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 sug- gest that Dhalgren is any sort of map of that city, intentional ESC . (March ): – 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. | Haslam 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 criti- cism—they lie at the borders of the current argument. Memory’s Guilted Cage | 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 affec- tive 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” ().

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