Gibson, Pattern Recognition: notes on 9-11, uncanny

More thoughts on William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. I posted about this, once, a while back, and some comments followed. I've also set up a wiki for my notes and your comments.

9-11: this is very much a September 11th novel, and unsurpassed in creative work, I think. The attack apepars without fanfare, described minimally, yet with careful attention to the psychology and language of catastrophe. The event breaks through the text quietly, without flags, as in the glimpse in Tokyo (125), in media, or in the sudden, associative memory of a PATH train (232, appropriately being disinterred). The subsequent war on terror slides away from the novel, which is a weakness when we reach the Russian scenes, where Chechens should have played a larger presence, at least rhetorically.

Haunted Spaces: the novel offers another instance of the uncanny and cyberspace. The footage is haunting, strange, and its cult following appropriately cryptic and obsessed. More powerfully, the uncanny is in the form of Cayce's mom, who is focused on electronic voice phenomena (EVP) (115, first sign). We know she named her daughter after Edgar Cayce, so we expect (rightly) that there will be prophecy* - and how better to describe Cayce's ability to foresee the fate of logos? There's a cheery nature to this, or a positive one, as Cayce refuses to fall into mysticism, and ultimately finds the ordering patterns in footage and London. Like the classic Gothic explique (cf Ann Radcliffe, also Scooby Doo), the heroine shuns mystery to use reason to find her way out. And we get a string of heroes, both emasculated and macho, none of which enters the romantic circuit until the very last chapter. There is something conservative in the ultimate structure of this form, as Gothicists have pointed out.
*(Apophenia (also 115) is the limit to this prophetic power, and appears, fairly conservatively, via Cayce's father (226-227).)

Cyberpunk now: Gibson has backdated cyberpunk in his writing, as our world has caught up. The intense cosmopolitan rhetoric of novels like Neuromancer is toned down, and now sociologically accurate. This is a proximate mapping, not because this is fiction, but because Gibson can't escape his bibliography, and, as Macherey reminds us, the attempt to map fiction precisely onto the conditions of its production makes that separation more evident.