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A Cheap Narratology Trick
At the beginning of Bruce Sterling’s 1998 novel Distraction, strategist Oscar Valparaiso and his “krewe”—armed with “goals, a mission, options, tactics, and a future” (8)—seem equipped to deal with any political situation as they make their way across the unstable landscape of the American South in November 2044. Valparaiso has just designed and operated a successful senate campaign in Massachusetts for Alcott Bambakias. Now, he enjoys the proceeds: he is “a brand-new policy analyst for the U.S. Senate Science Committee” on his way to East Texas to investigate and reorganize the political structure of the Buna National Collaboratory, a giant, domed biotechnology and genetics lab complete with its own power supply and atmosphere (8). Nevertheless, before the they are able to cross the border from Southwest Louisiana, the “krewe” encounters a unexpected and apparently unprecedented obstacle. Even in this vision of a United States with “sixteen major political parties,” even in this vision of the U.S. that has been wholly changed and destabilized by “[t]he horrific speed of digital communication, the consonant flattening of hierarchies, the rise of net-based civil society, and the decline of the industrial base” (119), it is still apparently an anomaly for the U.S. Air Force to stage a roadblock-fundraiser of this kind on an interstate in order to drum up funds.
Like most other members of the krewe, what surprises Valparaiso is not the imposing roadblock itself. In a country of “privately owned cities with millions of ‘clients’ where the standard rule of law [is] cordially ignored” (119), a rural encounter near a state border with a military force is hardly a notable event. Nor is it the prospect that the Air Force, now highly factioned, could become strapped for cash and forced to pursue its own fundraising under the thin, ironic guise of a “bake-sale.” Rather, it is the technological method of fundraising used by the Air Force that attracts Valparaiso’s attention. Learning that the Air Force is not only stopping out-of-state vehicles to ask for donations, but that airmen are using a database to “‘run credit scans and marketing profiles, [and] pick out the people likely to make generous financial contributions without any fuss’” in an “‘alternative, decentralized, tax-based scheme,’” Valparaiso responds, “‘Can they do that?’” (18). It would seem, at least on a first reading, that even is this dystopian future of American governmental and cultural institutions and practices rendered hollow, commodified, and put into the service of light-speed consumerism, the ethics of micro-marketing are still questionable, at least for Oscar Valparaiso.
But the question “‘Can they do that?’” is rhetorically unstable. Grammatically correct or not, it has at least two meanings for Sterling’s 1990s audience, and the response Sterling provides to the question from Valparaiso's security chief Fontenot cleverly exploits the meaning of that instability by ironically refusing to read it. Valparaiso appears to be asking about the ethics of the situation. He appears to be asking about will, not feasibility, and the late twentieth-century audience Sterling had in mind for his novel no doubt would imagine the word “can” as a grammatical mistake so common that it is a functional synonym for “may.” Yet Fontenot responds as if Oscar had asked the question that he literally asks, and not the question we imagine he is asking: “‘Sure, it’s doable.’” In this moment, the difference between the world of Sterling’s real audience—readers of cyberpunk fiction (or of post-cyberpunk science fiction; see this thread for more of the debate behind the term "cyberpunk")—and the world Sterling imagines and presents to his readers comes, after a slight delay, into striking relief. Oscar Valparaiso voices a more succinct version of the question that is clearly on the reader’s mind: in the middle-distance future that can be extrapolated from the social and technological trends of the late 1990s, would the United States Air Force set up a roadblock on a federal highway and use high-tech, highly invasive consumer marketing techniques as a way of collecting what is essentially a tax? But he simultaneously asks a literal question with a literal answer about the logistics of such an act in the represented world of the novel, which Fontenot answers without even flinching.
Ultimately, the move is more interesting for what it demonstrates about Sterling and his third-person narrator than for what it reveals about the characters of the novel. On the one hand, the move follows the logic of what Ian Watt famously called “delayed decoding” in his landmark study of Joseph Conrad—the device by which the particular details of a narrative event occur before the reader knows how to interpret their meaning—and suggests the presence of a quasi-modernist impulse toward epistemological reticence on Sterling’s part that clashes with what is otherwise a highly transparent mode of narrative transmission. Yet for Sterling, the disconnect between the world of the telling (our world) and the world of the told (the novel’s represented world) does not have an aesthetic so much as a rhetorical or political purpose, as the ironic quality of the move implies. Consider, for example, the reason the narrator gives for Fontenot’s deadpan reply. Here is the passage, which constitutes complete two paragraphs, in its entirety:
The narrator’s free indirect reasoning is almost as pokerfaced as Fontenot’s reply, and yet it distances the narrator from his twentieth-century reader in the same way that his characters seemed designed to distance themselves. In other words, Sterling seems as interested in calling attention to the differences between our world and the extrapolated world of Distraction as he is in bridging that imaginative gap, and our future a concept that is at once the bitterly ironic consummation of many of our present fears and something we must nevertheless confront and begin to imaginatively enter.
A novelistic world that simultaneously invites and alienates the reader: however fraught with seeming internal contradiction, this narrative dynamic is not disruptive so much as emblematic of science fiction, where the success of an imagined world often depends on the very interplay between what is plausible and what is novelty. But in Distraction, the matter is further complicated by the influence of technology on the experience of language Sterling imagines for the inhabitants of his novelistic world. The response, “Sure, it’s doable,” notably, does not just have significance as a word used by a character to indicate the semantic differences between our world and Sterling’s. Rather, it is the first use in the novel of what subsequently becomes Oscar Valparaiso’s—or is it the narrator’s?—favorite word. Considering his Boston girlfriend Clare during a conversation in Chapter Two, the narrator reveals that the word has entered Oscar’s thoughts, or at least that it can be used as a free indirect approximation of his thoughts: “Don’t get anxious, [Oscar] thought. Don’t think too fast. This isn’t one of the other ones, this is Clare. This is Clare, this is doable” (62, italics mine). Then, as the narrator paraphrases Valparaiso’s thoughts on the frustrating, practical contingencies of his job in Chapter Three, the word occurs again: “Scratch the old bus, inhabit the brand-new hotel. Just keep the krewe together, keep up the core competencies. Keep the herd moving. It was progress, it was doable.” (86, italics mine). The word finally infiltrates Valparaiso’s speech in Chapter Four, when he explains to star Collaboratory scientist Greta Penninger that saving her lab “‘might even be doable’” (141, italics mine). Then, the occurrence of the term in the novel begins to accelerate in Chapter Five—“‘Boston is totally doable’” (165), “‘Well, that’s doable’” (177)—and becomes a frequent feature of Valparaiso’s speech for the remainder of the novel.
Since this is a novel that begins and ends deeply in medias res, offering a snapshot of a few characters from an imagined world that the reader is prompted to suppose has a history and future beyond what is described within the book’s physical limits, it is difficult to know whether the word “doable” is new to Oscar or simply new to us. It is difficult to know if we observe the development of a personal speech pattern or a general feature of the American English dialect of Oscar Valparaiso’s social and intellectual class in 2044. The question, moreover, is one a literary narratologist might otherwise discard: traditionally, the aesthetic effects and semantic meaning of a novelistic word-use pattern take precedent over its identity as a pattern (a tradition that admittedly may be on the verge of shifting more generally, considering what Katherine Hayles--after the vocabulary Warren Weaver and Claude Shannon--has suggested about the increasingly dominance of the pattern/randomness binary in the context of informatics (32)). But in Distraction, and more importantly in the chapter of Distraction where the word “doable” begins to occur with increasing frequency, Sterling also imagines in the represented world of the novel a “cheap net-trick” that can be used to analyze speech patterns. The passage occurs when Valparaiso briefly returns to Washington DC to meet with other members of the Senate Science Committee for the first time, and describes the reaction of committee staffer Mr. Nakamura to several sentences spoken by Valparaiso . Here it is:
The significance of this concordance is hard to overestimate. If until now the reader had been consciously or unconsciously picking up on the frequency with which Valparaiso attracts and uses the word “doable,” here, in a chapter in which its use, like the terms from Nakamura’s vocabulary, also begins to accelerate “on strong upward trends,” the attentive reader inevitably becomes self-conscious of the act.
In Distraction, Sterling plays on the difference between the meanings of words for the reader and for the characters of the medium-future represented world of the novel. At the same time, he proposes in the novel’s imagined world a technology used for reading a character in the novel that could undoubtedly be useful for an external observer hoping to read the characters of the novel and, for that matter, any recorded text. Whereas the narratological close reading of novels often reveals synecdochic figures that can be extracted and used to read a work as a whole, what may be Sterling’s most compelling synecdoche appears to be a technological replacement for narratological close reading itself. It is as if Distraction contains embedded within its represented world an analytic tool that might—if it were to come to pass, if it were to become as easily accessible as it is for Valparaiso—seriously threaten the literary critic who took the time to notice it.
But would the word “doable” really show up on an “analyzed, ranked, and sorted” speech pattern readout? Or does the possibility of looking for “doable” on a speech pattern analysis depend in the first place upon the recognition of a subtler narratological pattern in the text, the sort that—for now at least—is only accessible by the reader’s ability to detect tonal ironies, to pick apart the referents of various and often competing shades of free indirect discourse? This is, after all, a science fiction novel and not a prophecy, and the technology Sterling describes, while now readily available to companies like Amazon.com, is by no means accessible enough to be considered “cheap” or easy to obtain for, say, scholars in the humanities. Perhaps the matter is the "price" of the technology versus the cultural capital necessary to pursue literary close reading, for wouldn’t speech pattern analysis as a tool for reading novels only be of real value to the literary critic who took the time to recognize it? The situation seems, at best, a paradox: the technology described in Distraction that might finally undermine the literary critic would only be useful to a literary critic, and would perhaps mean nothing to the lay reader of Distraction. Because as a rhetorical presence it rests precisely on the border between the literary and the critical, the “cheap net-trick” as a textual object is a perplexing hybrid that seems half what Edgar Dryden calls an “enabling contaminant”—a literary trope or figure against which a text is written, but which also makes that text possible (e.g. the genre of chivalric romance for Don Quixote)—and half a quantum particle that changes when you attempt to observe it. In other words, the “cheap net-trick” depends upon and opens an interesting critical problem by rendering obsolete the very discursive apparatus that would find such problems interesting.
Cheap narratology tricks aside, what we might finally attempt to suggest is that the order of technologies in Distraction must be considered before an accurate impression of the meaning of any particular technology described by the novel can be formed. My impulses as a reader are conservative: to suppose that Sterling’s novel contains the best set of instructions by which it can be read, to take the “cheap net-trick” as seriously as possible and to imagine how it might be used to interpret the novel. But the “cheap net-trick” seems a trap laid by a shrewd writer for the attentive reader, and nothing short of a bottomless fall for the literary critic who would take it too seriously. Distraction is not concerned with resolving this problem. It is, on the other hand, the central provocation of the book: the shift of human intellectual activity from the pursuit of truth to the pursuit of the “doable,” a trend which seems to be taking place both inside and outside Sterling’s novel. For the literary critic, perhaps the largest question, and what remains to be seen, is the function and therefore the future of the novel in such a world. Clearly, the genre of the novel, in the hands of a writer like Bruce Sterling, can imaginatively support such a world complete with irresolvable semantic paradoxes to keep the literary critic busy, working, and funded. But can such a world imaginatively support the genre, let alone the critical apparatus, of the novel?
Works Cited:
Like most other members of the krewe, what surprises Valparaiso is not the imposing roadblock itself. In a country of “privately owned cities with millions of ‘clients’ where the standard rule of law [is] cordially ignored” (119), a rural encounter near a state border with a military force is hardly a notable event. Nor is it the prospect that the Air Force, now highly factioned, could become strapped for cash and forced to pursue its own fundraising under the thin, ironic guise of a “bake-sale.” Rather, it is the technological method of fundraising used by the Air Force that attracts Valparaiso’s attention. Learning that the Air Force is not only stopping out-of-state vehicles to ask for donations, but that airmen are using a database to “‘run credit scans and marketing profiles, [and] pick out the people likely to make generous financial contributions without any fuss’” in an “‘alternative, decentralized, tax-based scheme,’” Valparaiso responds, “‘Can they do that?’” (18). It would seem, at least on a first reading, that even is this dystopian future of American governmental and cultural institutions and practices rendered hollow, commodified, and put into the service of light-speed consumerism, the ethics of micro-marketing are still questionable, at least for Oscar Valparaiso.
But the question “‘Can they do that?’” is rhetorically unstable. Grammatically correct or not, it has at least two meanings for Sterling’s 1990s audience, and the response Sterling provides to the question from Valparaiso's security chief Fontenot cleverly exploits the meaning of that instability by ironically refusing to read it. Valparaiso appears to be asking about the ethics of the situation. He appears to be asking about will, not feasibility, and the late twentieth-century audience Sterling had in mind for his novel no doubt would imagine the word “can” as a grammatical mistake so common that it is a functional synonym for “may.” Yet Fontenot responds as if Oscar had asked the question that he literally asks, and not the question we imagine he is asking: “‘Sure, it’s doable.’” In this moment, the difference between the world of Sterling’s real audience—readers of cyberpunk fiction (or of post-cyberpunk science fiction; see this thread for more of the debate behind the term "cyberpunk")—and the world Sterling imagines and presents to his readers comes, after a slight delay, into striking relief. Oscar Valparaiso voices a more succinct version of the question that is clearly on the reader’s mind: in the middle-distance future that can be extrapolated from the social and technological trends of the late 1990s, would the United States Air Force set up a roadblock on a federal highway and use high-tech, highly invasive consumer marketing techniques as a way of collecting what is essentially a tax? But he simultaneously asks a literal question with a literal answer about the logistics of such an act in the represented world of the novel, which Fontenot answers without even flinching.
Ultimately, the move is more interesting for what it demonstrates about Sterling and his third-person narrator than for what it reveals about the characters of the novel. On the one hand, the move follows the logic of what Ian Watt famously called “delayed decoding” in his landmark study of Joseph Conrad—the device by which the particular details of a narrative event occur before the reader knows how to interpret their meaning—and suggests the presence of a quasi-modernist impulse toward epistemological reticence on Sterling’s part that clashes with what is otherwise a highly transparent mode of narrative transmission. Yet for Sterling, the disconnect between the world of the telling (our world) and the world of the told (the novel’s represented world) does not have an aesthetic so much as a rhetorical or political purpose, as the ironic quality of the move implies. Consider, for example, the reason the narrator gives for Fontenot’s deadpan reply. Here is the passage, which constitutes complete two paragraphs, in its entirety:
Oscar glanced at Fontenot. “Can they do that?”
“Sure, it’s doable.” Fontenot said. Fontenot was ex-Secret Service. The USSS had always been very up to speed on these issues. (18)
The narrator’s free indirect reasoning is almost as pokerfaced as Fontenot’s reply, and yet it distances the narrator from his twentieth-century reader in the same way that his characters seemed designed to distance themselves. In other words, Sterling seems as interested in calling attention to the differences between our world and the extrapolated world of Distraction as he is in bridging that imaginative gap, and our future a concept that is at once the bitterly ironic consummation of many of our present fears and something we must nevertheless confront and begin to imaginatively enter.
A novelistic world that simultaneously invites and alienates the reader: however fraught with seeming internal contradiction, this narrative dynamic is not disruptive so much as emblematic of science fiction, where the success of an imagined world often depends on the very interplay between what is plausible and what is novelty. But in Distraction, the matter is further complicated by the influence of technology on the experience of language Sterling imagines for the inhabitants of his novelistic world. The response, “Sure, it’s doable,” notably, does not just have significance as a word used by a character to indicate the semantic differences between our world and Sterling’s. Rather, it is the first use in the novel of what subsequently becomes Oscar Valparaiso’s—or is it the narrator’s?—favorite word. Considering his Boston girlfriend Clare during a conversation in Chapter Two, the narrator reveals that the word has entered Oscar’s thoughts, or at least that it can be used as a free indirect approximation of his thoughts: “Don’t get anxious, [Oscar] thought. Don’t think too fast. This isn’t one of the other ones, this is Clare. This is Clare, this is doable” (62, italics mine). Then, as the narrator paraphrases Valparaiso’s thoughts on the frustrating, practical contingencies of his job in Chapter Three, the word occurs again: “Scratch the old bus, inhabit the brand-new hotel. Just keep the krewe together, keep up the core competencies. Keep the herd moving. It was progress, it was doable.” (86, italics mine). The word finally infiltrates Valparaiso’s speech in Chapter Four, when he explains to star Collaboratory scientist Greta Penninger that saving her lab “‘might even be doable’” (141, italics mine). Then, the occurrence of the term in the novel begins to accelerate in Chapter Five—“‘Boston is totally doable’” (165), “‘Well, that’s doable’” (177)—and becomes a frequent feature of Valparaiso’s speech for the remainder of the novel.
Since this is a novel that begins and ends deeply in medias res, offering a snapshot of a few characters from an imagined world that the reader is prompted to suppose has a history and future beyond what is described within the book’s physical limits, it is difficult to know whether the word “doable” is new to Oscar or simply new to us. It is difficult to know if we observe the development of a personal speech pattern or a general feature of the American English dialect of Oscar Valparaiso’s social and intellectual class in 2044. The question, moreover, is one a literary narratologist might otherwise discard: traditionally, the aesthetic effects and semantic meaning of a novelistic word-use pattern take precedent over its identity as a pattern (a tradition that admittedly may be on the verge of shifting more generally, considering what Katherine Hayles--after the vocabulary Warren Weaver and Claude Shannon--has suggested about the increasingly dominance of the pattern/randomness binary in the context of informatics (32)). But in Distraction, and more importantly in the chapter of Distraction where the word “doable” begins to occur with increasing frequency, Sterling also imagines in the represented world of the novel a “cheap net-trick” that can be used to analyze speech patterns. The passage occurs when Valparaiso briefly returns to Washington DC to meet with other members of the Senate Science Committee for the first time, and describes the reaction of committee staffer Mr. Nakamura to several sentences spoken by Valparaiso . Here it is:
Nakamura nodded reflexively, then frowned. For a moment, Oscar thought he had overdone it. Nakamura had twenty years of recorded public appearances in the federal files. Oscar had taken the trouble to have the man’s speech patterns analyzed, ranked, and sorted. Nakamura was especially fond of the terms ‘prudence’ and ‘continuity,’ with ‘helpful’ and ‘a firm hand’ on strong upward trends lately. Verbally mimicking Nakamura was a cheap net-trick, but like most such tricks, it usually worked. (170)
The significance of this concordance is hard to overestimate. If until now the reader had been consciously or unconsciously picking up on the frequency with which Valparaiso attracts and uses the word “doable,” here, in a chapter in which its use, like the terms from Nakamura’s vocabulary, also begins to accelerate “on strong upward trends,” the attentive reader inevitably becomes self-conscious of the act.
In Distraction, Sterling plays on the difference between the meanings of words for the reader and for the characters of the medium-future represented world of the novel. At the same time, he proposes in the novel’s imagined world a technology used for reading a character in the novel that could undoubtedly be useful for an external observer hoping to read the characters of the novel and, for that matter, any recorded text. Whereas the narratological close reading of novels often reveals synecdochic figures that can be extracted and used to read a work as a whole, what may be Sterling’s most compelling synecdoche appears to be a technological replacement for narratological close reading itself. It is as if Distraction contains embedded within its represented world an analytic tool that might—if it were to come to pass, if it were to become as easily accessible as it is for Valparaiso—seriously threaten the literary critic who took the time to notice it.
But would the word “doable” really show up on an “analyzed, ranked, and sorted” speech pattern readout? Or does the possibility of looking for “doable” on a speech pattern analysis depend in the first place upon the recognition of a subtler narratological pattern in the text, the sort that—for now at least—is only accessible by the reader’s ability to detect tonal ironies, to pick apart the referents of various and often competing shades of free indirect discourse? This is, after all, a science fiction novel and not a prophecy, and the technology Sterling describes, while now readily available to companies like Amazon.com, is by no means accessible enough to be considered “cheap” or easy to obtain for, say, scholars in the humanities. Perhaps the matter is the "price" of the technology versus the cultural capital necessary to pursue literary close reading, for wouldn’t speech pattern analysis as a tool for reading novels only be of real value to the literary critic who took the time to recognize it? The situation seems, at best, a paradox: the technology described in Distraction that might finally undermine the literary critic would only be useful to a literary critic, and would perhaps mean nothing to the lay reader of Distraction. Because as a rhetorical presence it rests precisely on the border between the literary and the critical, the “cheap net-trick” as a textual object is a perplexing hybrid that seems half what Edgar Dryden calls an “enabling contaminant”—a literary trope or figure against which a text is written, but which also makes that text possible (e.g. the genre of chivalric romance for Don Quixote)—and half a quantum particle that changes when you attempt to observe it. In other words, the “cheap net-trick” depends upon and opens an interesting critical problem by rendering obsolete the very discursive apparatus that would find such problems interesting.
Cheap narratology tricks aside, what we might finally attempt to suggest is that the order of technologies in Distraction must be considered before an accurate impression of the meaning of any particular technology described by the novel can be formed. My impulses as a reader are conservative: to suppose that Sterling’s novel contains the best set of instructions by which it can be read, to take the “cheap net-trick” as seriously as possible and to imagine how it might be used to interpret the novel. But the “cheap net-trick” seems a trap laid by a shrewd writer for the attentive reader, and nothing short of a bottomless fall for the literary critic who would take it too seriously. Distraction is not concerned with resolving this problem. It is, on the other hand, the central provocation of the book: the shift of human intellectual activity from the pursuit of truth to the pursuit of the “doable,” a trend which seems to be taking place both inside and outside Sterling’s novel. For the literary critic, perhaps the largest question, and what remains to be seen, is the function and therefore the future of the novel in such a world. Clearly, the genre of the novel, in the hands of a writer like Bruce Sterling, can imaginatively support such a world complete with irresolvable semantic paradoxes to keep the literary critic busy, working, and funded. But can such a world imaginatively support the genre, let alone the critical apparatus, of the novel?
Works Cited:
- Dryden, Edgar. The Form of American Romance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988.
- Hayles, N. Katherine. "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers." How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1999.
- Sterling, Bruce. Distraction. New York: Bantam, 1998.
- Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: California UP, 1979.
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Much later in the book (much later than I suspect you were able to keep up your note-taking kevin_of_los_angeles), Valparaiso scolds Dr. Penninger and the rest of the remaining scientists at the Collaboratory thus:
"even though you are both directly responsible for the catastrophe that our society is undergoing, you are both incredibly adept at casting yourselves as permanent, misunderstood victims. You both whine and moan endlessly about how nobody else is cool enough or smart enough to understand you. And you both never clean up your own messes. And you both never take responsibility for yourselves" (373). Valparaiso, here speaking about scientists in 2044, could easily be speaking about humanities scholars at the beginning of the twenty-first century (much of the richest allegorical content of the novel is contained in the discussions of “science"). More particularly, Valparaiso uncannily describes precisely the dynamic of what has occurred in this essay: you narratologists are directly responsible for the “catastrophe” the closed system of your reading of this novel is undergoing, yet you are “incredibly adept at casting yourselves as permanent, misunderstood victims.” When will we ever break this discursive self-destruction written under the sign of truth? For more perspective on the matter, you might take a look at Alan Liu’s THE LAWS OF COOL. Liu argues rather compellingly that the New Critical gesture toward paradox is inextricably bound in "a slant version of truth according to which the very action of gesturing was as dogmatic as any attempt by orthodoxy or heterodoxy to point to polemical versions of truth" (38). In any event, I am stunned by the degree to which you neglect the format of the wiki in this essay that, according to your editing history, you seem to emphatically support elsewhere. You and your rhetorical questions. How could anyone ever attempt to revise this solipsistic text?
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