Chapter Six

6.William Gibson’s “Architecture”: Virtual Light, idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties

William Gibson’s latest publication, All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999), serves as a “prequel” to the two previous novels, Virtual Light (1993) and idoru (1996). Its significance lies in the fact that all three seem to share many common motifs and themes, even characters, without being sequential. Gibson, when interviewed about the literary intentions behind writing All Tomorrow’s Parties, stated:

Without my having intended it, it seemed that both Virtual Light and idoru emerged with more than the usual number of inexplicable connectors hanging off them. They were clearly connected to each other, but there was something that suggested that both of them were connected even more profoundly to some nonexistent third. They sort of triangulated on a nonexistent book – All Tomorrow’s Parties is it.1

This sort of intertextual hybridity, fuelled by the recycling of themes explored in the three novels, is also reflected in their narrative structures, which follow a layered pattern of storylines and character formations. Each novel is comprised of a number of separate story plots, appearing in a serial form and developing in parallel, before intersecting and fusing into a cognitive whole where the voids and hollow spaces of narration are filled with the valid explanations and connections required. The process of structuring and restructuring data and images finds these novels caught up in a mechanism of compulsive repetition, giving rise to what Anthony Vidler calls an “uncanny sense of déjà vu” (1992: 13). The depictions of digital technologies and the cyberspace representations, which were so

1 Therese Littleton. ‘Going Random with William Gibson: An Interview’. On line at: www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/feature/-/23040 (consulted 20.10.1999).

PDF created with FinePrint pdfFactory Pro trial version http://www.pdffactory.com 176 Gothic Motifs in the Fiction of William Gibson evident in Gibson’s previous novels, and especially in ‘The Sprawl Trilogy’, seem in the last three novels to be going through a process of restoration. The evolution of all the motifs into different patterns and textures of representation makes them converge into a new mode of communication, which is reflected in the visual linguistic codes of the diverse architectural forms appearing in the novels. Such an interest, as Ross Farnell explains, marks a transition to “more “organic” structures […] in relation to the changing science fiction aesthetic of the early nineties, where after a decade of dominance, cyberpunk was on the decline” (1998: 459). When referring to Gibson’s Neuromancer, one of the key novels in the ‘Sprawl Trilogy’, Scott Bukatman states: “Neuromancer itself represents a “consensual hallucination” – an abstraction and reduction of the complexities of cybernetic culture to a kind of reckless, but sensible, cognitive experience” (1993: 152). Gibson’s novels are viewed as literary manifestations of the revolutionary cybercultural scene of the eighties and they constituted a radical way of describing the evolving contemporary socio-political and cultural reality (cyberpunk). In other words, his ‘Sprawl Trilogy’ represents cyberpunk’s speculative and contemplative nature in its descriptions of the alienation but also the fear of an anticipated future of cyborg and posthuman identities engaged in a quest for information control through the computer terminal. However, the acceleration of information technology in the nineties facilitated the fusion of cyberpunk aesthetics with everyday reality, which resulted in diminishing the textual potential of its narrative. This left behind, as Gibson notes, “a pop culture flavour”(in Farnell 1998: 460), since more emphasis was placed on the staging of the virtual spectacle due to the marketability of cyberpunk’s cyberspatial image power, making it seem as an empty and substanceless cultural signifier. Though regarded as limitless, cyberspace is endowed with a particular architectural quality, since it is nothing more than a ‘representational’ construct of the programmes and data of the world. Even though it initially appears to be pure image, cyberspace is a digital assemblage of layer upon layer of codes and mathematical calculations. Though located within the arbitrary realm of the computer medium, cyberspace is endowed with certain architectural qualities, since it is described as a construct built out of textually tangible (typed on the

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