DW: Actually, there is an article in here on NASA's virtual reality project, and Whole Earth calls it cyberspace.
WG: (looking at the photo of a sensor-lined glove that controls the movement of the wearer in "cyberspace") Hey, Tom: you know, if you turned this thing inside out, you could get the computer to jerk you off?
TM: (laughing) That's beautiful, Bill. Put it in your book and someone'll build it.
WG: (laughing) Instead of jacking in, you'd be jacking off.
DW: It seems to me that what is at the center of the discussions in this issue of Whole Earth is the way the "personhood" of people is jeopardized by new technologies. What does happen to the concept of self in a society where downloading, cloning, and replaceable body parts are commonplace? In your books, the main characters use technology to protect what's left of the self. Molly is a particularly good example. The mirrors over her eyes, and the razorblades under her nails seem to me to be an attempt to protect what's left of any kind of interiority.
TM: I think the categories you're using are too traditional. Those are adaptations; those aren't protections of the self. The self is much more labile than in previous cultures, if you will... and in Gibson's stuff, it seems to me that what the self is is sort of open to negotiation on a particular day.
WG: Yeah, I'd agree with that.
DW: Something else that comes up over and over is the position that women characters end up occupying in your books, and in Postmodern literature in general. There's a book written by a feminist theorist at Yale named Alice Jardine called Gynesis, and she talks about the way in Postmodern fiction that women's bodies become a map for Postmodern Man to follow--the only the only remaining guide to the unknown. Angie in Count Zero, with the vvs written on her brain, or the messages Wintermute sends Case through Molly's eyes in Neuromancer, could be textbook examples of this phenomenon.
TM: No; I don't know; I just don't...
WG: I find it kind of poetically appealing.
TM: Yeah. I can't imagine it being true or false, right? (laughing). It's a nice way of looking at this stuff.
WG: Yeah (laughing). It's a good come-on line; try that next time.
TM: (laughing) Right: "Let's explore the unknown."
WG: I don't think it's necessarily women's bodies; why not men's bodies? You know, it's a two-way street. The closest I ever come to saying anything about that is the scene in Neuromancer where Case fucks the construct of Linda Lee in the construct on the beach. He has some kind of rather too self-consciously Lawrencian experience. He connects with the meat and it's like he gets Lawrencian blood-knowledge (and that's a little too much the English major there), but I was sincere about that; on some level I guess I believe it. But I think it works both ways.... Am I shooting myself in the foot, Tom? Should I be saying these things and have people come back in 20 years and cite this guy's thesis to me?
TM: There's a fundamental separation of categories that you have to understand here. Asking Bill if this thesis about women's bodies is true to his work is asking him to be the interpreter of his own text, in which case he's just another interpreter. Now if you what he meant by something, well, that's legit, but he can't validate or invalidate a particular interpretation, and in fact, to ask him to validate or invalidate a particular interpretation is like asking him to betray the possibilities of his own work. Umberto Eco wrote a book called A Postscript to The Name of the Rose, in which he said that in writing his postscript he was betraying the novel. He said, if I wanted to write an interpretation, I wouldn't have written a novel , which is a machine for generating interpretation.
WG: Well, the thing that I would question in that theory as you paraphrased it is that women's bodies are the map; I think bodies are the map, and if, for instance, you looked at the sequence in Mona Lisa Overdrive where what's-her- name, the little thing... I forget her name... Mona! yeah, Mona.
TM: (laughing) Your title character, remember?
WG: Jesus, I can't remember the character's names... I never think about this shit. (laughing) That's what I think you gotta understand.
TM: Nobody who ever writes a book thinks about this shit.
WG: Yeah, the eponymous Mona, where she remembers her stud showing up for the first time, when she's working in a catfish farm. All that really sexual stuff happens there before he takes her away. Think about the way she's looking at him, the way she's reading his body. Or look at the art girl, Marly. Marly follows the map in that book. She's the only one who can receive the true map and she goes to the heart of it. She gets an audience with God, essentially, and she does it through her own intellectual capacity and her ability to understand the art.
TM: She, in a way, for me is the most important one of those three characters [in Count Zero].
WG: If I was doing a thesis on my work, I would try to figure out what the fuck that Joseph Cornell stuff means in the middle of Count Zero. That's the key to the whole fucking thing, how the books are put together and everything. But people won't see it. I think it actually needs someone with a pretty serious art background to understand it. You know, Robert Longo understood that immediately. I was in New York--I've got a lot of fans who are fairly heavy New York artists, sort of "fine art guys", and they got it right away. They read those books around that core. I was actually trying to tell people what I was doing while I was trying to discover it myself.
DW: It goes back to Postmodernism, to pieces again, and to making new wholes from fragments, doesn't it?
WG: Yeah. It's sort of like there's nothing there in the beginning, and you're going to make something, and you don't have anything in you to make it out of, particularly, so you start just grabbing little hunks of kipple, and fitting them together, and... I don't know, it seemed profound at the time, but this morning it's like I can't even remember how it works (laughs).
DW: But it seems to me that the body is still more important to your female characters than to your male characters. You start out with Case, and the whole thing about how "the body is meat." It's like it's just not important to him; it doesn't matter.
WG: He's denying it.
TM: There's that key line "He fell into the prison of his own flesh," which is the whole point, in a way. I don't know--if you want some real ammunition for this that's not just bullshit Postmodernist criticism, there's a guy at Berkeley named Lakoff, George Lakoff. He's a cognitive psychologist, and he's testing a whole set of theories based on the notion that all knowledge is a "body" of knowledge, and that every single intellectual structure in the world is ultimately a piece of embodied spatial knowledge translated by metaphor into something else.
WG: Wow...
TM: Very heavy shit. This guy's really something. He's got a book called Women, Fire and Dangerous Things that's about how we categorize the world. And, as a matter of fact, I'll set him loose on Neuromancer some time because he'll come really back with like four hundred explanations about why this is the way that Bill's books work. But it fits very nicely with Bill's thoughts, because in the worlds he creates, knowledge is perceived knowledge, which means embodied knowledge, and the people who deny that, like Case, maybe they have to be taught by women about that denial, taught that the prison of our own flesh is the only place there is.
WG: The thing is, I'm very labile, especially this morning (laughs). I could sit here with 20 different people and 20 different theories and say, "Yeah, that's what it is." I like Chip Delany's reaction to anybody who comes on him with anything like this. He listens really intently and then he says, "That's an interesting thesis." And that's all. (laughs)
TM: It's very easy to make this stuff stand up and dance to whatever tune you want it to. If you're Julia Kristeva and you've got some well worked out critical act that you want to work on something, fine. But here's what I'm really objecting to in this stuff. The categories that you're applying to this stuff are not categories that are integral to the books. Things like the map on the woman's body and the "self". The interesting thing about Bill's stuff is that it's creating new categories. Cyberspace is not an analogue of something. It's not the self, it's not sex, it's cyberspace. that's what's really interesting. Look at the new categories. There's sort of ongoing discussion groups where people who work at universities and corporations all around the world are thinking about what they call cognitive engineering The most valid literary criticism that I know of is archaic by comparison. It's got all these categories it's trying to drag kicking and screaming into the twentieth century. It's like J.G. Ballard says about Margaret Atwood and those people: "Yeah, it's the psychology of the individual--who gives a fuck, you know? It's all been done." Right, it's been done as well as it's ever going to be done. And why people get excited about Bill's stuff, is that it's not what's been done. And the categories are genuinely emergent. Maybe there's not a body. Maybe the idea of the body or self is entirely irrelevant. Maybe the question of the self becomes infinitely complex. Literary critics love to talk about consciousness. You know what Marvin Minsky says about consciousness? It's a debugging trace. It's like a little piece of froth on the top of this larger thing. I think Bill believes that. Consciousness is just part of the act (laughs). All this other shit that goes on is equally important.
WG: Yeah. The snake wanted catfood [7], yeah.
TM: (laughing) Yeah, the snake wanted catfood, right, yeah, right.
WG: And, you know, sometimes you're just running on brain stem. I was running on brain stem last night. Look where it got me too.
(laughter)
TM: This is what Bill's work is in fact about. Bill has been an obsessive afficionado of late twentieth century experience, which for most people is just too unnerving. They don't want it, so they screen themselves off from it. But Bill actively seeks it out, and this has always been true. I mean most people don't want it. It fucks their minds up and they don't want to be part of it.
WG: What I do is I give it to them in these books and they're able to open up to it a little bit because it's science fiction.
TM: Right. But in science fiction itself, which is enormously conservative in these matters, his stuff generates a lot of resentment because they don't want to know, and they don't want to experience what the late twentieth century is like, they want to experience what some fifties version of the future is like. Most of the stuff he thinks about, in terms of structure and all that, the visual artist immediately gets, bang bang bang. Whereas people who do straightforward literary criticism wheel out these creaky old novelistic categories that don't apply worth a fuck.
WG: Most of the stuff that I'm seeing, even the stuff in The Mississippi Review, it's like a bunch of guys from the English Department being forced to write rock criticism (laughs).
DW: So what do you consider some of the better work that's been done on your writing?
WG: Well, one of the things that's really amazing about the British reception of my work, and this has just been consistent all the way through, is they think I'm a humorist. By and large, they think of me as being largely a humorist, and they think the stuff's funny as hell. It's 'cause they're Brits. They understand--it's more like their sense of humor. The kind of sense of humor I've got is still considered sort of suspect to North America, it's considered just a little too bleak. See, a lot of it was written because I thought it was funny.
Bruce Fletcher: That kind of backhanded humor really came out in the reading [excerpts from The Difference Engine [8]] last night.
WG: Well, there's kind of two levels to that thing. Actually, the world we're depicting there is infinitely grimmer than the world of Neuromancer, and it needs that humor. I mean, when you get to the third section of the book, you realize that they've invented the art of making people disappear. And they're doing this with death squads (chuckles). There are death squads working in London to take these Luddites out, or anyone who interferes with the system. They just arrest you and take you to Highgate and hang you in the middle of the night, and drop your body into a pit of quicklime, and that's it. One of the viewpoint characters is this tortured British spook diplomat named Laurence Oliphant--he was a real historical figure--he was Queen Victoria's personal spook: "Oliphant of the Tokyo legation." He was a hero; he was in this crazed samurai uprising, in Tokyo. Anyway, Oliphant's manservant was an avid lepidopterist. In the middle of one night, these black-clothed barefoot ninjas with samurai swords were sneaking toward Oliphant's bedroom and they stepped on this fucker's pinned butterflies which he'd put into the tatami.
(laughter)