But first, speaking of avatars

we can’t help confessing our incredibly mixed feelings about Snow Crash, which we can’t help feeling are related to what we can only call telling editorial slips. And while we don’t have another edition to compare (we are trusting the Bantam) and assume Stephenson can afford a decent editor, we take the liberty of assuming that these are in fact editorial mistakes, not authorial intentions. Case in point:  Rescued by Raven from Pentecostal zombies slicing fish in Port Sherman (during which time Y.T., at the tender age of fifteen, stumbles upon the epiphany that “this is just like life must be for about 99 percent of the people in the world” (324)), aboard the rafted Third World orbiting The Core (aircraft carrier + oil tanker + a bunch of freight, natch) Y.T. reflects upon her fish slicing days and current plight in the form of a comparison between the utter desexualization of labor and (she hasn’t yet realized everyone on the Raft is actually staring in fear at Raven, not at her with desire) having suddenly become a sexual object for every male aboard the Raft, thereby arriving in the ambiguous resolution that “In that way, it’s a big change from being a slop-slinger for the repressed” (345).

Now,  we could be wrong, but we assume that for “repressed” we are meant to read “oppressed.” (We realize of course this is the speech of a character and not the narrator, and that Stephenson works hard at other moments in the novel to square Y.T.’s impossibly surly understanding of the world with the facts of her fifteen year-old childishness, so we are not immune to the logic that argues the slip is merely representative of confusions endemic to fifteen year-old consciousness; but see the clarity of her insight quoted above, a scant few pages earlier. We are forced to find this argument unlikely to dubious at best.) And while it’s tempting to credit Stephenson with a whole philosophy of history contained in the exchange of consonant and vowel funding that particular conceptual elision, we can’t help feeling it is more than a little related to the employment of “subconscious” for “unconscious” in the speech Juanita (who, so far as arguments of intention go, is surely intended to be presented as more than intelligent enough to know which term names a true concept and which represents its popular corruption) makes to Hiro in her office back in the day (59), when she relates how granny’s “internal wiring” enabled her to nearly instantaneously decipher the code “Pass the tortillas” into the message “I’m pregnant.”

Political unconscious, anyone?

And in that regard, it’s hard not to feel a measure of skepticism toward a novel sporting such slips while leaning so self-consciously on its own bravado in the arena of linguistic theory in order to make its plot run the program for playing the game of gaining control over the means of reproduction. So here we really have to register our incredulity towards the narrative of language as wetware—at least as presented here–where the singularly tired pun on me and fantasy of BIOS (check the afterword) exist in order to make Enki’s mastery of information in the form of his “water of the heart” antidote to Asherah’s deep structures/infrastructure programming consciousness to put out glossalalia and reproduce said structures according to the will of whomever possesses Asherah’s matrix/dictionary/database (395)—all of which is finally an elaborate artifice to make hackers newold gods bearing digital nam-shubs. It’s a nice story (except for the scary if we speak your true name/language we can control your DNA part; and, well, that gendered narrative you won’t need our help to parse about viral reproduction the demi-godding of Juanita in the end as a voluntary antennae-head struggles to subvert, sorta) and has the benefit of making language the mediating term between the subject and the Real, making the Real thereby social and subject to change.

But this remains a mystified mediation, holding out the possibility of mystical powers to the possesers of knowledge of true names: and how then does the immense as usual privilege of access to that knowledge get distributed, do you wanna make a bet? So we don’t see, Mr. Stephenson, why in that case we wouldn’t just see your relativized Chomsky-cum-DNA piercing viruses and call your bluff by raising you a point de capiton? The trouble as it appears to us, then, lies not in the decision to make language the mediating term–we are totally down with that–but with making linguistic intervention into biology the basis of and motor for social change. This makes us more than a little squeamish, in part because it justifies the novel’s fantasy of a hacker aristocracy it’s hard to imagine (in 2008) escaping the historical inertia that threatens to make it isomorphic with, say, corporate media moguls broadcasting from bridges of aircraft carriers converted into yachts the better to tow the brainwashed Third World around and spread the seeds of religion, which are as usual nought but signs of real social inequality in the form of serpents twined round the false cross: $$$. And speaking of the uncanny, that last narrative bit sounds eerily familiar to us here in 2008, by which we mean to suggest that while we insist on registering our gripes, the novel hits more than a few nails on the head. If those nails belong more to coffins than to archigrams, we can’t help feeling the fault lies not in Snow Crash but in the world wherein it circulates.

(We admit we’re not sure we have this account pieced together altogether a-right; corrections or editions are very welcome. We had to read fast and furiously last weekend, and the parts of the novel that go all annoyingly Sophie’s World on us were not our favorites. But neither were the sword fights, if you’re keeping score at home. And there’s plenty here we liked plenty. Including the Librarian, one of which we wish we had right about this time of year. About which more anon.)

~ by Tim on May 30, 2008.