Cannibalizing “Ancient” Technologies and Art Forms:

William Gibson’s Nostalgia

Sandor Klapcsik (University of Jyvaskyla)

I intend to characterize the apparent contradiction between cyberpunk as cutting-edge, postmodern writing and its

nostalgia towards “ancient,” modernist techniques, the images and the technology of the Machine Age. By drawing

on numerous examples of Futurist techno-vision, avant-garde and Art Deco imagery, I intend to explore how irony

becomes increasingly tangible in William Gibson’s oeuvre.

The impact of Futurism on Gibson’s early novels is tangible and hardly surprising. Istvan

Csicsery-Ronay describes the artistic and technological visions of Neuromancer (1984) as

“sentimental futurism.” Furthermore, several allusion relate Gibson’s fiction to other avant-

garde movements: references to Constructivism, Dada, Art Deco and Art Nouveau, the images

and the language of Futurism and Expressionism, the synesthetic experience of Symbolism

and Surrealism go hand in hand in Gibson’s texts; analogously, computerized technology is

supplemented by references to old-fashioned televisions, calculators, typewriters, and

photography.

Avant-garde artifacts, in a way similar to outdated analogue technology, may be interpreted as “fashionably archaic”

phenomena in the dystopic wastelands of the “Sprawl” stories; they provide essential means for the characters to

survive and remain “hip.” Neuromancer comprises a unique, compressed, fragmented and lyrical language, and thus

form reinforces content: the experimental style coincides with the celebration of avant-garde art. Yet Neuromancer

is basically the only novel (in addition to a few short stories) in which the unusual and nonlinear language dominates:

Gibson’s later works comprise mainly straightforward narration, losing the avant-garde edge. Eventually, the post

9/11 novels, especially Spook Country (2007), add up to burlesque travesties, as the avant-garde cultural phenomena

and the technology appear in a parodying manner.

Gibson’s technological and stylistic eclecticism illustrates Fredric Jameson’s argument that postmodernism utilizes

multiple and fragmented histories, nostalgia towards a lost or never existing past. My interpretation also suggests

that Gibson has become increasingly conscious of these trends in literature and his own oeuvre; he may even have

found these ideas overused, and so the fragmentation of time, as well as the avant-garde influence, is portrayed

with growing irony in his novels.