The Highs and Lows of Snow Crash

*Spoilers crowd this post like groupies outside the Black Sun--read at your own risk*

Do you know what’s great about Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash?  The world he creates.  Stephenson’s turn-of-the-century world is fantastic satire of the logical extension of capitalistic ideas and the drive that existed in the late 80s when Stephenson began writing Snow Crash—and is still a desire among many conservatives today—to privatize as much as possible that was once the purview of the U.S. government.  In the novel, the U.S. government has been shrunk down to an insignificant size, and everything from suburbs to highways to police to entire armies has been privatized, marketed, given a logo, and franchised out.  Come on, a western-themed prison franchise?  How fantastic is that?  Bribing cops to take you to one prison franchise over another?  The competing forms of currency?  The existence of burbclaves and franchulates?  The reduction of the Library of Congress to a pay-to-use library to which individual intel-gatherers can upload information and then get paid by the download?  This is the stuff of a brilliant world right here!

Do you know what else is great about Snow Crash?  The virtual reality that is the Metaverse.  The notion of The Street with its monorail and ports, along with the all the rules that govern avatar appearances and interactions are wonderful.  Clints and Brandies as pre-purchasable avatars, as well as the details of black-and-whites from public terminals without good connectivity are all details that bring the Metaverse to life.  Hypercards as visual representations of packages of data that can be shared or exchanged between avatars are a great detail.  And how much do I love the history of the Metaverse, from its origins as a playground for hackers with no rules to a structured and marketed world that is used by hackers and average folks alike?  So much.

Do you know the other thing that is great about Snow Crash?  The mythological structure that forms the skeleton upon which Stephenson hangs his critical plot points.  All of the middle scenes of Hiro making connections with the help of the Librarian are riveting.  It is a pure joy to watch all the dots appear like stars in a rapidly darkening night sky and then to watch them all be drawn together into a giant constellation.  To connect the story of the Tower of Babel to the Sumerian language and the digital information that codes the human brain at a prelinguistic level to draw a parallel between computer operating systems and human being and between the en and hackers and me and programs—all of that is thrilling to witness.  Plus, what is not to love about words and phrases like “informational hygiene,” “infocracy,” and “infocalypse”?  It is also great fun to watch all the connections Stephenson can make between viruses and the world around us.  One of my favorite of these connections is his discussion of the franchise:   

The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another.  You just have to find a sufficiently viral business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder—it’s DNA—xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane.  Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.

There are a lot of neat ideas and fun connections that for the muscle and connective tissue of this narrative body.

Do you know what isn’t so spectacular about Snow Crash?  The characters, especially the main characters.  Hiro is about as developed as his name implies—he’s our protagonist, and that’s pretty much his main job in the novel.  Yes, he has cool swords, cool hacking skills, cool driving skills—but there’s really nothing to him, and there really nothing about him that affects the structure of the story.  He’s got the right skills and the right personality to help Stephenson unfold this one story.  Y.T. has a lot of vim and vigor, but she is all surface explosions and skater girl teenage hipness.  Like Hiro, she is much more a function of the plot than anything that demands a life of its own.  Other than revealing a few signs of vulnerability and some sexual desire, there is nothing under her surface.  I was about to complain that she is only 15 years old, which I think is a horrible decision, but once again the plot has forced her to be underage because she needs to live with her Mom (and thereby have that connection to the Feds) and have something to rebel against that makes her brash and hip.  I really like Fisheye as a character, but really, he’s not much more than a stereotype with a glass eye and a Gatling gun that fires spent chips of Uranium.

Do you know that else isn’t so spectacular about Snow Crash?  All that bone and muscle and connective tissue doesn’t really go anywhere once it is assembled.  What I mean by that is there are a lot of cool things here but they don’t add up to much of anything beyond their own coolness.  Two of the critical blurbs on the cover and inside pages of my edition compare Snow Crash to Neuromancer and Vineland, and I can see why readers would make those connections.  The quirky absurdities that lie in the details of the novel are certainly reminiscent of Pynchon, and the bringing together of disparate areas of study and showing how they are all interrelated is classic Pynchon, but the comparison unfortunately only points to Snow Crash's shortcomings.  In a Pynchon novel, all the ideas build on top of one another and add up to something greater than the sum of its individual connections.  Something unified is said about the world we live in our way of perceiving it.  It’s crazy, mind-blowing stuff and it feels like you are in the presence of something truly brilliant.  All the chaos of Stephenson’s passages with the Librarian, when Hiro is piecing together the mystery, is shown to be merely the energy of moving particles.  In chapters 56 and 57, Hiro brings Ng, Lee, and Uncle Enzo up to speed on what he has learned and he lays out all the connections for us in one smooth narrative.  What amazed me about these chapters was how lifeless it all felt when statically presented.  Yep, there it is, all wrapped up into a neat package that doesn’t point to anything other than itself and the plot of the novel.  That’s not brilliance; that’s cleverness.  Admirable, to be sure, but not breathtaking.  From those chapters, having laid out they mystery in cold hard clay, the novel devolves into a series of chase and fight sequences which are far less interesting than anything in the first three-quarters of the novel. 

Snow Crash is an incredibly fun novel with fantastic ideas placed in a wonderful world.  For me—and I say “for me” knowing that there are a ton of diehard fans out there who will readily disagree—the novel falls victim to its own plot, which restricts its characters and its ideas instead of letting it all breathe and grow into something phenomenal.

Possession's Obsessions

*Spoilers haunt the post ahead, like ghosts in a gothic romance*

Titles are such interesting things.  For most novels, the title serves two functions—to intrigue us and to simultaneously give us a sense of what the book is about.  The Man Who Loved Children.  Things Fall Apart.  Under the Volcano.  Ragtime.  When we begin each novel, the title whispers a promise about where we are going.  And when we finish that last page and examine the cover, we revisit the title and see its little surprises and the subtle undercurrents of its meanings.  A.S. Byatt’s Possession is a novel that never wanders far from its title.  The word and all its variations—“possession,” “dispossession,” “self-possession,” “possessed”—pepper Byatt’s prose, and Ash’s and LaMotte’s verse for that matter.  At the very heart of the mystery and the relationships of the novel lies the issue of possession, ownership, and control or mastery.

At a literal level, the drama of Possession revolves around the physical possession of a set of love letters and documents.  The novel begins with Roland, in 1988, finding two drafts of a letter that Randolph Ash had written to Christabel LaMotte in 1859.  Those two drafts lead to the discovery of a set of letters between the two writers that will change all existing scholarship about them, and there is a chase between the characters for possession of both the physical papers and the story held within them.  Mortimer Cropper, the rich American, wants to personally own all important Ash paraphernalia.  James Blackadder, the stodgy British professor, wants to keep as many Ash documents as possible in his homeland of England.  Roland and Maud, the LaMotte scholar who finds the letters, just want to share the adventure together and learn the story of Ash and LaMotte.

Then there is the notion that characters are possessed by an idea or desire, like a ghost inhabiting their very souls.  Ash himself is possessed with the desire to be with LaMotte.  Cropper is possessed with the desire to be as close to Ash as humanly possible, following in his literal footsteps for his scholarly work.  Roland is possessed of the desire to keep this mystery to himself for as long as possible.  LaMotte, meanwhile, actively fights against being possessed, either as a physical object or in the sense of losing her agency.  She wants to be, in her words, self-possessed.   Maud and Roland are in similar positions, wanting their independence but the company of each other.  Even as such, when the two finally go to bed at the conclusion of the novel (I warned you about spoilers!), “Roland finally, to use an outdated phrase, entered and took possession of all her white coolness that grew warm against him.” 

As that final sex scene shows, the language of possession is inescapable when it comes to matters of love.  Maud and Roland struggle with the notion of love in part because they are living in the post-modern age as scholars who experience life as a slightly meta-experience, knowing the roles and narratives that surround them like quicksand and pitfalls.  But their troubles with love are more than that—“love is terrible, it’s a wrecker,” Maud declares.  Love is laden with the notion of ownership and belonging, and it always threatens an individual’s agency, especially a woman’s.  LaMotte feared it so much that she kept her child secret from Ash, and Maud and Roland keep a distance from each other to keep their love “pure,” their goals intellectual, historical, and honorable.

An additional layer of possessiveness, and in many ways the main aspect that's explored in the novel, is the possessiveness of literary criticism and analysis.  The fighting between the scholars is to a small extent about their career ambitions and their thirst for fame and lasting glory, but for the most part, there is a desire to own their version of who Ash and LaMotte were.  The love letters undo Cropper’s perception and construction of Ash and reveal that he did not know Ash as he thought he did.  In reconstructing Ash’s travels, he imagined every detail but missed the woman who shared those walks with him.  Literary analysis, in Possession, is an act of possessing and knowing.  Leonora Stern, the brash American feminist and omnisexual is certain that LaMotte must have hated Ash’s poems, but we find out of course that she is wrong.  Instead of uncovering the past, scholars layer themselves over the past in an unwitting desire to shape it, coloring it with their own lens.  Ash and his contemporaries were well aware of this desire by historians and scholars and they tried their best to protect themselves.  Ash’s wife, Ellen, for instance, chooses to destroy or lock away anything that the vultures who write biographies might misconstrue.  Ellen wants to preserve her own agency and Ash’s agency and not let the future rewrite the past, or in this case, accurately write the past.  Part of having your own agency means creating your own myths.

Byatt’s look at scholars is not an impartial one, I think, but a critical one.  There is much made in the novel of feminist scholars and Lacanian models and Freudian approaches.  At first I was befuddled by what seemed near animosity over the behavior of feminists in academia.  But what I think bothered Byatt is that any scholar with an “approach” is automatically taking agency away from the text, and for Byatt, feminists were the easiest category of scholars to target.  (That said, it has been fascinating for me to learn how much gender roles and gender relationships were on people’s minds in the 80s.  I was of course aware of When Harry Met Sally’s question “Can women and men be friends?,” but I was surprised to hear Richard Ford ask that exact question in The Sportswriter, another novel obsessed with how men and women relate.  And of course Byatt’s entire novel here struggles with the relationships between men and women, romantic and professional, and how difficult that terrain is to navigate.  For Byatt, it might be a minefield, but it is certainly navigable, and equality and equal agency is achievable.  As Beatrice Nest noted in her Finals paper, “There are poets . . . whose love poems seem to be concerned neither with praise nor with blame of some distant lady, but with true conversation between men and women.”)

Byatt puts us in the same position as the literary scholars in Possession by beginning and number of chapters with (and indeed making a few chapters in their entirety) excerpts of poems and narratives written by Ash and LaMotte.  These excerpts of course breathe life and believability into these purely fictional authors, but they also serve to make us readers, to ask us how we read them.  Do we read them for their poetry and language?  Or do we read them looking for clues about the authors and their relationships?  Are we taking them at their word or comparing them to the things we now know?  There’s a natural tendency to exert agency over the writings, and Byatt makes us feel that.  She brings that home to us with Roland’s realization at the end of the novel.  In many ways, Roland is an odd choice for a main character, since it is Maud who ends up being at the center of the story told.  As Roland admits, he is an outsider to the events that unfold—none of it is about him.  But Byatt makes him central all the same, and while he is important for the larger discussions of love and for the paralleling of the stories of Ash and Lamotte with Maud and Roland, there is something more.  What he learns is to find the joy in reading Ash, which he lost when he became “an old-fashioned textual critic.”  In his moment of aloneness, of self-possession, he reads Ash not for meaning and clues, but for the joy of the poetry and language.  He becomes not a critic, but a poet himself, which is an entirely different way to exert one’s agency.

There is much more to discuss but no room to discuss them.  Had I time, I’d want to drill down on the role of the narrator, and the important passages in which the narrator reveals to us the past that never becomes known to the scholars we follow.  I’d want to talk about the difference between physical objects and their reproducibility, since microfiche and copies are several times referred to as solutions for disseminating information to others while leaving ownership of the thing itself in one person’s hands.  I’d want to talk about the multiplicity of voices and how they come together and shape the narrative.   I’d want to talk about how horrible the cover of my copy is with pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart are and how movie promotionals should never invade book covers.  Had we world enough and time . . .