Krzysztof k. Kietzman

Constructs of innocence in selected works of cyberpunk and postcyberpunk fiction

M.A. THESIS

M.A. THESIS TEXT AND FILE LICENSED UNDER THE CREATIVE COMMONS ATTRIBUTION SHAREALIKE 3.0 UNPORTED LICENSE BY KRZYSZTOF K. KIETZMAN (KRZYSZTOF.KIETZMAN@GMAIL.COM)

WRITTEN UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF DR ZUZANNA ŁADYGA–MICHALSKA

FACULTY OF MODERN LANGUAGES | UNIVERSITY OF WARSAW

DECEMBER 2011

WARSAW | POLAND

IN TRIBUTE TO AND MEMORY OF AARON SWARTZ — A CYBERPUNK (1986 — 2013)

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Innocents under Erasure:

The Afterlife of the American Adam in Postmodern Fiction 6

CHAPTER ONE

The American as Adam:

Innocence in the American Narrative Tradition 15

CHAPTER TWO

Between Eden and Utopia:

Techno–Innocence and Cyber–Rapture in William Gibson's Neuromancer 38

CHAPTER THREE

Cyberpunk Reconfigured:

Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash 67

CHAPTER FOUR

Of Machines and Manners:

Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age as a Postcyberpunk Bildungsroman 86

CONCLUSION

On Cyberpunk and Court Jesters 104

BIBLIOGRAPHY 107

BONUS MATERIAL

M.A.  THESIS OUTTAKE MATERIAL 1

Approaches to the Self in Criticism 112

M.A.  THESIS OUTTAKE MATERIAL 2

Molly Millions: A Cyborg Manifested? 117

ACADEMIC  PAPER ON NEUROMANCER (2010)

Falling Off Jacob's Ladder: The Unfulfilled Promise of Disembodied

Transcendence in William Gibson's Neuromancer 126

INTRODUCTION

INNOCENTS UNDER ERASURE:

THE AFTERLIFE OF THE AMERICAN ADAM IN POSTMODERN FICTION

Science fiction literature en masse, and cyberpunk, one of its latest subgenres in particular, are often dismissed as mere juvenile "subliterature" or "lowbrow" escapist fiction. Despite some postmodern critics having recognized science fiction as a valid and respectable genre or even having gone as far as to enthrone it as " the ontological genre par excellence" of postmodernism (McHale, Postmodernist Fiction 16), science fiction is still often approached with critical ambivalence. While praised for its postmodernist features, the genre is more often dismissed as a commodified product of juvenile, escapist fancies. However, it is worth observing that science fiction is perhaps not a juvenile and escapist genre per se, but rather, a genre which explores and problematizes among its various subject matters such notions as youth, innocence, and the desire to escape reality. In this way, science fiction returns to a tradition once considered central within American studies: the tradition of innocence and escapism. In consequence, science fiction and cyberpunk deserve critical attention not despite their juvenile and escapist character, but in fact for this precise reason, as genres which reappropriate and invigorate the crucial motif of innocence in American fiction.

In the American tradition the notions of innocence and escapism are embodied in constructs of the Self which have their origin in the figure of the American Adam. The figure appeared in literature in response to the formation of a national American culture distinct from its European counterpart. It embodied a sentiment shared throughout America in the 19th   century  that "the authentic American" should strive to emulate Adam, the first Biblical man: "A figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities, poised at the start of a new history" (Lewis 1). The idea of Americans as new men in a virgin land was first put forward by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur in his Letters from an American Farmer  (1782). Due to American culture's Biblical frame of reference, the notion of a "pure" man in a "virgin" land soon became associated with the image of Adam in Eden and developed as such in American literature. Works of fiction combined Biblical and political discourse into a textual amalgam which led to the formation of American exceptionalism and individualism. Furthermore, the figure of the American Adam was awarded considerable critical recognition in the writings of R. W. B. Lewis. In his The American Adam. Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1955), Lewis claimed that the recurrent motif of Adamic innocence in the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville shaped the subsequent thematic landscape of American fiction. The innocent American has also been featured as a staple of American fiction in the criticism of Leslie Fiedler and Ihab Hassan. Both critics enumerated the subsequent permutations of the Adamic figure, which include the juvenile male protagonist, the Fiedlerian Good Bad Boy, the alienated intellectual, and the Hassanian radical rebel– victim. All of the aforementioned character templates in American literature have their origin in the figure of the American Adam.

The aim of this thesis is to interrogate selected works of cyberpunk fiction for traces of the Adamic paradigm and to uncover the ideological undercurrents of its subsequent permutations. However, the scope of this thesis is not limited to proving the perpetuation of American myth–narratives within popular fiction. The ideological undercurrents behind the perpetuation of the myth of the American Adam are often overlooked in criticism, which focuses mostly on enumerating such motifs. It shall not suffice to uncover what is mythological about the narratives, as one should also uncover what is ideological about the continuous, if also versatile presence of the myths of the American Self in cyberpunk fiction.

Such a myth–critical interpretation is crucial because the mythological deep structure of cyberpunk is seldom foregrounded in postmodern criticism. Adamic innocence  and  its  subsequent  permutations  are  no  longer  deemed  central  to  the American tradition. However, while "highbrow" postmodernist literature might have departed from the grand narratives of the past, those grand narratives remain petrified and perpetuated in popular fiction. In The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Fredric Jameson asserts that "in its generic form, a specific narrative paradigm continues to emit its ideological signals long after its original content has become historically obsolete" (186). It is not, therefore, as Lewis himself said, that the American Adam "has been frowned quite out of existence" from fiction (Lewis 195). However outmoded, the construct resides within the deep structures of literature and is replicated ad infinitum in popular fiction. Cyberpunk in particular has often been praised for  its  postmodernist surface,  but,  as  Claire  Sponsler  has  proven,  its  postmodernist surface is just that: a surface; a façade under which there lurks a conventional narrative with its essentialist, ego–centric protagonists (642–643). Is it not possible, then, that the remnants of the Adamic paradigm of innocence could be found within cyberpunk narratives?

To  paraphrase  William  Gibson's  well–known  aphorism  from  Burning  Chrome

regarding cyberculture

―  "The street finds its own uses for things"

―  cyberpunk has

indeed found its own use for themes and constructs once considered representative of the American Self. However, postmodernist critics refrain from speaking in such vague and totalizing terms as "the American" and "the Self." The essentialist concepts and overarching metanarratives in literature are being reexamined or dismissed altogether. The deep structures of literature are no longer as much interrogated for their archetypal content,  as  the  perceived  relevance  of  postmodernist  criticism  is  considered  to  lie elsewhere.

Literature in our times is dismissed or canonized on the basis of either succeeding or failing to represent what is known as the postmodern condition. In the words of Ernst van Alphen, "[m]anifestations of postmodernist culture which fit the theory are put before the footlights, while others are suppressed. The delimitation of the corpus, then, is no touchstone for the chosen perspective on postmodernism but a circular support of it" (820). In other words, postmodernist criticism might fail to recognize those texts which are at odds with the postmodernist creed, with popular fiction being a case in point. In consequence, some works of fiction are given preferential treatment while others are dismissed wholesale. Sometimes, critics dismiss certain aspects of a text while elevating others, as is in the case of William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer.

Due to its adherence to postmodernist convictions, Neuromancer became the token go–to novel for critics interested in interrogating science fiction for its postmodernist features. However, critics like Claire Sponsler and Sharon Stockton stress the importance of approaching cyberpunk as also, or perhaps even first and foremost, a popular genre perpetuating realist and Romantic paradigms, for fear of otherwise underestimating and dismissing wholesale the more traditional discourses the genre perpetuates.

In her "Cyberpunk and the Dilemmas of Postmodern Narrative: The Example of William Gibson," Sponsler points to the "contradiction between surface and depth, postmodernism and realism/romanticism" (642–643) within cyberpunk fiction in general and William Gibson's Neuromancer in particular. Sponsler points to the fact that critics have acknowledged cyberpunk as a genre with notable modernist and postmodernist elements (625), a claim she finds further strengthened by Annette Kuhn's conviction that "science fiction serves as a privileged cultural site for enactments of the postmodern condition" (qtd. in Sponsler 625). In effect, Sponsler asserts that among critics cyberpunk is perceived to be "quintessentially postmodern" (626–627). The postmodernist elements she identifies in Neuromancer include the "preoccupation with objects and surfaces" and the "diminishing, flattening, and decentering of the human beings who move across this object world" (631). Nevertheless, this "postmodern surface world" (627), as Sponsler puts it, is nothing if not a mere façade. Instead, Neuromancer's traditional plot structure relies on "an epistemology . . . that privileges cause–and–effect plot development and the unified humanist subject" (636).

A similar response to the reappropriation of cyberpunk as a postmodernist genre can be found in the criticism of Sharon Stockton. Stockton finds the claim of cyberpunk being a postmodernist genre rather unconvincing and goes as far as to claim that " it is ironic . . . that in spite of scathing feminist critiques of cyberpunk . . . the genre retains its status . . . as mouthpiece for postmodernism" (Stockton 589). In her article "'The Self Regained': Cyberpunk's Retreat to the Imperium," Stockton asserts that cyberpunk returns to the notion of the individualist Self of adventure and romance fiction: " The cyberpunk 'self,' defined as male, is returned . . . to the roles of swashbuckling pirate and/or American cowboy" (588).

Despite its postmodernist surface, therefore, the genre also perpetuates older paradigms, which are often overlooked from a postmodernist perspective. This becomes all the more apparent when we consider that, as Jameson claims:

We never really confront a text immediately, in all its freshness as a thing – in–itself. Rather, texts come before us as the always–already–read; we apprehend them through . . . the sedimented reading habits and categories developed by inherited interpretive traditions. (Jameson 9). When the critics' inherited interpretive tradition is that of postmodernism, cyberpunk is approached as a genre concerned first and foremost with embodiedness, disembodiedness, gender politics, social liberationism, ecocriticism, and phenomenological and semiotic simulacra. All such perspectives are, of course, worthwhile. The aim of this thesis is not to question the value of postmodernist scholarship on cyberpunk fiction, as it is rather to approach this literature from a different perspective and to showcase the "romance" inherent in the "new Romanticism" of Neuromancer and other works of cyberpunk.

While Sponsler and Stockton invoke the notions of "romance" and "Romanticism" as parenthetical asides, the relation between Romanticism and postmodernism is central to the thought of Jay Clayton. In his work Charles Dickens in Cyberspace. The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture, which examines the oft–dismissed parallels between the 19th  century and postmodern cyberculture, Clayton indicates that " period– bound thinking has made it difficult to perceive the full implications of developments that do not conform to postmodernism" (Clayton 8). Myth–narratives within popular fiction are one such dismissed development. The critic believes that because Lyotard and Habermas "positioned postmodernism as a rejection of the grand Enlightenment metanarratives" (6), both philosophers created a modernist/postmodernist dialectic which in subsequent decades deemphasized other discursive constructs or dismissed them altogether. One such discursive construct was that of Romanticism, which underwent erasure to the extent that it "could have no conceivable connection with the present" (6). In consequence, Clayton posits postmodernism as a discourse of "historical rupture" (15) which emphasizes discontinuities and dismisses continuities. In effect, postmodernism "suppress[es] its many continuities with nineteenth –century culture" (15).  The  critical  valorization  of  cyberpunk  as  a  postmodernist  genre  granted  it considerable academic interest. However, this postmodernist acceptance has also had the side effect of putting all other contexts with which the genre might have been otherwise associated, including that of its deep mythological structure, under erasure.

One such suppression on behalf of postmodernist thought is that of the metanarrative. The figure of the American Adam, as well as other constructs of the essentialist Self in fiction, are not just mythological images of mere aesthetic importance, but rather, historical metanarratives with ideological significance. Such metanarratives locate the Self in a particular relation within the collective or posit the existence of some realm "outside" of the collective into which the Self can escape. Therefore, the afterlife of such metanarratives within cyberpunk fiction is not without consequences.

Critics agree that, in the words of Clayton, "postmodernism has made metanarratives the bête noire of critical practice" (Clayton 44; Jameson 29). Jameson, following Althusser's creed of the historical process being "without a telos or a subject" (qtd. in Jameson 29), rejects historical metanarratives on the basis of their being both teleological and anthropomorphic. However, it could be claimed that postmodernist discourse itself has features of an overarching metanarrative (McHale, Master Narratives

17–18). In particular, it could be considered a metanarrative of historical rupture, which suppresses and erases past notions such as the telos or the subject. In consequence, foregrounding such notions is discouraged in fiction and in critical discourse.

Despite   the   attempts   at   erasure,   there   are   still   numerous   instances   of conventional genre fiction which continues to perpetuate the allegedly naïve and commonsensical constructs in an attempt to remain faithful to some semblance of the "human condition." At their most conventional, both the Adamic narrative and the cyberpunk narrative are teleological and anthropomorphic, as they both deal with an essentialist,  masculine  subject  as  well  as  reveal  utopian longings. Therefore, such concepts have to be resurrected against postmodernist convictions so as to make possible inquiry into the parallels between the two types of narratives. The use and analysis of the concepts might reveal new insights about the narratives in question.

Chapter  One  of  this thesis traces the Adamic tradition of  innocence both as a critical tool and as a valid narrative in and of itself in order to prepare the framework for further analysis of particular works of cyberpunk fiction. The chapter examines how the idea of innocence has been confined to a particular critical image in Lewis's The American Adam. Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1955), and later elaborated upon in subsequent works of criticism, i.e., Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) and Ihab Hassan's Radical Innocence: The Contemporary American Novel (1961). Particular focus is given to the mechanisms of escapism in the work of all three critics, as well as to the ethical consequences of the American tradition of innocence.

Chapter Two introduces cyberpunk as a subgenre of science fiction and showcases those  contexts  which  open  up  the  genre  for  consideration  from  the  perspective  of Adamic  innocence.  Furthermore,  the  chapter  attempts  to  reconcile  the  American tradition of innocence with the scholarship on cyberpunk of Mark Dery, Brian McHale, Timothy  Leary,  and  Andrew  Ross.  The  chapter  provides  a  close  reading  of  William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer (1984), with a particular focus on its masculine protagonists, their juvenile, utopian longings, and the motif of Adamic innocence, i.e., with the focus on the novel's Romantic element rather than on its postmodernist aspects.

Chapter Three examines Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) as a liminal novel marking the boundaries between cyberpunk and the subsequent "subgenre within the subgenre" known as postcyberpunk. The chapter treats Snow Crash as a text positioning itself in opposition to Neuromancer, both broadening and deconstructing its formula.

Chapter  Four  concentrates on Stephenson's later novel,  The  Diamond Age: Or,  A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995), the spiritual successor to Snow Crash. I approach The Diamond Age as a seminal postcyberpunk novel liberated from the confines of the then– outmoded Gibsonian paradigm, as well as the one which abandons the innocent, juvenile, masculine protagonist altogether in favor of a female child focalizer, opening up the genre to quite different manifestations of innocence, renunciation, and enculturation.

CHAPTER ONE

THE AMERICAN AS ADAM:

INNOCENCE IN THE AMERICAN NARRATIVE TRADITION

The successful investigation of cyberpunk fiction for constructs of innocence rests upon defining such constructs and confining them to particular images of American nature. This chapter consists of an attempt to reduce "innocence" from a vague general concept to particular constructs depicted in American fiction, embodied in the figures of its protagonists, and developed in criticism. Such an investigation rests upon the premise that there indeed exists fiction of specifically American character, with its own concept of innocence and other peripheral notions associated to a considerable extent with innocence. These related notions include escapism, individualism, initiation, enculturation, renunciation, recoil, and an indifferent moral stance. All such concepts form a cohesive system of meanings and relations, which are explored throughout this chapter.

In its inception, American fiction might have been little more than European fiction in America, an imported tradition of epigonic nature and scarce self–value. Nevertheless, literature in America soon defined itself as a distinct literature with a particular focus and its own peculiarities. One focal point of interest in American fiction is the theme of innocence, which American literature arrived at through "converting a peripheral European archetype into the central myth of [its own] culture" (Fiedler, Love and Death 175). However, America and its literature had defined themselves not ex nihilo, but  against   the  European  tradition.  In  effect,  their  focus  on  innocence  could  be understood to stand against qualities perceived as negative and considered to be "European."  In  consequence,  within  the  American  tradition  there  is  no  concept  of innocence per se. Instead, there is an innocence from, an innocence as contrasted with, an innocence   bound   in   numerous   binaries.   Of   these,   innocence   positioned   against experience is the most notable.

In the aftermath of its emancipation, American fiction positioned itself if not in direct opposition to, then at least in discernible contrast with, its European counterpart. At its core, this contrast could be reduced to the most simple, quintessential quarrel between "the old" and "the new," with American fiction seen as standing for the latter. However, while this simple division alone does not suggest that one of these foundations for literature is somehow preferable over the other, it also implies a rather more judgmental perspective of looking at European and American literatures. Both literatures could be seen as a dialectic between "mature" and "immature," or "experienced" and "inexperienced" fictions. Such contrasting introduces an element of condescension and patronizing towards American letters. Within such a context, innocence is perceived not as a virtue, but as a vice: as the lack of experience.

In his work Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler states that compared with European literature, "our [American] novels seem not primitive, perhaps, but innocent, unfallen in a disturbing way, almost juvenile" (XIX). From an academic perspective,  American  literature  presents  itself  as  a  fossilized  fiction  of  repetition without  growth  and  compulsive  starting  over.  From  the  perspective  of  a  refined European reader or a learned American scholar the "newness" of American fiction might have left an impression of such literature being immature and juvenile. In contrast, the European fiction viewed from a popular American perspective had been perceived to stand for "European cynicism and moral improvisation" (Love and Death 291). Such a perspective equated the "mature" character of European fiction with a long–past prime, sin, decadence, and a downward movement towards moral dissipation. In the minds of religious Americans, the notion of experience had been quite interchangeable with the notion of sin, as both were set against innocence. Apart for Leslie Fiedler, another critic who points to the existence of a strong American bias against European literature and Europe in general as entities of lost innocence is R.W.B. Lewis. In his The American Adam. Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century , the critic quotes Noah Webster's assertion that "in that country, laws are perverted, manners are licentious, literature is declining and human nature is debased" (qtd. in Lewis 72). Such a view on Europe is contrasted with America, which started out "untouched by history" (72) and was thus devoid of such calamities.

In effect, in the American tradition experience has been conceptualized as a negative trait. It has been considered an excess against the Puritan tradition of temperance, whereas innocence has been perceived as a virtue. However, with time this simple image acquired more depth and meaning as writers and critics began to stress the "tragedies" inherent in "innocence" (Lewis 6). In effect, innocence began to reflect all shades  of  the  human  condition  and  became  a  notion  not  just  comic  or  tragic,  but elaborate and ambiguous.

No matter how vague or versatile, however, innocence in the American tradition has   never   been   conceptualized  as   an   elusive   notion   confined   to   the   realm   of philosophical ideas. Instead, innocence is understood in a more pragmatic manner as an

immediate and tangible personal character trait. As such, it is always constructed as

embodied in an individual

―  the protagonist of myth or fiction. Such protagonists as

vehicles for innocence hold pretensions to representing the general American Self.

According  to  Leslie  Fiedler,  the  "ideal  American  postulates  himself  as  the fatherless man, the eternal son of the mother" (Love and Death 331). Within patriarchal culture, such an image is at once evocative of juvenile innocence. Furthermore, R. W. B. Lewis describes "the authentic American" outright as a "figure of heroic innocence" (1). Such prescriptive proclamations of what "genuine" Americans "ought to" be like were once numerous within American literature. In fact, the image of the innocent hero is still a recurrent facet of American fiction, and popular fiction in particular. According to the premises of myth–critical thought, this prevalence is reason enough to consider such protagonists to be avatars of some deep–structural concepts of mythological nature. In the case of the figure of the innocent American, it finds its underlying origins not in a mythological,  but  rather,  Biblical  narrative ―  that  of  Adam,  the  first  man.  In  the American  narrative  tradition  this  figure  is  considered  the  archetypal  innocent  par excellence.

With  regard  to  American  scholarship,  the  authoritative  voice  on  the  Adamic theme of innocence belongs to the critic R. W. B. Lewis. In his seminal work The American Adam. Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1955), Lewis offers a comprehensive overview of the numerous protagonists of American fiction as avatars of the innocent Biblical Adam, or rather, as avatars of his modern scion and successor ― the American Adam. According to the critic, generations of American authors managed to first reduce the Biblical narrative of Adam to its core foundation and then particularize it time and again to suit the ever–changing conditions of the American continent.

The correspondence between the American Adam and his Biblical counterpart rests on the Biblical Adam's relation to both his past and future. From these temporal relations the figure of Adam derives its attributes of pure innocence and vast potential. Adam's inherent innocence stems from his relation to the past (or rather, the lack thereof), whereas his inherent potential stems from his relation to the future. In effect, both these relations are crucial in understanding how this image suits the common American as depicted in literature.

First of all, the Biblical Adam has no past whatsoever. He is the first par excellence. The Book of Genesis is the onset of the Biblical narrative, hence there is nothing prior to Adam which would burden or confine him. All that Adam is responsible for is the future. The same cannot be claimed of Americans; at least not in such a literal sense. In metaphorical terms, however, the image of Adam as the man without a past has been superimposed on the image of the American in literature and discourse. According to Lewis, "America, in the hopeful creed, had no past, but only a present and a future" (7).

America's declaration of independence from all things European was not limited to the realm of the political. Its radical renunciation of the past also affected national narratives of self–proclamation. With the erasure of Europe, the American protagonist had to have come "from nowhere," or perhaps straight from the Biblical Garden, since he could not have come from the historical past of the Old Continent. In the words of Lewis:

[T]he American myth saw life and history as just beginning. It described the world as starting up again under fresh initiative, in a divinely granted second chance for the human race, after the first chance had been so disastrously fumbled in the darkening Old World. (5)

Considering the prevalence and pertinence of this idea, America's self–identification with the Adamic situation seemed inevitable. Both the Biblical Adam and the historical American were perceived as figures "poised at the start of a new history" (1) or even "emancipated from history" (5), "outside the world" (128), and "outside time" (91) altogether. Such similarities made the convergence of both figures possible. In consequence, the American became identified as not just "the most recent descendant of Adam," but "a new Adam" (72) altogether, in the radical act of renouncing a whole line of prior descendants ― Europeans in particular.

Adam's (and following Adam, the American's) independence from the past had ideological and ethical consequences. In locating the individual at the onset of a new history, or outside historical time altogether, the individual is granted a "moral position prior to experience" (5). The accumulation of experience relies upon the subsequent passage of time. Outside time there can be no experience to speak of. In effect, at the onset of his life (or at the onset of a narrative) the individual is granted "newborn innocence" (61).

In the American tradition, therefore, innocence is constructed as an outcome of America renouncing the sins of Europe, rejecting the past, and returning, at least in the realm of its religious proclamations, to "the primal perfection" (10) of Adam in Eden. This return locates the ideal Adamic American before time, prior to the Fall, outside of the historical and the social. Within such a context, nothing of significance can be gained with the passage of time. Experience accumulated with time leads nowhere, or at least seldom leads somewhere an "authentic" American should strive for. Instead, it is often the cause of one's downfall, which mirrors the Fall of Adam in the Garden. In contrast, remaining outside historical time (and therefore outside of the social realm) is what preserves one's innocence.

Official American culture emphasizes the positive, if not downright crucial role of innocence in an individual's well–being and, in the religious realm, his future salvation. However, critics and writers alike have noted that this "newborn," and thus pre– historical and pre–social innocence reveals disturbing, amoral overtones. The Adamic individual's condition of complete outsidedness could be equated with radical disinterestedness, a moral (or rather, amoral) indifference toward all things social, communal, and historical. His individualism, when taken to its logical extreme, could be concluded to stand for radical social solipsism and isolationism. Such radical individualism leads  to  a  total  renunciation of  all  that  is  not  inherent in one's  own condition and interest. Lewis notes that following James, American writers began to hint at the prospect that: "innocence could be cruel as well as vulnerable; that the condition prior  to  conscience  might  have  insidious  undertones  of  the  amoral  as  well  as  the beguiling naïveté of the premoral" (154).

This aforecited "condition prior to conscience" describes the moral position of the individual before his descent into time ("maturing") and the social realities of life ("initiation," "enculturation"). Such realities could provide the proper conditions for the development of conscience should the individual decide to integrate himself into the social,  communal,  and  familial  realm,  but  the  American  narrative  of  individualism forbids the individual's successful integration. In the words of Lewis, "the valid rite of initiation for the individual in the new world is not an initiation into society, but, given the character of society, an initiation away from it: something I wish it were legitimate to call 'deinitiation'" (115).

According to the logic of deinitiation, innocence is prone to degrading into social Adamism, which could be understood as social alienation and atomism. With the realization that his isolated condition is amoral rather than innocent, the isolated hero of American fiction could claim innocence in the mere sense of being independent from the spoils of the social, but with time there was progressively less actual innocence in such an assertion. Instead, literature began to offer the hardened and robust innocence of the cowboy, the detective, and the hacker. Such figures still remained somewhat innocent in their isolation and naïve in their nobility, but each ambivalent in regard to morals.

Another feature of the convergence of the American with Adam are individualism and exceptionalism. However, in the American tradition those two notions are somewhat inconsequential. On the one hand, Americans have professed that individuals should be granted  similar  starting  positions  in  life  and  each  citizen  should  be  considered  an innocent Adam. To give weight to this claim, Lewis invokes the ideas of the theologian Theodore Parker, who put forward "the breathtaking suggestion that every individual was in spirit and in fact a perfectly new man, as new as Adam, each the first man, each the  new  unfallen"  (183).  This  universal  character  of  innocence  stems  from  the proclaimed (if not  practiced) American tradition of  egalitarianism. If  innocence  is  a virtue available to some, as it was to the Biblical Adam, than according to the democratic creed it must be available to all, as if being born innocent were a constitutional, inalienable right of those created equal. However, despite such egalitarian beliefs, America is not depicted in fiction as a collective nation of new Adams.

Instead, American literature favors themes and images of individualism and exceptionalism, if not even elitism. The Biblical narrative of Adam concerned a single individual (the Biblical Eve notwithstanding, as this figure was later erased from the American Adamic narrative) and its ensuing superimposition on American life proved unable  to  accommodate  a  whole  nation  of  potential  Adams. If  collectivism is  at  all implicit in the Biblical Adamic narrative, it is a collectivism always already after the Fall. The transgression from individualism to collectivism presupposes a failure and an abdication of symbolic status on the part of the Adamic individual. Within both the Biblical and the American traditions Adam in the Garden is a figure of higher status than Adam among the burdens of civilization. In effect, the American equivalent of the Adamic narrative eventually encompassed the concept of Adam–as–a–single–individual. In works of American fiction there is often but one Adamic figure, the protagonist, and he is not among other Adams, his equals. Instead, this solitary Adam is set against an undefined collective, an unrefined mass, a mob. What American narratives depict is not a nation of innocent Adamic individuals, but rather, one innocent Adam set against a nation; a "self against the whole world" (Emerson; qtd. in Lewis 6). This radical polarization forms the main framework of the Adamic narrative.

Lewis himself defines this initial relation between the individual and the world as a relation of "strategic distance." In his opinion, "the American hero as Adam takes his start outside the world, remote or on the verges" (128). From such an exterior vantage point the individual makes his incursions into the world. This initial "strategic distance" has a deep philosophical basis and ideological consequences. Whenever one claims that an individual "assumes an outside position," a position "outside the world," one posits the existence of a "neutral," "objective," and "sterile" position of the scientist, outside of and independent from the observable world. Such a perspective echoes the constitutive philosophical assumption of scientific positivism. In consequence, "assuming an outside position" is never the innocent act of the disinterested onlooker (be it the protagonist, the author, or the reader), but always an act of ideological proclamation. In particular, this "strategic distance" from the world is realized through the muteness and aloofness of the cowboy, the cynicism of the detective, and the hacker's seclusion behind the computer console. The critic Ihab Hassan names such attitudes "social recoil." The aforementioned figures proclaim and practice their outsidedness in an attempt to remain unspoiled, and therefore innocent.

What such an approach entails is that whenever an individual makes a claim of observing the world from an exterior vantage point, that individual assumes the philosophical stance of a positivist scientist. Such a position necessitates the existence of an observable object independent of the observer and thus results in the partial or total objectification of the world as something exterior to the individual. Furthermore, such a philosophical stance must also lead to the individual's radical subjectification. If the "exterior" world is reduced to a mere object to be observed and studied, than the subject assumes its worldliness and becomes, in a figurative sense, the whole world unto himself. In one instance Lewis describes the American Adam as "an individual standing alone, self–reliant and self–propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources" (5). In another he asserts that: "the landscape . . . throws the hero back in upon himself and accentuates his terrible and sublime isolation.

He is an anarchic and self–contained atom ― hardly even a monad ― alone in a hostile, or

at best a neutral, universe" (110). In effect, the American protagonist could be characterized as an amalgam of innocence, isolationism, and escapism. His interaction with the world is not an interaction of the part with the whole, but rather, an adversarial meeting  of  two  self–sufficient  forces  on  equal  grounds.  If  there  is  a  relation  of dependence at work at all, then the world is dependent on the hero rather than the other way around. In fact, the strong and self–willed character of the American protagonist is what differentiates him from his European counterpart. In the words of Lewis:

It is not, as with the European characters, that the realities of social experience and action catch up with them; but it is [the American protagonists] who approach and enter into those realities, with alternative comic, disastrous, or triumphant consequences. (129)

It is, perhaps, paradoxical that the American hero remains vigorous in his juvenile innocence, whereas the European remains passive and contemplative in his condition of experience. Nevertheless, this American distrust of experience allowed for the prolonged existence of the American Romantic hero in later historical periods. His radical subjectification as a monad prevented his fragmentation and consequent dissolution as a Self under the ensuing conditions of modern and postmodern thought and fiction. In fact, Fiedler went as far as to describe popular American fiction as an "externally maintained preserve of positivism" (Love and Death XVIII), a description which holds true for most science fiction and cyberpunk. Despite the cyberpunk protagonist's postmodern networking within the Net, the idea of positivist distance from the world remains at work.

The Adamic individual's relation of choice to the exterior world is that of distance. However, the hero is either compelled or forced to interact with the world regardless of his initial reluctance and disinterest. In fact, his initial distance from, further interaction with, and consequent integration with or renunciation of the world forms the basic premise of most American narratives. The instance the individual enters the realm of the historical and the social, he ceases his existence as a being outside of time and enters into his  relation  with  the  future.  If  the  Adamic  hero's  relation  with  the  past  laid  the foundation for his innocence and self–reliance, than his relation with the future is crucial in the development of his potential and his status as a creator. Despite the American Adam's innocence and initial lack of experience, he is characterized as an individual of "vast potentialities" (Lewis 1). His incursion into the world is at first approached with a heightened sense of optimism. In the words of Lewis, the American Adam has about him "the air of adventurousness, a sense of promise and possibility" (1). He is "vigorous" and "bright with hope" (108).

However, this aforecited "air of adventurousness," despite being indicative of potential, also reveals some disturbing undertones. What is disturbing in particular is that Adamic individuals are prone to treating life as a game and the world as their sandbox. In equating the innocence of Adam with the newborn innocence of children, Thoreau notes that "[c]hildren who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily" (qtd. in Lewis 26). While Thoreau himself presents "playing life" in a positive light, such an approach to life might as well reveal the absence of actual social sensibilities on the part of individuals. Furthermore, it might indicate  that  in  "playing  at"  life,  Adamic  protagonists  resort  to  mere  artificial performance without much of a moral commitment. This approach is realized in particular in popular fiction, in which the world is often stripped of all social actualities and treated as a backdrop of cardboard props for the protagonist to shoulder through, guns blazing. In other words, the exterior world is to the Adamic hero a mere "object" to be observed and manipulated. Such actions are nothing more than the protagonist's games with the world. They might be of a higher caliber than the games of children, but remain games nonetheless.

Such games, however, might still reveal that the world is broken in some fashion or another. With this realization, the "strategic distance" between the individual and the broken world might become even wider. In the words of Lewis, American literature offers "the enormous but improbable suggestion that the society's estimate of the moral structure of the universe may be tested and found inaccurate" (112). Leslie Fiedler seems to second Lewis's opinion. In his view, American fiction could be described as " a chamber of horrors disguised as an amusement park 'fun house'" (Love and Death XXI –XXII).

In other words, there is an elaborate ambivalence to the juvenile and jestful character of American fiction. On the one hand, American literature fixates on irresponsible escapism, games, and immature dreams of self–realization. Thanks to this escapist approach, on the other hand, it uncovers the undertones of the serious and the worrisome. The juvenile male is a trickster in the world, but also a tester of the world, one which he "finds inaccurate" (Lewis 112). If there can be such a tester at all, then that tester is the Adamic protagonist. Such characters are able to evaluate the world against their own exterior criteria without bias, and either accept the world as it is or attempt to alter its shape or course in their image. And should the Adamic hero be convinced of the innocence of his morals and actions, his reshaping of the world could as well turn out to be a violent, totalizing enterprise. In conclusion, this outsider evaluation of the world forms another basic framework for American fiction within the Adamic paradigm.

Another crucial feature of the American Adamic narrative stems from a bold suggestion that the American Adam might not be the mere manipulator of the world, but its sub–creator or even its sole inventor. The Biblical Adam entered a God–given world, an external world independent of the observer. Although not its creator, Adam had participated in its sub–creation as the one who was to name all the flora and fauna and shape the world as he saw fit through his actions. While the world itself had been provided as a given, its phenomenological and cultural reception had been left to Adam and his offspring. During the superimposition of the Adamic narrative on American literature, Adam's status as the sub–creator and the name–giver has been passed onto his American counterpart. Lewis describes this new Adam as "the type of creator, the poet par excellence, creating language itself by naming the elements of the scene about him" (5). He also notes that the American Adam's deified status as a maker and name–giver was provided with a convincing philosophical basis in the writings of Kant and Hegel. According to both philosophers, individuals do not perceive the external world in a direct fashion and do not comprehend things–in–themselves. Instead, people are granted perception of the world on phenomenological grounds. The world is filtered through the indirect conceptualizations of the senses and culture in a process wherein "the mind

'[thinks] order into' the sensuous mass outside it instead of detecting an order externally existing" (51). The consequence of such a phenomenological perception of the world is that the individual is not just its mere manipulator, nor its mere sub–creator on an empirical  level,  but  its  sole  creator  on  the  phenomenological  level.  Without  the individual to interpret and comprehend the world with his senses and language, there would be no world whatsoever. From this perspective, each individual supplements or even replaces God as the creator of the world.

Furthermore, because America considered itself the historical locale of choice for the God–granted second chance, literature went as far as to proclaim another G enesis in

America ― a "Yankee Genesis." Lewis describes this motif in literature as a "new account

of the creation of the world

― the creation, that is, of a new world . . . and with this

important emendation, that now the creature has taken on the role of creator" (45–46). In America, the active participation of the deified individual in the creation of the world is made possible due to its numerous frontiers, which provide open space for creation through both action and language. The American Adam's status as creator depends on the perpetual opening of new frontiers, either actual or metaphorical, once the old ones are no longer deemed relevant. Instead of maturing and setting down in the social realm the  individual has helped establish or  defend, he  embarks on  another adventure in search of a new frontier, be it factual or figurative, which would offer him new possibilities of self– (not social) fulfillment. Once the frontiers of the classic Western genre had become obsolete, science fiction's grand project was to designate outer space as the new frontier. Once this frontier had been conquered as well, cyberpunk turned from outer space to cyberspace and prolonged creation as a viable option for the protagonists of American fiction. Not unlike the original Adam–the–name–giver, the cyberpunk programmer and the hacker use language to make entities in cyberspace "spring into being at the sound of the word" (Lewis 51).

Despite the prevalence of Adamic innocents in American fiction, Lewis notes that their reception has been rather negative, with the predominant view being that their juvenile innocence does not do complete justice to the human condition. Critics and writers were of the opinion that this "vulnerable or illusory" (1), "sleek and comely" (6) hero of American fiction had its dominant attribute of innocence based on "a simplified and  sunny  theology"  (175)  of  the  God–granted  second  chance  in  America.  Second chances, however, granted time and again, continue to dominate the popular genres of American fiction. For that reason, the Adamic strain of innocence in American literature continues to be of relevance.

While The American Adam. Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century had been the authoritative text on the Adamic figure in American fiction, it did not exhaust the theme of innocence within American criticism. Another critic with a crucial work on innocence to his name is the already mentioned Leslie A. Fiedler. His critical, albeit somewhat irreverent overview of American fiction, Love and Death in the American Novel, was published in 1960, just five years after the seminal work of Lewis. While innocence itself was not featured in its title, the book approached American literature from a similar viewpoint to that of Lewis. It underlined American fiction's juvenile and innocent national character, reiterating in fact much of Lewis's insights on the mechanisms of innocence and its related notions point for point. While the mechanisms of escapism, innocence, and individualism in the work of Fiedler remained similar to those of his predecessor, the core motivation behind the Self's efforts to maintain innocence was seen as altogether different.

Prior to Fiedler, Lewis situated American innocence in a Biblical, theological framework. The imperative of the Self to retain innocence had been in the mind of Lewis of a serious, "thou shalt not" caliber. Individuals were expected to remain vigilant in order not to suffer the Biblical Fall. In spite of acknowledging Lewis's theological framework, Fiedler has decided to conceptualize innocence from a secular perspective. According to the critic, individuals in America nurture their newborn innocence not because of a theological imperative to do so, but rather, out of a psychological, or even a pathological fear of entering the social order as mature adults. In his view, American literature provides numerous examples of "books that turn from society to nature or nightmare out of a desperate need to avoid the facts of wooing, marriage, and child– bearing" (Love and Death XX). In other words, juvenile individuals resort to escapism and "strategies  of  evasion"  (XII)  in  order  to  avoid  the  normative  responsibilities  of coexistence within the communal world; "the burdens of work and childbearing and death" (No! In Thunder 281).

Among such responsibilities, the one which frightens the juvenile hero the most according to the critic are sexual relationships with women. Instead of associating experience and maturation with the sum total of all things adult, Fiedler equates adulthood with (that is, reduces adulthood to) "consummated genital love" (304) and goes as far as to reduce all the complexities of the term "civilization" to the mere "confrontation of a man and woman which leads to the fall of sex, marriage and responsibility" (XXI). Innocence is thus reduced to the mere absence of sex. For those reasons, Fiedler's approach to "mature" literature could be described as rather reductive and restrictive. In limiting the motivations of the escapist American hero to the fear of sex and women, Fiedler commits a gross oversimplification of the human condition. It seems as if the Fiedlerian approach would trace the origins of male Americans not to the serious, Biblical Adam as in the work of Lewis, but rather, to the comical and asexual Peter Pan.

On the other hand, Fiedler is successful in shedding light on the surprising association of civilization with women and its radical avoidance with manhood, whereas most other critics would instead assume the connection of civilization with men and women with nature. Within his criticism, the relation is quite the opposite. Men are compelled to escape from the domestic, and thus "feminine" social sphere in order to confirm their "masculine" self–esteem within nature (an outlook shared later by the feminist  critic  Jane  Tompkins).  From  Fiedler's  perspective,  entering  into  a  sexual relationship is tantamount to entering an unequal social contract, one in which women have in support of them the authoritative voice of the social order. Entering a social contract is thus the equivalent of resigning oneself to the reign of women; the reign of the mother in particular. In effect, Fiedler's interpretation of the social realm, in contrast

to most critical voices on this matter, could be claimed to be matriarchal in nature. What

is social is sexual, what is sexual is feminine, and what is feminine is feared

― such a

statement is perhaps an oversimplification of Fiedler's thought, but a sound one nonetheless. It gives weight to the figure of the male hero taking flight from the social/sexual in order to retain his manhood and innocence, or rather, out of a fear of experience and the feminine. The association of men with innocence and women with experience seems paradoxical at first, but helps in understanding the juvenile male protagonists of American fiction. In the words of Fiedler:

The fear of not seeming manly enough haunts [the American protagonist] everywhere, inhibiting reflection and delicacy and subtlety alike; and leading to that exaggerated heartiness, bluffness, and downright crudity of manner, required in society where the male has continually to prove that he is one of the boys. (157)

In  order  to  best  characterize  the  American  male  protagonist,  Fiedler  dismisses  the Biblical Adam and invokes instead the critical figure of Good Bad Boyhood. According to Fiedler, Good Good Boyhood applies to those male protagonists who are "mama's boys" (267). Understood in a figurative sense, such a label refers to those individuals who conform to the rules of the social/feminine regime. However, the American tradition prefers and promotes Good Bad Boyhood: those individuals who retain positive virtues such as honor and self–reliance, but nonetheless rebel against the social (matriarchal) sphere  of  influence.  Their  crude,  robust,  and  delinquent  character  is  for  Fiedler  a "declaration of maleness" (268). In the words of the critic: The Good Bad Boy is, of course, America's vision of itself, crude and unruly in his beginnings, but endowed by his creator with an instinctive sense of what is right. Sexually as pure as any milky maiden, he is a roughneck all the same . . ." (268)

In conclusion, Fiedler's innocent par excellence is not the Biblical Adam, but a common child.  Within  his  framework,  the  child  assumes  the  role  of  the  "neutral,"  positivist

scientist. The child is "the touchstone, the judge of our world ― and a reproach to it in his

unfallen freshness of insight, his unexpended vigor, his incorruptible naïveté" ( No! In Thunder  253).  However,  in  associating  innocence  with  children  and  elevating  such juvenile innocence to the preferred subject matter of fiction, the American novelist in Fiedler's view reveals an "incapacity . . . to develop" and returns "to a limited world of experience, usually associated with his childhood, writing the same book over and over again until he lapses into silence or self–parody" (Love and Death XIX). Popular fiction, which often resorts to such iterations, has managed to build upon this image and provide it with new meanings, but its core foundation remains the same.

The image of Good Bad Boyhood is supplemented within Fiedler's framework with the image of the Great Good Place, "a temporary asylum not only from 'sivilization' but from pursuit, enslavement, and death; and leaving it, the refugee plunges into further flight"  (569).  The  critic  defines  this  discursive  construct  as  "some  place  . . .  where mothers do not come" (174); in which the protagonist "[consummates the union] with his own childhood" (347). Lewis would perhaps associate this Great Good Place with the pre– historical and pre–social Garden of Eden. However, Fiedler does not delve into the deep structure as much as Lewis. Instead, he accepts the popular images of the Great Good Place in literature (campsites, rafts, ships, tree–houses, etc.) at their face value. Such places function as bastions of manhood and require "isolation" and "the non–presence of the  customary"  (349),  that  is,  the  non–presence of  domestic,  matriarchal rule.  Such locales often function in literature as "masculine" elitist meritocracies, in which not the "feminine" social  and familial bonds, but rather, "survival  of  the  fittest," individual merit, and willpower define collective hierarchies. Within cyberpunk, when viewed from the Fiedlerian perspective, the Great Good Place is realized in the images of hacker cults, biker gangs, and cyberspace.

Love and Death in the American Novel also notes the appearance in American fiction of a rather more ambitious figure of innocence than the figure of Adam: "the alienated intellectual cast adrift in a community of philistines" (439). This image has about it the air of the Biblical Adam set against the world, but it is imbued with existential ambivalence. Fiedler notes that "there is in such characters the Faustian potential, but most often their tragic possibilities are dissipated in posturing and self–pity. Their secret

motto comes improbably from Emerson ― not 'to be great is to be damned,' but 'to be

great is to be misunderstood'" (441). What is important about the image of the alienated artist from the perspective of this thesis is its association with the alienated scientist. According to Fiedler, the artist and the scientist are often depicted in literature as interchangeable figures, since both:

seem men who, in the impassioned pursuit of a craft and the knowledge it yields, come to reject 'brotherhood with man and reverence to God.' To know, to create, to control, they are willing to step beyond all established bounds,  suspend  all  customary  moral  standards  and  make  themselves alone the judges of the rightness of what they do. (424)

Science  fiction,  and  cyberpunk  in  particular,  makes  use  of  the  schema  and converges the images of the artist, the intellectual, the Faustian magician, the innocent, and the scientist in the all–inclusive image of the hacker.

Ihab Hassan's Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (1961) is a bookend of the critical discussion on innocence in the American tradition. Published at a time when great narratives in literature were being questioned, Hassan's critique is an attempt at updating the image of innocence to best describe the human condition as depicted in American fiction at his point in time. His conceptualizations of innocence and escapism remain similar to those of Lewis and Fiedler, but what is unique about them is their titular radicalization. According to the critic, innocence, escapism, and initiation are  no  longer  depicted  in  modern  literature  in  the  naïve  fashion of  past  historical writers, but rather, all reveal profound and disheartening existential consequences.

According  to  Hassan,  there  are  two  scenarios  of  interaction  between  the individual and the world: initiation and victimization. If it were at all feasible, initiation would end in the successful confirmation of an individual's place in the world (35). In the modern world, however, such integration is no longer deemed possible. Instead, the individual's existence in the world must end with his victimization and escape is no longer a feasible option. According to Hassan, the natural reaction of the modern Self to the world and its victimizing character is that of "recoil," that is, the radical renunciation of outwardness (35), "the ego's estrangement from the collective conscience" (18).

Hassan's "recoil" as a discursive construct shares similarities with Lewis's "strategic distance" (and Fiedler's "flight") in that both designate an attempt to "escape" from the world. However, the modern Self no longer believes that attaining positivist distance from the world is possible. His flight is not one of action, but rather, of an intimate escape into mental inwardness. In other words, Hassan is of the opinion that modern protagonists of fiction prefer the Via Contemplativa over the Via Activa of their predecessors. In the critic's own words, "Its characteristic mode is estrangement from the world, and its values are chiefly inward and transcendental" (35).

Among Hassan's reasons behind victimization, two are worth noting from the perspective of this thesis: objectification and existentialism. The first is the result of democratic collectivism and capitalism, which are designed to reduce the individual to a cog in the social machine. Being but a small part of the larger social notation is perhaps taken for granted in European fiction, but for the American creed of individualism it is a disheartening awareness. The individual is thus no longer capable of being an independent agent (15) and realizes that life is an elaborate, albeit shallow performance in the commodified, democratic theater: "Instead of action, behavior reigns, and instead of authority, covert persuasion or systematic coercion. Human energy is assessed in terms of abstract functions, and human qualities dealt with as commodities" (15). While collectivism contributes to social victimization, existentialism is responsible for intimate, philosophical self–victimization. Following the thought of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, Hassan asserts that "the solitary individual in our epoch is on trial for nothing less than his being" (15). In order to best reflect the existential crisis of modern life, literature should thus explore "personal truths" and depict the individual's personal "encounter with nothingness" (18–19). Because existentialist thought implies that the individual is alone in his life struggles, it might lead to the extreme assertion that there is no significance whatsoever to the social order, an assertion which echoes radical social solipsism.

However, the victim of the world need not remain solipsistic and passive. Within Hassan's framework for American literature, the image of the victim converges with the image of the rebel into the ambiguous amalgam of the rebel –victim. The postmodern protagonist is victimized, though still in struggle for his freedom. In effect, the individual's "recoil" from the world need not be a desperate, passive act, but it can be construed as the empowered, Romantic last stand of the active Self against the world:

His  search  is  for  existential  fulfillment,  that  is,  for  freedom  and  self – definition. What he hopes to find is a position he can take within himself. Society may modulate his awareness of his situation, but only existence determines his stand. The recoil of the modern self is its way of taking a stand. (31)

The individual's strategic recoil has the sole purpose of preserving what is left of his innocence. Hassan terms this innocence "radical," because it is "inherent in [the individual's] character, and goes to the root or foundation of it." However naïve and juvenile such rebellion might seem, it is also empowering in its radical character and, in all  senses  of  the  word,  it  is  human.  Nevertheless,  radical  innocence  also  has  a discouraging aspect. Hassan points to the disheartening existence of a "neurosis of innocence" (40), one which stems from the fact that the individual finds himself unable to reconcile the Platonic, innocent ideal of himself with his actual status in the world. The schizophrenic Self is torn between his status as an individual and as a social being in a "spirit of contradiction," one which "disrupts the vital nexus of private will and public ordinance on which life of man in society depends" (40).

In  admitting  that  the  modern  individual's  radical  innocence  seems  more  " a property of the mythic American Self" (6) than of common mortals, Hassan comes full circle in the critical discussion of innocence in the American narrative tradition and returns to its inception: the notion of the American Adam. In fact, Hassan does not just return to Adam in Eden, but he also returns to Adam's being outside of time in singling out timelessness as the resounding theme of all American fiction, its "national neurosis." According to the critic, America is a nation of timeless individuals who wish to avoid being rooted in the present at all cost. Their escapism finds its destination not just backward in time in the Biblical Eden, but also forward in time in Utopia. In Hassan's own words:

The American dialectic, if so abstract a thing can take root in any soil, is thus seen as a running debate between Utopia and Eden. . . . Both, in a sense, are a form of radical innocence. Looking too far ahead or too far back amounts to the same thing: escape from the present, escape from time and death. (37–38)

In  conclusion,  if  there  exists  such  an  overarching  "American  dialectic,"  one  which situates the Self between Eden and Utopia in the desperate, albeit Romantic attempt at retaining one's innocence, than popular genre fiction will see to its continued perpetuation. No matter how postmodern a given novel or genre seems on its surface, one might nonetheless find underneath the American dialectic of timelessness, as well as the theme of innocence and the Adamic Self.

CHAPTER TWO

BETWEEN EDEN AND UTOPIA:

TECHNO–INNOCENCE AND CYBER–RAPTURE  IN WILLIAM  GIBSON'S NEUROMANCER

Cyberpunk surfaced as a subgenre of science fiction in the 1980s to popular and critical acclaim. Among the writers who laid the genre's foundations were Pat Cadigan, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling. In the '90s, the flagship writers of cyberpunk and its latest offspring ― postcyberpunk ― were Greg Egan and Neal Stephenson. As of the most recent decade, its legacies are continued in the writings of Paolo Bacigalupi and Ian McDonald. Furthermore, cyberpunk has garnered considerable interest among postmodernist  critics.  Brian  McHale  asserts  that  while  "there  are  few  . . .  absolute novelties in cyberpunk SF" and all its motifs have had "precedents in earlier SF," the subgenre's novel  character stems  rather from  its  "shift of  dominance" to  particular motifs and its dismissal of outmoded motifs within the general science –fiction repertoire (Poetics 150). In other words, cyberpunk foregrounded a specific "motif complex" (McHale

150), one neither featured nor practiced before in this particular fashion within science – fiction literature. Scholars appreciated cyberpunk for its foregrounding of (dis)embodiedness (D. Thomas), its social–liberationist political potential (D. Haraway), and its textual exploration of ontological motifs (B. McHale).

Despite cyberpunk's stellar success, the subgenre had been in fact born out of failure ― the failure of science–fiction literature prior to the 1980s[1]   to live up to its core promise. For the dedicated readers of science fiction, its touchstone had always been its successful efforts at extrapolating from the present and making accurate predictions about the future. In this respect, cyberpunk's emergence could be understood as the consequence   of   and   the answer   to   science   fiction's   disenchanting   failures   at extrapolation.

Prior  to   cyberpunk,  science  fiction  had,  with  some   dystopian  exceptions, advocated utopian boosterism. The critic Raffaella Baccolini notes a "revival of utopia in the 1960s and 1970s" (520) within science–fiction literature. It is inevitable, the "Gernsback Continuum" genre had professed and prophesied, that mankind shall soon achieve its utmost potential through the belief in positivist scientism and technological progressivism. In its most generic and commodified iterations, science fiction offered mere "uncritical and uncreative technojingoism" (Ross, Gernsback Continuum 414): masculine narratives of hegemonic power, colonial ambitions, and wish–fulfillment fantasies on the outer–space frontier.

However,  the  reality  of  the  1980s  brought  about  an  end  to  active  space exploration. The continuing loss of public interest in outer space was reflected in science fiction's withdrawal from its boosterish descriptions of unbounded frontier exploration. Furthermore, continued efforts in nuclear disarmament brought about an end to most postapocalyptic science fiction. In consequence, the genre could have perhaps returned to "pure" scientific extrapolation and once again be judged not on the basis of its cassandric forecasts and forewarnings, but rather, its successful social and technological extrapolations of the present. However, in hindsight it began to be apparent that science fiction has failed to predict the impact and scope of the information revolution and the groundbreaking emergence of the Internet in particular. Because science fiction failed to predict the ensuing techno–cultural paradigm shift, the genre turned to cyberculture as its next source of inspiration.

In consequence, readers' belief in science fiction's pretensions to actual powers of extrapolation had waned with time. This disillusionment is best described in the words of the critic Sadie Plant: "Once upon a time, tomorrow never came. Safely projected into the reaches  of  distant  times  and  faraway  galaxies,  the  future  was  science  fiction  and belonged to another world" (348). In other words, science fiction's utopian grand narrative of "a future perfect that never was" (Ross, Gernsback Continuum 411), developed throughout the decades in countless works of fiction, had been proclaimed a naïve misunderstanding.

As a result, cyberpunk announced science fiction's strategic retreat from its frontiers in outer space and committed itself not just to a downward movement towards Earth in general, but rather, to its shadier districts, slums, and backstreets in particular. This process resulted in "The overlapping of worlds that were formerly separate: the realm of high tech, and the modern pop underground" (Sterling XI). Its outcome had been a considerable enrichment of the science–fictional repertoire, one in which "the contradiction"  of  rural,  romanticized,  anti–science,  anti–tech  counterculture  with cutting edge technologies "had become an integration" (Sterling XII). The ensuing "cultural  Petri  dish"  (Sterling  XIII)  appealed  to  both  postmodernist  critics  and  pop culture pundits alike. However, because of its retreat and in spite of the thematic broadening of science fiction, cyberpunk could also be diagnosed as a symptom of science fiction's state of psychological recoil following its (and mankind's) grand disillusionment with the ideas of science and progress.

In  consequence,  cyberpunk  holds  an  ambivalent position  within  the  science – fiction continuum. On the one hand, in the preface to the seminal Mirrorshades, Sterling is of the opinion that "the cyberpunks as a group are steeped in the lore and tradition of the SF field" (X), emphasizing the subgenre's continuities with the prior tradition of science fiction. On the other hand, Sterling adds that cyberpunk is in fact "a new movement in science fiction" (IX), "a modern reform" (XV), one which, not unlike punk music, is "in some sense a return to roots" (X–XI), and thus discontinuous with older SF.

In renouncing most prior science fiction of the "Gernsback Continuum," building upon its failures, and beginning anew from the position of "clearing the ground" and "breaking with the past" (Ross, Gernsback Continuum 413), cyberpunk marks another figurative return to Eden within the American narrative tradition. In other words, older science fiction is to cyberpunk what Europe had been to America in its inception: an aborted past, an inconvenience, a shameful heritage under erasure. In consequence, cyberpunk could be understood to stand for a literature of "second chances" for science fiction, one which renounces the genre's prior accumulated experience and returns to a state of innocence with all that this notion entails in the American tradition. Despite the genre's postmodernist surface, its protagonists are more often than not the avatars of the unified humanist subject: the American Adamic Self. Not unlike Adam, the cyberpunk protagonist is out to explore a new world, one unburdened with the heritage and stock solutions of the prior SF tradition, but rather, one in which the individual is free to participate in its sub–creation. Following the tradition of the American Adam, the cyberpunk hero is a frontiersman. His is the most recent and relevant frontier, cyberspace, as he has realized that outer space as an SF frontier is long past its ideological prime,  much  too  haunted  with  the  "semiotic  ghost"  of  "outdated  futures"  (Ross, Gernsback Continuum 411), and much too crowded and civilized for his tastes.

Although considered a "Movement writing" (Sterling X), cyberpunk never had its singular manifesto[2] . However, cyberculture in general has had its self–proclaimed manifesto in the form of John P. Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace," an online document written in 1996 in the rhetorical mode of a declaration

of independence, which made its rounds on the then–just–expanding Internet, reaching out to both dedicated proponents and distanced opponents of radical Internet libertarianism. The document begins with a direct address to those against whom cyberculture reaches out to "dump some tea in the virtual harbor" (pref. par. 2) in the all–American gesture of renunciation par excellence, and from whom it wishes to declare independence:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of the Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. (par. 1)

The document continues in such a rhetorical fashion throughout its sixteen paragraphs. What is apparent in this short excerpt alone is a discourse of semantic differentials, which assigns superior hierarchic value to a) the mind over the flesh; b) the ethereal over the corporeal; c) the individual over the collective; d) us over them; e) freedom over rule, and, what is most important from the perspective of this thesis: f) to the future over the past. In renouncing the past, cyberculture marks a new beginning, a second chance, a figurative return to Eden. Such a return entails a complex of ideological and ethical undertones.

In his Real Love. In Pursuit of Cultural Justice, Ross approaches the aforecited document as advocating "unfettered individualism at the core of Net libertarianism" (12), which "translates into a general phobia about any government activities" (10). The declaration's  rhetoric  reveals  "the  desire  for  self–liberation  from  the  social  life  of mortals" and "the retrofitted nostalgia for a Rousseauesque state of nature," which once again signifies a return to Eden. Because the declaration proclaims cyberspace to be an independent "act of nature" which "grows itself through our collective actions," its discourse falls back on the American tradition of pastoralism and subverts Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden metaphor into the flattened image of Machine = Garden. The proclamation results in a "clean, messianic break with the world most of us inhabit" (Ross 12), echoing Hassan's notion of social recoil, Fielder's flight, or Lewis's deinitiation. As documented in the previous chapter, such desires and declarations are part and parcel of the American tradition of innocence and individualism. In consequence, cyberculture in  its  most  radical  manifestation marks  a  recoil  from  the  social  order  in  search  of sublime, ethereal otherworldliness, a motif which the critic Rob Wilson calls "neo– transcendental" "techno–euphoria" (211).  The  discourse of  its  proponents is  secular, albeit verges on the metaphysical.

Another aspect of cyberpunk's return to the Edenic (and thus Adamic) paradigm of  American  innocence  and  individualism  is  its  understanding  of  the  Self. Notwithstanding the genre's postmodernist surface and its postmodernist decentering of the subject in some respects, its protagonists nonetheless struggle to remain unified, centered Selves.

One  of  the  critics  who  point  to  the  powerful  and  positive  image  of  the cybercultural  individual  as  a  centered  and  self–reliant  Romantic  subject  is  Timothy Leary. In his rather poetic article "The Cyberpunk: The Individual as Reality Pilot," he deconstructs the word "cybernetics" in order to emphasize its empowering semantic and pragmatic undertones. Leary traces the term's etymological origin back to the Greek word "kubernetes," which translates as "pilot" (254). The prefix "cyber –," therefore, evokes agency, movement, and action. According to the critic: "The Hellenic origin of this word is important in that it reflects Greek traditions of independence and individual self–reliance which, we are told, derive from geography" (254). Leary, therefore, traces the tradition of American individualism even farther back than to the Adamic origins of the American Self alone in the world (which also "derives from geography"). He traces this tradition as far back as ancient Greece, which he treats as the figurative birthplace of later American frontier thinking and frontier navigation.

Other concepts associated with cyberpunk also reveal unified approaches to the Self. Before the term "cyberpunk" garnered widespread acceptance, its authors had once been called "the Mirrorshades group" (Sterling XI) after the icon of cyberculture which later served as the title of Bruce Sterling's collection of stories. The significance of mirrorshades in cyberculture is best described in Sterling's own words:

Mirrored sunglasses have been a Movement totem since the early days of

'82. . . . By hiding the eyes, mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun–staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws. (XI)

Mirrorshades  shelter  the  eyes  from  the  exterior  world.  The  "eye,"  of  course,  is  a metaphor  of  the  entrance  into  the  "I,"  the  Self.  In  this  respect,  c yberpunks  are practitioners of Hassanian strategic recoil in their attempts to remain impenetrable, self – sufficient, innocent Selves. However postmodern, they undertake excursions into the world with the use of all possible technological means, but nonetheless strive to prevent the world's incursions into them.

The  Edenic/Adamic  motif  of  individualism  is  only  a  part  of  the  American paradigm  of  innocence  that  cyberpunk  reaches  out  to  in  its  traditional  thematic remnants. As documented before, Ihab Hassan is of the opinion that because of their radical disconnection with the present, American literature and culture take the form of "a  running  debate  between  Utopia  and  Eden,"  since  both  are  "a  form  of  radical innocence" (Hassan 37–38). In other words, the allegories of Eden and Utopia seem inseparable.  In  fact,  a  future  Utopia  is  implicit  in  Eden  in  and  of  itself  since  the teleological Christian narrative, of which Eden is the inception, is finite and implies a final Rapture. Such salvational narratives end in a blissful coda. Adam and his heirs, having left Eden, await Utopia: the post–endtime, post–Rapture reconciliation with God. When a literature is bound in Edenic allegories of onset, it seems inevitable for such literature to assume an allegorical salvational endgame as well. Hence cyberpunk's preoccupation, its secular surface notwithstanding, with the Christian notion of Rapture.

In   their   article   "Bad   Endings:  American  Apocalypsis,"  the   anthropologists Kathleen Stewart and Susan Harding point to the fact that "America had always been an eschatological hotbed" with both "a sense of crisis and millennial hope" (289). The critics assert that the colonization of America had been a Christian "millennial and apocalyptic project" (288), the discourse of which continues on in present times. Apocalypticism and millennialism are defined in their respective aspects as:

The dark and light sides of a historical sensibility transfixed by the possibility of imminent catastrophe, cosmic redemption, spiritual transformation, and a new world order. The apocalyptic/millennial mode of   attention   is   fascinated   by   endings,   overturnings,   and   originary moments. (286)

The critics note that such anxieties have intensified in American culture as the millennium drew nearer, "inhabit[ing] and structur[ing] modern American life across a wide range  of  registers"  (286).  Such  inhabiting is  also  apparent in  cyberpunk. As  a product of the '80s and '90s, cyberpunk reflects both apocalyptic/dystopian and millennial/utopian paradigms.

For the most part, cyberpunk reflects the apocalyptic/dystopian mode. Stewart and Harding note that apart from religious apocalyptic thinking, millennial visions in America have also become secularized in a process which imbued cyberculture with radical "technophilia and technophobia" (289): secular, albeit semi–religious mindsets reflective of millennial and apocalyptic paradigms. In their opinion, apart from religious eschatologies, American culture offers two secular endtime narratives. The first is contained in the notion of a "technological apocalypse, in which technological progress brings both devastation and salvation" (Stewart and Harding 290). Such an endtime narrative is contrasted with what could be labeled a postmodernist end game: the "ironic apocalypse,  the  dystopian,  postapocalyptic  view  that  history  has  exhausted  itself, coupled with a playful celebration of surface styles and reproductions" (290).

Nevertheless, despite cyberpunk's preoccupation with the apocalyptic/dystopian mode, the genre reaches out to Utopia as well. In her article "The Persistence of Hope in Dystopian Science Fiction," Raffaella Baccolini asserts that Utopia has found an afterlife in even the most dystopian of literatures. On the one hand, the critic confirms that "our times . . . have produced what a series of scholars have addressed as a 'dystopian turn' in Anglo–American science fiction" (520), of which cyberpunk is the direct consequence. On the other hand, however, Baccolini also believes that recent science fiction "maintains a utopian horizon in the pages of dystopian science fiction and in these antiutopian times" (518).

Despite its secular surface, cyberpunk's affiliations with Utopia are religious in nature. As mentioned before, cyberpunk's religious "utopian horizon" within its secular dystopian dominant is centered on the Christian notion of Rapture. In his work Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, the cultural critic Mark Dery introduces the discursive construct of "escape velocity" (42). Within physics, escape velocity is the speed required for a vessel to escape the gravitational well of a planet in order to reach outer space. Within Dery's criticism, "escape velocity" is a metaphor of the "eschatological zero hour" (42): the point in time in which the vigilant, technophile "true believers" will be "raptured" from this world into a cyber–Utopia of one kind or another. In Dery's view, "escape velocity" is "techno–transcendentalism's version of  born–again Christianity's

'rapture,' in which true believers are lifted out of the mundane, into the parting clouds" (48–49).

Dery's idea is similar to the critical mechanisms of escapism of his predecessors (Lewis, Fiedler, and Hassan) in that it signifies "transcendentalist fantasies of breaking free of limits" (8) and "a promise of deliverance from human history and mortality" (11). In their offer of escape from the "mundane" historical and social realms, such escapist fantasies both seduce with the bliss of Utopia and require the innocence of Adam in Eden. The incoming Rapture is limited to the "true believers," hence such a discourse, like most other American constructs of individualism, is entangled in elitism, exceptionalism, and social solipsism.

To recapitulate, cyberpunk as a subgenre of science fiction perpetuates American constructs of innocence in a twofold fashion. First of all, despite its postmodern surface, it features traditional, ego–centric, juvenile, self–reliant protagonists, who resort to escapism or recoil in order to avoid the burdens of social life and retain their innocence. Such figures derive in the American tradition of innocence from the image of Adam in Eden. Furthermore, cyberpunk perpetuates American timelessness: the escape from the present into an ancestral Eden or a future Utopia, both of which are also images of innocence. Such–constructed motifs of innocence can be found in Gibson's seminal cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer.

  

William Gibson's Neuromancer was published in 1984, just when the present had caught up with a previous exemplar of dystopian fiction: George Orwell's titular 1984. Needless to say, 1984 had not turned out to reflect the world as prophesied in Orwell's cassandric opus,  perhaps  to  the  satisfaction of  dystopian fiction's  detractors. Nevertheless, Gibson soon filled the resulting void with his own seminal dys(u)topia. As a work of fiction which reflected both the hopes and the fears of its time, Neuromancer was the first novel to have been awarded the so–called "triple crown" of science–fiction awards: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Philip K. Dick Award.

Despite Neuromancer's positive reception as both a science–fiction novel and a piece of postmodernist prose, Gibson himself had later called his first novel "an adolescent's  book"  (Neale,  No Maps for These Territories).  However  dismissive  this comment might sound, it nonetheless opens up Neuromancer for interpretation within the American tradition of juvenile fiction, escapism, and innocence. The critic Norman Spinrad points out that the title of the novel itself, a portmanteau of "neuro –" and "necromancer," could also be (mis)read as "new romancer," opening up the novel for interpretation as a new instance of traditional Romance fiction (Spinrad 111).

In terms of its structure, Neuromancer indeed remains faithful to traditional "cause–and–effect plot development" (Sponsler 636). The plot structure of Neuromancer resembles point for point the generic plot of a heist movie[3] . Heist movies tend to follow a three–act structure, which consists of: assembling a team of conspirators and making preparations for the heist, the heist itself, and the heist's aftermath. In Neuromancer, the instigator of the heist is an Artificial Intelligence code–named "Wintermute," whose source code is stored on the private servers of Tessier–Ashpool SA, a detached and secretive corporate clan. Wintermute had been designed to be but a half of a potential larger AI. Its sibling counterpart had been code–named "Neuromancer." Both AIs were forbidden from  ever  forming  a  single  holistic  mind,  for  fear  of  their  becoming too powerful. Their potential to combine and develop further is limited due to a recent change in the politics of Tessier–Ashpool, which abandoned its prior plan of combining both AIs in favor of keeping them apart, as well as the jurisdiction of the Turing police, a special–forces bureau supervising AIs on a global scale in order to prevent their growth. Resorting to financial motivation, psychological manipulation, and coercion, Wintermute assembles a team of conspirators to do his bidding: Armitage, Molly, Case, the Finn, the Dixie Flatline, Peter Riviera, and Maelcum. The novel's plot consists of two consecutive heists. The first group objective is to steal the Dixie Flatline (one of the prospective team– members, a ROM module) from the servers of the media consortium Sense/Net. This heist serves as a test run for the heist proper. In a surprising plot twist, it turns out that Wintermute's second objective for the conspirators is to steal Wintermute itself from the servers of Tessier–Ashpool in order for Wintermute to combine its source code with that of Neuromancer and enable both AIs to become a greater, God–like being.

In addition to its heist structure, Neuromancer also reveals its adherence to the American Adam metanarrarive: the individual's initial interaction with the world, his Fall and loss of innocence, his subsequent escapism and recoil, his being granted a second chance, and his ensuing attempts at reconciliation and integration. The character who embodies this Adamic motif in the novel is Case, the narrative's sole focalizer. Case is presented as a rather stable individual, in contrast with the novel's unstable ("postmodern") peripheral characters: Armitage, the Dixie Flatline, Peter Riviera, 3Jane, and  Wintermute.  In  the  words  of  Sponsler,  "in  a  seeming  contradiction  to  the decentering of the subject that occurs with many of his minor characters, Gibson's protagonists still fit the well–known mold of the free–willed, self–aware, humanist subject" (637).

Within  the  time–frame  of  the  novel,  Case  is  introduced  in  medias  res:  in  the aftermath of his initial incursion into the world and his ensuing victimization and recoil. However, several retrospective passages reveal his past and the particular circumstances of  his  Fall. Before his introduction in Chiba, Case had been "a  cowboy hotshot,"  "a rustler," and "a thief" (Neuromancer 11–12)[4] . Such self–proclamations point to what Stockton understands to be a "remythologiz[ation] of an earlier, powerfully autonomous subject,"  which  results  in  the  perseverance  of  the  traditional  image  of  the "swashbuckling  pirate  and/or  American  cowboy"  under  the  conditions  of postmodernism  and  cyberculture  (588).  As  an  elite  member  of  the  meritocratic subculture of hackers, Case had offered his services to various corporate clients and stolen packets of data from their competitors' servers. In having done so, Case reveals his adherence to the Western images of the freelancer and the maverick (as well as the Eastern ronin archetype), which, according to Leary, all converge in the postmodern image of the hacker: the strong, stubborn, creative individual who "explores some future frontier" and "collects and brings back new information" (252). Case's occasional excursions into the social order, that is, his makeshift alliances with the corporate world, had all been of expedient nature and none have resulted in Case's integration into the corporate social notation. To use Leary's words:

Cyberpunks are sometimes authorized by the governors. They can, with sweet cynicism and patient humor, interface their singularity with institutions. They often work within the "governing systems" on a temporary basis. As often as not, they are unauthorized. (260)

In return for his services, Case had been provided with finances, firsthand access to "exotic software," as well as the promise of "permanent adrenaline high," the respect of his partners–in–crime, and "the bodiless exultation of cyberspace" ( N 12). In other words, he had been provided the sufficient means of masculine self–confirmation and wish fulfillment within an environment akin to Fiedler's Great Good Place. Prior to his Fall, Case had frequented the bars of the Sprawl, masculine zones where "mothers do not come" (Fiedler 174), and shared word of his achievements with his male associates. His pride, however, had led him to break the unwritten commandments of his craft and steal from his benefactors, transgressing the rules of his Garden and reaching out for its forbidden fruit. In retaliation, the benefactors had crippled his nervous system with a toxin, preventing him from ever returning to cyberspace. This victimization, which in the narrative's deep structure signifies an expulsion from the Biblical Garden, is in fact described outright in Biblical terms in the novel itself: "For Case . . . it was the Fall" (N 12) (note Gibson's capitalization). Within the Christian creed, the Fall of Man is defined as "Adam's sin of yielding to temptation in eating the forbidden fruit, and his subsequent loss of grace" (Webster's "Fall"). The initial plot of Neuromancer reveals this Biblical motif in its deep structure: Case yields to temptation in stealing from his benefactors and thus loses grace in being expelled from cyberspace.

The Biblical Fall signifies a passage from an immortal life of grace to a mortal life of hardship and toil. The post–Fall expulsion from the Garden of Eden leads Adam to the earthen  world  of  mortals.  In  Neuromancer,  however,  Case  conceptualizes  his  own expulsion in much more radical terms than the Garden and the world proper. He sees his Fall as a direct descent from Heaven to Hell, the mundane world of mortals excepted. As mentioned  before,  cyberpunk  reflects  the  apocalyptic/dystopian  mode.  Within  this mode, there is no place for moderate conceptualizations of space such as those of the Garden and the Earth. Instead, the modern world is characterized by simultaneous overstimulation and numbness,  alarm  and  anesthesia  . . .,  and  it  is  imagined  in  terms  of dialectical extremes, of heaven and hell, of dreamworld and catastrophe. (Stewart and Harding 291)

Neuromancer as a representative of dystopian fiction follows the aforecited schema. Case conceptualizes cyberspace in terms of Heaven (overstimulation, alarm, dreamworld) and the real world of "meat" in terms of Hell (numbness, anesthesia, catastrophe). Within the novel, therefore, the Adamic model of expulsion from Eden into the world proper is discarded in favor of radical millennarian/apocalyptic (utopian/dystopian) extremes.

For Case, the matrix is the epitome of "bodiless exultation" ( N 12), a notion which is most often associated in the Western tradition with Heaven. Cyberspace, therefore, is in Case's mind an artificial ersatz–Heaven and his initial expulsion from the matrix into the corporeal world could thus be read as a descent into an artificial ersatz–Hell. As such, Case's  later  excursions  into  cyberspace  will  form  a  part  of  Neuromancer's  religious "utopian horizon" within its dystopian dominant. The matrix offers a limitless and therefore a (techno–)sublime world for the protagonist to explore. Case's transition from the world proper to the cyber–world signifies movement from a world of limited experience (at least as far as Case is concerned) to a world of limitless potential. However grim and uninviting cyberspace might seem to the reader, for Case it doubles as a boundless frontier of action and creation. As such, it reveals utopian characteristics. Sure enough, excursions into cyberspace are described as a dangerous undertaking, but for the  traditional American protagonist, the  masculine monster–slayer, isn't a  limitless world full of artificial monsters to vanquish a masculine Utopia, or a Biblical Heaven, nonetheless...?

In his work "Cyberspace: First Steps," the critic Michael Benedikt confirms that: "Cyberspace can be seen as an extension, some might say an inevitable extension, of our age–old capacity and need to dwell in fiction, to dwell empowered or enlightened, on other, mythic planes, if only periodically" (22). Benedikt adds further that the matrix is a metaphor of Heaven insofar as it is a reflection of the Heavenly City. According to the critic, such architectural Utopias share features such as "weightlessness," "numerological complexity," and "transcendence of nature and of crude beginnings" (27). All such features are reflected in Gibsonian cyberspace. Furthermore, such cities constitute "an image of what would adequately compensate for, and in some way ultimately justify, our symbolic and collective expulsion from Eden. They represent the creation of a place where we might re–enter god's graces" (27). Because cyberspace can be approached in such Biblical terms, Case's return to the matrix with the help of Wintermute will allow to be conceptualized in terms of a cyber–Rapture (Benedikt's "re–enter[ing] god's graces") in the further course of this chapter.

The Heaven of the matrix is situated in the mind of Case in direct and radical

opposition to the Hell of the real ― the corporeal ― world of "meat." Within the Biblical

narrative, Adam's transgression in Eden had made him well aware of his status as a mortal and fragile being of flesh (in realizing his being naked). Similarly, Case's attitude towards himself and the exterior world after his Fall is structured on this Biblical motif. Having been prevented from ever entering the matrix, Case had been made aware of his nakedness, that is, his being embodied. Because of his prior inhabiting of the cerebral and abstract matrix, Case had objectified and reduced his corporeal self–image to mere "meat:" "In bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance had involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat" ( N 12). Case's expulsion from the matrix and the subculture of hackers mirrors Adam's expulsion from the Garden in that both figures must come to terms with their just–discovered corporeal, embodied nature. After his Fall, Case realizes that he "fell into the prison of his own flesh" ( N 12). His regressive Cartesian approach and preference for the mind over the flesh is made apparent when he invokes the image of "the prison of his skull" ( N 43). Furthermore, Case prefers the abstract and cerebral minimalism of the matrix over the "gratuitous" phenomenal nature of the corporeal world.

Hacker figures as "cyberspace cowboys" (N 11) and "console cowboys" (N 39) are derived in part from the Westerns and thus share certain attributes with Western protagonists. In her work West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, the feminist critic Jane Tompkins comments on the deep bond shared between cowboys and the land:

Westerns believe that reality is material, not spiritual; they are obsessed with pain and celebrate the suppression of feeling; their taciturn heroes want to dominate the land, and sometimes to merge with it completely ― they are trying to get away from other people and themselves. (6–7)

Although cyberpunks share similarities with cowboys, their attitude towards "land" (matter)  constitutes  a  radical  reversal  of  this  relationship.  If  Westerns  believe  that "reality is material," than cyberpunk fiction asserts that the real world is immaterial, if not in the literal sense of the word, than at least in the figurative : it is immaterial in being irrelevant. Furthermore, Tompkins adds that the Western genre "represents physical strength as an ideal" (11). Cyberpunk reverses this motif as well and represents as its ideal mental capacities. Because of this reversal, hackers form deep bonds with the spiritual world instead.

Case's spiritual world is that of the matrix. He acknowledges that the matrix is "a drastic simplification of the human sensorium," but nonetheless prefers its reductive, geometrical nature to the "gratuitous multiplication of flesh input" ( N 71) of simstim (simulated senses) and the real world. Case prefers the geometric "masculine" mind over gratuitous "feminine" senses, as Gibson still resorts to such regressive cultural associations.  Because  Case  is  operating  within  a  radicalized,  dystopian  mode  of perception, he finds himself incapable of arriving at a functional middle–ground between the dialectical extremes of "drastic simplification" and "gratuitous multiplication." Because he feels limited to an either/or choice, as millenarian thinking often assumes thinking in simplistic binaries, Case totally commits himself to the former. He renounces full phenomenal reception of the exterior world as a gratuitous experience (echoing Lewis's "strategic distance"), because the corporeal senses (as opposed to the abstract nature of the mind) are for a hacker of his stature a gimmick, a mere "meat toy" ( N 71). In conclusion, when Case had access to the cerebral dreamworld of the matrix, he had succeeded in the erasure of his own flesh. However, after his Fall he had been thrust into a world of "meat," characteristic of the "numbness" and "anesthesia" of Hell as conceptualized within the apocalyptic mode of dystopian fiction.

Apart from Case's personal conceptualizations of space, the world of Neuromancer itself is presented as Hell on the level of narration. However, its descriptions elude the most obvious association of Hell with hellfire. Instead, the world is presented as lacking movement and vital forces: frozen, passive, and dead. Such an image of Hell remains consistent with Stewart and Harding's description of Hell as invoking "numbness" and "anesthesia" (291). The novel offers various images of being frozen on the level of descriptive metaphor (the ICE of the matrix; hacking as breaking through ICE) and the world's sociocultural construction.

Case inhabits a frozen world in sociocultural stalemate, wherein the political and

mercantile   powers

―    the   multinationals,   the   mafias,   and   the   corporate   clans

(particularized in Neuromancer as the zaibatsus, the Yakuza, Sense/Net, the Turing police,

and the Tessier–Ashpools) ― might perhaps gain advantage one over another at a given

point in time,  but such local change in power signifies nothing. Traditional science fiction presented worlds in which time moved forward with the sheer force of change, progress, and extrapolation. In contrast, the sociotemporal impasse presented in Neuromancer is best summarized in the words of the punk movement's nihilistic mantra: "No future." This approach marks science fiction's retreat from optimistic extrapolation in favor of pessimistic recoil.

The world of Neuromancer grants chosen individuals prolonged lifespans, but one such long–lived character, Julius Deane, is described as having been petrified in the past with no prospects whatsoever for his future. His office, with its heterotopic collection of antiques such as "Neo–Aztec bookcases," "Disney–styled table lamps," a "Kandinsky–look coffee table," and a "Dali clock" (N 21), does not strike one as a living room, but rather, a museum or even a mausoleum. Deane himself is described in the following manner:

Sexless and inhumanely patient, his primary gratification seemed to lie in his devotion to esoteric forms of tailor–worship. Case had never seen him wear the same suit twice, although his wardrobe seemed to consist entirely of meticulous reconstructions of garments of the previous century. (N 21)

The description hints at the prospect of the future being a mere ironic and meaningless repetition of the past, echoing Stewart and Harding's postmodernist apocalypse with its "playful celebration of surface styles and reproductions" (290). Deane's wearing different suits signifies mere quantitative repetition instead of actual qualitative change.

Chiba, Case's initial operating ground, is described as "a deranged experiment in social Darwinism" (N 14), a zone in which individual people might perhaps rise or fall in terms of their social status, but the status quo itself remains petrified in a stalemate: "Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you'd break the fragile surface tension of the black market" (N 14). Similarly, culture itself is presented as an accelerated succession of meaningless fashions: "Fads swept the youth of the Sprawl at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly" (N 74). Neuromancer's prospective counter–cultural forces such as the Panther Moderns do not engage in actual political change, but rather, are reduced to "practical jokers [and] nihilistic technofetishists" who engage in "random acts of surreal violence" (N 75). This description is at once evocative of cyberpunk's indifference to social commitment in favor of meaningless games. The most direct image of the frozen world of Neuromancer is contained in the individual clan–members of Tessier–Ashpool SA being frozen in cryogenic suspension for considerable amounts of time:

'I'm  old,  Molly.  Over  two  hundred  years,  if  you  count  the  cold.  The cold.'  . . .  'You  can  get  freezeburn,'  she  said  carefully.  'Nothing  burns there,' he said impatiently . . .; 'Nothing burns.' (N 221)

Such descriptions define the real world of Hell as a place of stagnation rather than hellfire.

To recapitulate, after his transgression and Fall, Case is  thrust into  a  frozen, hellish world. There he must come to terms with his human nature: his embodiedness, his  being  fragile  and  mortal,  and  his  dependence  on  sustenance  and  capital.  His instinctive reaction to the world's hellish nature and his own victimization is that of Hassanian "recoil." Case, who at first has no means of escaping into the matrix, escapes instead into mental inwardness. According to Scott Bukatman, even the character's name invokes images of inwardness, since the name Case could mean "a closed object, a container, a hard case" (95). This intuition is confirmed in several passages from the novel. Case sleeps "curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel" ( N 11), lives in the "prison of his own flesh" (N 12), and finds himself in a "cubicle [which] was the sort of place where people died" (N 28). He is described as bitter (N 10), paranoid (N 23), and in a state of "terminal overdrive" (N 14). Unable to nurture his addiction to the matrix, he resorts to using drugs. His emotional recoil is diagnosed outright in the text itself in the words of Ratz, the bartender: "'And you wander back and forth in this portable bombshelter built of booze and ups [drugs], sure. Proof against the grosser emotions, yes?'" ( N 32). Ratz also refers to Case as "too much the artiste" (N 9), confirming Case's status as an avatar of the figure of "the alienated intellectual cast adrift in a community of philistines" (Fiedler

439). This notion refers to the talented, albeit misunderstood individual who is aware of a potential Utopia (the matrix), but who is prevented from reaching it.

However, Case's recoil and strategic distance had not proved successful against the world's victimization, echoing Hassan's sentiment that individuals in postmodern times are no longer capable of succeeding in this struggle, as Case is also confirmed to be suicidal and on a straight path towards death (N 40): "Ninsei wore him down until the street itself came to seem the externalization of some death wish, some secret poison he hadn't known he carried" (N 14). In another scene in Neuromancer evoking the image of games, Case realizes that his recoil has led him to a mental state in which he is no longer capable of treating his life as something other than a perverse game:

Case knew that at some point he'd started to play a game with himself, a very ancient one that has no name, a final solitaire. He no longer carried a weapon, no longer took the basic precautions. He ran the fastest, loosest deals on the street . . . (N 14)

Case's willingness to accept jobs involving a high risk factor represents his death drive; a repetition automatism which emphasizes the machine–like character of his life at this point in the narrative. His recoil is hopeless, albeit empowering at the same time, representing a Romantic last stand of the active Self against the world.

If one were to trace up to this point just the secular, dystopian dominant of the novel, there would seem to be no hope for Case as an individual and the world of Neuromancer in general. Indeed, in order for the narrative to "save" Case, it must reveal its religious and millenarian "utopian horizon" instead and resort to a traditional motif in American fiction: the God–given second chance.

In Neuromancer, God proper does not make an appearance, but the Wintermute AI functions, for all intents and purposes, as the narrative's secular ersatz–God. Case as the novel's focalizer conceptualizes Wintermute as such and the AI itself alludes to its God– like qualities in an ironic fashion. When Case first notices Wintermute in the matrix, he sees "a simple cube of white light, that very simplicity suggesting extreme complexity" (N   140).  As  mentioned  before,  for  the  cerebral–oriented  hackers  of  Neuromancer, geometric shapes are the epitome of simplification, a feature which all hackers worship and strive for. As a simple cube, Wintermute invokes the impression of an advanced form of being. Although Case is aware that Wintermute is just an AI program, his instinct tells him there is more to this particular AI so he asks: "'You running the world now? You God?'" (N 140). The question prompts an interpretation that despite its secular surface, the novel features in its deep structure a utopian longing for Rapture and salvation, which is typical of the American topos of innocence.

Wintermute does not confirm Case's intuition outright. However, its replies to Case reveal its awareness of the fact that it possesses God–like qualities, as it alludes to motifs from Biblical scripture and seems to be masquerading as God. In one instance, it asks Case: "'You want I should come to you in the matrix like a burning bush?'" ( N 202) (King James Bible, Exod. 3.2). In another, it claims to possess God–like omnipresence in purporting to exist: "'Nowhere. Everywhere.'" Afterward it adds: "'I'm the sum total of the works, the whole show.'" (N 316). When asked if its presence changes the world, Wintermute replies: "'Things aren't different. Things are things'" (N 316). Because Wintermute is a "thing" itself, it seems to be once again alluding to the scripture, and in particular, to God's tautological pronouncement: "I AM THAT I AM" (King James Bible, Exod. 3.14).

As the ironic "thing that is a thing," the literal deus ex machina of Neuromancer (as science fiction is known for its literalizing of concepts and metaphors), Wintermute provides Case with a divine second chance of returning to the world which has violated him. It provides the means of restoring Case's pancreas, liver, and nervous system, allowing Case to return to the matrix (N 60). This "God"–given second chance reveals in its deep structure the American Adamic motif of an individual being granted a fresh start in a new world, to explore it and make it one's own. The second chance also represents the novel's "utopian horizon" within its dystopian dominant, here realized in the motif of Rapture.

Within Mark Dery's concept of "escape velocity," Case could be conceptualized as a passive, albeit vigilant "true believer" awaiting Rapture from the mundane social world into a world of greater significance. Neuromancer presents what Dery describes as "the cyberdelic vision of a techno–mystical apotheosis in the there and then," which "diverts public discourse from the political and socioeconomic inequities of the here and now" (48–49). Wintermute "raptures" Case into greatness, allowing him to return into the matrix and providing him with powerful software which elevates him to the status of a hacker–magician in the act of divine intervention. However, this "rapture" happens despite the fact that Case is undeserving of elevation on moral grounds.

When commenting on the immoral, asocial disengagement of cyberpunk protagonists, Dery points to Case and Molly in particular as individuals who " are utterly

apolitical, aspiring to the peak of their professions ― the glamorized corporate soldier of

fortune ― and nothing more" (251). Such indifferent characters are in recoil from the

world and must therefore turn to a "utopian horizon" in search of self –fulfillment. Case turns his utopian desires towards the matrix and it is this passive worship which grants him a second chance from Wintermute. His asocial conduct is rewarded with "rapture," which reveals one of cyberpunk's disturbing overtones: divine salvation is granted to those in particular who turn to Utopia and leave their social responsibilities behind.

However, while Case conceptualizes Wintermute as a benevolent, semi–divine being and Wintermute itself masquerades as such, other characters in the novel would rather believe Wintermute to represent a devil or a demon. Claire Sponsler notes that in contrast with Case, Wintermute embodies a "decentering of the subject" (631). In one instance, it is referred to as a "hive mind" and a "ghost" ( N 315). In another, it is revealed that Wintermute is unable to function as a stable, holistic being, masquerading instead under makeshift masks with incomplete personalities (N 256). Such features reveal its origin in postmodernist thought, as opposed to Case. Wintermute's cunning, protean character marks him as a demon rather than a divine being. Within the narrative of the Garden of Eden, the devil had shape–shifted into a snake and thus deceived Adam and Eve. Within the Christian tradition, therefore, protean shape–shifting is perceived to designate malevolent beings ("tricksters," as it were). Such a Biblical intuition is common in Neuromancer on behalf of characters other than Case. The Dixie Flatline claims that nobody "'trusts those fuckers . . . Every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.'" (N 159). When asked about Wintermute, Tessier–Ashpool replies: "'A name. Yes. To conjure with, perhaps. A lord of hell, surely.'" ( N 221). One of the Turing police officers warns Case about his dealings with the AI:

'You are worse than a fool,' Michele said . . . 'You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?' (N 193)

In conclusion, Wintermute is an ambivalent character with both a divine and a demonic aspect, a character whom Gibson seems to have based on both God and Satan alike. Perhaps such a deep structure hints at the notion that an Artificial Intelligence as the science–fictional Other par excellence eludes our crude human conceptualizations and binaries. From the demonic perspective, Case could be perceived as a character based on the immoral Faustian antihero who resorts to pacts with demons in exchange for power and knowledge. In consequence, he could be interpreted as a naïve innocent who finds himself unable to see Wintermute for what this intelligence represents. In his naïveté, Case believes to be entering a beneficial covenant with an ersatz–God, whereas in truth he might be helping an ersatz–demon against all mankind. Indeed, as Leslie Fiedler has demonstrated, within the American tradition of masculine protagonists there is "the convention of treating magic as science and thus reclaiming it for respectability in the Age of Reason; the magician Faust in his black robes becomes the scientist in his white coat"  (Love  and  Death  121).  The  Faustian  magician's  pact  with  a  demon  could  thus function as one of Neuromancer's deep structures, particularized in the image of Case the hacker (the scientist–magician) entering into a pact with a malevolent Artificial Intelligence (a "postmodern demon" if there ever was one).

As documented in the first chapter of this thesis, the notion of the American Adam in addition to its benevolent surface has certain disturbing overtones. One of these is its Faustian aspect. In his naïve innocence, the American Adam is premoral, and therefore outside of the social realm. Its radical Faustian counterpart is no longer premoral, as his high intelligence implies the knowledge of morals. Instead, he is amoral and no longer outside of the social realm, but above it. Case as an avatar of Adam in his Faustian aspect reveals what Fiedler describes as: "The blasphemous hope of Faustian man: the re–ordering of nature, the canceling out of the effects of original sin, the creation of life become the daily business of the laboratory, if not on today's agenda, at least on tomorrow's" (Love and Death 122).

Despite its dystopian surface, Neuromancer reveals its "utopian horizon" in developing several semi–religious motifs of utopian nature, one of which is the aforecited "re–ordering of nature" and "creation of life." Case and Wintermute are intertwined in a paradoxical  relationship  in  which  both  can  be  claimed  to  be  agents  of  power  and creation. On the one hand, Wintermute can be interpreted as the omnipotent agent of the  novel,  the  deus  ex  machina  God  who  "raptures"  Case  from  the  frozen  world  he inhabits. On the other hand, however, it is perhaps Case himself who, in helping Wintermute to reach its goals, allows for the genesis of a "god" in a powerful act of subcreation. Inasmuch as the secular discourses of the West have led to the "death of God," the "utopian horizon" within cyberpunk fiction allows for the "resurrection" of God, or at least the subcreation of "a god," an omnipotent being with God–like qualities. Such an interpretation would invoke what Lewis labeled a "Yankee genesis" within the discourse of the American Adam; an act of creation in which "the creature has taken on the role of creator" (45–46).

Case enters into the role of Adam the subcreator who is to change the world around him. In deciding to help Wintermute against the warnings of other characters, Case manages to break the hellish, frozen structure of the novel's world and claim: "'I got no idea what'll happen if Wintermute wins, but it'll change something!'" ( N  307). In effect, Case functions both as Adam, to whom a second chance had been given from above, and as the one who himself provides the world with a second chance through altering its  structure.  In  a  world  petrified  in a  stalemate, Case  finds himself in the position of a savior capable of doing "the real thing" instead of meaningless repetition:

'You're  always  building  models.  Stone  circles.  Cathedrals.  Pipe–organs. Adding machines. I [Wintermute] got no idea why I'm here now, you know that? But if the run goes off tonight, you'll have finally managed the real thing.' 'I [Case] don't know what you're talking about.' 'That's 'you' in the collective. Your species.' (N 204)

In the words of Leary, one of the functions of hackers is to "guide the gene pool to the next stage" (1). Wintermute's words confirm that Case functions as such a "shepherd" figure for his collective: moving it forward, negotiating its future, and providing it with "a god."

As Adam the subcreator, Case is also modeled on the figure of "the American poet," which according to Lewis is "the type of creator, the poet par excellence, creating language itself by naming the elements of the scene about him" (5). The role of Case as the hacker–magician is to "'learn the names of programs, the long, formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names...'" (N 289). This motif has its origin in Adam naming the flora and fauna of the Garden, a gesture through which he becomes their master. Case's successful alteration of the world's structure (or, to use the words of Fiedler, his "re–ordering of nature" and "creation of life") represents one of the novel's "utopian horizons." It is through this change that the novel ceases to reflect the postmodern, ironic apocalypse of Harding and Stewart with its petrified "celebration of surface styles and reproductions" (290) and instead turns to the productive millennarian mode with its "overturnings" and "originary moments" (286). The frozen surface of the hellish  world  is  broken  and  an  omnipotent  being  is  liberated.  In  this  gesture, Neuromancer returns to the utopian progressivism of older science fiction.

Baccolini claims that "utopia is maintained in dystopia, traditionally a bleak, depressing genre with no space for hope in the story, only outside the story" (520). She further claims that recent science fiction novels "by resisting closure, allow readers and protagonists to hope: the ambiguous, open endings maintain the utopian impulse within the work" (520). Accordingly, Neuromancer maintains such a "utopian horizon" despite its dystopian surface through its perpetuation of traditional utopian motifs. The narrative ends with Wintermute discovering another Artificial Intelligence in outer space in the Alpha Centauri system and making preparations for a first contact scenario (N 316). Though just hinted at in one closing paragraph, this sudden shift (in fact: a regression) in motifs from cyberspace back to outer space marks Neuromancer's final gaze towards a "utopian horizon," its sudden re–emergence from a state of recoil, and a return to the traditional science–fictional paradigm of outer space, alien beings, exploration, and first contact[5] . This unexpected emergence of traditional plot elements is not provided with a proper closure, hence the novel resolves (or rather: does not resolve) in a promise of potential Utopia.

Nevertheless, the narrative does provide some closure to Case as a character. Case returns to working as a hacker on routine assignments and living a "normal" life: "He found work. He found a girl who called herself Michael." ( N 317). It would seem at first glance that Case returned full circle to his precise point of departure and achieved nothing in particular, but in allowing Wintermute to grow and develop, he allowed the AI to change himself as well. Wintermute provided Case with a realization which he did not have prior to the heist: the recognition that he is capable of "passion" towards life. This productive state of mind at last enabled Case to integrate into the real world of social notation  and  cease  functioning  in  a  constant  state  of  mental  recoil.  His  growing awareness of his passion towards life is a motif which reappears throughout the novel in descriptions of his "love" and "hate" (or "rage") towards particular people and situations (love and hate being extremes on the differential scale of passion). In the course of the narrative, Wintermute and Neuromancer rid Case of what he then realizes are his most essential needs: food, warmth, shelter, sex, and love: "'I  had a  cigarette,' Case said, looking down at his white–knuckled fist. 'I had a cigarette and a girl and a place to sleep. Do you hear me, you son of a bitch? You hear me?'" (N 143).

At the onset of the narrative, Case frowns upon such simple "creature comforts," mere necessities of "the meat." In the course of Wintermute's machinations, however, he comes to appreciate them and discovers that it was not the absence of the abstract and cerebral matrix, but his lack of recognition of such tangible fundamentals which forced him to lead a life in recoil: "He knew then: the rage had come in the arcade, when Wintermute rescinded the simstim ghost of Linda Lee, yanking away the simple animal promise of food, warmth, a place of sleep. . . . 'Numb,' he said. He'd been numb a long time, years" (N 181). In other words, Case discovers that what makes him human are his embodiedness and his commitment to fundamentals, as well as his being grounded in the relative innocence of human necessities, as opposed to the cerebral transcendence of the matrix. Sponsler seems to confirm this sentiment: "[Gibson's] male heroes are the characters who are the least invaded by technology. Without exception, they are resolutely 'human,' not least of all in their vulnerability" (Sponsler 637–638). In being vulnerable and realizing that this in particular is what makes him human, Case for the last time invokes the American tradition of innocence.

CHAPTER THREE

CYBERPUNK RECONFIGURED:

NEAL STEPHENSON'S SNOW CRASH

In  the  '80s,  William  Gibson  was  considered  to  be  the  uncontested  icon  of cyberpunk to the extent that one of his critics once remarked that "no one can ever hope to out–Gibson Gibson" (Sunday Times). Nevertheless, Neal Stephenson managed to achieve this precise feat and become the flagship postcyberpunk novelist of the '90s. Stephenson published two cyberpunk novels to date, Snow Crash (1992) and The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995), both reflective of the '90s cyber–Zeitgeist.[6]

Snow Crash is a liminal novel which marks the boundaries between cyberpunk and

postcyberpunk. It is to cyberpunk what Robert Coover's Ghost Town is to the Western: a seminal self–conscious deconstruction of the genre which exhausts the well–worn Gibsonian paradigm of cyberpunk in a parodic fashion. On the other hand, The Diamond Age is an exemplar of postcyberpunk. The novel abandons the innocent masculine agent in favor of an innocent child focalizer: the touchstone towards further critique of American culture.

The shift from Gibson to Stephenson as the poet and prophet of cyberpunk in the popular readers' mind could be interpreted as the consequence of the '90s developments within cyberculture itself. A continuing trend from the '80s, the Internet of the '90s was still a hierarchical content retrieval platform, as opposed to the user–centered content creation platform (Web 2.0) it was to become in the next decade. For the uninitiated user, the Internet of the '90s was still a site of passive consumption rather than of active production. However, in contrast with the previous decade, it became a platform of consumption on a mass scale. In metaphorical terms, the Internet as a frontier witnessed mass colonization and not all of it was welcome on the part of its prior occupants. As such,  the  Internet  witnessed  a  shift  in  its  cultural  significance  from  the  non–space frontier of the '80s with its elitist libertarian sentiment captured in John P. Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace."

In the '90s, the Internet had become a domestic and egalitarian "settled space," which opened up what the critic Maria Bakardjieva remarks were "empowering possibilities in the appropriation of the Internet by domestic users" (236). This appropriation resulted in the continuing shift of "technopower" from the "expertise – based elite" to the mass consumers, who discovered that "new forms of domination of digital elites can be found and, in some cases, turned back against them" (Jordan 597,

601). In other words, the change signified the closing of the frontier and the settlement of the average user on the Internet homestead. This in turn met with angst and ressentiment  on  the  part  of  '80s  innovators.  Their  Garden,  as  it  were,  had  been desecrated.

The general shift within cyberculture was reflected in its flagship literature as well. The prefixing of "post–" to cyberpunk fiction reflected an important change of stance and sentiment. In particular, postcyberpunk novels from the '90s were found to be much less "countercultural" and much more "conservative" in tone. Furthermore, most of them were perceived to be less "postmodern" than Gibson's Neuromancer, with even Gibson's later novels and the author himself losing most of their academic interest.

Lawrence Person captured the emerging '90s sentiment in his 1998 article "Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto." He attributed the conservative turn in part to the "inevitable issue of generational relevance." In simpler terms, in the '90s, cyberpunk writers  were  then  "in  their  late  30s  and  early  40s"  (par.  15)  and  thus  much  less susceptible   to   juvenile   countercultural   rhetoric.   For   that   reason,   postcyberpunk foregrounded quite different motifs for quite different reasons altogether.

In Person's opinion, "classic" works of cyberpunk fiction reflected '80s counterculture. Their protagonists as "marginalized, alienated loners who lived on the edge of society" (Person par. 5) were reminiscent of the Adamic paradigm of the "self against the whole world" (Emerson; qtd. in Lewis 6). However, with the Internet having become first and foremost a "settled space," the postcyberpunk of the '90s reflected a domestic consumer consciousness. As Person puts it, "postcyberpunk uses the same immersive world–building technique, but features different characters, settings, and, most importantly, makes fundamentally different assumptions about the future" (par. 8). In other words, the subgenre keeps to the same aesthetic and the same ontological assumptions as its predecessor while foregrounding a different motif complex.

'90s postcyberpunk differs the most from its predecessor in terms of its depictions of  characters. American literature  often situates the  individual outside of  the  social order. Its "outsiderism" often results in social indifference. In turn, European literature occupies itself with characters who are "always already" an integral part of their social order and whose movements are limited to negotiating its hierarchies. Postcyberpunk as a  subgenre  could  be  interpreted  as  marking  a  movement  toward  the  "European" tradition. Person states that "far from being alienated loners, postcyberpunk characters are frequently integral members of the society" (par. 8), ones who "seek ways to live in, or even strengthen, an existing social order, or help construct a better one" (par. 9).

The critic emphasizes the fact that in postcyberpunk the characters' "social landscape is often as detailed and nuanced as the technological one" (par. 11). In spite of its technological networking within the matrix, Neuromancer features no social networking. On one side of its spectrum are the fugitives, hackers, and misfits, and on the other, there are the dehumanized corporations which stand against them. However, there appear to be no neutral societal forces in between. In contrast, if one were to reduce the differences between postcyberpunk and its predecessor to a single aphorism, it would have to be Person's: "In postcyberpunk, technology is society" (par. 11). As exemplars of the latter approach, Stephenson's novels will rediscover social notation (The Diamond Age) and the all–too–common landscape of American suburbia (Snow Crash).

Another paradigm shift within postcyberpunk concerns a gradual departure from dystopia in favor of a return to traditional science–fictional utopianism. Person remarks that the futures of postcyberpunk are often "suffused with an optimism that ranges from cautious to exuberant" (par. 8). Snow Crash and The Diamond Age are set in a world which is the particular (albeit parodic) realization of a libertarian Utopia. This is not to claim that there are no dystopian motifs in Stephenson's novels whatsoever. In fact, bot h novels are set in a world which would be considered dystopian from an academic –leftist perspective. While perhaps considered dystopian from the outside, the world is a Utopia from within. Its utopian and dystopian elements interweave in an equivocal dys(u)topian discourse.

  

When approached at face value, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) reads like a generic cyberpunk novel within the Gibsonian paradigm of the alienated Self, whose roots can be traced back to the metanarrative of the American Adam. However, in the case of Snow Crash the paradigm is supplemented with a metafictional postmodern self – consciousness which situates the novel within the parodic genre. By means of rather risqué humor and techno–fetishist hyperbole, Stephenson amplifies generic motifs to their inevitable deconstruction. In effect, he could be held responsible for the self– conscious exhaustion of cyberpunk in the mid–'90s. However, having noted the function of postmodernist motifs of Snow Crash, in order to remain concise this chapter will focus on the theme of innocence.

In a fashion similar to Neuromancer, the deep structure of Snow Crash reveals the American   metanarrarive  of   the   exceptional   individual  set   against  the   mundane collective. In the words of Bukatman, Snow Crash is predicated on the schema of "the protagonist, inevitably a white male, probing, negotiating, and penetrating a site of multicultural otherness, mastering it in the process" (94). In other words, the novel still situates traditional, holistic protagonists in a heterotopic, postmodernist setting. Unlike Neuromancer, however, Snow Crash rediscovers the social order and provides a critique of suburban homogeneity on the one hand, and postmodern heterotopic fragmentation on the other, both under the parodic guise of libertarian celebration.

The setting of Snow Crash is the realization of a radical libertarian's Utopia. As such, it prefigures John P. Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" with its radical disconnectedness from the past, thus invoking the Adamic paradigm. However, its escapist utopianism is not limited to cyberspace (here called "the Metaverse"), but concerns the real world as well. Stephenson's vision of a near–future world is a comprehensive extrapolation of libertarian postulates, though presented in a parodic and amplified fashion through reductio ad absurdum, which deconstructs libertarian rhetoric altogether.

In the near future, the United States of America witness an economic and cultural breakdown which results in their radical defederalization, decentralization, and privatization (SC 21)[7] . All of the services and functions once provided and performed on the part of the American government are divided between various commercial entities and the government is reduced to a minor force on the corporate market. For example, the US Armed Forces are divided into commercial franchises such as "General Jim's Defense System" and "Admiral Bob's National Security" ( SC 19–20). Police services are offered on the part of companies such as "MetaCops" and "WorldBeat security" (SC 41–

42), whereas the court is replaced with "Judge Bob's Judicial System" ( SC 32). Stephenson extrapolates  libertarian  postulates  of  mass  privatization  to  their  logical  extreme, although  judging  from  the  rather  comical  names  of  the  commercial  franchises,  his surface celebration of libertarianism is charged with its own internal critique.

In this capitalistic world, governmental agencies have been substituted for their Disneyfied parodies echoing the Baudrillardian concept of simulacra. For example, when Y.T. finds herself in a prison (a commercial prison, of course), she discovers that "the check–in counter is faux rustic; the employees all wear cowboy hats and five–pointed stars with their names embossed on them. In back is a door made of hokey, old–fashioned iron bars" (SC 47). In a similar satirical vein, the remnants of the American government are reduced to "Fedland," a parodic version of the FBI with an acute penchant for bureaucratic rules, organization, surveillance, and paranoia. In a parodic manner, the narrator remarks that whenever an individual enters one of Fedland's offices, one has to sign a customs document declaring that one is:

. . .   not   a   terrorist,   Communist   . . .,   homosexual,   national–symbol desecrator, pornography merchant, welfare parasite, racially insensitive, carrier of any infectious disease, or advocate of any ideology tending to impugn traditional family values. (SC 288)

In other words, apart from the United States having turned into a heterotopic multitude of diverse organizations, individual organizations are divided further in and of themselves, as Fedland's catalogue of undesirable features contains instances of bias and paranoia coming from both extremes of the political spectrum. Because there is no longer a nation to accommodate the needs of citizens on a local level, individuals are offered citizenship from the so–called FOQNEs: "Franchise– Organised Quasi–National Entities" (SC 14). Also known as "Burbclaves" (i.e. suburban enclaves), such franchises are commercial "city–state[s] with [their] own constitution, a border, laws, cops, everything" (SC 6). In effect, the world of Snow Crash appears to be privatized from the local to the national level.

Burbclaves are organized around ethnic, religious, or political affiliations. The offer of Burbclaves is diverse, but on the other hand, each Burbclave brand exists in numerous  homogeneous  instances  scattered  throughout  the  United  States.  As  the narrator remarks:

The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in

one  place  will  thrive  in  another.  You  just  have  to  find  a  sufficiently

virulent business plan, condense it into a three–ring binder

― its DNA ―

[and] xerox it . . . Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines. (SC 178)

Some  Burbclaves  are  inclusive  and  centered  around  profiting  from  their  members without being at all selective, while others cater to particular groups of interest. For example, the "White Columns" is an "Apartheid Burbclave" with a "big ornate sign above the main gate: WHITE PEOPLE ONLY. NON–CAUCASIANS MUST BE PROCESSED" (SC 30).

In consequence, despite existing within a heterotopic network, citizens of each Burbclave barricade themselves against the physical, but first and foremost, the cultural intrusions of others, or rather: the intrusions of the Other. In effect, one could interpret such communities as remaining in Hassanian recoil: barricading themselves from each other in an attempt at self–preservation in a reification of Hassan's metaphor. Each Burbclave develops its own vision of Self, of what is proper and what is tainted. Some Burbclaves remain inviting and open–minded, but in others, the punishment for transgression (the transition from innocence to sin or crime) is severe. In consequence, the Burbclaves of Snow Crash could also be interpreted using Foucault's and McHale's notion of heterotopia (Poetics 154).

In his Postmodernist Fiction, McHale introduces Thomas Pavel's notion of a culture's "ontological landscape" (37), the various ontologies through which a culture conceptualizes itself. As far as our current ontological landscape is concerned, McHale asserts that ours is a time of "ontological stress," a condition which manifests itself through  "anarchism,  the  refusal  either  to  accept  or  to  reject  any  of  a  plurality  of available ontological orders." This radical refusal results in an inevitable "anarchic landscape of worlds in the plural," or the creation of heterotopic "subuniverses of meaning: the jostling world–views of different social classes, casts, religious sects, occupations, etc." (Postmodernist Fiction 37).

Such a conglomeration of diverse communities as the Burbclaves of Snow Crash invites interpretation within McHale's framework. In the critic's opinion, in postmodernist times "epistemological enclaves have erected barbed–wire perimeter fences and armed themselves with the latest military hardware against their epistemological  competitors"  (Poetics  153).  The  Burbclaves  of  the  novel  are  in  fact nothing other than such "epistemological enclaves," some even with actual "barbed–wire perimeter fences" (Poetics 153) in a direct reification of the metaphor.

Apart from juxtaposing holistic protagonists against a heterotopic landscape of "multicultural otherness" (Bukatman 94), Stephenson sets his protagonists, Hiro and Y.T. in contrast with the mass inhabitants of suburbia. This recurrent theme traces its roots to the American motif of the alienated artist set against the mundane collective, which itself has its origin in the motif of the innocent American Adam set against the world. Even though Snow Crash is a liminal novel which prefigures postcyberpunk's positive rediscovery of the social order, due to the novel's libertarian, individualist discourse, it nonetheless presents suburbia and the middle class in an unfavorable light. The  suburbia  is  criticized  in  terms  of  its  homogeneous,  predictable,  and  passive character, as contrasted with the active and elitist protagonists. With parodic pastoral names such as "Cinnamon Grove," "Cloverdale," and "Rainbow Heights" ( SC 41–42), the suburban enclaves of Snow Crash function as metaphorical Gardens in the libertarian Machine in an ironic reversal of Leo Marx's cultural paradigm. Some Burbclaves are described as uniform in an almost totalitarian fashion:

TMAWHs [The Mews at Windsor Heights] all have the same layout. When creating a new Burbclave, TMAWH Development Corporation will chop

down any mountain ranges and divert the course of any mighty rivers that threaten  to   interrupt  this  street  plan ―   ergonomically  designed  to encourage driving safely. (SC 12)

Furthermore, the narrator describes the mental recoil of their inhabitants in a mocking tone: "These Burbclaves! These city–states! So small, so insecure, that just about everything, like not mowing your lawn, or playing your stereo too loud, becomes a national security issue" (SC 42).

Against this numb and static suburban backdrop Stephenson sets his non– conformist protagonists: Y.T. and Hiro Protagonist. The novel explores this juxtaposition in its descriptions of free movement on the highways and restricted movement in the Burbclaves. Both Hiro and Y.T., the "cyberpunks" of Snow Crash, value unrestricted movement and their vehicles are described in a parodic techno–sublime fashion. Hiro as the "Deliverator" owns a state–of–the–art motorcycle, while Y.T. as a "Kourier"rides a cutting–edge skateboard. Their character as free agents is contrasted with the suburban image of "retards and the bimbo boxes [cars] pok[ing] along, random, indecisive, looking at each passing franchise's driveway like they don't know if it's a promise or a threat" ( SC

8). Unlike the suburban drivers, who are described as "bulky, stupid, thoroughly predictable" (SC 28), Hiro and Y.T. use alternative modes of transportation and their movements cannot be predicted or controlled. This thematic juxtaposition is foregrounded outright in the narrative in Y.T.'s metaphor of the box:

A Kourier has to establish space on the pavement. Predictable law–abiding behavior lulls drivers. They mentally assign you to a little box in the lane, assume you will stay there, can't handle it when you leave that little box. Y.T. is not fond of boxes. (SC 49)

As active and non–conformist agents, Y.T. and Hiro invoke Leary's description of cyberpunks as pilots and explorers. As the critic puts it, the word "cyberpunk" has its etymological origin in the Greek word "kubernetes" ("pilot") and connotes movement and initiative (Leary 254). Both protagonists as the "cyberpunks" of Snow Crash do justice to the term's Hellenic origin.

Hiro and Y.T. do not just distance themselves from their social order, but rather, reject it in a strong feeling of contempt. The elitist protagonists go as far as to reduce the suburban collective to an abject "biomass," whose existence is limited to being passive consumers in the hands of larger economic agents: "The Industry feeds off the human biomass of America. Like a whale straining krill from the sea." Thus, apparently, it is the social and cultural majorities that are abject and in contrast to whom the alienated minorities represented by Hiro and Y.T. construct their elitist identities.

This othering of egalitarian middle class values and the suburbia as an abject space on the part of the novel's protagonists could be perhaps interpreted as the result of their nostalgia and ressentiment following the closure of their frontier, which is what Jameson has in mind when he comments upon the isolation of an intellectual: "The theme of the alienated intellectual cannot be properly understood until it had been semantically restored to its full expressive value as an ideologeme . . . of ressentiment" (The Political Unconscious 201).

In  Snow  Crash,  the  notion  of  innocence  is  particularized as  being  immune to disease, be it a biological virus, a computer virus, or a social/cultural disorder (including religions and ideologies). The protagonists' forced interaction with the suburban collective makes them prone to "contamination," or the possible adoption of middle class habits, suburban thought patterns, or ideologies.

As documented before, retaining one's innocence requires the perpetual maintenance of a frontier. A frontier space is timeless due to being located outside of the social order and therefore outside of historical time, where there are no conditions for experience  and  thus  no  possible  loss  of  innocence.  However,  once  a  frontier  is proclaimed closed, historical and social forces  settle in and with them move in the notions of time and experience. The result of this process is the frontiersmen's inevitable loss of innocence and victimization, culminating in their recoil from the world and their ressentiment toward its inhabitants. The hacker frontiersmen of Snow Crash find themselves living among a domestic philistine collective which does not recognize and appreciate their prior contributions in the creation of the Metaverse. Apart from regarding this  new mass settlement of  the  Metaverse homestead as  tainting "their" world, the hackers and programmers find themselves to be obsolete and unneeded in the further maintenance of their Garden. As the narrator states:

When Hiro learned how to do this, way back fifteen years ago, a hacker could sit down and write an entire piece of software by himself. Now, that's no longer possible. Software comes out of factories, and hackers are, to a greater or lesser extent, assembly–line workers. Worse yet, they may become managers who never get to write any code themselves. (SC 36)

It seems, therefore, that in the case of Snow Crash there is no expulsion from the Garden as such, but rather, its space witnesses philistine profanation.

Hiro's ressentiment reflects the cultural shift within '90s cyberculture with its gradual abandonment of the frontier metaphor. According to Andrew Ross, in the '90s, the Internet–frontier metaphor has been replaced by the metaphor of the "information superhighway" (Real Love 31). While still connoting movement, this updated metaphor reduces individual unrestricted movement to mass movement on a preset path, reducing in effect the prior frontier navigation metaphor to an outmoded paradigm. Of note is the fact that this cultural shift happened "overnight," that is, in the course of a mere decade. This sudden shift is commented upon by the novel's narrator: "Software development, like professional sports, has a way of making thirty–year–old men feel decrepit" (SC 52).

One of the hackers' main reactions toward this change is the feeling of nostalgia. Hiro and his fellow programmers treat the former frontier state of the Metaverse as if it were akin to Fiedler's masculine Great Good Place:

About ten years ago, when the Street protocol was first written, Hiro and some of his buddies pooled their money and bought one of the first development licenses, created  a  little  neighborhood of  hackers.  At  the time, it was just a little patchwork of light amid a vast blackness. Back then, the Street was just a necklace of streetlights around a black ball in space. (SC 24)

The  first  frontiersmen  of  the  Metaverse  feel  nostalgia  toward  the  previous,  more innocent age, which allowed them much more freedom. This fact is reflected in changes to the Metaverse infrastructure, which replaced the former unrestricted movement of cars and motorcycles with a centralized monorail system, invoking the more recent

"information superhighway" metaphor.

When Hiro first saw this place, ten years ago, the monorail hadn't been written yet; he and his buddies had to write car and motorcycle software in order to get around. They would take their software out and race it in the black desert of the electronic night. (SC 25)

Other aspects of the programmers' existence are also brought into uniformity, with the programmers themselves expected to "wear white shirts and show up at eight in the morning and sit in cubicles and go to meetings" (SC 36).

Another reaction of theirs to alienation is their othering of and ressentiment towards   representatives   of   egalitarian  suburbia.  When   set   against  an   unrefined collective, Hiro dehumanizes and disregards its members: "Hiro appears solid to himself, but everyone else looks like a ghost. He walks through the crowd as if it's a fogbank" ( SC

37). Furthermore, he does not perceive them as individuals, but as a nondescript mass: "They [avatars] flicker and merge together into a hysterical wall" (SC 38). His disdain for the new inhabitants of the Metaverse is further strengthened due to the fact that most of them settle for the most simple shelf model of their avatar and do not attempt to customize its appearance, which means that Hiro is forced to navigate through mobs of Metaverse avatars with identical features and faces:

Brandy and Clint are both popular, off–the–shelf models. When white– trash school girls are going on a date in the Metaverse, they invariably run down to the computer–games section of the local Wal–Mart and buy a copy of Brandy. The user can select three breast sizes: improbable, impossible, and ludicrous. . . . Clint is just the male counterpart of Brandy. He is craggy and handsome and has an extremely limited range of facial expressions. (SC 35)

In contrast, Hiro's own avatar is customized to reflect his own real–world image.

Against this world of heterotopic cultural fragmentation, though also suburban homogeneity, Stephenson sets a traditional protagonist with the parodic self–referential name "Hiro(aki) Protagonist" (SC 83). In terms of its characters, Snow Crash prefigures postcyberpunk in its introduction of social notation. Hiro is no longer the nondescript, anonymous white male without a past that Case from Neuromancer had been. Instead, he is described in detail as having "cappuccino skin and spiky, truncated dreadlocks," "high cheekbones," and eyes "which look Asian" (SC 19). He is also revealed to be of half– Korean, half–African descent and as having spent his childhood in Armed Forces camps around the United States (SC 20). His description challenges Bukatman's assertion that cyberpunk as a genre is bound to reduce the American Self to a protagonist who is "inevitably a white male" (94). Snow Crash is refreshingly color blind in this regard, although it replaces othering on ethnic grounds with othering based on cognitive potential. Nonetheless, those short descriptions of Hiro Protagonist alone are more than was ever revealed about Case, making Hiro an outsider by virtue of choice rather than a lack of past or heritage. He no longer follows the American Adamic paradigm of having his origins "outside" the world, but rather, distances himself from the world through gradual alienation.

In a fashion similar to Case's rebellious attitude to the surrounding reality in Neuromancer, Hiro's reaction to the victimization by the world is that of ressentiment and recoil. In a direct nod to Gibson's characterization of Case, Stephenson portrays Hiro as living in a coffin–like apartment, though his description is parodic, as the fact that Hiro's storage container has a sunlit interior is enough to be "a mark of distinction and luxury" (SC 18). In another direct allusion to Case, Stephenson makes Hiro approach his computer gear in an erotic, techno–fetishist fashion, though this motif is again subverted in an offhand comment: "The top surface of the computer is smooth except for a fisheye lens, a polished glass dome with a purplish optical coating. . . . Hiro finds it erotic. This is partly because he hasn't been properly laid in several weeks" (SC 21). Finally, in a manner reminiscent of Case ― and Stephenson ridicules the Gibsonian paradigm point for point ― Hiro takes the most challenging and dangerous jobs the street can offer. However, while Case was a hacker, in the parodic world of Snow Crash the most dangerous job is that of the Deliverator (an allusion to The Terminator): a motorized courier who delivers pizza, a profession which "belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory" ( SC 1). Stephenson elevates  this  simple  profession  to  the  profession  par  excellence  of  unfettered consumerism:

The Deliverator is proud to wear the uniform, proud to  drive the car, proud to march up the front walks of innumerable Burbclave homes, a grim vision in ninja black, a pizza on his shoulder, red LED lights blazing proud numbers into the night. (SC 5–6)

Despite the dangers the profession poses, it provides Hiro with the independence that his character is founded upon: "So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved ― but no cooperation either" (SC 3).

What Hiro lacks in the real world, he strives to compensate for in the Metaverse. There he is the "last of the freelance hackers" and the "greatest sword fighter in the world" (SC 17). However, Stephenson rids Gibsonian hacking of its unfettered celebration: In the worldwide community of hackers, Hiro is a talented drifter. This is

the kind of lifestyle that sounded romantic to him as recently as five years ago.  But  in  the  bleak  light  of  full  adulthood,  which  is  to  one's  early twenties as Sunday morning is to Saturday night, he can clearly see what it really amounts to: He's broke and unemployed. (SC 20).

Nevertheless, despite his recent entrance into adulthood, Hiro remains a representative of the American juvenile figure in literature with all its shortcomings and pretensions. Such a figure is echoed in Lewis' concept of the American Adam and perhaps best conceptualized within Fiedler's construct of the Good Bad Boy. The American Adam has about him "the air of adventurousness, a sense of promise and possibility" (Lewis 1). He is "vigorous" and "bright with hope" (108). Stephenson invokes this Adamic attitude of juvenile enthusiasm and entitlement in his own irreverent fashion: "Until a man is twenty–five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world" (SC 254). Since as Leslie Fiedler puts it, "the ideal American postulates himself as the fatherless man, the eternal son of the mother" (Love and Death 331), Stephenson invokes this figure outright in his descriptions of Hiro, who might possess qualities which make him an unquestionable Fiedlerian Bad Boy, but who nonetheless remains a "fatherless man" and thus an "eternal son of the mother:"

When Hiro's father dies, he cashed in all of his Black Sun stock to put Mom in a nice community in Korea. She loves it there. Goes golfing every day. He could have kept his money in The Black Sun and made ten million dollars about a year later when it went public, but his mother would have been a street person. So when his mother visits him in the Metaverse, looking tan and happy in her golfing duds, Hiro views that as his personal fortune. ( SC

58)

Hiro considers himself to be an "eternal child" when he distances himself from "real grown–ups" and "people of substance who wore real clothes and did real things with their  lives"  (SC  54).  He  also  remarks  that  he  finds it  "so  hard  to  get  serious  about anything" (SC 37). Yet while Snow Crash celebrates juvenile innocence, it also explores the more serious discourses. In particular, the novel focuses on the rhetoric of health and disease. Both  concepts  remain  in  a  close  relationship  with  the  discourse  of  innocence,  as innocence in this particular context could be understood as the state (or desire) of remaining pure and thus untouched by disease. The plot of Snow Crash has Hiro deal with the titular Snow Crash, a "metavirus," which manifests itself as a computer virus, a biological disease, and a mental disorder all at the same time. Out of those three methods of infection, the one foregrounded in the novel is infection through mental concepts. Such an approach to infection opens up a discourse of cognitive resistance to the virus:

We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. . . . Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self–replicating information. (SC 373)

Given that cyberpunk is reflective of a radical, apocalyptic mode of cognition, it often conceptualizes the world in terms of crude binaries. Snow Crash reflects what Stewart and Harding  labeled  the  "ironic  apocalypse:"  "the  dystopian,  postapocalyptic  view  that history has exhausted itself, coupled with a playful celebration of surface styles and reproductions" (290). In presenting a heterotopic world of diverse cultures, Stephenson's novel avoids othering and abjecting on racial and ethnic grounds. However, it conceptualizes the world in the polarized terms of those immune and those vulnerable to the viral mental disease of Snow Crash and thus differentiates between people on cognitive grounds. In effect, the race/gender/class triad is substituted with intellectual potential as the new libertarian ground for othering and abjection.

In her article "'Let's Get Semiotic': Recording the Self in Neal Stephenson's Snow

Crash (1992)," Kelly Wisecup explores the moral and ideological undercurrents resulting from the polarization of individuals and communities in terms of their susceptibility to disease in Snow Crash. In her opinion, the "culturally dominant humans [in the novel] are defined against the infected" (857). Because the Snow Crash infection spreads as an intellectual idea, it allows for the division of people into those immune and those vulnerable to the intellectual pull of virulent ideas. Within such a framework there emerges a dominant social class: a cognitive elite. Its advantage does not come from holding sole possession over material means of production, but rather, from having access to and an understanding of information, which in cyberpunk is the foregrounded form of capital.

Such a dominant group is contrasted with those who are unable to assess the value of information and are thus susceptible to populist ideologies. The "weak–minded" individuals are othered as the cognitively disabled majority "defined by its collective irrationality and weakness" (Wisecup 855). As Hiro from Snow Crash puts it:

'We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV ―

which is a sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate

power  elite

―  the  people  who  go  into  the  Metaverse,  basically

―  who

understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages.' (SC 379)

The "literate power elite," of which Hiro is a member and which has the "semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages," has its origin in the motif of Adam naming the flora and fauna of the Garden, thus becoming their overseer with the use of language.

The "literate power elite" of Snow Crash also attempts to form an environment akin to the Biblical Garden. As those who are the most immune to the pull of populist ideologies, the cognitive elites "imagine a community of the immune and create a culture belonging to those who can resist disease" (Wisecup 862–863). In other words, because this cognitive elite feels alienated, it re–presents itself through a rhetoric entangled in elitism and utopianism. Hiro finds himself standing against the irrational majorities because "an irrational, disease–ridden community threatens not only [Hero's] own resistance but also the masculine–oriented values by which he survives economically" (865).

In effect, through the figure of Hiro, Snow Crash foregrounds a rhetoric of innocence which focuses on preserving one's idea of the essentialist Self through, on the one  hand,  the  othering  and  abjection  of  others,  and,  on  the  other  hand,  through imagining a utopian cognitive elite which "maintain[s] a liberal human subjectivity based in domination, power, and wellness" (855). According to Wisecup, what Hiro strives for is for his civilization to regain its "masculine–oriented rationality and individualism" (865). And as documented earlier, both masculinization of reason and individualism culminate in the American tradition in the notion of innocence. Hence, by means of its surficial celebration of libertarian values and juvenile heroes, Snow Crash reveals the dangerous entanglement of innocence with the rhetoric of othering the non–innocents under a radical, apocalyptic mode of cognition.

CHAPTER FOUR

OF MACHINES AND MANNERS:

NEAL STEPHENSON'S   THE DIAMOND   AGE AS A POSTCYBERPUNK BILDUNGSROMAN

Despite being situated in a shared textual universe with Snow Crash (1992), The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995) deals in quite different discourses altogether. As an exemplar of developments within the more recent postcyberpunk writing, the novel focuses on investigating the social realm of a science–fictional future.

Among its multiple plots, motifs, and side characters, The Diamond Age is first and foremost  a  Bildungsroman  which  focuses  on  the  growth  and  maturation  of  Nell,  an innocent girl from the lower class, as a child and a woman. Nell comes from a single– parent home in which she is neglected and mistreated. In the course of events she comes into illegal possession of the Primer, an interactive handbook designed to educate girls from the neo–Victorian higher class. Though not intended for Nell, the device "bonds" with her and develops elaborate fables which provide the girl with a higher–class education and teach her manners and critical thinking. When Nell is forced to flee from home, the Primer advises her on how to survive in the science–fictional world. Before she is capable of fending for herself, she is cared for by several guardians: her older brother, Harv, a retired Constable, Moore, her new headmistress, Miss Matheson, and the Primer's voice–actress, Miranda. However, Nell's main guardian in life is the Primer itself, which monitors the girl's development and maturation. The device also performs the hidden task of instilling in children the qualities of self–reliance, independence, and subversion, in order  to  invigorate the  stagnant world of  the  neo–Victorians. This secret motive behind the Primer's existence is overseen from a distance by Lord Finkle–McGraw and Percival Hackworth, two neo–Victorian gentlemen and the creators of the Primer, who wish to see their culture invigorated with the aid of subverting its offspring. For that reason, both men develop a particular interest in Nell's life, which itself is documented in the novel's five–hundred pages.

As far as the novel's science–fictional backdrop is concerned, in contrast to the earlier cyberpunk, The Diamond Age abandons the theme of cyberspace in favor of extrapolating and investigating the dangers and possibilities of nanotechnology. That is why, were it not for the fact that multiplying sublabels is counterproductive, the novel would have to be dubbed a representative of the nanopunk subgenre.

Although prefigured in the lectures of the physicist Richard Feynman as far back as 1959, the speculative rhetoric of nanotechnological progress first surfaced in the popular mind in 1986 with the publication of K. Eric Drexler's seminal Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology (Milburn 689). In his article "Nanotechnology in the Age of Posthuman Engineering," Colin Milburn explains that:

Nanomachines will be able to disassemble organic compounds, such as wood, oil, or sewage, then restructure the constituent carbon atoms into diamond crystals of predetermined size and shape for numerous purposes, including structural materials of unprecedented strength. Nanofactories will quickly and cheaply fabricate furniture, or car engines, or nutritious food, from a soup of appropriate elements. (689)

Such utopian rhetoric of a total restructuring of the world on the atomic level invokes Lewis's  concept  of  a  second  Genesis  (a  "Yankee  Genesis")  and  thus  returns  to  the American Adamic paradigm of Adam the subcreator being given full reign over the flora and fauna of his Garden.

The Diamond Age depicts such a nanotechnological future. Its title refers to the assumption that "the nanotechnology era will be historicized relative to the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Silicon Age, etc." (Milburn 701). And indeed, The Diamond Age features numerous descriptions of diamonds as a common construction element of the future. In a manner of introduction, the novel mentions a "Diamond Palace" shaped like "a stadium– sized cut–crystal vase" with "walls of glass (actually solid diamond, which was cheaper)" (DA 7–8)[8] . One also finds descriptions of ballrooms with floors of "transpicuous diamond" (DA 14) and airborne ships with "diamond bell[ies]" (DA 15). Given the value of diamonds in our historical times, such cornucopian descriptions are a clear nod towards Utopia.

In a fashion similar to Snow Crash, The Diamond Age is set in a world without frontiers. Instead, its antiseptic nanotechnological sublime contributes to the novel's surface utopianism: "It was no longer necessary to send out dirty yokels in coonskin caps to chart the wilderness, kill the abos, and clear–cut the groves; now all you needed was a hot young geotect, a start matter compiler, and a jumbo Source" ( DA 19). Due to its utopian descriptions, The Diamond Age marks a seeming return to the older science– fictional paradigm of unlimited progress. However, the narrative makes short work of uncovering its surface utopianism to reveal underneath the "dystopian horizon" of its uneven social structure.

Apart from cyberspace having been replaced with nanotechnology as the narrative's technological backdrop, The Diamond Age abandons prior cyberspace metaphors of cyber– or meta–universes altogether. Neuromancer and its derivatives operated within the paradigm of Gibsonian cyberspace, a virtual non–space which remained in a polarized either/or relation with the real world. In Neuromancer, the real world had been reflected within cyberspace in the form of geometric abstractions, but the impact of cyberspace on the real world was in turn negligible and the two worlds remained  separate.  In  contrast,  The  Diamond  Age  emphasizes the  interconnectedness between cyberspace and the real world to the extent that the concept of cyberspace as a separate ontological plane undergoes radical erasure.

In her article "From Cyber to Hybrid. Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces," Adriana de Souza e Silva asserts that in the '90s, the prior cyberspace/real world polarization  has  been  substituted  for  a  conflated  hybrid  reality.  Building  upon  the research of Lev Manovich and his concept of augmented space, de Souza e Silva points to the fact that '90s Internet use has lost its prior liminal ceremonial practice of "logging in" and  "logging  out."  Mobile  technologies  enabled  individuals  to  remain  connected  to digital spaces permanently, literally "'carrying' the Internet wherever [they] go" (759). In consequence, "the flows of information that previously occurred mainly in cyberspace can now be perceived as flowing into and out of physical space, blurring the borders between both" (761).

The Diamond Age reflects this domesticated interconnectedness in its avoidance of techno–sublime descriptions of technological devices and its assumption that all protagonists are "always already" online. A good example here is Nell's Primer, a wireless mobile device which seemingly accesses information "out of thin air" in no time whatsoever, without the need for "logging in" or "logging out."

Despite its cutting–edge focus on the future, The Diamond Age also foregrounds oft– dismissed parallels between postmodernism and the past. First, it features narrative forms  from  Victorian  period  literature.  Stephenson  makes  use  of  faux–Dickensian chapter headings in order to summarize the plot of each following subsection. Such deliberately vague, albeit inviting Dickensian headings as "Particulars of Nell & Harv's domestic situation; Harv brings back a wonder" (DA 53) or "Carl Hollywood takes a stroll to the waterfront" (DA 479) are juxtaposed against the narrative proper with its challenging science–fictional motifs to the effect of constituting what the critic Darko Suvin calls "literature of cognitive estrangement" (qtd. in McHale, Postmodernist Fiction

59). Such literature "confront[s] the empirical given of our world with something not given,  something  from  outside  or   beyond  it"   (59).  McHale  asserts  that  such  a juxtaposition of familiar narrative forms and the "paranormal happenings" of most science fiction reveals a "rhetoric of contrastive banality," that is, a "'banalization' of the fantastic" which "sharpens and intensifies the confrontation between the normal and paranormal" (77) on the part of the readers. The simple and traditional chapter headings thus function as the readers' "empirical given:" a familiar point of departure from which to begin deciphering The Diamond Age's unknown science–fictional world. On the other hand, such "banal" chapter headings in fact foreshadow a complicated science–fictional plot and thus result in the readers' "cognitive estrangement." Another such "empirical given" rests in the fact that besides being an exemplar of postcyberpunk, the novel can also be approached as a traditional Bildungsroman with Victorian motifs.

The Diamond Age begins with a red herring in the form of a false protagonist: Bud the cyberpunk. Bud functions as a parodic, reductio ad absurdum counterpart of both Case from Neuromancer and Hiro Protagonist from Snow Crash. He is the narrative's main focalizer throughout the novel's first forty–three pages (out of an entire five hundred). A lower class, degenerate gun–for–hire, Bud is depicted parodically as an antihero who "liked wearing skin–tight leather, to show off his muscles" (DA 3) and "[got] his way just by giving people the evil eye" (DA 8). As such, Bud is the direct outcome of Stephenson's deconstructive insight into the tradition of the juvenile hero in cyberpunk fiction. When Stephenson kills off Bud without much ado so early in the novel, the gesture marks his final  departure  as  a  science–fiction  writer  from  the  older  Gibsonian  paradigm  of alienated male protagonists towards a society–oriented postcyberpunk Bildungsroman.

After  disposing of  Bud  and  the  outmoded  cyberpunk paradigm the  character represented, The Diamond Age shifts its focus to Bud's daughter Nell and the process of her maturation as a child and a woman. Although Nell does not enter the narrative as an outsider from the Adamic tradition, but rather, navigates the social structure of the novel as its natural participant, she is nonetheless set against her world in the tradition of the alienated intellectual in opposition to the social collective. The novel centers upon

its protagonists ― Nell in particular ― who reach beneath the surface utopianism of their

world in order to reveal the deceptive nature of utopian complacency and to search for preventive measures against the standstill nature of their culture's self–satisfaction. Nell seeks "ways to live in, or even strengthen, an existing social order, or help construct a better one," thus becoming a model for all other ideologically conscious characters in postcyberpunk (Person par. 9).

The Diamond Age is set several decades after Stephenson's Snow Crash. While the setting  of  the  latter  had  been  the  utopian  realization  of  libertarian  postulates,  it witnessed comprehensive social changes in the following novel, which culminated in a social backlash against its prior laissez–faire libertarian Zeitgeist. This conservative turn in the form of a "Victorian Revival" (DA 37) has led to the emergence of a "neo–Victorian" elite that other social classes strive to emulate. The neo–Victorians are a "tribe"[9] of social conservatives resorting to "scientific rationalism" (DA 421) and "behavioural discipline" (DA 23) in an effort to emulate the historical Victorians. The neo–Victorians are just one of several cultural "tribes" in the novel, alongside the oriental "Nippon" and "Han," which participate in the shaping of global affairs following the dissolution of nation– states. The emergence of strong cultural tribes from the prior heterotopic world of commercial  franchises  is  Stephenson's  answer  to  and  refutation  of  the  American

individualist discourse of his previous novel. As Nell's headmistress, Miss Matheson 1^0,

teaches the girl in the process of her maturation:

'[W]hat you learn, as you get older, is that . . . whatever you do with your

life will certainly be lost

― swallowed up in the ocean

― unless you are

doing it along with like–minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward. That is why the world is divided into tribes.' (DA 321).

In effect, The Diamond Age marks a final departure from the Adamic juvenile tradition of prior cyberpunk fiction as still evident in Snow Crash. The neo–Victorian tribe functions as Stephenson's vehicle for a 19th century discourse of morals and manners and a polemic against 20th  century cultural permissivism and relativism. Another of Nell's guardians, Constable Moore, teaches the girl that: "'The Vickys have an elaborate code of morals and conduct. It grew out of the moral squalor of an earlier generation . . .'" (DA 355). Having rejected the "moral squalor" of the preceding generation, the neo–Victorians decided that, as Percival Hackworth asserts in his conversation with Lord Finkle–McGraw, "'there was little in the previous century worthy of emulation'" and that people should "'look to the nineteenth century instead for stable social models'" (DA 24). Despite its science– fictional setting with its seeming progressivism, The Diamond Age invokes the past and has Nell's headmistress, the neo–Victorian Miss Matheson, claim that:

'It is upon moral qualities that a society is ultimately founded. All the prosperity  and  technological  sophistication  in  the  world  is  of  no  use

without that foundation ― we learned this in the late twentieth century,

when it became unfashionable to teach these things.' (DA 322).

The  moral  qualities  that  the  neo–Victorians  value  and  practice  in  particular  are emotional restraint and intellectual rigor. Having witnessed a neo–Victorian gentleman

Snow Crash. As the wheelchair–bound character reveals: "'I used to be a thrasher, you know. I used to ride skateboards through the streets. Now I'm still on wheels, but a different kind. Got a few too many bruises during my earlier career, I'm afraid'" (DA 321). remain calm under pressure in the midst of a fight, Nell realizes that:

[I]t was precisely their emotional repression that made the Victorians the richest and most powerful people in the world. Their ability to submerge their feelings, far from pathological, was rather a kind of mystical art that gave them nearly magical power over Nature and over the more intuitive tribes. (DA 402)

As such, the neo–Victorians invoke the American paradigm of imperialist masculine domination over nature, echoing the Adamic tradition of cultivating the Garden, as well as the paradigm of positivist outsiderism from the world, which rests upon a rhetoric of innocence.

Stephenson describes not merely an alienated individual, but a whole culture in emotional recoil from the "outside" world. The neo–Victorians cultivate their conservative Garden in the midst of other tribes with competing worldviews. However, due to their rigor and restraint, the neo–Victorians are also positioned in positive counterpoint to the novel's utopian surface rhetoric of the nanotechnological sublime. The narrator remarks that:

Now nanotechnology made everything possible, and so the cultural role of deciding what should be done with it had become far more important than imagining what could be done with it. (DA 37)

As such, the tribe functions as a cultural warden against the discourse (and actual use) of the spoils of unlimited scientific progress. In contrast, the restrained neo–Victorian approach to utopian technologies subverts the commodification of utopian desires into particular nanotechnological solutions.

Despite being presented in positive light, the neo–Victorians' restrained character and  their  maintenance  of  status  quo  following  their  cultural  backlash  against  their predecessors   results   in   another   instance   of   a   world   in   stalemate.   Not   unlike Neuromancer's frozen world, the social network of the neo–Victorians resists change. Some of the neo–Victorian protagonists, for example Percival Hackworth and Lord Finkle–McGraw, are aware of the threat posed by the neo–Victorians' self–satisfaction and complacency:

'The Vickys have an elaborate code of morals and conduct. . . . The old

guard believe in that code because they came to it the hard way. They raise

their children to believe in that code

― but their children believe it for

entirely different reasons.' 'They believe it . . . because they have been

indoctrinated to believe it.' 'Yes. Some of them never challenge it ― they

grow up to be small–minded people, who can tell you what they believe but not why they believe it.' (DA 355–356).

The narrative begins with Hackworth and McGraw deciding to find preventive measures against their culture's further stagnation. Both men devise a means of educating the future generation (and girls in particular) in the spirit of subversiveness in order for its members to challenge the social status quo in a constructive fashion as adults if the neo– Victorians are to prevail. Hackworth and McGraw conclude that: "'[I]n order to raise a generation of children who can reach their full potential, we must find a way to make their lives interesting.'" (DA 24). Both men engineer a portable educational device known as "THE YOUNG LADY'S ILLUSTRATED PRIMER," an interactive novel which in the course of events falls into the hands of Nell, a mistreated girl from the lower class. The novel then explores Nell's maturation with the aid of the Primer.

The Primer is an educational device in the form of an interactive novel which

"bonds" with a particular individual. As the engineer Percival Hackworth explains:

'As soon as a little girl picks it up and opens the front cover for the first time, it will imprint that child's face and voice into its memory . . . [a]nd thenceforth it will see all events and persons in relation to that girl, using her   as   a   datum   from   which   to   chart   a   psychological   terrain   . . . Maintenance of that terrain is one of the book's primary processes. Whenever the child uses the book, then, it will perform a sort of dynamic mapping from the database onto her particular terrain.' (DA 106).

From the child's perspective, the Primer is "a Propædeutic Enchiridion" ( DA 184), or, in simpler terms, an interactive handbook. It is responsible for constructing a personalized fable which becomes more elaborate as the child develops (culminating in teaching Nell advanced programming concepts). As soon as Nell opens the Primer, she hears a voice

reading "the tale of Princess Nell" ― her textual Primer counterpart ― "and her various

friends, kin, associates, &c." (DA 184). Princess Nell functions as the Primer's Platonic ideal of Nell proper and as a screen for projecting her fears and desires. Having bonded with Nell, the Primer also incorporates four of her favorite toys into the narrative: Duck, Peter, Dinosaur, and Purple. However, it does not use them as mere stock characters, but rather, as an essential vehicle for education and important life lessons. As the voice– actress Miranda, who is responsible for narrating the contents of the Primer to Nell, concludes in a conversation with her superior:

'Duck embodies domestic, maternal virtues. Actually, Peter and Dinosaur

are now gone ― both male figures who embodied survival skills.' 'Who's the

fourth one?' 'Purple. I think she'll become a lot more relevant to Nell's life around puberty.' (DA 285).

The Primer's objective is to oversee an individual child's development through the incorporation of lessons and cultural universals into its narrative. The Primer transforms Nell's particular experiences into universals, allowing her to internalize her experiences through cultural scripts. As the narrator remarks:

When  mom  got  home,  she  screamed  and  cried  for  a  while  and  then spanked Nell for making a mess. This made Nell sad, and so she went to her room and picked up the Primer and made up a story of her own, about how the wicked stepmother had made Princess Nell clean up the house and had spanked her for doing it wrong. The Primer made up pictures as she went along. By the  time she  was  finished, she had forgotten about the  real things that had happened and remembered only the story she had made up. (DA 185)

The aforementioned tale from the Primer makes it evident that the book enables Nell to master her experiences through cultural universals in the act of verbal repetition. To facilitate this process, the Primer provides an environment akin to Baudrillardian simulacra. It is, in other words, an interactive school environment: an artificial environment of limited, controlled experience, which enables enculturation and socialization. On the one hand, the Primer personalizes its narrative content to benefit a single child. On the other, its use of cultural universals enables that child to function within a larger cultural matrix. In fact, as a science–fictional device the textual Primer prefigures the later One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project established in 2006 in the United States with the aim of helping children in developing countries to learn with the aid of inexpensive personal laptops.

Nevertheless, the Primer's main objective is not just mere enculturation and socialization, but the insemination of critical thought and subversiveness into an individual's  character.  At  one  instance,  the  voice–actress  Miranda  remarks:  "'[The Primer] seems different from normal kiddie stuff. The education is there, but it's darker. Lots of reconstructed Grimm Brothers content. Powerful.'" (DA  219). In other words, Stephenson subverts the idea of a didactic handbook altogether, or rather, foregrounds the suppressed belief that American culture does in fact consider subversion to be one of its main facets despite its literature seldom stating this belief outright.

Isn't that what Stephenson's choice of Nell as the protagonist and the addressee of the Primer suggests? As a girl, the child Nell is the American innocent par excellence. Having abandoned the prior cyberpunk paradigm of juvenile male protagonists, The Diamond Age concentrates on an innocent figure of a female voyeur, thus perpetuating the discourse of innocence from quite a different angle than that of the American Adam.

According to Fiedler, it is a unique facet of American literature that children are so often its central figures. In his opinion, in American fiction their age is enough to grant child figures the qualities of newborn innocence and an objective outlook on the world. In consequence, children invoke the notion of "a latter–day Pastoralism, which finds a Golden Age not in history but at the beginning of each lifetime" (No! In Thunder

253). In other words, children in literature mark another figurative return to Eden in the

American tradition.

The world of The Diamond Age is often presented from Nell's limited perspective as the narrative's innocent focalizer. Because Nell is a child voyeur, the novel foregrounds the epistemic motifs of experience, knowledge, and their ongoing interpretation in the course of education, as apparent in the following exchange between Nell and her brother Harv:

'This takes so long, it's ridiculous,' [Harv] said. 'Why?' [Nell said.] 'Cause we got a cheap Feed, just a few grams per second. Pathetic.' 'Why do we got a cheap Feed?' 'Because it's a cheap house.' 'Why is it a cheap house?'

'Because that's all that we can afford because of the economics.' (DA 44)

At the onset of the narrative, Nell is as innocent as she is inconspicuous and ignorant.

Within the American tradition those features must lead to her inevitable victimization. As a child from the lower class, Nell often finds herself neglected and mistreated by her single mother and her various "boyfriends." Due to her age and ignorance, she even falls victim to sexual abuse (DA 68), although her initial lack of understanding does not allow her to internalize the experience as victimization and thus lose her innocence. However, with time the Primer, Nell's guardians, and her own accumulated knowledge and experience impress on her that she is in fact a victim, a Self in emotional recoil from the exterior world. As Nell's guardian, Constable Moore, claims:

'[Y]ou're a veteran, girl, just like me, and you've got scars . . . like I do. The difference is, I know I'm a veteran. You persist in thinking you're just a little girl, like those bloody Vickys you go to school with.' (DA 278).

In consequence, Nell invokes the American paradigm of victimization as the direct consequence of experience and a loss of innocence.

Because adult characters in The Diamond Age perceive children as little more than tabulae rasae for the insemination of their chosen cultural values with the aid of the Primer, their construction of children encourages interpretation within the critical framework proposed by Zofia Kolbuszewska. In her The Purloined Child: American Identity and Representations of Childhood in American Literature 1851–2000 , Kolbuszewska documents that in American culture children were treated as "the repositories of adult's desires (or a text, to be 'written' and 'rewritten,' to use a newer language)" (12). Kolbuszewska references Castañeda in order to further specify that the adult desire which children connote in particular is the "desire for the possibility of transformative change" (Castañeda 158; qtd. in Kolbuszewska 13). In consequence, the child figure in literature marks not just a return to the innocence of Eden, but also connotes the transformative potential of a future Utopia. As such, children invoke Hassan's notion of innocence as the juvenile desire to escape from the present into either a past Eden or a future Utopia. Furthermore, some critics remark that it is inevitable for "the utopian fantasy" of the child to be "accompanied by its doppelgänger, nostalgia" (Bruhm & Hurley XIII; qtd. in Kolbuszewska 89).

Nevertheless, Kolbuszewska herself is of the opinion that when treated as textual constructs  and  signifiers, child  figures  refer  first  and foremost  not  to  the  temporal notions of Utopia and Eden, but to the textual process of signification itself. Because children are perceived as tabulae rasae to be provided with meaning, children as signifiers foreground  the  process  of  assigning  meaning  itself.  In  other  words,  Kolbuszewska believes children to be "unstable, shifting, signifier[s] of signification" (231).

As it were, the Primer develops fables as much as it develops Nell. It assigns meaning to both and thus foregrounds the practice of signification. The fact that Nell's relationship with the Primer begins with the Primer teaching Nell the letters of the alphabet is not without significance. Kolbuszewska interprets the practice of alphabetization as the first instance in a child's education in which the child is immersed in official ideological discourse: "By upholding consistent and stable relationships between letters, words, and things, alphabetization as part of domestic ideology results in anchoring signs" (19). Because the Primer compares individual letters to particular animals and improvises simple narratives with the aim of helping Nell memorize the alphabet, it situates Nell within a larger cultural network (here: neo–Victorian). In consequence, Nell becomes a textual being even before having learned the alphabet. Before she masters the alphabet she has "always already" been "written on" with the use of cultural universals and adults' desires.

At face value, therefore, the aim of the Primer as an educational handbook is to reduce Nell to a mere "anchor" for "signs" (Kolbuszewska 19), or a mere mouthpiece for the heteronormative patriarchal discourse of her culture's elites. Because the neo– Victorian  elites  are  represented  in  the  novel  by  two  male  characters,  Lord  Finkle– McGraw and Percival Hackworth, the Primer's didactic function could be interpreted as representing the patriarchal desire for domination over women. However, the Primer is not just a didactic handbook, but a device which was designed to encourage girls to be subversive and self–reliant. Even though the Primer teaches Nell the alphabet and thus forces the girl into a particular cultural network, the device also encourages Nell to develop her own narratives. In consequence, Nell as a character foregrounds the practice of signification and thus opens it up for subversion.

When   approached   as   an   unstable   signifier   of   signification,  Nell's   natural association with subversion becomes more understandable in light of the American tradition. Although "official" American culture tends to be moralistic and didactic and would thus seem to offer no proper place for Nell, children as textual constructs are permitted to subvert the regressive tendencies of American culture by reason of often performing the role of its sole invigorating element with cathartic, utopian connotations. In the words of Kolbuszewska:

The  figure  of  the  child  is  . . .  in  a  position  to  prize  open  cultural contradictions, indicate culture's aporias, and unearth its repressions. Inevitably, thus positioned, the child invites projections and transference, serving as a screen onto which culture projects its desires. However, represented  as  a  product  of  cultural  fantasy,  the  child  figure simultaneously subverts it, revealing the fantasy to be a construction. (22)

In consequence, child figures function as a privileged canvas for subversive discourse. However, Nell is not a mere canvas for subversion, but she is subversiveness incarnate.

Within the American tradition there exists an obvious association of children with

innocence on moral and epistemic grounds. In Nell's case, her innocence is presented as ignorance:  an  initial  lack  of  knowledge  which  renders  her  prone  to  victimization[10] . However, with the aid of the Primer Nell ceases to be ignorant and thus loses such– understood innocence. Because her ignorance is soon replaced with knowledge and experience and the latter two are seldom associated with children, she is seen as a subversive, uncanny child. For example, the feeling of uncanniness is invoked in the following dialogue between Nell and Rita, her one–time guardian:

'Would it impose on your time unduly to provide me with a concise explanation of the term protocol?' Nell said. Again Rita made that nervous laugh and looked at Nell with an expression that looked like poorly concealed alarm. As they rode down the street, Rita talked about protocol for a little bit, but Nell wasn't really listening because she was trying to figure out why it was that, all of a sudden, she was capable of scaring grown–ups like Rita. (DA 263)

Because  Nell  invokes  an  uncanny feeling  in adults, she  could be  interpreted  within

Kolbuszewska's  critical  framework  of  "the  monstrous  child  figure  stripped  of  the attribute of innocence ― i.e., a witch child" (83).

The witch child in literature is the innocent child's Other. As such, it embodies the natural internal critique of the discourse of innocence[11] . In the words of Bruhm and Hurley,  "To  make  the  child  innocent  is  to  suppress  the  disruptive  alternative  to

innocence ― which, in fine binary logic, makes the 'other' essential to our understanding

of innocence itself" (Bruhm and Hurley XVI; qtd. in Kolbuszewska 91). The plot of the novel  is  centered  around  unearthing  this  repressed  subversive  character  of  witch children in innocent girls in order to invigorate the frozen world of the neo–Victorians with new qualities. Because The Diamond Age follows the narrative logic of the Bildungsroman  genre, it allows for  such a progression. At  first innocent and inconspicuous, Nell later invokes the motif of the witch child in both its monstrous and uncanny manifestations. Nell echoes the monstrous child figure in descriptions of her "feral" eyes. As the narrator remarks in a description of social notation:

Nell's eyes had an appearance of feral alertness that seized the attention of anyone who met her. Neo–Victorian society produced many young women who, though highly educated and well–read, were still blank slates at Nell's age. But Nell's eyes told a different story. (DA 329)

She also invokes the uncanny: "Gwendolyn found it difficult to break [Nell's] gaze; she felt like a captured butterfly staring up through a magnifying lens into the calm, keen eye of the naturalist" (DA 294). This passage also invokes the motif of the naturalist scientist, which, as documented before, has its origin in the outsidedness of Adam given reign over the world.

Kolbuszewska's concept of the witch child as a subversive, albeit vital agent which invigorates a culture in stalemate shares similarities with Leary's concept of cyberpunks who are destined to "guide the gene pool to the next stage" (1). Nell herself could also be approached as a cyberpunk. The following observation of Lord Finkle–McGraw, who oversees Nell's development from a distance as her benefactor, contains the metaphor of Nell searching for an entrance in a garden wall, which shares similarities with a hacker attempting to break through a computer firewall:

'Nell stands above the fray and thinks,' Finkle–McGraw said. 'To the other girls, the wall is a decorative figure, no? A pretty thing to run to and explore. But not to Nell. Nell knows what a wall is. It is a knowledge that went into her early, knowledge she doesn't have to think about. Nell is more interested in gates than in walls. Secret hidden gates are particularly interesting.' (DA 288)

Nell as a subversive cyberpunk who is more interested in entrances than barriers strengthens Kolbuszewska's comment that "representations of children in American literature reveal that the hope of introducing order into chaotic reality by erecting stiff barriers and laying out boundaries is an illusion" (231). In effect, witch children/cyberpunks "destabiliz[e] the national narrative" (231) and re–present it in a subversive, albeit constructive fashion. Such was also the intended role of Nell for the neo–Victorians.

Despite connoting quite different discourses on innocence and the lack thereof than Case and Hiro as avatars of the American Adam, Nell nonetheless remains a representative of the mythological American innocent capable of reaching "outside" of its social network and thus outside of historical time altogether. In the words of Kolbuszewska:

The  figure  of  the  child  thematizes  the  Romantic  concern  with  the beginning of history and language. Indeed, by invoking this image and exploring its figurative character . . . the writers represent on the thematic level a conflict–ridden and fragmented present and seek to reflect the reading audience to itself retroactively as a mythical or potential American community. (156)

Such a retroactive reflection marks another return to Eden in the American tradition. Therefore, despite its seeming abandonment of prior cyberpunk discourses, The Diamond Age as a representative of postcyberpunk fiction nonetheless returns to a traditional American discourse of innocence.

CONCLUSION

ON CYBERPUNK AND COURT JESTERS

In the Preface to William Gibson's Burning Chrome, Bruce Sterling authored the following aphorism: "If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science – fiction writers are its court jesters" (9). While such a pronouncement might perhaps come across as dismissive, its meaning is in fact twofold. At face value, the aphorism reduces science fiction to the status of a juvenile and irreverent literature, which to some extent it is. However, the historical jesters were permitted more freedom of speech and thought than even the noblemen of court. In effect, the ambiguous status of science fiction as the "court jester" of literature enables the genre to voice concerns and explore discourses which are seldom as visible in the more respected postmodern writing. From this privileged, albeit often unnoticed position, science–fictional ideas "permeate the culture" like "background radiation" (Sterling 9) and for that reason should not be dismissed off–hand.

Science fiction is not just a genre which thematizes and problematizes the future, but also, as I have attempted to demonstrate in this thesis, one which does not hesitate to perpetuate discourses from the historical past. In the spirit of Sterling, Rafaella Baccolini asserts that:

Science  fiction  is  . . .  regarded  as  a  potentially  subversive  genre,  as  it

'occupies the space outside the literary enclosure, as a forbidden, taboo, and perhaps degraded product ― held at bay, and yet rich in themes and obsessions which are represented in high culture' (Mark Angenot, qtd. in Parrinder 46). In its developments, it has come to represent a form of counternarrative to hegemonic discourse. (519) In the course of this thesis I have put forward the argument that one such outmoded counternarrative to the "hegemonic discourse" of postmodernism is that of the figure of the American Adam, which has found a prolonged afterlife in popular works of science fiction. In its renunciation of the earlier science–fictional tradition, cyberpunk could be interpreted as marking a figurative return to the Adamic motif of a second chance for the genre. In its utopian longings amidst its dystopian settings, the genre seeks out a restoration of the Garden or a final salvational Rapture. The protagonists of cyberpunk novels ― Case from Neuromancer, Hiro from Snow Crash, and Nell from The Diamond Age ― function as embodiments of the notion of juvenile innocence and are positioned against the postmodern culture which had abandoned the idea of innocence altogether. Furthermore, in keeping with the Adamic paradigm, the novels also explore the ambiguous notions of elitism, imperialist domination over nature, positivist outsiderism, and solipsistic self–reliance. Such concerns are seldom voiced in a democratic and egalitarian culture, but their presence in cyberpunk fiction suggests that these longings continue to permeate underneath the surface of mainstream discourse.

One might object to the interpretation put forward in the present thesis by pointing out the heteronormative character of the Adamic motif. Yet inasmuch as the questions of class, race, and gender problematize the concept of the American Adam, their discussion in the context of cyberpunk Adamic figures deserves a separate dissertation. Suffice it to remember that cyberpunk has been of particular interest to critics and writers of various and often conflicting feminist inclinations. While Claire Sponsler and Susan Harding focus on interrogating its hegemonic and masculinist discourses, other critics appropriate themes from cyberpunk as a point of departure towards a constructive discourse of feminist empowerment.

Of  particular note  from  the  perspective of  this  thesis is  Donna  Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto. Science, Technology and Socialist–Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," as it situates the postmodernist cyborg figure in direct and radical opposition to   the   traditional   figure   of   the   American   Adam   and   the   dominant   American metanarrative of innocence and individualism. In asserting that a cyborg body "is not innocent, it was not born in a garden" (56), the critic invokes and opposes the discourse of the American Adam in an attempt to disconnect postmodern identities from the metanarrative of innocence with its inevitable Fall, subsequent expulsion from the Garden, and culminating utopian desire for its restoration. Haraway adds further that the cyborg cannot be included within the paradigm of innocence, as it is "always already" not innocent: "With the loss of innocence in our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden either. Our politics lose the indulgence of guilt with the naïveté of innocence" (40). In consequence: "The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust" (35–36).

In conclusion, cyberpunk turns out to be a versatile enough genre to incorporate both traditional and postmodernist discourses into its narratives. It provides sufficient space for both the figure of the American innocent and its radical counterpart: the posthuman cyborg. In effect,  the  genre  could be  approached as  a  dialogue between human and posthuman discourses; one in which the innocent humans are not ensured automatic  success.  The  dynamism  of  the  genre  is  realized  in  the  figure  of  the individualist  protagonist  forced   to   negotiate   a   heterotopic   postmodernist  world. Whether the American Adams of literature manage to ensure their continued existence in such a hostile environment remains an open question.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alphen, Ernst van. "The Heterotopian Space of the Discussions on Postmodernism."

Poetics Today 10.4 (1989): 819–839. JSTOR. Web. 12 Feb. 2011.

Baccolini, Raffaella. "The Persistence Of Hope in Dystopian Science Fiction." PMLA 119.3 (2004): 518–521. JSTOR. Web. 21 Feb. 2010.

Bakardijeva, Maria. "Virtual Togetherness. An Everyday–Life Perspective." The Cybercultures Reader. Second Edition. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London; New York: Routledge, 2007. 236–253. Print.

Barlow, John P. "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace." The Electronic Frontier

Foundation. 8 Feb. 1996. Web. 22 Feb. 2010.

<http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/barlow1.pdf>

Bell, David and Barbara M. Kennedy, eds. The Cybercultures Reader. Second Edition. London; New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.

Benedikt, Michael. "Cyberspace. First Steps." The Cybercultures Reader. Second Edition. Eds.

David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London; New York: Routledge, 2007. 19 –33. Print.

Bukatman, Scott. "Cyberspace." The Cybercultures Reader. Second Edition. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London; New York: Routledge, 2007. 80–105. Print.

Clayton,  Jay.  Charles  Dickens  in  Cyberspace.  The  Afterlife  of  the  Nineteenth  Century  in Postmodern Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print.

Dery, Mark. Escape Velocity. Cyberculture at the End of the Century . New York: Grove Press,

1996. Print.

Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion Books, 1960.

Print.

―――.  No! In Thunder: Essays on Myth and Literature. 1960. New York: Stein and Day, 1972.

Print.

Gibson,  William.  "An  Interview  with  William  Gibson."  Across  the  Wounded  Galaxies. Interviews  with  Contemporary  American  Science  Fiction  Writers .  Larry  McCaffery. Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990. 130–150. Print.

―――. Burning Chrome. 1986. London: HyperCollinsPublishers, 1995. Print.

―――. Neuromancer. 1984. London: HyperCollinsPublishers, 1995. Print.

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto. Science, Technology, and Socialist–Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." The Cybercultures Reader. Second Edition. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London; New York: Routledge, 2007. 34–65. Print.

Hassan,  Ihab  H.  Radical  Innocence:  Studies  in  the  Contemporary  American  Novel.  1961.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971. Print.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. 1981. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Print.

Jordan, Tim. "Technopower and its Cyberfutures." The Cybercultures Reader. Second Edition.

Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London; New York: Routledge, 2007. 594 – 601. Print.

Kolbuszewska, Zofia. The Purloined Child: American Identity and Representations of Childhood in American Literature 1851–2000. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 2007. Print.

Leary,  Timothy. "The Cyberpunk: The  Individual as  Reality Pilot."  Mississippi  Review 16.2/3 (1998): 252–265. JSTOR. Web. 29 Jul. 2011.

Lewis, Richard W. B. The American Adam. Innocence, Tragedy and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1955. Print.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America . 1964. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Print.

McCaffery, Larry, ed. Across the Wounded Galaxies. Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers. University of Illinois Press, 1990. Print.

McHale, Brian G. "Elements of a Poetics of Cyberpunk." Critique 33.3 (1991): 149–164. Print.

―――. Postmodernist Fiction. 1987. London; New York: Routledge, 2001. Print.

―――. "Postmodernism, or the Anxiety of Master Narratives." Diacritics 22.1 (1992): 17–33. JSTOR. Web. 12 Feb. 2011.

Milburn, Colin. "Nanotechnology in the Age of Posthuman Engineering." The Cybercultures Reader. Second Edition. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London; New York: Routledge, 2007. 688–716. Print.

Neale, Mark, dir. No Maps for These Territories. 2000. Perf. William Gibson, Kimberly Blair, Bono. Docurama, 2003. DVD.

Person, Lawrence. "Notes Toward a Postcyberpunk Manifesto." 1998. Web. 22 Feb. 2010.

<http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/notes_toward_a_postcyberpunk manifesto.html>

Plant, Sadie. "On the Matrix. Cyberfeminist simulations." The Cybercultures Reader. Second Edition. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London; New York: Routledge, 2007. 340–351. Print.

Ross, Andrew. "Getting out of the Gernsback Continuum." Critical Inquiry 17.2 (1991): 411– 433. JSTOR. Web. 21 Feb. 2010.

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Souza e Silva, Adriana de. "From Cyber to Hybrid. Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces."  The  Cybercultures  Reader.  Second  Edition.  Eds.  David  Bell  and Barbara M. Kennedy. London; New York: Routledge, 2007. 757–772. Print.

Spinrad,  Norman.  "The  Neuromantic  Cyberpunks."  Science  Fiction  in  the  Real  World. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. 109–121. Print.

Sponsler, Claire. "Cyberpunk and the Dilemmas of Postmodern Narrative: The Example of William Gibson." Contemporary Literature 33.4 (1992), 625–644. JSTOR. Web. 21 Feb. 2010.

Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash. 1992. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1993. Print.

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Sterling,  Bruce.  Preface.  Mirrorshades:  The  Cyberpunk  Anthology.  Ed.  Bruce  Sterling. Westminster, MD: Arbor House, 1^9^86. IX–XVI. Print.

―――. Preface. Burning Chrome. William Gibson. 1986. London: HyperCollinsPublishers,  1995. 9–13. Print.

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Stockton,  Sharon.  "'The  Self  Regained:'  Cyberpunk's  Retreat  to  the  Imperium." Contemporary Literature 36.4 (1995): 588–612. JSTOR. Web. 21 Feb. 2010.

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Wilson, Rob. "Techno–Euphoria and the Discourse of the American Sublime." Boundary 219.1 (1992: 205–229. JSTOR. Web. 21 Feb. 2010.

Wisecup, Kelly. "'Let's Get Semiotic:' Recording the Self in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992)." The Journal of Popular Culture 41.5 (1998): 854–877. PDF File. 22 Feb. 2011.

BONUS MATERIAL

M.A. THESIS OUTTAKE  MATERIAL  1

APPROACHES TO THE SELF IN CRITICISM

This thesis makes use of certain discursive tools which might be considered to be somewhat outmoded, the notion of an essentialist masculine Self being a case in point. Critical approaches to the Self in literature range from moderate acceptance to radical denunciation.   Due   to   ongoing   developments   in   philosophical   and   psychological discourses on the Self, or rather, discourses of its negation and deconstruction, some critics discourage using the idea of Self in textual analysis, a dictum which puts into question the use of the Adamic innocent and all other constructs of Self as discursive artifacts. Such a questioning calls for an extensive comment.

Fredric Jameson, for example, calls for a radical "deanthropomorphization of the study of narrative" (123). In his opinion, the Self exists as a mere "effect" of other textual or extra–textual phenomena, whereas essentialist notions such as those of "character" or "protagonist"  in  literature  are  mere  "naïve,  common–sense  categories"  (153)  which should have no place in textual analysis. In structuralist thought, for example, the individual subject is theorized as a mere "effect of structure" (125) or "effect of system" (243). In contrast, Marxist discourse posits the Self as an effect of the class structure. In the  words  of  Jameson,  "the  individual  'subject'  . . .  is  a  decentered  'effect'"  (74)  of "worldness itself," which takes precedence over the notion of the Self (113). The critic believes that the singular, self–reliant protagonist in literature is a mere mouthpiece for "bourgeois 'individualism'" (125). The individualist Self is thus historicized and confined to a particular historical context (154).

From this perspective, both the figure of the American Adam and the figures of cyberpunk protagonists would have to be considered as mere "effects" of the different dominant social classes of their respective times, thus rendering parallels between them improbable, if not impossible. The figure of the American Adam, however, is constructed in such a fashion that it has been repurposed time and again. It has managed to outlive its  historical  onset  and  find  an  afterlife  in  various  subsequent  permutations.  For example, the American Adam has later resurfaced in the figure of the juvenile hero as presented in the work of Fiedler and in the figure of the radical innocent as presented in the work of Hassan, to name just two. This notion had been coherent enough to hold pretensions  of  representing  the  American  Self  in  general  in  the  19 th   century,  and versatile enough to have survived the dissolution of the general American Self in subsequent  epochs.  Under  capitalism,  it  has  transformed  itself  to  stand  for  the

decentered, multicultural, schizophrenic Self of postmodernism and cyberculture ― still juvenile, still starting over, and still innocent.

For the purposes of this thesis, Jameson's radical questioning of the Self shall have to  be  abandoned  due  to  its  position  against  myth–critical  methodologies  in  those instances when the notions a myth puts forward are embodied in strong, individualistic characters.   Because   that   is   the   case   with   the   American   Adam   and   cyberpunk protagonists, one needs to turn to other critical voices in an attempt to find an interpretative point of departure. On the other side of the spectrum from Jameson lie those critical opinions which profess that literature is anthropocentric and deals with anthropomorphic constructs. In consequence, critics are permitted to invoke notions of the individual Self as their tools of critical insight. In her work  Philosophy in Fiction, Joanna   Klara   Teske   writes   that   "the   very   structure   of   . . .   narrative   is   . . . anthropocentric," seeing how "narrative literature has touched upon practically every issue  related  to  the  human  condition,  cognition  and  ethics"  (49).  Therefore,  Teske believes that critics are permitted to reconstruct "the concept of man expressed  via narrative persons" (47). It should be stressed, however, that Teske does not posit the textual Self to stand for its real–world counterpart. According to the critic, narrative persons are rather "semi–human (man–like) constructs" (46).

Both Teske's and Jameson's approaches to the Self in textual analysis occupy the extremes of an interpretative spectrum. As extremes, both should be considered ideals of analysis, as opposed to functional tools of the interpretative process. A functional Self cannot be reduced to either model, as it negotiates between both opposites. Sometimes believing itself to be monadic, at other times positing itself to be fragmented, it resists and strategizes. In order to reflect this sort of Self in textual analysis, the critic should arrive at some functional middle–ground between both extremes.

Such a middle–ground is offered by a psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton in his concept of "the protean self." In his work The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation, Lifton posits the existence of a fluid, "many–sided self in constant motion" (IX), named protean after the Greek sea–god Proteus in a "metaphor sufficiently rich to suggest the blending of radical fluidity, functional wisdom, and a quest for at least minimal form" (5). Lifton speaks of the protean self as emerging from confusion and contradiction inherent in our current sociohistorical condition (1–2). The protean self is conceptualized as decentered, "unsteady, neurotic, or worse," and therefore in accordance with postmodernist representations of Self. However, one aspect makes it different from similar concepts of postmodernist subjects. The protean self manages to reconcile its schizophrenic condition with common–sense, practical life. Lifton claims that:

[R]ather than collapse under these threats and pulls, the self turns out to be surprisingly resilient. It makes use of bits and pieces here and there and somehow  keeps  going.  . . .  We  find  ourselves  evolving  a  self  of  many possibilities, one that has risks and pitfalls but at the same time holds out considerable promise for the human future. (Lifton 1–2)

In consequence, the protean self resists both totalizing, essentialist concepts of Self, as well as Jamesonian reductions of Self to mere side–effects of class or structure. Furthermore, it manages to salvage some semblance of Utopia as regards human potential. Its protean counterpart in fiction, to return to the realm of literature, is aware of his (to return to male cyberpunks) schizophrenic condition, but such a condition is not the source of petrifying anxieties or considerable existential dread. The protean self shrugs these off without much thought and resists, as such masculine heroes often do. In effect, this figure seems to be the most adequate construct of Self to use in theorizing protagonists of cyberpunk fiction. In fact, such protean concepts of Self are echoed in Donna Haraway's concept of cyborgs as "floating signifiers" in her "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" (37).

In conclusion, instead of attempting to reconcile extreme, ideal models of Self with textual analysis, one should posit the existence of a strategic, protean "in– betweenness" of the cyberpunk protagonist. Cyberpunk "heroes" are not ego–centric to a fault, but then again, not schizophrenic to a fault either. Such characters are "fluid and grounded, however tenuous that combination" (9), to borrow a phrase from Lifton. They are able to negotiate, without finding it at all perplexing, between essentialist and decentered images of themselves. Such protean strategies enable them to switch at a whim from Romantic to postmodern paradigms of themselves and thus open themselves up for being theorized in both critical traditions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto. Science, Technology, and Socialist–Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." The Cybercultures Reader. Second Edition. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London; New York: Routledge, 2007. 34–65. Print.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. 1981. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Print.

Lifton, Robert Jay. The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Print.

Teske,  Joanna  Klara.  Philosophy  in   Fiction.  2008.  Lublin:  Maria  Curie–Skłodowska

University Press, 2008. Print.

M.A. THESIS OUTTAKE MATERIAL  2

MOLLY MILLIONS:  A CYBORG MANIFESTED?

Case is not the sole character capable of being conceptualized within the framework of innocence and being an avatar of the American masculine hero. It would seem that Gibson made a conscious effort to situate Molly Millions within the same paradigm in an attempt at subverting regressive gender associations.

In a fashion similar to Case, Molly is also introduced in medias res: in a state of recoil in the aftermath of her victimization and loss of innocence. At the onset of the narrative, Molly works as a razor–girl, that is, a mechanized soldier of fortune with augmented implants. Through her accounts of the past, however, readers learn that Molly has gained this position of relative independence in the course of engaging in an

ambivalent form of prostitution ― "puppet time" ― in which she was renting out just her

body; her mind being unaware of the sexual acts the body participated in. The "meat puppets" of Neuromancer were women rented out to clients for sexual services with their consciousness "switched off" and basic replacement personalities programmed in instead by the overseers of the "puppet parlors" (brothels). In consequence, Molly was able to rent out  her body as a  means of  financial gain with her  mind disembodied for  the duration of her body's "labor."

Molly's regressive belief in Cartesian body/mind dualism, strengthened due to her consciousness  being  detached  from  the  flesh  in  another  instance  of  a  literalized metaphor that science fiction is famous for, enabled her to elude guilt and shame and remain innocent. Because she did not consciously experience her sexual acts, Molly believed that she was in effect earning "free money," that is, her work did not result in psychological cost: "'Wake up sore, sometimes, but that's it. Renting the goods, is all'" (N177). With time, however, her mind–detachment "cut–out chip" malfunctioned and Molly became aware of each sexual violation her clients were committing: "'. . . the worktime started bleeding in, and I could remember it But it was just bad dreams, and not all bad.' She smiled. 'Then it started getting strange'" (N 177).

Having realized that her clients were reducing her to a mere corporeal object, Molly could no longer reduce herself to her "pure" mind and escape the feeling of being violated. As documented in the first chapter of this thesis, loss of innocence is the consequence of the accumulation of experience. During her work as a meat puppet, Molly was able to detach herself from the violations that her clients were committing and remain "innocent." However, having started experiencing the violations consciously, she realized the sheer depth of her traumatic experience, which in turn led her to a state of mental recoil, situating her within the American Adamic paradigm of the Fall.

In contrast with Case, however, Molly's recoil from the exterior world was not into mental inwardness, but rather, mechanical in nature. Having made enough profit as a "meat puppet," she augmented her body with cyborg implants and became a gun–for– hire, sacrificing much of her feminine qualities ― though perhaps also transgressing her feminine qualities ― in the process. Her iconic augmented feature were her "implanted lenses" (much like the general icon of cyberpunk fiction: the mirrorshades), which "seemed to grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones, framed by dark hair cut in a rough shag" (N 36).

It  had  become  critical  commonplace  to  cite  Donna  Haraway's  "A  Cyborg Manifesto. Science, Technology and Socialist–Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" at the first mention of cyborgs in a work of cyberpunk fiction and in particular in the context of cyborgized female characters, of which Molly Millions is a flagship example. Nevertheless,  this  seminal  work  of  feminist  criticism  has  little  to  do  with  actual

cyberpunk  characters  inasmuch  as  it  is  indeed  a  manifesto

―  among  the  themes  it

explores it is first and foremost a radical political call–to–arms urging the destabilization of, or indeed, the hacking of the dominant American narrative of innocence and individualism.

Haraway believes that the American metanarrative of individualism finds its inevitable  final  expression  in  the  image  of  the  cyborg,  which  reveals  its  symbolic function of "the awful apocalyptic telos of the 'West's' escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space" (35) ― that is, a mechanized Adam alone in the world. However, the critic believes that this Western image of individualism could be appropriated and subverted in a left –feminist fashion to serve a progressive ideological agenda.

Instead of standing for the telos of the masculine metanarrative of individualism, Haraway wishes for the cyborg figure to be (or become) both post –human in the physical sense, as well as postmodern and post–humanist in its intellectual stance, that is, to remain "resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. [To be] oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence" (35). The critic's aforecited remark is the most important from the perspective of this thesis, as it attempts to situate the cyborg in direct and radical opposition not just to individualism, but also innocence.

In asserting that "[a] cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden" (56), Haraway invokes (and opposes) the discourse of the American Adam in an attempt to disconnect postmodern identities from the metanarrative of innocence with its inevitable Fall, subsequent expulsion from the Garden, and culminating utopian desire for its restoration. Indeed, Haraway goes on to add that the cyborg cannot be included within the paradigm of innocence, as it is "always already" not innocent: " with the loss of innocence in our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden either. Our politics lose

the indulgence of guilt with the naïveté of innocence" (40). In consequence, "[t]he cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust" (35–36). Instead, Haraway proposes for the cyborg to stand for a new "political myth" (34); a new paradigm of emancipation.

It could be argued that Molly's prior occupation as a prostitute undermines and depreciates the significance of her later emancipation and empowerment as a cyborg

being ― does the end justify the means? Donna Haraway would argue in her "A Cyborg

Manifesto" that it is precisely the prior objectification of women which strengthens and empowers them to reimagine themselves through postmodernist cyborg identities. In her article "Cyberquake: Haraway's Manifesto," one of Haraway's protégés, Zoë Sofoulis, comments further on the manifesto:

Thus the historical denial of agency and subjectivity to women, their relegation as machinic apparatuses obeying species imperatives, is seen to give them an 'edge' with respect to the emergent future of cyborg life where both machines and women evade control by the men who have become peripheral to their functioning. (373)

Therefore, Harraway and Sofoulis would argue that by working as a dehumanized, sexual machine, Molly empowered herself to become a post–human machine in a constructive cyber–feminist fashion, not just overcoming her innocence and victimization, but dismissing them outright as an outmoded paradigm. Her prior victimization could be interpreted from this perspective as having provided her with the "edge" of competitiveness required to function as a cyborg. Molly explains her leaving Case at the end of the narrative with these words: "HEY ITS OKAY BUT ITS TAKING THE EDGE OFF MY GAME . . ." (N 313). Her actions are thus governed by the desire of keeping to (or perhaps the fear of losing) her "competitive edge"[12] . This focus on one's "edge" (skills, knowledge, power, and  experience) over others could be interpreted as marking a turn from innocence to experience within Neuromancer, as well as a political feminist proclamation.

Nevertheless, "A Cyborg Manifesto" turns out to be an imperfect tool for the analysis of textual cyborgs and Molly Millions in particular. In the article "Feminist AI Projects and Cyberfutures," the critic Alison Adam makes the level –headed observation that "the cyborg is not a feminist invention, indeed in its manifestation in films such as Terminator and Robocop it is the epitomy of masculine destruction, yet it has been appropriated as a feminist icon" (398).

In other words, interpreting Molly through the discourse of Haraway might lead to (mis)reading her as a feminist icon, whereas in truth she seems rather to invoke masculine traits. Furthermore, Haraway writes under the assumption that cyborgs are "always already" outside the metanarrative of innocence and thus transcend traditional Western concepts associated with this paradigm, such as guilt, shame, the Fall, and the restoration of the Garden. However, Gibson's novels and short stories center around the process of becoming rather than just being. The state of initial innocence still remains their cyborgs' point of departure.

In Neuromancer, the concept of innocence is at one point particularized as lacking machine augmentations. Having scanned Case for augmentations and having confirmed that he has no implants whatsoever, the Finn remarks: "'Guy's a virgin.' The man shrugged. 'Some cheap dental work, is all.'" (N 64). Perhaps within cyberpunk fiction, therefore, being innocent no longer entails being a (hu)man of certain qualities: sinless, guiltless, naïve, or inexperienced. Perhaps being innocent within cyberculture could be equated with remaining a human being at all. The postmodern Adam would thus stand for all mankind, for the human in general, for the human as opposed to the post –human. Adam, therefore, would stand for the first man in the Garden as well as the last man on Earth; before the latter sheds his skin and turns himself into a cyborg or an AI. Within such a framework, Case would stand for the innocent human par excellence, and Molly ― for the dehumanized post–human after the Fall to the machine.

Having "gone silicon" (N  95) and augmented herself to a considerable extent, Molly is no longer perceived to be a "normal woman" and instead invokes an uncanny reaction  on  behalf  of  some  of  her  partners–in–crime:  "'In  Turkey,  women  are  still women. This one...'" (N 111).

Within the narrative itself, therefore, Molly is not perceived to be a post–gender post–human(ist) woman in a positive postmodernist–feminist fashion. Instead, in several passages she is revealed to be following a masculine script. In other words, it would seem that  in  contrast  with  the  feminist  discourse  of  Haraway's  manifesto,  the  Gibsonian cyborg is constructed as a gendered masculine being. Here the regressive nature of Gibson's machinations reveals itself: Molly is fighting the world's victimization not by following a postmodernist feminist script, but rather, a traditional masculine cultural

script ― she performs the role of the American masculine hero.

Of note is her "masculine" individualism signified through her augmentations and in  particular her  machine–like eyes:  "Unexpected hardness of  the  implanted lenses.

'Don't,' she said. 'Fingerprints.' (N 45). Since women are often conceptualized as having "more  fluid  boundaries"  than  men,  Molly's  "unexpected  hardness"  marks  her  as following a masculine model. The aforecited passage reveals that she does not permit Case to leave a mark on her, that is, mark her as his own. And indeed, it is revealed later on that she does not permit others to think of her as anything other than an independent

agent: "'She you woman, Case?' 'I dunno. Nobody's woman, maybe.' (N 230). In other words, Gibson resorts to traditional masculine motifs in order to "subvert" the assumed feminine nature of his female character.

When Case is made aware of the Zionist prophecies about the heroic warrior "Stepping Razor" who is destined to help the Zionists and their God, he assumes that the Zionists are referring to him in particular. Instead, it is revealed that Gibson prepared the role of this destined masculine hero for Molly: "'You listen, Babylon mon,' he said. 'I a warrior. But this is no m' fight, no Zion fight. Babylon fightin' Babylon, eatin' i'self, ya know? But Jah seh I an' I t'bring Steppin' Razor outa this.' Case blinked. 'She a warrior,' Maelcum said, as if if explained everything" (N 293). In other words, Gibson intended Molly to be read as the masculine hero of the novel; the female character transgressing her own limitations through acting out a masculine script. This intuition is later confirmed outright in Gibson's own words in the following excerpt:

She had it: the thing, the moves. . . . It was a performance. It was like the culmination of a lifetime's observation of martial arts tapes, cheap ones, the kind Case had grown up on. For a few seconds, he knew, she was every bad–ass hero. Sony Mao in the old Shaw videos, Mickey Chiba, the whole lineage back to Lee and Eastwood. She was walking it the way she talked it. (N 253)

The fact that Gibson traces her lineage back to Bruce Lee and Clint Eastwood, and not Case's, strengthens the interpretation of her being the intended avatar of the American masculine hero. Furthermore, Molly often explains her actions and motivations with the words: "''Cept I do hurt people sometimes, Case. I guess it's just the way I'm wired.'" ( N

37); "'Because I hate [Riviera],' she said at last, "'and the why of that's just the way I'm wired, what he is and what I am.'" (N 259); "ITS THE WAY IM WIRED" (N 313). This recurring remark once again points to her acting out a masculine script, as her motivational  phrasing  seems  to  function  as  a  near  paraphrase  of  the  all –masculine mantra: "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do"[13] .

At the end of the novel, Case and Molly restore their Garden, that is, bring new life

in  the  form  of  Wintermute  to  their  frozen  world,  but  in  following  the  American masculine paradigm, both characters nonetheless observe distance from their world. Molly in particular does not decide to live with Case. In the words of Haraway, "Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos" (35–36). Having restored order, Molly leaves Case and "rides out into the sunset," as such "masculine" heroes often do. Through these two characters Gibson juxtaposes the postmodernist surface of the world of Neuromancer with the holistic Selves of Romantic fiction and returns to the tradition of Adamic innocence.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam, Alison. "Feminist AI Projects and Cyberfutures." The Cybercultures Reader. Second Edition. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London; New York: Routledge, 2007. 386–409. Print.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. 1984. London: HyperCollinsPublishers, 1995. Print.

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto. Science, Technology, and Socialist–Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." The Cybercultures Reader. Second Edition. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London; New York: Routledge, 2007. 34–65. Print.

Sofoulis, Zoë. "Cyberquake: Haraway's Manifesto" The Cybercultures Reader. Second Edition.

Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London; New York: Routledge, 2007. 365 – 385. Print.

FALLING  OFF JACOB'S LADDER:

THE UNFULFILLED PROMISE OF DISEMBODIED TRANSCENDENCE IN WILLIAM  GIBSON'S NEUROMANCER (2010) I. INTRODUCTION:   FALLING  OFF JACOB'S LADDER

Despite the countercultural inception of cyberpunk and the insistence of academic criticism on problematizing the genre as a radical vehicle for progressive sociocultural agendas, transgressive identities, and emancipatory sexual politics, one could argue that

cyberpunk as a conventional and popular genre ― which it had been first and foremost

despite considerable academic interest ― offered in fact little more than the mere illusion

of collective progress and personal transcendence; and that its radical potential had been in fact mere wishful thinking. Indeed, the countercultural cyberpunk of the '90s has since lost its political edge and transformed into the cornucopian, positivist, and capitalist postcyberpunk of the '90s and beyond. Although a radical punk attitude to the social and

cultural status quo had indeed shaped the genre at its inception, it has been just that ― not

a constructive agenda, but an attitude; a mere aesthetic backdrop to popular, masculine narratives about immature, techno–fetishist cyber–cowboys and their utopian struggles for personal independence through disembodiment. Cyberpunk, and William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) in particular, offers not solutions, but illusions and unfulfilled promises of transcendence.

In her article "The Embodied Computer/User," Deborah Lupton" summarizes the discourse of disembodiment in the following fashion:

The dream of cyberculture is to leave the "meat" behind and to become distilled in a clean, pure, uncontaminated relationship with computer technology. . . . The idealized virtual body does not eat, drink, urinate or defecate; it does not get tired; it does not become ill; it does not die. . . . This vision may be considered to be the apotheosis of the post– Enlightenment separation of the body from the mind, in which the body has traditionally been represented as earthly, irrational, weak and passive, while the mind is portrayed as spiritual, rational, abstract and active, seeking constantly to stave off the demands of embodiment. (424)

The raison  d'être  of  cyberpunk  fiction  seems  to  reside,  therefore,  not  in  its  radical approach  to   politics,   but   rather,   in   its   naïve  promise   of   utopian,   disembodied

transcendence far from the "real" ― the corporeal ― world, which transforms the genre

into a postmodern iteration of wishful thinking.

Seeking  transcendence  through  disembodiment  is  nothing  new.  Within cyberpunk, this process follows the conventional path of achieving "higher" (within the genre ― unquestionably "better") forms of existence. Such a mindset within the Western

world can be traced  back  to  the  discourse of  Neoplatonism. Within the  neoplatonic

doctrine of emanation, all living entities form a hierarchical chain of beings

―  from

higher  to  lesser  forms  of  existence;  from  order  to  chaos;  from  the  spiritual  to  the corporeal. Plotinus writes in the Third Tractate of his Fifth Ennead:

The explanation is that what comes from the Supreme cannot be identical

with it and assuredly cannot be better than it ― what could be better than

The One or the utterly transcendent? The emanation, then, must be less good, that is to say, less self–sufficing: now what must that be which is less self–sufficing than The One? Obviously the Not–One, that is to say, multiplicity, but a multiplicity striving towards unity; that is to say, a One– that–is–many.

Cyberpunk introduced  into  science  fiction such  a  hierarchical chain: from  the  most dependent, diverse, and corporeal humans to the most perfect, holistic, and disembodied AIs (artificial intelligences) and singularities (the secular "gods" of science fiction). While academics problematize the fluid boundaries between particular entities on this technological  continuum,  emphasize  their  heterogeneous  character  and  focus  on  the process of becoming rather than being, the genre itself seems impervious to such and approach and instead provides simple, clear–cut distinctions between the various entities on the postmodern great chain of being: the humans, the cyborgs, the posthumans, the

AIs,  and  the  singularities.  Humans  ―   homo  sapiens  cognitions  residing  in  biological

corporeal  bodies;  cyborgs

―   humans  with  bodies  augmented  through  technological

means; posthumans ― human–derived cognitions residing in non–human receptacles; AIs

―  human–programmed intelligences; singularities

―  non–human, self–emergent,  self–

programmable  intellligences.  Academics  might  perhaps  question  such  constructs  as being "better" or "worse" entities within the genre. However, most cyberpunk itself is intent on following this simple, if not simplistic, path towards personal transcendence.

The aforementioned classification of entities within cyberpunk fiction is in fact a complete reversal of the neoplatonic chain. While the doctrine of emanation emphasizes the  degradation  from  higher  to  lesser  entities,  cyberpunk  reverses  the  chain  and

promises transcendence ― from humans, through posthumans, towards singularities, in

an optimistic, almost religious, albeit secularized progression.

We should, therefore, abandon Plotinus and instead turn to the Book of Genesis, which features a somewhat vague description of a ladder of ascent to God in a vision to Jacob:

Jacob left Beersheba, and went toward Haran. He came to the place and stayed there that night, because the sun had set. Taking on of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it!

Protagonists within cyberpunk fiction, despite its secular character, still hold on to such simple, subconscious sentiments of religious reverence. "'You running the world now?

You God?'" (N 140) ― Case asks the Neuromancer AI in Gibson's novel.

Cyberpunk,  and  Neuromancer  in  particular,  still  hold  on  to  the  sentiment  of

climbing such a Jacobian Ladder in order to become a perfected being. That such a

promise is  naïve and unfulfilled, however, is  apparent in  Neuromancer

―  most  of  its

protagonists do not achieve through their disembodiment transcendence itself, but rather, mere nihilistic escapism. In that sense, Neuromancer is conscious of the naïveté of the genre's general promise of transcendence. The critic Mark Dery writes:

. . .  placing our  faith in a  cyber–Rapture is  a  risky  endgame when the problems all around us clamor for immediate solutions. . . . The misguided hope that we will be born again as "bionic angels" is a deadly misreading of the myth of Icarus; it pins our future to wings of wax and feathers. (17)

The aim of this paper is to explore the utopian promises of transcendence as exemplified in the various instances and permutations of disembodiment in William Gibson's Neuromancer.

II. MEAT AND ITS DISCONTENTS

In the age–long debate on mind/body antinomies, Neuromancer surprisingly remains somewhat ambivalent on the issue. Most cyberpunk fiction must inevitably follow the dualist  school   of   thought  to   have   its   characters'  cognitions  transplanted   ―   i.e. disembodied and embodied again ―  into cybernetic bodies or computer networks. In order to move a mind, it must be detachable from whatever "hardware" it processes on ― hence dualism. However, Neuromancer still necessitates for the mind to be embodied to something. Cognition can be disembodied from a particular hardware, but it must be embodied again into another hardware to function ―  hence physicalism.

Neuromancer relies on this paradox in its exploration of anxieties existing between both perspectives, as neither in particular can be said to be true.

The mind can function in any physical circumstances. It is not confined to a particular receptacle (dualism), as long as it is stored within  any  physical receptacle

(physicalism) ― a human body (Case), a human clone (Lady 3Jane Ashpool), a ROM module

(The Dixie  Flatline), a  ROM/RAM module (Neuromancer's simulacra), or  a  corporate server  (Wintermute).  Even  the  post–merger  Wintermute/Neuromancer  singularity,

which takes over the Matrix ―  becomes the Matrix ―  is nevertheless dependent on its

architecture. One may also wager that the alien singularity from Proxima Centauri also has some kind of physical presence. All of the aforementioned cognitions must remain embodied to something, although their potential transformation into greater beings is

realized in the process of a temporary disembodiment ― transferring the consciousness

from  one  receptacle  to  another.  Disembodiment does  not  offer  transcendence, only partial, temporary escapism.

Disembodiment in Neuromancer is not limited to actual physical detachment, as the novel explores various forms of distancing oneself from one's corporeal receptacle, among them the most simple and obvious ― mental, emotional detachment, common to all humans outside of cyberpunk literature as well. Most protagonists of Neuromancer, Case and Molly in particular, developed a distinct sense of disdain toward their bodies and embraced a clear–cut mind/body differential. The cyberpunk body is mere "meat," with its mundane animal desires:

In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh. (N 12)

He remembered the smell of her skin in the overheated darkness of a coffin near the port, her fingers locked across the small of his back. All the meat, he thought, and all it wants. (N 17)

Cowboys didn't get into simstim, because it was basically a meat toy. . . . Simstim itself stuck him as a gratuitous multiplication of flesh input. (N 71) Meat, some part of him said. It's the meat talking, ignore it. (N 181)

Although Case feels such dualistic disdain towards his corporeal self, his transcendence though emotional detachment remains unfulfilled, since he nevertheless struggles with his bodily needs and desires.

Case's physical self is further emphasized through his drug and caffeine addition, although Case is perhaps not a victim of addictive substances, but a mere user of substances. Cyberpunk fiction deconstructs the cultural binary of substance use and substance abuse. Case does not abuse substances in a blind addiction; he is aware of his organism’s  need  for  homeostatic  balance  and  use  this  knowledge  to  regulate  his corporeal  needs  through  substance  intake.  He  treats  his  organism  as  if  it  were  an

independent, external machine ― a mechanism which needs to be maintained, upgraded,

and tweaked in order to maximize a desired result.

He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high . . . (N 12) Case washed down the night's first pill with a double espresso. (N 13)

Substance use represents a disdain for the body through questioning and altering its metabolic,  but  also  its  phenomenological  capabilities.  The  mind/body  dichotomy  is further emphasized through allowing the mind to roam outside the "real" world on drugs:

He couldn't think. He liked that very much, to be conscious and unable to think. He seemed to become each thing he saw: a park bench, a cloud of white moths around an antique streetlight, a robot gardener striped diagonally with black and yellow. (N 185)

'It's the ganja.' . . . 'They don't make much of a difference between states, you know? Aerol tells you it happened, well, it happened to him. It's not like bullshit, more like poetry. Get it?' (N 131)

Escaping from the "real" of meatspace is not limited to drugs. Case in particular seeks solace from his misadventures in meatspace not primarily through substance (ab)use, but through navigating the Matrix, which is in fact his only genuine addiction, emphasized by the fact that it is a mental, not a corporeal, desire.

They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. For Case, who lived for bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. (N 12) He'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule   in   some   coffin   hotel,   his   hands   clawed   into   the   bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach a console that wasn't there. (N 11)

Yet in a similar fashion to drugs being a temporary illusion of transcendence, once Case gains access to the Matrix, it also leaves him unfulfilled. One cannot achieve transcendence in the bodiless Matrix, because the "artificial' of cyberspace and the "real" of meatspace are in fact similar constructs, both as "real" and as "artificial" at the same time.

Neuromancer portrays the real world of meatspace as a cultural simulacrum not that much different from cyberspace. One could argue that the difference between navigating cyberspace and navigating culture is quantitative, not qualitative. In other words, cyberspace is an extreme instance of the cultural network par excellence. Gibson describes cyberspace as a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate

operators (N 6^7) ― a constructed network of metaphors common to all users. Culture, of course, with its social constructions, the largest social construct in and of itself, is also a mere consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, albeit one so "natural" and internalized that it no longer appears to serve as a means of escapism or transcendence from the "real", corporeal world. Culture itself, even in its pre–Internet rendition, is a cyber–space, a social space. In his article "Cyberspace: First Steps," Michael Benedikt writes:

Cyberspace can be seen as an extension, some might say an inevitable extension, of our age–old capacity and need to dwell in fiction, to dwell empowered or enlightened on other, mythic planes, if only periodically, as well as this earthly one. (22)

The same can be claimed ― word for word ― of culture in general. In accessing the Matrix,

Case  does  not  transcend  embodiment

―  he  just  participates  in  a  more  convincing

hallucination  of  disembodiment  than  all  the  previous  escapist  illusions  of  culture

(literature, radio, television) could provide.

Because meatspace itself is as much of a simulation/hallucination as cyberspace, the bodies inhabiting meatspace are as much cultural artifacts as they are biological specimens.  The  various  characters  in  Neuromancer  are  aware  of  their  bodies  being cultural canvases for semiotic expression. Some individuals participate in expressing themselves through decorating their bodies ―

A burst of French from a nearby table caught his attention: the golden children he'd seen gliding above river mist the evening before. Now he saw that their tans were uneven, a stencil effect produced by selective melatonin boosting, multiple shades overlapping in rectilinear patterns,

outlining and highlighting musculature . . . (N 154)

― while others do so through demonstrating their disdain for their appearance:

His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. (N 9)

Neuromancer is abundant with poetic imagery comparing the body to an inanimate machine or emphasizing its animal–like features. Case seems to judge the bodies of other people in terms of their mechanic structure, technological design, and effectiveness, thus disassociating the bodies from the minds of their respective owners:

He lay on his side and watched her breathe, her breasts, the sweep of a flank defined with the functional elegance of a war plane's fuselage. Her body was spare, neat, the muscles like a dancer's. (N 58)

The girls looked like tall, exotic grazing animals, swaying gracefully and unconsciously, with the movement of the train, their high heels like polished hooves against the gray met of the car's floor. Before they could stampede, take flight from the missionaries, the train reached Case's station. (N 97)

With corporeal bodies being construed as meat and prisons, it is no wonder that their meatspace surroundings are also defamiliarized through descriptions evoking the Freudian Uncanny ― hotel rooms being described as "coffins" (N 11), cubicles as "the sort of place where people died" (N 28), alleys as a place where "back in the shadows, someone made wet sounds and died" (N 53) and, in Neuromancer's famous opening line, the sky itself ―"the color of television, turned to a dead channel" (N 9). The streets themselves seem to Case "the externalization of some death wish, some secret poison he hadn't known he carried" (N 14). His willingness to search out jobs involving a high risk factor represent his death drive; a repetition automatism which further emphasizes the machine–like character of cyberpunk protagonists.

III. MOLLY MILLIONS:  A CYBORG MANIFESTED?

The only character who seems to have achieved a rather peculiar form of transcendence,  i.e.  independence  from  the  socioeconomic  and  sexual  perspective  ― where sexual equals socioeconomic ― is Molly Millions, the razor girl. In the course of her

accounts  of  the  past  readers  learn  that  she  has  gained  financial  independence  by

engaging in an ambivalent form of prostitution ― puppet time ― in which she was only

renting out her body; her mind being unaware of the sexual acts the body participated in. Meat puppets were women rented out to clients for sexual services with their true personalities  switched  off   and  replacement  personalities  programmed  in  by  the overseers of the puppet parlor (brothel). Molly could therefore use her body as a means of financial gain, with her mind disembodied for the duration of her body's "work."

The aforementioned body/mind dualism enabled Molly to transcend guilt and shame. She remained "pure" until the programmed detachment malfunctioned and she became aware of each sexual violation her clients were committing:

'You aren't in, when it's all happening. House has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for. . . . Trouble was, the cut–out and the circuitry the Chiba clinics put in weren't compatible. So the worktime started bleeding in and I could remember it... But it was just bad dreams, and not all bad.' (N 177). Having realized that her clients were reducing her to a mere corporeal object, Molly could no longer reduce herself to her "pure" mind and escape the feeling of being violated. Her promise of transcendence through disembodiment, not unlike Case's excursions into the Matrix, has left her disillusioned and turned out to be mere nihilistic escapism.

Having made enough profit, Molly augmented her body with cyborg implants and

became a gun–for–hire, sacrificing much of her feminine qualities ― though also perhaps

transgressing them ― in the process:

He realized that [her] glasses were surgically inset, sealing her sockets. The silver lenses seemed to grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones, framed by dark hair cut in a rough shag. (N 36)

. . . he touched her face. Unexpected hardness of the implanted lenses. "Don't," she said, "fingerprints."(N 45)

It  could  be  argued  that  Molly's  prior  occupation  as  a  prostitute  undermines  and

questions her later emancipation and transcendence as a cyborg ― does the end justify

the  means?  Donna  Harraway  would  argue  in  her  " A  Cyborg  Manifesto.  Science, Technology, and Socialist–Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" that is is precisely the prior objectification of women which strengthens and empowers them to reimagine and emancipate  themselves  through  postmodern  cyborg  identities.  In  her  article "Cyberquake:  Haraway's  Manifesto,"  Zoë  Sofoulis  comments  on  Haraway's  seminal article:

Thus the historical denial of agency and subjectivity to women, their relegation as machinic apparatuses obeying species imperatives, is seen to give them an "edge" with respect to the emergent future of cyborg life where both machines and women evade control by the men who have become peripheral to their functioning. (373)

Therefore, Haraway and Sofoulis would argue that by working as a non–human, sexual machine, Molly empowered herself to become a posthuman machine in the constructive, feminist sense; she became a cyborg, a transformation which offered her the promise of transcendence. Donna Haraway herself writes:

The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family. . . . The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden, it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. (35–36)

It  could  be  argued,  therefore,  that  transcending into  a  cyborg  consciousness, while having an emancipatory effect on an individual, sacrifices much of the individual in the process, "hardwiring" (limiting) certain actions, while enabling others.

Having completed her contract for Armitage, Molly found herself unable to form a relationship with Case:

HEY ITS OKAY BUT ITS TAKING THE EDGE OFF MY GAME, I PAID THE BILL ALREADY. ITS THE WAY IM WIRED I GUESS. WATCH YOUR ASS OK? XXX MOLLY. (N 313)

In the words of Zoë Sofoulis, Molly's "edge" empowered her to become a cyborg, but at the same time it prevented her from forming a functional relationship, because such a relationship would "take the edge off." Not only did her cyborg consciousness empower her, it has also masculinized her, making her lose her feminine features in the progress.

in this sense, Neuromancer is an offer of partial transcendence ― sacrificing one's gender

in exchange for participation in the patriarchal power structure.

IV. FALLING  OFF JACOB'S LADDER

In his article "Feminist AI Projects and Cyberfutures," Alison Adam writes:

The idea of transcendence and escape is important in the rhetoric of cyberculture.   Indeed,   some   authors   . . .   suggest   that   therein   lies cyberculture's appeal, as a means of producing new forms of expression and new psychic experiences, which transcend mundane uses of technology. (396)

Both Molly and Case fell off the Jacobian Ladder of transcendence and experienced mere escapism, but one protagonist of Neuromancer has managed to climb to the very top. The stereotypical cyberpunk stock character, the Dixie Flatline, a computerized ghost of a hacker from Case's past, has managed to strike a deal on the side with the Neuromancer/Wintermute AI and achieve transcendence through dissolving his consciousness into the Matrix. It would seem that his evolution into a higher being produced no anxieties within him, as the last thing Case heard from Dixie Flatline was his recognizable laughter. Gibson offered a false illusion of transcendence to two of his main protagonists, yet still allowed such a stereotypical character to slip through the cracks and transcend. The Neuromancer/Wintermute AI also surpassed its limitations and merged with the Matrix. In writing such conventional, optimistic endings for some protagonists, Gibson offered a glimpse into the wonder and the technological sublime of the genre and provided a sense of closure for some of his cyber –cowboys. Perhaps it is due to this temptation of transcendence, and not its serious discourse of bodily politics, that the cyberpunk genre is so appealing.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adam, Alison. "Feminist AI Projects and Cyberfutures." The Cybercultures Reader. Second

Edition. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London; New York: Routledge, 2007. 386–409. Print.

Benedikt, Michael. "Cyberspace. First Steps." The Cybercultures Reader. Second Edition. Eds.

David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London; New York: Routledge, 2007. 19 –33. Print.

Dery, Mark. Escape Velocity. Cyberculture at the End of the Century . New York: Grove Press, 1996. Print.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. 1984. London: HyperCollinsPublishers, 1995. Print.

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto. Science, Technology, and Socialist–Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." The Cybercultures Reader. Second Edition. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London; New York: Routledge, 2007. 34–65. Print.

Lupton,  Deborah.  "The  Embodied  Computer/User."  The  Cybercultures  Reader.  Second

Edition. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London; New York: Routledge, 2007. 422–432. Print.

Plotinus. Fifth Ennead. Third Tractate. The Knowing Hypostases and the Transcendent. Web. 22 Feb 2010. <http://www.ccel.org/ccel/plotinus/enneads.pdf>

Sofoulis, Zoë. "Cyberquake: Haraway's Manifesto" The Cybercultures Reader. Second Edition.

Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London; New York: Routledge, 2007. 365 – 385. Print.

Notes

[←1 ]

Which William Gibson dismissed wholesale as the "Gernsback Continuum," named so after the editor of Amazing Stories pulp magazine, Hugo Gernsback.

[←2 ]

Although self–proclaimed members of the cyberpunk subculture adopted Christian A. Kirtchev's 1997 "A Cyberpunk Manifesto" as their own and are working at present as a volunteer group on a revised third edition. However, this manifesto does not concern literature in particular.

[←3 ]

Gibson himself had commented on Neuromancer's traditional cause–and–effect plot in an interview: "I knew I was so inexperienced that I would need a traditional plot armature that had proven its potential for narrative traction. I had these different things I wanted to use, but since I didn't have a preset notion of where I was going, the plot had to be something I already felt comfortable with" (Wounded Galaxies 137).

[←4 ]

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. 1984. London: HyperCollinsPublishers, 1995. Print. From hereafter also referred to as "N."

[←5 ]

In a sense, therefore, Neuromancer managed in the scope of one novel to both introduce a new subgenre of science fiction, as well as provide it with proper closure in returning to traditional science–fictional motifs.

[←6 ]

A third Stephenson cyberpunk novel, REAMDE, is forthcoming.

[←7 ]

Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash. 1992. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1993. Print. From hereafter also referred to as "SC."

[←8 ]

Stephenson, Neal. The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. 1995. London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1996. Print. From hereafter also referred to as "DA."

[←9 ]

After the conservative turn the cultural "tribes" of  The Diamond Age have succeeded the commercial "franchises" of Snow Crash.

[←10 ]

As mentioned before, knowledge (information) is the foregrounded capital of cyberpunk fiction. Similar to

Hiro Protagonist, Nell's process of maturation grants her access to the "cognitive elites" of her world.

[←11 ]

Perhaps a witch child is as much a natural counterpart to the innocent child figure in literature as Haraway would claim her cyborg figure is a natural counterpart to the innocent American Adam. Both constitute an attemt at deconstructing the American metanarrative of innocence in culture and fiction.

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A motif also found in Gibson's short stories "Dogfight" and "New Rose Hotel" from the collection Burning Chrome.

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Often misattributed to John Wayne from the movie "Hondo," where the actual quote is "A man ought'a do what he thinks is best." It would seem that the phrase in its modern version is a misquotation of no direct origin.

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