William Gibson’s new novel Pattern Recognition (which I have finally finished reading) is very likely the first work of literature to use “Google” as a verb (as in: “If you Google him, you’ll find…). What’s important, however, is not that Gibson is savvy enough to note how everyone’s favorite search engine has entered the vocabulary, but rather the absolute ordinariness, or taken-for-grantedness, of this usage: it’s a detail, precisely, that doesn’t stand out in any way in the novel. And that is what makes it significant….
Pattern Recognition is Gibson’s first book to be set in the present, rather than in a science-fictional imagined future or alternative past. It describes a world of beautiful surfaces, a world where image is everything, a world where money unlocks every door: “a world where there are no mirrors to find yourself on the other side of, all experience having been reduced, by the spectral hand of marketing, to price-point variations on the same thing” (341). Our world, in fact. The one we are living in, whether we like it or not.
There are three ways in which Gibson brings this globalized, hyperreal world into focus for us.
In the first place, Gibson is a masterful cartographer, who maps the contours and nodal points and byways of this world; he recognizes the patterns of global flows that increasingly define what Manuel Castells calls our “culture of real virtuality.” Gibson’s uncannily lucid prose describes what Baudrillard called hyperreality’s “hallucinatory resemblance to itself”–and does this with a subtlety and power of observation that far exceed’s Baudrillard’s.
Gibson is also, in the second place, a superb psychologist: in the sense that Nietzsche called Stendhal and Dostoyevsky great psychologists. Gibson both evokes and analyzes the feelings, the affects, of our world: the way, in the place of modernist depth psychology, we now feel and suffer and experience a sort of lateral psychology: a muffled panic, a vague but perpetual sense of dislocation. This structure of feeling is literalized in the experience of jet lag, from which the protagonist Cacye Pollard suffers for almost the entire novel, and which she describes as a state in which the soul has not yet caught up with the body, but has been left behind somewhere, and is in the process of slowly being reeled in–all this qualified by the fact that Cayce also isn’t sure that such a thing as “the soul” even exists at all.
In the third place, Gibson limns what might best be called an aesthetics of the postmodern world: something that, as yet, we are scarcely able to grasp. Is there any hope of beauty amidst the pre-programmed banality, and the treachery and paranoia, of our post-everything world? Adorno notoriously said that it was barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz. You might say that the ironic fulfillment of Adorno’s warning is precisely our current state of affairs in which everything is poetry–by which I mean that everything is “culture,” and that culture is increasingly indistinguishable from advertising, or from product design (as Andy Warhol was the first person to clearly understand). But Gibson suggests, however waverlingly, that it is precisely, and only, in this void that an aesthetics could possibly be reinvented. The novel centers around a search for a film that has only been released, in fragments, and anonymously, on the Internet; a film that arouses deep emotions among people who see it, so that they form a virtual (online) subculture around it. The film bespeaks a possibility of passion that exists, not in spite of, but because of, the culture of fragmentation and glittering surfaces and instant commodification that surrounds it. A passion, and an aesthetic, that does not in any way transcend the world of commerce and advertising and celebrity in which it exists, but that nonetheless co-exists with it laterally, or obliquely, so that it cannot merely be reduced to the flows and circuits of money and power that it nonetheless does not transcend. A passion, and an aesthetic, too, that has its roots in trauma: Cayce feels an obscure connection between her love of the fragmentary film, and her unresolved mourning for her father, who disappeared in Lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001.
(This novel is also the best work I have encountered, in any genre, that deals with the traumatic events of 9/11).
As cartographer, psychologist, and aesthetician, Gibson has probed both the depths, and the lateral expanses, of this postmodern world, in which “to Google” is a commonplace verb. He gives us a thriller plot, as well–the hook that marks his connections to genre fiction, rather than avant-garde experimentation. Pattern Recognition is not as formally adventurous as the film footage it is about. But, fortunately, the thriller plot is really rather peripheral, or incidental–it gets worked out according to the rules of tight narrative construction, but at the same time it is secondary to all the other things that inhabit the novel, moment by moment.
There are only two other novels I am aware of that have done anything similar, in terms of reflecting upon the postmodern, globalized world we face, and live in, today: Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama, and J. G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes. Gibson’s novel is quieter, less experimental, and less extreme and outrageous than either of these; but it just may be subtler and more far-reaching.