"SOMETIMES IT FEELS LIKE THE WHOLE WORLD IS

SMEARED WITH VAZ": THE CHAOTIC FICTION OF JEFF NOON

A Thesis

Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of Master of Arts

in

English

University of Regina

By

Andrew Carter Wenaus

Regina, Saskatchewan

March 2009

Copyright 2009: Andrew Carter Wenaus Library and Archives Bibliotheque et 1*1 Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition

395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Canada Canada

Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-55052-6 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-55052-6

NOTICE: AVIS:

The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distribute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non­ support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats.

The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la these ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission.

In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these.

While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis.

1+1 Canada UNIVERSITY OF REGINA

FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES AND RESEARCH

SUPERVISORY AND EXAMINING COMMITTEE

Andrew Carter Wenaus, candidate for the degree of Master of Arts in English, has presented a thesis titled, "Sometimes it Feels Like the Whole World is Smeared with Vaz": The Chaotic Fiction of Jeff Noon, in an oral examination held on February 18, 2009. The following committee members have found the thesis acceptable in form and content, and that the candidate demonstrated satisfactory knowledge of the subject material.

External Examiner: Dr. Charity Marsh, Department of Media Production and Studies

Supervisor: Dr. Nicholas Ruddick, Department of English

Committee Member: Dr. Lynn Wells, Department of English

Committee Member: Prof. Samira McCarthy, Department of English, Campion College

Chair of Defense: Dr. Robin Ganev, Department of History i

ABSTRACT

The present work examines the fiction and poetry of contemporary experimental

British writer Jeff Noon through the critical lens of chaos theory. For Noon, chaos theory is not only a scientific theory but also an epistemological philosophy and a legitimation for artistic and literary experimentation, an aesthetic move Noon feels will be the savior of contemporary British literature. A study of two novels, Vurt (1993) and Falling out of

Cars (2002), and the experimental book of prose and poetry, Cobralingus (2001), demonstrates that Noon's writing project celebrates the artistic poignancy of finding meaning in disorder.

In the first chapter, I study Noon's unique application of the metaphors of fractal geometry in Vurt and how his use of this new spatial concept has an effect on literary content and form. I examine Noon's fascination with wordplay and the malleability of language through a writing game called the Cobralingus Engine in the chapter on

Cobralingus. The aesthetic process of this game whimsically appropriates concepts associated with communication theory to create a remarkable, complex, and beautiful kind of poetry and prose called "metamorphiction." In the final chapter on Falling out of

Cars, I look at Noon's use of the concept of "noise" in communication theory as a metaphor for the contemporary anxiety concerning the precariousness of memory and perception in an increasingly disordered world. Ultimately, this study concludes that not only are Noon's literary experiments masterfully successful, they represent a passionate and sincere desire to reevaluate and reinvigorate the experimental spirit in British literature. ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe countless thanks to Samira McCarthy and Lynn Wells for their astute criticisms,

observations, and invaluable insights. For making the study of science fiction literature

such a cogent intellectual pursuit, I thank my mentor and thesis supervisor, Nicholas

Ruddick, with whom it has been a prestigious privilege to work.

I am also particularly grateful to the University of Regina Department of English for offering me a teaching assistantship. For this, I express thanks to Ken Probert and Nils

Clausson.

I would also like to thank Andrew M. Butler for generously providing me access to his article, "Journeys beyond Being."

Also, I thank the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research at the University of

Regina for their assistance and guidance.

I express special gratitude to Jeff Noon for his generous permission to use images from Cobralingus.

Finally, my greatest thanks go out to my family and friends who have supported me both financially and with kind patience. iii

POST DEFENSE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to offer warm thanks to my external examiner, Charity Marsh, for making the defense such an informative, stimulating, and enjoyable experience. IV

DEDICATION

For Christina

With heartfelt gratitude and love V

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT i

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii

POST DEFENSE ACKNOWLEDGMENT iii

DEDICATION iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS v

INTRODUCTION , 1

FRACTAL NARRATIVE, PARASPACE, AND STRANGE LOOPS: THE PARADOX

OF ESCAPE IN VURT 9

METAMORPHICTION, INFORMATION THEORY, AND THE SEMIOTICS OF

CHAOS IN COBRALINGUS 38

FALLING OUT OF CARS: THE CHAOTICS OF PERCEPTION AND MEMORY 70

CONCLUSION 99

WORKS CITED 104

APPENDIX 112 1

INTRODUCTION

In 1994, Jeff Noon was awarded the Arthur C. Clarke Award for his boldly original debut

novel, Vurt (1993). In the subsequent year, he won the John W. Campbell Award for

Best New Writer. Since Vurt, Noon has published five novels,1 one collection of short

stories,2 a collection of avant-garde poetry,3 and a hypertext novel/writing game in

partnership with Steve Beard,4 and is currently coauthoring a hypertext novel/labyrinth

with Susanna Jones, Alison MacLeod, and William Shaw.5 Born in 1957 in Droylsden,

"a little town some eight miles outside of Manchester" (Noon, "Biography"), Noon's

artistic career has also encompassed painting, music, and play writing. Indeed, Noon's

entrance into the literary world was through the theatre;6 his play, Woundings1 (1986),

won the Mobil Prize. Upon the success of Woundings Noon "decided to give up painting

and music, and to concentrate purely on play writing, working mainly on [Manchester's]

local fringe theatre scene" ("Press Biography"). After taking a job at a Waterstone's

bookshop in Manchester to support himself, Noon was urged by Steve Powell, an ex-

o

colleague who had recently set up an independent publishing company, to write a novel.

Thus began Noon's professional writing career.

1 Pollen (1995), Automated Alice (1996), Nymphomation (1997), Needle in the Groove (2000), and Falling Out of Cars (2002). 2 Pixel Juice (1998). 3 Cobralingus (2001) 4 Mappalujo (2002); Noon notes in "Transmission>Reception: The Modern Word Interviews Jeff Noon" that he and Beard "are trying to do some more pieces, with a view to a book and all that. Mappalujo''s natural home is a book, I think, rather than the Web. The structure and process of the work becomes much more obvious on paper, with the ability to flip through the pages" (Santala). 5 217 Babel Street (2008). 6 Noon's interest in theatre remains active; four short stories were dramatized to form the play Alphabox which appeared on a BBC Radio 4 program titled "1000 Years of Spoken English," Vurt was adapted for the stage in 2000, The Modernists appeared in 2001, and the radio play Dead Code-Ghosts of the Digital Age aired on BBC Radio 3 in 2005. 7 Woundings was also adapted for the screen by Roberta Hanley in 1998. It was released in the US under the title Brand New World. 8 Ringpull Press. 2

Noon's fiction is marked by virtuosic wordplay, Borgesian9 themes, Carrollian10

whimsy, and the ability to handle chaotic contemporary themes with profound elegance.

Manchester features prominently in the majority of Noon's fiction—Falling out of Cars

is unique as it is Noon's only novel that does not take Manchester as its setting. The

process and philosophy of electronic music11—particularly the process of the remix—

also play a central role in Noon's aesthetic and creative approach to writing. Most

notable, however, is Noon's ability to take a central abstraction and, through spiraling

repetition and rigorous aesthetic and linguistic creativity, develop "something akin to a private vocabulary... a chamber of echoes where everyday words embrace new layers of

meaning and association" (Santala, "Introduction"). Yet despite the increasingly

experimental, nuanced, and elegant developmental path Noon's writing has taken in the

relation between chaotics and literature, his literary output remains critically neglected.

Exceptions to this critical disregard include Andrew M. Butler in 2008; a bio-critical

essay by David Ian Paddy in 2003; and Ann Weinstone's "Welcome to the Pharmacy:

Addiction, Transcendence, and Virtual Reality" (1997), a study of the link between

addiction, Baudrillardian "hyper-real transcendence," epistemological epiphany, and

virtual reality in the work of Noon, William S. Burroughs, William Gibson, and Pat

9 Noon writes that Borges' Collected Fictions (1999) is "[t]he mother lode. Better than food. There's a rumour going round that only his first dozen or so stories are the jewels. I thought this myself, until this giant cartography came out. All through his career, Borges was capable of mining a deep seam. Dark sparkles of narrative, magic charms. I see it as a vast storehouse of ideas, the best ideas ever. I mean that. Ain't nobody coming near" (Noon, "Jeff Noon's Top 10 Fluid Fiction Books). 10 Noon includes The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carroll, edited by Martin Gardner in his "Top 10 Fluid Fiction Books," second only to Jorge Luis Borges' Collected Fictions. Noon explains, "[t]wo nightmare destinations. Wonderland and Looking Glass. The more I read these books, the darker they shine. Gardner picks at the invocation, without breaking the spell. They's stuff in here you don't even know about, nobody does. Carroll operates on language like a cruel, crazy surgeon. Beyond the wordplay, check out Alice's own explanation of the Jabberwocky poem: 'Somebody killed something.' Scary stuff" (Noon). 11 The influence of music on Noon's work, particularly the practice of the remix, is a topic of much exciting discussion. However, this aspect of Noon's aesthetic is dealt with only in passing as it strays somewhat from the main focus of this thesis: the relationship between Noon's fiction and chaos theory. 3

Cadigan. Val Gough's "A Crossbreed Loneliness? Jeff Noon's Feminist Cyberpunk"

(2000) examines in impressive depth an apparent "feminist cyberpunk sensibility" in

Noon's first four novels—a trajectory that she argues remains underdeveloped: "Noon's

work shows that cyberpunk can begin to pursue the radical possibilities of feminist

thinking. However, as long as cyberpunk's post-humanism occurs within a heterosexual

matrix, its critique of existing social structures will remain necessarily limited" (Gough

126). Noon's third novel, Automated Alice, has captured the attention of Carroll

scholars—such as Will Brooker in Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture

(2004) and Jennifer Kelso Farrell in her dissertation Synaptic Boojums: Lewis Carroll,

Linguistic Nonsense, and Cyberpunk (2007). The novel is also engagingly examined by

Joanne Benford in Through the Screen Wildly: The Aesthetic of the Sublime Wilderness—

Towards a Postmodern Wildzone (2008), an excellent study of postmodern aesthetics and

poetics, the postmodern city, posthumanism and cyborgs. While these articles valuably

situate Noon generically, thematically and theoretically, they do not address the aesthetic

relationship between chaotics and literature in Noon's fiction.

However, to speak of a unified system of knowledge as the guiding principle of

Noon's explicitly postmodern "liquid fiction" would prove misleading. Marked by radical fragmentation of form and narrative strategies that decompose reality, Noon's

fiction demands a readership "adept at riding the multiple layers of information" of a

"fluid society" (Noon, "Post Futurism"). Noon rejects much of the apocalypticism often

associated with literature depicting the postmodern condition. Rather, according to the penultimate sentence of his most recent novel Falling out of Cars (2002), he finds that in the chaotic flux of contemporary existence "possibilities abound" (344). "I'm a real 4

optimist, I really am, I'm one of the last," Noon asserts in an interview with Michael

Silverblatt. He claims that his optimism stems from advancements in twentieth-century

science and their applications to art:

What's happening in the twentieth century is that scientists have taken over the

realms of the imagination... And you see that again and again with chaos theory,

complexity theory, relativity... The universe became strange and was proven to be

strange... It's almost.. .as though poetry had entered the universe... and I think the

artists and writers have been lagging behind. ("Interview")

For Noon, the scientific community legitimated his admiration of the experimental spirit.

He feels it is both sensible and appropriate for contemporary writers to take strange and poetic approaches to literature. He is not interested in the literal links between science and literature; rather, he celebrates the scientific conclusions that the universe is strange

and mysterious. This sentiment fuels Noon's desire to turn to contemporary scientific theories for aesthetic guidance. In other words, his appropriation of chaos theory is purely figurative.

Chaos theory was developed in the scientific community to examine, as James Gleick remarks in Chaos: Making a New Science (1987), "the irregular side of nature, the discontinuous and erratic side" (3). Moreover, chaos theory attempts to locate inherent order in seemingly random data; these ideas have since permeated the humanities. N.

Katherine Hayles has applied the implications of chaos theory to texts by authors such as

Henry Adams, Stanislaw Lem, and Doris Lessing; Gordon Slethaug has examined John

Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Don DeLillo; and Ira

Livingston, from a Deleuzian-Guattarian perspective, has applied chaos theory to the 5

Romantics. Despite Noon's interest in chaos theory, literary critics are yet to examine his

fiction from the perspective of chaotics—a term "used to talk about the implications of

chaos theory in the broad cultural context" (Slethaug xii). Hayles argues in Chaos Bound

(1990) that "information theory and poststructuralism concur in assigning a positive

value to chaos. But where scientists see chaos as the source of order, poststructuralists

appropriate it to subvert order" (176). Hayles argues that the scientific and literary

applications of chaos theory share many suppositions and methodologies, a circumstance

"that can hardly be explained without the assumption that both are part of a common

episteme" (176). She suggests that "deconstruction shares with chaos theory the desire to breach the boundaries of classical systems by opening them to a new kind of analysis in which information is created rather than conserved" (176). Noon, though he admits he is not concerned with science or scientific accuracy, is attracted to the optimism of the

scientists and information theorists vis-a-vis chaotics. In Noon's appropriation of chaotics, chaos and order are inextricably linked together in a complex and dynamic dialectic. In other words, Noon envisions the chaotic universe, not as an opportunity to rupture arbitrary structures, but as Hayles puts it, as a "complex configuration within which order is implicitly encoded" (25).

Noon's fiction is marked by the author's adherence to representational strategies more appropriate than realism to a chaotic universe. The narrative of Vurt, for example, constantly and vertiginously shifts from seemingly ordered situations to uncannily self- similar and chaotic systems, while Falling out of Cars consists of non-linear journal entries which shift unpredictably from first to third person narration. However, what is more striking about Noon's fiction is the manner by which chaotics is applied, not only to 6

form, but also to content and subject-matter. In an interview Noon said, "I see art as an

experimentation with subject-matter" (Southern). Speaking of the experimental technique

of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, who "treated the history of jazz as a subject matter, and

took bits, and produced a collage out of it," Noon said, "I think... what Vurt was trying to

do was to excite people with the subject matter, rather than the weirdness of the language.

Any games that I have with the language is all to do with promoting the subject matter"

(Southern). Here, Noon is explicitly addressing the use of metaphor as a game and how

such a game may be used to apply chaotics to content.

Noon accomplishes this experiment with both form and content through a language

game he terms "metamorphiction." The game is first introduced in Noon's experimental

book of poetry, Cobralingus. A portmanteau word fusing metamorphosis and fiction,

metamorphiction imagines a sample piece of text transcoded or mutated into a new,

linguistically related sample of writing. Cobralingus introduces the Cobralingus Engine,

an imaginary interface through which the literary experimentation is manifest. In

Cobralingus, Noon subjects the text to a variety of processes of metamorphosis and

change influenced by electronic music remix production, genetic recombination, and communication theory. Despite the mechanical metaphors used to refer to it, the game is purely imaginative and is executed without the intervention of technological gadgetry.

Following the alteration of the original text, the interim stages of the text's metamorphosis, and the final stage of the text, the Cobralingus Engine functions as a template to examine mutations of textual form and how this change may affect its

subsequent relation to content; the results are profound, exciting, and often highly amusing. 7

In this thesis, I will demonstrate how Noon applies chaos theory to create a new type of literary fiction: metamorphiction. In the first chapter, I will look closely at the role of form, metaphor, and content in Noon's debut novel, Vurt. Through selected close readings from the text I will suggest that the novel's movement from order to disorder and finally towards a new order suggests that the structure of Vurt may function mimetically according to a contemporary mindset responding to the reality proposed by chaos theory. In this way, Noon experiments with literary and narrative form by reinterpreting the paradoxical narrative spaces of virtual reality as mediated by the metaphors of fractal geometry. I will explore the relationship between metaphor and content, through the trope of conflict between order/chaos and meaning/absurdism, and by applying Douglas Hofstadter's theory of consciousness and his concept of the "strange loop." These tropes may cast light on the complexities of the characters' intense desires to escape and, as Noon suggests, "fac[e] up to the realities of what it is [they're] trying to escape from" (Johnston). Accordingly, chaos functions as a reminder of the complexity and turbulence inherent in human relationships. Vurt may be regarded as Noon's first successful attempt to use chaos theory to explore cacophony in both life and literature.

In the second chapter I will discuss Noon's experimental book of poetry,

Cobralingus, giving particular attention to the language game associated with metamorphiction as a way of understanding the author's application of chaotics to poetry.

By adopting the metaphorical processes of genetic mutation, remix, and the disorder associated with general communication systems in information theory, Noon offers thoroughly fascinating ways of understanding the aesthetic possibilities of language and signification. The semiotic model inherent in Cobralingus is a means of reconciling 8

systems of signification with unpredictability, mutation, and flux and owes something to

N. Katherine Hayles' concept of the "flickering signifier." This imaginative aesthetic

strategy, rather than one that applies mathematics or technology to produce innovative texts, suggests that Noon finds literary order implicit in chaos. Ultimately, Noon in

Cobralingus uses chaos theory to reinvigorate poetry.

In the third chapter I will examine Falling out of Cars, Noon's most recent novel, with attention to his use of the concept of noise in communication theory as a metaphor for contemporary anxiety concerning the relationship between literature, perception, and memory in an environment of disorder and excess. Noise here refers to unwanted sound that disrupts a signal—a phenomenon which occurs in the nonfigurative space between a transmitter and a receiver. While the main theme of the novel is the contemporary threat posed by the distortion of semiotics in the field of communication, Noon handles the experimental narrative with a paradoxical elegance. Falling out of Cars illustrates

Noon's increasingly sophisticated approach to the literary representation of chaos: in his exploration of the theme of loss and mourning Noon reveals that constancy—both perceptive and mnemonic—is, at best, extremely precarious, for the most delicate changes may initiate enormous effects. In my view, Falling out of Cars marks Noon's highest achievement. On the one hand, the protagonist, Marlene, is unable to experience consolation for her mourning and is thus left in a disordered emotional and intellectual state. Yet, the novel concludes by suggesting that uncertainty, turbulence, disruption, and disorder do not necessarily impede meaning, but may open up diverse and radical possibilities for new meaning. Falling out of Cars may be read as a celebration of chaos as a means to the salvation of contemporary fiction. 9

FRACTAL NARRATIVE, PARASPACE, AND STRANGE LOOPS:

THE PARADOX OF ESCAPE IN VURT

Both the narrative structure and the subject-matter of Noon's debut novel Vurt (1993)

display recursive patterns of self-reference and self-similarity. Vurt, like most of Noon's

fiction, is marked by the author's adherence, not to traditional literary conventions of

realistic representation through realism, but to representational strategies more

appropriate to a chaotic and irregular universe. Brian McHale and Gordon Slethaug

argue that, despite the remarkably unrealistic, even anti-realistic, quality of much of the

content of postmodern writing, it nevertheless "turns out to be mimetic after all.. .at the

level of form" (McHale 38). Vurf s structural shifts towards unpredictability through

narrative self-similarity and the protagonist's syntactic feedback loops leading to his

eventual apotheosis are formally mimetic in their dependency on a reality projected by

chaos theory.12 In the structure, subject-matter, and choice of metaphors in Vurt, the

influence of chaotics is positively evident.

Generically, Vurt is often described as a cyberpunk novel, though Andrew M. Butler

in "Journeys beyond Being" (2008) is more accurate in describing it as "cyberpunk-

flavoured in the way that some food tastes, looks and feels like chocolate, but it is not in

fact chocolate" (3). He also notes that in Vurt "there is less of a sense that [Noon] is writing consciously within a cyberpunk tradition" (3). Tony Keen writes in "Feathers

into an Underworld" (2006) that the cyberpunk elements of the novel function primarily as "surface gloss" (101). What is clear, however, is that Vurt does not conform to any rigid generic definition. Perhaps the most poignantly effective description of the novel

In Aristotelian mimesis, as outlined in Poetics, representation favours unified action and probable causes. 10 can be found in Michaela Bushell's terse and accurate phrase, "jarringly original," in The

Rough Guide to Cult Fiction (2005) (184).

The title of the novel refers to a virtual realm that individuals can enter by placing hallucinogenic Vurt13 feathers into their mouths. In describing the experience of being inside the Vurt realm, Noon synthesizes narrative techniques suitable to describe experiencing drug induced hallucinations, playing video games, watching body horror films, and reading nature poetry. The novel alternates between the first person narration of Scribble, the protagonist, and, as Butler notes in Cyberpunk (2000), "hints, tips, and evasions of Game Cat" (65).14 The premise of the story itself is rather simple. A group of

Vurt feather15 addicts—Beetle, Scribble, Mandy, Bridget—are in search of ever- increasingly potent feathers as a means of escaping both from themselves and the dystopian Manchester in which the novel takes place. Scribble, the narrator and protagonist, is also on a quest to rescue his sister/lover, Desdemona, from a Vurt realm

Ron Hogan notes that the word "Vurt...was initially a stopgap, a word that Noon was using instead of 'virtual reality' until he could come up with a better name; the substitute was so odd-sounding that it stuck" (Hogan). 14 The Game Cat sections, or mini-chapters, of the novel are typically dedicated to cryptically explaining various Vurt feathers; these are, presumably, excerpts from the Game Cat magazine. The magazine excerpts are a mixture of street wit and Cheshire Cat-like riddles, delivered in the tone of video game magazines from the early- and mid-1990s. Furthermore, the Game Cat, as a character, lives permanently in the Vurt. Intermittently, he appears to impart hints—both to direct Scribble on his quest and to uncover critical narrative information for the reader—through riddles and philosophical aphorisms. Overall, the Game Cat is certainly a Cheshire Cat character and one of many Carrollian archetypes that both ornament and inform Noon's fiction. 15 The use of the feather as the central metaphor for escape and access to virtual realities is striking for both its contrasting delicacy amidst Noon's violently chaotic Manchester and its polysemous mobility. The feather metaphor is part of a profound and unique linguistic game that appears to be at work in the novel, evident when one considers the word's Old French cognate, "plume." The feather/plume metaphor consequently takes on three points of significance that inform the novel. The first metaphorical meaning points directly to a central image of chaos, a plume of smoke. Gleick describes this chaotic image: "A plume of smoke rises smoothly from an ashtray, accelerating until it passes a critical velocity and splinters into wild eddies" (122). This connection between the feather and a plume of smoke is visually signified in the cover art of the 2001 Pan Macmillan edition which displays a feather fissioning "into wild eddies" according to the nature of a plume of smoke. The second two metaphorical meanings are closely linked: that of a plume as a writing implement and as a verb, to plume, which refers to a feeling of ease or satisfaction with oneself. In this sense, accessing virtual reality as a means towards escape or consolation is equated with the act of writing which lends an elegiac tone to the novel. 11 that can be accessed through a feather called "Curious Yellow." Desdemona, while in a

Vurt called "English Voodoo," entered another Vurt realm, a meta-Vurt. In "Curious

Yellow," Desdemona is pulled under the earth of a garden and disappears. When

Scribble returns from the Vurt without his sister, he notices the Thing-from-Outer-Space, a Vurt Being who functions as a substitute for Desdemona via a rule of exhange, Hobart's rule.17 When Scribble ultimately finds his sister/lover in a Vurt realm, he exchanges himself for her—that is, she can return to the real world while he must stay in the Vurt.

In this way, the novel is, as Butler and Keen both note, a retelling of the Orpheus and

Eurydicemyth.18

A striking aspect of the narrative is that it is framed by two actions. The sentence, "A young boy puts a feather into his mouth" (Noon 1), precedes the first chapter, while the last chapter ends, ".. .a young boy takes a feather out of his mouth" (327). As Butler notes ("Journeys Beyond Being" 14), this framing device suggests that the whole narrative may be the Vurt hallucination of an unnamed young boy. In part, the novel's remove from ordinary reality lends itself to a narrative structure that moves between

While the name of this feather evokes the 1967 Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow), directed by Vilgot Sjoman, there is no explicit connection between the significance of the feather and the film. 17 The Game Cat explains this logic of exchange: "Sometimes we lose precious things. Friends and colleagues, fellow travelers in the Vurt, sometimes we lose them; even lovers we sometimes lose. And get bad things in exchange: aliens, objects, snakes, and sometimes even death. Things we don't want. This is part of the deal... all things, in all worlds, must be kept in balance" (69). The Game Cat provides Hobart's rule, in equation form: "R = V + or - H, where H is Hobart's constant. In the common tongue; any given worth of reality can only be swapped for the equivalent worth of Vurtuality, plus or minus 0.267125 of the original worth. Yes my kittlings, it's not about weight or volume or surface area. It's about worth. How much the lost ones count, in the grand scheme of things. You can only swap back those that add up to something, within Hobart's constant. Like for Like, give or take 0.267125" (69). Weinstone, examining the Western literary link between drug addiction and transcendence, argues that the "H" in Hobart's rule may be slang for heroin (82). Consequently, she argues that there is a literary tradition in which "junk" rhetoric is commodity rhetoric (81) and links Hobart's rule to William Burroughs' pseudoscience of drug addiction that suggests "transcendence is for sale, and the price of admission is addiction" (82). 18 Joan Gordon's "Yin and Yang Duke It Out" in Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Postmodern Science Fiction (1991), though primarily a discussion of feminist issues in cyberpunk, equates the journey into virtual reality with the mythic trope of journeying into the underworld. 12

Vurts, meta-Vurts, meta-meta-Vurts, and so on ad infinitum. In other words, the narrative of Vurt occurs entirely within a virtual space that shifts into more remote virtual spaces. Consequently, the relation between ontological realities and narrative structure in

Vurt are not transparent and must be conceptualized carefully. Additionally, Vurt demands an epistemic shift in thinking about ontological spaces and narrative structure.

Chaos theorists developed fractal geometry as a supplement to Euclidean geometry in order to examine irregular and complex structures in nature. Fractals are shapes or structures that display detail at any degree of magnification. The term fractal, coined by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot in 1975, is derived from the Latin adjective fractus,

"from the verb fragere, to break." Mandelbrot found two English cognates, fracture and fraction, that communicated the proper connotations (Gleick 98). An interesting feature of fractal structures is that they may be conceptualized as a feedback where the length of the loop curve is infinite while the structure itself only occupies a finite amount of space.

Gleick sites one of the most simplistic fractal structures, the Koch curve,19 to illustrate this paradox. Gleick describes how this structure may be constructed: "begin with a triangle with sides of length 1. At the middle of each side, add a new triangle one-third the size; and so on. The length of the boundary is 3 X 4/3 X 4/3 X 4/3...—infinity. Yet the area remains less than the area of a circle drawn around the original triangle. Thus an infinitely long line surrounds a finite area" (99). The second notable feature of a fractal shape is the quality of self-similarity. Gleick explains self-similarity as

symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside pattern... Monstrous

shapes like the Koch curve display self-similarity because they look exactly the

19 See Appendix. 13

same even under high magnification. The self-similarity is built into the

technique of constructing the curves—the same transformation is repeated at

smaller and smaller scales. Self-similarity is an easily recognizable quality. Its

images are everywhere in the culture: in the infinitely deep reflection of a person

standing between two mirrors, or in the cartoon notion of a fish eating a smaller

fish eating a smaller fish eating a smaller fish. (103)

From a literary standpoint, fractals are of particular value as metaphors for postmodern structures. N. Katherine Hayles in Chaos Bound (1990) argues that postmodern spaces20 and structures are those that cannot be described using traditional

Cartesian models. Not only is fractal geometry, Hayles suggests, "emerging as an

important area of research because it is one way of conceptualizing and understanding postmodern space," it is also "a source of this space" (289). Likewise, the fractal quality of self-similarity on all scales of succession of iterations is of interest for examining narrative structures that shift in and out of various levels of virtual reality, particularly in the narrative of Vurt which occurs entirely within virtual postmodern spaces.

Ultimately, the postmodern space expressed in Vurt is familiar to the reader through

fractal geometry while it concurrently estranges reality both through surreal events and unpredictable structure and subject-matter. Fractal geometry is the inspiration for some of the ontological realities and postmodern space that Noon explores in Vurt.

20 Hayles cites Jean Baudrillard's precession of simulacra "where there are only copies of copies in an endless display of self-similar forms" none of which can be considered the original, and William Gibson's cyberspace where human beings and computers become "equally sentient entities vying for control of a space that is very real but entirely different from everyday life" as two examples of postmodern spaces (Hayles 289). 21 And time too: Scribble, who at the end of the novel is now living permanently in a Vurt realm as a result of his apotheosis, writes: "I'm forty-one now. I feel about twenty-five or so. Look it, too. Living in Vurt really slows down the rate of change. God knows how old the Game Cat is. He looks a youthful fifty" (321, italics in original). Consequently, time in the virtual reality is simply "slowed down" yet conceptually analogous to the time otherwise ordinarily experienced. 14

Hayles suggests that Jean-Francois Lyotard's theory of paralogy22 in The Postmodern

Condition (1984) may suggest a way to critically examine virtual space. An

experimental and somewhat paradoxical melange of "fractal geometry, quantum

mechanics, catastrophe theory, and Godel's theorem" (Hayles 215), paralogy is an

inventive hermeneutics that privileges local over global knowledge and promotes a shift

from universal grand narratives to localized little narratives. As Bill Readings notes in

Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics (1991),

narratives [little and meta-] clash by virtue of the syntagmatic displacement of

preceding narratives by the next, without any narrative claiming paradigmatically

to replace all preceding ones by incorporation and negation. That is to say

narratives are to be understood metonymically rather than metaphorically. This

underlines the distinction of Lyotard's account of narrative from that of

narratology, for which the syntagmatic functioning of narrative is understood

precisely insofar as it is transformed into a metaphor for something else.. .in the

expanded field of little narratives any one language element speaks after

preceding ones, not about them... This is what Lyotard refers to in The

Postmodern Condition as the 'horizon of dissensus', in which consensus is never

reached but [is] always displaced by a new paralogical narrative, which does not

aim at installing a new consensus but evoking a further paralogical move—its

own displacement. (68-69)

22 Lyotard's concept of paralogy implements a form of resistance against the risk of totalitarianism in technocratic late capitalist society where a select group may control and exploit electronic databases. Paralogy, as a theoretical way of emancipating postmodern culture from technocratic totalitarianism, is unsuccessful insomuch as the concept, as Hayles suggests, "is akin to social Darwinism, in that it confuses scientific theories with social programs" (Hayles 215). Furthermore, the validity of Lyotard's conclusion in The Postmodern Condition—that paralogy may "wage war on totality" (Lyotard 82)—is highly questionable in light of the fact that the scientific disciplines which Lyotard appropriates are fundamentally in conflict with Lyotard's program. 15

A paralogical argument is in a continual state of change—final consensus is impossible,

though agreement may occur provisionally—and legitimation of ideas is subject to

perpetual debate. Lyotard proposes in The Postmodern Condition that

we no longer have recourse to the grand narratives—we can resort neither to the

dialectic of Spirit nor even to the emancipation of humanity as a validation for

[postmodernism]... the little narrative remains the quintessential form of

imaginative invention... the principle of consensus as a criterion of validation

seems to be inadequate. (60)

However, Hayles argues that paralogy fails to acknowledge that the scientific disciplines

appropriated by Lyotard gesture towards the universal, rather than towards the local and provisional. That is, the scientific theories, in contradistinction to the philosophical

concept they inform, tend to be fervently committed to universality (Hayles 215). There

remains, however, some validity in the paralogical emphasis on scale and in the shift

from global systems to locality. Consequently, the relation between scientific concepts

such as fractal geometry and the postmodern space expressed in Vurt establishes the

fundamental matrix through which one may approach the novel's structure and subject- matter. Paralogy's appropriation of fractal geometry becomes, in this sense, of particular interest in the examination of the setting of Vurt as a postmodern, or paralogical, space.

On a more literary level, Butler's discussion of virtual realms in "Journeys beyond

Being" focuses on Samuel R. Delany's concept of "paraspace." This concept usefully

links Lyotardian paralogy more explicitly to the literature of virtual reality. Delany uses the term in a 1987 interview with Takayuki Tatsumi as a means of talking about many of the complexities and paradoxes of cyberspace in novels such as William Gibson's 16

Neuromancer (1984). Like the local, provisional emphasis of paralogical narratives that

"speak after" not about other narratives, Delany argues that paraspaces "are not in a hierarchical relation—at least not in a simple and easy hierarchical relation—to the narratives' 'real,' or ordinary, space" (Delany 168). Furthermore, concerning the rhetorical shift that occurs in postmodern space, Delany suggests that

this alternative space is a place where we actually endure, observe, learn, and

change—and sometimes die. With these paraspaces the plot is shaped, as it were,

to them. And inside them, the language itself undergoes changes—the language

the writer uses to describe what happens in it is always shifted, is always rotated,

is always aspiring toward the lyric. (168)

Indeed, this metamorphosis in both language and character that represents the shift towards paraspace occurs frequently in Vurt.

The paraspatial narrative places an emphasis on observation, knowledge, and change and is precisely in accord with what Noon wishes to accomplish in his novel. In a transcription of a live correspondence between Noon and some fans on the Guardian

Unlimited website, Noon explains the function of drugs such as the Vurt feathers in his fiction: "I use drugs as a metaphor for change, a way of forcing my characters into a new way of being" (Noon, "Transcript: Jeff Noon Live Online"). Consequently, Noon writes that

My interest in playing with words as a medium in their own right, for instance, is

nothing to do with the influence of drugs, as it was for Burroughs, but entirely to

do with my love of dub reggae and the mysteries of the remix. I've arrived at a

similar place by an entirely different route. Most of the time, I don't even know 17

I'm walking a particular route until I'm well down the way. There's no theory

involved. Slowly, over the years, book by book, a map comes into being. It's a

map of smoke. (Santala, "Transmission>Reception: The Modern Word Interviews

JeffNoon")

In other words, Noon's metaphorical drugs facilitate the rhetorical shift toward the

narrative paraspace.

The lyric quality of Noon's writing is both elegant and accomplished. While Vurt is

most often compared to Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange (1962) and William

Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), David V. Barrett, in his review of Vurt in the New

Statesman, appropriately remarks that "in places it has the lyricism of Elizabeth Smart's

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, mixed with the weird and wild fun of

Chester Anderson's cult hippy-SF novel The Butterfly Kid and the streetwise cynicism of

Kurt Vonnegut at his best" (41). Joanne Benford suggests that, by acknowledging the

"full potentialities of the processes of communication in the new electronic cosmos,"

Noon

seeks to develop a poetic language which will resituate the book within this new

communicative cosmos, while simultaneously recognising the drive toward the

development of the theoretically all-inclusive, all-encompassing medium, 'virtual

reality'. Since the action takes place in a dreamworld, Noon can produce an

impressively prophetic imaginary prototype for the virtual worlds of the future.

His dreamworld places the reader within an aural sphere, accompanied by kinetic

and gestural components that arise from effects of rhythm and intonation realised

through the visual act of reading... Noon's practice and his theoretical orientation 18

imply that as the road to cyberspace unfolds, the very nature of the word, the

image, and the icon also changes. (165)

However, as both Butler and Keen have noted, since the entire narrative of Vurt is arguably estranged from "ordinary" reality, inasmuch as it is likely occurring as a young boy's feather hallucination, the reader may be more apt to think differently about the novel's conception of space. Cyberspace is presumably always already unfolding in the narrative of Vurt. That is, Noon's framing device suggests that even the apparently non- hallucinatory scenes in Vurt may be the hallucinations of the otherwise unnamed "young boy" and consequently occur only in simulations of ordinary space—this accounts for the ubiquity of lyricism in the novel. The space in which the entire narrative of Vurt takes place is analogous to the estrangement the reader experiences as a character in the novel undergoes the hallucinations from a feather. In this sense, all Vurt feather hallucination scenes in the novel take place in a meta-Vurt, while the evidently "meta-Vurt" scenes induced by the "Curious Yellow" feather (80) take place in what is actually "meta-meta-

Vurt." The spatial structure of Vurt may be systematized as follows. First, there is the real, non-fictional space in which the reader and the physical book exist. The fictional space of the young boy, i.e. Vurfs narrative, constitutes the primary virtual space. The secondary virtual spaces correspond to the hallucinations experienced by fictional characters in the Vurt narrative. The tertiary virtual spaces are those in which feathers are consumed by characters already in a secondary virtual space. This structural succession, presumably, continues ad infinitum. Ultimately, Delany's conception of paraspace figures in Vurt as both a rhetorical manifestation of Lyotard's concept of paralogy and 19

according to the metamorphosis of language that signals the transitions between spatial

levels.

Take the first Vurt feather hallucination scene in the novel, for example. Scribble,

The Beetle, Mandy, Bridget, and the Thing-from-Outer-Space are occupying what they believe to be an apartment building in ordinary space. The Stash Riders have returned to their apartment; it is characterized by typically unremarkable objects that one may find in such a room, "a settee," a "window," a "Turkish rug" (26), a "kitchen" (27), etc.

However, when Beetle force-feeds Scribble a "Skull Shit" feather (27), the half-willing victim notes: "I could feel it there, tickling, making me want to gag. And then the Vurt kicked in. And then I was gone. I felt the advurts roll, and then the credits" (29). At this moment, the reader's conception of space in this episode is radically altered, though the characters themselves never physically move through space. The following is Scribble's description of the transformation of the nondescript apartment room:

Screaming down tunnels of brain flesh, putting thoughts together, building words

and cries, cries of the heart. Electric impulses, leading me on, the room

wallpapered in reds and pinks, blood all flowing down from the ceiling. Brid

hiding behind the settee. The Beetle taking Mandy from behind the Turkish rug. A

Thing-from-Outer-Space floating in the air, gently landing on the dining table. Me

walking through a swamp of flesh towards the kitchen door, in search of breakfast

cereal. Stepping over Beetle and Mandy, finding the kitchen door locked and

barred, looking just like a wall of beef. Blood pulsing from the keyhole. (29)

What is notable about this first description of a Vurt hallucination is that Scribble carefully attributes a hallucinatory reality to the typical objects in the apartment room. 20

The reader is almost certain that the narrative has not moved into another physical locale,

yet at the same time remains confident that the space the narrative continues to inhabit

has been altered, shifted or reapplied in some way. Rather, the narrative has been relocated in the sense that it has moved from one fractal iteration to another. While the characteristics of the preceding iteration—such as the objects in the room—remain present, they are altered by a successive recursion of descriptive ornamentation. The metamorphosed narrative may supposed to be occurring in a paraspace; location has been transformed while objects, orientation, and characters retain self-similarity.

Paraspace in Vurt demands a different way of approaching the conceptualization of fictional setting. It would be fundamentally misleading to imagine the paraspace of Vurt mapped according to Cartesian grid principles and characterized by well ordered and predictably structured patterns. Hayles and Gleick use the analogy of movement through an urban space with the help of maps and Cartesian grids that display predictable and regularly spaced streets (Hayles 288-289, Gleick 97). While the cityscape can be coded as Cartesian grids, the grids in turn legitimate the cityscape, suggesting a feedback loop of epistemic validation. Epistemically, Cartesian grids serve a similar function as fractal geometry: the two types of geometry serve as tools for conceptualizing space and ultimately become a source for creating fictional versions of space. However, this feedback loop of legitimation no longer functions appropriately when confronted with complex systems such as natural processes or, on the other hand, postmodern spaces such as virtual reality (Hayles 289). Scribble notes that what we all want is "a squaring of the tides" (Noon 201), recognizing the incompatibility between his desire for simple

Euclidian order and the tidal imagery of the flux between chaos and order which 21 characterizes the world in which he exists. Ultimately, attempting to understand the postmodern space such as that exemplified by Vurt through ordered and sequentially predictable Cartesian grids will be hermeneutically vain.

The metamorphosis of objects in the room at the apartment building consequently provides the first example of how paraspace functions in the narrative of Vurt. The settee, the Turkish rug, and the kitchen do not, for example, become clocks or clouds.

Rather they remain, in some objective sense, the same objects, therefore confirming the self-similarity of the room before, during, and after the characters engage in taking the

"Skull Shit" feather. The reader is certainly aware that the room and its objects are structurally similar to how they were before the Scribble's narrative shifts to represent a

Vurt hallucination. Likewise, the characters are not radically different, but rather are subject to a narrative recursion and subsequent transformation. The narrative technique that Noon employs in order to effectively represent paraspace in Vurt is akin to the way the process of recursive iteration functions in the examination of the infinite self-similar complexity of fractal structures.

Mathematically, iteration is rather simple. Leonard Smith describes it in Chaos: A

Very Short Introduction (2007) thus: "you put a number in and you get a new number out, which you put back in, to get yet newer number out, which you put back in. And so on" (Smith 33). In other words, the process involves the repetitive application of a specified algorithm or preceding formula in terms of itself. For fractal geometry, recursive iteration allows scientists to both produce and examine the infinitely complex and self-similar structures that fractals represent. Perhaps a simpler way of understanding the process involves imagining a succession of repeated dependent processes or instructions to the process itself towards a desired result. It is this process

that Noon translates into a narrative technique. Indeed, Scribble does not move into a

new space that can be conceptualized according to Cartesian grids; he is not, for example,

moved in terms of coordinates from the room to the Arctic Circle. Nevertheless, an

explicit shift of some sort certainly occurs, evident at the narrative level. The result of

narrative recursive iteration is one of apparent radical dislocation, from a paraspace to a

self-similar paraspace—the movement from Vurt to a meta-Vurt. That is, there is a shift

from a typical apartment room to the self-similar organic fleshy room. The movement through paraspace that occurs in the novel when shifting between Vurt, meta-Vurt, and meta-meta-Vurt, etc. may best be understood, not as a movement from one locale to

another, but as a succession of iterations within the paralogical locality that Noon

establishes through his "fractal narrative."

Accordingly, Noon appropriates recursive iteration and transcodes it from a mathematical process into an imaginative and creative literary tool. Actual recursive iteration is subject to the logic of mathematics and the successive iterations follow a determined pattern; Noon's narrative technique reproduces this process metaphorically.

Noon's algorithm is essentially imaginative: a sample of writing with a delimited, malleable lexicon. All the narrative that does not represent feather hallucinations, may be, for argument's sake,23 regarded as the first iteration in the narrative process, while the hallucinatory episode of the fleshy room may be understood as the second iteration of this process. The meta-meta-Vurt episodes in the novel may be considered as the third

iteration of the successive sequence of narratives. Interestingly, Noon reconciles the

23 Since there is no evidence that the young boy exists in the primary level of fictional reality, the reader is left to assume that the narrative may be situated anywhere along the fractal chain of narrative iterations. 23 disagreement between Lyotard and Hayles in terms of the universality of applicability in fractal geometry and its philosophical implications. That is, all structural and narrative shifts in the novel from Vurt to a meta-Vurt or from a meta-Vurt to a meta-meta-Vurt are subject to a fractal narrative process that applies itself to the text as a whole. Because

Noon's narrative strategy is a metaphorical appropriation of the mathematical process of recursive iteration, it paradoxically allows both the creative mobility of the author's imagination and the determinism of iterative movement within the paralogical locality that the structure of the novel both creates and examines. It is important at this point to to make a distinction: while fractal geometry metaphorically determines the structure of the narrative, the manner in which the different iterations of Vurt realms interact is metonymic. Like Lyotard's paralogical "horizon of dissensus," the relationship between the Vurt realms is expressed by a succession of paraspatial narrative displacements.

However, while recursive iteration as a mathematical process functions as a metaphor within the novel, this should not be confused with the relation between the iterations or paraspaces in the narrative of Vurt which, like the relationship between radical localities according to Lyotard's paralogy, function metonymically. The narrative structure of Vurt is essentially chaotic and nonlinear: that is, nonlinear not so much in terms of its narrative chronology but in terms of its spatial conception. Noon has written a novel that presents a narrative structure that shifts along a succession of metaphorical iterations; that is, he has put a sample of text in and gotten a new sample of text out, etc. By rewriting a sample of the text itself, producing meta-texts, or meta-Vurts, the narrative both represents and is dependent on self-similarity. In other words, the narrative could be said to be structured like a fractal. 24

Perhaps the most notable example of the novel's fractal structure can be found in the

chapters titled "My first words" (170-172) and "Tapewormer" (173-188). In these chapters Scribble enters the Vurt realm by swallowing a "Tapewormer" feather. In doing

so, his ultimate goal is to try and rewrite the past, to recede into memory and rework, if not literally, at least metaphorically, the opening of the novel. This chapter is Scribble's account of writing the opening lines of Vurt. "I remember thinking that if I ever get out of this with a body and soul still connected, well then," he writes, "I was going to tell the whole story, and this is how it would start" (7). The following sentence is identical to that which opens the first chapter of the novel: "Mandy came out of the all-night Vurt-U-

Want, clutching a bag of goodies" (171). But rather than continuing with his writing,

Scribble drops a Vurt feather into his mouth, hoping he can rewrite the past retrospectively. That is, rather than making an attempt to consolidate his past through self-reflection and the act of writing, Scribble simply desires to escape and experience the opening of the novel differently, or as he puts it: "to feel the fade before the hit" (172).

The juxtaposition of the opening of the novel with the "Tapewormer" incident clarifies the paraspace that structures the narrative. That is, the space Scribble enters in

"Tapewormer" cannot be regarded as a traditional narrative flashback or a narrative shift in chronology. Nor can the obvious differences be blamed on Scribble's unreliable narration. Rather, this juxtaposition highlights a shift from one iterative move to another along a chain of successive iterations. The similarities the reader notes between the

"Tapewormer" episode and the opening of the novel are the result of the correspondence between the narrative structure and the fractal quality of self-similarity along different stages of iteration. 25

Chapter 1, titled "Stash Riders," opens with the sentence, "Mandy came out of the all-

night Vurt-U-Want, clutching a bag of goodies" (7). It differs from the first line of

"Tapewormer" by the substitution of a name: "Desdemona came out of the all-night

Vurt-U-Want, clutching a bag of goodies" (173). In "Stash Riders," the opening line is

followed by a scene describing the dense slums of Manchester—complete with "a

genuine dog, flesh and blood mix" and a homeless "robo-crusty" with "a thick headful of

droidlocks and a dirty handwritten card - 'hungry n homeless, please help.'" (7). The

"Tapewormer" account, however, is entirely devoid of any description of the city; the

opening line is simply followed by the statement, "[there] was no trouble, a nice clean pick-up. Des is an expert and we love her for that" (173). The discrepancies between the

descriptions of Desdemona, the "expert," and Mandy, who is "all twitching steps and head-jerks" (7), do not, however, affect the structural similarities between the two

sections. Rather these discrepancies serve as a sentimental and nostalgic value judgment on behalf of Scribble. The exclusion of the description of the city in the second account also serves this agenda. Presumably Manchester is the same; it is Scribble's idolization of Desdemona24 that accounts for his omission. Structurally, however, the two passages are inextricably self-similar; the differences are primarily due to Scribble's judgement of the events.

This idolization is critical in understanding Noon's reason for naming Desdemona as he did. The reference is to Shakespeare's Othello: the unshakably faithful Desdemona remains loyal to her delusional and jealous husband, Othello, even as he takes her life. Noon's naming of Scribble's lover as Desdemona is consequently ironic. Desdemona readily accepts Scribble's self-sacrificing exchange of himself for her, allowing her to exit the Vurt and return to Manchester. Her devotion, unlike Shakespeare's heroine's, is entirely to herself. Mandy, who is altogether absent in "Tapewormer," is new to the group. At the

opening of "Stash Riders," she is assigned to pick up an English Voodoo feather, an act

which she fails to accomplish. The Stash Riders are left

waiting in the van for the new girl. Beetle was up front, ladies' leather gloves

pulled tight onto his fingers, smeared with Vaz.. .1 was in the back, perched on the

left-side wheel housing, Bridgette on the other, Sleeping. Some thin wisps of

smoke were rising from her skin. The Thing-from-Outer-Space lay between us,

writhing on the. tartan rug. He was leaking oil and wax all over the place, lying in

a pool of his own juices. (7)

The "Tapewormer" episode, on the other hand, has no mention of waiting. As early as the fourth sentence of the chapter, Scribble writes,

we rode the stash back to the flat, the fearless four of us: Beetle and Bridget,

Desdemona and I. The Beetle was up front, the van pilot, Vaz-smeared for extra

performance. I was on the left-side wheel housing, Brid was on the right. She

was fast asleep, so what's new? Desdemona was sitting between us, slightly

forward, with the treasure sack in her lap. (173)

Again, the similarity of the two passages demands the reader's attention. That is, the first passage takes the opportunity to mention that they are "waiting in the van for the new girl" while the second passage omits any mention of waiting. Logically, the reader is to assume that, if a character went into the all-night Vurt-U-Want, the remaining characters waited in the van; the omission of mentioning the wait in the second passage is simply a narrative manipulation employed by Scribble to emphasize what he sees to be the more ideal of the two incidents—the structural reality of the events, however, remain self- similar and are beyond Scribble's control. The manner in which Scribble treats the

naming of the characters in the two passages is also significant. While in the first passage Scribble dismisses Mandy by calling her "the new girl" rather than by her proper name, he seems to treat the naming of characters with more deliberation in the second.

The characters are paired according to their emotional connections with one another:

"Beetle and Bridget, Desdemona and [Scribble]," while in the first passage each character is treated in isolation from the others. Furthermore, Beetle is attributed a definite article in a narrative attempt to emphasize the significance of Scribble's respect for, and fear of, the driver.

Overall, the narrative of the second passage is fundamentally more optimistic in its attitude towards the situation and more respectfully cautious in the treatment of character.

The character exchange between the absurdly titled Thing-from-Outer-Space that leaks

"oil and wax all over the place" and lies "in a pool of his own juices" and Desdemona with a "treasure sack in her lap" has a dual function. On the one hand, it symbolizes the exchange, according to Hobart's rule, which occurs when Scribble loses his sister to the

Vurt. On the other hand, Desdemona functions as a poignant juxtaposition to the oily

Thing in Scribble's sentimental and idealized narrative in "Tapewormer." And while

Mandy returns with the wrong feathers and the police pursue them in a destructive high­ speed car chase back to the apartment, Desdemona simply returns with the correct feather, "a Yellow...a pure and golden flight path" (173), and the ride back to the apartment is described succinctly and without effort: "It was a smooth road" (173).

Despite Scribble's doctored narrative in "Tapewormer," the structure of the two accounts remain congruous and self-similar: the van, Beetle driving, Scribble and Bridgette sitting 28

in parallel locations, a character—the Thing, in the former account, and Desdemona, in

the latter—positioned between Scribble and Bridgette, and finally the ride back to the apartment building. In other words, there appears to be a structural determinism overriding Scribble's desire to reorder and revise the events that open the novel. Despite the move from the first iteration that opens the novel to another iteration which determines the locale in which "Tapewormer" takes place, the fractal quality of

Scribble's two accounts ultimately determines the structural self-similarity, at no matter what point of iteration the narrative occurs.

The deterministic self-similar structure among different successive iterations of the fractal narrative becomes increasingly apparent in "Tapewormer." In the van, on the route back to the apartment, Desdemona displays the "Takshaka Yellow" feather:

"Takshaka Yellow," she said, all quiet like.

There was a suck of breath as we all breathed it in, all those perfumes, those

pleasures to come.

"Takshaka ?" I said, unbelieving.

"Takshaka fucking Yellow!" screamed the Beetle, letting the wheel slip for a

second. I felt the van careen over to the pavement, and then the jolt as it took the

kerb at speed. For a second or two we were travelling in chaos. (174)

Beetle's dissonant interjection prompts Scribble to unsuccessfully order him to stop disrupting the peaceful harmony of the scene: "Beetle! You shouldn't be doing that!...

Because this is supposed to be perfect... this is my trip, Beetle... Let me ride it" (174).

But Beetle's actions appear to be determined to follow the same structural pattern as that in "Stash Riders." When ordered by Scribble to stop destroying the scene which the 29

narrator quixotically attempts to reconstruct, Beetle is unmoved: '"Tell me why, little

man?!' he screamed. And then: 'Awooooooh!!!!! Let's rock!' And he drove that van into

a let's all go out in a blaze of yellow glory" (174). Beetle's response to Scribble's plea

for a perfectly reordered narrative, "Fuck perfect" (174), corresponds to the consistency of self-similar structure despite the different levels of iterations in the fractal narrative.

Indeed, both incidents lead to scenes with remarkable narrative self-similarity. The chapter, "(Some Serious) Skull Shit," opens with the previously examined scene in the left column while the parallel passage in "Tapewormer" is as follows:

Brid was slumped on the settee, slow- We made an easy,

gazing at the two-week-old copy of the snakeless flight up the

Game Cat. Beetle was standing by the stairways, into the pad,

window, leafing through the feather which welcomed us with

stash. He had the snake head pinned to a show of lights. Now

his jacket lapel. I had the right side of Brid was slumped on the

my face laid out on the dining table, my settee, slow-gazing at a

left eye fixed on a small lump of apple three-week-old copy of

jam...The Thing-from-Outer-Space was the Game Cat. Beetle

lying on the floor, waving for a fix, his was standing by the

grease dripping onto Bridget's Turkish window, stroking the

rug.(26) saffron feather. (177) What Scribble attempts to restructure through narrative in "Tapewormer" is ultimately in

vain. Both scenes lead to unfulfilling shifts into a Vurt hallucination: in "(Some Serious)

Skull Shit" the shift is into a second iteration meta-Vurt, while "Tapewormer" presents a

meta-meta-Vurt, or third iteration of the fractal narrative. Consequently, the paraspace that the novel inhabits is determined by the quality of self-similarity in the structure of the narrative.

This deterministic fractal structure is intimately linked to the theme of the novel. In an interview with Anthony Johnston (2000), Noon remarked,

If you actually examine Vurt, there are serious things going on in there which

nobody ever talks about. It's about escape, and facing up to the realities of what it

is you're trying to escape from. This is something that happens again and again in

my work; it's one of the themes that I pinpointed as being a typical Manchester

story. The need to escape from your situation. (Johnston)

And while Noon admits to the social implication of his writing, what makes the theme of escape so poignant in Vurt is that the fractal structure of the novel makes the possibility of physical escape altogether impossible. To step outside a worldview, particularly one with a chaotic and fractal structure, is a fundamentally paradoxical act; nevertheless, the desire to escape is ever-present. Hayles writes:

The innocence of chaos is an assumption that is most tenable when one believes

that the self is not itself constructed by the same forces that are replicated in

theories and in the social matrix. When theory, self, and culture are caught in the

postmodern loop, the construction of chaos cannot be unambiguous, because it

derives from and feeds into the same forces that made us long for escape. (293) 31

The feather hallucinations are perhaps the most explicit means through which Noon

articulates the desire for escape. In particular, the feather "Blue Lullaby" emphasises the

demand for feather hallucinations to act as a means of escape. The Game Cat explains

that "BLUE LULLABY is for when life gets bad. When life deals a stupid hand. If you

should ever find your give-a-fuck factor has gone down to zero, this is the feather for you" (91). This feather, the Game Cat explains, is like being wrapped up in "blankets and cuddles" and makes all the bad things one can experience seem, "well, you know, kind of good all of a sudden" (91). He explains that Blue Lullaby "can cure the tiny troubles; it fucks out on the big troubles, just makes them worse.. .the Cat doesn't like these let's-make-everything-sweet feathers. Life's to be lived, not to be dreamt about"

(91).25 Indeed, while the locales of escape—such as a Vurt, meta-Vurt, or meta-meta

Vurt, ad infinitum—are infinitely vast, there is nevertheless a sort of claustrophobic paradox for the characters in the novel. They are contained absolutely within a postmodern paraspace where the possibility of physical escape is inherently foreclosed.

The climax of Vurt coincides with Scribble's "facing up to the realities of what it is

[he's] trying to escape from." Scribble at this point has the Curious Yellow feather in his possession—the feather that will allow him to enter the Vurt and exchange the Thing for his sister/lover, allowing her to return to the "real" world with him. However, the Thing has been shot and killed by the police; and while Scribble is no longer in possession of anything that can be used in an exchange, he decides to enter Curious Yellow regardless of this fact. The act of entering Curious Yellow without the Thing to make the exchange

25 While the irony that the Game Cat may in fact not be aware that the "[life] to be lived" to which he refers may in fact be within the hallucination or dream of the "young boy" (1, 327), it nevertheless does suggest that he is aware that, according to the fractal quality of the Vurt, simply moving from one Vurt to another— or one iteration to another—cannot be equated with escape. 32 is of central importance for Scribble's eventual fate. That is, negating the possibility of material exchange between the two realms signifies Scribble's increasing knowledge and acceptance of both the structure of the space in which he exists and how the qualities of that structure will determine his mourning and consolation.

The gradual process Scribble must undergo towards acceptance and consolation culminates in the climactic chapter, "A Curious House." Here Scribble enters Curious

Yellow wishing to reencounter Desdemona. But what occurs instead is a confrontation with the reality of his dysfunctional family: his incestuous relationship with his sister and repeated harmful encounters with his abusive father. Structurally, the nature of this confrontation accords with the chaotic and fractal structure of the novel as a whole; that is, the quality of self-similarity in the structure of the book pervades even the manner through which the characters must function in accord with determined narrative patterns.

The chapter describes the same incident three times; that is, the chronological time continuum of the narrative moves towards a certain penultimate point before looping back upon itself, ultimately ending up where it began. This process may be understood most effectively, as a metaphor of a "strange loop," a concept originally developed by

Douglas Hofstadter in Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979)26 (hereafter

GEB). Hofstadter explains the concept in I Am a Strange Loop (2007):

What I mean by 'strange loop' is.. .not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in

which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift

26 According to a short piece for the Guardian Unlimited, "Books Top 10: Jeff Noon's Favorite Fluid Fiction," Noon rates GEB third only to the "Collected Fiction of Jorge Luis Borges" and "The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carroll, edited by Martin Gardner." Noon describes GEB as "a complex, ticking bomb. This is easily the most difficult book I've ever read. It took me four goes, starting from the beginning each time, and it's 750 pages, just to explain Godel's Theory of Incompleteness. Along the way Hofstadter takes in all human knowledge systems, including Lewis Carroll. Still not sure what it's all about, but that's beside the point. Again, ideas abound. There are passages in here, without which, Vurt would not exist" (Noon, "Books Top 10"). 33

from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards

movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive 'upward' shifts turn

out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one's sense of departing ever

further from one's origin, one winds up, to one's shock, exactly where one had

started out. (101-102)

Fractals and video feedback are appropriate examples of strange loops (204). However,

one of the most significant applications of Hofstadter's strange loop is how the concept

functions as a model for consciousness. Hofstadter notes in GEB that he believes

that the explanations of'emergent' phenomena in our brains—for instance, ideas,

hopes, images, analogies, and finally consciousness and free will—are based on a

kind of Strange Loop, and interaction between levels in which the top level

reaches back down towards the bottom level and influences it, which at the same

time being itself determined by the bottom level.. .The self comes into being at

the moment it has the power to reflect itself. (709)

In this regard, the shift Noon seems to make from the fractal quality of the narrative

structure of the book to the more explicitly strange loop quality of consciousness is

evident. Indeed it is this shift from the geometrically fractal quality of the narrative to the

"strange loopiness" of Scribble's eventual "facing up" to his trauma, that forces him to metaphorically take a look "at himself," rather than to escape to another physical locale.

The chapter opens with Scribble, now being called by his given name Stephen, in conversation with himself at a bathroom mirror as he shaves using his father's "open razor" despite the fact that his father "hated [Stephen] using it" (300). Talking to himself, "Looking good, Stephen" (300), Scribble/Stephen laments that he could not get 34

his sister the birthday gift she would have wanted. The Scribble/Stephen conversation comes to an abrupt end when he takes a "nick out of [his] face" and "when [he] looked into the mirror to stop the flow it was [his] father's face that [he] dabbed at" (301). This first of three incidents, one each corresponding to each of the three episodes in "A

Curious House," demonstrates how the structure of successive iterations through recursion and self-similarity of the novel's structure ultimately determines, and is determined by, subject-matter and imagery. After nicking his face with the razor,

Scribble's description of the blood that "fell into the water, swirling," (301) visually signifies the self-similar loop which now structures the narrative. The narrative now takes a violent shift as the father takes the razor intending to attack and kill his son.

Scribble/Stephen urges himself to "Jerk out" of the Curious Yellow Vurt—an act which entails forcefully wrenching oneself out of a Vurt realm back into ordinary reality. At this climactic point, the narrative unpredictably loops back to where it started: "Looking good, Stephen" (302).

A second loop ultimately follows the same pattern as the first. Scribble/Stephen is having a conversation with himself in the mirror; the conversation concerns an unsatisfactory gift, or lack of a gift, for Desdemona's birthday (302). In this loop,

Scribble/Stephen is not shaving and the imagery of the drip of swirling blood signifying the deterministic self-similarity between the structure and content within the novel is changed. Rather the structure and content of the novel is even more explicitly linked through Scribble/Stephen's act in front of the mirror: he is attempting to tie a "Windsor knot" (302). In accordance with the structural self-similarity of the typical apartment room objects in the Skull Shit hallucination and the explicit narrative and structural link 35

between the opening of the novel with the "Tapewormer" chapter, Noon suggests the

fractal loop quality of the narrative through the deterministic constancy of structural self-

similarity. Again the narrative shifts to violence when the reflection in the mirror is transformed from Stephen to the father. The father, again, attempts to murder

Scribble/Stephen, this time by choking his son to death with the tie's Windsor knot: "He pulled the knot tight. Tight! Pulling down on each end of the tie until my throat was closing and the breath leaving me" (303). And again, Scribble/Stephen escapes his murder by, so he thinks, "jerking out" of Curious Yellow only to realize, in this episode/loop, that "you can 'tjerk out of a Yellow" (304). This realization is crucial, as

Scribble must learn to reject the notion of physical escape; he cannot truly become physically removed from the trauma he has experienced and so desperately wishes to escape.

In the third loop there is a certain degree of variation. The narrative again loops back on itself: "Looking good, Scribble" (304). Neither having a conversation with himself in the mirror nor without a gift for his sister, Scribble is now with Desdemona discussing what they should do for her birthday. The gift he gives her is a feather. Regardless of these variations, a similar pattern of events follow. Desdemona, with the feather in her mouth, metamorphoses into Scribble's father who subsequently stabs Scribble in the back with a razor. Scribble pulls the feather from his father's mouth and places it in his own.

Here the implication of the loopiness of the narrative is, rather than through the imagery of swirling blood or the Windsor knot, represented at the level of syntax: looking good Stephen cheers looking good Stephen cheers looking good

Stephen cheers cheers my face bathed in yellow light which is bathed in yellow

light which is...

which is a man's blade the blade swinging for me in the mirror of the mirror of

the mirror curiouser and curiouser the blade swinging a thousand times as it...

Layers upon layers... (309)

The act of putting the feather in his mouth may allow Scribble to momentarily attack and escape his father and enter a meta-Vurt (or meta-meta Vurt) where he can finally meet with Desdemona and initiate the exchange. She can return to a different iteration of Vurt reality while he will stay behind. But Scribble's consolation occurs in a self-similar space of radical and paradoxical locality: the strange loop of his own consciousness. The death/disappearance of the father and the separation from his sister, both emotional and spatial, allows Scribble to face himself: he ultimately writes that through this separation,

"[Desdemona 's\ wounds have healed; so have mine''' (323). While the fractal structure of the novel determines the process through which Scribble must face himself, it is the archetypically self-similar strange loop of his own sense of Self which, ultimately, constitutes the novel's subject-matter. It leads to a resolution once Scribble realizes his situation cannot be escaped.

Vurt represents a new type of narrative related non-hierarchically at every level, from the fractal quality of the novel's structure down to the fractal strange loop of the protagonist's own consciousness at the moment of consolation: the relationship between the structure and content of the novel is, therefore, metonymic. Noon's transliteration of scientific chaos theory into Vurt's literary metaphors, the metonymic relationship 37 between virtual realities, and poignant aesthetics marks an ever increasing feedback loop of influence between the sciences and the humanities. Hayles argues that "many scientists have commented that working on chaos has allowed them to renew their sense of wonder" (292), that "chaos is an image for what can be touched but not grasped, felt but not seen," and that it signifies something more than "novelty" and "the precession of simulacra" (293); ultimately, to many in the scientific community, "chaos signifies the truly new" (293). Indeed, Noon appears to achieve a similarly innovative end, through literary means. Noon, in conversation with Anthony Johnston, said "in this whole kind of pro-postmodern world we're living in, I think it's fruitful that people can discover new ways of telling stories. The way we live now, I call it Liquid Culture, and I think to find the prose equivalent of that is great" (Johnston). Noon "hopes [his] work becomes part of that" literary movement effectively representing a chaotic and postmodern episteme"

(Johnston). Indeed, Noon's appropriation of chaotics through fractal geometry as a means of constituting narrative structure and content is not only an exciting aesthetic experiment, but also, in its desire for epistemic sincerity, functions as a prose equivalent for a postmodern world. 38

METAMORPHICTION, INFORMATION THEORY, AND THE

SEMIOTICS OF CHAOS IN COBRALINGUS

In January 2001, Guardian Unlimited published Jeff Noon's manifesto, "Post

Futurism," in which Noon laments the contemporary state of the English novel and offers

the avant-garde writing process of metamorphiction as an aesthetic antidote. The "Post

Futurism Manifesto" is posited in particular opposition to the collection of stories edited by Nicholas Blincoe and Matt Thorne, All Hail the New Puritans (2001), which Noon

critiques as "dry, deft, slightly engaging tales...without any rules other than fixed tradition" accentuating "a fearsome denial of the imagination" (Noon, "Post Futurism

Manifesto"). James Wood, in his review of All Hail the New Puritans also published on

Guardian Unlimited, writes that

the short story has historically tended toward the simple. I have a favourite line

from Joyce's "A Little Cloud": "He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as

always happened when he thought of life) he became sad." Many stories by

Chekhov, Verga, Joyce and the incomparably simple Pirandello follow Blincoe

and Thome's rules. But this is the simplicity of those who have known richness,

and who are a little weary of congestion. Blincoe and Thorne, by contrast, are too

poor too young; paddling in remnants, they are incuriously abandoning something

they did not possess anyway. On the evidence of this book, we need a New

Abundance. (Wood)

27 In this volume of short stories initially inspired by the Dogme 95 filmmakers such as Harmony Korine and Lars von Trier, Blincoe and Thorne set out a ten-point manifesto calling for linear, simple, authentic, and transparent prose in favor of experimentation, nonlinearity, and lyrical prose styles in fiction. Noting this, it is clearly understandable why Noon would feel inclined to write the "Post Futurism Manifesto." Indeed, Cobralingus, Needle in the Groove, and Falling Out of Cars aggressively eschew the clarity and traditionalism of the New Puritans. 39

Indeed, the chaos and abundance of Noon's metamorphiction is offered as a more faithful

literary response to a reading public Noon describes as being "adept at riding the multiple

layers of information" of a "fluid society" (Noon, "Post Futurism"). It is also a rejection

of Blincoe and Thome's "manifesto for the New Philistinism" as Wood caustically words

it. Certainly, Noon is not weary of congestion; rather, he celebrates it.

Noon first describes the process of metamorphiction in his experimental book of poetry, Cobralingus (2001). Metaphors derived from chaotics govern the whimsical construction of these poems. This is not to say that chaos theory itself is governed by whimsical processes. Rather, the whimsical nature of Noon's metamorphiction is perhaps best understood as a celebration of the linguistic possibilities of destroying and randomizing semantically stable pieces of language and then reconstructing those excerpts into new units of meaning which are not necessarily related through any explicit etymological or semantic connotation. Indeed, Noon seems to take the "play" from literary play and the "game" from writing game and whorl the words into uniquely distilled forms. This strategy is not only impelled by the desire to experiment: he asks in the "Post Futurism Manifesto," "Can't we writers have some fun as well?" Ultimately, this process involves a metaphor undergoing rupture then being reconstructed into a new metaphor of a different semantic order. The literary play of the associated writing game,

"The Cobralingus Engine," treats the writing process using the technical terminology of the production of Dub reggae and its successor, experimental electronic music.

According to this writing game, "words become a liquid medium, a malleable substance capable of being transformed in surprising ways. Words can be stretched, broken, melted,

The visual template of Cobralingus is reminiscent of graphical electronic music programming environments such as Max/MSP, Supercollider, and Reaktor. drugged, mutated, forced into submission, set free" (Noon, "Post Futurism"). The process imagines a sampled piece of writing as an "inlet" which is "passed through various FILTER GATES, each of which has a specific effect upon the language. Each gate allows the writer to access different creative responses within his or her imagination" (Cobralingus 13). Consequently, the original writing sample undergoes a metamorphosis, from the semantic order of the inlet text, to the mercurial disorder of the intermediary stages, and finally to the reestablishment of a new order, the "outlet" text, which "can be seen as the ghost, or the unconscious desire, haunting the original text"

(13).

Michael Bracewell notes in his introduction to Cobralingus that

much of Noon's best imagery—from Vurt to Pollen through to the more

naturalistic styling of the stories in Pixel Juice—derives its power from the

literalising of poetic language and the concretizing of images: the sudden opening

up, within the landscape of the prose itself, of new routes to character and

narrative, enabled by altering the meanings of words within the containers of their

language. (6)

Abstracted from the writing game, the process of metamorphiction has two stages: first, the concretization of an abstraction which is to be understood metaphorically—a piece of text as an electronic data signal—and second, a further hypostatization through which the original metaphor, now mutated, "materializes." The new metaphor no longer exclusively functions as a comparison between the vehicle and the tenor but rather literally becomes the subject-matter and, in the form of an outlet text, determines the structure of the unfolding work. 41

The first poem in Cobralingus, "Organic Pleasure Engine," serves as a model for the process in its simplest manifestation and establishes the template for the rest of the book.

The poem has Thomas Lodge's 1591 poem "Rosalynde's Madrigal" as the inlet text (Fig.

1):

| STARTj

INLET

Rosalynde's Madrigal

Plucte the frulte and tast the pleasure

Youthful Lordings of delight,

Whij'st occasion gjues you seasure,

Feecte your fancies and your sight:

After death wfaen you are gone,

Joy and pleasure Is there none.

Thomas Lodge, 1591 42

Lodge's poem is then sent through the first "FILTER GATE," designated

"OVERLOAD," disordering the original poem and chaotically encoding it into an apple- shaped concrete poem—indicating a semantically similar yet metamorphosed homage to

Lodge's metaphorical "fruite" found in the first line of the inlet text (Fig. 2):

eas h e a t e e u a a h a uc te th efruu ea nta thp le as u J lucteethhefruuitteaniaastthpleeasu e p Ipluckeetheffruiteeandttasttthepleasurere r p pyyyouthftulloorddigsoffdelighhhtuutre r yyoutMulltorrdingsooffdelrighttghtthtu u w w yhilsstococassigiuuesyoseuuree e r w hilstooccasioguessyouuseasureee p e h h ffeedeeyoufaancitesndyuffsiighhtte I s a f eedeyypurrfanciesaandyyourssightt t e e eaafteerdeeathrthertyuaaregonee e a afterddeathhwhennyouaa reegone a ajyoyy apple easuuristheernnoone n o oyaanddpteasureisthereejno o n o aa nd jeea s l.sth ere no a e s sh e e h e

22 43

For example, the line "Plucke the fruite and tast the pleasure" (Noon, Cobralingus 21) in

Lodge's original passed through the filter gate may become "uc k eth efruu ea nta thp le as u" or "p lpluckeetheffruiteeandttasttthepleasurere r," (22). In the next stage, Noon passes the overloaded text through two further filter gates: "CONTROL" and

"SAMPLE." While the "CONTROL" filter gate "forces language to behave itself (14), it is the "SAMPLE" filter gate, which introduces a new element to the signal (15). Here

Noon samples the activities of which he partook on "Sunday 28 Feb, 1999" (Fig. 3): wake up; Julk; bed; Becker Cat; Radio..One; Kevin Greening Show; Spice Cat; feed cats; breaWast; frvft and fibre cereal; milk; tea; coffee; cats out; read newspaper; The Observer; news sections; a/teonatfi of report into: the Stephen Lawrence ease; sports section; Henma.i »J fiusedsftf nrfn Guardian Direct doubles final; Manchester United 2 Southampton 1; Cliesterfieid 1 Manchester Gtyl; re/iew section; Gilbert ano'Georgearticle; Sarah Kane suicide; new Uneerworld CD; book renews; Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom; Into the Looking Glass Wood,

e as h e at ehfruife ue.ea a nha uckeethfoefruutean aofathleas u I juckeethtefruitteantaastthp leeasu e p ipluckeetheffruiteancfttasthepleasurere r ppyyyouthhulloordcligaofdelighhtuutreer y: yyouthfulllorrdingsoffdeliighttghtthtu u w w yhilstococassigiuesyoseiiuree e r w hilstooccasiogiuesyouseasuree p e h hffeedeeyoufenciiesndyuirsigh hte I s f eedeyyounfanciesaamdyyoyrsightt a eeeaafteerdeeathhwhennuaaregonee afcerdd eath hvvwhennyouaaegone a ajjoy apple easuristhernoort n o oyadpleasureisthereejno on o aand leea $1 sthero

Alberto Manguei; work: Cobra!ing\js; Tony arrives; lunch; fiani sandwiches; chocolate biscuits; photographs of Venice; work; CobrBiingus; idea of including everything I do totiay; listen to records; Pols, C01: Porter Ricks, Bioklnetics; Time Team, Channel 4; Radio One Chart Countdown; 10 Written in the Stars; 9 Lullaby; 8 By Away; 7 Erase/Revtind; 6 Runaway: 5 Strong Enough; 4 Just Looking; 3 It's Not Right but It's Okay; 2 Tender; 1 Baby One Mors Time; dot; car stereo; The Smiths, The Queei\ Is Dead; The New Emperor Chinese Restsurant; Pork with Peking Sauce, Chicken In Black Bean Sauce; jasmins tea; home; car stereo; country and western tape; tea; check email; you have no new messages; bed; read; Box Nine, Jack O'Connell; sleep

23

This text is subsequently passed through two more filter gates, "PURIFY" and "MIX, thus establishing the outlet text, or the new order. The outlet text takes on a clearer concrete image of an apple and no longer contains any of the original language from 45

Lodge's poem—it now contains only the listing of events from Sunday 28 Feb, 1999— with the exception of scattered letters on the right side of what appears to be a bite out of the apple that, if reordered, would form the word "pleasure" (Fig. 4):

PURIFY

| MIX | T )• OUTLET

wak

Jul ie;bed;cat;ra cfi o;cat;fo od;drink;tastethepieasure;new s;football;tennis;manchester;revie ws;arts;shakespeare;invention;huma fl;thelookingglass;tastethepleasiire; work;cobralingus;tony;talk;food;dri nk;cfioeolate;tastethepleasure;p hotographs;venice;work;cobrali e ngus;ideas;everythingidotoday; music;biokinetics;tastethepieas u ure;tv;archaeology;radro;topten; tefideristhenight;blur;car;thesmiths; chfnesefood fruit tastethepIeasure;ho me;countryand'.vestemsongs;talk;ch eckingformessages;bed:v.'armth;r eadfng;noveJs;kiss;fpve;jrioon ;sunday;28/02/99; sleep

SAVE |

24 The influence chaotics have on the form of this process from order to disorder to new

order is evident. Moreover, the metamorphiction process itself becomes the subject-

matter of Cobralingus; as Noon attests, "from inlet to outlet, the journey is the goal" (13).

Accordingly, the process of metamorphiction is part of a "post futurist" project to assail

what Noon understands to be the "lazy cynicism and nihilism" (Noon "Post Futurism

Manifesto") that pervades much of the aesthetic of contemporary English writing. Its

function is to enable the production of radically polysemous texts, while it offers a new approach to the aesthetics of poetic and Active writing.

Noon's choice of opening the book with "Organic Pleasure Engine" is strategic in that the poem clearly demonstrates the aim of the Cobralingus Engine game. However, the remaining nine pieces do not exhibit such relative simplicity; rather, these pieces, though they vary,29 are characterized by a great deal of wit, craft, and complexity. Of the more complex pieces that make up Cobralingus, "Bridal Suite Production" is of particular interest, not only because it is in my view the best piece in the book, but also because it articulates a great deal about metamorphiction both as a process and in its relationship to a dialogue that may arise between print-based text and electronically mediated text.

The inlet text for "Bridal Suite Production" is an excerpt from Noon's fellow

Mancunian Thomas de Quincey's 1822 autobiographical work Confessions of an English

Opium Eater—a classic of drug literature. The de Quincey sample text is depicted in Fig.

5:

For example, the poem, "Blackley, Crumpsall, Harpurhey, Saturn," uses a sample from Michael Bracewell's short story, "Blackley, Crumpsall, Harpurhey," while the oulet text is an elegantly crafted English sonnet; "Exploding Horse Generator Unit" opens with a selection from Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew while the outlet text is written in Dantean terza rima; the outlet text for "Boa Conscriptor Breeding System," which opens with Robert Herrick's couplet sonnet "The Argument of His Book," constrains the sonnet to the use of only eleven letters while retaining Herrick's original rhyme scheme. 47

.START

JIMLETTJI

Confessions of an English Opium Eater

A$ me oeatwe state of (he eje inraeaiscd1, a sympathy scenvsedl to arise betwgen the waking and the droamSng state* of the brain in one point ~ihat whatsoever j tappered to cal! up and to trace by a w>luji5aiy act Mpon the darkness was ve

Here de Quincey describes an unpleasant effect of his opium addiction: that of experiencing involuntary visual hallucinations in darkness. As we shall see, the inlet text immediately draws the attention of the reader to its applicability to comment on the metamorphictive process that it will undergo. There are four major themes that run through de Quincey's text: first, the blurring of the threshold between two separate states—waking and dreaming—leading to the emergence of a new state, hallucination; second, the ability to immediately shape intangible images "into phantoms of the eye"—a power like Midas' often fantasized about but which once attained proves to be a great burden; third, the paradox that the "splendour" of the visions simultaneously frets the 48

heart. The fourth theme, which governs all three previous themes, is that of irrepressible

and disorderly metamorphosis from one state to another.

Noon's sample of de Quincey's text demonstrates the wealth of approaches Noon may undertake in the subsequent stages of the metamorphictive process. The first filter gate through which Noon passes the de Quincey text is, perhaps unexpectedly, not one of rupture or disordering, but rather one named "PURIFY" which, Noon writes, manipulates the sample so that it "loses deadwood" and "[s] elects images or phrases from the text"

(15) that contain the essential semantic signal that will form the basis of the variations in later stages of the poem. At this stage of the metamorphictive process, therefore, the original de Quincey sample is distilled and condensed into a more succinct and "pure" form. Noon takes the liberty of straining the semantic possibilities of the signal, thereby permitting selected phrases from of the original sample to trickle through the filter. Fig.

6 represents the next stage of the metamorphiction: 49

PURIFY

ercati'/e sate the eye increased jhe waking and the ctrec-ming states of the brain call up the darkness .transfer my dreams. jfeared Midas turned to gold defrauded human desires visually represented shapad into pJiantoms

: traced in faint visionary colours Sympathetic ink chemistry of my dreams insufferable splendour a fretted heart Thomas be Quineey

At this stage the new text conforms to the "PURIFY" filter gate in that the major images and memorable phrases reappear, though suspended and decontextualized from the sampled inlet text. The new text has no deadwood. Consequently, the inlet text, appearing as de Quincey originally wrote, is literally "filtered" by passing through a filter gate that manipulates the original communicative signal and allows only a small amount 50

of the inlet text to pass through. However, it is in the final two lines of this particular

stage, "a fretted heart / Thomas de Quincey" (38), where the filter gate becomes more

obviously a tool that, as Noon suggests, "allows the writer to access different creative

responses within his or her imagination" (13). The PURIFY filter gate is initially

represented mechanically yet there simultaneously appears to be a non-mechanistic value judgment imposed upon the inlet text as well. While words, phrases, and images

reappear in a purified form, the final two lines, "a fretted heart / Thomas de Quincey," prove to be a semantic abridgment of the inlet text as a whole. That is, the signature and

date which accredit the inlet text to de Quincey, after moving through the "PURIFY"

filter gate, serve to express the immediacy and severity of de Quincey's miseries. The romantic and autobiographical dimensions emerge from the disinterested tone characterizing de Quincey as an essayist. Consequently, a tense dialectic develops between imaginative authorial manipulation and the electronically mediated template of the Cobralingus Engine.

Readers may possibly misunderstand the nature of the tension between the mechanistic and aesthetic process in the Cobralingus Engine, as Noon notes in his article

"Origins of a Dub Fiction":

A Cobralingus piece is not planned in any way. An opening Inlet text is chosen,

followed by the first gate. How the text is transformed by the gate is entirely up to

the individual. This is not a mechanical process. It's a way of allowing the

imagination to explore areas it would not usually enter into. Once a text is

transformed, another gate is chosen. The process continues in this way, allowing

chance to play upon the text. Eventually, a phrase or an image will emerge from 51

the process, something that makes the writer sit up and take notice. This always

happens. This is the clue as to how the overall piece will end, and the process can

now be pushed along in that direction. Again and again, producing these pieces, I

was astonished as to how this moment arrived. I can only think that some hidden

text has been brought to light, out of the original inlet. I have described this as the

ghost, or unconscious desire, of the original text. Cobralingus, very like a Lee

Scratch Perry dub mix, is a way of calling up these ghosts. (Noon)

This tension between the mechanistic technique of the Cobralingus Engine and Noon's aesthetically subjective response establishes the inherent paradox in metamorphiction: the process is simultaneously neutrally technological and framed with authorial subjectivity.

It is the tension induced by this paradox that accounts for the unpredictable shifts that the signal may take. Indeed, the next stage of the process indicates a radical mechanistic move that nearly disrupts the semantic continuity of the signal altogether. In the subsequent stage, the signal is passed through the "DRUG" filter gate which, as Noon explains, "injects artificial stimulant into the language" (14). In this case the drug is

"anagramethane" (39). Essentially, by injecting this particular "artificial stimulant" into the language of the text, the letters which make up the preceding signal are rearranged, resulting in interesting word play (Fig. 7):

Throughout Cobralingus there are various different DRUG filter gates; Noon explains that each "type of drug will always be specified" (13). Some of Noon's other humorously created drugs appearing in Cobralingus include "fecundamol," "simileum," and "etymol" each of which affect the text accordingly via reproduction, simile, and etymology. 31 A portmanteau word blending anagram and methane indicating that the injection of this drug into the signal will yield anagrammatic metamorphosis. 52

a reactive, lest they serenade ice weals night germinated h^nd betroth fantasies. thg landscapes lu* $ad ferments marry if idea dfaanis dug rotten old Freud^ealdi iheadism runes unsea! led p&ivefslty dominant pSiesphates infect radiSjiE silicon ovaey outs synthetic kamp dsform as my chemi*"!ry If sabis found) rune spell eat the redraft o my sad tecfiftique

39

In comparing these lines of signal before and after the injection of anagramethane, we see that Noon's anagrammatic word play suggests two distinguishing features of metamorphiction. First, there is a definite relationship between the original phrase and its anagram. The process suggests that all language can be randomized yet that there is also some meaning that survives the injection of chaos. Second, while there is a definite 53

connection between the two stages of the metamophiction through the anagrams, the

semantic progression associated with the inlet text and the "PURIFY" filter gate has been

lost. Indeed, the actual meaning of the signal has been so radically and unpredictably

altered that the original meaning may be nearly undecipherable at this stage. Indeed, it appears as if Noon is concretizing the metaphorical process associated with information theory, a mathematical theory strongly linked to chaos theory.

Information theory was developed in the late 1940s at the Bell Telephone Laboratories by Claude Shannon; Gleick describes information theory as "a piece of mathematics cum philosophy" (255). Warren Weaver in his "Recent Contributions to the Mathematical

Theory of Communication" (1949), an addendum to Shannon's "The Mathematical

Theory of Communication," noted that

the word information, in this theory, is used in a special sense that must not be

confused with its ordinary usage. In particular, information must not be confused

with meaning. In fact, two messages, one of which is heavily loaded with

meaning and the other which is pure nonsense, can be exactly equivalent, from

the present viewpoint, as regards information. (8)

Information theory offers a means to understand the paradoxes inherent in the connection between order and randomness, sense and nonsense, and meaning and the absurd as they are examined in Cobralingus. The signal's movement from the PURIFY filter gate to the

DRUG (anagramethane) filter gate requires the reader to interpret a single signal as two antipodal possibilities as if it were exclusive, stable, and direct. Gleick explains, by means of Shannon's theory, that the best way to understand these patterns is to consider

32 Claude Elwood Shannon (1916-2001) was an American mathematician and electronics engineer. The ramifications of his work went beyond the practicalities of the engineering of electronic communications systems and had a notable influence on the humanities. 54

"a stream of data in ordinary language [as] less than random; each new bit is partly

constrained by the bits before; thus each new bit carries somewhat less than a bit's worth

of real information" (257). The paradox this situation presents is rather explicit: the more randomness that is featured in a data stream, the richer the information that each new bit will express (257). Hayles explains the significance of this paradox in How We Became

Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999):

If information is pattern then noninformation should be the absence of pattern,

that is, randomness. This commonsense explanation ran into unexpected

complications when certain developments within information theory implied that

information could be equated with randomness as well as with pattern.

Identifying information with both pattern and randomness proved to be a

powerful paradox, leading to the realization that in some instances, an infusion of

noise into a system can cause it to reorganize at a higher level of complexity.

Within such a system, pattern and randomness are bound together in a complex

dialectic that makes them not so much opposites as complements or supplements

to one another. (Hayles 25)

Whereas in information theory proper, information is to be understood as semantically neutral, Noon's metamorphictive process allows the increasingly disordered signal/data stream to multiply the richness of information and hence the polysemous possibilities of the text. The DRUG stage of the signal, while being in one sense neutral word play, also includes new key words which will govern the semantic direction the poem will take during the remainder of the signal's pathway. Shannon writes in "The Mathematical

Theory of Communication" that 55

the fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point

either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently

the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to

some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects

of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. The significant

aspect is that the actual message is one selected from a set of possible messages.

The system must be designed to operate for each possible selection, not just the

one which will actually be chosen since this is unknown at the time of design.

(31)

Noon, by concretizing the abstract infusion of noise into the signal/inlet texts through representing the disordered intermediary stages of the metamorphiction, attempts to display a similar process, albeit in terms of the development of a specific form of data stream: poetic literature. From the original order of the inlet texts, Noon introduces various sources of noise at the PURIFY and DRUG filter gates, eventuating in a reorganized fragment of text expressed at a new level of complexity. Shannon explains that when "the signal is perturbed by noise during transmission or at one or the other of the terminals.. .the received signal is not necessarily the same as that sent out by the transmitter" (65). What Noon wishes from his outlet text will be enhanced semantically—an outlet text which proves to be a semantic ghost of the original inlet signal, though very different from it.

Noon's representation of the metamorphiction as a technological process—it is, in fact, the reorganization of printed text—suggests that texts associated with the individual stages of the process have entered a unique dialectic between printed text and texts that 56

are electronically mediated. This dialectic may be viewed as a series of shifts which

occur in the semiotics between the text formats in question. Hayles describes the

differences in thinking about the semiotics of printed text and that of electronically

mediated text. Beginning with the semiotic model as developed by Jacques Lacan, which

denies a direct association between the signifier and the signified, Hayles explains that, through this disjunction in signification, Lacan asserts that "language is not a code" (30) and develops the concept of the "floating signifier." Hayles argues that Lacan's theory of

semiotics and language is fundamentally influenced by print-based text and "not

surprisingly focused on presence and absence as the dialectic of interest" (30). Drawing on Ferdinand de Saussure's theory that signifiers are not defined by their relation to corresponding signifieds but are rather identified according to their difference from other signifiers, Hayles explains that Lacan "complicated this picture by maintaining that signifieds do not exist in themselves, except insofar as they are produced by signifiers.

[Lacan] imagined them as an ungraspable flow floating beneath a network of signifiers, a network that itself is constituted through continual slippages and displacements" (30).

Consequently, not only are signifieds absent, the correspondence between their individual signifiers is also characterized by an absence. Cobralingus lends itself to a Lacanian semiotic insofar as it is like the traditional text format that influenced Lacan's formulation of the floating signifier. While it utilizes the technical language of electronically mediated hardware, Cobralingus is a distinct and unique printed document.33

33 Ismo Santala suggests that ''Cobralingus is definitely a landmark work, not only because of its originality, but for the clarity and energy by which Noon animates his literary experiments. It must be mentioned that the book, by British small-press Codex, is a beautiful object in and of itself: the typographical design is fantastic, and the bluish-gray color is easy on the eye. Illustrations by Daniel 57

Yet, Noon's conceptual and verbal borrowings from information technology and electronically mediated text in the Cobralingus Engine suggest a possible shift in the work's semiotic models. Noon, in an interview with Ismo Santala on The Modern World:

Scriptorium website, mentions his tempered fascination with both printed and electronically mediated literature:

The structure and process of the work becomes much more obvious on paper,

with the ability to flip through the pages. I'm a great believer in books, as being

the perfect hardware for the software of a story. And they give you overview

that's very difficult to achieve in the Web. But I am still interested in the Web as a

medium. It's early days as yet. A lot of research needs to be done, research in the

form of people creating stories just for that medium. There's a lot of theory being

passed around at the moment. (Santala, "Transmission > Reception: The Modern

Word Interviews Jeff Noon")

In this light, one must no longer simply consider the semiotics of Cobralingus, in general, and "Bridal Suite Production," in particular, in terms of printed texts and floating signifiers.

Hayles suggests that "the compounding of signal with materiality suggests that new technologies will instantiate new models of signification" (29) and that information technologies such as electronically mediated text must "fundamentally alter the relation of signified to signifier" (30). Hayles ultimately extends the Lacanian concept of the floating signifier model of semiotics into the realm of information technology to introduce the concept she terms "flickering signifiers" (30). Hayles characterizes these

Allington function as frontispieces, and seem to be telling stories of their own" (Santala, "JeffNoon: Works"). 58

flickering signifiers "by their tendency toward unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations,

and dispersions" (30). This shift from floating signifiers to flickering signifiers may

suggest that a rethinking of the absence/presence dialectic is necessary. That is, while the

Lacanian formulation asserts that language is not a code, Hayles reminds us that "word processing.. .is a code" (30).

In the next stage of the metamorphiction, the text passes through the "INCREASE

SENSE" filter gate. Noon explains the function of this filter gate: it "significantly enhances text" and "increases readability" (Noon, Cobralingus 14). Furthermore, Noon introduces "chemical symbols" and "rune names" into the signal (Fig. 8): 59

J INCKI&Si'SEMSE |

I&MWPJUP s \imitM

QIDgltr#g&)

-te sol Cast the nines: Lbntfori. 1936: £u Sigmund Freud died tonight. jtara singing a weak serenade or ice; Wo or he betrothed fantasies: technique: nsgai' digging up the iandsegpes of dream, CGf. Se where sadness turfcs and ferments:. Wd sifjj irigas of the s&hemfcal wsdding; Za eat all those old and rotten dreams; pertra science will unseat perversity; Cu .redraft chemisiiy of file rune spell: mao? tyr new we lot domlnamt phaspJiates Mg infect the radiant silicon ovaryr lagv test fui reaction: germination An of a deformed synthetic hand. nsud Fe odd.1 J7 eon Me

«o

With the INCREASE SENSE filter gate, Noon seems to urge the signal to reassemble in a meaningful way as a means of compensating for the increasingly divergent pathways it has taken from the inlet text by de Quincey. In the left hand column, Noon writes an elegy to Freud. It opens with a chaotic image, that of casting the runes, perhaps as an

homage to the chance and unpredictability that Noon employed to reach this elegiac

stage. Ultimately, Freud's death explicitly enters the signal only with the injection of

anagramethane into the word "defrauded." The incorrect date of Freud's death marks the explicit entrance of an "error" into the signal, an unpredictable event which will further the metamorphosis of the signal. Midway through the elegy, however, the

"increased sense" makes an unpredictable shift, a "redraft chemistry of the rune spell."

The chaos and randomness associated with the casting of runes pervades the elegy itself; the shift in the signal is now concerned with the "germination / of a deformed synthetic hand." The linguistic units that will produce this effect are to be found to the right of the elegy: chemical symbols and rune names randomly dispersed ready to combine in atypical ways to produce unexpected mutations. What is noteworthy, however, about the chemical symbols and rune names is their visual representation. Noon typographically represents the names as chaotically dispersed units suggesting concrete poetry in which semiotic models are the hypostatized visual subject. That is, the names—as signifiers— appear to be both floating and flickering. Consequently, Cobralingus aligns itself with

Runes are the letters of multiple Germanic languages used before the introduction of the Roman alphabet. A neo-pagan exercise involves tossing stones inscribed with runes which are then meditated upon—a geomantic practice similar to the traditional forms of divination associated with the classic Chinese / Ching. Indeed, the / Ching—often translated into English as The Book of Changes—espouses a philosophy similar to chaos theory; that is, it concerns the inevitability of change, flux and balance of opposing forces. The concept of geomancy, or the interpretation of objects tossed to the ground, is certainly in line with Noon's games of unpredictability. While Noon may be "tossing" runes in a more general sense—that is "tossing" poems—the process is comparable: the unpredictable stages of metamorphiction must be interpreted in order to proceed to further meaningful changes. The phrase "cast the runes" may also be an allusion to the ghost story by M.R. James, "Casting the Runes" (1904)—a story inspired by the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley. Both possibilities are in conjunction with Noon's desire to divert the reader's attention from the mechanical aspects of the Cobralingus Engine; that is, to simultaneously express an exercise that is admirably philosophical and entertainingly charlatanic. 35 Freud's actual date of death was 23 September 1939. 61

two simultaneous parallel dialectics—language and word processing—which are,

paradoxically, inextricably linked yet autonomous.

Noon then passes the signal through three further filter gates: "RANDOMISE" which

results in the disordering of the text where parts "may be lost or changed" (Noon 15); and

"PURIFY" and "CONTROL" where the language is forced to behave itself (14). What is

left is a series of randomly dispersed letters and words—"data," "unusual," "computer,"

"sex," "anagram," "rhizome," "dna," are among examples. The sentence, "CHEMICAL

WEDDING: / GERMINATION OF A DEFORMED SYNTHETIC DREAM HAND,"

suggests the zany direction the signal will take. There is a third sample in "Bridal Suite

Production," this time from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: "I beheld the wretch - / the miserable monster / whom I had created" (41). Again, the metamorphiction takes an unpredictable direction: toward marriage and the conception of a synthetic dream hand.

The Shelley quotation is appropriate insofar as it comments on the process of metamorphiction itself: that is, the reassembling and reordering of deconstructed subparts in order to produce a monstrous new creation. Furthermore, the language of the text, particularly in the concretized words metaphorically representing floating and flickering signification, is taking on connotations, not simply of technologies of reassemblage and production, but also of organic reproduction.

Just as the catastrophe of Lacan's presence/absence dialectic is castration, Hayles identifies mutation as the analogous outcome for the pattern/randomness dialectic.

Hayles argues that

randomness is the contrasting term that allows pattern to be understood as such.

The crisis named by mutation is as wide-ranging and pervasive in its import 62

within the patter/randomness dialectic as castration is within the tradition of

presence/absence, for it is the visible mark that testifies to the continuing interplay

of the dialectic between pattern and randomness, replication and variation,

expectation and surprise. (33)

Castration marks the catastrophe in psycholinguistic development in Lacanian psychoanalysis, as it is "the moment when the (male) subject symbolically confronts the realization that subjectivity, like language, is founded on absence" (31). Mutation, however, marks a disruption of pattern so explicit that "the expectation of continuous replication can no longer be sustained" (33). Both Hayles and Noon use the genetic code as a means of demonstrating via analogy the effects mutation can have on the dialectic.

Hayles suggests that the effects of mutation take place when an already existing pattern is disrupted by a random event, such as "a burst of radiation or a coding error" (32). In

Cobralingus, the date of Freud's death as it is introduced in "Bridal Suite Production" functions as a type of coding "error"; at this point, something new emerges in place of the previous code. In "Bridal Suite Production," however, mutation occurs from neither a blast of energy nor a coding error, but rather from a deliberate language game: the random sampling of DNA codes (Noon 42) into the already disrupted de Quincey sample text.36 The random disruption of the system or code establishes the direction in which the poem may now take. Noon's mischief metamorphoses the "CHEMICAL WEDDING: /

GERMINATION OF A DEFORMED SYNTHETIC DREAM HAND" (41) into a mock wedding invitation in the next interim text (Fig. 9):

In this stage the signal is passed through the "PLAY GAME" filter, which Noon describes as a "mischief maker" which "encourages craziness;" consequently, the "results may surprise the user" (15). 63

You wt> cordially Invited to a CHEMKSAtWiBDING * * # Behold! TAGTCGAA6C Mr Wretclwd Data ACTTGTMCG ATACGTAGAC will tgko the monstrous hand of TAGAfXGTAC CATOGATT&i MSss Deformed Synthetic GAOAGGC4T TCClMTSeW In maffingo GWCOST4TG GMGre&TO *** ^GICGWCTC W&aSTC&R Regulation Computer Sex /yOGFTOSSCS 7»77GGACS6 to bo publicly germinated GrMGrCEMTT CtaGTCGAGA creating AGCTGAOAAC AQCG7GAIAC Unusual Dream Rhizomes CTTAGTAGAA CATAAGTACG * * * TA6TACCATG KCAGAJCAA Plus! AAGTCCTAGA ATQGTAG&G Dancing to ttic sounds of GfC SAC"SA ClTAB/ffCGA Dan Anagram UNA K7GCCiMGT MGGCGARM & his Conjuro Fluid ACCGTAGACT CGAATAGTAC featuring Gay Miserable! GATCGATAGA, * * « Rdioadez S'H Vous Ptait

Noon now configures the metamorphosed text into a zany wedding invitation. The wedding invitation is framed by DNA code which, through its distinctive detachment from the invitation itself, gestures back to the two paradoxical dialectics. That is, the disconnected DNA codes are visual representations of signifiers which may be floating, flickering, or both. Hayles argues that "mutation is crucial because it names the bifurcation point at which the interplay between pattern and randomness causes the 64

system to evolve in a new direction. It reveals the productive potential of randomness

that is also recognized within information theory when uncertainty is seen as both

antagonistic and intrinsic to information" (Hayles 33). Indeed, Noon's game of sampling

DNA codes into the signal is among the list of antagonistic moves he makes against the order of de Quincey's original inlet text. However, for metamorphictive purposes, the move that begins the mutation is key in developing unpredictable and surprising literary results. It may appear that there is very little in the original de Quincey text which would, only five pages later, generate a wacky wedding invitation heralding the union of

"Mr Wretched Data" and "Miss Deformed Synthetic." Yet, there is certainly a common element to the signal that Noon has specified and exploited: that of unusual combinations that gesture towards unique and unusual forms of change. Nevertheless, despite the unpredictability of the direction the signal takes, the result has artistic merit in its innovative humor, in its technical expertise, and its formal eloquence.

In the following text, Noon again drugs the signal, this time with "fecundamol," furthering the chaotic hilarity of the signal by suggesting a strange wedding night. Here the signal becomes excessive; there is no spacing between the DNA codes which open and close the text and the chain of words which were employed earlier in the signal. The next stage, (Fig. 10), is as follows: I ogijgj—(SsaSifficsir)

ACiTCTAACSATACGTAGACTAGACCQlACCATCGAnGAACTAGGCA reloadanagfarriONAHoltfmonsuauschomicalwecldin^vretchedml sfflfabledatasvTithsticrnarrtaacreguliafeonHANDdefnrmedeompute rse>germinateclcreatingLiniisualdreSiTtrhiiflr3ics(taRcir«gconjureflu idgajrreloatSansgramDNAHoKlmonstrouschBniicaiwedttingkVfotch edmi5erahterfatasyntlietlctriamagenegulatiofaiANOaefonneclconi puietsexganrilriateclcrestinguiiiisijaldfeaniitiizonnesdaricirigsoiiiii refluWsayreSoadanagfamOMAHoleimonstrouscheniaealweddlngwr etchetlmiserablcda{asyntheticmamager(^ulationHANOon5troiiseliemicahv,eddineivretchedmiae«,abledat asyrrtheticmarriagercgulaticiHANDdefarmEdcomputersexgsrmin atedcfcatingunusua!dJesmrhtiamosdaficingconjurefIuidgayf(>3oa danagr8wDiNAHc!dnionstirousct!emicafiVsddingvirctcliedmiserab te(jatasynt!ietlcmairi8gereguiationHAMDdefoiniedctfmfelQaa ATlGCACGGGTAGTCeATTCGAGTCCAGAASCTeASAACACCGTeAT

43

Here Noon displays the signal as white noise in that this stage includes the presence nearly everything which has disrupted the signal thus far. The white noise itself, however, is not devoid of meaning (and humor). At the climax of the wedding night repeated "DNAH" (derived from DNA), suggests sighs of sexual pleasure.

Also, "DNAH" is the word "hand" spelled backwards. 66

In the final stage, Noon passes the signal through a DRUG filter gate, the drug now

being "metaphorazine."38 This marks the outlet text of the metamorphiction, indicating

the terminus of the signal's pathway and the final manifestation of "Bridal Suite

Production." The outlet text is a concrete poem: a mutated human hand of six fingers

comprised entirely of repetitions of the word "hand" (Fig. 11):

I OUTLET |j

an dnhana dnaha ctnahan ndhand dhn dnahan ndnaha clnahan handna adnaha andnsh C dnaSirtd hnadna dnehna ar;dr»ah dnshna hantfna handna T andnaha dnandh nahandn nandnah han nahand andnana andnaha andn tfnahna ahandna dnaftand dnana hancnan dnahand nandnaha Jiandn handna nandnah anahandn andhan andlian andnahanhandnahanahandad a nahandn andnaha nanhandrtahnadr.aharidnahan C dnanhan dnahnad naliandnahandndnasndnahad nahandnh ' dna a ruinate handnadnahanand nanannacna hanandhh A hanaha ndnahanahardnadnahandnnadtiadiiahsnct nhandnan ear-dha sanc'handnadnaandnahandnahacnahandn hnadnaha nahandn nJiandnhandnaandnahandnaliandnasndnahanriandnahan dnaand dnanandnaandnahandnahandnaltandnanahandnahand nahandn artdnahandndnaSiananEhandnahandnahandnahandnah andnaha ndar.dnahandndnaftandnahahsndnahandnahandrcaba ahnandnahandna handna hnandnahanhandrtaharsnahandn andhandnahandnahandnahandnahandnahsnadnahn dnaanandnahandrcahandnahandnahandrialia nan T fid na ha ndnahandandnasiafidnhandnahand nahandnahandnahandnahandnahandna nananCnahanddnahandnahnartdnah andnahandriahandnahandnannati andnahandnanahandnahandnah andnahandnahandnaiiantfnaha ndrahandnahandandnahartd ACTGAATCGGTAGCGATAG GCTTAGTCCAGAAGCTGA

SAVE

38 "Metaphorazine" is also the name of a humorous short story which Noon includes in his dizzyingly diverse and masterful collection of short stoires, Pixel Juice (1998). The story consists of a variety of portmanteaux consisting of combinations of tropes and drugs which dictate the way the language is executed in the corresponding section of the story. This short story is an early example of Noon's experiments in drugging language with chaos. 67

The final two lines of the concrete poem appear to form a wrist band or some sort of barrier made up, again of the four bases of DNA: ACTGAATCGGTAGCGATAG /

GCTTAGTCCAGAAGCTGA (Noon 44). Furthermore, between and around the polydactylous hand are individual bases—"G," "C," "A," and "T"—that could be floating or flickering signifiers. While this outlet text in the form of a concrete poem may seem a disappointment, particularly in comparison with the strong metamorphictive stage that elegizes Freud, it is a poignant reminder of the inlet text. That is, the signal that began as a sample of de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, though radically disrupted and altered, has now ended as a concrete poem representing a deformed human hand. The outlet text ultimately asks readers to recapitulate their memory of the inlet text—de Quincey's miserable musing on his opium addiction—as a disorderly and disobedient shift from one state to another. Indeed, the massive ruptures from one manifestation of order via unpredictable reassemblage to another form of order suggests that order, in some variety of self-similar variation, is inherent in disorder. The deformed six fingered hand is, after all, an artifice—one brought into being by human agency rather than the natural reproductive process that regularly produces five fingers—indicating that the DNA is meant to be explicitly taken metaphorically as subject to synthetic mutation.

Ultimately, the concrete poem representing a polydactyl human hand, the "same"

(though metamorphosed) signal as the de Quincey text, metaphorically represents the intermediary stages that fiction must take from printed text to electronically mediated manifestation. The Complete Review's review of Cobralingus, while comparing the book with constrained writing techniques of Oulipo and Raymond Roussel, attests that

39 A literary movement standing for "OUvroir de LItterature POtentielle"—translated as Workshop for Potential Literature. The movement was founded in 1960 by Francois Le Lionnais and Raymond Queneau. 68

Noon writes of the 'specific effect' of each FILTER GATE, as though it were a

precise algorithm and the text transformed according to very precise rules. In

fact, the Cobralingus Engine is no such thing. The rules, beyond their most basic

operation, are entirely of Noon's own choosing... Cobralingus is artifice, an

excuse for literary play (though it does, admittedly, impose some restrictions on

the texts). (The Complete Review)

Ultimately, the synthetic hand of the concrete poem, as a synthetic formation of the

Cobralingus Engine, indicates one of the most poignant dimensions not only of "Bridal

Suite Production" but also of the epistemic literary function of metamorphiction. Noon wishes to explore the implications of the shift literature is invariably taking into provisional electronically mediated forms whereby Cobralingus and all its associated pieces and processes may be considered no more than metaphors for the interim stages of the representational shift from printed text to electronically mediated text that fiction and poetry is presently undergoing. It may be too much to claim that Cobralingus, as a printed text, consequently subscribes to Lacan's notion of signification. However, the

Gordon Dow explains on growndodo.com that "Characteristic of Oulipean composition is the 'generative device,' which I break down into two major categories: constraint-based writing, where the author chooses an arbitrary constraint to which her writing must adhere, and rule-based writing, whereby an algorithmic, random, or otherwise unwilled process controls or at least heavily influences the resulting text" (Dow). The Oulipean influence on Cobralingus is quite evident, particularly in the poem "Boa Conscriptor Breeding System" where the outlet text, a sonnet, is constrained to the use of eleven letters. Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), was a French novelist, playwright, musician, and poet best known for his novels Impressions d'Afrique (1910) and Locus Solus (1914); he had a lasting influence on the Oulipo movement. Michael Bracewell also links Cobralingus to Derrida's book Glas (1974). Noon himself notes the influence of artist Tom Phillips' book A Humument on Cobralingus. Noon writes concerning A Humument that it is "a favourite, and a big influence, especially on Cobralingus. Phillips is a visual artist. Here, he's treated an obscure Victorian novel called A Human Document. He's painted over every single page, with a different design on every page, but leaving words showing through here and there. All that's left of the first page is this: "The following sing I, a book, a book of art, of mind and art. That which he hid, reveal I." These words tell a fragmented story, and the page designs comment on this. A box of treasures, with many secret compartments" (Noon, "Jeff Noon's Top 10 Fluid Fiction"). 69 polydactylous hand metaphorically represents metamorphiction itself, as an intermediary stage in the semiotic mutation that literary texts are likely to undergo in the near future. 70

FALLING OUT OF CARS:

THE CHAOTICS OF PERCEPTION AND MEMORY

Upon handing Falling out of Cars to the publisher, Noon explained that it was

my first novel since leaving Manchester. It's been an interesting journey, to say

the least, discovering a new way to write, without the bedrock of the old city. First

of all I went through a period of intense experimentation, with language itself as

my subject matter. Out of this came my book of textual manipulations,

Cobralingus. After this, I felt the need to return once again to storytelling. (Noon,

"The Dissemination")

This return to storytelling marks the author's most elegant and accomplished work to date. Tomas L. Martin in his review of Falling out of Cars on Sfcrowsnest.com writes that "Noon's prose is sublime" and that it "could be the most impressive stylistic novel of recent times" (Martin); John Berlyne writes in his review on SFRevu.com that the work is "an extraordinary piece of writing.. .a prose poem rather than a novel.. .filled with

Pinteresque dialogue, peppered with non-sequiturs and eerily disturbing scenes that read like a literary puzzle" (Berlyne); Tony Chester on concatenation.org writes that "Noon has proved once again that he is at the forefront of literary innovation" (Chester); Ismo

Santala explains on The Modern Word website that the piece "is more than a road novel40 or a portrait of one woman's unraveling sanity: Falling out of Cars is a poetic essay on perception, memory and the arts" (Santala).

40 Noon would certainly agree with this observation. In his notes concerning the novel, he writes "I like to call Falling out of Cars a transcendental road novel. A journey through a strangely transformed, diseased, England. Four desperate people, strangers, in a beat-up old car, brought together in search of certain misplaced, and seemingly magical objects. So, there's a (very) loose connection to the classic Fantasy plot of the quest through the wounded land, albeit set in a recognisable reality. And the quest is not the governing force behind the novel; these people are, to all intents and purposes, lost. They're driving, just driving. Running away, each from their own personal troubles" ("The Dissemination"). 71

While Falling out of Cars is Noon's most eloquent piece of writing, it is also arguably the most difficult work in his oeuvre. The piece is, as Berlyne notes, "plotless"—at least in the traditional sense of a plot. The literary references in the novel are abundant; the fragmented nature of the work gives the impression of a vaporous whorl comprised of images and metaphors from Carroll, Borges, Calvino, Beckett, Woolf, Kerouac,

Nabokov, and Kafka. The work is dreamlike and constantly morphing; Claude Lalumiere on infinityplus.co.uk notes that "the narrative...gets increasingly fractured into nearly incoherent fragments whose meaning is elusive yet tantalizingly almost graspable" and that it "shimmers with unexplained and intriguing mysteries" (Lalumiere). What makes the novel most astonishing may reside in Noon's application of noise—as it is understood in communication theory. Yet, despite the chaotic subject matter, the narrative of Falling out of Cars is executed with tranquility and control. While Cobralingus employs similar metaphors, its mood is humorous and zany; Falling out of Cars, on the other hand, expresses a sense of quietude, sadness, and meditative elegance. Santala writes that

as Noon's characters are searching for the right words, searching for ways to

reach out, their speech at times lapses into banality, into noise. The prose, on the

other hand, is highly controlled; a signal pregnant with meaning. Falling out of

Cars holds these near-polar opposites within itself and lets them to play against

each other. Soon the reader picks up a clear, vibrant pulse. It's the heartbeat of

literature. (Santala)

Noon's novel is articulate, semantically charged, and aesthetically sophisticated; it is a project in accord with Noon's ongoing fascination with the paradoxes of perception, memory, logic and meaning. A year before the publication of Falling out of Cars, Noon 72 wrote in his "Post Futurism Manifesto," "if the English novel is truly dead, we should place a flower on its grave, trample down the dirt. Now is the time to raise up the fragile, blossoming ghost."41 Falling out of Cars is indeed an example of such a fragile, blossoming ghost.

As with Noon's other novels, Falling out of Cars cannot be satisfactorily situated in any single genre. For Noon the novel is certainly not a work of science fiction. Jon

Courtenay Grimwood in his review of Falling out of Cars, "Behind the Mirror," notes that

Noon's...signature is a refusal to compromise with his readers. In fact, it's

probably fair to say that he is currently engaged in a war, if not with all his

readers then certainly with his old SF fans, those who originally helped to make

his name and found in Vurt and Pollen a perfect updating of the work of William

Gibson. At the Cheltenham literary festival recently, Noon put his frustration on

record, referring to SF's "zombie life as pure escapism," and announcing:

"Science fiction no longer has a role. It's a dying genre." This position was only

slightly softened by his rider that "in an ideal world, there would be no genres, or

an infinite number, one for every book produced." (Grimwood)

41 Noon's collaborator on Mappalujo, Steve Beard, in an interview with irrealist author D. Harlan Wilson on Beard's novel Meat Puppet Cabaret (2006), alludes to this idea. When asked, "[i]s postmodernism in our dust? How would you depict the contemporary aesthetic terrain?" Beard answers, "I think postmodernism has pretty much led to a dead end, with everyone happy to sample the same cultural greats from the past. Maybe that's been its value, actually — a process of canon formation for postwar pop culture. Something that could point to an exit from the postmodern hall of mirrors is a cultural trend called 'hauntology'" (Wilson). Hauntology is a term coined by Jacques Derrida in Spectres of Marx (1993). The term indicates that the present can only exist in its conceptual relation to the past. After the "end of history"—Derrida's central concern is with Francis Fukayama's The End of History and the Last Man (1992)—society will epistemologically realign and redefine itself according to the conceptual "ghosts" or "spectres" of the past. 73

Noon admits this much rather explicitly in the novel with an allusion to such characteristic Ballardian motifs as abandoned artifacts of civilization and crashed cars:

"I thought [the abandoned car] a supremely romantic image, the symbol of a dying civilization...But now, becoming commonplace, the image has lost its poetic allure. The cars have been vacated, simply because the drivers can no longer trust themselves" (Noon

13). For Noon, contemporary science fiction is a genre against whose dead weight he has struggled since the publication of Vurt;43 Polly Marshall notes that in Noon's view "the genre has forgotten its finest moments in inner space and is fossilized in conservative narrative forms that went out with the ark" (Marshall, "Jeff Noon : Pixel Juice : Dub Til it

Bleeds : Interview with Jeff Noon"). Noon, however, does provide a suitable generic label for the work. He writes, "I have tried to write a truthful book about the way we live now, as I see it, and allow for a certain element of hope... I'm entering my Surrealist

Noir period. If this sounds all too serious, rest assured that the journey also involves various car chases, gunplay, existential gangsters, magical events, and general weirdness"

(Noon, "The Dissemination"). This profound and eloquent experimental novel is, as

42 See Ballard's Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974), and The Kindness of Women (1991).

43 Noon explains his frustration with the genre: "When the public goes into a book shop, the only people that venture into the science fiction section are hardcore fans and usually it's on the third floor at the back... I know for a fact that my main audience doesn't come just from the science fiction community, but from a vast amount of rock'n'roll kids. To a large extent I'm writing for and with them. Being put in science fiction, I'm losing out on kids who will walk into the bookshop, see a book and think 'That looks okay.' The science fiction writers in Britain, and there's a number of us who are all on the edge, have to make a decision before it's too late...It's an extremely laddish genre which doesn't appeal to me at all. My work sets itself up against that. If I had my way, I would define science fiction very precisely as being about two things: it's either about spaceships or it's about elves. And in the SF section of a book shop, I would put just those books. Now everything else, including Ballard, Dick, me, Michael Marshall Smith, Paul J. McAuley, and Pat Cadigan, I'd move into general fiction" (Marshall, "Jeff Noon : Pixel Juice : Dub Til it Bleeds : Interview with Jeff Noon"). Additionally, Grimwood includes Falling out of Cars in what he finds to be "part of Noon's continuing revolt out of genre and into creative resistance against all traditional forms of fiction" (Grimwood). 74

Noon himself suggests, "a more mature work, a novel that deals more with the real world, whatever that might mean these days.. .The novel remains in a state of flux at the end; a realm of possibility" (Santala).

The genesis of Falling out of Cars is a point of interest, particularly as it relates to chaotics and metamorphiction. The work was composed by experimentations with chance and with narrative chronology, and by combining three otherwise unrelated stories. Noon notes in his article "Mirror Writing" that

the first story concerned a group of teenagers obsessed with chess. The main

character was a girl called Tupelo. [A]fter about 40 pages the writing came to a

dead end. Meanwhile, I was thinking back to an old story44 of mine based on

Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass. The mirror that Alice climbs through

is broken. Over the years, the fragments of this magical object are scattered

around the world, much sought after by collectors. I had always thought that this

idea could be expanded, made darker, brought up to date. I had a few tries, all to

no avail. (Noon)

The third element harkens back to the idea Noon had begun to experiment with in

Cobralingus, namely the value that communication theory may have in the development and expression of new types of literature. He explains that

the third idea came from reading about communication theory, where "noise" is

the name given to any kind of interference affecting a message as it passes along a

medium. Static on a telephone line is a common example. I had a vision of a

world in which the levels of noise rise alarmingly, becoming a sickness. Even

44 "Latitude 52" first published in Intoxication: An Anthology of Stimulant-Based Writing" (1998) edited by Toni Davidson. 75

speaking to another person would be next to impossible. Perhaps this could be a

new kind of disaster novel for the information age? It seemed a powerful idea, but

no more than that. I had no entry point into the narrative, and once again the idea

died on the screen. (Noon)

In the spirit of metamorphiction, Noon turned to the chaotics of chance procedures and the imaginative spirit to execute the project that was eventually become Falling out of Cars. He writes,

some outside agency was needed, some way of forcing my brain to take a new

approach. I would open myself up to chance. To do this I went back to the

notebooks I had kept when I first started writing, more than 500 pages filled with

ideas, images, lines of dialogue and the like. I hadn't looked at these books in

years, but now I chose one at random and turned to a page. The plan was to use

whatever was written there as the opening of my novel. (Noon)

From this point of departure, Noon went about formulating Falling out of Cars. He attempted complex experiments in chronology but, as he explains, "I finished the first draft, which I then showed to a few people. They liked the writing, but were totally confused by the chronology. In response I unfolded the narrative, arranging the chapters in their proper linear order" (Noon). Ultimately, Noon explains that this experimental method of composition "gives the book a slightly fractured feel, as though.. .it is slowly being put back together from fragments.. .None of this was planned. The novel arrived by its own methods" (Noon). Here, Noon's fascination with chaos is employed to develop a work of fiction that is simultaneously as permeated with noise as it is serene, as elusive in 76

its meaning as it is semantically excessive, and as fragmented in its form as it is a unified

expression of the potentialities and possibilities of experimental literature.

The resulting narrative is as vertiginously complex as it is delicate. Falling out of

Cars is presented as a series of diary entries by Marlene Moore, a journalist:

My name is Marlene Moore. This is my book.

It's the kind of notebook a teenager might buy, with the picture of a tiger on the

cover. A tiger with blue stripes. Inside, the paper is thin, almost translucent; the

ink from my pen seeps through. All these lines of writing. Shadows, glances.

This is the story. These are all the various things that have happened to me in

the last few weeks. But now, as I flick through the book, I see only the mess I

have made. Words, sentences, paragraphs, whole pages, scoured with black

marks. Mistakes. The noise gets in everywhere. Pages are ripped, or torn out

completely; some discarded, other taped into new positions. There are smudges

of dirt, of food, of blood. The marks where once a pressed flower lay; stains of

chlorophyll, pollen, the tiny fragments of a petal. (Noon 11)

The reference to the tiger with blue stripes recalls Jorge Luis Borges' short story "Blue

Tigers" (1983). "Blue Tigers," like Falling out of Cars, examines the thresholds of human understanding when faced with paradox and the infinite. However, Noon desires not only to offer homage to Borges, but also to include Borges among the various other literary references ornamenting and informing the novel. These ornamental references function like the Ballardian landscape to which Noon alludes near the opening of the novel. These are symbols, not so much of a dying civilization, but of a dying art form: the English novel. Whereas the Ballardian landscape is marked by abandonment, the 77

landscape Noon describes is persistently inhabited, frequented, and distressed by literary

artifacts; that is, the Noonian landscape is quite literally haunted. The textual

ornamentations also function as the specters or ghosts which Noon wishes to resurrect

from contemporary fiction. This aim in Falling out of Cars is poignantly achieved.

Marlene is on a quest by car—commissioned by Kingsley, a mysterious and ailing

elderly man,—for fragments of a broken mirror that have been scattered across a

dystopian England. The shattered mirror in the work is presumably the mirror through

which Carroll's Alice had traveled in Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found

There. Along the way, Marlene picks up three companions: a young woman who

practices tai chi; Henderson's occasional lover, ex-soldier Peacock who has "got a gun"

(14); and a teenage girl, Tupelo, a hitchhiker who is picked up from the side of the road,

holding a sign that reads "wherever"45 (Noon 16). England has been infected with an

illness known as "The Noise."46 The illness disorders semiotic order and hence all types

of communication—time, chess, have lost all rules; mirrors may not be gazed into for the risk of "the noise being caught in a loop," "a face.. .screaming" (201); "the symbols and

letters [float] free from the signs" of "bars and cafes, amusement arcades, cinemas"

(153); and "words [crumble] into dust" (290). The illness functions symbolically as a

state of mourning.

Grimwood explains the symbolic significance of the covered mirrors: "No sufferer from the virus may look in a mirror, so looking glasses are painted over or turned to the

45 This scene is repeater later in the novel when the travelers encounter a young man hitchhiking. Unlike Tupelo's sign, however, the young man's sign is simply a "blank piece of card" (111) suggesting, an increase in the destructive effects that the noise is having on written language. 46 The origin of this illness is never explained. Similar to Kafka's employment of unfathomable and incomprehensible bureaucracies to express a nightmarish atmosphere, Noon uses the absence of reason and explanation to establish a dreamlike atmosphere of magic and Carrollian nonsense. 78

wall, as though the whole country had gone into high-Victorian mourning for a lost way

of life—our way" (Grimwood). Marlene records that "the noise is a dark hand, a soft

hold, slow poison, sickness, it will not leave me go. And yet I will have such moments of

lucidity, a sudden pain of memory, whole and vibrant; a fleeting glimpse that must be

caught hold of immediately, or else be lost for ever" (11-12). Her notebook gradually

replaces her memory: "I have to keep writing. There is no other escape, especially now that I seem to be getting worse.. .This is the book" (12). Marlene, Henderson, and

Peacock are suffering from the illness—and, consequently, also suffering from individual sorrow; Tupelo, on the other hand, is immune to the illness, though it is important to note that she is not immune from grief. Furthermore, Marlene has lost her daughter to the illness, a back story which, along with Marlene's abandoned marriage, allows Noon to engage in a philosophical meditation on loss and memory. The Noise can be provisionally treated with a government distributed drug, "Lucidity" or "Lucy:" "What would I be, without Lucidity," Marlene asks, "I would not be able to write. I would have no real understanding of words, as they are spoken. The world would fill up with noise and I would be lost, completely" (37). This drug becomes a central symbol that, like the feather drug in Vurt,47 functions with a great deal of connotative polysemy

On the one hand, the drug's street name, Lucy, becomes increasingly linked to various vampire themes, bringing to mind Lucy Westenra from Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). We learn through Tupelo that those individuals who are immune to the illness hold the cure in their blood, a trait which ironically proves to be dangerous for the immune: Marlene writes, "I can't even imagine what it must be like, to be immune... There's not many of them, and I know they have a lot of trouble. Stories of violence. One terrible case, where a man was found dead with his neck cut open. The blood sucked out. I remember another writer at the magazine was working on a piece about these people. Every week, they're supposed to report to a designated hospital, to have the extraction made. Some quality in the hormones, which forms the base element of the Lucidity drug. They say that just one tiny droplet will calm a million or more bad signals" (99). Tupelo, reluctant to give blood, wears a scarf to hide the puncture wounds in her neck. Indeed, the vampiric undertones of the novel are striking. For example, this schematic network of vampiric connotations recalls the vampire's lack of reflection in a mirror. The drug also has connotations of LSD and lucid dreaming. 79

The narrative occurs in a metaphorical paraspace: that which is situated between a transmitter and a receiver. Noon writes that

[t]he English road novel has always been seen as a problematic genre, compared

to the American model. There's just not enough space in this country, for people

to get lost in. However, I was interested in the number of books that have come

out in the last few years, dealing with the idea of the "non-space." All those

journeys around the London orbital, and through the cold wastes of suburbia. The

Boring Postcards book also plays with this idea. So, maybe an English road novel

can journey through these various non-spaces, this is where the sense of loss will

be most intensely felt. (Noon, "The Dissemination")

Before the first chapter, Noon establishes this paraspace by having a page with the word

"Transmission" at the top of the page, and the word "Reception" near the bottom, with two questions situated in between: "Where do you come from? / And where are you going?" (1). The novel and its components become a signal passing through noise; as in

Cobralingus the signal flickers, is distorted, feeds back, and mutates. Noon establishes a narrative paraspace where binary structures and concepts such as the signifier and the signified, the mirror and its image, the Self and the other are subjected to chaotic flux.

For Noon, however, the chaotic pathway from transmitter to receiver, as destructive and disorderly as it may appear, is a narrative space in which fruitful experimentation can occur. As Noon's conclusion to the novel insists:

In these days of chaos, possibilities abound.

I shall leave this book on the nightstand, in between the traveler's bible and the

telephone directory. These pages of smoke. They have their own conclusion. I 80

can only hope that some other sweeter device or agency will cast its spell upon

them, making them clean, and the world alongside.

Listen now. Whoever you are, with these eyes of yours that move themselves

along this line of text; whoever, wherever, whenever. If you can read this

sentence, this one fragile sentence, it means you're alive. (Noon 344)

Falling out of Cars marks a literary midpoint between the traditional stability of scripture

and the absolute chaotics implied by communication theory. The pages of the novel's nebulous, fragile sentences suggest a new way of thinking about experimental fiction: that which exists in a paradoxical state between stability and precariousness, literary tradition and literary experimentation. Grimwood observes that "Marlene hunts because hunting gives her life what little meaning it still contains." By analogy, Noon experiments to illuminate in contemporary literature what meaning he feels the literary artform still contains.

We may wish to consider Falling out of Cars as a general communication system with five consituted parts as mapped out by Shannon. They are as follows: the information source, the transmitter, the channel, the receiver, and the destination. Shannon explains the information source as that which "produces a message or sequence of messages to be communicated to the receiving terminal" (33). The transmitter also functions in a rather straightforward way: it "operates on the message in some way to produce a signal suitable for transmission over the channel" (33). The channel is simply the medium employed in the transmission of the signal from the transmitter to receiver, whether it is a set of wires, a band of radio frequencies (34), or, in the case of Noon's metamorphiction,

48 This is an humorous allusion to a phrase of particular interest in communication theory and shorthand training: "//w en rdths msg..." (Gleick 256). 81

the Cobralingus Engine. Shannon explains that "the receiver ordinarily performs the

inverse operation of that done by the transmitter, reconstructing the message from the

signal" (34) and consequently provides a received signal similar to its original manifestation. The final part of the system, the destination, is essentially "the person (or thing) for whom the message is intended" (34). This general system functions like the poetic machine found in Cobralingus. That is, the inlet text may be thought of as an information source; the transmitter as the metamorphictive process which transforms the inlet text into a poetic signal appropriate for transmission; the channel is manifest as the

"snake diagram" displaying the interim stages of the transmission process; the receiver is the reconstructed message, or the outlet text; and the destination might be considered to be the book itself49 and—by extension—its readership.

Taking the general communication system as a model, noise may affect the signal somewhere between the transmitter and the receiver. With Cobralingus, the reader may delight over the chaotic mutation and semantic flux that the texts undergo along the signal pathway. The interim texts in Cobralingus allow the reader to examine the paraspace and moment between the transmitter and receiver where the signal is most susceptible to noise. These spaces and corresponding pulsations in time constitute some of the most pleasurable moments in Cobralingus; yet, simultaneously, the significance of this literary pleasure is related to the metamorphictive process as a whole—that is, as

Noon remarks, the pleasure of metamorphiction is the result of taking the complete journey from the inlet to the outlet. Falling out of Cars, when considered in terms of a general communication system, may be regarded as an extended narrative that occurs in

49 There is a paradox here, of course. The book itself functions both as the final stage in the transmission and as a model of the whole system; that is, it functions simultaneously as a subpart and the whole. 82 the conceptual space and time between the transmission and receiver. Viewed in relation to Cobralingus, the narrative is an extended interim stage of metamorphiction. However, this stage makes no reference to an original transmission. Unlike the complete process represented in Cobralingus, Falling out of Cars is a paraspatial and paratemporal pulsation resulting from the collision of three transmitted signals as they are situated between a transmitter and a receiver—where and when the signals are most likely to be subjected to noise and interference. It is a narrative which is constantly at odds with itself yet elegant in its balance, a structure permitting new literary possibilities to flicker and pulsate in radically new ways.

Weaver explains that when noise is introduced into a communication system

the received message contains certain distortions, certain errors, certain

extraneous material, that would certainly lead to what the received message

exhibits, because of the effects of the noise, an increased uncertainty. But if the

uncertainty is increased, the information is increased, and this sounds as though

the noise were beneficial!...This is a situation which beautifully illustrates the

semantic trap into which one can fall if he does not remember that "information"

is used here with special meaning that measures freedom of choice and hence

uncertainty as to what choice has been made. It is therefore possible for the word

information to have either good or bad connotations. Uncertainty which arises by

virtue of freedom of choice on the part of the sender is desirable uncertainty.

Uncertainty which arises because of error or because of the influence of noise is

undesirable uncertainty. 83

In Falling out of Cars, however, the correlation between noise and uncertainty conveys

the necessity of both the desirable and undesirable connotations of information by

displaying a paradox which is as uncompromising as it is attractive. Noon is quite

explicit that noise may have a desirable influence on the contemporary arts. To his

novel's characters, on the other hand, the ubiquity of noise is an illness which disrupts all

meaningful semiotics and communication and threatens the concept of the self. Indeed, this disease results in death, as in the case of Marlene's nine-year-old daughter, Angela who was, as Marlene laments, "drowned by her own heart" (294). The illness may be controlled by a receiver, represented as the drug Lucidity, that artificially and provisionally rearranges signals for the user. However, the treatment is ultimately in vain as the entire novel is to be understood as an isolated position and moment located between a transmitter and receiver. That is, there is a distinction between the perspective of the characters suffering from the illness and the reader's perspective of the infected

English landscape. The narrative itself—the text which constitutes the pharmacologically treated narrative—is in continual mutation due to signal interruption and noise. The disordered nature of the novel's Active world lends itself to the expression of the increasing angst, despair, and absurdity experienced by the characters in their journey across England. The characters may be considered metasignals within a constitutive disrupted signal—that is, the novel—as they are subjected to the noise which chaotically disrupts all order. While the characters experience undesirable uncertainty as a a symptom of the noise, the reader must translate their predicament into desirable uncertainty if the novel is to be aesthetically successful. 84

Noon uses the character-as-metasignal caught between "metatransmitters" and

"metareceivers" to examine perception in a philosophical meditation at the heart of

Falling out of Cars. Indeed, the epistolary form of the novel allows the reader to follow, as Santala explains, the "dreamlike, languid downward spiral into the increasingly unstable mind of Marlene" (Santala, Works: Falling out of Cars). Noon explains that

Falling out of Cars is

a first person narrative, told through the journal of Marlene... Because of the

nature of the land, the disease, and also because of her own damaged psyche,

Marlene is a very unreliable narrator. Exactly what is really happening, and what

imagined, and how can we tell the difference? (Noon, "The Dissemination")

Marlene-as-narrator is a metasignal caught in a paraspatial and paratemporal locale between two poles of a metaphorical communication system. The environment in which

Marlene is situated is subject to the interference of the noise while she, as epistolary narrator, amplifies the ambient confusion through her diary entries; she is, in this sense, both subject to the noise and has the noise as her subject.

The metaphor of noise as an illness is ubiquitous; both perceiver and percept are affected and contaminated and the reader must be continually suspicious of Marlene's apprehension and interpretation of events. Objects themselves are infected at the phenomenological50 level. Consequently, derangement is the novel's method and theme.

Noon plays narrative games with the nature of perception, radicalizing the device of the unreliable narrator. Appropriately, he summarizes Falling out of Cars as "about a group of people who are traveling around this diseased Britain, trying to find a scrap of meaning

50 Phenomenology, here, is used according to its basic denotative meaning and is not intended to be aligned with the work of any particular philosopher. 85

in the barrage of infected images. It's about the final days of the Empire of Signs"51

(Santala "Transmission > Reception: The Modern Word Interviews Jeff Noon").

Marlene's diary entries are subjected to the chaotics of communication—flux, conflict, paradox, disorder—and she herself may be viewed as an infected metasignal within a paraspace affected by the same disease.

An episode52 of exceptional interest is Marlene's description of a "machine" that can be used to simultaneously look at a mirror and read a passage of a text—both tasks being of exceptional difficulty and danger to a sufferer of the illness. The machine is comprised of seven parts: a silver coin, a single blade of a pair of scissors, a small battery, a compact disc of Tomorrow Is the Question, by Ornette Coleman53 which is

"broken, one shard missing" (Noon 265), a piece of string, a bottle top, and a page torn from a book54 (265). Marlene explains how the machine works:

First, choose a location approximately one metre from the water's edge, with the

tide incoming; here the blade of the scissors is buried halfway in the pebbles, with

the sharpened point showing; the compact disc is placed horizontally on the blade,

with the point of the blade pushed securely through the hole provided; please note

that the labelled side of the disc must be facing downwards, and that the disc

should be tilted at a slight angle, towards the operator; a knot can now be tied in

51 This is most certainly a reference to Roland Barthes' semiotic study of Japan, Empire of Signs (1970). 52 The novel is without chapters. Rather, it is in five overarching parts comprised of fragmented episodes. Each episode is marked with a large ">" indicating the direction of the novel as a signal. 53 Ornette Coleman (b. 1930) is an American free jazz saxophonist, trumpeter, and composer. 54 The page of text Noon provides is from The Diary of Samuel Pepys: "Up, and put on my coloured silk suit very fine, and my new periwig, bought a good while since, but durst not wear, because the plague was in Westminster when I bought it; and it is a wonder what will be the fashion after the plague is done, as to periwigs, for nobody will dare to buy any haire, for fear of the infection, that it had been cut off the heads of people dead" (Noon 266). In this diary entry, Pepys records the fear of contracting, from infected periwigs, the Great Plague of 1665 which, in the spring and summer of that year, devastated London with an outbreak of bubonic plague. This excerpt is appropriate as Noon invokes an epistolary account of a plague—analogous to the Noise—that affects perception and identity. 86

one end of the piece of string; the other end is tied round the battery. The battery

is placed on the pebbles close by the compact disc, with the page of the book held

in place beneath the battery.. .finally, the knotted end of the string is placed within

the broken part of the compact disc, in such a way that the string is held

there.. .The operator should place themselves in such a position that they can both

read the text and see their own face reflected in the mirrored surface of the

compact disc. The eyes glance back and forth between the text and the mirror, as

the text is read aloud.. .And the mirror holds the face, gently. (265-266)

Marlene explains that "all that matters is the text and the mirror, the joining of the two,

and that the text be read aloud to the final word whilst the eyes stare back at themselves,

examining" (266). She adds that "the fact that nobody has yet managed this task, not

completely, should not discourage us" (266). The whimsically absurd machine serves

Noon well; it opens a stimulating passage examining the correlation between the infected perceiver and the phenomenological percept. The strange episodes that follow Marlene's gaze into the machine comprise one of Noon's most profound narrative examinations: of the failing distinction between the perceiver and the percept when the narrative is situated

in the paraspace between the transmitter and the receiver.

The episode opens with Marlene recognizing another subject:

I saw somebody. I saw a person that I recognized, or thought I recognized. In the

crowd. A sideways glance of somebody known briefly, or well known, a long

time ago or recently. A woman. In the crowd that moved along the beach path,

she walked there, below the promenade. A woman, somebody. A certain way

she had, a certain look about her, half-turned towards me and then away. I 87

followed her. I pushed through the crowd, trying to keep the woman in sight.

Sometimes she would seem very near to me, and then further away, and

sometimes she would vanish altogether, drift away and then reappear some

distance off, and always moving. (Noon 268).

Marlene calls out to the woman and is surprised by her own utterance: "My name. My own name," Marlene writes, "we have the same name. The woman stands there quite still, with her back towards me, as I approach" (269). The narrator becomes increasingly uncertain who—Marlene or the woman—is speaking:

"Marlene? Is that you?"

Someone speaks. The woman turns round. I imagine a mirror turning on a

central pivot, shifting through degrees, through slow degrees. Her face is dark

and soft, retained by shadows. She will not come forward.. .1 have to move close

myself, one step, one more, to let the face reveal itself. And with these eyes,

those lips, this mouth, that strand of hair falling, these bones, that skin so pale,

these hands that reach forward. (269)

The ubiquity of the noise dissolves the boundary between Marlene the perceiver and the other woman as percept. This blurring culminates in the dissolution of proximal and the remote, "this" and "that," indicating the two bodies' perceptual merging. That is, the noise affects the perceptual exterior—the signal—and Marlene—the infected metasignal—to such a degree that the two become indistinguishable, establishing a debilitating identification between perceiver and percept.

Fictional characters may be understood as proxies with a likeness to actual individuals.

On another ontological level, a literary character is a textual arrangement, existing within 88

a larger linguistic system. Because Falling out of Cars may be understood as a disrupted

signal situated in the paraspace between a transmitter and a receiver, the characters are

both individuals and parts of a code. Because the text of Falling out of Cars is a

disrupted signal, characters as text also manifest disruption. If the characters are to

function iconically—that is, as proxies for nonfictional perceiving individuals in a chaotic

environment—then by analogy their perception will be chaotic. In Falling out of Cars, the text is chaotic and noisy, therefore the reader perceives the characters to be deranged.

Ontological levels—those of textual and actual reality—are deliberately blurred by Noon, producing an effect that is simultaneously consistent and recognizable, yet highly

alienating.

As Marlene-as-metasignal is relocated into the overarching infected signal, she fears the loss of her memory. Much earlier in the novel, Marlene explains that "[t]there seems to be no ruling to how my memory works; certain events will stay with me, free as yet from infection, but lately, and more and more, I can feel the past drifting away, Beyond hold. The weeks, the years gone by, one by one, all drawn over by confusion" (18-19).

Marlene's anxiety about memory loss is the product of her translation from her position as a metasignal/character to the infected signal itself—that is, she is dissolving into the environment of noise. The ubiquity of noise in the overarching signal threatens the

"events" and memories that are "free as yet from infection."

The memory Marlene holds most precious is that of her dead daughter, Angela. The scene of translation consists of an unnamed narrator describing Marlene's furious attempt to write Angela back into existence: 89

Black marks, wetness, scratches. In the darkness, a pen moving across skin,

across a young girl's skin. Words being put there, on the skin, with Marlene's

own hand doing the writing. Words, these words, being written on the skin and

Marlene thinking to herself that only by covering the body with words, entirely,

will the young girl be saved. And then feeling the sharp, polished nib of the pen

cutting into the skin, pushing the ink through into the body of the girl, pushing the

words deep into the veins; Marlene realizing that the words, these very words,

they will either enliven the girl, or kill her. Only by putting the correct words

down, in the correct order, will the girl be roused again. (271)

This episode suggests that Marlene the third person narrator now belongs to a realm paradoxically removed from Marlene the first person narrator. However, the reader also recognizes that the words being written by Marlene—"[w]ords, these words, being written on the skin"—are the same words that comprise the third person narration. There has been a translocation from a metasignal to the infected signal, or from the perceiver's diary towards the perceiver's phenomenal environment. Marlene attempts desperately to stop the memory of her daughter from drifting away by transforming text into body, by transcoding Angela back into a character-as-metasignal. By providing a third-person narrative from the position of the infected signal, Noon demonstrates Marlene's desire to reconstitute Angela into the realm of the characters-as-metasignals, thus giving Angela presence in both memory and physicality.

However, Marlene's desire to write her daughter back into existence proves impossible. In fact, the act of writing takes a disconcerting turn as, rather than restoring the daughter to life, it damages her as she exists as a memory for Marlene. The third-

person Marlene explains the absurdity of this task:

The soft wetness, shreds of skin, scratches, the black ink. Tiny cries of pain, the

darkness. Marlene knew that she was failing, she was failing in the task. The

writing was a poison. But still, she could not lift the pen away from the flesh.

Marlene could not stop writing. And then from nowhere came the idea that all

she had to do, to stop herself from writing, was to wake up. She had to wake

herself up from this dream, that was all.. .to lift the pen from the body of the

young girl, to let the eyes come open finally, blinking at the light that burned into

them. (271-272)

The above passage almost certainly alludes to Kafka's allegorical story, In the Penal

Colony (1919). The theme linking the two stories is the metamorphic relation between body and text. In Kafka's story the sentence of the Condemned man is inscribed—by sharp needles—upon his body by an elaborate torture device, operated by an Officer.

Upon the completion of the inscription the Condemned, though enlightened, dies.

Important here is the idea of transforming the Condemned—by inscription upon the body—into text; that is, the movement is from body to sentence, both in its legal and grammatical sense. Marlene's intention is based upon an inversion of this idea. By writing upon the body of Angela, her desire is to resurrect her; that is, to metamorphose text into body. Both intentions, however, are based on a fallacy: the failure to distinguish between the literal and figurative levels of meaning. Although Marlene's desire is to rescue the memory of her daughter and to give her presence through the act of writing, the outcome ultimately proves to be similar to that in In The Penal Colony: a gratuitous 91 form of torture. Like the execution device in Kafka's story, Marlene's body is described as "a slow machine, with only the brain and the hand at work, the writing hand" (271-

272). Here, however, the guilt being inscribed on Angela's body is not that of the daughter, but of Marlene; the guilt and sentence are derived from the mother's sense of debilitation and helplessness. While in Kafka the Officer's resolve leads to his death as a result of his own folly, Marlene survives having recognized that inscribing the body of her daughter is, in fact, a painful act of self-reflexive guilt, rather than one motivated by the desire to resurrect Angela through writing.

Upon Marlene's awakening from the "dream," the narration shifts back to first-person

Marlene: "Where was I? Painful, curled up on the back seat of the car, coming to, awakening. Alone" (Noon 273). For Marlene, the consolation for her loss cannot be obtained through text-to-body metamorphosis of her daughter. Because Falling out of

Cars is conceived as a signal that is situated between a transmitter and receiver—and therefore constantly subject to noise—the process of mourning is, like everything else in the novel, chaotic. Marlene's hold on her valued memories is subject, like the flickering signifiers in "Bridal Suite Production," to a process of "unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations, and dispersions" (Hayles, How We Became Posthuman 30). Ultimately, chaos here functions as a metaphor for the incomprehensibility, despair, and anxiety associated with loss and mourning; a chaotic confusion of perceiver and percept confirms the impossibility on behalf of the mourner to achieve closure by recapturing the past.

The novel's conclusion offers no reconciliation between Marlene's memory and perception. After abandoning her fellow travelers, Marlene takes the car and continues on her journey across the infected English landscape: "It wasn't that long a time since I'd 92

last driven the car, a week perhaps two, but it felt like some months had gone by, and I

had changed since then, grown worse in the sickness, and the car the same. We were

bound together, held one within the other" (327). The wretched Marlene continues on

her journey, alone:

I moved on. Open country, slowly giving way to trees, and the pale sun climbing.

I would pass the occasional other vehicle, or a man walking the roadside, or

people working the farmlands. And then the forest closed in and I saw nothing

but the trees themselves, still in leaf.

Driving, only driving; only drifting.

The car started to move across the road from side to side, without my

command, the wheel slipping in my hands. I should have stopped then; I thought

of stopping but then the car would right itself, giving control back to me. The

journey was not quite done.

From the radio, only sighs of breath.

...I took my hands off the wheel. (335-336)

Marlene is reluctant to admit her despair and the apparent defeat of her perception and memory. She protests that the "journey was not quite done," though she admits to "only driving; only drifting." The motivation for the journey is displaced from Marlene to the car: she admits that she should stop the car, but that the car "would right itself." This is followed by a kind of technological pathetic fallacy;55 that is, the car responds to

Marlene's projecting of the journey's impetus onto the vehicle with no more than "sighs of breath." Ultimately, the perceiver and the object—that is, Marlene and the car,

55 The car is not simply a metaphorical projection on Marlene's behalf, but literally takes a conscious and active role in the narrative. Nature, on the other hand, remains indifferent to Marlene's grief. 93 respectively—abandon the quest. Marlene removes her hands from the wheel and the car glides softly into a tree:56

Time was a slow liquid through which we moved, now swerving towards the

trees. A bank of earth slowed us even more, and we crested the rise at an easy

pace and then slid to a halt against and old, blackened tree trunk. The seat belt

embraced me round the heart, so gently. I felt that we had caressed the tree,

rather than hitting it. A scuffle of birds flew away through the branches, and then

all was still. (336)

The car continues to take an active role in sympathetically guiding Marlene towards confronting her grief. The nominative plural pronoun "we" establishes the active relationship between Marlene-as-perceiver and the car-as-conscious-object. The seat belt embraces her heart and the car caresses the tree "rather than hitting it." Marlene, on the other hand, passively allows the impact to occur in despair that her quest is literally ending in defeat.

The subsequent episode clarifies the significance of the novel's title: "Everything seemed to be fine, until I opened the door and tried to climb out of the car. A dizziness came over me, and I fell to the ground, the air singing around me. And I lay there in the grass for a time, a good time, I don't know how long a time, just lying there" (337).

Here, Marlene literally falls out of the car; an act which symbolically permits her to

56 This scene is an allusion to Vladimir Nabokov's masterpiece, Lolita (1955). Here, the despairing yet ever-witty Humbert Humbert, after the murder of playwright Clare Quilty, is thwarted by police and gently drives his car into a tree: "The road now stretched across open country, and it occurred to me—not by way of protest, not as a symbol, or anything like that, but merely as a novel experience—that since I had disregarded all laws of humanity, I might as well disregard the rules of traffic. So I crossed to the left side of the highway and checked the feeling, and the feeling was good.. .Then in front of me I saw two cars placing themselves in such a manner as to completely block my way. With a graceful movement I turned off the road, and after two or three big bounces, rode up a grassy slope, among surprised cows, and there I came to a gentle rocking stop" (Nabokov 306-307). 94 confront her mourning and sense of guilt by ending her delusional quest. Marlene is roused by a snake "curling and uncurling" (337) around her hand, a symbol evocative of postlapsarian guilt. Collecting the items from the wrecked car—her bag, the notebook, the photograph of Angela, and some clothes—she continues into the forest by foot.

In this scene, Noon includes three further polysemous signs: an ivory coated horse with a "gleaming eye of the deepest blue" (339), mirrors, and a river. Noon's interest in and understanding of mythology and mythical symbolism—most evident in Pollen—is sophisticated and accomplished. In this episode, however, the symbols are so overdetermined that they may function as a kind of noise, an excess of dissonant symbolic information. The symbolic and semantic abundance of this episode brings about a kind of catharsis whereby Marlene, although incapable of deciphering the symbols, is led by them through a series of ritualistic motions into self-forgetfulness.

First, she is led by the horse deeper into the forest until she reaches a river:

The horse walked ahead of me, weaving a pathway. The further we went, the

more I seemed to lose all sense of myself, and my surrounding. Now, in

recollection, I can use these various words: horse, tree, gun, flower, clock,

Marlene. But just then I no longer knew the name of the creature that roamed

ahead; I no longer knew the name of the strange objects that grew all around me.

I no longer knew what it was I should call myself, not even this; neither my being,

my species, nor my given name.

Presently, seen first only as flashes of light, of reflection, the forest gave way to

a body of water. (339-340) 95

While the symbolism here is profuse, it is evident that the horse functions as a surrogate

for the car, and leads Marlene into an existentially threatening environment, the forest,

where Marlene must lose herself in order to find a new self in a scene reminiscent of the

Narcissus myth. Indeed, Marlene's inability to recognize herself allows her to free

herself from her anxieties concerning her loss of memory. At the moment of her inability

to recognize herself, she becomes emotively and philosophically equipped to confront

undesirable effects without the angst caused by her failing memory.

Once she arrives at the river, she recollects "another person, sitting as [she] was,

partially hidden behind the flowers and the weeds. The figure could not be made out

clearly" (340). The person across the river is probably some manifestation of Marlene

herself; the figure functions as would a mirror image. As if she understood the ritual—

"finally, the idea came to me" (340)—Marlene begins to place the collected fragments of the mirror into the river; the woman on the opposite bank acts, as if a mirror image,

accordingly. Upon gazing at the submerged mirror fragments, Marlene sees herself: "The

face that was held beneath the surface, a drowned woman, staring back at me" (341).

The motif of the drowned woman takes on a dual significance. On the one hand, it

indicates that Marlene is contemplating suicide by walking into the lake: "All of the troubles endured since Angela's passing, they would melt away in the cold depths, and be

laid finally to rest" (342). At the same time, it facilitates for Marlene a philosophical

shift permitting her to surrender her desire for reconciliation between her failing memory and her emotional preoccupation with Angela's presence. That is, Marlene comes to

learn that the relationship between perception and memory is based on principles of

immanence, rather than presence: 96

This was it. I could not turn away from the drowned woman, this one temptation,

and, reaching forward, I let my fingers play amongst the contours of the face. I

felt I had dipped my hand in mercury. The image rippled, becoming lost, and

then slowly re-forming itself. And I found in there, in place of my own features,

the now clearly seen lines of my daughter's face; as though the one contained the

other.

Which it did, which it did. (342)

Marlene comes to realize that the relationship between perception and memory, although precarious, is inherently meaningful; that is, love persists in memory. While she may become increasingly incapable of retrieving orderly memories of Angela, this immanent relationship between the mother and the memory of her daughter affords Marlene provisional consolation and enables her to refuse suicide:

My hand slipped deeper into the water, without my choosing. The face closed

round my wrist. Something stirred within me. A beating heart. It was not of any

great notice, all told; a small releasing and nothing more. A simple refusal.

No. It would not end here, and not in this way.

Nothing more. But such a moment; so pure, and so forgiving. The water

glistened. The snake uncurled itself. The violet snake shifted on my skin, and

was then washed clean, its thin transparent body drifting away through the

shallows. (342)

Marlene's rejection of suicide is far from cataclysmic; it is a "small releasing" and a

"simple refusal." Her epiphany, though subtle, leads to self-forgiveness: the snake, as a symbol of her guilt, is "washed clean," its body is transparent and drifts away as her 97

sense of guilt fades. In her increasing failure to retain memory, Marlene recognizes that

her recollection of Angela is subject to the logic of chaotics. Angela is the inherent order

in the increasingly disordered mind of Marlene. The relationship between perception and

memory in Falling out of Cars is one of orderly disorder. By falling out of the car and

undergoing the ritual that follows, Marlene is fleetingly made capable of separating her

anxieties concerning the association of perception and memory, and can come to terms

with her loss.

The final fragment of the novel suggests Marlene's recognition of the fragility of her

mourning. Her solace lies in the fact that the memory of Angela is immanent even if it is not necessarily lucidly retrievable:

Only the photograph. The one thing left to me. How it blossoms in my sight. It

burns. Or else clouding over, a murmur of scent arises. In scarlet and blue it

cradles; in crimson and gold it may scatter and swirl, unfold, dispersing itself.

Now, let these colours cascade. Let these whispers awaken; let these sparkles

compose, gleam forth, froth and foam, fizzle, burst, enclose and caress

themselves, speaking themselves. Now let this tongue emerge from the light that

fell once on a garden, on a child's face, on chemicals. Let the picture overflow

from itself, spilling itself. It spills over and spells out the word of itself, and then

dispelling itself, making a game of itself, a flame of itself, the blossom and bloom

and perfume of itself. Only the photograph. This word, this tiny word, almost

known. Almost spoken. Louder now, softer. I will wait. Now let me wait. (345)

Marlene is left to remember her daughter abstractly. The photograph no longer functions as a surrogate for the absent Angela but rather as a fissioning signifier of chaos and 98 immanence. No longer is Angela simply represented by the photograph, but her image blossoms, burns, clouds over, cradles, scatters, swirls, unfolds, and disperses. Akin to the novel's artistic statement—"In these days of chaos, possibilities abound" (344)—

Marlene's comfort is to be continually sought after in the paradox of orderly disorder. In this sense, Falling out of Cars may be read as Noon's impassioned expression of the conflict inherent in the "post futurist" novel: it is an act of at once mourning the loss of literary traditions and celebrating the resurrection of these forms in spectral, uncanny fiction. Indeed, Falling out of Cars is a metaphorical misty whorl, a multiplicitous allusion to the poignant images and ideas of other great authors. Yet, Noon wishes to do more than merely acknowledge Kafka, Borges, or Carroll; rather he wishes to transform their fiction into ghostly new literary manifestations. Ultimately, Marlene's consolation, initiated through her commemoration of Angela through radically new spectral abstractions, becomes a metaphor for Noon's literary project: to raise up the fragile, blossoming ghost of the English novel. 99

CONCLUSION

This study focuses on the epistemological feedback between contemporary science and the arts that Noon employs to inform his literary experiments; needless to say, such an examination leaves various crucial aspects of Noon's work in want of further study.

Noon's work is complex; that his literary output infers order in disorder is, however, simply one aspect of his work worthy of further analyses. Butler and Gough successfully inspect the relationship between Noon's Vurt cycle and cyberpunk; Benford's insight into

Noon's postmodern significance is particularly striking; while Brooker and Farrell's

Carrollian examination of Automated Alice is highly valuable from Carrollian persective.

These studies form a foundation upon which further Noonian studies may be constructed.

A close examination of Noon's Mancunian fiction may shed some light on the critical issues associated with the status of experimental fiction in the study of the regional novel.

In his review of Keith Snell's The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1800-1990

(1998), Ralph Pite alerts readers to the unfortunate emphasis on realism in the study of the regional novel.57 Pite expresses some concern over Snell's exclusion of writers of fantasy and science fiction "for whom the local is nonetheless important" (Pite 165). Pite includes Noon amongst these neglected authors. Manchester plays a potent role in

Noon's early fiction and, as Gough argues, "[h]is fictional technique gives contemporary urban Manchester a futuristic veneer," a project that is in accord with cyberpunk's uncannily extracted depictions of contemporary urban conditions" (Gough 111). Andrew

Butler notes in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at the British Boom" that

This is a rather patronizing term, which suggests the enormous cultural dominance of London. Ultimately, this term implies that the provinces are deprived places that can only sustain a sort of naturalistic fiction. 100

Noon's position in Manchester surely helped him in the mid-1990s, in a period

when publishing houses outside of London appeared to be thriving. Vurt could

have been plotted on an A to Z map of Manchester: to a soundtrack of pounding

bass, it focused on the broken glass and dog excrement surrounding the tenements

in Hulme and the Moss Side crescents which had seen riots in the 1980s, and had

become the province of the squatter, the dealer, the student, and the infirm. (380-

381)

It is Noon's uncanny version of Manchester and its relation to the actual Manchester which may indeed be an area of marked interest for the study of the metamorphosed locale in the regional novel.

The influence of music on Noon's fiction is of primary importance. Indeed, the literary games associated with metamorphiction are metaphorically linked to the electronic production techniques of contemporary music, feature prominently in and inform Noon's body of work. In his article "Origins of a Dub Fiction," Noon writes

[t]he Clash included a song called 'Police and Thieves' on their debut album. Like

many people of my generation and background, this track was a doorway through

to that elemental unfolding of music known as Dub Reggae. Quite apart from the

value of the music itself, the most surprising thing about the Dub concept was its

approach to the act of creation. I was used to the idea of music being built up,

track by track, piece by piece, until the final mix was reached. Jamaican dub

producers such as Lee Perry and King Tubby reversed this process... Music no

longer has a final outcome; rather, it exists in a constant state of flux... This

creates, I believe, a music totally in tune with the contemporary mind.. .Turning to 101

the world of literature, can we see any real evidence of equivalent techniques

being used by writers? I would have to answer in the negative. (Noon)

By applying the creative process of musical remix to literature, Noon wishes to generate

new works of fiction that are without a "final outcome." By approaching literature

through the lens of this creative philosophy, fiction may constantly thwart the possibility

of becoming a finished product. That is, like recorded music, literature—both classical and contemporary—may be subjected to similar remix processes in order to create a type of fiction that is appropriate to the contemporary mind.

The intertextual relations invoked by Noon's work is certainly a fruitful area of interest, particularly in relation to the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Lewis Carroll.

Noon has explicitly indicated that through his fiction he wishes to update the ideas of both Borges and Carroll. What is striking, however, is Noon's ability to go beyond thematic rehashing and to produce innovative works of fiction by applying the metamorphictive process to Borges and Carroll. While some work has already been done on Noon's Automated Alice from a Carrollian perspective, it is important to note that

Carroll's influence is ubiquitous in Noon's oeuvre from Vurt to his more recent hypertext projects. For Noon, Carroll's Alice is more than one intertextual influence on his work.

Alice's presence in its various manifestations in Noon is as a major symbol for the imaginative and experimental spirit the English novel must adopt.

The relationship between the fiction of Noon and Borges is of equal importance.

Borges' intensely rigorous and succinct studies of paradox and the infinite inform Noon's desire to push the liminal parameters of contemporary fiction. The results of his influence on Noon are manifest in a variety of astutely elegant ways. Furthermore, 102

Borges' stylistic and philosophical influence may find its most explicit examples in the

fictional extract from the pseudo-essay, "The Looking Glass Wars" by the fictional

scholar R.B. Tshimosa, that frames the main narrative of Pollen, or in the masterfully crafted short stories in Pixel Juice, Noon's short story "The Cabinet of Night Unlocked"

(2000) is a rather precise homage, both stylistically and thematically, to the Argentine master. Noon remarks that Borges' fiction is "the bank of ideas I come back to, and use freely as I see fit, trying to keep Borges' spirit alive in a new, contemporary way"

(Santala, "Transmission>Reception: The Modern World Interviews Jeff Noon").

Noon's preoccupation with dream and dreamscapes may be a particularly fruitful area of study from a psychoanalytic perspective. The Vurt Cycle, with its abundance of mythological archetypes and excess of polysemous symbols, appears to be indebted to

CO the work of Carl Gustav Jung and Joseph Campbell. Falling out of Cars, while it expands upon this mythological symbolic tradition, is also quite strikingly reminiscent of

Lacanian psychoanalysis, especially in the novel's recurring themes of broken mirrors, fragmented bodies, and the relationship between shifts in narrative voice and the potential alterity of identity.

An in-depth study of Noon's highly masterful poetic prose style might also be valuable. While the fractal repetitions and lyricism of Vurt, the Carrollian nonsense prose of Automated Alice, the unforgettable remix of " Jabberwocky" in Nymphomation, the metamorphic structure of Cobralingus, and the meticulous and intricate prose poetry ofNeedle in the Groove and Falling out of Cars demonstrates Noon's success as an

58 Noon cites Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) as an inspiration for the plot structure of Vurt; Noon writes, "[The Hero with a Thousand Faces] examines myths from all around the world, in order to chart the ultimate narrative. I'd read this book a few years before, and it became obvious that I'd used the same structure in Vurt. I won't go into it further, because readers may want to discover the parallels for themselves" (Noon, "Where the Stories Come From: Vurt"). 103

aesthetically stimulating experimentalist, he is stylistically indebted to the classic poetic tradition. Michael Bracewell notes that

As a prose stylist, Noon deals in terms of voice and tone, locating the feelings

within his characters and then pitting them—more often than not—against a set of

circumstances or a pre-determined condition which will shape their particular

destiny. In this sense, Noon is a classicist, usually working within the understood

conventions of Greek or Shakespearean drama. He then relates this classicism to

a radical index of style and language. (5)

Furthermore, Cobralingus pays homage to a number of traditional poetical forms and concepts. For example, Noon sometimes conceals poetic forms within his prose, such as the haiku that blossoms in the second sentence from this passage of Pollen:

Coyote dug away from the fingers, away from time and loneliness, away from

care and woe, safety, the rules, cartography, instruction, shit fares and meta-cops;

all the bad things were peeling away. Black cab was sinking towards a small

green glimmer in the night-dark soil. (283)

Furthermore, Needle in the Groove may be viewed as both a magnificently crafted epic poem and an elegy for the spirit of the chemical generation of the late twentieth century.

Cobralingus is, in my view, one of the most interesting and invigorating works of contemporary poetry and a postmodern masterpiece. Each poem/metamorphiction is constructed with meticulousness and intricacy; the poems are simultaneously humorous, absurd, elegant, intellectually pleasurable, and often emotionally poignant. And finally, the lyricism of Falling out of Cars demands closer attention as it is one of those rare instances in contemporary fiction where the prose attains the poetic sublime. 104

WORKS CITED

Barrett, David V. "Review." New Statesman 21 (1994): 41.

Barthes, Roland. Empire of Signs. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang,

1982.

Beard, Steve, and Jeff Noon. Mappalujo. 2002: 14 February 2008

.

Benford, Joanne. Through the Screen Wildly: The Aesthetic of the Sublime Wilderness—

Towards a Postmodern Wildzone. Moog Enterprises, 2008.

Berlyne, John. "Review: Falling out of Cars by Jeff Noon." November 2002. SFRevu. 7

January 2008. http://www.sfrevu.com/ISSUES/2002/0211/Book%20-

%20Falling%20Out%20of%20Cars/Review.htm

Borges, Jorge Luis. "Blue Tigers." Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York:

Penguin, 2000. 494-503.

Bracewell, Michael. "The Metamorphiction of Jeff Noon." Cobralingus. Illus. Daniel

Allington. Hove: Codex, 2001: 5-7.

Brooker, Will. Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture. Continuum, 2005.

Bushell, Michaela, Helen Rodiss, Paul Simpson, eds. The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction.

London: Rough Guides, 2005.

Butler, Andrew M. "Journeys beyond Being: The Cyberpunk-Flavoured Novels of Jeff

Noon." Email from Andrew M. Butler. 16 March 2008.

. "Thirteen Ways of Looking at the British Boom." November 2003. Science

Fiction Studies. Vol. 30, No. 3. 14 November 2008. www.jstor.org

Carroll, Lewis. The Annotated Alice. Ed. Martin Gardner. New York: Norton, 2000. 105

Chester, Tony. "Science Fiction Book Review: Falling out of Cars."" The Science Fact &

Science Fiction Concatenation. 7 January 2008.

http://www.concatenation.org/frev/falling.html

Clayton, Keith. "Koch Curve Diagram." Basic Concepts in Nonlinear Dynamics and

Chaos. 28 June 1996. Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and the Life

Sciences. 22 April 2008.

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/psychology/cogsci/chaos/workshop/Workshop.ht

ml

Complete Review's Review: Cobralingus. The Complete Review. 7 February 2008.

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/noonj/clingus.htm

Conte, Joseph M. Design and Debris: A Chaotics of Postmodern American Fiction.

Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2002. de Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other Writings.

London: Penguin, 2003. de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. Ed.

Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Reidlinger. New York: McGraw

Hill, 1966.

Delany, Samuel R. "Some Real Mothers...: The SFEye Interview." Silent Interviews: On

Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics: A Collection of Written

Interviews. Hanover, NH: WesleyanUP, 1994. 164-185.

Derrida, Jaques. Specters of Marx: The State and the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the

New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. 106

Dow, Gordon. "The Oulipo." Grown Dodo. 20 June 2008.

http ://www. growndodo. com/wordplay/oulipo/index. html

Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. Bloomington: Indiana UP,

1976.

Farrell, Jennifer Kelso. Synaptic Boojums: Lewis Carroll, Linguistic Nonsense, and

Cyberpunk. Diss. Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical

College, 2007.

Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Viking, 1987.

Gordon, Joan. "Yin and Yang Duke It Out." Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of

Postmodern Science Fiction. Ed. Larry McCaffery. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.

Gough, Val. "A Crossbreed Loneliness? Jeff Noon's Feminist Cyberpunk." Future

Females, The Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science

Fiction Criticism. Ed. Marleen S. Barr. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.

109-128.

Gregson, Ian. Postmodern Literature. London: Arnold, 2004.

Grimwood, Jon Courtenay. "Behind the Mirror." The Guardian. 7 December 2003.

Guardian Unlimited. 7 January 2008.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/dec/07/featuresreviews.guardianreview23

Hayles, Katherine N. Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science.

Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.

. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science.

Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990. 107

. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and

Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

Hofstader, Douglas R. Godel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York:

Vintage, 1980.

. I Am a Strange Loop. New York: Basic Books, 2007.

Hogan, Ron. "Interview with Jeff Noon." 1996. Urban Desires. 7 January 2008.

http://www.desires.eom/2.l/Word/Reviews/Docs/noon-int.html

James, M.R. "Casting the Runes." Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Harmondsworth:

Penguin, 1974.203-229.

Johansen, Jergen Dines. Dialogic Semiosis: An Essay on Signs and Meaning. Ed. Thomas

A. Sebeok. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.

Johnston, Anthony. "Jeff Noon: Needle in the Groove: Liquid Culture: Interview with

Jeff Noon." August 2000. Spike Magazine. 7 January 2008.

http://spikemagazine.com/0800jeffnoon.php

Jones, Susanna, Alison MacLeod, Jeff Noon, William Shaw. 217 Babel St. 18 February

2008. http://www.217babel.com/

Kafka, Franz. "In the Penal Colony." Metamorphosis and Other Stories: Works

Published During Kafka's Lifetime. Trans. Malcolm Pasley. London: Penguin,

2000. 127-153.

Keen, Tony. "Feathers into an Underworld." The Arthur C. Clarke Award: A Critical

Anthology. Ed. Paul Kincaid with Andrew M. Butler. Daventry, UK: Serendip

Foundation, 2006. 97-107. Lalumiere, Claude. "Review: Falling out of Cars by Jeff Noon." 7 June 2003. Infinity

Plus. 7 January 2008.

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/fantasticfiction/fallingoutofcars2.htm

Livingston, Ira. Arrow of Chaos: Romanticism and Postmodernity. Minneapolis: U of

Minnesota P, 1997.

Marshall, Polly. "Jeff Noon: Pixel Juice: Dub Til It Bleeds: Interview with Jeff Noon."

August 2000. Spike Magazine. 7 January 2008.

http://spikemagazine.com/0800jeffnooninterzone.php

Martin, Tomas L. "Review: Falling out of Cars by Jeff Noon." Science Fiction Crows

Nest. 7 January 2008.

http://www.sfcrowsnest.com/sfnews2/03_dec/reviewl 203_23 .shtml

McHale, Brian. Constructing Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1992.

. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Milligan, Barry. "Introduction." Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other

Writings. London: Penguin, 2003. xiii-xxxviii.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: Vintage, 1997.

Noon, Jeff. Automated Alice. Illus. Harry Trumbore. London: Black Swan, 2000.

. "Biography: Jeffs Version." Spike Magazine. 14 Feb. 2008

.

. "Books Top 10: Jeff Noon's Favorite Fluid Fiction." Guardian Unlimited. 7

January 2008. http://books.guardian.co.uk/toplOs/topl0/0,6109,423637,00.html

. Cobralingus. Illus. Daniel Allington. Hove: Codex, 2001. 109

. "The Dissemination of the Works of Jeff Noon by Jeff Noon: Falling out of

Cars." Vurtamorphology. 7 January 2008. http://www.vurt-feather.co.uk/

. Falling out of Cars. London: Doubleday, 2002.

. "Interview with Michael Silverblatt." Bookworm. KCRW. April 1996. http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw960404jeff_noon

. "Latitude 52." Intoxication: An Anthology of Stimulant-Based Writing. Ed. Toni

Davidson. London: Serpent's Tail, 1998. 1-24.

. "Metaphorazine." PixelJuice. London: Black Swan, 2000. 47-49.

. "Mirror Writing." The Guardian. 27 December 2003. Guardian Unlimited. 7

January 2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/dec/27/featuresreviews.guardianreviewl4

. Needle in the Groove. London: Anchor, 1999.

. Nymphomation. London: Corgi, 1998.

. "Origins of a Dub Fiction." Language Is a Virus. 20 June 2008. http://languageisavirus.com/articles/articles.php?subaction=showcomments&id=l

099110671 &archive=&start_from=&ucat=&

. PixelJuice. London: Black Swan, 2000.

. Pollen. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1995.

. "Post Futurism." The Guardian. 10 January 2001. Guardian Unlimited. 1

January 2008. http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0„420328,00.html

. "Press Biography." Spike Magazine. 14 Febuary 2008. http://www.jeffnoon.com/pressbiography.php 110

. "Transcript: Jeff Noon Live Online." 16 May 2000. Guardian Unlimited. 7

January 2008.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,221845,00.html

. Vurt. London: Pan, 2001.

. "Where the Stories Come from." Spike Magazine. 7 January 2008.

http://www.jeffnoon.com/novelnotes.php

Paddy, David Ian. "Jeff Noon." Twenty-First-Century British and Irish Novelists. Ed.

Michael R. Molino. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 267. Detroit: Gale,

2003.

Pite, Ralph. "Reviewed Work: The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1800-1990 by

K.D.M. Snell. The Review of English Studies, 51, (February, 2000). 156-167.

http://www.jstor.org/

Readings, Bill. Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics. London: Routledge, 1991.

Santala, Ismo. "Introduction." The Scriptorium. 8 October 2003. The Modern World. 7

January 2008. http://www.themodernword.com/SCRIPTorium/noon.html

. "Transmission > Reception: The Modern Word interviews Jeff Noon." The

Scriptorium. 8 October 2003. The Modern World. 7 January 2008.

http://www.themodernword.com/SCRIPTorium/noon_interview.html

. "Works: Cobralingus." The Scriptorium. 8 October 2003. The Modern World. 1

January 2008. http://www.themodernword.com/SCRIPTorium/noon_works.html

. "Works: Falling out of Cars." The Scriptorium. 14 October 2003. The Modern

World. 7 January 2008.

http://www.themodernword.com/SCRIPTorium/noon_works.html Ill

Shannon, Claude Elwood. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 1949.

Slethaug, Gordon E. Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics in Recent

American Fiction. Albany: State U of New York P, 2000.

Smith, Leonard. Chaos: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.

Southern, Nile, Mark Amerika. "As Per Vurt: Interview with Jeff Noon." 23 February

1995. ALTX Online Network. 7 January 2008.

http://www.altx.com/int2/jeff.noon.html

Weaver, Warren. "Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication."

The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois

Press, 1949.

Weinstone, Ann. "Welcome to the Pharmacy: Addiction, Transcendence, and Virtual

Reality." Diacritics 27 (Autumn, 1997): 77-89. 7 January 2008

http://www.j stor.org

Wilson, D. Harlan. "Interview: Steve Beard." The Dream People: A Journal ofBizarro

Texts. 31 October 2008.

https://www.msu.edu/~dhw/dreampeople/issue27/interviewbeard.html

Wood, James. "Celluloid Junkies." 16 September 2000. Guardian Unlimited. 12 May

2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4064046,00.html 112

APPENDIX

Diagram of the Koch curve. "Generator Length=4/3" is the first iteration, while "Level 2

Length=16/9" is the second iteration, etc (Clayton):

Initiator Length=l

Generator Length=4/3

Level 2 Length-16/9

Level 3 Length=64/2*7