William Gibson as a Misunderstanding of Literary Fiction

Gibson occupies an unusual place between literary fiction and the kinds of fantasy and sci-fi that use language as a minimal, transparent vehicle for fantasy. He has been read by any number of critics, including Fred Jameson, as a measure of postmodernism in the digital age; and he has been taken as a kind of cyberworld version of Nostradamus, full of “eerily prophetic” ideas about our future. The implied author of The Peripheral is engaged in both activities; the book is full of thought experiments about plausible or perfected technologies, and there are some extended meditations on the possible future courses of the world, climate, economics, and culture.

I am not interested in fiction as litmus test or predictor of culture, and that's one reason I don't read much science fiction. What follows is therefore not at all about science fiction or genre fiction in general, but instead something about this book in particular: it occurs to me there's a sense in which some of his books are made possible by a certain reading of contemporary literary fiction that could be described as a misunderstanding.

1. Writing

Gibson is a very good writer by literary fiction standards. Most every sentence is crafted. There are only a few passages that can be read at speed, just in order to get a sense of the story: most of it needs to be read slowly because of what he's doing to language. His observations, dialogue, descriptions, and metaphors are often original. (On p. 392, for example,he describes Tasmanian tigers as “carnivorous kangaroos, in wolf outfits with Cubist stripes.”)

At the same time, he seems to feel as if serious writing can often best be achieved by neologisms. In modernist fiction, purposively written language—I am thinking of anyone from Flaubert to Eimear McBride—defamiliarizes. Gibson's does too, but mainly by inventing things that don't exist. The Peripheral is full of imagined fashions and fabrics, tattoos that move, walls that are transformed by nanobots, teleportation of several sorts, out-of-body states, future weapons, future gardening with biogenic trees, different kinds of remotely operated surgical devices, and new kinds of encryption involving invented languages. Those are the things that make the language interesting, more than choices of trope or syntax. “Her hair white as the crown Macon had printed in Fabbit” is a good enough example (p. 222). It refers to a teleportation “crown” that had been 3-D printed by a company named Fabbit; the sentence is typical of the way Gibson avoids ordinary description, but leans on imagined technologies, technical and commercial terms, and neologisms. It’s a very different sense of how to “make it new” from either Flaubert or McBride (whose most recent book has only one notable word of Gibsonian specificity, picallilly sauce—everything else is a manipulation of parts of speech and metaphors).

2. Affect

If I try to imagine this book without the specifics of its plot—which means subtracting hundreds of references to peripherals, sigils, imagined technologies, and time travel—and ask myself what feelings, what desires or anxieties, drive the narrative, then I come to two things in particular:

(a) A fear of the present. No character in this book wants to live in the present, with the telling exception of some romantic moments in moonlight, which are about wishing for an impossible ideal. The writing itself doesn’t want to be in the present, and there’s an ongoing effort to open a space between the writing and every experience we may know as readers. Here is an example. A “sigil,” in the book, is a kind of logo or icon that appears in a person's visual field and can be expanded into a “video feed” or even into an immersive virtual reality. Gibson describes sigils the way a person might describe a logo. “An unfamiliar sigil appeared,” he writes, “a sort of impacted spiral, tribal blackwork” (p. 236).
Here he’s working hard, like an author of literary fiction, to defamiliarize. An “impacted spiral” is an interesting thing to try to picture, and a reader may have to look up “blackwork” to understand what he’s conjuring. Imagining both the “impacted spiral” and the blackwork as an icon adds a layer of imaginative work.
The cumulative effect of sentences like this (which amount to maybe half the sentences in the book) is to make it seem that the author feels it’s necessary to work continuously to produce even an incremental distance from the present. At the same time the project of shifting the present is fragile, because it’s superficial (here he’s only adjusting our notions of what an icon might look like). It’s as if he needs to pry open a space between the present and the place he wishes to be, as if it constantly needs to be renewed, because the fragile invented future is in danger of collapsing back onto the unbearable present.

(b) A desire to disappear. Characters in The Peripheral nearly always prefer dream states, projections, out-of-body experiences, time travel, medication, and dissociative experiences to living where they are. The book must have hundreds of examples of things that help people disappear: robots they can inhabit, toys they can wheel around by remote control, game worlds they can enter, Matrix-style teleportation comas they can enter, walls they can walk through, stand-ins they can program, cars and clothing that can be cloaked, cosplay zones populated with avatars and cyborgs, invisible tables in restaurants (eg, pp. 227-8).
The characters are ostensibly driven by the plot, but affectively, in terms of their desires, they want to vanish. As I read, I often thought of the author, as opposed to his narrative: to write a book like this, I thought, such a person needs to want to disappear. The language of The Peripheral is a concerted attempt to “cloak” ordinary writing in a veneer of micro-metaphors, translucent to ordinary meaning but safe from it. The technology described in the book is an equally forceful attempt to picture ways that machines might help us dissolve some of our bodily mass and material into a foam of biogenic digital projections.
The plot, too, can be understood this way, because it turns on time travel, and there are people in both the “present” (our near future) and “future” (seventy years farther on) who want to disappear, both within their own times, and within the “present”; and the plot is arranged in such a way that there are uncountable “presents,” which diverge even as we read. What could be more comforting to someone who wants not to be present?
In a sense this is what’s meant by “escapism” in popular fiction and film, except that here it’s not only a matter of an invented world, transparently described, but of the act of writing, in a literary sense, put to the same purpose.

I don’t mind the ongoing invention of neologisms, technologies, and time-travel plots, although I am often more interested in its underlying anxiety than its particulars. But it is a misunderstanding of writing in postmodernism to think that language can’t be interesting unless it is injected with nanobots of unfamiliarity. That’s one reason I won’t be reading any more Gibson. The other tunnels under that first one: it’s that the desire to escape, to vanish into time or the cyberworld is itself uninteresting because it is relentless and uninterrogated. It’s the lack of reflection on the desire itself that puts this book to one side of the conversations of modernism and postmodernism.