Present Unheimlich: William Gibson's Blue Ant Trilogy

U.S. Hardcover of Pattern Recognition.

One of my favorite ideas that we've played with here on this website is the relationship between Camp, the Uncanny, and the Unheimlich. I went over this in the piece I wrote about Over the Garden Wall and how the retrospective view it takes short-circuits the nostalgic mode and breaks through into something else. One of the things I asked near the end of that piece is what an uncanny intensification of our own time would look like – some way of sabotaging future nostalgic projects and lay the groundwork for an escape from nostalgia. I had no idea what such a thing would look like. I was recently reminded by the Weird Studies episode on the topic, that I've already read the book in question.

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson is the first of a loose trilogy – called, alternatively, the Blue Ant or Bigend trilogy – that also includes Spook Country and Zero History. Pattern Recognition was released in 2003, and was set in the summer of 2002 – the events of September 11 form the backdrop for the plot, but are not center stage. Spook Country was released in 2007, and was set in the summer of 2006. Zero History was released in 2010, but was set in the summer of 2009. Each of these books was crafted to be specifically of a moment in history, yet they feel more timeless than many high literary books released at the time.

This is because Gibson essentially invented cyberpunk (discussed, briefly here), and thus basically invented the culture of the 1990s. No one, I would argue, was more well-positioned to analyze the aughts. These books understand things that are opaque to other writers, because Gibson brings with him the baggage of the past without being constrained by the thinking of the past. In 2003, he essentially predicted Youtube – the plot centers around a series of videos released anonymously on the internet, and a diffuse but obsessive subculture that grew up around trying to dissect them and understand them.

Pattern Recognition presents a world that has been shorn from its moorings and set adrift on a stormy sea – there is a feeling of viral paranoia in play that would be recognizable but alien to hardened cold warriors. Though the plot of the story does not deal directly with terrorism, being more concerned with internet mysteries, graphic design, and fashion, there is this sense not of creeping but infectious dread. The lead character Cayce (her name homophonous with Neuromancer's lead character “Case”) is the daughter of a cold war-era intelligence expert that went private in the nineties and disappeared on 9/11. The plot doesn't concern this, but deals partially with her attempt to move past it (and her mother's inability to move past it, sinking deeper and deeper into obsession over Electronic Voice Phenomena.) Cayce makes her living as a cool hunter, aided by a bizarre species of synesthesia: she is allergic to effective logos, and suffers from a paralyzing phobia of Bibendum, more commonly known as the Michelin Man.

To be fair, the original version of the Michelin Man was horrifying.

She is eventually hired by a jet-setting billionaire not for this quality, but for her fascination with the Footage, a mysterious series of films released on the internet that lack dialogue or plot, but possess just enough narrative tension to suggest some connection.

The other two novels follow a former musician and freelance journalist, Hollis Henry, as she becomes embroiled in a fairly complicated thriller plot, but the themes of paranoia and branding, as well as the figure of Hubertus Bigend (who was the subject of one of my more successful papers in graduate school – I explained how he qualified as a cyborg by the literal definition, and how he gave a new model for understanding corporate capitalism as a result. Send me an email if you want to read it) remain steady.

One of the most interesting things about the Blue Ant trilogy is the fact that there are almost no depictions of nature in it. There is digital technology, there is analog technology; there are public places, there are out of the way places; there are cities all over the globe. But there is no nature – the only rural setting was the site of an industrial disaster. These books, as I said, take place in an unmoored world.

In short, it is a world with only history. Nothing just happens. It's an environment completely designed but designed by a myriad of unconnected agencies that all have different goals and values. There is never a situation where the information is unavailable to the characters, there are only situations where the signal is hidden by the noise. To my mind, it's very much like what I described when I talked about the Epistemic Crisis: the world is reduced to a swirling chaos and the real begins to peek through the realism of the moment.

I spoke about apophenia on Monday, and that's exactly what the title of the first book means: Pattern Recognition, and as the book puts it:

Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition . . . Both a gift and a trap.

For our purposes, however, this is secondary. Nothing more than the reason that I remembered this book was there. Still, the experience of reading patterns into the swirling chaos of the world around us, experiencing flashes of grace and paranoia, is indeed the experience of our time, it is the thumbprint of our moment in history, when the ability to make a coherent narrative of the world has eroded.

In Pattern Recognition, we see characters behave in a way that seems to be the exact opposite of nostalgia: they seem to be intensely conscious of the fact that they live in a moment of history, something that feels uncanny to me from my place in 2019. At one point, Cayce says:

The future is there . . . looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.

And here, in a novel written specifically to circumvent the nostalgic mode, we have finally an articulation of the opposite mode. Instead of staring back at a glossy image of the past, we have a look forward into the abyss of the unknowable future, with the consciousness that someone will be looking back towards us, trying to remember what we did and imagine how we lived at this moment.

The whole mystery is opened up by the fact that Nora managed to steganographically encode the image of a Claymore Mine’s arming mechanism into the Footage — the exact piece of shrapnel lodged forever into her brain.

Yet, like the creator of the footage, Nora Volkova, we are locked into the past, reliving our traumas and building up artwork and systems of meaning around it, we have collapsed everything down, to the point where it is “only the wound, speaking wordlessly in the dark.”

This novel, which I have read more than I've read the other two, is an intimation of a sort of hypermodern or metamodern or transmodern fiction – whatever we're referring to the period after post-modernism as. It extends the Baudrillardian issues of simulacra and simulation, but it moves beyond the Nostalgic Mode that Jameson said that Post-Modernity would continue to operate within, and in the end it's just us, crash-landed in the desert of the real, trying to make sense of the whole damned thing.

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