Delany's Dhalgren and Gibson's Pattern Recognition

Memory’s Guilted Cage: Delany’s Dhalgren and Gibson’s Pattern Recognition Jason Haslam Dalhousie University

 ,   William Gibson—the “father” of Icyberpunk, living in British Columbia after moving to Canada to evade the Vietnam draft¹—wrote an introduction to the re-release of the novel Dhalgren, originally published in , written by Samuel Delany, often described as a precursor to or inspiration for later authors of cyberpunk.² In his introduction to Delany’s eight-hundred-page opus, Gibson writes that he “place[s] Dhalgren in history,” a history he then specifies: No one under thirty-five today can remember the singularity that overtook America in the nineteen-sixties, and the genera- tion that experienced it most directly seems largely to have opted for amnesia and denial. But something did happen: a city came to be, in America. (And I imagine I use America here as shorthand for something else; perhaps for the industrialized nations of the American Century.) e city had no specific locale, and its internal geography was mainly fluid. […] e city was largely invisible to America. If America was about “home” and “work,” the city was about neither, and that made the city very difficult for America to see. […] I would not suggest that Dhalgren is any sort of map of that city, intentional

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Haslam.indd 77 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM or otherwise, but that they bear some undeniable relationship. (ose who would prefer to forget the city say that it produced no true literature, but that too is denial.) […] When I think of J H is an Dhalgren, I remember this: A night in Dupont Circle, Wash- Assistant Professor in the ington, D.C., amid conditions of civil riot, when someone, as the police arrived with their staves and plastic shields, tossed Department of English a Molotov cocktail. (xii–xiii) at Dalhousie University. He is the author of Gibson implies, or intones, that Dhalgren is a novel not just about Ameri- Fitting Sentences: Identity can civil unrest, but that it is an encapsulation of that unrest, “the unmed- in Nineteenth- and iated experience of the singularity […], free of all corrosion and nostalgia” Twentieth-Century (xiii). Gibson thus places Dhalgren at the crux of memory and nation, Prison Narratives, suggesting that what Toni Morrison has elsewhere called the “national and the co-editor of narrative”—the “official story [that] obliterates any narrative that is coun- Captivating Subjects: ter to it” (xvi, xviii)—has either intentionally “forgotten” the civil unrest Writing Confinement, of the s or rendered it nostalgic, while Dhalgren stands not just as Citizenship, and a final testament to, or reflection of, but a nearly magical incarnation of Nationhood in the those events. Delany’s postmodern, circuitous, self-reflexive, exploration Nineteenth Century of the fictional city of Bellona represents, for Gibson, the recent radical, (both Toronto , ). if not revolutionary past which has been subsumed by the “long slough” He has also published (xiii) of the national narrative which, in turn, is created for and by what is articles on prison so often referred to as “middle America.” Little wonder, then, that Gibson writing, American revisits issues of amnesia, denial, and their relations to American national literature, and film in identity (again figured by him as “shorthand for something else; perhaps such journals as College […] the American Century” of globalization) in his  novel, Pattern Literature, ESC, Genre: Forms of Discourse and  In his brief autobiographical statement (or, as it is called, his “Source Code”) Culture, and Modern posted on his official website, Gibson explains: Language Studies. He I left my school without graduating, joined up with rest of the has recently completed, Children’s Crusade of the day, and shortly found my self in Canada, a country I knew almost nothing about. I concentrated on evading for Broadview the draft and staying alive, while trying to make sure I looked like Press, a scholarly I was at least enjoying the Summer of Love. I did literally evade edition of Constance the draft, as they never bothered drafting me, and have lived here in Canada, more or less, ever since. (Paragraph ) Lytton’s suffragette While Gibson is often characterized as a Canadian author, and all of his work has autobiography, Prisons been published while living in Canada, this nationalist identification is perhaps and Prisoners: Some slipperier for Gibson than most: most of his works centre on the .., but most Personal Experiences. deal with a future .. that is intrinsically globalized, culturally and economically, and his self-proclaimed literary references are largely .. American.  Tucker writes, correctly, I would argue, that Dhalgren is “one of ’s most important novels” (). Tucker also examines the relations between Delany’s Dhalgren and Nova and later cyberpunk (–) and briefly discusses Gibson’s introduction to the novel.

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Haslam.indd 78 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM Recognition, possibly the first literary, fictional exploration by an (osten- sibly) American author of the position of / within an American and global history—and future.³ Gibson’s and Delany’s novels construct a similar tension related to the past and to a largely unspoken sense of a guilt that concerns memories (personal and cultural) of inaction in the face of (cultural and personal) moments of violence. e past becomes a space of both individual neu- roses and communal guilt. I argue that both Delany and Gibson use a thematic focus on a past that has gone missing (the protagonist’s amnesia in Delany’s text, a missing father in Gibson’s) to discuss the ways in which the American national narrative, in order to maintain a self-cohesive vision of the nation, needs to repress its very creation of and relation to a silenced other (represented through the inner city by Delany, and the history of global conflict by Gibson). Following the mechanics of ideology, this decontextualization or a-historicizing transforms a given historical moment, with its specificities (of a given system of power relations, for example) into a universalized myth and therefore into a supposedly unas- sailable truth—in Barthes’s terminology a “global sign, the final term of a first semiological chain” (). is global sign is then appealed to as the justification of the hegemonic relations it is in fact a result of. e national narrative, thus made consensual, becomes a universally accepted, unconscious narrative. However, this blanking of past (and present) relations of power in the service of maintaining what Lyotard calls “metanarrative” leads, in both novels, to a postmodern fragmentation of narrative and vision, because the process simultaneously and necessarily brings with it a fetishization of the very specifics which have been repressed—a fixation on the silenced other that can, however, in turn be exploited by a globalized, or what Gibson calls a “post-geographic,” metanarrative of identity. Delany and Gibson’s conjoined vision of the preconditions of this postmodern fragmentation is thus different—and more bleak—than Lyotard’s, who cites the loss, and not the maintenance, of metanarratives

 Lying behind this argument, of course, is the fact that both Gibson and Delany are most commonly described as writers of science fiction, as well as ’s con- cern with history, be it in the form of “future histories” of utopian and dystopian texts, alternative histories, or the general distinction between the realism of what Delany has elsewhere called “mundane fiction” (Trouble on Triton ) and the constructed universes of  (a distinction that leads to the creation of what Darko Suvin has famously termed “cognitive estrangement”). While such discussions are very important—as endless as they may seem in  criticism—they lie at the borders of the current argument.

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Haslam.indd 79 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM as the “originary” spark, writing that he “define[s]postmodern as an incre- dulity toward metanarrative” (xxiv).⁴ What both triggers and silences this process, as envisioned by Delany and Gibson, is guilt, defined as both the dominant group’s (unacknowl- edged) recognition of its own violence and the individual subject’s affective sense that both affirms and denies his or her own responsibility in the memory of victimization. In this dynamic, oppression leads to guilt, which leads to an amnesia or dissociative fugue state surrounding the oppression (for both victim and victimizer). If unchecked, this blanking of the past can lead to assumptions of the absolute right of the present state of things—or the dominant narrative—and therefore can lead to the naturalization of powerlessness for the dominated (including the silencing of alternative narratives). Guilt here walks a fine line between, on the one hand, a juridical assertion of responsibility and, on the other, the psychological processes of trauma, what P. S. Greenspan, for one, has called the distinction between “objective” and “subjective” guilt (terms I avoid because of the dangers of seeing ascribed juridical guilt as always pseudo-scientifically “objective”; see Greenspan, especiallly –). If the recognition of guilt is denied, then, in the first group-oriented definition, a dominant national narrative is created based on a repression of past events, while in the latter individual-oriented definition, the subject is

 For Lyotard, modernity is ushered in by “a shattering of belief” and the “discovery of the ‘lack of reality’ of reality, together with the invention of other realities” (). Within this modern moment, the postmodern is a matter of emphasis on the reaction to the shattered “grand narrative.” Instead of a modernist nostalgia, Lyotard’s postmodern response functions as a positive beckoning to possibility: “Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name” (). If the postmodern, for Lyotard, is the rejuvenation of multiple perspectives, then for Delany and Gibson it is a shattered storefront window reflecting “looters,” honouring the “saving” of designer logos. As I discuss below, the figure of the logo is central to Pattern Recognition. In Dhalgren, Bellona creates its own fashion trends that are nonetheless emptied of significance in a logo-ized manner, including chains with mirrors, connoting for the reader, perhaps, violence, containment, and reflection. Additionally, the gang of which Kid is occasionally a member, the Scorpions, project holograms of mythical creatures around themselves. ose following Lyotard generally use his terms “grand narrative” and “metanarrative,” as well as “master narrative,” interchangeably. e term “metanarrative” is also occasionally used to reference textual self-reflexivity (as in the common usage of “metafiction”), but here, as for Lyotard and others, it references one narrative, which, standing above all others, frames and gives meaning to those others (and thus, as Frederic Jameson writes in his introduction to Lyotard, is similar to his notion of the “political unconscious” [xii], and also closely echoes Barthes’s definition of mythology).

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Haslam.indd 80 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM denied a control of the self due to the processes of trauma. However, if the guilt is acknowledged and its sources recognized, then, in the former definition, the national narrative both affirms culpability in the past and responsibility in the present, while for the latter sense of guilt, the subject can—perhaps—renarrativize the repressed trauma into a new control of self-hood.⁵ Writing a decade before the publication of Dhalgren, John G. McKenzie sees the definition of guilt as central for literary, sociological, legal, psychological, and other forms of study. McKenzie begins his  text, Guilt: Its Meaning and Significance, by noting of guilt that “Our age is riddled with it. It is the theme of our best novels on both sides of the Atlantic” (“Pref- ace”). He further quotes “Professor Hamilton of Winnipeg,” who states that “Literature is the barometer of the spiritual climate of an age” in order to argue that, if this is so, “then our age is not only an ‘anxiety-ridden age’ as the poet Auden describes it, but guilt-ridden” (). He points, however, to the difficulty of creating what could be called a “unifying theory” of guilt and, in so doing, highlights one of the gaps in the current argument: Father White in his essay on Guilt, eological and Psy- chological draws attention to the fact that a good deal of misunderstanding in regard to the meaning of guilt is due to the “different fields of association which the word ‘guilt’ can conjure up” in different people’s minds. “To the theologian—as well as the moralist and the lawyer—the word will at once suggest something reprehensible and blameworthy; indeed unpardonable except on strict conditions of repentance and amendment. To the psychologist it will suggest more often a pitiable affliction, probably a delusion; a symptom of disorder which causes intense suffering, inhibits life and joy in living and which calls for sympathetic understanding and as little reproach as does physical sickness.” is misunderstanding is due to a difference in definition. e meaning and significance of guilt is crucial for the lawyer. He is concerned not with the feelings of guilt, but with the objective behaviour which he deems guilty. ()

McKenzie attempts to delineate the differences and relations between juridical, psychological, ethical, and religious (or moral) senses of “guilt” and thus tries to find approaches to the “dissipation” of guilt in terms  Actual large-scale social projects that try to create this form of re-narration have been attempted, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. See http://www.doj.gov.za/trc/.

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Haslam.indd 81 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM applicable to every field. While McKenzie’s focus seems primarily psychological and religious, his distinction between a juridical ruling, which only ascribes “guilt” to a person externally, and a psychological guilt, which is primarily internally ascribed (once again, the supposedly “objective” and “subjective” forms of guilt), is useful for the present project insofar as it falls apart, be it through a Lacanian understanding of the external “fictional” direction of the internal judgmental gaze or a legal understanding of internal psychological circumstances that can mitigate or even assuage rulings of guilt, something which McKenzie discusses.⁶ ese complex relationships and confused slippages between group and individual guilt, between culpability and interiority, in these various formulations allow both Delany’s and Gibson’s novels to analyze the dynamics of guilt by focusing on trauma. Moreover, by detailing various related traumas of .. history (including the violences of classed, gendered, sexual, and racial internal warfares, as well as international conflict), both novels can move beyond the allegorical equation of so many popular renditions of history (where coping with personal trauma serves solely as a metaphor for national or social forms of healing—the examples that spring immediately to mind here are Jerry Bruckheimer’s Pearl Harbor and James Cameron’s Titanic). e novels instead re-member the allegory as synecdoche, where personal and public spheres and their pasts are shown to have interrelated and inseparable histories. Because of this relationship, supposedly private trauma can only be remembered through the public sphere (since trauma is necessarily a result of social interaction), and supposedly public national narratives can only be revised through private memories (since the public sphere is necessarily a function of private subjects). Both novels, however, rather than portraying a quasi-Romantic transcendence beyond guilt through communal acts of re-narration and storytelling, instead ultimately focus on an inability of the traumatized subject to move beyond ingrained, ideologically reinforced traumatic narratives that are characterized by their own amnesia.

 e religious aspects of guilt on which McKenzie elaborates form a lacunae in this paper, as they largely do in the works being studied, though a reading of the “re-placement” of religious guilt—in terms of globalized markets or internal otherings—would be a useful exploration.

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Haslam.indd 82 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM I. Delany’s novel focuses on an amnesiac and pseudonymous protagonist who is referred to variously as “Kid,” “the Kid,” or “Kidd.”⁷ e setting of Bellona thus most of the novel is the city of Bellona, found, as Mary Kay Bray writes, “right at the centre of the country. It is equally far from the east and west becomes a coasts and from the country’s northern and southern borders” (). At some point in the recent past, Bellona has suffered an unnamed catas- metaphor for trophe that has covered it in fog and/or smoke, leaving several of the buildings burning and rendering its inhabitants effectively cut off from both the the rest of the country. e most people can agree on about the event is that it coincided with a riot—generally set in the area of the city known material as Jackson, the black neighbourhood of Bellona—that may have been the result of the shooting of one of the city’s black leaders by a lone gun- existence of man. Written in the years immediately after the Watts riot and the riots that followed Martin Luther King’s assassination (as Jeffrey Tucker has racial and class detailed),⁸ Dhalgren’s portrayal of Bellona as having a largely poor, mostly black populace, and as a city that is constantly burning in the after-effects inequity in the of a racially motivated uprising, obviously metaphorically identifies this city, located in the heart of America, with what we now call the inner U.S. and their city—an urban space that has become increasingly culturally identified with the black working or unemployed poor, through what Michael Ben- erasure from the nett calls a “spatialization of race,” in which the mass media have aided in associating black people with ghettos and inner cities that, in turn, have metanarrative of become increasingly vilified and identified with crime. As Bennet argues, “since World War II, ‘central-city residence, race, joblessness, and poverty “American life.” have become inextricably intertwined’ in American ghettos” ().⁹ Bel- lona thus becomes a metaphor for both the material existence of racial and class inequity in the .. and their erasure from the metanarrative of “American life.” is erasure is pointed out in the opening pages of the novel, when Kid arrives at the outskirts of Bellona:  I follow Tucker in referring to the protagonist as “Kid.”  e chapter “Contending Forces: Racial and Sexual Narratives in Dhalgren,” from Tucker’s book, A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Dif- ference, offers a tremendously detailed and subtle reading of the ways in which Dhalgren “operates as a text that exhibits formal characteristics associated with black culture, addresses American racial history, and investigates the construc- tion and meanings of racial difference” (). By placing Delany firmly within an African American literary tradition, Tucker situates his reading against what he sees as “Ross Posnock’s universalist interpretation of Delany’s works and his contention that they evade racial specificity” ().  Bennett is quoting omas J. Sugrue ().

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Haslam.indd 83 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM Very few suspect the existence of this city. It is as if not only the media but the laws of perspective themselves have redesigned knowledge and perception to pass it by. Rumor says there is practically no power here. Neither television cameras nor on- the-spot broadcasts function: that such a catastrophe as this should be opaque, and therefore dull, to the electric nation! It is a city of inner discordances and retinal distortions. () e lack of “power” in the city refers, denotatively, to the simple loss of electricity, resulting in the inability to broadcast images. Obviously, though, this is also a symbolic description of the lack of the power of representation; Bellona is an (inner) city rendered powerless to represent itself to the larger (outer) nation, which controls the power of representation itself. Unable to excite the energy of the outside perception, Bellona and its inhabitants “dull” to a blank, a void that the nation ignores. e “inner discordances and retinal distortions,” which Bray reads as an externalized portrayal of Kid’s amnesiac mental state (), also constitute a portrayal of the country’s discordance and the distortion of its self-perception, a national repression of its own inequities. Bellona does, as Bray writes, “function primarily as a symbolic centre of American consciousness and behavior” (), but only insofar as that consciousness is enabled by its own aphasia and its behaviour by inaction. I want to focus my discussion of Dhalgren on its portrayal of “middle America’s” repression of its ties to this “opaque” city and the relationship between the national narrative’s erasure of and fascination with—even fetishization of—this internal other. e primary vehicle for this discussion is Delany’s portrayal of the Richards family: a middle-class white family who, unlike all of the other original inhabitants of their upper-end apartment complex, have stayed in Bellona. In this focus, my argument touches on that of Jeffrey Tucker, the most recent and extensive analyst of Delany’s work. However, where Tucker’s excellent analysis concentrates on the structural relations (and their discontents) between the form of the novel, other African-American literary and musical creations, the composition or fabric of the city, and the novel’s exploration of (sexual and racial) identity and history, I will be attending to Delany’s cutting analysis of the role of guilt (and its discontents) in the maintenance of ideological “national narratives.”¹⁰ Mrs Richards, the matriarch of the

 Bray also analyzes Dhalgren’s ironic revisiting of some of the standard narrative fares of American literature in ways that have echoes with my project; she examines, for instance, the “theme of quest and initiation” and “romantic

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Haslam.indd 84 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM family, is in a state of deep denial about the condition of Bellona. Just after Kid first arrives in town, Tak, a man who has lived there for quite a while, tells him that Fresh food is hard as hell to come by. Meat especially. But there’s canned stuff in the city enough to last […]. Truth is, I don’t know how long it’ll last. I lucked out on a couple of pretty well-stocked places nobody else seems to have found yet. You’ll discover, by and large, people are not very practical around here—if they were, I guess they wouldn’t be here. But when somebody else eventually does stumble on one of my classified, top-secret, hush-hush food sources, in a place like Bellona you can’t very well say, “Go away or I’ll call the cops.” ere aren’t any cops to call. Have a piece of bread. Another thing I lucked out on: Ran into this woman who bakes loaves and loaves of stuff every week; just gives it away to anyone who comes by. () Meeting Kid on the edge of Bellona, Tak serves as an interstitial introduction to the history and culture of the area, an inner-city Virgil for Kid’s Dantean journey through the underside of modern America. Tak also serves as an ideological bridge, mimicking the dominant cultural assumption that people living in poverty “are not very practical,” where practicality is somehow equated to the inviolability of personal property, but also pointing out that such market-based “practicality” is impossible because of the lack of civic structure. Bellona is thus a place where traditional store fronts, and the modern market itself, have collapsed, leaving only acts of charity and older forms of barter and exchange. Mrs Richards, refusing to recognize the situation, sends her son Bobby out on an attempt to buy bread: “I could only find half a loaf,” Bobby called [from the kitchen]. “Did you ask for a whole one?” Mrs. Richards called back. “I’m sure if you’d asked them politely for a whole loaf, they would have tried to find one for—” “ere wasn’t anybody in the store.” “Oh, Bobby—” “I left the money.”

individualism” and its ties to the “frontier,” as well as “the myth of the excep- tional outlaw” (, , ).

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Haslam.indd 85 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM “But you should have waited for somebody to come back. Suppose someone had seen you going out. ey wouldn’t have known you’d—” (–) Misrecognizing the condition of the city, Mary Richards seems incapable of moving beyond middle-class notions of propriety and hegemonic notions of property. She doesn’t realize that, as Jean Mark Gawron notes, “What is left of the middle class in Bellona is diseased or dying” (). Her blinkered view is reinforced by her family: Bobby leaves the money at the store, and her husband continues to leave the apartment every day for a non-existant job. Mr Richards later tells Kid that “Mary lives in her world of cooking and cleaning and the children. I come home. And nothing looks … I can’t describe it. A man’s home is supposed to be—well, a place where everything is real, solid, and he can grab hold. In our home, I just don’t know. I come in from that terrible world, and I’m in some neverland I just don’t believe in. And the less I believe in it, the more it slips. I think it’s me, sometimes. Mary’s always been a strange woman; she hasn’t had it that easy. She tries so hard to be … well, civilized. We both do. But what with this …” He nodded toward the open balcony doors. […] “suddenly you begin to feel she’s changing the world into her own ideas. She doesn’t go out, now; but who could blame her. And once you get inside the door, it’s all hers.” “She keeps a nice house,” Kid offered. “Oh, she does much more than that. She keeps us too. We all say things for her, you notice? Everybody who comes in there. She projects this … well, nervousness. And then you start to try to figure out what she wants you to say; and you say it. At first so you won’t get her upset. en out of habit.” ()

Beyond simply fulfilling gendered stereotypes of the agoraphobic house- wife, Mrs Richards “projects” the interpellation lying behind this position outwards, transforming her surroundings into a world that’s “all hers,” that conforms to her vision of “civilization,” which includes a caring building management, functioning stores, a working husband, and children who will go to college (the one son who left the Richards for the streets of Bellona is no longer mentioned in the home). And so witness Mary Tyler Moore’s Mary Richards abandon independence and media control only to become an inverted and perhaps unwitting Big Brother: Big Brother may not be watching you, but she won’t hesitate to passive-aggressively “guilt trip” you into self-surveillance.

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Haslam.indd 86 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM Mr Richards, however, is not as self-aware and free of personal blinders as their conversation would have Kid believe. He too falls into a middle- American, stereotypically gendered vision of his family and their prospects during a dinner party that they hold. When their daughter, June, talks about wanting to go to college (“‘if I could go someplace like New York’”), Mr Richards replies, “‘June isn’t too, what you’d call, well, academic. June’s sort of my old-fashioned girl […]. Aren’t you honey?’” He goes on to say to her, “‘You wouldn’t like New York […]. You’re too much of a sunshine girl. June likes the sun, swimming, outdoor things. You’d whither away in New York or Los Angeles, with all that smog and pollution. […] Your mother went through [the Junior] college. […] I went through college. Bobby’s going to go. If nothing else, it’s a place to get married in’” (–). Not simply reinforcing his wife’s agoraphobic class consciousness, Arthur Richards here enforces his own “old-fashioned” class and gender ideolo- gies, weaving a vision of his daughter as the “sunshine girl” whose only interest in education would be “to get married.” But, it is with June that the extraordinary repression involved in the Richardses’ engagement with the various “national narratives” of identity becomes highlighted. June is not the “sunshine girl” her father sees, nor is their family as isolated or separated from the events of Bellona as her mother’s agoraphobia, and Mr Richards’s reinforcement of it, would imply. e race riot that accompanied the Bellona catastrophe was also tied to a stereotypical American myth, reproduced on the pages of the periodic newspaper published in Bellona by Roger Calkins: a white woman being raped by a black man. Kid is told the story originally by Joaquim Faust, the newspaper delivery man: “See if you can get hold of the paper for that day. People say you never seen pictures like that before. […] ere’s supposed to be one set of pictures; of this big buck, getting after this little white girl … a whole lot of stink about them pictures. ‘Rape’ is the nasty word they didn’t use in the paper but rape is what it was. […] I mean, Calkins is all interested in civil rights and things. He really is. […] I mean, I know the colored people got it rough. But if you want to help, you don’t print a picture of the biggest, blackest buck in the world messin’ up some little blond-headed seventeen-year-old girl, and then runnin’ two pages of him saying how good it was, with every other word ‘shit’ and ‘fuck,’ and ‘Wooo-eeeee,’ how he’s going to get him some more soon as he can, and how easy it’s gonna be with no pigs around! I mean not if you want to help—do you?

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Haslam.indd 87 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM And because of the article, Harrison—his name was George Harrison—is some sort of hero, to all the niggers left over in Jackson; and you’d think just about everybody else too. Which What we have, shows you the kind of people we got.” “But you didn’t see it, though?” then, is an Faust waved that away. () e white girl, June Richards, and the black man, George Harrison, are image of white, described by Joaquim, as Tucker and other critics have argued, in the typical terms of the “myth of the black rapist” (Tucker  ff).¹¹ However, middle-class this story gets told and retold throughout the novel, providing, as Tucker writes, several different “counternarratives” and other contexts for June repression of and George’s encounter (among other events) that “challenge […] socially privileged narratives of ‘certain knowledge’” (–). Even the connec- the classed and tion between June and George’s encounter and the Bellona riots/disaster is tenuous in this, the first, account: Faust didn’t see the collapse of the raced other city. In Kid’s own encounters with June throughout the novel, she is herself trying to find George, constantly searching for him; Kid first meets being tied to a her, before he meets her family, as she is looking for George. e “myth of the black rapist” is recontextualized, turned into a consensual act of fetishization of sadomasochism, and June is turned from passive, white, female victim to active groupie, the name “George Harrison” being used possibly to recall that other. images of female Beatles fans screaming in ecstasy as “George Harrison” walks by (Tucker notes, though, citing Robert Elliot Fox, that this “George Harrison is more Soul on Ice than the Beatles” [Tucker ; Fox ]). To a certain degree, as Bray writes, Dhalgren inverts “the black man-white woman rape plot” in such a way that “readers are not allowed to come away […] without an ironic double-awareness of American experience” ().¹² What we have, then, is an image of white, middle-class repression of the classed and raced other being tied to a fetishization of that other.¹³ e fear of the outside that keeps Mrs Richards in her house and enables her repressive reproduction of middle-class life finds its extreme incarnation in the newspaper’s pictures of George Harrison, read as raping her

 In addition to Tucker, see, for example, Bray and Gawron.  Bray’s use of “double-awareness” here is part of her overall analysis of Delany’s engagement with what W. E. B. DuBois termed the “double-consciousness” of African-American life and culture.  Tucker reads another fetishization in relation to George in a similar way, specifically “the fetishization of black male sexuality on the part of white gays,” which, Tucker states, “is by no means unproblematic” in the novel since “sexual fetishization and social oppression can easily go hand in hand” ().

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Haslam.indd 88 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM daughter; simultaneously, however, this myth of rampant and violent black male sexuality is what draws June to George, as a result of her desire to escape the identity imposed on her by her father. As June herself tells Kid, when pleading with him not to tell her parents about her quest for George, “e paper had the pictures […]. ey looked at them, Mother and Daddy. ey looked at them and they didn’t recognize me!” (–). is lack of recognition is, for June, simultaneously both a freedom from interpellation by the “national narrative” embodied by her parents and a failure on her part to live up to their standards. She desires George but must also maintain her position in the normative white family. is circular dynamic of repression and fetishization thus creates an unending conflict within June, one that expresses itself as psychological guilt and in guilty violent actions, both of which culminate when June, perhaps accidentally and unconsciously, perhaps willingly and purposively, pushes her younger brother down an elevator shaft, killing him with a seventeen-storey fall, immediately after he threatens to tell their parents that she has a poster of George, naked. While carrying a rug out of their apartment, Bobby says to June, “Hey, don’t back me into the damn door […] don’t push me so fast.” Shortly afterwards, June screams, leading Kid and Mrs Richards to run into the corridor. June yells to her mother: “Mom! Bobby, he fell in the—” K-chunk! “No, oh my dear God, no!” “I didn’t see it, mom! I didn’t! I thought it was the other—” “Oh, God. Bobby, no he couldn’t—” “Mom, I didn’t know! He just backed into it! I didn’t see—” K-chunk! (–)

June’s need to hide her lust for George, and perhaps to hide her non-normative sadomasochistic desires, is shown by the fact that she keeps the poster of George even though—or because—“it’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen” (). June experiences feelings of guilt (as evidenced by her simple hiding of the poster) which are the result of her inability to live up to her parents’ vision.¹⁴ Her guilt arises from the conflict between her parents’ mythical white self-presence and impenetrability (the “national

 Bray argues that it is possibly “June’s lusts” that drive her to “murder[] her brother” (), while Tucker, explicitly countering Bray’s analysis and relying on Gawron’s, writes that “June’s explanation,” that the death was an accident, “is actually the more terrifying one” (). While both of these arguments can hold true (due to the multiple variants on June and George’s relationship, as Tucker

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Haslam.indd 89 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM narrative”) and her willing participation in its exergue myth (the ever-present threat of the black rapist). In other words, her guilt is an indication that it is her desire that threatens the “purity” of white domesticity. But with Bobby’s threat to expose her, so too is the violence that lies behind the guilty maintenance of the narrative exposed (Delany highlights the violence with grotesque descriptions of Kid gathering what’s left of Bobby’s body in the elevator shaft, slipping in “either grease or blood” [] that “looked like jellied paste” []: “One eye, open, had burst. e face, as though it had been made of clay, was flattened across one quarter,” and Kid wonders why he is “standing here with this armful of heavy, heavy meat, filthy with blood” [–]). e othering necessary for and leading to the repressive nature of middle America’s national narrative brings with it its exergue in the erotic attachment to and need for that very other. But, this need itself needs in turn to be repressed for the maintenance of the dominant culture, leading to a potentially explosive cycle of the repression and its return—the very thing that most threatens the dissolution of the dominant narrative is that which enables its reproduction. George himself recognizes this need, by saying: “Well, after I was finished, we did not exactly introduce ourselves. […] Suppose, afterward, I’d done said, ‘Oh, hey baby, that was so fine, let’s you and me get married and live all happily ever after so we can just take care of one another every night!’ What she gonna say? ‘You crazy, nigger!’ I mean a couple of times I tried that, and it don’t work. at ain’t her thing. at ain’t mine. She ain’t interested in me neither. She interested in what she thinks about me.” ()

June’s fetish, arising from her family’s repression, is a figure of Bellona itself, which is occasionally visited by tourists, who, like poet Ernest Newboy, drop in because “Bellona has developed … an underground reputation […]. One never reads about it, but one hears” (). Bellona itself, as a representation of, in Tucker’s words, the “very real, ‘autumnal’—‘decaying and declining’—urban American terrain” (), is, like June’s vision of George, both the figure of repression and fascination, a silence surrounding a fetish, a violent oppressive othering that nevertheless dominates the dominant, that is necessary for the maintenance of the national narrative. Guilt, in

argues), the idea that the murder is represented as a manifestation of June’s guilt, arising from her variance from the “national narrative,” accounts for both. It is an accident as far as June knows, but it is also a result of her desires.

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Haslam.indd 90 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM this process, is what enables the necessary silencing, for if the desire that lies at the heart of the process was not silenced, the oppressive nature of the relationship would require a constant repressive violence against both other and self (as in Bobby’s death). e guilt June feels over not living up The personal to her parents’ “ideal” is the necessary step to silencing reality—her relationship to George—a silence that extends to everyone but George. is guilt felt over guilty silencing is necessary to keep Mrs Richards’s “national narrative” possible. e personal guilt felt over the desire for the other leads to the the desire for the silencing of the public guilt of the violence of oppression itself. As Eliza- beth V. Spelman argues about the related concept of shame, “Perhaps that other leads to is why an institution is unlikely to feel or admit to shame: it may be unable to countenance the possibility that at root it is not what it purports, even the silencing of to itself, to be” () or, one could add, that it is “at root” that an institution is not itself, and this nothingness must be guiltily forced down.¹⁵ Just as the public guilt June “didn’t see” herself pushing Bobby to his death in a dark shaft, no one outside of Bellona (or indeed outside of Jackson) sees the “disaster” that of the violence creates Bellona as a powerless (inner)city. Indeed, following Spelman, one could well argue that this guilty hiding of recognition is itself an indication of oppression that the privilege of the national narrative is a self-consciously tenuous one, since she writes that “e deeper privilege goes, the less self-conscious itself. people are of the extent to which their being who they are, in their own eyes as well as the eyes of others, is dependent upon the exploitation or disadvantage of others. Seeing oneself as deeply disfigured by privilege, and desiring to do something about it, may be impossible without shame” (). Mary Richards may not see herself as disfigured by privilege, though perhaps Delany figures June’s unconscious recognition of her own guilt as the externally disfigured corpse of her brother.

 My distinctions between “personal guilt” and “public guilt,” on the one hand, and recognized and unrecognized guilt, on the other, could both be refigured in terms of Spelman’s distinction between guilt and shame. Spelman views the former, in Sharon Todd’s words, “as only being, in the end, self-referential; that is, [guilt] only recognizes that one has done harm, not that harm has had an affect on someone else” (, n). Shame, however, does constitute such a recognition. e primary reason why I use the terminology of “public” and “private” guilt instead of the distinction between shame and guilt is to emphasize what I see as the interconnectedness, in Delany’s and Gibson’s novels, of social (and public) oppression and personal (and private) repression of the memory or recognition of one’s role in that oppression. In this, I am also partially agree- ing with Todd in not defining psychological guilt as narrowly as Spelman does. Todd writes: “My own view is that guilt is very much about the recognition of harm experienced by others and it is precisely this awareness that often causes us to feel guilt over deeds we have not directly committed” (, n).

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Haslam.indd 91 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM Kid’s amnesia is obviously tied to this lack of insight, figuring the nation’s ignorance of the city into our own through our identification with the protagonist. Kid’s lack of memory may seem, in some respects, to allow him to sidestep the primal scenes of the national narrative and therefore to escape the guilty narratives of the Richards family, which permits him to travel relatively unhindered throughout the city and become part of its various groups. Gawron in fact makes just such a claim about Kid: “Bel- lona is inconstant boundaries; and the man of many backgrounds who makes our only interface with it—whose consciousness constructs it for us—is equally unfixable, is half-Indian, half-white, half-mad, half-named, bisexual, one-shoed, ambidextrous, wilful, liable, poet, and hero” (). However, one cannot escape the fact that the gaps in Kid’s knowledge are simultaneously a lack of a sense of self (figured through his non-name), leading him in a fragmented quest for a past, a quest that is never satisfied. Looking through his notebook, near the end of the novel, Kid realizes that a list of names (his possible names) is missing: “I wrote all this down because today the page with the list of names on it is missing from the notebook. […] as soon as I realized that page was gone, I suddenly felt an obsession to read it again, and began searching through the entries again and again on the chance I might have overlooked it. How many times have I read it before? […] And what does it get me? e writing it down, I mean?” ().¹⁶ Gawron’s reading insists on the necessity of Kid’s inconstancy as a figure of an endless Hegelian “becoming.” In this passage, however, Kid questions the significance of the entire narrative, of his quest for self and for the “true” nature of the city. us, the novel presents a circular, reproductive situation, where any attempt to alter (or even fully explain) the city’s public and Kid’s private narratives are frustrated. is situation is rendered formally by Kid’s own fragmented poetry, which is simply the rewriting of a found journal, which itself is reproduced at the end of the book as a retelling of the plot, which in turn ends with a half sentence that circularly connects to the opening passage, itself a foreshadowing of the journal’s opening entry. Delany constructs a complexly re-itera- tive system of similitude, slight alteration, and reproduction that mimics a radical understanding of American economic and racial exploitation, representing the cyclical dependencies of oppressor and oppressed, of repression and self.

 Tucker reads Dhalgren’s denial of closure as an attempt to “purposefully sub- vert[] a ’s reader’s expectations,” denying material explanations for any of the seemingly fantastic elements of the narrative ().

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Haslam.indd 92 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM II.

If this guilty dynamic is true of Delany’s representation of internal Ameri- can politics and the economics of the inner city, then Gibson’s statement in the introduction to Dhalgren that America can stand for the industrialized “first world” means that this dynamic may be transferred to Gibson’s representation of global economics and politics in Pattern Recognition. Gibson starts with this assumption, and transforms / and previous war trauma into global foci of the tautology of repression, fetishization, and guilt. e plot of Gibson’s novel—set about a year after the events of /—follows a young professional woman named Cayce Pollard (named by her New Age-y mother after the prototypical New Age seer, Edgar Cayce, the name purposively mispronounced by the character as “Case” rather than “Casey”).¹⁷ Cayce is described in the opening pages as having an “allergy, a morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace” (); specifically, she has an anxiety reaction to commercial logos: she must carefully remove any brand identifiers from her clothing, panicking and even becoming physically ill when confronted by store displays of, for example, “A mountainside of Tommy [Hilfiger]” (). Cayce’s reaction seems to be caused by the way in which global capitalist branding separates the logo from any form of material connection to its product in a mise en abyme of product referentiality: My God, don’t they know? is stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavoring their ready-to-wear with liberal lashings of polo knit and regimental stripes. But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. ere must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul. Or so she

 is naming, and indeed Pattern Recognition’s overall use of a figure whose per- sonalized, mental relationship to information makes her desired by the larger market, obviously ties this novel to Gibson’s most famous work, Neuromancer, the main character of which is a male “cyber-cowboy” named Case. e refigur- ing of Case/Cayce as female, combined with the later novel’s rewriting of the “cowboy” as globalized, semi-ruthless businessman, could be read as a rewriting of the problematic gender politics of Neuromancer (see Nixon and Stockton). Andrew Leonard, in a Salon.com interview with Gibson, however, states that “Gibson denies that there is any significance. It’s just coincidence […]. ere is no connection between Cayce and Case; no meaningfulness.”

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Haslam.indd 93 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM hopes, and doesn’t know, but suspects in her heart that this in fact is what accounts for his long ubiquity. (–) Transforming Edgar Cayce’s supposed power of prophecy, Cayce’s sensitiv- ity to Tommy Hilfiger’s perfect derivativeness, and therefore the purity of his logo as advertisement, is what allows her to perform her various con- tracted jobs: she is hired by multinational conglomerates to test whether the logos for their new products will be effective. Cayce is a “cool hunter,” a market prophet, and therefore an agent, through most of the novel, of the economic and cultural globalization that is fueled by multinational corporations (and, one may add, only given a semblance of democratic control by the World Trade Organization). Cayce has two main tasks that comprise the novel’s plot. One is working for Hubertus Bigend, a cowboy-hat-wearing advertising mogul (“who looks like Tom Cruise on a diet of virgins’ blood and truffled chocolates”) whose company is so global and virtual that Cayce sees it as “more postgeographic than multinational” (). Bigend hires Cayce to hunt down the maker of what’s known as “e Footage,” a series of brief film clips which appear seemingly at random throughout the virtual space of the World Wide Web, which “have yielded no period and no particular narrative direction” () and only seem connected by the two characters—one male, one female—who appear in them. e footage has formed its own global subculture of followers, the “footageheads,” of whom Cayce is a member. For Cayce, the footage is a mastery of anti-productization, wherein the two characters are rendered completely context-less, outside of history: “ere is a lack of evidence, an absence of stylistic cues [of historical context], that Cayce understands to be utterly masterful” (). Cayce, then, sees the footage as pieces of a popular art form that, despite its global proliferation, has remained untouched by global marketing, an art that is somehow present and material in and of itself, despite its fragmentation—the exact opposite of the endlessly same, endlessly repeated non- product of global multinationals like Tommy Hilfiger, that rely, so many of them, on the labour of forgotten local Bellonas. Bigend, however, sees the footage from a diametrically opposed perspective: rather than timeless fragments of an untainted art, he views it as “e most brilliant marketing ploy of this very young century” because in following the footageheads on the Net, he sees “attention focused daily on a product that may not even exist” (). Bigend interprets the very fragmentation of the footage and its lack of context as an exploitable commodity and so wants to find its “maker” in order to see if he can use

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Haslam.indd 94 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM that person to further his own global power; he then exploits Cayce’s love of the footage to enlist her help, a quest that constitutes the majority of the plot. But, as I mentioned above, there are two tasks that drive the novel. e second forms the ground of the work to the figure of the footage: this ground is Cayce’s search for what happened to her father on /. A former  operative who worked in Moscow during the Cold War, Win Pollard was, she knows, in New York on the day of the attack on the twin towers. What neither she, nor her mother, nor the police or insurance companies know is why he was there and whether or not he was anywhere near the vicinity of the attacks. In short, while she suspects that he is dead, there is no way of proving it and, therefore, no way of achieving either a legal or emotional closure. is lack of finality to Cayce’s personal connection to the attacks leads to the description of / in the novel—which focuses, as usual, on the New York attacks rather than the Pentagon attack or the Pennsylvania crash.¹⁸ Cayce is at a meeting in a hotel at the time and watches the twin towers fall: “Cayce and the German designer will watch the towers burn, and eventually fall, and though she will know she must have seen people jumping, falling, there will be no memory of it. It will be like watching one of her own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority. An experience outside of culture” (). ese televised dreams combine the popular, the public, and the personal, erasing their differences in a masking of meaning, just as personal and public sources of guilt become confused in Dhalgren. As in many media reports, / is portrayed here as an event outside of causal relations in the political and historical senses, an endlessly iterated tragedy that appeared on a blank canvas and that is, therefore, a repetitive site of trauma.¹⁹ e fact that Cayce’s father, the  Cold War spy, goes missing in this moment is representative, then, of the way in which the past of America’s  e / Report offers a convincing explanation for the distinction in attention, at least between the Pentagon and  attacks: “If it had happened on any other day, the disaster at the Pentagon would be remembered as a singular challenge and an extraordinary national story. Yet the calamity at the World Trade Center that same morning included catastrophic damage , feet above the ground that instantly imperiled tens of thousands of people. e two experiences are not comparable” (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks ).  I am here echoing two texts: Hayden White’s analysis in “e Modernist Event” of reactions to fictional, and specifically cinematic, portrayals of some of the major historical terrors of modernity; and, more specifically, Art Spiegelman’s graphic analysis of / and trauma in his series of broadsheet comics, In the Shadow of No Towers.

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Haslam.indd 95 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM global politics—like the fight against communism that people like “Win” Pollard supposedly “won” for the ..—was missing in narrations of /. As Slavoj Žižek writes in his analysis of / and the War on Terror, “the awareness that we live in an insulated artificial universe […] generates the Judith Butler notion that some ominous agent is threatening us all the time with total destruction. In this paranoiac perspective, the terrorists are turned into argues that this an irrational abstract agency […] subtracted from the concrete socio-ideological network which gave birth to it” (). e disappearance of Cayce’s redaction of father functions metaphorically as the disappearance, in the national narrative of /, of American global political actions, intelligible or not: history is part as Cayce’s mother tells her, “when the second plane hit, Win’s chagrin, his personal and professional mortification at this having happened […] of the narrative would have been such that he might simply have ceased, in protest, to exist” (). ese politically and publicly “disappeared” past actions echo politics of 9/11, the repression of June’s fetishization of George. Judith Butler argues that this redaction of history is part of the narrative politics of /, in which in which politics politics are not, themselves, narrated. I quote this argument at length to situate the history fetish in Pattern Recognition: are not, them- [A] frame for understanding violence emerges in tandem with selves, narrated. the experience, and […] the frame works both to preclude certain kinds of questions, certain kinds of historical inqui- ries, and to function as a moral justification for retaliation. […] ere is as well a narrative dimension to this explana- tory framework. In the United States, we begin the story by invoking a first-person narrative point-of-view, and telling what happened on September . It is that date and the unex- pected and fully terrible experience of violence that propels the narrative. If someone tries to start the story earlier, there are only a few narrative options. We can narrate, for instance, what Mohammed Atta’s family life was like, whether he was teased for looking like a girl, where he congregated in Ham- burg, and what led, psychologically, to the moment in which he piloted the plane into the World Trade Center. Or what was bin Laden’s break from his family, and why is he so angry? at kind of story is interesting to a degree, because it suggests that there is a personal pathology at work. It works as a plausible and engaging narrative in part because it resituates agency in terms of a subject, […] something that accords with our idea of personal responsibility […]. is is doubtless easier to hear than that a network of individuals dispersed across the globe conjured and implemented this action in various ways. […]

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Haslam.indd 96 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM Isolating the individuals involved absolves us of the necessity of coming up with a broader explanation for events. (–) e inability to narrate the “broader explanation,” the necessity of focusing on the personal instead of the political, the individual rather than social context, means that any sense of history must be erased (or, in Win, sublimated into a missing family member). e political past is a possible source of a form of secondary (Win’s/..) guilt, leading to its erasure, because a public acknowledgement of the existence of this past would challenge the power of the current national narrative. If Mary Richards is a passive-aggressive, inverted version of Big Brother, Win Pollard here is an echo of Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Winston. Win does not need the rats in the wire face-cage of Room  to help him chase away his rebellious concerns before his pre-determined “vaporization”; Win’s very existence is literally vaporized by the planes crashing through the steel mesh of the twin towers, just as his figurative existence as  “pre-war” intelligence must be vaporized to maintain the affective narrative of /. e past is not just malleable post /; it ceases to exist as an object of study and instead becomes a quasi-mystical fetish object. is disappearance of America’s role in the global context, indeed the disappearance of the global context per se, is perhaps figured best not by Gibson but by the most strange of all strange representations of /, in the X-Files spinoff,e Lone Gunmen (which, in some ways, owes a lot to Gibson’s earlier work: Gibson in fact co-wrote two X-Files episodes that featured the central characters of e Lone Gunmen). In the pilot episode, entitled (ironically, in this case) “Pilot,” which aired six months before /, a passenger airplane is hijacked and aimed at one of the World Trade Center towers, only to be pulled up at the last minute, missing the top of the tower by mere feet. e portrayal of this event is interesting—and chilling—on two levels: first, it shows exactly how disingenuous or out-of- touch the .. administration was being when Condoleezza Rice said, “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center […]; that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile” (“National Security Advisor”; this statement was made during a White House press briefing on  May , in response to a question about whether or not / should “be seen as an intelligence failure”). Second, in the episode, it is the .. government that hijacks the plane, by remote control, in order to increase arms sales and to create a sense of fear among the populace in an attempt to revoke civil liberties and privacy protections, in the name of national security (again, this episode was aired six months before /,

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Haslam.indd 97 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM about seven-and-a-half months before the  Act was passed). e episode, and Gibson’s novel, represents a post-Cold-War environment, where history is portrayed as no longer relevant and the global context is a constructed one, still in flux as various powers re-interpret history in an attempt to find a new stability. I do not bring e Lone Gunmen in to suggest by any means the reality of the conspiracy theory, nor to ascribe a prophetic nature to . What I do think both Gibson’s novel and e Lone Gunmen pilot highlight is the relationship between American isolationism and protectionism and the necessity of fear of the outside, and that this relationship, in turn, logically but paradoxically gives rise to American intervention and expansion.²⁰ is discussion ties into the fascination in American popular culture with conspiracy theories, a fascination that Gibson’s novel pathologizes into apophenia, from which Cayce suffers, and which is defined as the need to link disparate events into a cohesive narrative: apophenia is thus a condition that lies in the interstitial space between fiction and criticism, between cultural creation and cultural analysis, between the guilty action and the recognition of guilt. And, apophenia is a pathology that specifically requires a lack of history: the apopheniac can only link disparate events if the links are absent to begin with. e conspiracy theories about world events—and the cultural criticism thereof—only arise when the material connections are insufficient (or covered up), when the populace is denied (through its own or others’ devices) access both to the information sup- porting political decisions and to the decision makers, the condition of both Bellona and Gibson’s post-/ globe. As Gibson’s novel shows, however, it is precisely this lack of material history—and its mirroring silencing of guilty actions—that also drives the global market, leaving Cayce with her terror of the void that is Tommy Hilfiger. What draws Bigend to the footage isn’t the quality of its emotive or artistic content, but its very lack of a containing narrative. As Paul Virilio writes in his account of / and its contexts, “advertising in all its forms aspires to provide the entire terrain of social reality,” working to create “a new popular legitimacy” (),²¹ but only insofar as it is “dependant on  Delany has also explored this general dynamic, in a trilogy of short novels published together under the title e Fall of the Towers in , the year tenants began to occupy the . In this series, Delany explores a kingdom on the verge of collapse which creates a fictional war to maintain its top-heavy economic infrastructure—real people are signed up and killed under false pretences in a circular narrative of isolationism, fear, and attack.  I’m somewhat transforming Virilio’s discussion here, where he uses advertising to explain the judiciary, in order to tease out his underlying logic.

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Haslam.indd 98 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM simulators of proximity (TV, the Web, mobile phones) […], drawing […] on an imposture of immediacy that is more dystopian than ever” (). is popular legitimacy, in the theoretical framework created around /, is specifically not a public one, a legitimacy of the citizenry in any Lockean sense. As Habermas writes, Locke “tied the publicly promulgated law to a common consent” () whereas here “common consent” is created through popular promulgated publicity. “According to the liberal model of the public sphere,” Habermas writes, the institutions of the public engaged in rational-critical debate were protected from interference by public author- ity by virtue of their being in the hands of private people. To the extent that they were commercialized and underwent economic, technological, and organizational concentration, however, they have turned during the last hundred years into complexes of societal power, so that precisely their remaining in private hands in many ways threatened the critical functions of publicist institutions. () Gibson uses Bigend to portray the ultimate culmination of this perversion of the public sphere. Habermas states that while the “mass media”—which Gibson models through Bigend—have “attained an incomparably greater range and effectiveness” in the current period, they have also altered their relation to public opinion: “Whereas formerly the press was able to limit itself to the transmission and amplification of the rational-critical debate of private people assembled into a public, now conversely this debate gets shaped by the mass media to begin with” (). Bigend, likewise, wants to use the dissemination techniques of the footage in order to harness what he can only see as its “imposture of immediacy,” just as / appears as an immediate interior affect that nonetheless is constantly disseminated in the media and is used to create a sense of immediacy about a continual and all pervasive threat—Cayce finds commercial representations of / everywhere, including Japan and Russia. In Delany’s Dhalgren, this repression of material reality in the service of maintaining a mythic national narrative is joined to a fetishization of that which is repressed—the inner city and its classed and racialized others—and the psychological guilt felt over this desire leads to a silencing of the juridical guilt of the originary oppression. e same dynamic is at play in Gibson’s novel, but what is fetishized here is history itself. Cayce’s search for the maker of the footage not only emotionally parallels her search for her missing father, but both, in the end, turn out to be searches for the history of past global conflict (and both, in the end, help to further

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Haslam.indd 99 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM the dominant narrative of globalism). Cayce finally discovers the maker only by buying information from an ex-Anglo-Russian intelligence operative for the Americans who comes to symbolize the espionage narratives of the Cold War. e maker, in turn, is the niece of a powerful Russian businessman/oilman/mobster/ex-politico in the . e maker’s parents were murdered by her family’s business rivals, using an American-made claymore bomb that had been designed for use during the Cold War. Part of the bomb gets lodged in the maker’s brain, rendering her incapable of any communication beyond the editing of the footage, and the footage, it turns out, contains an encrypted diagram of that particular piece of ordinance, while the content of the clips is perhaps a timeless portrayal of her parents, outside of the context of the Cold War which ultimately killed them, outside of history: a negative exposure, if you will, of Cayce’s vision of the / attacks. Cayce’s discovery of the maker, then, involves a long and complex connection of the history of global conflict, especially the Cold War, the Russian War with Afghanistan, the new global oil market that is centred in an Afghan pipeline, and /, but also touching on the two World Wars and Vietnam. But, rather than being pieced together in a series of historical, causal links, as a “cure” to the simulacrum of the postgeographic market of information exchange, as a solution to the question of guilt (“Why did ‘they’ do this to ‘us’?”), Cayce fetishizes these events as objects of desire outside of material history. Cayce fetishizes a relation to “history” as a concept, rather than finding a series of material connections between events as part of a quest for an assertion of culpability. is fetishization is symbolized best, perhaps, by “the dig,” an event her friend Damien is filming, which “is a post-Soviet summer ritual involving feckless Russian youth, male […] who […] excavate the site of some of the largest, longest- running, and most bitterly contested firefights of WWII,” where they dig up the corpses looking especially, it seems, for Nazi memorabilia (). At one point, they find an intact Nazi fighter plane, complete with pilot, pre- served in mud, and, literally, in Damien’s words, “tore him apart, the pilot” in an effort to get souvenirs (). e images that Damien gives Cayce of the dig recall for her the destruction of /: “Heaps of bone. at initial seventeen stories of twisted, impacted girder. Funeral ash. at taste in the back of the throat” (). is connection, when combined with the facts of the dig’s obviously ritualistic and totemic nature, with its connection with the last worldwide imperial conflict and with Damien seeing the dig as “my version of the footage” (), renders this site of consumerist horror into the symbolic (silenced) centre of Cayce’s fetish of “history.”

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Haslam.indd 100 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM e novel furthers the dig’s symbolic nature when Cayce visits the site in the denouement of the novel, after Bigend has formed an alliance with the Russian oil magnates and power brokers, after she discovers the maker, and after the Russians, by way of payment for connecting them with Bigend, use the old  and new corporate spy networks to trace the last I recall here the moments of her father’s life, finally placing him in downtown Manhattan at the site of the attacks, thus legally proving his death. At the dig, echoes between she’d found herself, out of some need she hadn’t understood, this popular down in one of the trenches, furiously shoveling gray muck and bones, her face streaked with tears. Neither Peter nor Damien had asked her why, but she thinks now that if they rendition of had she might have told them she was weeping for her century, though whether the one past or the one present she doesn’t the trauma of know. (–) 9/11 and the act Her constant digging for the political past does not give Cayce a contextu- alized global narrative of the causes of, or culpability for, / but instead of criticism or culminates in her creation of a new form of historical timelessness, which mimics rather than critiques the new decontextualized narrative of global- analysis itself. ization, leaving her unsure as to which century she mourns. e circular nature of oppressive desire in Dhalgren, and of national security in e Lone Gunmen episode, becomes the circular nature of globalist simulation in Gibson’s novel. I recall here the echoes between this popular rendition of the trauma of / and the act of criticism or analysis itself. If apophenia is a form of criticism that denies history only to draw connections between disparate objects and events, then Cayce now finds herself lost in the theoretical end result of the denial of history discussed by Butler. Beyond the ability to create narrative connections, Cayce is rendered subject to the global (hi)story, subject to, rather than a conscious analyst of, those global marketing phenomena: at the end of the book, she is no longer allergic to Tommy Hilfiger. Like Dhalgren, Pattern Recognition offers us not a healing re-narration of trauma through which, as Butler argues, subjects can “come to understand ourselves as global actors, and acting within a historically established field” (); instead, both texts offer satirical narratives circling around a gap or hole of memory and history. Cayce’s digging for history is no more able to recreate a more fully public, more completely global narrative of history than Kid’s digging in the elevator shaft can recreate Bobby. Gibson’s novel takes this satire one step further, however. Following the paragraph that ends with her weeping for the past or present, the novel continues:

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Haslam.indd 101 9/6/2007, 10:05 AM And now it’s late, close to the wolfing hour of soul-lack. But she knows, lying curled here, behind [Peter], in the darkness of this small room, with the somehow liquid background sounds of Paris, that hers has returned, at least for the meantime, reeled entirely in on its silver thread and warmly socketed. She kisses his sleeping back and falls asleep. () e constant jet-lag this global player feels, described throughout the novel as “soul-delay,” ends at this moment. Instead of taking inspiration from the liberatory political revolutions of the past, Cayce is lulled into a dark, closeted space of unconsciousness at the end of the novel. Cayce is finally happy, happy to be lost in the new “universal,” guiltless history.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Joel Faflak, Julia M. Wright, and the anonymous readers of this essay for their comments. I would also like to thank audiences at the “Memory, Haunting, Discourse” conference (Karlstad University, Sweden), the Canadian Association for American Studies conference (Winnipeg), and Dalhousie University’s Crosscurrents Interdisciplinary Seminar Series for helpful questions on earlier versions. Finally, I would like to thank the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their continued support.

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