I sent an inquiry via e-mail to a friend, to find out if he was the one I (thought) had borrowed a particular book. His answer, “As Leonard Cohen says, ‘I’m your man.’” sent me off on a search for the song, and into a tailspin of repeated listening.
I don’t know anything about Mr. Cohen. I haven’t Wiki-ed, or Google-ed, or anything else-ed him – on purpose. All I know is this song (ok, a few others piqued my interest and I got them, too) which I first encountered as the soundscape to a particularly interesting scene in the film Secretary. Now, the fact that I not only saw that film―in conjunction with the fact that it got added, at first opportunity, to the DVD collection—quite probably reveals things about me that are uncomfortable to contemplate, much less know. The ick factor aside, there is something undeniable about the voice of Leonard Cohen intoning the words of I’m Your Man: S-E-X, in all caps, italicized, bold, and the largest typeface imaginable. O very yes.
If Barry White’s voice conjures elaborate visions of the seraglio, harems of cool white marble surrounding deep, still blue pools, tapestry hung alcoves with plush Oriental rugs, low inlaid tables with swanlike silver coffee services, and silk and satin pillows in glorious profusion, well, Mr. Cohen’s suggests something completely different. A high rise apartment, vast windows overlooking the city, glass, cool blond Scandinavian furniture, large black vases with bare black branches – the sort of images gleaned from years of Woody Allen films and New Yorker stories – since one has never actually visited a city (much less THE city) that remotely resembles anything like those images.
In the midst of such cool emptiness, Mr. Cohen’s voice glows like a burning coal. Warm, ENVELOPING, suggesting long days spent on a huge slab bed, being occasionally stroked like a favored pet, while that silky voice unspools, saying anything, anything, anything at all.
If all love songs (by men, at least) are some variation on “Pick me!!! Pick me!!!” then surely, I’m Your Man represents the ultimate distillation of that particular cri de coeur. The world may indeed be, as James Brown avers, a man’s world, but because I’m Your Man advances the argument that the man in question is willing to be, do, say anything to be the one picked, it may be one of the most devious love songs ever penned. Because while all love songs plead, very few promise change on the part of the one pleading! They plead, offer excuses, crow celebratory paeans after being picked, or lament no longer being the lady’s choice, but very seldom do they offer to change spots, even if there is some acknowledgement that spots-changing might have been necessary to secure said lady’s happiness and continued favors.
But it is a very unsettling combination – warm voice, cool spare background, and promises of everything uttered in as dispassionate a tone as has ever been employed while delivering a declaration. The most unsettling and dispassionate section of the song is the bridge, and on the words – please, please – a plea unlike (in my experience) any other uttered in song. The tone implies that these words are merely pro-forma, an inclusion without meaning, since the bare offer of the verses should be enough. That is what I mean by devious, especially when this sentiment is coupled with that slow, sex-laden, warmly cool, coolly warm voice.
This is why I don’t need to know anything about Mr. Cohen’s biography. This song tells me that it will be littered with evidence of multiple love affairs, of varying lengths and intensities, of veritably Rousseau-ian proportions. It is all there in the song.
I still like it, though.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
America: Problem Child
The principal problem that afflicts our country was diagnosed two hundred and twenty-seven years ago, by a very perceptive Frenchman. To wit:
“Cast your eyes upon the capital of your empire, and you will find two classes of citizens. The one, glutted with riches, displays an opulence which offends those it does not corrupt; the other, mired in destitution, worsens its conditions by wearing a mask of prosperity which it does not possess: for such is the power of gold (when it becomes the god of a nation, stands in the stead of all talent, and takes the place of every virtue) that one must either have wealth or feign to have it.”
~ Denis Diderot (Abbé Reynal) in Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans des Deux Indes, Book IV, 1781 (Vol. XV, Oeuvres complètes, Paris, Club français du livre,1973).
Mon. Diderot was writing 'under cover' in a book officially authored by his friend and co-philosophe, the Abbé Reynal, addressing his Majesty Louis XVI of France. That portion of the sentiment which I have emphasized (bold & italic) is as applicable now as it was then -- perhaps more so, since the age of the CREDIT CARD has made "feigning" wealth a practically universally available affliction, and by virtue of the sentiment in parentheses -- which is, if anything, more true now than it was then.
Would Diderot weep to know that still, after all this time, his warnings have gone unheeded? Or would he, being philosopical, put it down to the apparently immutably small nature of human nature? One can't help but wonder.
“Cast your eyes upon the capital of your empire, and you will find two classes of citizens. The one, glutted with riches, displays an opulence which offends those it does not corrupt; the other, mired in destitution, worsens its conditions by wearing a mask of prosperity which it does not possess: for such is the power of gold (when it becomes the god of a nation, stands in the stead of all talent, and takes the place of every virtue) that one must either have wealth or feign to have it.”
~ Denis Diderot (Abbé Reynal) in Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans des Deux Indes, Book IV, 1781 (Vol. XV, Oeuvres complètes, Paris, Club français du livre,1973).
Mon. Diderot was writing 'under cover' in a book officially authored by his friend and co-philosophe, the Abbé Reynal, addressing his Majesty Louis XVI of France. That portion of the sentiment which I have emphasized (bold & italic) is as applicable now as it was then -- perhaps more so, since the age of the CREDIT CARD has made "feigning" wealth a practically universally available affliction, and by virtue of the sentiment in parentheses -- which is, if anything, more true now than it was then.
Would Diderot weep to know that still, after all this time, his warnings have gone unheeded? Or would he, being philosopical, put it down to the apparently immutably small nature of human nature? One can't help but wonder.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
William Gibson: Feminist Author? A Preliminary Essay.
Disclaimer: all that follows is, of course, IMHO, solely.
A few initial disclosures:
1. I am a woman.
2. I claim the label feminist, because. . .
3. I am old enough to remember some of the brouhaha over some of the more militant actions that occurred at the height of second wave feminism’s greatest public (or perhaps more accurately, publicly perceived) period of active engagement / confrontation with the cultural conditions that govern American women’s lives. Old enough that most of these actions (and reactions to same) are not remembered directly, but when confronted with dates I can correlate the time period to memory of my Mother’s general attitudes and actions during the relevant period. I am both old enough to have benefited by the gains made during this wave, and young enough to understand that very little truly substantive change actually occurred, while not so young that this lack of true change comes as any big surprise.
4. I have been reading science fiction since I was, in David Hartwell’s formulation, the age of wonder: 12 or so. I caught the cyberpunk bus rather later, and well after it had left the station–probably about mid-way on its journey to becoming an historical phenomenon–when it was still exerting influence on active writers, but past its polemical prime.
5. I am employed by an institution of higher learning, but am not an academic. However, I did recently finish up my long delayed Batchelors degree (in English), and have been engaged in study for a Masters in same. So, while I have some familiarity with the tropes of current streams of theoretical thought in literary criticism, I am not an expert in any of these, nor am likely to become one in the near or far term(s).
6. It is spring break at my institution, so on Tuesday (03/11/08) I re-read Pattern Recognition, and on Wednesday (03/12/08) I re-read Spook Country, and my reflections on my re-reading governs these remarks. I also apologize for the verbosity of these remarks – I have also recently been re-reading Infinite Jest, so my thought processes and writing have become somewhat (although not nearly so brilliantly) David Foster Wallace-erized as a result. Sorry.
7. My thinking on the William Gibson novels noted has also been influenced by a comment received via e-mail on my review of the novel The Commoner by John Burnham Schwartz, that I posted as part of my catalog entry for same in my LibraryThing catalog of my books. To wit: the difficulties encountered while reading–as a woman–novels in which the principal protagonist is a woman, written by men. This brings up all kinds of thorny questions, which have been/are being addressed by literary critics of all stripes and theoretical persuasions. While I do not feel that it is impossible for a man to write a ‘real’ woman as a character, I do not—at the same time—feel that a man can understand a woman’s interior life in the same way that he can understand a man’s interior life, although the interior lives of human beings as a class are more than likely quite similar. This is due to the unassailable fact that the worlds in which men and women live, while physically congruent, are culturally constructed so to be quite different, both in their parameters and most importantly, in how this construction impacts on the interior life as experienced within it, for both women and men, no matter the particular culture considered or addressed by a novelist of either sex.
So, at last to the topic that prompted all the above:
I was struck, on re-reading both Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, by how the female protagonists of both are presented in their capacity as employees, as persons engaged in work. Cayce and Hollis are working. Not at jobs that most of us will have, or could ever imagine having: coolhunter? ex-rock star turned journalist? but jobs nevertheless. Both narratives occur because each is doing her job, and both are concerned with how to successfully meet the requirements of said jobs, and with completing the tasks imposed by the nature of the job. Neither novel is primarily concerned―at all―with the subjects typically addressed as essential in novels in which the principal characters are women: i.e., their emotional entanglements with men or other partners, their love-lives, their sex-lives, their families, in short, their closest, most interpersonal relationships. (It must be said, however, that this is not without precedent in Gibson’s oeuvre, however, when you consider the conditions in which we encounter both Molly (Neuromancer) and Chevette (Virtual Light)). These latter subjects make appearances in both, but are not the primary point of the action of the narrative.
This makes me very happy, as a feminist woman reader. Most of us will spend the bulk of our lives working, and the bulk of our time concerned with our jobs, and all the attendant worries and minutiae generated by those jobs. And it occurred to me that Gibson has written novels which, at last! feature truly modern, contemporary women as protagonists! Who work!!!
Now, I will freely admit that there may be many other novels which have done this. While I consider myself well-read, I have not read everything there is to read, by any means. And I do not habitually read that species of fiction that seem to be, in the marketing sense, aimed at women: romance novels. (I suspect I am not alone in considering the bulk of these productions as being unworthy of even having the appellation novel applied to them!) I don’t read a lot of (insert finger motion here) quote LITERARY unquote fiction, or best-sellers, or the sort of sprawling multi-generational multiple volume sagas that litter my younger sister’s meagerly stocked shelves, nor do I read the multiple-volume single-protagonist detective sagas or horror/suspense novels that regularly crop up on both best seller lists and the shelves and in the conversations of some of my friends and colleagues. Thus, I freely admit that my experience may be seen to be somewhat limited. But I have read, in some cases frequently and often, those novels considered classics which touch upon the concern entered above in point number 7. These would include but not be limited to Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, and of course, all of Jane Austen. I must shamefully admit to not having read Zola’s Nana, nor Balzac’s Cousin Bette, nor many another classic novel that one feels one must have read to enable one to state that one is well read! (This, upon consulting the list of 101 titles on pages viii-x provided by Jane Smiley in her 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, one of the many books-on-books I have, but in this instance the easiest to lay hands on, which, while excellent, is by no means the last word on the subject.) However, of those cited above by name, the only one in which the world of work plays a significant part in the narrative is Jane Eyre, although it does play a part in Vanity Fair as well as in Austen, and in Middlemarch Dorothea complains often and mightily about her lack of useful education and a place in which to employ her particular talents, employment wise. The majority of those novels, however, deal in the main with the protagonists difficulties with marriage, or lack of same, or love affairs in any and all states of relative success and failure. With each protagonists life as a participant in the area culturally deemed to most concern women: the personal, interpersonal, and private sphere, not the wage earning public sphere.
Therefore, to return to Gibson, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, it is refreshing to have both Cayce and Hollis presented as being engaged throughout the course of the narrative in work, at work, working. They talk about money, and paying bills, and how the decisions they make will impact future prospects for both. Each makes decisions within the context of the particular problem they have to solve that are taken with that knowledge uppermost on a hierarchical listing of items of importance vis-à-vis the outcome or actions resulting from each decision. And as a feminist, and as a woman reader, I cannot but feel that this is important, that this makes them more real, as they operate in a more real world, a world that I as a reader recognize as being much closer to my own than might generally be the case. This is especially relevant when considering Gibson as a part of the mosaic of science fiction, (the genre with which he is most often associated, although both of the novels in question resist classification as science fiction, or even slipstream, being basic, straight-on fiction), in which the protagonist has often been presented at work, with being engaged in said work as a primary thread of the narrative, with work often the ‘pre-existing condition’ from which the narrative itself springs, as indeed it is for both Cayce in Pattern Recognition and Hollis in Spook Country. This is the first aspect of both that makes me approach both novels as, if not definitively or openly meant as feminist, at least as texts that can be read as having come to grips with an issue at the heart of the feminist project: that women work, that work matters, and that women as workers should not be confined to any particular role(s) in such work simply because they are women.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, each narrative takes advantage of the ways in which women’s behavior has been culturally conditioned, and presents aspects of this very conditioning as positive, as something that can be used in the world of work, and that has perhaps been overlooked when evaluating success in the workplace generally, at least in currently operant American (or the larger Western) work-culture. To illustrate: Cayce attributes a good part of her success as a coolhunter to the fact that “… she’s learned it’s largely a matter of being willing to ask the next question.” (Pattern Recognition, pg. 32, US Berkley trade softcover edition, 2003)
If you accept that the work world has been constructed by men as a hierarchical system where roles are defined (chiefly) in terms of where you fit on a who-is-above-me-who-is-below-me pyramid wherein status is based on the why, when, and how of who and what you can order about, then that is an important difference, this willingness to ask the next question. Admittedly, there are quite a lot of jobs wherein that ability plays an important part, and men hold them, and can and indeed do ask that next question. But, speaking very generally, questioning and the ability to incessantly ask the next question is not highly valued in your stereotypical corporate structure. Because it implies an unwillingness to take orders, to follow orders, to ‘get with the program’ of a particular corporate mind-set which would therefore allow for success within that particular corporate structure. But questioning is an ability that the culturally constructed world of women has always valued, since it is one of the tools employed in building the type of mutually reinforcing relationships women use to negotiate the world. The world of women is constructed not on a up/down hierarchical pattern, but on a more loosely circular, whom-are-you-connected-to-and-how-am-I-connected-to-them-and-therefore-to-you pattern. Basically, six degrees of Kevin Bacon, writ all-encompassing and incredibly large. It is through conversationally deployed questioning that such information is elicited, and traded, and upon which relationships are built and maintained.
Yet, in the context of Pattern Recognition, wherein Hubertus Bigend is the order-giver extraordinaire, it is this ability to question that constitutes Cayce’s precise value to him as an employee engaged in the search for the maker of the footage. She may question both him and his motives, but that does not stop her from asking the questions anyway. Bigend, as the head of an admittedly anomalous corporation, values the very thing that makes Cayce unlikely to ever be a good fit in a more ‘normal’ organizational structure. (See her comment on this very thing, 7th paragraph, pg. 61.) A behavioral characteristic, or tactical communication strategy, that has been a part of women’s culturally encoded world for so long it has ceased to be seen (within that world) as a strategy at all. It is just part of the way things operate.
Hollis demonstrates a different aspect of this same trait, when she extracts, without noticeable difficulty, information on where and how to find Bobby, in Spook Country’s chapter 62, entitled ‘Sister.’ Hollis uses that very same tactic, asking the next question, to get Bobby’s address. But…and maybe it is just me, I can’t help but see this entire conversation through an enhanced lens, so to speak. Because it is the facial expressions, vocal tone and tempo that accompany this conversation (which aren’t described, since that would be terribly unwieldy) which are left to the readers imagination, that, in such a situation, would bear on Sarah’s decision to give Hollis the address as heavily as the words of her questions. Gibson trusts the reader to interpret/imagine these individually, since while this exact experience may be novel for a reader, the general type of conversation will/should/might not.
For instance, it would be hard not to imagine the type of eye-rolling, eyebrow raising grimace of long-suffering exasperation that surely must accompany Sarah’s declaration that “He’s as self-centered now as he was when he was fifteen. It isn’t easy, having a monster of giftedness for a brother.” (Spook Country, pg. 272, US G.P. Putnam’s Sons hardcover edition, 2007) We can also infer a tone of ‘yes, I understand how he can be a pain in the butt’ with the corresponding ‘I understand your frustration’ look from Hollis when she says, “Because I’m a journalist, and I’m writing about locative art. And he seems to be at the center of it, and certainly he’s at the center of his sudden absence, and the upset it’s caused.” (emphasis mine, pg. 273) This comment replies almost directly to Sarah’s description of her brother, which encompasses her attitude to him, and their relative importance to their parents within their respective places in their specific family drama. It doesn’t matter that Hollis never refers to siblings, because we know she has been in a band, which, as a very small group, partakes of the communication patterns operant in both marriages and families. From which a reader can infer that Hollis has done her time dealing with just those sorts of ‘siblings’ and very likely experienced just that exasperation, thus her ability to convince Sarah of her understanding of the situation Sarah occupies vis-à-vis Bobby quickly and easily, without which it is difficult to imagine Sarah being so forthcoming, so quickly and easily.
This ability to both understand and convince is again a behavioral characteristic, or tactical communication strategy, that has long been part of the cultural surround of women. It is based on immersion in and recognition of the patterns that dominate our (American) cultural conditioning that allows for this type of communication between total strangers: they share a milieu and have experience of such similar situations that the ‘correct’ pattern for establishing understanding is applied without conscious thought.
That Gibson can a) write such a conversation testifies to his acute observation of the conversational patterns of women in this culture, (and/or really great relationships with the women in his life, a testimony in itself!) and b) trust the reader to overlay the situationally appropriate facial expressions and vocal cues to such a conversation testifies to his belief that readers have, on some level, observed/participated in same. That is why I would offer this novelist, and both of these novels, as participating in and contributing in a positive way to the ongoing feminist project in American culture generally. Which would make, if I can be so bold, Gibson a feminist author, or at least one who has produced texts that forward feminist viewpoints, at least insofar as I read them, regarding the two subjects treated however briefly and altogether too generally here.
Or is it just me?
Discuss.
A few initial disclosures:
1. I am a woman.
2. I claim the label feminist, because. . .
3. I am old enough to remember some of the brouhaha over some of the more militant actions that occurred at the height of second wave feminism’s greatest public (or perhaps more accurately, publicly perceived) period of active engagement / confrontation with the cultural conditions that govern American women’s lives. Old enough that most of these actions (and reactions to same) are not remembered directly, but when confronted with dates I can correlate the time period to memory of my Mother’s general attitudes and actions during the relevant period. I am both old enough to have benefited by the gains made during this wave, and young enough to understand that very little truly substantive change actually occurred, while not so young that this lack of true change comes as any big surprise.
4. I have been reading science fiction since I was, in David Hartwell’s formulation, the age of wonder: 12 or so. I caught the cyberpunk bus rather later, and well after it had left the station–probably about mid-way on its journey to becoming an historical phenomenon–when it was still exerting influence on active writers, but past its polemical prime.
5. I am employed by an institution of higher learning, but am not an academic. However, I did recently finish up my long delayed Batchelors degree (in English), and have been engaged in study for a Masters in same. So, while I have some familiarity with the tropes of current streams of theoretical thought in literary criticism, I am not an expert in any of these, nor am likely to become one in the near or far term(s).
6. It is spring break at my institution, so on Tuesday (03/11/08) I re-read Pattern Recognition, and on Wednesday (03/12/08) I re-read Spook Country, and my reflections on my re-reading governs these remarks. I also apologize for the verbosity of these remarks – I have also recently been re-reading Infinite Jest, so my thought processes and writing have become somewhat (although not nearly so brilliantly) David Foster Wallace-erized as a result. Sorry.
7. My thinking on the William Gibson novels noted has also been influenced by a comment received via e-mail on my review of the novel The Commoner by John Burnham Schwartz, that I posted as part of my catalog entry for same in my LibraryThing catalog of my books. To wit: the difficulties encountered while reading–as a woman–novels in which the principal protagonist is a woman, written by men. This brings up all kinds of thorny questions, which have been/are being addressed by literary critics of all stripes and theoretical persuasions. While I do not feel that it is impossible for a man to write a ‘real’ woman as a character, I do not—at the same time—feel that a man can understand a woman’s interior life in the same way that he can understand a man’s interior life, although the interior lives of human beings as a class are more than likely quite similar. This is due to the unassailable fact that the worlds in which men and women live, while physically congruent, are culturally constructed so to be quite different, both in their parameters and most importantly, in how this construction impacts on the interior life as experienced within it, for both women and men, no matter the particular culture considered or addressed by a novelist of either sex.
So, at last to the topic that prompted all the above:
I was struck, on re-reading both Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, by how the female protagonists of both are presented in their capacity as employees, as persons engaged in work. Cayce and Hollis are working. Not at jobs that most of us will have, or could ever imagine having: coolhunter? ex-rock star turned journalist? but jobs nevertheless. Both narratives occur because each is doing her job, and both are concerned with how to successfully meet the requirements of said jobs, and with completing the tasks imposed by the nature of the job. Neither novel is primarily concerned―at all―with the subjects typically addressed as essential in novels in which the principal characters are women: i.e., their emotional entanglements with men or other partners, their love-lives, their sex-lives, their families, in short, their closest, most interpersonal relationships. (It must be said, however, that this is not without precedent in Gibson’s oeuvre, however, when you consider the conditions in which we encounter both Molly (Neuromancer) and Chevette (Virtual Light)). These latter subjects make appearances in both, but are not the primary point of the action of the narrative.
This makes me very happy, as a feminist woman reader. Most of us will spend the bulk of our lives working, and the bulk of our time concerned with our jobs, and all the attendant worries and minutiae generated by those jobs. And it occurred to me that Gibson has written novels which, at last! feature truly modern, contemporary women as protagonists! Who work!!!
Now, I will freely admit that there may be many other novels which have done this. While I consider myself well-read, I have not read everything there is to read, by any means. And I do not habitually read that species of fiction that seem to be, in the marketing sense, aimed at women: romance novels. (I suspect I am not alone in considering the bulk of these productions as being unworthy of even having the appellation novel applied to them!) I don’t read a lot of (insert finger motion here) quote LITERARY unquote fiction, or best-sellers, or the sort of sprawling multi-generational multiple volume sagas that litter my younger sister’s meagerly stocked shelves, nor do I read the multiple-volume single-protagonist detective sagas or horror/suspense novels that regularly crop up on both best seller lists and the shelves and in the conversations of some of my friends and colleagues. Thus, I freely admit that my experience may be seen to be somewhat limited. But I have read, in some cases frequently and often, those novels considered classics which touch upon the concern entered above in point number 7. These would include but not be limited to Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Middlemarch, Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, and of course, all of Jane Austen. I must shamefully admit to not having read Zola’s Nana, nor Balzac’s Cousin Bette, nor many another classic novel that one feels one must have read to enable one to state that one is well read! (This, upon consulting the list of 101 titles on pages viii-x provided by Jane Smiley in her 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, one of the many books-on-books I have, but in this instance the easiest to lay hands on, which, while excellent, is by no means the last word on the subject.) However, of those cited above by name, the only one in which the world of work plays a significant part in the narrative is Jane Eyre, although it does play a part in Vanity Fair as well as in Austen, and in Middlemarch Dorothea complains often and mightily about her lack of useful education and a place in which to employ her particular talents, employment wise. The majority of those novels, however, deal in the main with the protagonists difficulties with marriage, or lack of same, or love affairs in any and all states of relative success and failure. With each protagonists life as a participant in the area culturally deemed to most concern women: the personal, interpersonal, and private sphere, not the wage earning public sphere.
Therefore, to return to Gibson, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, it is refreshing to have both Cayce and Hollis presented as being engaged throughout the course of the narrative in work, at work, working. They talk about money, and paying bills, and how the decisions they make will impact future prospects for both. Each makes decisions within the context of the particular problem they have to solve that are taken with that knowledge uppermost on a hierarchical listing of items of importance vis-à-vis the outcome or actions resulting from each decision. And as a feminist, and as a woman reader, I cannot but feel that this is important, that this makes them more real, as they operate in a more real world, a world that I as a reader recognize as being much closer to my own than might generally be the case. This is especially relevant when considering Gibson as a part of the mosaic of science fiction, (the genre with which he is most often associated, although both of the novels in question resist classification as science fiction, or even slipstream, being basic, straight-on fiction), in which the protagonist has often been presented at work, with being engaged in said work as a primary thread of the narrative, with work often the ‘pre-existing condition’ from which the narrative itself springs, as indeed it is for both Cayce in Pattern Recognition and Hollis in Spook Country. This is the first aspect of both that makes me approach both novels as, if not definitively or openly meant as feminist, at least as texts that can be read as having come to grips with an issue at the heart of the feminist project: that women work, that work matters, and that women as workers should not be confined to any particular role(s) in such work simply because they are women.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, each narrative takes advantage of the ways in which women’s behavior has been culturally conditioned, and presents aspects of this very conditioning as positive, as something that can be used in the world of work, and that has perhaps been overlooked when evaluating success in the workplace generally, at least in currently operant American (or the larger Western) work-culture. To illustrate: Cayce attributes a good part of her success as a coolhunter to the fact that “… she’s learned it’s largely a matter of being willing to ask the next question.” (Pattern Recognition, pg. 32, US Berkley trade softcover edition, 2003)
If you accept that the work world has been constructed by men as a hierarchical system where roles are defined (chiefly) in terms of where you fit on a who-is-above-me-who-is-below-me pyramid wherein status is based on the why, when, and how of who and what you can order about, then that is an important difference, this willingness to ask the next question. Admittedly, there are quite a lot of jobs wherein that ability plays an important part, and men hold them, and can and indeed do ask that next question. But, speaking very generally, questioning and the ability to incessantly ask the next question is not highly valued in your stereotypical corporate structure. Because it implies an unwillingness to take orders, to follow orders, to ‘get with the program’ of a particular corporate mind-set which would therefore allow for success within that particular corporate structure. But questioning is an ability that the culturally constructed world of women has always valued, since it is one of the tools employed in building the type of mutually reinforcing relationships women use to negotiate the world. The world of women is constructed not on a up/down hierarchical pattern, but on a more loosely circular, whom-are-you-connected-to-and-how-am-I-connected-to-them-and-therefore-to-you pattern. Basically, six degrees of Kevin Bacon, writ all-encompassing and incredibly large. It is through conversationally deployed questioning that such information is elicited, and traded, and upon which relationships are built and maintained.
Yet, in the context of Pattern Recognition, wherein Hubertus Bigend is the order-giver extraordinaire, it is this ability to question that constitutes Cayce’s precise value to him as an employee engaged in the search for the maker of the footage. She may question both him and his motives, but that does not stop her from asking the questions anyway. Bigend, as the head of an admittedly anomalous corporation, values the very thing that makes Cayce unlikely to ever be a good fit in a more ‘normal’ organizational structure. (See her comment on this very thing, 7th paragraph, pg. 61.) A behavioral characteristic, or tactical communication strategy, that has been a part of women’s culturally encoded world for so long it has ceased to be seen (within that world) as a strategy at all. It is just part of the way things operate.
Hollis demonstrates a different aspect of this same trait, when she extracts, without noticeable difficulty, information on where and how to find Bobby, in Spook Country’s chapter 62, entitled ‘Sister.’ Hollis uses that very same tactic, asking the next question, to get Bobby’s address. But…and maybe it is just me, I can’t help but see this entire conversation through an enhanced lens, so to speak. Because it is the facial expressions, vocal tone and tempo that accompany this conversation (which aren’t described, since that would be terribly unwieldy) which are left to the readers imagination, that, in such a situation, would bear on Sarah’s decision to give Hollis the address as heavily as the words of her questions. Gibson trusts the reader to interpret/imagine these individually, since while this exact experience may be novel for a reader, the general type of conversation will/should/might not.
For instance, it would be hard not to imagine the type of eye-rolling, eyebrow raising grimace of long-suffering exasperation that surely must accompany Sarah’s declaration that “He’s as self-centered now as he was when he was fifteen. It isn’t easy, having a monster of giftedness for a brother.” (Spook Country, pg. 272, US G.P. Putnam’s Sons hardcover edition, 2007) We can also infer a tone of ‘yes, I understand how he can be a pain in the butt’ with the corresponding ‘I understand your frustration’ look from Hollis when she says, “Because I’m a journalist, and I’m writing about locative art. And he seems to be at the center of it, and certainly he’s at the center of his sudden absence, and the upset it’s caused.” (emphasis mine, pg. 273) This comment replies almost directly to Sarah’s description of her brother, which encompasses her attitude to him, and their relative importance to their parents within their respective places in their specific family drama. It doesn’t matter that Hollis never refers to siblings, because we know she has been in a band, which, as a very small group, partakes of the communication patterns operant in both marriages and families. From which a reader can infer that Hollis has done her time dealing with just those sorts of ‘siblings’ and very likely experienced just that exasperation, thus her ability to convince Sarah of her understanding of the situation Sarah occupies vis-à-vis Bobby quickly and easily, without which it is difficult to imagine Sarah being so forthcoming, so quickly and easily.
This ability to both understand and convince is again a behavioral characteristic, or tactical communication strategy, that has long been part of the cultural surround of women. It is based on immersion in and recognition of the patterns that dominate our (American) cultural conditioning that allows for this type of communication between total strangers: they share a milieu and have experience of such similar situations that the ‘correct’ pattern for establishing understanding is applied without conscious thought.
That Gibson can a) write such a conversation testifies to his acute observation of the conversational patterns of women in this culture, (and/or really great relationships with the women in his life, a testimony in itself!) and b) trust the reader to overlay the situationally appropriate facial expressions and vocal cues to such a conversation testifies to his belief that readers have, on some level, observed/participated in same. That is why I would offer this novelist, and both of these novels, as participating in and contributing in a positive way to the ongoing feminist project in American culture generally. Which would make, if I can be so bold, Gibson a feminist author, or at least one who has produced texts that forward feminist viewpoints, at least insofar as I read them, regarding the two subjects treated however briefly and altogether too generally here.
Or is it just me?
Discuss.
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