3 Sprawl Space
The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary lists the following under “sprawl”:
1 v.i. Orig., move the limbs in convulsive effort or struggle; toss about. Now, lie, sit, or fall with the limbs stretched out in an ungainly or awkward way; lounge, laze. […] b Of a thing: spread out or extend widely in a straggling way; be of untidily irregular form […]. (New Shorter OED 1993)
The second part of the entry refers to the transitive verb, for which the agency has shifted semantically and lies elsewhere, as “sprawl(ing)” is inflicted on something, and “usu[ally] foll[owed] by out” (ibid.), sig- nalling the expansiveness of the motion. As a noun, “sprawl” also oc- curs in combination with “urban” (meaning “Of, pertaining to, or con- stituting a city or town”) which renders “urban sprawl” as “the uncon- trolled expansion of urban areas” (ibid.). Considering the etymology, one might think that the notion of “sprawl” has relaxed with regard to living subjects as actants. When it comes to things, however, dead matter comes to life, things seem to appropriate agency and expand, taking up more space; or they already are where they should not be. The resulting form is a disorderly one that deviates from an established order: “Sprawl” usually refers to an outward movement and is not perceived as very pleasant or becoming. In short, most of the above may already explain why “sprawl” is of in- terest to cyberpunk and to William Gibson in particular: matter ac- quires lifelike agency and potentially decenters the subject; it moves in space and upsets a given order; it is messy. Sprawl may also mean that everything becomes city. Thinking “sprawl” with Gibson entails thinking about a site that he envisions as a scattered, multicentered metropolitan area that will grow together into one enormous city. This increasingly dense and ev- er expanding urban environment is in many ways a paradigmatic set- 48 No Maps for these Territories? ting for cyberpunk fiction.1 As Jameson observes, cyberpunk writing since the 1980s has branded a form of “dirty realism” favoring the ur- ban, where both “the traditional values of privacy” and “public space as such” had disappeared and were “replaced by the no-man’s-land of posturban infinite space and corporate property” (Jameson 1994: 158). This central setting of “no-man’s-land” called “the Sprawl” provides the name for William Gibson’s first trilogy, a loose succes- sion that includes Neuromancer (NM)(1984), Count Zero (CZ) (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (MLO) (1988).2 Capitalized and with a definite article, “the Sprawl” in Gibson’s work refers to the geographic area of the densely populated Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis (BAMA), an urban growth phenomenon that covers a large por- tion of the US American East Coast, although a national denomination is never mentioned. “The Sprawl” thus stands for a concrete geo- graphic setting in Gibson’s fiction, “sprawl” describes a specific process of urbanization independent of geographic location, and “sprawl-space”, in a more general sense, refers to a peculiar type of space informed by expansive urbanization. A brief digression is necessary to clarify this terminology, given that in secondary sources, confusion persists on the subject. Tatiani Rapatzikou’s book Gothic Motifs in the Fiction of William Gibson (2004), one of the few monographs on Gibson’s work, devotes a short subchapter to “the Sprawl” and its relation to the Gothic. Rapatzikou writes:
According to Michèl [sic] Foucault’s definition of the heteroclite (1970: xviii) [1970: xvii; KH], the Sprawl, the near future cityscape of Gibson’s novels, is depicted as a conglomeration of fragments coa- lesced together within a boundless space where there are no fixed boundaries and rigid models of representation. Gibson refers to it as Chiba, the Night City, presented in his Sprawl trilogy as a collage of
1 For even as Gibson left behind his more science fictional writing and emerged with singular success from the various squabbles on an alleged end of cy- bepunk, he maintained some of the distinct stylistic and thematic elements of the 1980’s avantgarde movement he had once helped to shape. One case in point, as I will here proceed to argue, is Gibson’s unwavering preference for the city as both setting and topic. 2 The Sprawl series includes also the 1986 short story collection Burning Chrome.