Review: "The Savage Detectives" by Roberto Bolaño

Having read Bolaño's 2666 prior to this, I am perhaps more apt to "get" the Savage Detectives. One of the biggest complaints is that this novel does not have a plot (or one that gets tied together). Following the journal of a young poet through the sex and literary references of his friendship with two anti-hero poets, the visceral realists, the individual narrative suddenly comes to a screeching halt as the characters escape into the Sonoro desert in search of an older poet, and to escape the murderous revenge of a pimp. Then twenty years pass, told only in monologues from people around the world who met the poets afterward, and their decline into the entropic nothingness of modernity (though personally I was expecting at least a hundred more narrators for the story to really get interesting). Eventually one realizes that the poets are fleeing some horrible crime, and that all the narratives are essentially interviews with someone looking for them. The beauty of this narrative move is that the point is not "what happens," but the effect of time and desire/desperation on our sense of reality, particularly through the use of choral narratives that everyone's got their own (flawed and limited) perspective. This is a move similar to in 2666, where no one character is the story's central protagonist, but we have an end date hundreds of years in the future that acts as a sort of existential crossroads for the present, casting the long shadow called history back onto events that, for the characters living them, are relatively important but soon fade into the otherworldly insignificance of the desert. As Bolaño himself suggests, this is a threnody, a death song for those still living. On the other hand, this story can be read as a comment on the discourse of the "other," that two Mexicans lost in the rest of the world is a parallel of the "noble savage" myths that accompanied the colonization of the new world. The visceral realist poets are so foreign that everyone whom they encounter become alien to themselves, and through the lack of closure, we the reader become equally as displaced from our own lives and sense of history. Despite all the literature and culture we acquire, Bolaño seems to suggest that on the most visceral level of reality we are all still savages, unsure what we are looking for and just as likely to kill the object of our desire when we find it.

Punctuation and Post-literal Communications, or the curious life of !

Recently I have become more involved with sending text messages as a useful and quick form of communication. Usually I prefer face to face communications, or if that is not possible, then long monologuous letters (in an attempt to keep alive that dying art form). I absolutely loathe the telephone, mainly because it gives the illusion of having a real conversations, except that all you get is someone's disembodied and ghostly voice in your ear, but not all the gestures, non-verbal cues, pheromones, that make real live communication so intricate and exciting. The issue of course is the level of mediation between the conversants, which, as our technology and ability to quickly communicate through little boxes increases, destroys the necessity of those heightened modes of articulation inextricable from the meat.

Also destroyed however is any pretense at actual emotion, particularly when you are limited to a miniscule number of character spaces and want to communicate something of such vast importance, or even with an element of friendliness, etc. I find that when I write a text message (and this I'm sure applies to Twitter, though I have no desire to get caught up in that ephemeral epiphenomenon), that if I don't include punctuation and read it back to myself before hitting send, it often reads to me as somewhat dour, or at least, mechanical. How could these few typographical symbols convey anything of the complexity of what I am actually feeling? The easiest solution I have found is simply to tag an exclamation mark at the end of the message, which, though it conveys perhaps even less of what I mean, also conveys (for me, and this is important) a sense of immediacy and positivity that allows me to know that my message will not be read in a negative light.

An article on the history and contemporary use of the exclamation mark suggests that: "The origin of the exclamation mark is uncertain. The first one appeared in print around 1400. The exclamation mark, it has been argued, derives from the Latin Io (which means joy). One day (we hypothesise) somebody wrote a joyful upbeat sentence and to clinch that sense, they concluded it by putting the second letter of Io under the first."

However, "Shipley and Schwalbe are right when they say a sentence without exclamation marks is less friendly than one with at least two. When, though, did friendliness become the arbiter of orthographic etiquette? There is surely a point after which exclamation marks no longer express friendliness. In this post-literal time, exclamation marks become signs of sarcasm as witty correspondents rebel against their overuse. Hence: "I loved your last email! OMG did I LOVE it!!!!!!" The point is they didn't. They were being IRONIC."

Sure too much of anything makes it meaningless, but personally, I don't find anything ironic about the exclamation mark, for me it is still a symbol expressing io: excitement, epiphany, agreement. But then again, I don't care much for the emotional irony that hallmarks our postmodern age. When I text for example "I love you!" I don't mean that ironically. I mean it more emphatically then just "I love you", where the lack of punctuation is like a cliff you can fall off of into all the ambiguity and sadness of the contemporary world. Granted, there is much good poetry, fiction, etc. that intentionally dis-uses punctuation in order to convey that uncertainty of effect, but once punctuation marks no longer signal what they are supposed to (imagine a period meaning &, or to skip a sentence), then the doors are open for every typographic symbol to become unattached from its accepted meaning or phoneme, with the possibility that any letter in this sentence could actually refer to something else. Granted, this might not be such a bad thing, as that is the basis for cryptographic transmutations, but the whole point of language, particularly written language, is that it is a commonly understood means of communication, without which none of this would make any sense at all!

The American Hologram

[Highlights rom a speech by Joe Bageant]

"No matter how smart we may think we are, the larger world cannot and does not exist for most of us in this room, except through media and maybe through the shallow experience of tourism, or in the minority instance, we may know of it through higher education. The world however, is not a cultural history course, a National Geographic special or recreational destination. It is a real place with many fast developing disasters, economic and ecological collapse being just two. The more aware among us grasp that there is much at stake. Yet, even the most informed and educated Americans have cultural conditioning working against them round the clock.

"This financialization of our consciousness under American style capitalism has become all we know. That's why we fear its loss. Hence the bailouts of the thousands of "zombie banks," dead but still walking, thanks to the people's taxpayer offerings to the money god so that banks will not die. We believe that we dare not let corporations die. Corporations feed us. They entertain us. Corporations occupy one full half of our waking hours of our lives, through employment, either directly or indirectly. They heal us when we are sick. So it's easy to see why the corporations feel like a friendly benevolent entity in the larger American consciousness. Corporations are, of course, deathless and faceless machines, and have no soul or human emotions. That we look to them for so much makes us a corporate cult, and makes corporations a fetish of our culture. Yet to us, they are like the weather just there.

"Fortunately though, we can meaningfully differentiate our lives (at least in the Western sense) in the way we choose to employ our consciousness. Which is to say, to own our consciousness. If we exercise enough personal courage, we can possess the freedom to discover real meaning and value in our all-too-brief lives. We either wake up to life, or we do not. We are either in charge of our own awareness or we let someone else manage it by default. That we have a choice is damned good news.

"So how is it that we Americans came to live in such a parallel universe? How is it that we prefer such things as Facebook (don't get me wrong, I'm on Facebook too), and riding around the suburbs with an iPod plugged into our brain looking for fried chicken in a Styrofoam box? Why prefer these expensive earth destroying things over love and laughter with real people, and making real human music together with other human beings -- lifting our voices together, dancing and enjoying the world that was given to us? Absolutely for free.

"And the answer is this: We suffer under a mass national hallucination. Americans, regardless of income or social position, now live in a culture entirely perceived inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation and world that does not exist. Our national reality is staged and held together by media, chiefly movie and television images. We live in a "theater state."

"Now for a national mythology to work, it has to be accessible to everyone all the time, it has to be all in one bundle. For example, in North Korea, it is wrapped up in a single man, Kim. In America, as we have said, it is the media and Hollywood in particular. Hollywood accommodates Imperial myths, melting pot myths, and hegemonic military masculinity myths, and glamour myths. It articulates our culture's social imaginary: "the prevailing images a society needs to project about itself in order to maintain certain features of its organization." And the features of our media mythology are terrifying when you think about them."

Cyberpunk and the Technological Magic of Language

Cyberpunk and the Technological Magic of Language

As the renowned science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously quipped: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It is certainly true that advanced technologies, such as the intricate logic boards of computers, may seem magical because we do not know how they work, but as Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age of Information, also suggests, “powerful new technologies are magical because they function as magic, opening up novel and protean spaces of possibility within social reality” (180-1).
One of the most important contemporary examples of these magical “spaces of possibility” is cyberspace – a metaphor for the visualization of complex information structures and exchanges endemic to computer networks (191) – which arose from the cyberpunk fictions of Vinge, Gibson, and Stephenson beginning in the mid-‘80s, when such technologies were descending from the realm of literature and fantasy to the actuality of home computer systems. Perhaps anticipating that the technological spaces they described might seem like magic, these cyberpunk authors employed the terminology of the occult as a metaphor for how computer and information systems work. As we will see, this use of magical terminology is entirely apt, as it not only allowed the conceptualization necessary for the creation of our current information technologies, but also articulated one of the primary concerns of our age: that language – the symbolic exchange of information which magic, computers, and literature have in common – has the power to cause real effects in the real world.

True Names and the Magical Metaphor
The occult theorist Aleister Crowley (though undoubtedly one of the most infamous charlatans of modern history) offers in his Magick in Theory and Practice what is considered the best definition of actual magic: “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will… by the application of the proper kind and degree of Force in the proper manner through the proper medium to the proper object” (xii-i), and gives as an example the publication of a book as a magical way of conveying information to people at a distance. This definition seems contrary to what most people might think of when they hear the term magic, which is either the hocus-pocus of stage magicians or the sword-and-sorcery tropes of fantasy literature and video games. In short we are generally aware of the imagery or the metaphor, but not that magic is primarily a tool (albeit a symbolic one) for getting things done. Erik Davis suggests that by “using language, costumes, gestures, song, and stagecraft, magicians applied techne to the social imagination, actively tweaking the images, desires, and stories that partly structure the collective psyche… which in turn impacted the construction of native reality as a whole” (173).

In his short story True Names – which offered the first fictional representation of that virtual “space of possibility” later called cyberspace (239) – Vernor Vinge uses magical terms drawn explicitly from early computer games in order to describe his information technologies. Cyberspace is called the “Other World” or “Other Plane” and is accessed through “Portals,” hackers are called “warlocks,” and a group or network of hackers is called a “coven” (243-4). The process of navigating through this visualization of information also reads like a fantasy adventure; the hackers have to manipulate symbols, face tests and elementals, and “trade spells and counterspells” (essentially passwords) (254). The story itself critiques and explains this use of jargon and imagery. While the news networks “made it clear there was nothing supernatural about… the Other Plane, that the magical jargon was at best a romantic convenience and at worst obscurantism,” and the world governments refuse “to indulge in the foolish imaginings of fantasy,” the warlock-hackers themselves suggest that “sprites, reincarnation, spells, and castles were the natural tools here, more natural than the atomic twentieth-century notions of data structures, programs, files, and communications protocols… more convenient for the mind to use the global ideas of magic as the tokens to manipulate this new environment” (252, 271).

According to Davis in Techgnosis, this metaphor is effective because “the allegorical and hieroglyphic language of magic works well with the fact that the Other Plane exists simultaneously on two levels of reality” (215). Shamans, Gnostics, and other practical magicians have historically manipulated symbolic representations of information about reality (planetary sigils and runes, angelic or demonic gatekeepers, etc.) in order to concretely effect the world around them, similar to the way that hypertext or the icons of the World Wide Web “function as symbols, inscriptions, and operational buttons; they are both a writing and a reality” (201). Computer programming languages are likewise such symbolic representations that can create realities and make things happen. As the warlock programmer Mr. Slippery puts it in True Names: “even a poor writer… can evoke complete internal imagery with a few dozen words of description. The difference now is that the imagery has interactive significance, just as sensations in the real world do” (252). For an example of computer technology demonstrating Crowley’s definition of magic, one only has to look at the AI the Mailman using its hacking skills to nearly blow up the entire planet, a kind of ‘cyber-magic’ terrorism that the United States government currently states is a very real and dangerous threat to national security.

This issue of security and the danger inherent in both magic and information technologies is made clear in the title of Vinge’s True Names. The power of names is an ancient occult concept summed up in the introduction to the story: “the prudent sorcerer regarded his own true name as his most valued possession but also the greatest threat to his continued good health, for… once an enemy… learned the sorcerer’s true name, then routine and widely known spells could destroy or enslave even the most powerful” (241). Vinge himself believed that “the ‘true names’ of fantasy were like object ID numbers in a large database,” somewhat like modern passwords and IP addresses (16). Early computer scientists, such as Timothy C. May, explicitly used the ideas inherent in this metaphor of magical true names when dealing with issues of “anonymous interaction, reputation-based systems, digital pseudonyms, digital signatures, data havens, and public-key encryption” that were necessary to securely transform the fictional cyberspace into the actual Internet of today (35-6). As Davis suggests in Techgnosis, Vinge was eerily prophetic: “over a decade after his story appeared, the federal government and digital librarians became embroiled in similar debates [as those in the story] over encryption standards, privacy, and online security” (217). One of Vinge’s predictions however is yet to play itself out, the issue of controlling and interacting with self-aware computer systems like the Mailman, called Artificial Intelligences.

Neuromancer and the Spirits in the Machine
William Gibson’s Neuromancer brought the term cyberspace, and the idea of virtual “spaces of possibility,” more fully into the public consciousness, while at the same time abandoning many of the obvious magical metaphors of True Names. Unlike Mr. Slippery, who accesses the Other World Portal through “a certain amount of self-denial – or at least self-hypnosis” reminiscent of shamanic trance states (Vinge 250), Gibson’s cyber-cowboy Case “jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix,” which is imagined as “bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void” (5).

Despite the more technological and even gritty, noir descriptions that permeate the novel, Neuromancer still refers to occult language and concepts when discussing the relationship of man to Artificial Intelligence programs, which are still sufficiently advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic. As the Turing Registry agents warn Case about his dealings with the AI Wintermute, “For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible” (163). Even the AIs’ creators have an uneasy, occult relationship with the beings; Ashpool calls Wintermute “a name… to conjure with, perhaps. A lord of hell, surely,” while Lady 3Jane believes the AIs are “ghosts in the corporate cores” (185, 229). The AI Neuromancer itself echoes a prominent magical axiom, “to call up a demon you must learn its name” (243).

Artificial Intelligences act as the traditional dues ex machina, the god or ghost in the machine, patterns of information that act as if they are intelligent and cause real effects in the world. As Erik Davis suggests, this issue of self-aware digital agents raises the same questions that magicians and ritualists encounter when summoning gods, angels, or demons: how do we know that AIs are sentient beings and not just simulations (197)? Many occult manuals, such as Bill Whitcomb’s The Magician’s Companion, warn: “any concepts, forces, or objects which manifest as entities should be treated as real beings;” just because they can be viewed as patterns of energy or objectified aspects of human personality doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous to treat them as only non-living (15). The warlocks in True Names likewise treat the were-robot DON.MAC “as though he were a real person. Usually it was easier to behave that way toward simulators” (Vinge 295). Though it may not be possible to know if spirits or self-aware programs are really sentient or real, Crowley suggests, “it is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things certain results follow” (Davis 183).

For the time being, Artificial Intelligences still remain on the pages of sci-fi novels (though there are certainly many computer scientists working to make them a reality), but the perils highlighted in Neuromancer of dealing with runaway patterns of information are still applicable to our contemporary world. Science fiction author Philip K. Dick worried that our technological environment is becoming increasingly alive; as Davis points out in Techgnosis: “the Internet has already become home to a variety of autonomous and rather parasitic programs – including viruses, Trojan horses, spiders, worms, smartshoppers, and bots” (187). Just because a computer virus, like the recent Conificker Worm, is only made of ones and zeroes, doesn’t mean it can’t wipe out your entire operating system (unless of course you have the correct magical spells of protection, ie: anti-virus software). It is also worth noting that due to the cryptographic near-anonymity of Internet interactions, it is possible to treat other human computer users as merely patterns of information instead of intelligent beings. The flip side of Neuromancer’s artificially aware entities may be a process of technological de-humanization, such as Case’s divorce from the “meat” in favor of mediated virtual experiences (for us, TV, video games, etc.) that reduce us to being passive nodes or routers in a global network of information exchanges, which seem to have more of a life of their own than we do.

Snow Crash and the Power of the Word
In the world of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, “information is power” (379). We can see the beginnings of this concept in True Names, when the warlock Erythrina suggests that hackers “probably understand the System better than anyone on Earth. That should equate to power” (Vinge 268). In Snow Crash however, this equation drives every level of society, from the global media network owned by L. Bob Rife, to the hacker Hiro Protagonist’s job selling potentially useful scraps of information to the Central Intelligence Corporation. This is also a world very much like our own (or at least only a few steps ahead), full of advertisements, strip malls, corporate-controlled politics, and a virtual network “space of possibility” called the Metaverse.

In the story, people access the Metaverse through “audiovisual body” software simulations called avatars (33), a term originally indicating the incarnations of Hindu deities, but popularized to such a degree by Stephenson’s novel that it now applies to any representation of a self in a digital world (Davis, 223). Descriptions in Snow Crash of the Metaverse, which is “subject to development,” the construction of “buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality” (23), could easily apply to contemporary virtual realities and MMOs, massively multiplayer online worlds such as Second Life. Even information tools in the novel, like the CIC software Earth, which tracks spatial information of “maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance” (99), are now almost fully realized in programs like Google Earth.

If the techno-socio-economic world portrayed in Snow Crash seems viably realistic, then so to is the novel’s depiction of magic. Stephenson does not rely on fantasy tropes as a metaphor for information technologies, but instead presents magic as a historically researched plot element, modernizing the ancient concept that language – the symbolic exchange of information – causes real effects in the real world. The central conflict in Snow Crash is the resurrection of an ancient Sumerian nam-shub, described as a neurolinguistic virus, essentially “speech with magical force “(197), which Rife wants to use to gain greater control over people’s minds. This concept of language as “both a story and an incantation… a self-fulfilling fiction” is explicated in the novel through several chapters of researched information, and relies on the Sumerian concept of me: linguistic units that functioned as “algorithms for carrying out certain activities essential to society” (202, 240).

Stephenson is quick to draw a connection between the concept of me and the functioning of computer technology. He suggests, “The Metaverse is a fictional structure made out of code. And code is a form of speech – the form that computers understand. The Metaverse in its entirety could be considered a single vast nam-shub,” but also that “the belief in the magical power of language is not unusual, both in mystical and academic literature” (197, 256). As Davis points out in Techgnosis, language is perhaps the earliest and most pervasive human technology, and the supernatural or performative power of names haunts the majority of early linguistic cultures and religious traditions (23-5). It is not just a coincidence that we use the same word “spell” to describe both the construction of words and the performance of magic. Contemporary scientific studies echo Stephenson’s position that learning new information forms neurolinguistic pathways in the deep structure of the brain (117); language effectively creates our perception of reality.

As we see in Snow Crash, the issue inherent in such operational or performative language is in who controls its use: “someone who knows the right words can speak words, or show you visible symbols, that go past all your defenses and sink right into your brainstem” (369). In our contemporary world, like in the novel, this is done through advertisements, viral marketing campaigns, the three-ring binders that allow franchises to operate, and any and all media and information technologies. We have even come up with an equivalent to the Sumerian me: memes, a term coined by the scientist Richard Dawkins that refers to a unit of cultural information virally transmitted between people through speech. As Hiro explains in Snow Crash, “we are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head” (373). Information does not have to be self-aware like AIs in order to be dangerous! On a much broader scale, whole social, political, and economic realities can be magically constructed from a single linguistic document. As the Metaverse “is just a computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere” (23), so to is the United States of America a “space of possibility” constructed from the language of the Declaration of Independence.

One can easily see the problems that arise when we passively relinquish our operational relationship with information to vast media conglomerates and religious or political ideologues like those in Snow Crash, or those in our own world. As Nietzsche expresses it, quoted in one of the articles that prefaces True Names, “The master’s right of naming goes so far that it is accurate to say that language itself is the expression of the power of the masters” (43) On the other hand, those of us fortunate enough to be literate can, like Hiro Protagonist, write our own codes and stories that present equally valid linguistic realities. Vernor Vinge claims that, “up until the personal computer came along, Orwell’s vision [in 1984] of technology as the enabler of tyranny was the mainstream view. But in the 1980s… people with PCs began to realize that computers might bring the end of tyranny” (22). Ultimately, the true magic espoused in the fictions of Vinge, Gibson, and Stephenson is not merely their envisioning of technological “spaces of possibility,” but their insistence on inhabiting those spaces with neuromancers, literally magicians of the mind, willing to confront the dangers and complexities of informational systems, in a manner that upholds our human freedom to linguistically construct the worlds that are our future.


Works Cited

Crowley, Aleister. “Magick in Theory and Practice.” Dover Publications, Inc. New
York: 1976

Davis, Erik. “Techgnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age of Information.” Three
Rivers Press. New York: 1998

Gibson, William. “Neuromancer.” Ace Books. New York: 1984

Stephenson, Neal. “Snow Crash.” Bantam Books. New York: 2000

Vinge, Vernor. “True Names: and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier.” Ed. James
Frankel. Tor Books. New York: 2001

Whitcomb, Bill. “The Magician’s Companion: a Practical and Encyclopedic Guide to
Magical and Religious Symbolism.” Llewellyn Publications. St. Paul: 1993

Apocryphal Narratives in Pynchon's Slow Learner

Apocryphal Narratives in Pynchon's Slow Learner

Pastiche, intertextuality, historiographic metafiction. According to the ever-dubious Wikipedia, these terms often appear in relation to the writings of Thomas Pynchon, as techniques of literary postmodernism. Pynchon is heralded as a forefather of American postmodernist literature, which raises certain problems in interpreting his texts, namely that postmodernism is itself a “weasel word;” as a cultural theory or perspective it seems to have no clear or unified definition. Searching through numerous books and articles on the subject left me even more uncertain as to what postmodernism might actually mean, so I took recourse in the general opinions of my cultural milieu and cobbled together a hazy understanding from the apocryphal heart of the internet: en.wikipedia.org. Postmodernism then “tends to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing principle and embodying extreme complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, diversity, interconnectedness, or interreferentiality,” and is often characterized by a lack of belief in absolute truth along with the corollary notion that reality is therefore constructed from our perspectives and use of language . At least that’s how I took what I read.

It may seem irrelevant, or just bad scholarship, to refer to Wikipedia, postmodernism, or my own process of grappling with this material, but, I would argue as a writer attempting to learn from contemporary literature, that these are all performances of what Pynchon does in Slow Learner (as well as in the rest of his oeuvre, though we unfortunately won’t get to that) by use of the techniques mentioned in the first line of this paper. Through the engagement of his early stories’ characters, readers, and the author himself with a hodgepodge of texts, cultural references, and modes of storytelling, Pynchon creates what might best be called apocryphal or alternate realities, which in turn trouble the conventional notion that reality is absolute in favor of contemporary models of reality production.

As a literary technique, pastiche is the combining of diverse elements in a text, from styles and genres to cultural levels (such as the blending of high and low culture). We can see this pastiche of cultural levels in Pynchon’s short story The Small Rain, where the staff sergeant Rizzo “would lie in his bunk and read things like Being and Nothingness and Form and Value in Modern Poetry, scorning the westerns, sex novels, and whodunnits that his companions kept trying to lend him” (36). This placing together of various cultural references does not only serve to represent the intellectual climate of the army, but also signifies the protagonist “Lardass” Levine’s conflict in the story. Even though Levine is a “college graduate, [with the] highest IQ in the damn battalion” (33), he still finds himself attracted to artifacts and situation of low culture, as in the sex novel Swamp Wench. Pynchon illustrates this cultural conflict further by displacing the action onto a college campus, and then having Levine encounter a girl in the exact swamp-shack situation described in the pulp he’s reading, whom Levine treats with the “same nonchalant compassion which he felt for the heroines of sex novels or for the burned out but impotent good guy ranchers in a western” (50). While this attitude might come off as poor characterization, it also shows that it is the characters themselves who are pastiched together in The Small Rain, as representations of the cultural attitudes they espouse.

We see a similar use of pastiche on the walls of Dennis Flange’s room in Low-lands, “walls covered with photographs clipped out of every publication, it seemed, put out since the Depression” (67). This juxtaposition of high and low culture historical figures into a “rogues’ gallery of faded sensation fragile as tabloid paper, blurred as the common humanity of a nine-day wonder” (68), effectively flattens out modern culture into the very newspaper on which it is printed as an example of the non-hierarchical interconnectedness of the postmodernist style. In other words we are shown that reality is something that is constructed through being represented.

While Entropy continues this use of pastiche through its almost constant barrage of classical and contemporary musical allusions, this story extends the technique beyond the mention of references into the intertextual use of borrowed texts from various scientific and historical discourses. Callisto, for example, discusses the Second Law of Thermodynamics (in a third person, autodiegetic, stream of conscious monologue): “He had known all along, of course, that nothing but a theoretical engine or system ever runs at 100% efficiency; and about the theorem of Clausius, which states that the entropy of an isolated system always continually increases” (87). By displaying this scientific discourse alongside other discourses of socio-political power (such as those of Henry Adams and Machiavelli), the character is able to find in the concept of entropy a “metaphor to apply to certain phenomena of his own world” (88), a concept made only more real when we see it played out in the party scene on the floor below. This intertextuality of “real world” dialogues in a fictional world allows the characters to engage in what we generally consider to be the world outside the text. At the same time however, these integrated texts require the reader to engage both with the real texts themselves as well as with their presentation in the story, forcing us to collude with the characters in treating the world in the story as a real world.

Pynchon seems highly aware of this interactional nature of storytelling, so much so that he has his character Dennis Flange in Low-lands muse on the very subject in relation to the telling of personal sea stories as a function of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle:

“It is all right to listen but not to tell stories about that sea, because you and the truth of a true lie were thrown sometime way back into a curious contiguity and as long as you are passive you can remain aware of the truth’s extent but the minute you become active you are somehow, if not violating the convention outright, at least screwing up the perspective of things” (69).

This metafictional foregrounding of the art of fiction within the story itself troubles whatever illusions we might have left that reality is not something created through our uncertain observations and utterances. As Flange finds in the story, his strongly recalled memories of himself as a rogue sea-dog actively screw up his perspective as existing in a normalized suburban reality and plunge him instead into an equally real subterranean adventure. So to might we find that our engagements with and observations of our own lives and historical realities are what create the worlds we live in. Any historian is ultimately a storyteller writing from his or her own perspective.

In Under the Rose, Pynchon continues this metafictional technique by having the spy Porpentine mention that another character could have gotten his information on the state of affairs of Egypt “from any Baedeker” (115). Pynchon himself admits in the introduction to Slow Learner that Baedeker’s “guide to Egypt for 1899 was the major ‘source’ for the story” (17). This fictionalization of historical events or settings, called historigraphic metafiction , serves several purposes in the story. By presenting a wealth of historical detail, Pynchon manages to suggest an actual historical reality in the text, which is troubled by the anachronistic inclusion of the android Bongo-Shaftsbury, who, with similarly realistic description, has a “miniature electric switch, single-pole, double-throw, sewn into the skin [of his arm]” (121). This writing of a seemingly accurate historical reality from a point in the future also allows Pynchon’s characters to comment, somewhat prophetically, about the future of their own historical period. Porpentine, for instance, muses: “history was being made no longer through the virtù of single princes but rather by man in the mass; by trends and tendencies and impersonal curves on a lattice of pale blue lines” (107).

This last comment of Pynchon’s on the act of writing, that history is becoming written by “man in the mass,” does indeed seem to be our current cultural reality. Anyone can edit the articles of Wikipedia, anyone can posit a definition of cultural theories like postmodernism, and anyone can tell a story. Pynchon’s apocryphal style of writing, which re-presents reality as something that we construct, suggests that this new, democratic model of writing historical or theoretical documents is perhaps more “truthful” to the way our reality is actually produced: through our engagement with texts, cultures, and our experiences of these things, new realities can be created beyond what we imagined was only possible on the pages of storybooks.


Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “Postmodernism,” http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Postmodernism (accessed April 14, 2009)
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, s.v. “Pastiche,” http://en.wikipedia.org/
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Believing in the Fantastic of Gaiman's Neverwhere

Believing in the Fantastic of Gaiman's Neverwhere

After many adventures in a magical realm beneath the city of London, Richard Mayhew, the protagonist of Neil Gaiman’s novel Neverwhere, is faced with the harrowing ordeal of the key: the possibility that he has actually spent the last week as a crazy homeless person rather than a fantasy hero, and that by realizing this he is now, “starting to edge a little closer to sanity” (243). If he believes in the everyday reality suggested by the phantoms of his real-life friends, then Richard will edge not only closer to “sanity,” but to the suicidal edge of a subway platform. He also has the seemingly impossible choice of believing in the primacy or immediacy of the magical world, and in doing so go on to win the key, complete his quest, and become the greatest warrior in London Below.

At the crux of Richard’s ordeal is the necessity of belief in the magical or otherwise non-real reality in which he’s found himself. This question of belief is also at the heart of the reader’s quest through the book. If we approach the ordeal cold, that is, without already having read and believed in the magical world of Neverwhere, then we are likely to agree that Richard is mad, and instead side with his friend Gary, who claims of London Above that, “this is reality. Get used to it. It’s all there is” (368). Only the most unimaginatively adult readers seem likely to chose this interpretation of the text, but what allows the rest of us to so willingly believe in this world of angels, warriors, and rat-speakers? By applying certain Romantic and Fantasy theories of belief to the story – Coleridge’s concept of the suspension of disbelief, Tolkien’s thoughts on the consistency of Secondary Worlds, Blake’s Contrary Method, and Todorov’s notion of hesitation in the face of fantastic events – we can see how Gaiman has not only managed to create a compelling magical world in London Below, as well as inclined the reader to identify with his protagonist’s quest of believing in Neverwhere, but also questioned our belief in the primacy of our everyday reality.

The Willing Suspension of Disbelief
Like most people since the rational Age of Enlightenment, it is unlikely that you live in a world convincingly inhabited by faeries, witches or other creatures of fancy. The new sciences of the Eighteenth Century led to a general disbelief by the educated classes in real supernatural agents, which led to a decline of their use in the poetry and fiction of the period. The Romantic poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose focus on the powers of the imagination made him one of the forefathers of the genre of fantasy, struggled with this question of how to include non-realistic elements in his and his contemporaries’ writings. How could he convince readers to overlook the implausibility of such fantastic narratives, as with the undead sailors in his The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?

In chapter XIV of his Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, Coleridge suggests that supernatural stories can be framed, “so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief… which constitutes poetic faith.” This ‘suspension of disbelief,’ as the term has found purchase in contemporary culture, also requires for Coleridge: “the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real,” and is the power of imagination that “reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities” (a phrase that echoes the Contrary Method of William Blake, another Romantic poet-philosopher whose ideas we will consider as an undercurrent to the more theoretical mechanics of believability).

While it may be difficult to untangle Coleridge’s centuries-old language it is still possible to apply his ideas to contemporary supernatural fictions such as Gaiman’s Neverwhere. At heart of our ability to suspend disbelief is the representation of the supernatural, not only as something really happening, but also as containing some relevance to everyday human affairs. At the beginning of the novel, Richard Mayhew is presented as an “everyman,” inhabiting a reality that, like for most of us, consists solely of: “work. Home. The pub. Meeting girls. Living in the city. Life;” a description tempered by the very real question, “is that all there is” (364)? Like many people in the contemporary world, Richard has problems at the office, problems in his relationship, an inability to hold his liquor, and a penchant for material goods (such as mass-produced trolls), “in a vain attempt at injecting a little personality into his working world” (12). By his sheer normalcy it would be impossible not to believe that Richard contains a “semblance of truth;” he represents each of us, more than we might comfortably like to admit.

It is not just Richard Mayhew’s ordinariness that we identify with (if so we could do away with the supernatural altogether and confine ourselves to the social realism of a Charles Dickens novel), but also his uncertainty about the world in which he lives. After being told his fortune in the opening scene, Richard is, true to a realistic emotional response to the situation, “a little unsure how to treat information of this nature” (3). This uncertainty deepens when he moves to the city of London, which Richard at first finds to be “fundamentally incomprehensible, with only the Tube map… giving it any semblance of order” (8). Who has not been lost in a new city, or even in a familiar city stumbled upon, as Richard does in a taxi ride home, “an unlikely route involving streets… never before seen” (19)? Richard is uncertain about the world, but that world itself is also uncertain. London’s chaotic history and growth, as narrated by Gaiman, allow an unexpected place for more than just everyday experiences to occur.

But what kind of extraordinary circumstance might a typical man encounter in a presumably real city? If, as Coleridge suggests, the imagination works through the balance of opposites, or, as Blake asserts in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Without Contraries [there] is no progression,” then the only believable encounter is with a supernaturally powered woman from an assuredly fantastic otherworld. Just as Richard is at his wits end in dealing with the real world, a blank wall opens, and Door appears from London Below. By reacting with true human kindness to the hurt girl at his feet (as opposed to the caricatured blindness of his fiancé Jessica), Richard saves himself from the mundanity of dinner with the boss, and allows the reader to suspend their own disbelief, following our hero into the infinitely more exciting realms of the imagination.

The Inner Consistency of the Secondary World
In the century following Coleridge’s concept of the willing suspension of disbelief, supernatural elements once again became more common in literature. Many of these magical worlds however only seemed half-realized, or worse, were merely allegories for real-world events and religious doctrines (for example consider the realm of the seven dimensions in George MacDonald’s Lilith, which is only fully explicable in light of Biblical narratives). In 1938, J.R.R. Tolkien, whose The Lord of the Rings stands as the first major work in the fantasy genre, delivered a lecture entitled On Fairy-stories, which attempts to make clearer the mechanics of successful make-believe. Tolkien disagreed that the reader suspends their disbelief in a supernatural world, if so they are merely going along with it for sentiment’s sake. The burden of belief instead resides with the author, who can make “a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world” (37). While difficult to achieve, such fantasies require “the inner consistency of reality” (48), that is, there are rules to the way a successful Secondary World operates.

Discovering the rules of a new magical reality is one of the great joys of reading good fantasy, and Neverwhere is no exception. As an added bonus, Richard Mayhew’s quest is often comprised of this need to discover how the Secondary World works. In his first foray into London Below, Richard “realized that he did not know very much about what went on beneath London” (47), but he will soon discover that his very survival depends on finding out! This paradoxically leads to the first rule of Neverwhere: the more you learn about London Below the less likely you are of being able to return to the real world of London Above. After he rescues Door she tells Richard it wouldn’t do him any good to know what happened to her, and the Marquis de Carabas forbids Richard not only from asking questions but also tells him not to “even think about what’s happening to you right now” (47). Though these characters are trying to save Richard from getting trapped in their world, Richard (and the reader along with him) can’t help but wonder about the little bits of magic we see, and consequently are drawn deeper into London Below.

The true magic of the novel, and what makes finding out the rules of London Below both an enjoyable and believable experience, is that this Secondary World works through puns and juxtapositions, so that we see familiar elements of our world in an entirely new light. This use of Blake’s Contrary Method is first hinted at in the Prologue to Neverwhere, when, after looking at a map of the London Underground, “Richard found himself pondering… whether there really was a circus at Oxford Circus” (4). Whenever a Tube station is mentioned it becomes increasingly more obvious that the station’s title will be taken literally: there is a bridge at Knightsbridge, an earl at Earl’s Court, shepherds at Shepherd’s Bush, black friars at Blackfriars. Though not every Tube station is visited in the course of the novel, the inclusion of the map in the front of the book leads the reader to continue filling out the world of London Below in their imagination through application of this rule of the metaphor made literal. Eventually Richard, and the reader, stops questioning the rule: “the longer he was here, the more he took at face value” (161).

It is not just the landscape of London Below that plays off the familiar; the characters and events follow these rules as well. Though the villains Croup and Vandemar “did not look like anything Richard had seen before” (33), their and Door’s clothing calls to Richard’s mind “the History of Fashion section of the Victoria and Albert Museum” (29). Old Bailey’s rooftop lair reminds Richard of a theatrical performance of Robinson Crusoe. The feast served to our heroes by the Earl at Earl’s Court is “Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut chocolate,” and an antique goblet “filled with Coca-Cola” (160). We are led to believe that the Secondary World of London Below is internally consistent because, through these juxtapositions with and references to the familiar, we see where the supernatural fits inside of or coexists with our everyday reality. The lack of contradictions to our world makes London Below seem like it could really exist! This is a testament to Gaiman’s powers of sub-creation; like Richard perhaps we too can go “beyond the world of metaphor and simile into the place of things that are” (307).

Hesitation in the Face of the Fantastic
Though London Below is presented as a consistent Secondary World where Richard “was at least learning to play the game” (102), in order to believe in Neverwhere ourselves we must more fully explore the significance of the supernatural events of London Below existing along side the familiar, mundane world. As Coleridge suggests, in order to suspend our disbelief the character must react as if these events were actually happening in the real world. The Structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov, in his 1970 book Inroduction á la littérature fantastique (The Fantastic), presents what seems to be one of the truest literary responses to a confrontation with the extraordinary: uncertainty or hesitation. “In a world which is indeed our world… there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world… the fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event” (25). Because “the fantastic implies an integration of the reader into the world of the characters; that world is defined by the reader’s own ambiguous perception of the events narrated,” and so “the character wonders (and the reader with him) whether what is happening to him is real” (31 and 24). The fantastic works through presenting a supernatural event along side a series of potentially rational explanations – drugs, madness, dreams, tricks, illusions, and coincidences (45) – that never quite account for what happened, thus urging the character and reader towards belief in the supernatural.

Throughout Neverwhere, Richrad Mayhew is essentially characterized by this response of hesitation; he is constantly positing unlikely explanations for the fantastic events he encounters. When Door asks him to apologize to what seems to be a talking rat, Richard considers that “maybe he was the one who was going mad” (42). Our hero has a similar need to rationally account for his sudden invisibility to the real world when he returns from his first encounter with London Below: “whatever madness was happening that day was really happening. It was no joke, no trick or prank” (61). Because nothing he is experiencing makes rational sense, Richard also finds recourse in the possibility that he “walked into a nightmare” (126). The Ordeal itself essentially catalogues Todorov’s explanations, as being potentially a dream, a figment of Richard’s imagination, or a break in his sanity (242). In order to pass the test however, and not consider one of these explanations as real, Richard must already have established a belief in the primacy of the supernatural world of London Below.

At certain key points in the story, Richard and the reader realize that we cannot explain away the marvelous events that seem to be happening. Upon meeting the angel Islington, Richard realizes that “it was much easier not to believe in something when it was not actually looking directly at you and saying your name” (197). No rational explanation can account for this direct encounter with the supernatural. On the other hand, after “experiencing the exhaustion of someone who had managed, somehow, to believe several dozen impossible things” (133), the party reaches British Museum Station, which Richard finds to be “one oddity too many” (164). This turns the hesitant reaction to supernatural events on its head, because it turns out this Tube station really did exist; it seems fantastic merely because Richard does not know everything that exists in the real world of London Above. “He wondered how normal London – his London – would look to an alien” (112). Eventually Richard, and the reader, learn to accept that “the simplest and most likely explanations for what he had seen and experienced recently were the ones that had been offered him – no matter how unlikely they might seem” (201), but without total knowledge of the real world or an objective frame of reference, who is to say what seemingly marvelous events aren’t equally as real?

Belief Beyond the Cavern of the Real
This question of whether or not supernatural events could actually occur seems to be a central concern of Neil Gaiman’s novel. That we feel the need to posit rational explanations for seemingly unreal circumstances merely belies a human preference for the primacy of the everyday world with which we are most familiar. As Blake however suggests in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” When Richard rescues Door at the beginning of Neverwhere, “a normal, sensible Richard Mayhew… was telling him how ridiculous he was being” (25), or, when returning to what he considers to be the primary reality, Richard believes that “the events of the previous two days became less and less real, increasingly less likely” (56). These expectations about what is real form the narrow chinks of Richard’s cavern, which are progressively widened to encompass a much broader worldview. How could something like the fantastic Night’s Bridge exist “beneath the city of London, without everyone knowing” (100)? The answer occurs later when the guests at the museum, exemplary of this realistic mindset, are confronted with the supernatural opening of the Angelus: “ having dealt with something entirely outside their experience, agreed, somehow, without a word, that it had simply never happened” (196). Our belief in the primacy of the everyday reality is merely a social or cultural convention based on a familiarity with what we expect is possible, and is a much more recent modern invention compared to the age-old belief in invisible spirits.

Blake might argue through his Contrary Method that, like good and evil, reality and fantasy necessitate each other. How can we know what is real unless the unreal also exists? In Neverwhere, we can only really see Richard Mayhew as a real and identifiable character in his interactions with the internally consistent magical reality of London Below. And given a choice between these two realities on his return to London Above, Richard claims that “if [the real world] is all there is, then I don’t want to be sane” (369). At the end of the story, Richard creates a door and chooses to return to the magical world of London Below, clearly favoring his belief in the primacy of the supernatural. Ultimately, it doesn’t seem clear whether or not this last supernatural event occurs (though in our imaginations we can continue the story and “find out”), so it is left up to the reader and our own preferences between reality and the supernatural to choose whether we too believe in Neverwhere.

Works Cited

Blake, William. “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” Blake Digital Text Project. 2003.
University of Georgia. 12 Apr. 2009.

Colerdige, Samuel Taylor. “Biographia Literaria.” Michael Gamer: Home Page.
University of Pennsylvania. 12 Apr. 2009


Gaiman, Neil. “Neverwhere.” Avon Books. New York: 1998

Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre.” Trans.
Richard Howard. Cornell University Press. Ithaca: 1995

Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-stories.” The Tolkien Reader. Ballantine Books. New York:
1971