I ended up reading two novels more or less in a row this weekend: William Gibson's latest, Pattern Recognition, and Ernst Junger's The Glass Bees, written in 1957. The coincidence prompted some pattern recognition of my own, a series of readings and thoughts produced by the kind of startling conjunction one makes for oneself as often as possible.
1. Where Gibson's Neuromancer worked best as a kind of prophetic vision of the future, Pattern Recognition is more like a prophetic vision of its own present. I've never read a novel that makes the present moment seem so distanced or displaced from itself while nonetheless continuing to be very much what it is. Sebald's Austerlitz comes close, as does Perec's Things, but each of these does so in what you might think of as the "other" direction.
Whereas Gibson's world is completely and totally flat, and whatever psychological depth emerges from that flatness acquires its depth not through the individuation of a particular appreciation of it (the internal narrator's, as with Sebald, or the external one's, as with Perec) but from two other directions simultaneously: the surreal psychological disorder of the novel's main character, who is literally allergic to certain brand names, and the fact that what is revealed to the novel's reader as the intense and unbearable branded flatness of the world acquires via the act of revelation (that is to say, the act of its own expression in the pages of the novel) a kind of representational depth fully at odds with its own representative facticity.
2. Let me try again: the novel's flatness is deep only because it "reveals" (that word producing depth, I hope you see) the flatness of our current world as an experiential possibility. The novel is more or less a simulation of that experience.
3. Because of these things the novel's moments of traditional plotting and psychological depth (an aesthetically productive wounding, a mild love story) feel slightly ridiculous.
4. That said, the novel's major object of interest, namely an incredibly compelling sequence of potentially connected pieces of film footage, is moving for two major reasons: first because it is never clear whether what is moving about the film is the footage itself or the way the footage is marketed, and second because the creative act that produces the footage emerges from the body of someone who is otherwise brain dead (this another kind of flatness: the electronically represented line showing brain activity on a hospital monitor, for instance).
5. This last thing reminds me that in general in our culture we seem to be interested in examples of aesthetic beauty that might emerge from the brain damaged or the otherwise inhuman. There may be something inherently utopian and/or nostalgic about such fascinations. The example that comes to mind immediately is that of the people who teach apes to paint, though this seems like a silly illustration of what I'm trying to get at.
6. A few years ago, I heard one creative writing friend of mine say to another, a propos of Bret Easton Ellis's latest, that no one would be able to understand it in ten years, so full it was of references to brand names and temporally local histories. I wonder how true this will be of this novel of Gibson's, which is so of this moment that it comes to seem uncannily not of this moment.
7. Junger is a different case--the novel's pace is slow, and the meditation on technology and culture that it offers occurs largely at the level of internal monologue. But its ideas about technology, modernity, and capital are no less extraordinary than Gibson's, and perhaps stranger and stronger for being written almost a half-century ago.
In the garden of a roboticist, Zapparoni, whose technological prowess allows him to so dominate the globe as to appear in the dreams of children (Bruce Stirling says in the preface that Zapparoni is a cross between Bill Gates and Walt Disney), a survivor of the era of horse cavalry sits and watches automated bees gather nectar. The sense of dislocation provided by the combination of a light cavalryman and his horseless future is bewildering enough as a narrative situation that the fact that not much happens doesn't matter much. Instead the whole novel is saturated with violence and potential violence that emerges not from its events (with one exception) but rather from the suppurated residue of the surface of the history necessary to produce its real.
8. Junger lived from 1895 to 1998, and fought for Germany in both World Wars. That's a lot of history for anyone to live through. The novel's uncannily prescient account of technological modernity got me thinking, though, about what an extraordinary group of thinkers of precisely that modernity lived and wrote in Germany between the wars. In many ways, and despite efforts (Gibson's, Baudrillard's) to extend and exceed our present beyond the techno-modern imaginings of Benjamin, Kracauer, Lang, or Junger, we remain today well within the ambit of what they made it possible to think.
Printculture members can review, edit, and delete their comments, create a member page, and don't have to fill in the silly form below. Sign up or log in.
