yearning of an era. That it was real, entirely real. But the couple in front of me lived in it, and they frightened me.

… they were Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American … They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world.

Behind me, the illuminated city: Searchlights swept the sky for the sheer joy of it. I imagined them thronging the plazas of white marble, orderly and alert, their bright eyes shining with enthusiasm for their floodlit avenues and silver cars …

It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler youth propaganda.

(“The Gernsback Continuum,” BC, 32-33)

In rejecting science fiction's twentieth century version of the eighteenth century ideal, Gibson's work ventures anew into the Romantic heartland, where rebels against the dominant order are obsessed with experiences that sweep them up beyond the confines of self and where a desire to confront the unknown becomes an urgent force. In Gibson we witness, on the one hand, the “Abomination of Desolation” to which, as Blake believed, the “Holy Reasoning Power” can lead us (Milton, K 506; Jerusalem, K 629) and, on the other, the struggle to not be contained by that desolation. The Romantics lived in an age shadowed by the Newtonian paradigm and witnessing the onset of modernity: an age of radical psychic and social dislocations, political upheaval and repression, rapid urbanization, the spread of industry and a market economy and, last but not least, the vast expansion of print technology, with its own repression of the full interplay of all human faculties, its outering and isolation of the visual sense, homogenization and linealty.⁶ Lulled by this “multitude of causes unknown to former times” into a “savage torpor” and shackled by “mind-forg'd manacles,” modern humanity, for the Romantic sensibility, desperately needed to awaken to the silenced inner life and the lost riches of imagination.⁷ Their art is thus committed to mining the rich lode of what Marshall McLuhan has called the “ever-mounting slag-heap of rejected awareness” that print technology, as an expression of modernity, itself helped to create (McLuhan, 293).

But Gibson's purview is “post-modern.” His fiction posits a global post-Gutenberg and post-Newtonian culture where the old familiar borders of the industrial age have dissolved. Just as his “cyberpunk” fiction bridges the gap between “science” and “literary culture,” so he depicts a radical interfusion of the market and the polis, the Orient and the West, “man” and “machine,” self and world—and all are transmuted in the process. Driven by the energy of an all-consuming market economy, societies from Japan to the North American “Sprawl” are controlled not by nationalistic governments but by rival multi-national corporations. In that global culture, print technology is a mere memory and reading, and exotic art. Now, through “simstim”—Simulated Stimulation—the whole human sensorium can be technologically outered and, through neuroelectronics, even the most subversive of dreams can be accessed, restructured, edited, “balanced,” packaged and sold—“Radio Shack will sell you the box and the trodes and the cables,” (“Winter Market,” BC, 124). Technological “advance” has brought no utopia into being, however; instead, the “mind-forg'd manacles” Blake saw in late eighteenth century London have become tighter, more elaborate, more devastating. The cities themselves have turned into a “neon forest” roofed over by geodisic domes under a “poisoned silver” sky. In our cities, said Wordsworth, “Getting and spending we lay waste our powers”; in Gibson's urban environments the spread of malls and plazas is relentless, with black markets in drugs, body-parts, dangerous software and “surgical boutiques” selling “vatgrown flesh … tattooed with a luminous digital display wired to a subcutaneous chip” (N, 14). Everywhere, at every moment, is the “ravenous ear of an information-hungry global economy” (“Hinterlands,” BC, 62) and the subliminal hum of illegal “biz.”

In the emerging modern world, wrote Blake, “What is within [is] now seen without” (Four Zoas, K 281). True for his own age, it is even more potent as a description of the world of Gibson's fiction. For the “slag-heap of rejected awareness” from which the Romantics culled their visions of a rejuvenated humanity participating fully and joyously in life is turned inside out in Gibson's world and, in the process, becomes one, ironically, of “solid obstruction.” “Rejected awareness” is a spiritual and aesthetic slag-heap from which visionary art critiquing the present order may be mined. The environments Gibson creates are littered with slag-heaps of rejected and obsolete objects. Consciousness itself is surrounded by the “sea of cast-off goods our century floats on,” piles of “nameless junk,” “impacted scrap,” the waste, the garbage, the gomi that a global market economy generates (“Burning Chrome,” BC, 171; N, 48):

The door swung inward and she led him into the smell of dust. They stood in a clearing, dense tangles of junk rising on either side to walls lined with shelves of crumbling paperbacks. The junk looked like something that had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic. He could pick out individual objects, but then they seemed to blur back into the mass: the guts of a television so old it was studded with the glass stumps of vacuum tubes, a crumbled dish antenna, a brown fiber canister stuffed with corroded lengths of alloy tubing. An enormous pile of old magazines had cascaded into the open area, flesh of lost summers staring blindly up as he followed her back through a narrow canyon of impacted scrap.

(N, 48)

“Where does the gomi stop and the world begin?” asks the protagonist of “Winter Market” (BC, 119). The answer is nowhere; it doesn't. The earlier Romantics saw the journeys—spiritual, psychological, imaginative—on which they persistently embarked as opening up new horizons for the living. In Gibson's world, this Romantic faith in the inner life and, with it, the human imagination, as wellsprings of positive human and social transformation, have all but disappeared, leaving behind decaying goods and a residue, for the protagonists, of mostly nameless rage. In the end, his “Neuromanticism”—a “New Romanticism” of the nerves, “the silver paths”—is also a “Necromanticism”: a “lane to the land of the dead” (N, 243).

The key to understanding the nature of the change from the optimism of Romanticism to the resignation of Neuromanticism is to be found in the qualitative and substantive alterations generated by the technologies that Gibson depicts. The pictures he draws, moreover, assume a provocative power insofar as we see in them, in Sterling's words, the images of a “credible future … a future that is recognizably and painstakingly drawn from the modern condition” (Preface, BC, x). For however fantastical some of Gibson's technologies seem, they are all only extensions and intensifications of technologies already present in popular culture and, indeed, rapidly developing. Our portable telephone, for example, becomes the two-way “bone-phone” surgically implanted in the brain; contact lenses, along with our contemporary penchant for cosmetic surgery, become expensive eyes manufactured to match those of the latest media star, with the corporate logo “Zeiss Ikon” ringing the bearer's iris like “flecks of gold,” an internalization of our own readiness to present our bodies as billboards for designer labels. The current obsession with the decline of cultural and written literacy has evolved into the disappearance of the written word. Television has become “simstim.” People spend hours jacked into units through which they lead “synthetic lives” (CZ, 33), vicariously experiencing the “world—all the interesting parts, anyway”—as delivered by simstim star Tally Isham (“Tally is sham”?):

Tally raced a black Fokker ground-effect plane across Arizona mesa tops. Tally dived the Truk Island preserves. Tally partied with the superrich on private Greek islands, heartbreaking purity of those tiny white seaports at dawn

(“Burning Chrome,” BC, 183).

As McLuhan argues, technological environments “are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike” (McLuhan, 1). Living in a technological landscape where the whole human sensorium can now be outered and the unconscious electronically accessed, edited and packaged for consumer consumption—turned into spectacle by corporate giants through their control of the media—the human species depicted by Gibson is inevitably transformed from the “flesh-and-blood” human as we know it. Rare is the character who is mere “meat.” Nor is there the other extreme, the clunky R2D2's of a late mechanistic-early cybernetic imagination. Already “under our skin … inside our minds,” current technology gives birth to Gibson's futuristic version of the medieval Great Chain, a spectrum ranging from the quasi-animalistic to the bodiless, with all characters invaded and altered by sophisticated bio-and/or silicon technology. At one end are suggestively allegorical characters with names like “Fox” or “Ratz” and others like “Dog,” a “Lo-tek” with huge canine teeth transplanted from Dobermans so that he now wears “a mask of total bestiality” (“Johnny Mnemonic,” BC, 15). Towards the other end of the spectrum are characters who forcibly or by choice have yelded up the “ordered flesh” which alone allows the experience of emotion and who have become, instead, not pure mind but electronic memory. With a “cry of release,” grotesquely crippled Lise of “Winter Market” has herself translated into the “ROM on some corporate mainframe” achieving freedom at last from “the bonds of … hated flesh” (BC, 40). McCoy Pauley, the “Lazarus of Cyberspace” becomes a “construct, a hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead man's skills, obsessions, knee-jerk responses” (N, 76). In Count Zero, the “exceedingly rich” Virek manifests aspects of himself in interactive holographic images that seem fully alive, but his physical body has been “confined for over a decade in a vat,” while individual cells opt “for the quixotic pursuit of individual careers” (16).

The bestial Lo-teks and the once-human ROM's are psychic extremes. In the eye of the cyberpunk storm of technologically altered humanoid forms are Gibson's Romantic heroes, “perpetual outsider[s],” outlaws, independents, “rogue factor[s] adrift in the secret seas of intercorporate politics” (CZ, 89), “industrial-espionage artists and hustlers,” cracksmen, burglars (“Burning Chrome,” BC, 170) engaged by a constant conflict between “meat” and “mind”: “Automatic Jack” and Bobby Quine of the story “Burning Chrome,” Case of Neuromancer and Bobby Newmark, evolved from Bobby Quine, the “Count” of Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. “Meat” for these heroes is more than the fleshly body, more than the “darkness, pulse and blood” (N, 258). It is “all the meat wants,” and all that escapes it time after time, for it is born of the flesh and of the sentient vulnerability the heroes mock. The “meat” is the capacity to feel and the strength of feeling:

… something he'd known in Night City and held there, been held by it, held for a while away from time and death, from the relentless Street that hunted them all … Something he'd found and lost so many times … It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read.

(N, 239)

But Gibson's heroes have been “numb a long time, years” and when the meat talks, another voice within says “ignore it” (N, 152). Dismissed as “a meat thing,” mocked, diminished, lost, feeling—when it seeps through—is experienced as rage, lust, self—loathing, hate:

“Hate'll get you through,” the voice said. “So many triggers in the brain, and you just go yankin' ‘em all. Now you gotta hate …”

… fueled by self-loathing … old alchemy of the brain and its vast pharmacy—his hate flowed through his hands. …

(N, 261-2)

At war with their own discounted flesh, Gibson's heroes pursue ecstatic journeys of psychic liberation “beyond ego, beyond personality,” into a “distanceless home … extending to infinity” (N, 262; 52)—the paradigmatic Romantic journey leading to and reflecting a liberating expansion of consciousness. But in the Romantic paradigm, what Northrop Frye has called the “vehicular forms” of such journey—the Aeolian harp, the boat driven by the water's current, the rushing wind that becomes a “correspondent breeze,” the nightingale's song—are not in themselves agents of change; they are endowed with symbolic significance and transformative power by the imagination of the poet. Looking, as Blake said, not “with” but “through” the eye, the poet consciously chooses to perceive and thereby experiences the vehicular form as embodying a creative energy with which he profoundly identifies, and with which he creates, at the apex of the poem, a sense of communion in a heightened state of consciousness. He travels “on the viewless wings of poesy,” a language of metaphor that defies the splits of the Newtonian world order, a language he himself sets in motions.⁸ In the intensity of the imaginative union, the experiencing self and the focus of perception become one; human and non-human worlds are identified.⁹ Such a paradigm is always implicitly open-ended: the vehicular form remains always inexhaustible, “might half-slumb'ring on its own right arm” (Keats, 1133). The return to ordinary consciousness occurs because the union, however fleeting, has been attained; the moment ends, or, as repeatedly in Coleridge, the imagination fails. The vehicular form abides, however, a translucent world of symbol, world without end.

But just as the “rejected awareness” of the Romantic paradigm has turned into the Neuromantic gomi and as the dream-world of the individual unconscious is accessed, edited and packaged, turned into simstim, so in Gibson's post-Gutenberg neuroelectronic environment, the vehicular form is outered and objectified as well. The hero does not attain an exhilarating expansion of consciousness because he has made an imaginative leap between “self” and “other,” healing the breaches created by what Blake called “single vision.” “What is within [is] now seen without”: in the place of an imaginative leap rendered by language, a pair of electrodes and advanced interactive computer into which one plugs in—what Gibson calls a “cyberspace deck”—instantaneously transport the voyager, with only his “nerve,” “talent,” and digital agility required. The change in medium inevitably means a change in message as well: if the vehicular forms of the Romantic journey evoked a universe of translucent symbols, the cyberspace decks unfold one of opaque signs. That is, the multi-dimensional, vitally alive open-ended universe of imagination, unique to each poet, is “flat-lined” into the uni-dimensional ultimately self-enclosed semiotic world of corporate information. For to be transported via a “deck” or “console” into cyberspace is to experience one's disembodied consciousness entering humanity's “extended nervous system,” now reduced to an “electronic consensus-hallucination” that represents—in brilliantly lit, colored, mobile graphics—not what may be brought into being by the journeying into it, but rather what already is: “data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.” Cyberspace is not visionary or imaginative territory; it is the “nonspace of the mind,” where “the only stars are dense concentrations of information” and “the great corporate hotcores burned like neon novas” (N, 51; “Burning Chrome,” BC, 170; CZ, 38). Swept up, transported, “on an almost permanent adrenaline high” (N, 5) when jacked into their decks, Gibson's “console cowboys experience “silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames” (N, 52); “leagues of corridor, mazes of shadow,” “gray cathedral spaces between … bright towers” (“Burning Chrome,” BC, 170); “color-coded spheres strung on a grid of pale blue neon” (CZ, 63). But the cowboys forget at their peril that these images, however brilliant, however enthralling, are not gateways for human longing, invitations to the imagination. They are merely representations of data: bank accounts, products formulas, corporate secrets. To mistake the “neon prayer rug” or “living mandala” flashing on the screen for the symbol of a transcendent reality beyond the closed world of “Things of Memory” (Jerusalem, K 714) is to “go over the edge,” like the once “top jock” Wigan Ludgate who came to believe that “God lived in cyberspace, or perhaps that cyberspace was God” (CZ, 121). And that way professional impotence, burn-out, and ultimately madness, lies.

In the poetry of the Romantics, achieving union with a power greater than the self identifies, as I have said, the human and the non-human, the natural, worlds. That identification, Frye suggests, “is also one of the major functions of poetry itself” (210). By its very nature, however, that search for union implies a paradigm of separation, an assumption that there is a distinctly human world and a distinctly non-human world. It also implies a belief that those worlds can be reconciled through the alchemy of imaginative language: a belief about the human, about language, about imagination itself. Such assumptions are the paradoxical gift of Newtonian physics and print technology. They do not underly Gibson's post-Newtonian vision. Rather, in Gibson's fiction the non-human world of the old paradigm, the world of nature, is decaying and peripheral, a patch of poisoned sky glimpsed through fabricated geodisic domes; the human world, the bothersome meat, the lost body. Jacked into a deck, for example, console cowboy Case believes that “This was what he was, who he was … he forgot to eat … (N, 59), so that in the midst of a data-raid he finds himself

staring down … at a white-faced wasted figure, afloat in a loose fetal crouch, a cyberspace deck between its thighs, a band of silver trodes above closed, shadowed eyes. The man's cheeks were hollowed with a day's growth of dark beard, his face slick with sweat.

He was looking at himself.

(N, 256)

What Gibson proffers in the place of the old paradigm is a world relentlessly being made over by all-encompassing manufactured illusion. As both nature and the body fall away, the new world of cyberspace grows ever more complex, dense, and powerful. Cyberspace becomes a self-generating entity set in motion and controlled by equally self-generating Artificial Intelligences which now offer more than mere “synthetic life,” like simstim; they offer, rather, “an approximation of everything.” Once the cowboy needed at least nerve and talent; now he needs neither. In the last novel of Gibson's trilogy, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Bobby Newmark is a wasting body fed by tubes and plugged into, not the now outmoded cyberspace decks, but rather a “mother-huge microsoft”:

Gentry said that the Count was jacked into what amounted to a mother-huge microsoft; he thought the slab was a single solid lump of biochip. If that was true, the thing's storage capacity was virtually infinite … With no link to the global matrix, the data was immune to every kind of attack via cyberspace.

“He could have anything in there,” Gentry said, pausing to look down at the unconscious face … A world. Worlds. Any number of personality constructs … It's completely interactive … he literally could have anything at all in there. In a sense, he could have an approximation of everything. …”

(MLO, 128).

At the novel's end, Bobby dies. The human itself has become obsolete.

Blake believed that the goal of the imaginative journey was to arouse all human faculties out of “Single vision & Newton's sleep” so that humanity could rejuvenate the world by itself taking on a vitally alive “Spiritual Body” (Four Zoas, K 348). In Gibson, that Spiritual Body has turned into pure synthetic image: Bobby Newmark enters not a rejuvenated physical world but rather “a sort of toy universe” where “the long grass does not grow and the wildflowers do not fade.” Separated from imagination and body, he becomes what he beholds. Gibson's New Romanticism leaves us with a world neither dead nor alive.

On the verge of the cybernetic revolution over thirty years ago, C. Wright Mills warned that “the media have not only filtered into our experience of external realities, they have also entered into our experience of our own selves.”¹⁰ Gibson's Neuromantic vision suggests that as the electronic media continue their advance, they go far beyond influencing both “external realities” and “our own selves”; they swallow the whole of what was once reality itself. Yet, ironically, in Gibson's work “science” and “literary culture,” once so estranged from one another, have never been closer. The novel Neuromancer, product of apparently obsolescing print technology, is now available as a video game.

Notes

1. The following editions are used throughout: Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984), hereafter N; Count Zero (New York: Ace Books, 1987), hereafter CZ; Mona Lisa Overdrive (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), hereafter MLO, and Burning Chrome (New York: 1986), hereafter BC.

2. See “Locus Looks at Books,” Locus, March 1986, p. 13.

3. Bruce Sterling, “Preface” to Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, ed. Bruce Sterling. New York: Arbor House, 1986, pp. x-xi.

4. That modern novels are indebted to the innovations of Romantic poetry has been well established by such critics as Charles Schug, The Romantic Genesis of the Modern Novel (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979) and Robert Langbaum, The Modern Spirit: Essays on the Continuity of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).

5. See William Blake, The First Book of Urizen in Blake: Complete Writings with variant readings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Oxford University press, 1972), p. 224. Hereafter cited as “K.”

6. See Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962; rpt New York: New America Library, 1969), especially pp. 314 ff.

7. I am drawing on William Wordsworth's critique of his culture in the “Preface to the Second Edition of the Lyrical Ballads” in William Wordsworth, The Prelude Selected Poems and Sonnets, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1954), p. 7, and for the phrase “mind-forg'd manacles” on Blake's “London,” K 216.

8. The phrase is John Keats' in “Sleep and Poetry,” in David Perkins, ed. English Romantic Writers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967), p. 1133.

9. See Northrop Frye, “The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism,” The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), p. 209.

10. In The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 314.