Jeff Noon's "Vurt": A Critical Companion 9783031070297, 3031070291

Citation preview

PALGRAVE SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY: A NEW CANON

Jeff Noon’s Vurt A Critical Companion Andrew C. Wenaus

Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon Series Editors

Sean Guynes Michigan Publishing University of Michigan–Ann Arbor Ann Arbor, USA Keren Omry Department of English University of Haifa Haifa, Israel

Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon provides short introductions to key works of science fiction and fantasy (SFF) speaking to why a text, trilogy, or series matters to SFF as a genre as well as to readers, scholars, and fans. These books aim to serve as a go-to resource for thinking on specific texts and series and for prompting further inquiry. Each book will be less than 30,000 words and structured similarly to facilitate classroom use. Focusing specifically on literature, the books will also address film and TV adaptations of the texts as relevant. Beginning with background and context on the text’s place in the field, the author and how this text fits in their oeuvre, and the socio-historical reception of the text, the books will provide an understanding of how students, readers, and scholars can think dynamically about a given text. Each book will describe the major approaches to the text and how the critical engagements with the text have shaped SFF. Engaging with classic works as well as recent books that have been taken up by SFF fans and scholars, the goal of the series is not to be the arbiters of canonical importance, but to show how sustained critical analysis of these texts might bring about a new canon. In addition to their suitability for undergraduate courses, the books will appeal to fans of SFF.

Andrew C. Wenaus

Jeff Noon’s Vurt A Critical Companion

Andrew C. Wenaus Western University London, ON, Canada

ISSN 2662-8562     ISSN 2662-8570 (electronic) Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon ISBN 978-3-031-07028-0    ISBN 978-3-031-07029-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07029-7 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Christina, with love

Series Preface

The infinite worlds of science fiction and fantasy (SFF) dance along the borders between the possible and the impossible, the familiar and the strange, the immediate and the ever-approaching horizon. Speculative fiction in all its forms has been considered a genre, a medium, a mode, a practice, a compilation of themes or a web of assertions. With this in mind, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon offers an expansive and dynamic approach to thinking SFF, destabilizing notions of the canon, so long associated with privilege, power, class, and hegemony. We take canon not as a singular and unchallenged authority but as shifting and thoughtful consensus among an always-growing collective of readers, scholars, and writers. The cultural practice and production of speculation has encompassed novels, stories, plays, games, music, comics, and other media, with a lineage dating back at least to the nineteenth-century precursors through to the most recent publications. Existing scholarship has considered some of these media extensively, often with particular focus on film and TV. It is for this reason that Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy will forgo the cinematic and televisual, aspiring to direct critical attention at the other nodes of SFF expression. Each volume in the series introduces, contextualizes, and analyzes a single work of SFF that ranges from the acknowledged “classic” to the should-be-classic, and asks two basic, but provocative questions: Why does this text matter to SFF? and Why does (or should) this text matter to SFF readers, scholars, and fans? Thus, the series joins into conversation both with scholars and students of the field to examine the parameters of SFF vii

viii 

Series Preface

studies and the changing valences of fundamental categories like genre, medium, and canon. By emphasizing the critical approaches and major questions each text inspires, the series aims to offer “go-to” books for thinking about, writing on, and teaching major works of SFF. Keren Omry Sean Guynes

Acknowledgements

Without my friends and colleagues’ guidance, help, and support, this book would not have been possible. First, I would like to thank the Palgrave SFF: A New Canon series editors Keren Omry and Sean Guynes for their knowledge, guidance, and feedback. I would also like to thank Michelle Kass and Russell Franklin at Michelle Kass Associates for responding to my queries and providing me with essential materials for this book. To my friends and colleagues D. Harlan Wilson, Edward Matthews, Steve Beard, Andrew Weiss, and many of my colleagues at the University of Western Ontario: thank you for your insight, commentary, and help at various stages of writing. Thanks too to my parents, Susan and Daryl, and parents-in-law, Linda and George, for their love and support. A special thanks to Christina Marie Willatt for her feedback, discernment, support, and love. And, finally, I’d like to thank two Mancunians without whom this book would not exist: Nicholas Ruddick and Jeff Noon. Around 2007 or so, as I was beginning my MA at the University of Regina, I met Nick. With no real plan other than “I want to write my thesis on experimental literature or science fiction, ideally both,” after a few conversations with Nick about J.G.  Ballard, the Futurists, Jorge Luis Borges, and Philip K. Dick, my attention was drawn to Jeff’s work. I vividly remember first seeing the vibrant yellow, pink, and orange book spine glowing among the

ix

x 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

dull navy blue, brown, and black hardcovers. There’s something magical about this book; it really is like a rite of passage. Without Nick’s guidance, I don’t know if I, in the Great Plains of Saskatchewan, ever would’ve discovered Jeff’s work on my own. And, of course, a heartfelt thanks to Jeff for making possible the poetic life and continually guiding us all towards the strange light ahead.

Book Description

This book offers an examination of Jeff Noon’s iconoclastic debut novel, Vurt (1993). In this first book-length study of the novel, which includes an extended interview with Noon, Wenaus considers how Vurt complicates the process of literary canonization, its constructivist relationship to genre, its violent and oneiric setting of Manchester, its use of the Orphic myth as an archetype for the practice of literary collage and musical remix, and how the structural paradoxes of chaos and fractal geometry inform the novel’s content, form, and theme. Finally, Wenaus makes the case for Vurt’s ongoing relevance in the twenty-first century, an era increasingly characterized by neuro-totalitarianism, psychopolitics, and digital surveillance. With Vurt, Noon begins his project of rupturing feedback loops of control by breaking narrative habits and embracing the contingent and unpredictable. An inventive, energetic, and heartbreaking novel, Vurt is also an optimistic and heartfelt call for artists to actively create open futures. Keywords  Jeff Noon Vurt Arthur C. Clarke Award Cyberpunk Avant-­pulp Manchester Remix Rave Escapism Fractal geometry Chaos theory Strange loop Self-reflexivity Imagining the future Literary technology Science fiction Postmodernism Experimental literature Avant-garde Neuro-­ totalitarianism Psychology Strange loops

xi

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Black Market Dreams: From Cyberpunk to the Avant-Pulp 21 3 Totally Feathered Up in Bottletown: Imagining Manchester 35 4 Orpheus  and His Limbic Decks: Avant-Pulp Bricolage and Rites of Passage 53 5 Fractal  Narrative and Chaos Theory: The Formal and Thematic Paradox of Escapism 69 6 Conclusion:  What Literature Thinks—Vurt and Neuroemancipation 85 Appendix103 Bibliography121 Index125

xiii

About the Author

Andrew C. Wenaus  is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Writings Studies at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, a member of the Complex Adaptive Systems Lab, and the author of The Literature of Exclusion: Dada, Data, and the Threshold of Electronic Literature. He is also a composer and, with Christina Willatt, has written and performed electro-acoustic scores for theatre, dance, film, and contemporary classical ensemble.

xv

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Sometimes It Feels Like the Whole World Is Smeared with Vaz

Abstract  This chapter introduces Jeff Noon’s work and career, beginning with Vurt (1993). The chapter surveys critical responses to the novel by artists, writers, and literary critics; examines the cultural and literary context out of which the novel emerged; and finally investigates how iconoclastic works of literature reshape the literary canon. Rather than thinking of Vurt—a novel that samples and collages both itself and other texts—as authentic or authoritative in the traditional canonical sense, the novel’s success acts as a reminder that canonization often results from a dual process: the work must enter a tense conversation with legacies of literary practice and, simultaneously, strike the reader as a shockingly incomparable and singular text. Keywords  Jeff Noon • Vurt • Singular • Arthur C. Clarke Award • Canon • Canonization • Authority • Authenticity • Incomparable • Cyberpunk • Avant-Pulp • Manchester • Remix • Escapism • Fractal geometry • Chaos theory • Strange loop • Self-reflexivity • Imagining the future “If they can remix Madonna after she’s dead, why can’t they remix the night?”1 Asked by Scribble, the protagonist and “author” of Jeff Noon’s 1

 Jeff Noon, Vurt (London: Pan, 2001), 32.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. C. Wenaus, Jeff Noon’s Vurt, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07029-7_1

1

2 

A. C. WENAUS

debut novel Vurt (1993), this question is at the heart of one of the most enigmatic and unique novels of the 1990s. Nearly three decades later, the same question can be read as axiomatic for a general sense of our time. There is something about the past thirty years that feels at once relentlessly excessive in its output and, at the same time, like a skipping record, an infinitely-looping GIF animation, the same thing again and again. It can seem as if history is stuck, as if the rapid developments and aggressive newness of modernity have abruptly become caught in a loop. To summarize the cultural theorist Mark Fisher, we live in an era where updates and upgrades have supplanted innovation. New media technologies have made seemingly everything available at any time, in any place. Still, this everything seems to be the same as if it’s all been done. All we can do is go back to earlier works, update them, upgrade them, and try to perfect them. The need to rework, renovate, and redo has become pathological as if by perfecting a much-beloved novel, song, or film, we can transform the depressive, anxious, and exhausted state we find ourselves in. In doing so, however, we are no longer creating for the future; instead, we are grieving for it. And in our melancholic revamping of pop culture, we are desperately trying to write from the past to change the present. Such obsessive ruminations speak to the compulsion to search for something that went missing in some unknowable instance. It is as if we have forgone creating anything new because our contemporary pathology tells us that we are at once perpetrators and victims of some unknowable transgression. Things indeed do have a way of looping us back to where we started. Still, in rare instances, we encounter something strikingly singular. Perhaps this is the missing piece; perhaps this was the successful reconfiguration; perhaps this is the consolation we need to imagine and transform the future. In these instances, we let go of our search for the authority and authenticity sanctioned by the past and, instead, embrace novel singularity and look to the future. Vurt was precisely this kind of singular work. By tickling the back of the throat with a Vurt feather, users enter “vurtual” realms as diverse as games, pornography, comfort, memory, and confrontations with one’s unconscious traumas. The story follows a gang of outcasts who call themselves the Stash Riders. Scribble (whose real name is Stephen),2 has lost his 2  Stephen may be a homage to James Joyce’s alter ego Stephen Dedalus, anti-hero of the Künstlerroman A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and later the failed artist of Ulysses (1920).

1 INTRODUCTION 

3

sister/lover, Desdemona, to the Vurt and is on a journey to get her back: a quest that he will fail, but will beget his transformative rebirth as a mature artist. Vurt is a portal-quest narrative, a book about lost love, obsession, music, friendship, mourning, addiction, abuse, poverty, and the joys and perils of trying to escape vicious, repetitive cycles. It is a novel that is at once raucous and eloquent, transgressive and transformative, mournful and optimistic, surrealist and scientific, dreamlike and honest; Vurt is a singular, wild ride. And, the preceding list of problems and paradoxes do not simply account for the content of Vurt. The collage of dizzying puzzles that comprise the novel also informs its form: Noon establishes an associational kind of writing by engaging an ethos similar to that of a Dubmaster or a DJ. Vurt had an explosive effect when it found its way into readers’ hands in 1993: Noon was awarded the Arthur C.  Clarke Award for Vurt in 1994. A year later, he won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. But the enthusiasm around the novel continued to resound through the decades. In 1999, Noon adapted Vurt for the stage with performances taking place in Leipzig and Manchester; and the 2017 crowd-funded Vurt, the Table-Top Role-Playing Game (Ravendesk Games) attests to the novel’s ongoing cult status. But it is with Vurt’s surprising appearance in 1993 that inaugurates Noon’s career as a seeker of new ways of telling stories suited to a future where possibilities abound. This short book examines Noon’s Vurt as an original and singular contribution to science fiction and fantasy (sff) literature. I will consider how Vurt is a work of avant-pulp rather than cyberpunk, the importance of Manchester to the narrative, Noon’s interest in chaos theory and fractal geometry and how it informs both the form and the content of Vurt, musical and literary collage and the Orphic “portal quest” as a mythical and aesthetic rite of passage, the relationship between the novel’s structural paradoxes and compulsive behaviours resulting from trauma and, finally, why Vurt’s experimental spirit is so relevant nearly three decades after its publication as we find ourselves entering an unprecedented era of “neuro-totalitarianism”: a term used to refer to the reach of algorithms and unconscious behavioural steering by technological and media apparatuses. Ultimately, the overarching trajectory of this book considers how Vurt’s singular, intrepid experimentalism set in motion Noon’s ongoing commitment to breaking our storytelling habits, embracing the unpredictable, and, by confronting the obstacles that make the present feel

4 

A. C. WENAUS

otherwise hopeless, engaging in the difficult task of transformation and imagining a better future from the unique perspectives only experimental art can offer. Born in 1957 in Droylsden, UK, “a little town some eight miles outside of Manchester,”3 Noon’s artistic career has also encompassed painting, music, and playwriting. His first play, Woundings (1986),4 won the Mobil Prize. Upon the success of Woundings, Noon “decided to give up painting and music, and to concentrate purely on playwriting, working mainly on [Manchester’s] local fringe theatre scene.”5 After taking a job at Waterstone’s bookshop in Manchester to support himself, Noon was urged by Steve Powell, an ex-colleague who had recently set up an independent publishing company,6 to write a novel. After the unexpected international success of Vurt, Noon published three more novels loosely connected to it: Pollen (1995), Automated Alice (1997), and Nymphomation (1997). Following these sequels, his work took an even more avant-garde turn: Needle in the Groove (1999), a work of experimental writing in the style of a novel-length pop song (accompanied by a recording collaboration with David Toop); Pixel Juice (2000) and Cobralingus (2001), two collections of remix short stories; and 217 Babel Street (2008), an online hypertext writing game in collaboration with Susanna Jones, Alison MacLeod, and William Shaw. A further collaboration resulted in Noon’s 2010 story “Artwork 2058: Probability Cloud,” published “at the request,” he writes, “of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, to accompany her exhibition in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.”7 Nine years after the 3  Jeff Noon, “Biography: Jeff’s Version,” Spike Magazine, February 14, 2008. Accessible through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. https://web.archive.org/ web/20101127022928/http://www.jeffnoon.com/biography.php. 4  Noon’s interest in theatre remains active; four short stories were dramatized to form the play Alphabox, which appeared on a BBC Radio 4 program titled “1000 Years of Spoken English”; Vurt was adapted for the stage in 2000; The Modernists appeared in 2001; and the radio play Dead Code-Ghosts of the Digital Age aired on BBC Radio 3 in 2005. Woundings was also adapted for the screen by Roberta Hanley in 1998. It was released in the US under the title Brand New World. 5  Jeff Noon, “Press Biography,” Spike Magazine, February 14, 2008, accessible through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20090924195702/ http://www.jeffnoon.com/pressbiography.php. 6  Ringpull Press. 7  Jeff Noon, “Unilever Series: Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. TH.2058.” Tate Modern, accessible through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. https://web.archive.org/ web/20110801193929/http://blog.tate.org.uk/unilever2008/.

1 INTRODUCTION 

5

publication of Vurt, Noon would publish Falling out of Cars (2002), a novel that replaces the frenetic punk and techno energy of the earlier work with a hypnotic and disorienting balancing act between delicateness and unease. A year later, Noon wrote the play The Modernists (2003). After The Modernists, Noon did not publish another work of long fiction for nearly a decade. In 2012, he published the free novella Channel Sk1n. In 2016, Noon’s ongoing collaboration with Steve Beard blossomed into the wonderful collaborative collection Mappalujo. Noon is now publishing more regularly with his labyrinthine, hypnogogic Nyquist mysteries sff detective series: A Man of Shadows (2017), The Body Library (2018), Creeping Jenny (2020), and Within Without (2021). Noon has also written two works of non-sff, the detective novels Slow Motion Ghosts (2019) and House With No Doors (2020), that, while not sff, sustain the enchanted, occult quality of Noon’s writing by blending mourning, yearning, and hallucinatory searching with gritty, violent realism. Yet, Vurt expressed and still expresses a mysterious quality that continues to entrance and enchant readers, authors, and academics. There is a special paradigmatic quality to Vurt that calls for its canonization as a masterwork of sff literature. But, canonization in the twenty-first century is a difficult and contested practice. For nearly two millennia, the practice and maintenance of canonization in the West was an explicitly top-down process. “It might be claimed,” Arthur B. Evans notes, “that any notion of ‘authority’ automatically implies both an established hierarchy and the ownership of a certain power due to one’s standing within that hierarchy,”8 and, as it turns out, those already holding prestige, titles, or some other special station, as authorities, determined what constitutes an authoritative text. Such processes are never neutral. Instead, the canon reflects the values already shared by authorities; on occasion, a work challenges and reshapes what authorities consider representative and worthy of imitation. With the rise of democracy throughout Europe and North America in the late eighteenth century, the emergence of democratic humanism brought a ­challenge to aristocracy and, as a result, shifts in what pieces are considered representative works of literature.

8  Arthur B. Evans, “Authors, Canons, and Scholarship: The Role of Academic Journals,” Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization, and the Academy, ed. Gary Westfahl and George Slusser (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002), 95.

6 

A. C. WENAUS

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries, again, offered new challenges to the canon. While once the dominion of aristocrats and theocrats, later that of academics (almost exclusively white men) and an emerging democratic middle class, today the canon’s maintenance, reshaping, and redefinition is more multivocal and inclusive. Rather than an explicitly hierarchical practice, emerging approaches to canons (rather than the canon) are, instead, more heterarchical. Today, cultural debates around what makes an authoritative text self-consciously consider questions of power, ideology, race, gender, ability, class, and technology. Postmodernism, queer theory, popular culture studies, media studies, artificial intelligence research, to list a few areas of discipline, reconsider what is included in canonization processes and what has been excluded from being considered an authoritative and representative work of literature. The Palgrave SFF: A New Canon series is part of that process of looking at works of a genre and mode of writing (science fiction and fantasy) that has a history of marginalization amongst authors and academics. While authors like Mary Shelley, H.G.  Wells, George Orwell, Ursula K.  LeGuin, J.G.  Ballard, and William Gibson, for example, often make appearances in non-sff canons, sff has always challenged the very idea of a stable, lasting body of authoritative texts. Indeed, “science fiction has been one major bone of contention in academic arguments over the canon,” writes Gary Westfahl, and “has carried on its own internal arguments regarding the canon of science fiction, and has faced the special challenge of forces beyond academia which create and champion their own canons.”9 Criteria for literary canonization vary, but one principle seems to stick to the foreground: originality, novelty, or the sense that a work changes the way we think about literature. Or, in short, for a work to be authoritative, it must express authenticity. In his ambitious and contentious book The Western Canon (1994), Harold Bloom writes that “one mark of an originality that can win canonical status for a literary work is a strangeness that we either never altogether assimilate, or that becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.”10 This emphasis on originality 9   Gary Westfahl, “Introduction: Masters of the Literary Universe,” Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization, and the Academy, ed. Gary Westfahl and George Slusser (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002), 2. 10  Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), 4.

1 INTRODUCTION 

7

and authenticity is intensified when considering works like Vurt since, at its core “science fiction,” as Tom Shippey notes, “depends on a shocking or threatening novelty.”11 When Vurt appeared in 1993, it was a shocking and threatening novelty par excellence; decades later, however, its singularity still offers an idiosyncratic shock to the system. Twenty years after the publication of the novel, William Gibson, author of Neuromancer (1984), the classic of cyberpunk literature, writes that “Vurt was an SF novel that was really fresh and peculiar at the time when we were constantly being told that lots of SF novels were really fresh and peculiar, but they often weren’t, particularly.”12 Gibson’s remark that Vurt was an original contribution at a time when originality itself was increasingly commodified—and, ironically, standardized and predictable—is noteworthy; the remark also raises certain questions about strangeness and its role in canonization. If authenticity and originality can be commodified, stale, and repetitive, singularity cannot be easily commodified because it is outstanding; singularity is one of a kind. “Authenticity,” writes Byung-­ Chul Han, “presupposes comparability”13 and is authentic in that it differs from other works. Singularity, Han argues, is unique not only because it differs from other works but because it differs even from the differences that distinguish works designated by authenticity. In other words, singularity is incomparable. Vurt, as acclaimed sf author Lauren Beukes remarks, “was a viral a-bomb that changed what storytelling could be in the way it played with form and content.”14 That is, Noon’s work strikes us as so singular because it openly and explicitly challenges the paradoxes, challenges, even the very possibility of stable authenticity, both authorial and academic. Vurt is different from other novels; instead, even its qualities of difference are different from other otherwise unique works. It is one of a kind.

11   Tom Shippey, “Literary Gatekeepers and the Fabril Tradition,” Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization, and the Academy, ed. Gary Westfahl and George Slusser (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002), 8. 12  Lauren Beukes, “An Introduction in Three Parts to Vurt,” in Vurt, Jeff Noon (London: Tor, 2013), xiv. 13  Byung-Chul Han, The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today, translated by Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 20. 14  Beukes, “Introduction to Vurt,” xi.

8 

A. C. WENAUS

Critical Response: The Authors and the Academics Who exactly judges a work’s unique singularity (i.e. who writes the canon) today is generally the project of two sometimes overlapping camps: sff authors and sff academics. Westfahl addresses both. Let’s start with the authors. “Since the words ‘author’ and ‘authority’ derive from the same Latin root (augere, to make grow),” he writes, “it is only natural for some authors and unsophisticated readers to regard authors as the major forces controlling literature.”15 Because “authors are the ones who create and shape their traditions and their works … they should be regarded as the definitive arbiters of meaning and the value of their works.”16 So, let’s take a moment to consider other sff authors’ evaluations of Vurt and its lasting legacy. The Twentieth Anniversary edition of Vurt includes an introduction by Beukes. Rather than simply providing a toast to Noon’s novel, Beukes writes “An Introduction in Three Parts.” This is significant because Beukes recognizes the canonical potential of Noon’s novel in terms of its influence on her own writing, on the writing of other major sf figures, and on readers. The first part of the introduction, “Part One: Stories are Dangerous,” is what we might expect from a major sf author giving homage to another master of the tradition. Noting that twenty years ago, Vurt “hit like a drug or a song that means something … it sent out shockwaves.”17 It was a novel “full of intensely vivid visuals”18 that “pushes language” and steals “techniques from comic books and films and dub reggae, dropping in samples and scratches, freeze-frames and jump-cuts,” and a work that “interrogates who we are, what love does to us and how music moves us—plunging through the looking-glass of our subconscious.”19 We are inclined to trust an author as skilled as Beukes when she says that Vurt made a powerful impression on her when she first read it and that this “influence lingers in the source code of everything” she writes;20 of course, one writer’s admiration for a work does not make it canonical, or, as Beukes puts it “there’s no Geiger counter for cultural resonance.”21  Westfahl, “Introduction,” 1.  Westfahl, “Introduction,” 1. 17  Beukes, “Introduction to Vurt,” xi. 18  Beukes, “Introduction to Vurt,” xi. 19  Beukes, “Introduction to Vurt,” xii. 20  Beukes, “Introduction to Vurt,” xiv. 21  Beukes, “Introduction to Vurt,” xiv. 15 16

1 INTRODUCTION 

9

As a result, in “Part Two: Blooming Frequencies,” Beukes turns to the authority of other major sff authors for their evaluations, twenty years later, of Vurt. “Like [Gibson’s] Neuromancer,” writes Sandman Slim (2009–) author Richard Kadrey, “Vurt felt utterly of its time and a little ahead of it, like early mash-up singles. Vurt was doing Planet Rock as a cpunk-Lewis Carroll-Bataille remix” and is cherished for its alien singularity “as an object, like a Rauschenberg sculpture or a scrap of malfunctioning ET tech.”22 Comics writer, novelist, and scriptwriter Paul Cornell writes of the unique effects Vurt had on Mancunians: “[I]t chimed with the Madchester ecstasy culture I was part of then. All revelations amongst northern buildings. It was, much more than Neuromancer, the SF version of my life.”23 Steven Hall, the author of The Raw Shark Texts (2007), also attests to the unique power Vurt had for those living in and around Manchester: “as a teenager living in a small town on the outskirts of Manchester, Vurt came as a revelation.”24 Its influence on Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts is evident: “it’s no coincidence,” writes Hall, “that when Eric and Scout break into a bookshop to access the world of unspace, they do not only go to Manchester, but to Waterstones Deansgate—the place where Jeff Noon worked when he was writing Vurt.”25 Indeed, Hall hopes “it continues to inspire and infect young minds for generations to come.”26 Chuck Wendig, author of Blackbirds (2012), writes that “most of the books I’ve read come and go … and I don’t particularly remember how they got to me. Vurt? Vurt, I remember.” Wendig’s friends placed a book in his hands and, with wide eyes, asked “Have you read this?” … almost at a whisper, as if someone would hear. They refused to describe it. They talked about it and Pollen in a way that was like someone trying to tell you why you should try this food, or do this drug, or join this cult. It was an experiential thing. … Finally, I picked it up one night. Read it in a single sitting. And it did to me as it did to them. It was subversive, transgressive. It got under your skin. … But you don’t need to know more. You just need to look at my wide eyes as I hand you the book. You just need to take the book.27  Beukes, “Introduction to Vurt,” xiv.  Beukes, “Introduction to Vurt,” xiv. 24  Beukes, “Introduction to Vurt,” xv. 25  Beukes, “Introduction to Vurt,” xv. 26  Beukes, “Introduction to Vurt,” xv. 27  Beukes, “Introduction to Vurt,” xiii–xiv. 22 23

10 

A. C. WENAUS

Graphic novelist and videogame writer Anthony Johnston writes that, after finishing reading Vurt, his “entire outlook on SF, in fact on all fiction, had changed” and that he had “never read anything even remotely like it, and every novel [he] subsequently read would be judged against it. Most of them came up wanting,” concluding that “Jeff Noon is Britain’s greatest living SF author.”28 While each of the preceding authors speak twenty years after Vurt’s publication, to its inclusion as a canonical work of sf, Johnston is rather explicit: “It’s high time this book gets the attention and celebration, it deserves.”29 Warren Ellis, comics writer and author of Transmetropolitan (1997–2002) and Gun Machine (2013), is more explicit about Vurt’s place in the history of sf in the latter half of the twentieth century: [T]here’s a way of looking at science fiction that matters most, and it goes a bit like this: In the Fifties, there was Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. … In the Sixties, there was Mike Moorcock’s The Final Programme. … In the Seventies, there was Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man. … In the Eighties, there was William Gibson’s Neuromancer. … And in the Nineties, in the post-rave hangover, there was Jeff Noon’s Vurt. That’s the line. Science Fiction that is also fiction about the present it was written in … and utterly immersed in and driven by its cultural moment. But not trapped by it or dated by it. Because these books, the best books, discover the essential human notes of their times, and they ring so strongly down the decades that we remember them still.30

For Ellis, the case is already made. Vurt is not only already part of the sf canon, for a certain segment of writers, but it is also representative as a, if not the, peak of a decade of sf writing. We may even consider “Part Three: The B-Side Remix” of Beukes’s introduction as an aestheticized call for canonization: she remixes the reviews into a new, poetic text according to Noon’s metamorphiction technique. That Beukes pays homage to Vurt through imitation is itself a confirmation that, according to—and by means of—these authors, the novel is already canonized. Not only does Beukes discuss Vurt from her own experience, but she reaches out to a community of authors to solicit their evaluation, and, finally, demonstrates the “inescapable influences”31 that Vurt has had on a storytelling tradition.  Beukes, “Introduction to Vurt,” xv.  Beukes, “Introduction to Vurt,” xv. 30  Beukes, “Introduction to Vurt,” xvi. 31  Bloom, The Western Canon, 548. 28 29

1 INTRODUCTION 

11

The academic and critical work on Vurt and Noon’s oeuvre, however, is a bit sparser. We may assume that the authors have spoken and the deal is done, “yet members of the academy see matters differently,” 32 writes Westfahl. “From their perspective, it is trained critics, not authors, who are best qualified to delineate literary traditions and to read, evaluate, and interpret literary texts.”33 Some noteworthy examples of scholars who turned their attention to Vurt include Ann Weinstone’s “Welcome to the Pharmacy: Addiction, Transcendence, and Virtual Reality” (1997), and Val Gough’s “A Crossbreed Loneliness? Jeff Noon’s Feminist Cyberpunk,” (2000) where Gough considers the “feminist cyberpunk sensibility” in the Vurt tetralogy. A bio-critical essay on Noon by David Ian Paddy appears in 2003, and Andrew M. Butler’s “Journeys Beyond Being: The Cyberpunk-Flavored Novels of Jeff Noon” was published in 2008. Tony Keen’s “Feathers into an Underworld” is also examines Noon’s early work. Nickianne Moody’s article “Social and Temporal Geographies of the Near Future” (1998) considers Vurt at the intersection of British cyberpunk and the Chemical Generation. Janez Steble, in “The Role of Science Fiction within the Fluidity of Slipstream Literature” (2015), considers Vurt exemplary of slipstream literature. Vurt is briefly examined as a critical inversion of the “portal-quest fantasy” narrative in Farah Mendlesohn’s excellent Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008). Noon’s third novel, Automated Alice, captured the attention of Carroll scholars—of which Will Brooker’s Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture (2004) and Jennifer Kelso Farrell’s dissertation Synaptic Boojums: Lewis Carroll, Linguistic Nonsense, and Cyberpunk (2007) are notable examples. Vurt is also engagingly examined in Joanne Benford’s Through the Screen Wildly (2008). My own 2011 article “You are Cordially Invited to a/ CHEMICALWEDDING’: Metamorphiction and Experimentation in Jeff Noon’s Cobralingus” is included at the Electronic Book Review, while my 2012 article, “‘Spells Out The Word of Itself, and Then Dispelling Itself’: The Chaotics of Memory and The Ghost of the Novel in Jeff Noon’s Falling out of Cars” appeared in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23.2. There are two full-length articles that exclusively examine Vurt. My “Fractal Narrative, Paraspace, and Strange Loops: The Paradox of Escape in Jeff Noon’s Vurt,” appearing in Science Fiction Studies in 2011, considers the problem of sff escapism, trauma, self-referential traps, and chaos theory, while Sujata Iyengar’s “The Post-Shakespearean Body Politic in  Westfahl, “Introduction,” 1–2.  Westfahl, 1–2.

32 33

12 

A. C. WENAUS

Jeff Noon’s Vurt,” was published in Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare (2015) and argues that Vurt challenges Shakespeare’s Othello, a “tragedy of exogamy or racial crossing,” by instead favouring “cross-­ cultural myth-making over Englishness and hybrid adaptation … over generic or genetic purity.”34 Both Iyengar and I stress the intermixing fluidity and porous boundaries in Vurt again stressing the novel’s challenge not only to the parameters of sff literature, but to the certainty of a stable literary canon. This speaks to a hesitancy absent in works like Bloom’s The Western Canon. That is, everything, even the literary canon, is subject to fluid motion. In the ebbs and flows of cultural negotiation, unexpected jetties of literary inspiration appear, and amidst the debates by creators and curators, such unexpected and singular works both offer homage to the great works of the past and a path to an unthought future. Vurt is this kind of singular work as it confronts us in both content and form to move beyond nostalgia and mourning for the past and to, instead, embrace the unpredictability of what Noon calls “liquid culture” where possibility proliferates.

Literary and Cultural Context The literary and cultural context out of which Vurt arrives is complex. Though Noon’s fiction is marked by virtuosic wordplay reminiscent of Anthony Burgess’s Nadsat from A Clockwork Orange (1962), Borgesian themes,35 Carrollian whimsy,36 and Burroughsian intrepidness, Vurt was originally read as a contribution to cyberpunk. For nearly a decade after 34  Sujata Iyengar, “The Post-Shakespearean Body Politic in Jeff Noon’s Vurt,” Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare, 33 (2015). 35  Noon writes that Borges’s Collected Fictions (1999) is “[t]he mother lode. Better than food. There’s a rumour going round that only his first dozen or so stories are the jewels. I thought this myself, until this giant cartography came out. All through his career, Borges was capable of mining a deep seam. Dark sparkles of narrative, magic charms. I see it as a vast storehouse of ideas, the best ideas ever. I mean that. Ain’t nobody coming near.” Jeff Noon, “Jeff Noon’s Top 10 Fluid Fiction Books,” The Guardian, January 17, 2001, https://www. theguardian.com/culture/2001/jan/17/bestbooks.fiction. 36  Noon includes The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carroll, ed. Martin Gardner, in his “Top 10 Fluid Fiction Books,” second only to Jorge Luis Borges’s Collected Fictions. Noon explains, “[t]wo nightmare destinations. Wonderland and Looking Glass. The more I read these books, the darker they shine. Gardner picks at the invocation, without breaking the spell. [There’s] stuff in here you don’t even know about, nobody does. Carroll operates on language like a cruel, crazy surgeon. Beyond the wordplay, check out Alice’s own explanation

1 INTRODUCTION 

13

Neuromancer’s appearance, cyberpunk had dominated the attention of many sf writers and academics. Here, cyberpunk’s twitchy standoffishness became the ecstatic embrace of the other. So, Andrew Butler is correct to write of Vurt as “cyberpunk-flavored.”37 Butler also notes that in Vurt, “there is less of a sense that [Noon] is writing consciously within a cyberpunk tradition”38—perhaps because of an almost complete disregard of “cyber” in the novel. Tony Keen agrees, claiming that the novel’s cyberpunk elements serve primarily as “surface gloss.”39 However, it is clear that—although Vurt tenuously belongs to the tradition of cyberpunk narrative and the labyrinthine portal quest—it is stylistically and aesthetically not at all a formula piece. Part of the difficulty of categorizing Vurt may be the novel’s sharing of strategies and techniques associated with both cyberpunk and cutting-­ edge postmodern fiction, a condition Brian McHale identifies as “a consequence of [an] ever-tightening feedback loop between SF ‘genre’ fiction and state-of-the-art mainstream fiction that the poetics of mainstream postmodernism and the poetics of the latest wave of SF have come to overlap to such an unprecedented degree.”40 McHale’s analysis accounts for the anxieties over the legitimation of postmodern science fiction by literary institutions and the complex loops of influence and systemic relations between contemporary sf and postmodernist mainstream fiction. Cyberpunk literature can “be seen, in this systemic perspective, as SF, which derives certain of its elements from postmodernist mainstream fiction which itself has, in its turn, already been ‘science-fictionalised’ to some greater or lesser degree.”41 These dizzying loops of self-reference are mirrored in the content and form of Noon’s work and are something we will return to time and again in this book.

of the Jabberwocky poem: ‘Somebody killed something.’ Scary stuff.” Noon, “Top 10 Fluid Fiction Books.” 37  Andrew M. Butler, “Journeys Beyond Being: The Cyberpunk-Flavored Novels of Jeff Noon,” Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Graham J.  Murphy and Sherryl Vint (New York: Routledge, 2010), 66. 38  Butler, “Journeys Beyond Being,” 66. 39  Tony Keen, “Feathers into an Underworld,” The Arthur C. Clarke Award: A Critical Anthology, ed. Paul Kincaid with Andrew M. Butler (Daventry, UK: Serendip Foundation, 2006), 101. 40  Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992), 235. 41  McHale, Constructing Postmodernism, 229.

14 

A. C. WENAUS

However, the frenetic amphetamine-fuelled energy of punk gave way to another DIY mode of popular expression: techno and remix. The affectless revolt and anger of punk were being replaced by the bliss of MDMA (3,4-Methyl enedioxy methamphetamine), Ecstasy, E, X, or Molly and the Manchester rave scene.42 The music of raves is electronic: techno, IDM (intelligent dance music), Jungle, Drum & Bass, to name a few subgenres. The process and philosophy of these types of electronic music—particularly the remix process—play a central role in Noon’s approach to writing. Most notable, however, is his ability to take a central abstraction and, via remix, achieve “something akin to a private vocabulary … a chamber of echoes where everyday words embrace new layers of meaning and association.”43 As a result, Noon rejects much of the apparent nihilism often associated with literature depicting the postmodern condition. Rather than the end of history or the endless, nostalgic pastiches of the past, Noon’s fiction demands a readership “adept at riding the multiple layers of information” of a “fluid society”44 and sees the Modernism in postmodernity: the intrepid spirit of forging new, singular works of art. “I see art as an experimentation with subject-matter,”45 he writes. Speaking of the experimental technique of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, who “treated the history of jazz as a subject matter, and took bits, and produced a collage out of it,” Noon said, “I think … what Vurt was trying to do was to excite people with the subject matter, rather than the weirdness of the language. Any games that I have with the language is all to do with promoting the subject matter.”46 Or, in other words, Noon’s experimentalism treats the history of literature as his subject matter, available to be reconfigured, remixed, and metamorphosed to guarantee for narrative fiction a hopeful future. Ultimately, these remixes, Beukes notes, can be revelatory: “they can cut to the nerves of a text,”47 and can discover that something that only literature can offer our lives and the lives to come.  Sadie Plant, Writing on Drugs (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), 165.  Ismo Santala, “Transmission > Reception: The Modern Word interviews Jeff Noon,” The Modern World: The Scriptorium, October 8, 2003, http://www.themodernword.com/ SCRIPTorium/noon_interview.html. 44  Jeff Noon, “Film-makers use jump cuts, freeze frames, slow motion. Musicians remix, scratch, sample. Can’t we writers have some fun as well?” The Guardian, January 10, 2001, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jan/10/fiction.film. 45  Nile Southern and Mark Amerika, “As Per Vurt: Interview with Jeff Noon,” ALTX Online Network, February 23, 1995, http://www.altx.com/int2/jeff.noon.html. 46  Southern and Amerika, “As Per Vurt.” 47  Beukes, “Introduction to Vurt,” xvii. 42 43

1 INTRODUCTION 

15

Remix literature can think that which philosophy, politics, religion, and science on their own cannot. That is, Vurt sets in motion the notion that remix literature can offer something singular and incomparable. This is not to say that remix literature can simply feed off itself. Instead, remix fiction looks both at and beyond the literary arts. It seeks inspiration from philosophy, politics, religion, and especially science. For Noon, the “new sciences” legitimate his admiration of the experimental spirit. He celebrates the scientific conclusions that the universe is strange and mysterious. The new sciences refer to quantum theory (which asserts that we are not yet ready to make any stable claims about the nature of reality), chaos theory (that demonstrates that in disorder are hidden flows of order, or orderly disorder), and information theory (stressing that information and meaning are fundamentally different and, oddly enough, the more errors that are introduced to a signal of information, the more fecund it is in possibilities). By bringing non-imaginary concepts and texts into the remix, Noon makes unusual juxtapositions, confronts habitual patterns of thinking, and approaches the horizon of new literature. At the same time, Noon reminds us that, just as literature expresses that which does not necessarily corroborate with reality, the sciences too are ultimately models of reality. Like philosophy, theology, and politics, both literature and science seek to give meaning to a reality that can be indifferent, hostile, and unfair. By mixing these unusual disciplines and their accompanying modes together, Noon examines our pleas with the universe for comfort, simplicity, and solace: what we all want, are neither updates and upgrades nor mournful nostalgia, but “something more. A squaring of the tides.”48 To wrap up our introduction, let’s briefly consider what Vurt and its particular, peculiar, and singular quality offers to thought. To say that Vurt “thinks” may sound strange, yet this is a serious question and one close to Noon’s entire project: what can sff literature offer to thought that is unique and incomparable to any other practice or discipline? Vurt is only cyberpunk-flavoured because it does not approach cybernetic regulatory systems with punk energy of revolt towards technological merger and transcendence. Instead, I suggest that Vurt is a work of avant-pulp: Noon’s term for a mode of storytelling that connects to everything, blends experimental art with pulp fiction, and seeks to transform both literature and lived experience. Cybernetics regulate our thought and minds, making us addicted to technology, escape, commerce, narcissistically obsessed with  Noon, Vurt, 201.

48

16 

A. C. WENAUS

ourselves, and unable to understand the other. Avant-pulp deregulates the mind through non-habitual storytelling that is at once avant-garde and engagingly fun. “Literature … opens up the realms of the particular … to the field of knowledge,” writes philosopher and mathematician Alain Badiou, and “literature’s effects take place at the level of thought.”49 As a result, Noon suggests that storytelling is the sight of new modes of knowing. Vurt suggests that such storytelling must be met with both resignation and resistance to the trappings of trauma of a world that seems stuck. At the novel’s conclusion, after Scribble’s traumatic and ambivalent quest comes to an end, he is asked by the coked-out, stressed, endlessly working Sniffer General (the bureaucrat of the 1990s, today the ubiquitous, precarious worker), not about his heroic deeds or transcendence, but “Sir … are you crying …?”50 Resigned that, no matter how hard Scribble tries, he cannot square the tides nor can he remix the night. Instead, he must now ensure that the dreamer never stops dreaming. The knowledge he receives from his quest is not what he wants or expects; rather, the quest must remain open, fleeting, and unpredictable. Instead, Vurt suggests that literature will think the unthought: it will strike us, shock us, and challenge us. We hesitate to accept the singular, incomparable work of literature, but endless literary experimentation itself may be the key to the portal out of obsessive, repetitive traumas, both personal and public. Ultimately, nearly three decades after the publication of Vurt, its hybrid imagination and brutal honesty strike us as maybe even more urgent today than in 1993; the novel asks us to acknowledge the inheritance of the past, but also to tirelessly seek ways forward with intrepid, singular approaches to narrative. So, grab a feather and let the “advurts roll”;51 and, if we ever find ourselves trying to remix the night, asking “why are we doing this? … we should be going higher, searching,”52 it is Noon who reminds us that it is singular, daring, experimental storytelling that endlessly seeks that something even if what we discover confronts us to let go of tradition and embrace the future.

49  Alain Badiou, “What does Literature Think?” The Age of the Poets and Other Writings on Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose, ed. and trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2014), 133. 50  Noon, Vurt, 315. 51  Noon, Vurt, 29. 52  Noon, Vurt, 29.

1 INTRODUCTION 

17

The Chapters Ultimately, the aim of this short book is to make a case for Vurt’s remarkable singularity, its status as a notable achievement of style and imagination, and its call for artistic experimentation. While Noon remains one of the most original voices in sff, the potent, imaginative energy of Vurt remains unsurpassed. My goal here is twofold: first, I examine the ways that Noon’s project engages literary and sff history as a means of urging innovation through mutational reiteration and, second, I consider the ongoing significance and emancipatory power of poetry and the imagination when confronted with a constitutive social and political environment characterized by algorithmic control, social isolation, precarity, and impotence. My aim is to engage readers to think, critique, and examine the text in such a way that invites consideration of what it is that both challenges and delights us about the struggles of innovation, welcoming disquiet, and seeking alternatives. I also hope that the critical concepts and close readings will be of practical use by readers as transferable demonstrations of literary criticism. In Chap. 2, I make a case for Vurt as a work of avant-pulp rather than cyberpunk. Curiously absent from Vurt are the characteristic multinational mega-corporations, urban sprawls, and cybernetic implants. Instead, Vurt seeks the new by merging the avant-garde and pulp fiction. Instead of jacking into cyberspace, Vurt jacks into the wetware of the imagination to help answer the question: can we transform and transcend our tendency to repeat the same story, and can the imagination’s unbound potentialities seek to liberate our dreams, imagination, and lived experience beyond the page? Vurt’s answer is a careful “yes”: literature, and the avant-pulp, can think alternatives and set the stage for an open future. Chapter 3 examines the novel’s setting: Manchester and the “Madchester” rave scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Prompting us to recognize the fundamental difference between a place and the cognitive experience of that place, Noon asks us to reconsider confrontation and transformation, rather than escape, as the path to imagining the future. To do this, Manchester is treated both as an actual place and as a literary place. Noon investigates the “psychogeographical” effects on Mancunians’s emotions and behaviours that this tense interplay—between actual place and narrated place—elicits. Unveiling that the way we imagine a city is predicated on telling and retelling stories, Noon insists that we must learn to re-imagine, narrate, and exist in ways subject to endless mutations, marvels, and alternatives.

18 

A. C. WENAUS

In Chap. 4, I examine the cyberpunk trope of “jacking in” to cyberspace as an updated version of katabasis and anabasis: the mythical rite of passage depicting a descent into and out of the underworld. Vurt offers a retelling of the story of Orpheus and his lover Eurydice. Just as Orpheus, with his lyre, is able to persuade Hades and Cerberus to let him bring Eurydice back to Earth with him (a plan destined for tragedy), Scribble is fated to “remix” events endlessly and hopelessly with attempts to rewrite and “remix the night” in such a way that he can once again be with Desdemona. What he learns, however, is that art is not about capturing and making eternal the desired object but about seeking to express that which tirelessly mutates, collaborates, and transforms amid the chaos of experience. Of course, finding oneself condemned to endless repetitions of the same story can induce a sense of disquieting claustrophobia. Chapter 5 considers the relationship between escapism, melancholia, and the ways sff can, as Noon suggests, “fac[e] up to the realities of what it is [they’re] trying to escape from.” Noon achieves this on the level of form, content, and narrative structure. Rather than writing Vurt according to the conventional “shape” of a narrative arc (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement), Noon turns to a very different kind of narrative “shape”: the mathematical structure of a fractal associated with chaos theory: a paradoxical structure that infinitely repeats itself. Noon utilizes chaos theory and fractal geometry to examine the characters’ intense desires to escape and the ultimate futility of doing so. Vurt’s fractal narrative prevents Noon’s characters from escaping their problems and, instead, has them confront their traumas. From this confrontation comes transformation. The concluding chapter looks specifically at how difficult this can be as Scribble confronts his abusive father in the Vurt. Repetition is central to the content, form, and compositional method of the novel, and Noon interrogates whether it is possible to imagine alternatives when there appears to be no way out. To do so we will consider Douglas Hofstadter’s concept of the “strange loop”: a self-­ reflexive loop that, no matter how far you move up or down in its structure, you, paradoxically, always end up back where you started. While this is a metaphor for trauma, it also expresses a particularly current cultural concern about the individual’s autonomy over their own neuroplasticity. Franco “Bifo” Berardi refers to this process as “neuro-totalitarianism”: an invisible infiltration of the mind and soul by external logics where even our dreams, desires, anxieties, and imaginations are being mobilized towards

1 INTRODUCTION 

19

either neuro-subjection or neuro-emancipation. I suggest that Vurt confronts the totalizing effects of neuro-totalitarianism with the concept-­ creating forces of poetry, chaos, and experimental genre fiction. Vurt is a dark and heartbreaking book; yet, it is also an ambitious and heartfelt rallying call for the potential and positive power of creative, poetic energy. Ultimately, we will see that, once again, Vurt is concerned with the repetitive processes of trauma and loss, on the one hand, and with the future of imaginative fiction, on the other. Whether it is trauma or art that is holding us back, Noon suggests that we must move on, harness our private and social neuro-emancipation, and imagine alternate futures.

CHAPTER 2

Black Market Dreams: From Cyberpunk to the Avant-Pulp

Abstract  This chapter considers the way Vurt complicates the question of genre. While often categorized as a work of cyberpunk fiction, Vurt does not engage with many of the genre’s central tropes: it is a novel without multinational mega-corporations, urban sprawls, or cybernetic implants. Rather than cyberpunk, Noon characterizes his work as avant-pulp: the merger of avant-garde and pulp fiction. Rather than a flattening of high and low culture, the avant-pulp attempts to sustain contradictions in order to work through them. Ultimately, in the spirit of popular culture, Noon wishes to entertain; simultaneously, Vurt inaugurated Noon’s ongoing project of creating art that changes how we think and experience the world. Keywords  Genre • Avant-pulp • Avant-garde • Pulp fiction • Cyberpunk • Postmodernism • Vurt • Jeff Noon • Virtual • Virtual reality • Cyberspace • Cybernetics • Science fiction A singular text complicates the question of genre. Genre is a form of categorization; if a work ticks off enough boxes to qualify as this or that category, critics, booksellers, readers, and authors can then safely say “this book is sf,” or “this book is romance,” and so on. On the one hand, genre

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. C. Wenaus, Jeff Noon’s Vurt, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07029-7_2

21

22 

A. C. WENAUS

identification is as practical as convenient; on the other, it is as prescriptive as confining. Acknowledging these limitations, Noon subjects genre to relentless fluidity. Rather than do away with genre altogether, he tosses every writing game, genre, media, technique, and formal experiment available into the primordial soup of the imagination and concocts new, hybrid, ever-mutating entities in place of categorization. Central to Noon’s compositional method is the snipping, pasting, mutating, dismantling, and reconstructing from the whole of literature. He seeks a kind of literature that “has more edges and borderlines than all other genres put together.”1 If our stories are our dreams made into objects, literature for Noon is like entering, creating, and exchanging in a black market of dreams, free from institutionalized control, from which he can borrow, dismantle, sample, and rebuild anew. As a result, with Vurt, the very concept of genre disintegrates only to take a tenuous shape and, again, disperse then crystalize ad infinitum. Janez Steble writes that Vurt “is in many aspects a science fiction novel”;2 yet, the novel could also be categorized as slipstream, avant-pop, transrealism, irrealism, interstitial fiction, or surrealism. Nevertheless, Steble continues, Vurt “tends to quickly slip into inexplicable territories.”3 This chapter considers Noon’s generic designation for his work that he calls the “avant-pulp.” “I’ve always gone for either the avant-garde or really populist stuff,” he remarks, “and I’ve always tried to fuse those two. I try to explain [the avant-pulp] as being as if James Joyce had written The Big Sleep.”4 The avant-pulp is a category that signals the possibility of infinite categories through the blending and mingling of otherwise incongruous elements. So, rather than thinking about genre, we will look at how Vurt puts genre into question. First and foremost, Vurt is frequently, although misleadingly, described as a cyberpunk novel. Andrew Butler describes Vurt as “cyberpunk-­ flavoured” in the way that “some food tastes, looks and feels like

1  Jeff Noon, “Avant-Pulpism,” Jeff Noon, June 23, 2012, http://jeffnoon.weebly.com/ avant-pulpism.html. 2  Janez Steble “The Role of Science Fiction within the Fluidity of Slipstream Literature,” Acta Neophilologica, 48, no. 1–2 (2015): 82. 3  Steble, “Slipstream Literature.” 4  Sam Leith, “Jeff Noon: A Life in Writing,” The Guardian, April 20, 2013, https://www. theguardian.com/culture/2013/apr/20/jeff-noon-life-in-writing.

2  BLACK MARKET DREAMS: FROM CYBERPUNK TO THE AVANT-PULP 

23

chocolate, but it is not in fact chocolate.”5 Tony Keen, too, claims that the cyberpunk elements of the novel function primarily as “surface gloss.”6 While a discussion of cyberpunk is important when considering Vurt, it is primarily so as a means of distinguishing Noon’s novel from the genre. “Cyberpunk” enters the English language with Bruce Bethke’s 1983 short story “Cyberpunk.” However, with the publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1983), cyberpunk as we characterize it today first appears. Cyberpunk is officiated a few years later with Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986). Edited by sf writer and polemicist Bruce Sterling, Mirrorshades brought together in one volume the central figures of cyberpunk: William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, and Sterling himself. Cyberpunk literature is characterized by its kinetic and intricate plots, ubiquitous media technologies, neuro- and biotechnologies, virtual reality, and megalopolises sprawling across an ecologically distraught Earth. While Sterling, in 1986, proclaimed that “the ‘typical cyberpunk writer’ does not exist,”7 and represents a moment where “the realm of high tech” and “the modern pop underground” merge,8 Shiner laments that “by 1987, cyberpunk had become a cliché” and that “other writers had turned the form into formula”;9 nevertheless, while cyberpunk may have lost some of its novelty, the genre is as pervasive today as it was in the 1980s.10

5  Andrew M.  Butler, “Journeys Beyond Being: The Cyberpunk-Flavored Novels of Jeff Noon,” Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Graham J.  Murphy and Sherryl Vint (New York: Routledge, 2010), 66. 6  Tony Keen, “Feathers into an Underworld,” The Arthur C. Clarke Award: A Critical Anthology, ed. Paul Kincaid with Andrew M. Butler (Daventry, UK: Serendip Foundation, 2006), 101. 7  Bruce Sterling, “Preface,” Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, ed. Bruce Sterling (New York: Ace Books, 1988), ix. 8  Sterling, “Preface,” ix. 9  Lewis Shiner. “Confessions of an Ex-Cyberpunk,” New York Times, January 7, 1991, A17. 10  The recent proliferation of 8-bit synthwave gifs and synthwave electronic music on YouTube and SoundCloud, or the hype and subsequent controversy around CD Projekt Red’s video game Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) attests to cyberpunk’s ongoing plasticity and appeal. For a comprehensive look at the cyberpunk mode, its precursors, and ongoing influence in various media, see Anna McFarlane, Graham J. Murphy, and Lars Schmeink, eds., The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture (New York: Routledge, 2020).

24 

A. C. WENAUS

Vurt and Postmodernism Before considering the distinctions between cyberpunk and Vurt, let’s consider the historical moment in which both make their appearance. Both emerge at a time when self-reference was a central cultural preoccupation: the postmodern era. Postmodernism is a general cultural attitude of suspicion towards grand claims about history, nations, identities, and categorizations of all kinds. Postmodernism is also suspicious of language’s ability to represent reality satisfactorily. It is the era when media admits to itself and its audience that there is no longer a distinction between reality and media representations of reality. It is also famously described by Frederic Jameson as blank parody or “pastiche”: “Pastiche,” he writes, “is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style. … But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter.”11 These pastiches unhesitatingly blend High Art with Pop Art; however, this patchwork fiction does not mean anything beyond its own self-reference. Vurt, however, dramatizes the struggle to confront and escape this ever-tightening feedback, and, rather than transcend the feedback loop, Scribble must move through it by going deeper into it to transform himself. To do so, Scribble and Noon need a deep trust and respect for language’s ability to generate innovative ways of engaging the imagination and the world. Rejecting the apocalypticism sometimes associated with postmodern sf, Noon says: “I’m a real optimist. … I’m one of the last.”12 He claims that his optimism stems from advancements in twentieth-­ century science and their artistic applications: What’s happening in the twentieth century is that scientists have taken over the realms of the imagination. … And you see that again and again with chaos theory, complexity theory, relativity. … The universe became strange and was proven to be strange … as though poetry had entered the universe.13

Science legitimates Noon’s experimental spirit; however, he is not interested in the direct links between science and literature. While we will look 11  Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press), 1991. 12  Jeff Noon, interview by Michael Silverblatt, Bookworm, KCRW, April 1996. http:// www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw960404jeff_noon. 13  Noon, interview by Silverblatt.

2  BLACK MARKET DREAMS: FROM CYBERPUNK TO THE AVANT-PULP 

25

more at Noon’s engagement with the science of unpredictability in Chap. 5, it is worth noting here that quantum mechanics and chaos theory—or chaotics, a term “used to talk about the implications of chaos theory in the broad cultural context”14—conclude that reality itself is strange and mysterious, and, for Noon, this is something to celebrate. Nevertheless, he does not shy away from postmodernism. Vurt is characterized by self-reflexivity and a meditation on the role literature has in constructing reality in what he calls a “fluid society.”15 He remarks that “in this whole kind of pro-postmodern world we’re living in, I think it’s fruitful that people can discover new ways of telling stories. The way we live now, I call it Liquid Culture, and I think to find the prose equivalent of that is great.”16 By swapping the affectless, computer-simulated “cyber” for the liquid, multifaceted “virtual,” Noon allows language itself to become a theatre of self-referentiality in which ceaseless imaginative creativity, rather than affectless pastiche, is put into play. The paradoxical, dreamlike logic of Vurt goes a bit like this: if there is no outside into which one can escape the postmodern labyrinth, but there is a fluid infinite inwardness, then unleash the infinite imagination inwardly.

Distinguishing Between Cyberspace and the Vurt While both cyberpunk and Vurt are postmodern texts—and Vurt is an attempt to move beyond postmodernism—one thing that distinguishes Vurt from cyberpunk is the distinction between “cyber” and the “virtual,” and, consequently, “cyberspace” and “the Vurt.” The “cyber” part of cyberpunk and cyberspace comes from the term “cybernetics.” Cyber’s etymological root is the ancient Greek κυβερνήτης (kubernḗtēs), which in English translates roughly into “steersman.” Coined in 1948 by the mathematician Norbert Weiner, cybernetics is “the entire field of control and communication theory … in the machine or in the animal.”17 Cybernetics 14  Gordon E. Slethaug, Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics in Recent American Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), xii. 15  Jeff Noon, “Film-makers use jump cuts, freeze frames, slow motion. Musicians remix, scratch, sample. Can’t we writers have some fun as well?” The Guardian, January 10, 2001, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/jan/10/fiction.film. 16  Anthony Johnston, “Jeff Noon: Needle in the Groove: Liquid Culture,” Spike Magazine, August 1, 2000, https://spikemagazine.com/0800jeffnoon/. 17  Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965), 11.

26 

A. C. WENAUS

is the field of regulating—that is, steering, directing, or controlling—complex systems. While cybernetics studies, for example, how human body temperature regulates itself, it can also refer to how ­electronic systems and human beings regulate one another: we use machines, but machines also use us. When cybernetic processes are fully integrated with an organism— think of a pacemaker or a sf virtual reality port in the back of one’s neck— we have a “cybernetic organism” or cyborg.18 These concerns are key to cyberpunk. Unlike cybernetics, cyberspace does not come from the sciences but was coined by Gibson in Neuromancer. Gibson describes cyberspace as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts … a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.”19 Cyberspace has no physical existence and can be said to be Cartesian—in reference to the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596–1650)—in two ways. First, Gibson’s cyberspace is mathematically linear, akin to Cartesian geometric planes: “lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind,”20 a neon-lit grid or matrix in an abstract nonspace. Secondly, it is consistent with the famous Cartesian dualism that separates the body from the mind: after jacking into cyberspace, the body sits stationary in the “meatspace” of the physical world, while the mind enters the consensual hallucination. To put it explicitly, “Vurt is not cyberspace,” writes Steble, “and the zigzagging movement between worlds is not of electronic nature.”21 The Vurt, instead, is virtual. Originally a shorthand stands in for the realm, “Vurt” proved odd and catchy enough to stick. Most obviously, Vurt refers to “virtual reality.” “We may label virtual reality,” writes Berardi, any technology capable of directly transmitting impulses from one brain to another, in order to stimulate in the receiver brain a synaptic connection corresponding to a certain representation, to a certain configuration, image, concept, emotion. … If you can provide a reality with virtual reality tools, 18  See Donna Haraway’s Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991) for more, including Haraway’s brilliant essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” 149–182. 19  William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984), 51. 20  Gibson, Neuromancer, 51. 21  Steble, “Slipstream Literature,” 83.

2  BLACK MARKET DREAMS: FROM CYBERPUNK TO THE AVANT-PULP 

27

and if you can share this reality with other persons, you no longer need to describe the world, because you can simply create this contingence, this coincidence; you don’t need to describe an action, you can create it.22

In this sense, we can see that literature is, though loosely, virtual reality. However, Vurt is not simply about “virtual reality.” Virtual can refer to everything from the essential qualities of a thing, the healing properties of a substance, the image that results from a ray of light being reflected or refracted by an object, moral virtue, or that which relates to something essential and more real than physical.23 The Vurt is a place to learn and discover, not to hack. Indeed, Nickianne Moody writes that Noon’s novel is “explored by innocent characters rather than ‘the proper disaffected, cynical—yet idealistic style’ of cyberpunk adventurers.”24 So, as much as the Vurt is a simulated realm, it is also essentially a place to seek virtue (“Mandy came out of the all-night Vurt-U-want”25) and acquire knowledge: Scribble is both entering Vurts and writing his (the) story, seeking lost love, confronting his abusive father, transgressing social norms, and retrieving memories, all in an attempt to attain maturity, consolation, and the nourishment of poetic living. Ultimately, Noon does not distrust the power of language but instead keeps faith with it and seeks ever-new ways of galvanizing its multifaceted, generative qualities. Indeed, language itself is virtual, for Noon: it has essential qualities, healing abilities, reflects and refracts meanings, uplifts, challenges, and can be more essentially truthful than all the data compounded and calculated in cyberspace. So, the Vurt is not a computer program but a surreal, dreamlike, linguistic technology. Noon signals this via how one enters these alternate kinds of realities. Rather than “jacking in” electronically, one inexplicably enters the Vurt by tickling the back of their throat with different coloured feathers. “Everything revolves around Vurt,” writes Stebel, “yet we do not really receive a sufficient sci-fi explanation into its origins nor is that the focus of the novel. The more the plot advances, the more the differences between the real world and Vurt become fluid.”26 And, while the Vurt can 22  Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After the Future, eds. Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn (Oakland: AK Press, 2011), 31–32. 23  See “Virtual,” OED Database, Oxford University Press, 2021. 24  Nickianne Moody, “Social and temporal geographies of the near future: Music, fiction and youth culture,” Futures 30, no. 10 (1998): 1011. 25  Noon, Vurt, 7. Emphasis added. 26  Steble, “Slipstream Literature,” 82–83.

28 

A. C. WENAUS

be a “world of numbers,”27 rather than representing an unchanging two-­ dimensional Cartesian grid, these numbers are “floating by,”28 “pure and naked information,”29 “clashing against each other,”30 “broken,”31 “being discarded,”32 and metamorphosing. In place of the rigid mathematical procedures of early computer programming, Noon turns to the mathematics that model the unpredictability of reality itself: chaos, fractal geometry, and nonlinear dynamics.33 So, while the Vurt is not a computer program, it is mathematical; but this mathematical realm is as slippery and unpredictable as life itself. Rather than Cartesian dualism that separates the body from the mind, the Vurt emphatically merges physical embodiment with the immateriality of dreaming: it is “travelling the paths of your own mind.”34 Entering the Vurt is like “screaming down tunnels of brain flesh,”35 and this brain flesh is, at once, a “palace of numbers”36 and “a realm of mists,”37 where “green and violet inpho played on waves of shadows,”38 ambient with “the smell of jasmine,”39 and “clouds of yellow.”40 Not technically a consensual hallucination in Gibson’s sense, it is “collective dreaming,”41 but dreaming with the high stakes of seeking virtue: “there are some dreams you never wake up from.”42 The Vurt can be pure bliss and comfort; it can also be a bad dream “when the feelings turn to mud, and you can’t fight your way out.”43 The Vurt is a dream world, yet a real place that resonates with the mathematical playfulness of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland—but, it is not cyberspace.  Noon, Vurt, 290.  Noon, Vurt, 290. 29  Noon, Vurt, 290. 30  Noon, Vurt, 291. 31  Noon, Vurt, 291. 32  Noon, Vurt, 291. 33  See Chap. 5 below, “Fractal Narrative and Chaos Theory: The Formal and Thematic Paradox of Escapism.” 34  Noon, Vurt, 23. 35  Noon, Vurt, 29. 36  Noon, Vurt, 290. 37  Noon, Vurt, 290. 38  Noon, Vurt, 290. 39  Noon, Vurt, 290. 40  Noon, Vurt, 290. 41  Noon, Vurt, 211. 42  Noon, Vurt, 79. 43  Noon, Vurt, 231. 27 28

2  BLACK MARKET DREAMS: FROM CYBERPUNK TO THE AVANT-PULP 

29

Furthermore, while the Vurt can be like a video game or a film with “the music’s swelling main theme, intercut with credits”44 complete with “advurts,”45 it is quintessentially unlike the cyberspace of late capitalist markets. “Let it be said, once and for all” the Game Cat—Vurt’s very own Carrollian Cheshire Cat—remarks: “knowledge Vurt is for the few” and “you don’t buy knowledge, you earn knowledge.”46 Moreover, the Vurt has its own dream logic of exchange: “sometimes we lose precious things [in the Vurt]. Friends, and colleagues, fellow travellers in the Vurt, sometimes we lose them; even lovers we sometimes lose. And get bad things in exchange: aliens, objects, snakes, and sometimes even death. Thing’s we don’t want. This is part of the deal.”47 For example, when the beautiful Desdemona—with her “hair a blond halo against the scarlet sun”48—is lost in the Vurt, she is exchanged for the very different, amorphous “fat sack of a body”49 Thing-from-Outer-Space “leaking oil and wax,”50 “lying in a pool of [its] own juices,”51 with its “blur of feelers,”52 “six tentacles,”53 and “spiky fingers.”54 And, yet, on the other hand, when Tristan loses his brother—the Game Cat—to the Vurt, he gains a lover: “Suze was a Vurt Being! An alien. Just like the Thing, but one thousand times more beautiful.”55 These rules are mysterious—but the Game Cat explains that “all things, in all worlds, must be kept in balance.”56 While cybernetics examines human uses of machines and machine uses of human beings and cyberspace rigidly conforms to computer programming processes, the Vurt seeks a balance of a different kind: opposites in constant, paradoxical, energizing change and exchange. Ultimately, the only technology with which Vurt is seriously invested is the technology of literature and whether literature can think in ways unique from all other kinds of knowledge. While there are endless portals in the  Noon, Vurt, 171–172.  Noon, Vurt, 29. 46  Noon, Vurt, 103. 47  Noon, Vurt, 69. 48  Noon, Vurt, 101. 49  Noon, Vurt, 18. 50  Noon, Vurt, 7. 51  Noon, Vurt, 7. 52  Noon, Vurt, 14. 53  Noon, Vurt, 9. 54  Noon, Vurt, 12. 55  Noon, Vurt, 211. 56  Noon, Vurt, 69. 44 45

30 

A. C. WENAUS

novel, Noon suggests that literature can create new, experimental portals into the possibilities of alternate, mysterious, contradictory, hybrid, and rewarding ways of life. Indeed, as Scribble writes at (and of) the book’s conclusion: “maybe you’re reading [Vurt] now. Or maybe you’re playing the feather. Or maybe you’re in the feather, thinking that you’re reading the novel, with no way of knowing.”57 The technologies of the imagination, creativity, literature, and poetry break down categories and offer a richer way of writing, reading, and living in the world. To do this, Noon turns away from cyberpunk’s clinicality and postmodernism’s distrust of language and, instead, turns towards what he calls the Avant-Pulp.

Generative Genre: The Avant-Pulp Noon’s “Avant-Pulpism” manifesto is the best place to get a sense of Noon’s writing project: “Science Fiction infects and transforms,” he writes. “It questions, supports and replicates, firing off clichés and wonders at equal rates.”58 As avant-pulp, sf “conducts experiments upon Form and Content, inventing new techniques, new processes, new kinds of narrative expression,” “is designed to examine, distrust, perfect and dismantle itself,” “revels in having loose screws and wires,” “revels in elements from both pulp and avant-garde,” “is a four-dimensional object (at the very least)” and “has more edges and borderlines than all other genres put together,” “cries out, ‘Down with perfection!’” and welcomes “corrupted signals, glitches, and fused wires,” “celebrates hybrid creatures,” and “leaves mainstream, middlebrow culture far behind.”59 As a kind of summary of the manifesto, Noon writes, “Form is the Host. Content is the Virus. Infect. Infect! … Open all channels, connect to everything.”60 For Noon, sf is the generation of marvellous plots and new narrative structures, unique ways of reading, and ever-mutating concepts. The avant-­ pulp, then, is a self-affirming and self-negating perpetual motion machine of the imagination. When Noon imagines the avant-pulp as Joyce writing The Big Sleep, or Raymond Chandler writing Finnegans Wake, he is being completely genuine.

 Noon, Vurt, 323.  Noon, “Avant-Pulpism.” 59  Noon, “Avant-Pulpism.” 60  Noon, “Avant-Pulpism.” 57 58

2  BLACK MARKET DREAMS: FROM CYBERPUNK TO THE AVANT-PULP 

31

Because the fusion of opposites is essential to the avant-pulp, it is important to note that his use of “avant”—as in avant-garde—and “pulp”—as in pulp fiction—to express his methodology is carefully considered. We will first look at the avant-garde and then consider the (very different) pulp fiction genre magazines. The term avant-garde has military origins: it refers to the soldiers and scouts who march ahead of the rest into uncharted territories. From its inception, the avant-garde was a reaction against the institutionalized arts of the dominant culture. Peter Bürger writes that “the European avant-garde movements,” like Futurism, Vorticism, Expressionism, Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism, “can be defined as an attack on the status of art in bourgeois society.”61 The avant-gardists proclaimed that art had become removed from everyday life. They argued that academically approved techniques had replaced innovation. The result was that the potency of art had lost its vitality; it had been stolen from the people and locked away in galleries and museums and turned into dusty, taxidermied corpses. Yet, “when the avant-gardists demand that art become practical once again,” Bürger continues, “they do not mean that the contents of works of art should be socially significant. … Rather, it directs itself to the way art functions in society,”62 and places emphasis on the effects art has on social relations. Art, the avant-gardists argue, is not simply something to hang on a wall, or to serenade a reception, or to pass the evening with a cosy well-made novel in hand. Instead, it should challenge and revolutionize every aspect of everyday life; it should never affirm the way things are; it should instead point towards the way things could be.63 In contrast to the highly singular works of the twentieth-century avant-­ garde are the mass-produced, cheaply-made, highly entertaining formula-­ driven narratives found in the pulp magazines. It is in these magazines where, formulae aside, wildly inventive—sometimes absurd, other times 61  Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 49. 62  Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 49. 63  It is a bit ironic that today we often think of the avant-garde as High Art. To be considered High Art, the avant-garde would need to be institutionalized by the bourgeoisie and, in a sense, neutered of its revolutionary potential. In fact, this capture of the avant-garde by commercialism is central to Bürger’s book, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (1987), itself a critical response to Renato Poggioli’s 1962 book of the same name. Noon, however, does not see this as an irony, but an opportunity.

32 

A. C. WENAUS

brilliant, occasionally both!—serialized westerns, detective stories, sf, fantasy, horror, romance, adventure, or pornography found a home; it is where we find the appearance of The Shadow, Zorro, Tarzan, Conan the Barbarian, Multivac, Fu Manchu, hardboiled detectives, Flash Gordon, and Captain Future.64 Pulp magazines “have a history as far back as The Argosy in 1882,”65 and by 1902, Mike Ashley remarks, “almost every issue of The Argosy carried a story of some scientific or fantastic development.”66 Furthermore, “it was directly between the two world wars,” Carlos A. Scolari, Paolo Bertetti, and Matthew Freeman note, “when the pulps truly flourished.”67 This is the same historical moment where the Modernist avant-garde emerged; indeed, juxtaposing pulp magazines and Modernist pamphlets in the interwar years reveals two very different peripheral modes of rejecting dominant culture: confrontation and escapism. This contradiction attracts Noon: if confrontation and escapism seem incompatible, all the more reason to merge them. While the avant-garde aimed to confront and transform everything from lived experience to global politics through art, the pulp magazines offered highly imaginative, fun, low-stakes entertainment that offered brief escapes from the everyday. Indeed, the Game Cat intimates the struggle between these two tendencies and their consequences: “life is to be lived, not to be dreamed about. But when life needs a gentle hand, Lullaby could be the one. It’s a cradlesong. The Cat says—use Lullaby, don’t abuse Lullaby. It could turn nasty on you.”68 The avant-garde is a largely negative project, while the pulp magazines tended to be positive. Many avant-garde movements aimed at a future program, but to do so, they sought the dismantling of the 64  Some famous pulp sf magazines include Amazing Stories, Analog, Wonder Stories, Galaxy, If, Startling Stories, Other Worlds, Imagination, Worlds of Tomorrow, Galileo, Odyssey, Venture, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine, and Interzone. 65  Carlos A. Scolari, Paolo Bertetti, and Matthew Freeman, “Introduction: Towards and Archaeology of Transmedia Storytelling,” Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines, eds. Carlos A.  Scolari, Paolo Bertetti, and Matthew Freeman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 8. 66  Mike Ashley, The Time Machines: The Story of Science-Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 25. 67  Scolari, Bertetti, and Freeman, “Introduction,” 8. 68  Noon, Vurt, 91.

2  BLACK MARKET DREAMS: FROM CYBERPUNK TO THE AVANT-PULP 

33

dominant culture through a kind of creation via destruction. But this often came with unintended consequences. Matei Calinescu writes that “the overwhelming importance of the negative element in the actual programs of diverse artistic avant-gardes shows that … they are committed to an all-encompassing … self-destruction (here dadaism with its suicidal aesthetic of antiart for antiart’s sake is an example on point).”69 In contrast, the pulp magazines, generally escapist, aimed to harness the reader’s desire to go deeper into the story by serializing stories and employing narrative implication. Narrative implication “implies the existence of untold stories, hinting at a larger storyworld beyond the confines of the narrative taking place—a further series of spaces where concurrent adventures are unfolding.”70 Noon writes that, like the avantgarde, his work “is designed to examine, distrust, perfect and dismantle itself,”71 while it simultaneously, like pulp fiction, “evolves through small variations and wild mutations.”72 This simultaneous process of negative self-destruction and positive narrative proliferation is like two magnets of opposite polarities infinitely spinning one another. This is the spirit of the avant-pulp and helps us situate Vurt as a work of both avant-garde and pulp fiction. In 1935, the American avant-garde poet, Ezra Pound, proclaimed the rallying call for the Modernist avant-garde: “make it new!”73 In the 1990s, Noon picks up the torch and responds in the affirmative: “Let us go now. Open all channels, connect to everything. Here we are gathered, lost in the flow of words. There is a strange light ahead.”74 And Noon has been dedicatedly at the vanguard, following that light ever since, creating paths for others to follow. Just as the Modernists looked to technology, collage, the new sciences, and the unconscious, and the pulp writers looked to ever expansive and entertaining novelty, Noon turns to the black market of dreams—the archive of high and pulp culture—to create experimental texts with the charm of campfire stories. While ambiguity is for the 69  Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 96. 70  Scolari, Bertetti, and Freeman, “Introduction,” 8. 71  Noon, “Avant-Pulpism.” 72  Noon, “Avant-Pulpism.” 73  Ezra Pound, Make it New (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935). 74  Noon, “Avant-Pulpism.”

34 

A. C. WENAUS

postmodernist evidence of the limitations of language, for Noon, it points to language’s poetic potentialities. So, what is the purpose of the avantpulp? Amidst the rubble of the crumbling categories of genre, the purpose is to keep following the mysterious light ahead and within. But, as the Game Cat repeats time and again in the novel, “Be careful. Be very, very careful.”75 For Noon, after all, sf is not simply world making; it also transforms and re-enchants the world.

 Noon, Vurt, 25, 42, 70, 141, 156, 181, 198, 250.

75

CHAPTER 3

Totally Feathered Up in Bottletown: Imagining Manchester

Abstract  This chapter examines the novel’s setting: Manchester (Hulme and Moss Side) and the “Madchester” techno and rave scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The city in Vurt is both a rigid geographical place and a plastic space of the psyche. While the Manchester of the novel can be a place of physical entrapment, Vurt emphasizes that all locales are “psychogeographical.” While psychogeography investigates the emotional and behavioural effects places have on individuals, even the most rigid civic environment can be navigated differently. The same is true in terms of literary representations of place: Noon insists that we must learn to endlessly reiterate, mutate, and re-imagine the ways we write our experience of lived reality. Keywords  Manchester • Madchester • Hulme (Manchester) • Moss Side (Manchester) • The Crescents (Manchester) • Situationist International • Psychogeography • Vurt • Guy Debord • Raoul Vaneigem • Dérive (Drift) • Rave • Bricolage • Dub reggae • Punk • Jeff Noon • Science fiction In the previous chapter, we distinguished Vurt from cyberpunk literature. This chapter will examine the novel’s setting: the gritty postindustrial city of Manchester and the Madchester rave scene of the late 1980s and early

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. C. Wenaus, Jeff Noon’s Vurt, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07029-7_3

35

36 

A. C. WENAUS

1990s. Noon asks us how we distinguish place from our perception of that place. Vurt is very much about the tension between escape and confrontation. From this tension, Noon considers how new literary technologies offer alternative ways of telling stories. These new ways of telling and reading help us re-imagine the gritty, dirty, and chaotic city as fecund with marvellous discoveries, encounters, and revelations. To do so, he treats the novel’s setting as dual: physical place and literary place. By drawing our attention to the fact that both our embodied and narrative imagining of a city are stories that we tell and retell ourselves and others, Noon insists we can recount the city in mutating, marvellous, and alternative ways. At once a celebration of Manchester’s chaotic diversity and a lament about the gentrification of formerly vibrant, autonomous neighbourhoods, Vurt examines the meeting point where memory, emotion, behaviour, and imagination tangle into feedback looping narratives with the capacity for eliciting self-emancipation and self-destruction. We’ll consider Manchester from three perspectives. First, we turn to a brief history of Manchester and, in particular, the neighbourhoods where the novel takes place: Hulme and Moss Side. Secondly, we consider the effects Manchester’s urban environment has on the emotions, desires, and behaviours of its inhabitants. To help with our second goal, we will turn to concepts developed by the radical political and artistic collective, the Situationist International (SI): “psychogeography” and “dérive.” Finally, we look at the Madchester of early 1990s rave culture. Here, MC Ink (Scribble’s club moniker) attempts to remix the brain’s limbic system. His goal: to regulate behaviour, emotion, and memory through art. What he slowly learns, however, is that art is not about regulation, stability, or eternity, but, instead it is about transient instances of the marvellous both on paper and on the streets of Manchester. These three approaches should offer insight into the Stash Riders’ complicated attitudes towards physical entrapment and psychological emancipation from the city and the Vurt.

Imagining Manchester Andrew Butler remarks that a major feature of Vurt that distinguishes it from cyberpunk literature is the setting. Unlike the globetrotting, Silicon Valley and Japan saturated, James Bond-like narratives of cyberpunk fiction, the psychical location of Vurt takes place exclusively in a “distinctly

3  TOTALLY FEATHERED UP IN BOTTLETOWN: IMAGINING MANCHESTER 

37

mappable near-future Manchester.”1 While cyberpunk literature dissolves national borders and those separating the body from the machine, Vurt dismantles the borders that distinguish the psyche from the mind-­ independent world (the “real” world). Vurt, in this sense, is as much about the city as it is about imagined Manchesters. Cyberpunk narratives frequently use international settings to emphasize the instantaneous ease of information technologies zipping across the globe. Vurt moves across Manchester at the pace of running or crashing through municipal parks in a van. Cyberspace is smooth, digital, electronic, and instantaneous; the Vurt, however, is messy, nonlinear, and neural (the Vurt is paradoxically distinct from but embedded within the psyche). It is, unlike cyberspace, rough, chaotic, organic, and repetitive. Indeed, while information transfer is instantaneous, in Vurt, even crashing the van across the streets of Manchester to get from one location to another takes five to ten minutes. Noon himself has had an ambivalent relationship to Manchester over the years—sometimes dismissive, other times warm—and his Manchester novels investigate the city’s effects on the psychology of its inhabitants. In the nineteenth century, Manchester was the third-largest city in England and was densely populated. “The development of cotton mills and textile and other factories meant the city swelled with workers from the greater Lancashire area and immigrants from Ireland via nearby (and rival city) Liverpool,” Butler writes, and “hundreds of thousands of workers were crammed into terraced houses.”2 A city that bloomed as a major industrial centre in the nineteenth century, Manchester began to wither as the postindustrial era ended. After the Second World War, the decline in industry and the emergence of the postindustrial era had profound effects on the city. “Manchester has had to reinvent itself a number of times,” Butler remarks, “and Noon was writing Vurt during one such period of redevelopment.”3 But, Vurt reflects, alongside the city under redevelopment, psyches in constant reconfiguration. And, when characters feel physically and psychologically trapped, they seek to escape. Because they cannot escape the city, they turn inward to seek solace from the imagination. 1  Andrew M.  Butler, “Journeys Beyond Being: The Cyberpunk-Flavored Novels of Jeff Noon,” Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives, ed. Graham J.  Murphy and Sherryl Vint (New York: Routledge, 2010), 67. 2  Butler, “Journeys Beyond Being,” 67. 3  Butler, “Journeys Beyond Being,” 67.

38 

A. C. WENAUS

To emphasize entrapment, Noon constrains the novel’s setting to Moss Side and Hulme, “the [rave scene’s] after party zone”4 in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As a resident of Hulme at the time of writing Vurt, Noon experienced firsthand both the dysfunction and the vibrancy of a neighbourhood as hard-hit as it was hard-hitting. On the bright side, the low cost of living invited diversity; on the other hand, the pressing stress of unemployment, substance abuse, and racial and ethnic tension often erupted into violence. Hulme and Moss Side were relatively new in Manchester, unlike the larger metropolitan area: both emerged due to the Industrial Revolution. However, by the 1960s, “the terraced houses, by then slums, were torn down, to be replaced with flats and tenements” and became “known by their shape: the Crescents,” writes Butler. “But despite the utopian dream of the architects,” he continues, a combination of design flaws, lax maintenance, and poverty led to the rapid degradation of British post-Second World War urban housing stock, matched by a social disintegration which manifested itself in crime, gangs, and race riots involving the white underclass, immigrants from Pakistan and India (including many expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin), and second-­ generation Black British people.5

While Paul A. Taylor writes that the dog/cat human and zombie hybrids in Vurt and Pollen “serve as a vehicle to symbolize societal fears of the invasive power of the various technologies [cyberpunk] hackers enjoy identifying themselves with,”6 Nikolina Nedeljkov writes that “Noon’s phantasmagoric cityscape is a hybrid of cultures, myths, species, and emotions.”7 Such diversity is represented through the looking glass with Noon including—and including every combination thereof—dogs, humans, robo, shadows, and Vurt beings. He wishes to seize on the positive and generative effects of diversity and multiplicity: after all, “pure is poor.”8 From isolation and alienation, poverty and grief, the poignancy of

4  Nikolina Nedeljkov, “Creation, Resistance, and Refacement: Postfuturist Storytelling, Cultural Flows, and the Remix” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2015), 41. 5  Butler, “Journeys Beyond Being,” 67. 6  Paul A.  Taylor, “Hackers: Cyberpunk or Microserfs?” Information Communication & Society 1, no. 4 (1998): 409. 7  Nedeljkov, “Creation, Resistance, and Refacement,” 40. 8  Noon, Vurt, 10, 56, 59, 60, 100.

3  TOTALLY FEATHERED UP IN BOTTLETOWN: IMAGINING MANCHESTER 

39

love, openness, hybridity, consolation, and transformation support various kinds of reconciliation between page, people, and place. Noon remarks that when writing Vurt, he “was trying to create an alternative city,”9 not only to find new ways of writing fiction but also by celebrating “a new way of people being different from each other. I was trying to create a multicultural place that had a potential for great excitement, for great work and art.”10 So he transforms Manchester by literalizing metaphor: he speaks of one thing using the terms of another to transform it poetically. He is seeking the marvels of juxtaposition not unlike the Comte de Lautréamont’s famous phrase from Les Chants de Maldoror (1869): “as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.”11 Indeed, “the fluidity between different states of being/existence in Vurt goes beyond what science fiction would consider conventional,” writes Steble, “there is not only sex between dogs and men, but between men and entities originating in dreams and myths.”12 Indeed, Noon’s celebration of openness, hybridity, unfamiliar juxtaposition, and ceaseless creativity ultimately proved timely as a pre-emptive protest against neoliberal civic standardization. Shortly after Vurt was published, Manchester underwent major reconstruction and gentrification. As the hip, yuppie neighbourhoods came to replace the Crescents, these revitalized neighbourhoods could not really distinguish themselves from any other gentrified neighbourhood in England (or, frankly, elsewhere). This stale sameness conflicted directly with new ways of celebrating difference. Yet, even before the city’s gentrification, Noon felt a special urgency to reconfigure and re-enchant how Mancunians imagined and experienced the city. After Manchester’s gentrification, Vurt continues to resound with an optimistic reminder: things were not always the way they currently are, and any situation will not remain the way it currently is. The lesson: keep the pathways open, find ever-new pathways, embrace difference, and keep creating the New out of whatever materials are within reach. So, Noon aims to reconstruct another Manchester, and yet the same. Indeed, “there is a bleeding between fictional and hyper-fictional,” Butler  Butler, “Journeys Beyond Being,” 68.  Butler, “Journeys Beyond Being,” 68. 11  Comte de Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror, trans. Guy Wernham (New York: New Directions, 1965), 263. 12  Janez Steble, “The Role of Science Fiction within the Fluidity of Slipstream Literature,” Acta Neophilologica, 48, no. 1–2 (2015): 83. 9

10

40 

A. C. WENAUS

remarks “an imagined Manchester and the Vurt-realm,”13 and these different levels of narrative reality become increasingly difficult to distinguish. Vurt emphasizes setting as a closed system from which there is no escape; yet closed systems remain vulnerable to endless reconfigurations of novel juxtapositions and new pathways. As a result, Noon considers the imagination’s infinite, paradoxical expansion inward as the path to re-­ imagine Manchester. To this, we might add that the Stash Riders must stop repeating the given paths of the streets and, instead, must recreate both their own unconventional routes through the city and, crucially, their own neural pathways.

Psychogeography: Reimagining Manchester Italo Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities (1972) depicts Marco Polo and Kublai Khan describing several imagined cities. Like Noon, Calvino’s writing combines the avant-garde with a deep commitment to storytelling. As a way of bringing temporary states of order to the disorder of reality, both authors seek new ways of understanding what is already here. Each short story in Invisible Cities offers dreamlike, poetic, and self-reflexive narratives of imagined cities. Each city, in this sense, becomes a meditation on memory, literature, language, and place; Polo ultimately admits that each city he describes is, in fact, a meditation on Venice. Likewise, before Noon’s relocation to Brighton at the end of the 1990s, the whole of his fiction, beginning with Vurt, is a project to re-imagine Manchester. The numerous Vurts in Vurt are not simply other virtual spaces, but imaginative iterations of Manchester; these imaginings are where the relationship between place and states of mind may ultimately be rehearsed and re-­ imagined through new narrative technologies. What Noon does, then, with Manchester is to draw attention to the relationship between Manchester’s urban environment and its effects on the characters’ psyches. Noon’s unusual take on the city is a “psychogeographic” one. Psychogeography is a term that comes from the Situationist International (SI), a political and avant-garde organization based in France and Belgium in the 1950s–1960s. Associated with Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, the SI merged Marxism with Modernist avant-garde performances-­as-protest. The SI is most famous for the phrase “the society of the spectacle,” which describes the post-war context in which images,  Butler, “Journeys Beyond Being,” 70.

13

3  TOTALLY FEATHERED UP IN BOTTLETOWN: IMAGINING MANCHESTER 

41

slogans, and signs are treated as more real and valuable than material commodities. Because everything becomes subsumed into the abstraction of signs, the SI claims that even violent rebellion will be captured, repackaged, and sold back to consumers as commodities. The SI offered many modes of resistance to this, and psychogeographic exploration was one of them. Furthermore, the significance of the SI to Vurt cannot be underestimated: it has avant-garde roots, concerns itself with both the urban environment and its replacement with a society of spectacle that values the “virtual” over the actual, and influenced both punk and rave culture. Here, however, we will now turn to two concepts from the SI and Lettrist International to see how they offer insight into a reading of Vurt: “psychogeography” and “dérive.” While “the society of the spectacle” is the most famous phrase from the SI, psychogeography is likely their most influential concept. Defined by Debord, “Psychogeography,” he writes, could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The adjective psychogeographical, retaining a rather pleasing vagueness, can thus be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and even more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery.14

Many literary works express psychogeographical investigation.15 Psychogeographic novels typically tie a fictional story to an actual, mappable place. Furthermore, readers are encouraged to investigate these spaces independently, ideally at a certain pace: on foot. The Manchester of Vurt, like Polo’s Venice in Calvino, is a psychogeographical meditation; that is, Manchester is not only an actual urban centre but also accessible through reflection and unusual storytelling. And, like Venice, Manchester is surrounded by water: it is a place of entrapment. 14  Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” The Situationist International Text Library, http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/2. 15  For example, we could include Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory (1997) or London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25 (2003), Will Self’s essay collection Psychogeography (2007), Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy (1985–1986), and Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell: A Melodrama in Sixteen Parts (1989–1996), as well as, of course, Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Noon’s Manchester novels as psychogeographical investigations.

42 

A. C. WENAUS

That this entrapment is at once geological and psychological is highlighted by the novel’s framing device: “a young boy puts a feather into his mouth”16 and “a young boy takes a feather out of his mouth.”17 Here Noon signals that we are not moving through Manchester any more than we are moving through the pages of a book or the hallucination of another. Regardless of whether we are accessing the actual or imagined Manchester, we find ourselves caught in a feedback loop: the interplay between a geographical environment and its effects on individuals’ emotions and behaviour. Noon employs an unconventional rendering of Manchester to see if it may elicit, rather than literal escape, a psychogeographical “spirit of discovery” both on and off the page. To do so, Noon’s novel drifts through Manchester and the collective dreams of its Vurt-­eating inhabitants. The SI calls this psychogeographical practice the “dérive.”

Dérive: Drifting Through Manchesters Real and Re-imagined Dérive translates into English as “drift” and signifies the practice of skirting sanctioned pathways, getting lost, and wandering through the city. Debord writes that dérives represent “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances” and “involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.”18 There is no goal to a dérive other than discovering and documenting paths and places that elicit specific states of mind or emotional responses. As Debord puts it: “the lessons drawn from dérives enable us to draw up the first surveys of the psychogeographical articulations of a modern city.”19 By drifting off the usual routes, paths, sidewalks, and streets of a city, new relations can be discovered and, ultimately, may lead to the spontaneous, revolutionary re-­ enchantment of everyday living. Crucially, dérives do not seek to escape or exit a city. For Noon, too, the goal of drifting is not to escape but to discover the psychogeographical effects that Manchester has on individuals both on and off the page.  Noon, Vurt, 1.  Noon, Vurt, 327. 18  Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” trans. Ken Knabb, The Situationist International Text Library, https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html. 19  Debord, “Theory of the Dérive.” 16 17

3  TOTALLY FEATHERED UP IN BOTTLETOWN: IMAGINING MANCHESTER 

43

But Vurt has a peculiar take on the dérive: much of the drifting takes place in the van, whereas the SI would insist that dérives must take place on foot. The SI hated automobiles since they were required to drive on pre-sanctioned pathways: roads.20 Furthermore, Debord remarks that “the present abundance of private automobiles is one of the most astonishing successes of the constant propaganda by which capitalist production persuades the masses that car ownership is one of the privileges our society reserves for its most privileged members.”21 Furthermore, he states: “To want to redesign architecture to accord with the needs of the present massive and parasitical existence of private automobiles reflects the most unrealistic misapprehension of where the real problems lie.”22 In short, the SI hated automobiles due to their inability to drift. And, of course, if you present Noon with an artistic rule, he will, in principle, break it. The Stash Riders do not follow traffic rules. The roads, in this sense, do not persuade them or their pathways. Instead, they bring to the roads an unpredictable, anarchic force: the Stashmobile. Beetle pilots the van, and he could care less about the rules of the road. With his ladies’ driving gloves smeared with Vaz23—as if the slipperiness of Vaz enhances the slipperiness of the van itself—Beetle drifts, not simply through the streets, but, importantly, across them. After scoring some Vurt feathers, the Stash Riders escape the cops. But, the escape quickly turns into a game of law-­ breaking confrontation: “the van made a wild circle … until Beetle got it under control … over The Beetle’s shoulder I could see the wire fence coming up close … the two fleshcops were struggling with the fence. Beetle turned on the headlights, catching them full-beam. He gunned the Stashmobile towards them, total, shouting out, ‘Awoohhh!!! Kill the cops! Kill the cops!’”24

20  I’d like to extend a token of thanks to my friend and colleague Edward Matthews for helping me by giving his insight into the SI’s attitude towards automobiles. 21  Debord, “Critique of Urban Geography.” 22  Guy Debord, “Situationist Theses on Traffic,” The Situationist International Text Library, https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/traffic.html. 23  Vaz operates like a magical substance in Vurt. As a kind of universal lubricant, it can be used to open doors, make for smooth handling of objects, be employed as a hair product by Tristan and Suze, and be used as a lubricant for swallowing feathers or for sex. Ultimately, it can be used to facilitate the merging of incompatible objects; its origin is explained in Nymphomation (UK: Doubleday, 1997). 24  Noon, Vurt, 9.

44 

A. C. WENAUS

While Beetle does not kill the cops, he does take control of the road: Beetle “swung the wheel around like a true star, last moment, taking the Stashmobile all around the parking space, heading for the gateway. The debris of a thousand trips was banging and clattering all over the floor as we took a vicious U-turn on to Albany Road and then left on to Wilbraham Road.”25 He then takes “the corner onto Alexandra Road without slowing” and through the “dark jungle”26 of Alexandra Park, onto Claremont Road, then “burned all the way down, over the Princess Road, into the Rusholme maze.”27 These are not the police’s streets, but the Beetle’s: “Cops were following, but they were up against three killer factors: Beetle had a lover’s knowledge of these streets, all moving engine parts were greased with Vaz, Beetle was hooked on speed.”28 While Beetle is zipping across lanes, through municipal parks, and around in circles, Scribble no longer even knows where they were,29 but the Beetle always does: “that The Beetle for you. Total knowledge, fuelled by Jam30 and Vaz … driving us down a back alley, scraping paint off both sides of the Stashmobile.”31 This may not impress the SI, but this is an avant-pulp psychogeographical dérive. While Scribble is the artist-as-storyteller, Debord remarks that “written descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game.”32 Beetle, on the other hand, is the artist of the streets. His dérive may be chaotic and unpredictable, but he has a lover’s knowledge of the streets and uses the police’s rules and routes against them. Unlike the on-foot wandering of the SI, but similar in its anarchic and emancipatory effects, Beetle’s artistry is one of experiencing marvellous maps by drifting and remixing the Manchester streets. Like Beetle, Scribble will remix Manchester as well, not through the streets but in stories and music.

 Noon, Vurt, 9.  Noon, Vurt, 10. 27  Noon, Vurt, 10. 28  Noon, Vurt, 10. 29  Noon, Vurt, 10. 30  Like Vaz, Jam is a vague drug-like substance. It tends to elicit energetic, reckless punk confidence similar to amphetamine or speed. And, of course, it is an homage to the tea and jam that appears in Carroll’s Alice books. 31  Noon, Vurt, 10–11. 32  Debord, “Theory of the Dérive.” 25 26

3  TOTALLY FEATHERED UP IN BOTTLETOWN: IMAGINING MANCHESTER 

45

Imagining Madchester: Hulme, Moss Side, and Rave “After London,” Simon Reynolds writes, “Manchester has long been Britain’s Number Two Pop City.” During the punk 1970s and postpunk 1980s, “the city’s musical output was synonymous with the un-pop hue of gray.”33 Dominated by the Buzzcocks, The Fall, Joy Division, and New Order,34 the Manchester scene was monochrome, baleful, angsty, and “doubt-wracked.”35 In the postindustrial city, the joy and abandon of dancing to repetitive rhythms were scoffed at by the likes of The Smith’s Morrisey for having nothing to say “about real life.”36 But Reynolds points out that “Disco and DJ culture had the last laugh.”37 Noon’s career throughout the 1990s intertwines with the rise and fall of the “Madchester” rave scene. This is, however, largely coincidental and Noon himself never really intended to be a part of the raves, was not a consumer of ecstasy,38 nor really even a fan of the music. The famous clubs, the Haçienda, Thunderdome, and Konspiracy, thrived in the 1980s and early 1990s, transforming Manchester into Madchester: “The mecca for twenty-four-hour party people and smiley-faced ravers from across Northern England and the Midlands.”39 However, “Manchester’s funtopia turned to nightmare”40 and soon “turned into a self-consuming empire—a party Titanic disappearing in a merciless mixture of unfortunate

33  Simon Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999), 92. 34  While we will not examine the pop culture intertextuality of Vurt, those familiar with Manchester punk and postpunk will catch endless homages to lyrics and albums. This is something Noon revisits more explicitly in Needle in the Groove (Anchor, 2000). 35  Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 92. 36  Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 92. 37  Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 92. 38  The feathers are not simply a stand-in for synthetic party drugs, and Noon’s relation to the “Chemical Generation” of UK writers in the 1990s is about as provisional as his relation to cyberpunk. Instead, it is best to think of the feathers as marvellous encounters (for more on this, see Nickianne Moody, “Social and Temporal Geographies of the Near Future: Music, Fiction and Youth Culture,” Futures 30, no. 10 (1998)). Nevertheless, there is a strange story about rock journalist Jack Barron and his over-indulgence that bears some coincidental similarities to Vurt. Barron “took thirty-eight Es in a week” and “was completely convinced that there was this parallel universe which came to us in our dreams … the separation between dream time and day time … well, there wasn’t any” (Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 69–70). 39  Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 92. 40  Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 108.

46 

A. C. WENAUS

circumstances including corporate mismanagement, criminality, and conformism.”41 It is this troubled context from out of which Vurt emerges. Despite the consensus that Vurt is the quintessential Madchester novel, it curiously features only a single rave scene. In it, Scribble, under the moniker MC Ink, acts as DJ. Nevertheless, this scene resonated strongly with readers and fans: “If you look at Vurt the actual dance culture thing in it is minute,” he writes. “But I know when people read that book I had a lot of people coming up to me saying ‘Jeff I love that scene. Nobody’s done that before.’ I wasn’t really that conscious of it. I was looking round Manchester and thinking what have we got here, we’ve got these young people on the streets, we’ve got the drugs, we’ve got the music, we’ve got the guns.”42 And, while Noon’s early career became inextricable from the “Madchester” rave scene, to other readers, Vurt felt like it was concretely set in 1977, the year the Sex Pistols cried “No Future!” Noon states that both are accurate. Ultimately, the knotting of eras makes it difficult to disentangle the past from the present. When the past becomes conflated with the present, the result is stagnant melancholia. MC Ink’s quest is to reactivate the nervous system, re-regulate the emotions and behaviours, and (impossibly) transform the past. What he learns, however, is that art must look to the past to transform the future. The rave chapter, “Contaminated with bass,” opens with a reversal: “The djinn is going in! Feel it! Feel it!”43 Typically, once the genie is out of the bottle, it cannot be reversed. But, we are not asked to “think this,” we are asked to “feel it.” MC Ink, just like and as Scribble, wishes to reverse the order of events, remix the past, and, this time, get things right. Because this is a painful task, he must try to split his emotions, memory, and behaviour and offload the task to rave and remix technology. This splitting is signalled by the “Siamese decks,” the dual turntables, that require “two hands, separate, but in time with the big rhythm.”44 Not only are MC’s Ink’s limbs working the decks, these “two hands” keep splitting the nervous system and the perception of reality: “the twin decks” become “the triple decks,” which in turn fission into “the quadruple decks of the Limbic System house.”45 Ultimately, the “twin hands” are “working  Nedeljkov, “Creation, Resistance, and Refacement,” 41.  Steve Redhead, “Dub Fiction: Jeff Noon,” Repetitive Beat Generation (Edinburgh, Rebel Inc., 2000), 117. 43  Noon, Vurt, 121. 44  Noon, Vurt, 121. 45  Noon, Vurt, 121. 41 42

3  TOTALLY FEATHERED UP IN BOTTLETOWN: IMAGINING MANCHESTER 

47

the infinite decks, mixing dreams with real-time stories, forcing sweat out of hard-packed bodies.”46 He is attempting a literal transformative experience for both music and the psyche, and, as a result, the dance floor becomes a realm of transformation. While he is splitting the limbic system—literally expanding the psyche—he hopes to make space for merging the past with the present by remixing pre-existing materials, thus giving the past a literal presence. But, as we will see, Scribble goes too far and ultimately fails.

Reimagining Madchester: Bricolage, Dub, and Limbic Loops While Vurt captures the Manchester of the early 1990s, the novel feels like the punk 1970s. This makes sense since the late 1970s and early 1980s Manchester is central to Noon’s development as a painter, playwright, and musician. While some may be quick to think that punk and rave are opposites, one thing that both movements have in common is indebtedness to the collage aesthetics of the Modernist avant-garde. Like the Modernist avant-garde, punk and rave both self-consciously sourced already made materials47 from the materiality of text or clothing (paper, ink, fabric, paint, scissors, tape, etc.,) to musical recordings (magnetic tape, dub, scissors, digital and analogue sampling, etc.,). While punk is destructive and negative and rave is affective and positive, both express a spirit of anarchy, anti-authoritarianism, do-it-yourself aesthetics, and a trust in the transformative power of music. For many punks in the late 1970s, sampling, or repurposing, was more of a style practice than a musical one. Dick Hebdige identifies this re-­ appropriation as bricolage: the process whereby subcultural bricoleurs repurpose a “range of commodities by placing them in a symbolic ensemble which served to erase or subvert their original straight meanings.”48 Once stripped of their intended meaning, signs become disruptive, ­repurposed, and given new meaning. Think of punk’s semiotic repossession of the safety pin: originally meant to mend clothing and protect the skin from puncture, it becomes repurposed as a body piercing or  Noon, Vurt, 121.  For a look at punk’s place in twentieth-century artistic rebellion, see Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989). 48  Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979), 104. 46 47

48 

A. C. WENAUS

functionless garment ornament. Think of Beetle’s “frock-coat” covered with a “collection of biker badges,”49 the “six buttons up the sleeves,” and the severed head of a dreamsnake pinned as a trophy.50 Not only does this disrupt the dominant function of the safety pin, it actively mocks it. Like the Stashmobile drifting across the streets in the face of civic planners and the police, by disrupting the object’s function, the punk bricoleurs strip a narrative of its inherited purpose to establish a blank future: nihilistic but also radically unwritten and open. However, some punk bricoleurs went beyond fashion and engaged with sampling in the recording studio by employing the recording and remixing techniques of dub reggae. While sampling and electronic sound manipulation have been practised since the appearance of the musical recording arts,51 the ingeniousness of dub reggae emerges in the late 1960s with the Jamaican dubmasters. Made famous by King Tubby, Osbourne, Errol Thompson, and Lee “Scratch” Perry, dub consisted of remixing already recorded media, manipulating it, restructuring it, deemphasizing certain elements while emphasizing others (particularly drums and bass), and applying various studio effects like reverb, echo, delay, and stark equalization band contrast. Magnetic tape, scissors, effects units, reel-to-reel players, vinyl turntables, the mixing board, and, frankly, the studio itself became the instrument to create from already recorded media entirely new pieces. Not only was dub ingenious, but it also changed recording history across pretty much all genres. Like many white British listeners in the 1970s, Noon’s introduction to dub reggae was through punk. To Noon dub was a revelation. Heavily involved in the Manchester punk scene, he became particularly fascinated by dub, citing The Clash’s 1977 cover of Junior Murvin’s 1976 “Police and Thieves” (produced by Lee “Scratch” Perry) as a central example: “one very special thing that happened,” he writes, “is that white kids were introduced to dub reggae … if you can take the idea of dub reggae and merge it with the things I was learning about painting at college … you’ll find that I am still [in the late 90s] using those techniques in my writing.”52 Indeed, Noon’s work as a postpunk musician in the band Manicured Noise had him creating his  Noon, Vurt, 92.  Noon, Vurt, 159. 51  For a more complete account of the avant-garde musical tradition of sampling and repurposing recorded media, see my book The Literature of Exclusion (Lexington, 2021), 181–221. 52  Redhead, “Dub Fiction: Jeff Noon,” 115. 49 50

3  TOTALLY FEATHERED UP IN BOTTLETOWN: IMAGINING MANCHESTER 

49

own dub sound. “The postpunk vanguard—bands such as PiL, Joy Division, Talking Heads, Throbbing Gristle, Contortions, and Scritti Politti—defined punk as an imperative to constant change,” writes Reynolds in Rip it Up and Start Again (2005). The postpunks “dedicated themselves to fulfilling punk’s uncompleted musical revolution,” he continues, “exploring new possibilities by embracing electronics, noise, jazz and the classical avant-garde, and the production techniques of dub reggae and disco.”53 This spirit overflowed into Noon’s writing. While his version of dub and remix writing practice did not explicitly come into fruition until the reading tour for Sarah Champion’s wildly successful collection Disco Biscuits (1997), which includes Noon’s story “DJNA.” Noon developed the practice further in the short story collection Pixel Juice,54 Cobralingus, and the novels Needle in the Groove and Nymphomation. In Vurt, however, dub and remix nevertheless feature thematically in the form of repetition, interiority, and ghostly traces and transformation. Dub, house, techno, and rave music production is a practice of constraint and discipline, unlike the Dionysian abandon of punk shows or raves. Like the dubmasters, the producers of rave and techno considered the studio an instrument. Nickianne Moody writes that techno was “born in the despair of everyday mid-80s Detroit life in which technology was seen as a saviour rather than a destroyer. The commercial success of the music marks the first steps taken by Detroit … an industrial city,” not unlike Manchester, “left behind by postindustrial society, to joining the rejuvenating economic and social experience of information technology.”55 In the 1980s, house and techno were “defined by a mind-warping, wibbly bass sound that originated from a specific piece of equipment, the Roland TB 303 Bassline.”56 Consistent with the spontaneous spirit of the bricoleurs, the 303 was never intended for this purpose; but, “a few Italian disco producers discovered the 303’s potential for weird … sounds” in the 53  Simon Reynolds, Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 9. 54  In Pixel Juice in particular, Noon would later play “with tropes of DJ culture and electronic music production in a linguistic context,” Morrison writes, while seeking “to understanding the mechanical relationship of the sonic to the linguistic.” Simon A.  Morrison, Dancefloor-Driven Literature: The Rave Scene in Fiction (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 6. Jeff Noon, Pixel Juice (Doubleday, 1998). 55  Nickianne Moody, “Social and temporal geographies of the near future: Music, fiction and youth culture,” Futures 30, no. 10 (1998): 1009. 56  Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 31–32.

50 

A. C. WENAUS

early 1980s and “a few years later, house producers … started messing around with the 303, discovering applications that the manufacturers had never imagined.”57 The 303 requires patience and discipline to program; as a result, it tends—like MC Ink’s two decks, becoming three, four, and infinite—“to generate inspired errors … in much the same way that chaos theory generates complex phenomena out of simple iterated processes.”58 Despite its repetitive, hypnotic nature, the 303 is also “an amnesiac hook: totally compelling as you listen, but hard to memorize or reproduce after the event.”59 It, instead, produces mnemonic traces and ghosts that continue to mutate in the memory well after the experience of the music ends: temporality, then, becomes ghostly. While Scribble attempts to remix reality using the written word, MC Ink remixes the collective limbic system in real-time using music technology. Rather than grounding the narrative in sense and interpretation as Scribble does, MC Ink grounds musical experience in affect and emotion. “Rave constructs an experience,” Reynolds writes, and ravers “feel it” rather than think it. “Bypassing interpretation,” he continues, “the listener is hurled into a vortex of heightened sensations, abstract emotions, and artificial energies” and is ultimately asked whether “it possible to base a culture around sensations rather than truths, fascination rather than meaning?”60 To achieve this, MC Ink seeks to construct experience before interpretation by becoming his and the dancers’ autonomic nervous system: “I was looking through the booth glass,” he writes, “watching the sub-masses moving, groin to groin, or just on their own. Men, women, real, or Vurt. Robo or smoke. I’m moving them all.”61 Ultimately, though, MC Ink is attempting to manipulate both his and the crowd’s limbic system: the structural apparatus of the brain that regulates behaviour, emotion, and memory. While the dancers dance, MC Ink, in his private grief, may be losing them through the abstraction of his remix. It is not only his limbs and decks that are dividing and splitting: when a voice from out of the crowd cries, “[P]lay that Limbic Splitter, white boy!”62 it is not simply an appeal for head-splitting volume, but also to the effects on the limbic system that  Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 31–32.  Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 32. 59  Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 32. 60  Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy, 9. Emphasis in original. 61  Noon, Vurt, 121. 62  Noon, Vurt, 121. 57 58

3  TOTALLY FEATHERED UP IN BOTTLETOWN: IMAGINING MANCHESTER 

51

such music causes. To split the limbic system is to splice the centre of the brain that regulates behaviour, emotion, and memory: a remix to reverse experience, change behaviour, manage the emotions, and revisit (and possibly change) memories. But MC Ink’s is “coming on tough-core from the Limbic System,”63 and his virtuosic pyrotechnics risk losing their grounding. Beyond its rhythmic function, the reason dub production emphasizes drums and bass is that those tracks provide the repetitive, grounded structure upon which the effects-saturated mid- and high-end frequencies can echo, reverberate, and evaporate. Scribble’s hands can remix a collective experience of reality, but only to a degree before it begins to deconstruct experience: his remix may be heavy on the avant with too little pulp for the dancers. The calls for more bass from the dancers—“give us a go on the bass,” “I need some bass, man,” “more bass! More bass!” “give us some bass! Come on!”64—express that their affective and emotional experience is no longer grounded. As MC Ink fades his mix out and Dingo Tush fades his mix in, the former is reunited with the Beetle, who we learn is seeking both escape and grounding in nostalgia ever more aggressively and becoming a Tapewormer feather junkie. The scene is telling: as the two friends reunite, there is a distance between them: rather than an embrace, Beetle requests that he be plugged in directly “to the bass.”65 MC Ink reluctantly assents and shoves a five-pin XLR cable into the Beetle’s mouth: “Straight to the gate. The Beetle was wide open at the mouth … as I rammed the bass flex home. And then I was turning it up, turning the bass right up, way past the legal limits … and the Beetle was dancing in the air as the heavy waves pounded his system.”66 At once grounded with the bass and ascendant—“dancing in the air”—Beetle is caught in a self-perpetuating limbic loop. Having neither escaped nor confronted what they are running from, both need to learn that art is about imagining open futures, not about grounding the chaos of the present retreating into an idealized past. To do so, they must seek new ground via transformative experience. In the next chapter, we will look at this transformative experience by considering Vurt as a rite of passage.

 Noon, Vurt, 121.  Noon, Vurt, 122. 65  Noon, Vurt, 127. 66  Noon, Vurt, 128. 63 64

CHAPTER 4

Orpheus and His Limbic Decks: Avant-Pulp Bricolage and Rites of Passage

Abstract  This chapter considers how the cyberpunk trope of “jacking in” to cyberspace updates the mythical trope of descending into and ascending from the underworld. By revisiting the Greek myth of Orpheus and his lover Eurydice, Noon replaces Orpheus’s lyre with Scribble’s turntables. While Orpheus convinces the gods of the underworld to permit the return of his lost love, Eurydice, from the underworld (with tragic consequences), Scribble repeatedly attempts to relive and reinvent the circumstances of his grief by “remixing the night” through the act of writing and music. Like Orpheus, Scribble also fails. However, Scribble learns that art, longing, and loss are not about sculpting an eternal object of desire but about seeking, amid the chaos of experience, to collaborate with passing instances of significance. Keywords  Bricolage • Rites of passage • Dub fiction • Metamorphiction • Collage • Cut-ups • Dream editing • Modernist avant-garde • Vurt • Jeff Noon • Orpheus • Eurydice • Franco “Bifo” Berardi

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. C. Wenaus, Jeff Noon’s Vurt, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07029-7_2

53

54 

A. C. WENAUS

This chapter considers collage and cut-up and how these operate thematically, but not compositionally, in Vurt. We will also revisit the practice of bricolage by turning to anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s consideration of the ways associational writing are fundamental to myth-­making. Both music (MC Ink and the dancefloor) and literature (Scribble and his storytelling) act as the portals to the underworld or otherworld (the Vurt). This otherworld is inhabited by various literary, musical, and experiential associations and points of connection; by immersing oneself in this sea of associations and reconfiguring the available pieces, Noon observes how associational writing and bricolage can paradoxically create the new, hybrid, and mutant meanings from the fragments of the past. Ultimately, though, this kind of myth-making functions as a rite of passage: journeys into the otherworld, reassembling the available narrative pieces found there, and returning from the otherworld with the reconfigured knowledge (a new story), dramatize conscious and unconscious transformations in the artist and, in turn, society. The ends of music and poetry are not dissimilar. Like music, poetry seeks to capture the unthinkable thought and the inarticulate articulation: it seeks a profound affect that lies outside sense and, yet, feels profoundly meaningful. That it feels meaningful is not a deception but an invitation to alternative ways of knowing. Noon’s writing is replete with music and poetry: merging both pervades everything from content and form to compositional technique and sentence-level rhythm. Music is, in the broadest definition, deliberately organized sound. This organized sound has affective effects (we “feel it” rather than “think it”). Music is, unlike literature, without content. Music-induced emotions and affects do nevertheless latch on to alterior ambiguities and associations that are non-linguistic yet mysteriously meaningful in their own right. The Hungarian-Austrian composer of twentieth-century avant-garde classic music, György Ligeti—a composer whose work and interests share much in common with Noon’s— writes that “everything that is direct and unambiguous is alien to me. I love allusions, double-entendres, ambiguities, the double-bottomed, the cryptic.”1 Free of content, music is free associational: its effects cause further effects, and so on. It is, without meaning, able to make manifest mystery, ambiguities, mythologies, and a puzzling patchwork of feelings.

1  Constantin Floros, György Ligeti: Beyond Avant-garde and Postmodernism, trans. Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch (PL Academic Research, 2014), 28.

4  ORPHEUS AND HIS LIMBIC DECKS: AVANT-PULP BRICOLAGE AND RITES… 

55

Noon echoes Ligeti’s sentiment, though now speaking of literature: “I like to talk about a web of connections between my work. There’s little images and mirror images which will maybe resonate in people’s minds.”2 Like music, poetic literature like Noon’s also has a free-associational feel and is constructed from deliberately organized narrative associations (intertextuality). Unlike music, however, literature does have content. Noon’s storytelling, we should recall, is always coupled with the avant-garde spirit of formal experimentation and the impulse to make the everyday marvellous. In a way, he wants to achieve musical effects with his writing, and his poetic prose and linguistic virtuosity attest to this. Indeed, by 1997, Noon would literalize this even further by consciously writing literature by borrowing from electronic music production techniques—“dub fiction” and “metamorphiction”3—as he wrote Pixel Juice, Cobralingus, Needle in the Groove, and Nymphomation. But, this practice was largely conceptual at the time of Vurt’s composition. When writing his first novel, Noon was not physically or digitally cutting up text, rearranging it, and repurposing it to create new work. In Vurt, instead, we see the seed of this technique being planted. When writing Vurt, Noon’s goal was to literally merge form and content to achieve marvellous literary transformations. Michael Bracewell notes that much of Noon’s best imagery—from Vurt to Pollen … derives its power from the literalizing of poetic language and the concretizing of images: the sudden opening up, within the landscape of the prose itself, of new routes

2  Steve Redhead, “Dub Fiction: Jeff Noon,” Repetitive Beat Generation (Edinburgh: Rebel Inc., 2000), 118. 3  Because “dub fiction” and “metamorphiction” both appear well after the publication of Vurt, we will not be discussing them at any length in this book. For more in-depth look at Noon’s explicit remix and dub fiction, see Noon’s Guardian article “Film-makers use jump cuts, freeze frames, slow motion. Musicians remix, scratch, sample. Can’t we writers have some fun as well?” (January 10, 2001) and his article “The Ghost on the B-Side” (http:// jeffnoon.weebly.com/the-ghost-on-the-b-side.html). For extended academic analyses of Noon’s metamorphiction, see Ismo Santala’s unpublished PhD dissertation “‘Dub Fiction’: The Musico-Literary Features of Jeff Noon’s Cobralingus” as well as my two articles “‘Spells Out The Word of Itself, and Then Dispelling Itself’: The Chaotics of Memory and The Ghost of the Novel in Jeff Noon’s Falling out of Cars” in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 23.2 and “‘You are Cordially Invited to a/CHEMICAL WEDDING’: Metamorphiction and Experimentation in Jeff Noon’s Cobralingus” available online at Electronic Book Review.

56 

A. C. WENAUS

to character and narrative, enabled by altering the meanings of words within the containers of their language.4

So, rather than repurposing physical paper from which would emerge new fictions, Vurt is composed more precisely by making metaphor concrete. For example, think back to MC Ink’s chaotically splitting of turntables: two decks becoming three, becoming four, becoming infinite. It is not simply a metaphor but a literalized surrealist juxtaposition coming to life: MC Ink’s turntables are not just figuratively bifurcating. On the one hand, like the psychedelic LSD or psilocybin experience of objects mutating kaleidoscopically, this metaphorical concretization reminds us that sober perception itself is also a hallucination; the psychedelic image is simply an alternative hallucination, that is, another way of experiencing and interpreting what is already there. So, rather than “writing of one thing using the terms of another thing” (metaphor), we have “writing one thing as it fuses with the terms of another thing” (Noonian metaphor). This ultimately renders surreal transformations that leave in their wake free associations both semantic and imaginal. For Noon, language, like sound, is plastic, pliable, and modular: you can cut it up, edit it, rearrange it, reverse it, mirror it, and do, frankly, whatever you like with it. By making the rigid rules underlying language pliable, Noon allows language itself to be the mutant form from which content can then emerge and transfer its poetic potency beyond the page: “Form is the Host. Content is the Virus. Infect. Infect! … Open all channels, connect to everything.”5 However, these techniques do not spontaneously emerge with Vurt; instead, free-associational, collage, and cut-up art has a vibrant history. Let’s now quickly turn to a very brief overview of a few of the aesthetic traditions that inform Noon’s writing practice.

Snake Scissors: Avant-Garde Collage, Cut-Ups, and Dream Editing If there is nothing new under the sun, then the new must come about through novel, shocking juxtapositions of what is already there. This is not unimaginative; it is, in fact, synonymous with imagination. “Imagination is an infinite variety of analogical combinatory items, an infinite variety of 4 5

 Jeff Noon, Cobralingus, illus. Daniel Allington (Hove: Codex, 2001), 6.  Noon, “Avant-Pulpism,” Jeff Noon, http://jeffnoon.weebly.com/avant-pulpism.html.

4  ORPHEUS AND HIS LIMBIC DECKS: AVANT-PULP BRICOLAGE AND RITES… 

57

possibilities that the mind processes, starting from disposable engrams,” writes Berardi. “Memory storage,” he continues, “is limited, but the possibilities of rearranging the items stored in memory are not. The process of combining these analogical plastic items is called imagination.”6 Noon’s work is posited at the junction of a contradiction: the avant-garde meeting the pulp and popular. His associational writing seeks formal innovations in whatever associations possible by balancing formal experimentation with captivating storytelling. Of course, the most obvious place to start is the literary influences on Noon’s formal and thematic approach to writing. Thematically, Vurt is about the problem of trying to escape a labyrinth of associations without an exit. While this is similar to the postmodern condition—the circulation of dead images, flat surfaces, nostalgic trips into commercial art, reconfiguring the past rather than imagining the future—the sentiment finds its source in early twentieth-century modernity. Indeed, the Modernist avant-­ gardists were the first to experiment with the theme of a cultural apex abruptly halted and now in decline by applying a technique and form of composition that would enact this. While postmodern fiction is often criticized as being defeatist or nihilistic, many Modernists were committed utopians. Take the Russian Futurist Aleksei Kruchenykh’s collage book Universal War (1916). An example of a collage novel comprises the invented zaum language (which can be roughly translated as “trans-rational” or “beyonsense” language) and collage images, Universal War employs the unusual juxtaposition of ripped paper collage, simple geometric shapes, and a language that does not mean so much as to cause direct emotive effects (one of the mandates of zaum).7 English language readers will be more familiar with the paratactic collage used in T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (1922) or Pound’s career-long project The Cantos (written and published periodically between 1915 and 1968). These latter two major works of English Modernist poetry do not only make jarring juxtapositions between voice, style, meter, and genre; they also jump through history, moving forward and backwards, giving a distinct feeling that history itself is historiographical (it is written as narrative), and can be revisited and 6  Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After the Future, eds. Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn (Oakland: AK Press, 2011), 32. 7  For more, see Gerald Janecek’s Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism (San Diego State University Press, 1996).

58 

A. C. WENAUS

reconfigured to discover novel insights. Behind the many cultural, political, aesthetic, economic, and scientific contexts that inform the emergence of this kind of art, the one thing most Modernist avant-gardists have in ­common is the traumatic response to the reality of the First World War: art can never be the same again. Art needed to look to the future so as not to repeat the past. These works are not reader-friendly and require new states of mind from the reader to begin understanding and experiencing the work (and the world) in new ways. No Modernists were more extreme in their assault on traditional narratives of all kinds than the Dadaists. The Dadaists “wanted to bring forward a new kind of human being,” writes Hans Richter, who pursued freedom “from the tyranny of rationality, of banality, of generals, fatherlands, nations, art dealers, microbes, residence permits and the past.”8 Like Noon, the Dadaists were vehemently anti-authoritarian; unlike Noon, however, their full-scale revolt against art using anti-art was in many ways a protest movement rather than an artistic one. The Dadaists repurposed found objects, using them as the building blocks for their work. While this might seem defeatist for a group seeking “a new kind of human being”— after all, intuition would be suspicious of any claim that the new can come from scraps of the old—the most distilled articulation of the Dadaist imperative to use art as a means of achieving originality is Romanian poet Tristan Tzara’s completely tongue-in-cheek and completely serious piece “How to Make a Dadaist Poem”: Take a newspaper. Take some scissors. Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem. Cut out the article. Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag. Shake gently. Next take out each cutting one after the other. Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag. The poem will resemble you. And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

8  Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art, trans. David Britt (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997), 65.

4  ORPHEUS AND HIS LIMBIC DECKS: AVANT-PULP BRICOLAGE AND RITES… 

59

What is important about this poem is the random reassembling of words from a cut-up newspaper to create an original piece of poetry as original as the individual who created it. This project was picked up by Isidore Isou’s Letterist movement, Debord and Vaneigem’s Lettrist International and Situationist International, Fluxus, and most famously by beat writers William S.  Burroughs and Brion Gysin with their “cut-up technique.”9 While Noon commentators frequently conjure Burroughs, Noon was never really a fan. Perhaps, Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless (1988), an experimental novel that collages, copy-and-pastes, and remixes cyberpunk literature (notably Gibson’s Neuromancer) into a completely new work might be the best analogue to what Noon would later develop and innovate throughout the 1990s. These works claim that the borders between the real and the imaginary are porous, that the self can be written and over-written. They also suggest that remix experimentation responds to the anxieties, hopes, and uncertainties that arise in the context of ubiquitous media technologies and how these technologies are becoming less and less distinguishable from the self and the self’s orientation to memory and imagination. To be modern (or postmodern) is to exist in a hyper-associational era. From where and how we know this or that becomes difficult, sometimes impossible, to disentangle. Interestingly, just as Noon learned about dub from punk, he was introduced to collage and cut-up not from literature but painting and his dreams. Indeed, Noon’s formal training is not literature at all; it is painting. And it is painting and the visual dimensions of typography—much like the Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists, Lettrists—that brought cut-up, collage, and re-assemblage to his attention. While studying painting and sculpture at Thameside College of Technology, Noon’s teacher, Bill Clark, radically changed Noon’s conception of art: “what [Clark] would say to us was,” Noon writes, “that’s great, that painting’s fine, but now I want you to destroy it. I want you to cut that painting up and re-use it in other ways.” So we were getting the scissors out and cutting things up and sticking them down and starting

9  For an excellent, comprehensive introduction to collage and cut-up narratives, see Edward S.  Robinson, Shift-Linguals: Cut-up Narratives from William S.  Burroughs to the Present (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011).

60 

A. C. WENAUS

again. And you could introduce a lot of techniques like that. … To him it was just a way of releasing the creativity.10

As a teenage student, Noon was a bit shocked by this, yet he soon found this approach to be “a tremendous liberation.”11 This liberation even seeped into Noon’s dreams. The kernel that would eventually blossom into Vurt appears as a short entry into Noon’s notebooks. At the time, he was writing exclusively for the theatre.12 He kept meticulous notes to inspire his playwriting; this includes entries from dreams. “There were nine volumes of these ideas—1,130 ideas in total—before I stopped recording them,”13 he recalls. The earliest hint at Vurt appears in the fourth volume under entry number 385 jotted down sometime early in 1990. Here it is: DREAM HUT & SNAKE SCISSORS (SF) Dream Hut set up in field near housing estate. The Snake Scissors, designed for use in the once-external war against the snakes, now used for the purposes of dream cutting, dream editing. The Dream Hut is an editing suite. To produce the new films. People line up in the field, to have their dreams edited. Technicians of the snake scissors = editors. Chimera/Cinema/Cinema X/Chimera X14

While Icarus Wing and dreamsnakes play a role in Vurt, what is particularly important about this note are two concepts: first, a dream slipping into waking life and, second, the possibility of editing dreams in the same way one would edit a film or novel. In this early note, Icarus Wing is one of the technicians of the snake scissors; he is an editor of dreams. Dreams are the ultimate source of free-associative mixing, scrambling, remixing, and half-narrating; they are the imagination running wild, a kind of autonomic remix. Recognizing that this was not a theatrical idea, he marks “(SF)” in his notebook, hinting at the possible composition of a piece of SF to be written at some other time. Of course, this work of SF became 10  Steve Redhead, “Dub Fiction: Jeff Noon,” Repetitive Beat Generation (Edinburgh, Rebel Inc., 2000), 115. 11  Redhead, “Dub Fiction: Jeff Noon.” 12  After the success of his play Woundings, Noon became a writer in residence at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. 13  See Appendix A. 14  See Appendix A.

4  ORPHEUS AND HIS LIMBIC DECKS: AVANT-PULP BRICOLAGE AND RITES… 

61

Vurt three years later. However, what is particularly important here is the associational rather than chronologically logical way that remix, cut-up, and re-assemblage became central to Noon’s approach to form and content. Vurt is, after all, Scribble desperately writing by sampling and remixing his memories. He is quite literally attempting to edit his dreams using narrative technology. Seeking this kind of transformation, Scribble must enter the mythological realm—or mythographical realm—to discover a way beyond his grief and nostalgia. He ultimately does so by applying associational remix in the form of both writing and remix. After all, Scribble is an author and, as we saw, a DJ.

Rites of Passage: Anabasis as Katabasis, Bricolage, and Art as the Things That Slip Away In Dancefloor-Driven Literature (2020), Simon A. Morrison remarks that “a nightclub is a space beyond a liminal red rope—the threshold that guards the quotidian from the varied sonic and chemical pleasures contained within—for those allowed to step across, to transgress. Once within, the dancefloor is a further, sacred hermetic interiority.”15 The dancefloor as a mythical otherworld, a sacred place, separate from the everyday, where transgression begets transformation. This hermetic interiority has a kind of eternity to it: time works differently there, and the absent dead—lost and forever gone from the world of the living—are present in the form of memory or, literally, musical samples from the past being remixed into both the present and presence. As we saw in the previous chapter, one does not enter a sacred hermitic interiority to escape; whether it be dancing, remixing, or writing, Scribble will need to learn to confront the central problem of imagining the unwritten future from the pieces already available to him. To do so, he will need to undergo a rite of passage and profound transformation. Literature with a musical pulse and mysterious sonic ambiences can, ultimately, enhance storytelling technologies: it not only transforms how we see the here and now, but it can also transport us to cryptic new imaginative terrain.16 And, sometimes, those cryptic terrains are the 15  Simon A. Morrison, Dancefloor-Driven Literature: The Rave Scene in Fiction (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020), 1. 16  For an example of this process in its updated form, see Jeff Noon, “The Ghost on the B-Side,” Jeff Noon, http://jeffnoon.weebly.com/the-ghost-on-the-b-side.html.

62 

A. C. WENAUS

hermetically sealed crypts themselves. A common trope of cyberpunk literature is “jacking in” to cyberspace. As a move from one ontological realm to another, the trope offers an updated version of katabasis and anabasis: the mythical tradition depicting a descent (katabasis) into and back from (anabasis) the underworld. Vurt offers a particular retelling of the story of Orpheus and his lover Eurydice. It should be no surprise that in storytelling tradition, the music and the musician act as the means by which to enter the portal to other realms. In Vurt Orpheus, the mythical musician-­poet is re-imagined as the protagonist Scribble, the novel’s DJ and “author.” Eurydice, the wife of Orpheus, appears as Desdemona, Scribble’s sister and lover. Like Eurydice, Desdemona is lost in the Vurt, and Scribble, like Orpheus, is on a tragic quest to get her back. While katabasis and anabasis rely on separate topologies of the Earth and the Underworld, Vurt uses paradoxical layers of reality tangled into an endless inwardness without an outside. In other words, in Vurt, katabasis and anabasis merge into a single loop: even going underground leads you to exactly where you started. Joan Gordon writes that “cyberpunk … grapples with the journey to the underworld,” a quest that “allows us to shape and manage our futures rather than escape them.”17 The power, she continues, of “katabasis … lies not so much in what we learn on the journey as it does on the fact of our learning and in our subsequent transformation.”18 Vurt, as Butler points out, utilizes this mythic structure. However, there is a bit of a problem; Noon’s “mutant topologies”19 that link the “real” world to the Vurt are simultaneously up and down. In the next two chapters, we will examine these mutant topologies more closely; however, we will consider how the looping katabasis/anabasis structure invites Scribble to become a bricoleur of storytelling, a kind of transformative myth-maker. Because all knowledge he can bring back from the underworld will also be knowledge at one time brought down from the world, intuitive logic breaks down, and a different mythological narrative mode takes over. While Orpheus, with his lyre, can persuade Hades and Cerberus to permit him to bring Eurydice back to Earth with him (a plan destined for tragedy), Scribble is fated to rewrite and “remix the night” in such a way that he can once again 17  Joan Gordon, “Yin and Yang Duke It Out,” Storming the Reality Studio, ed. Larry McCaffery (Duke University Press, 1991), 199. 18  Gordon, “Yin and Yang,” 201. 19  Noon, Vurt, 134.

4  ORPHEUS AND HIS LIMBIC DECKS: AVANT-PULP BRICOLAGE AND RITES… 

63

be with Desdemona. However, since the universe of Vurt contains no clear topological distinctions between levels of reality (the “real world” and Vurt), Scribble is fated to endless permutations of the same until he learns the power of transforming what is already available. In his seminal study The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), a book Noon looked to while writing Vurt, Joseph Campbell writes that, when considering the dreamlike logic behind the strange rituals of a rite of passage, “it becomes apparent that the purpose and actual effect of these was to conduct people across those difficult thresholds of transformation that demand a change in the patterns not only of conscious but also of unconscious life.”20 However, Scribble and the Stash Riders need to come to terms with the fact that the Vurt itself is a rite of passage, not simply a drug or a game. Scribble, through many trials, does come to learn that, whether through writing or music, one cannot retrieve and make present what is inevitably lost (his sister) but must instead seek a way to transform the patterns of his own limbic system. The trial that Scribble will need to confront, then, is how one might reconfigure the loop that results when the descent into the underworld of the imagination is, at once, the same source as the ascent from the imagination: the nervous system itself. To achieve transformation, Scribble must then learn to tell the story. And, he must do so by becoming a bricoleur of narratives. Hebdige’s use of the term that we considered in this previous chapter is a borrowing from anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. For Strauss, bricolage is a fundamental characteristic of mythological storytelling. The bricoleur will piece together a diverse array of fragments; but, these fragments are nabbed from a limited corpus of stories that express any number of great, comic, or tragic human endeavours. The meaning that binds all these fragments can be said to be dual: on the one hand, the meanings around nebulously just floating around in the culture and, on the other hand, must be pieced together in ever-new combinations by the bricoleur to create new myths and stories. For Lévi-Strauss, this is not a feature of primitive storytelling; instead, it is a fundamental underlying structure of human myth-making. Bricolage of this kind, then, is what Noon is doing in Vurt. And doing this requires the author to repeatedly sample, revisit, remix, and repeat stories.

20  Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Princeton University Press, 1973), 10.

64 

A. C. WENAUS

After his DJ set as MC Ink, Scribble attends a party featuring the much more popular DJ Dingo Tush. When he arrives, we are already signalled that crossing the threshold will be a portal to a Carrollian topsy-turvy otherworld: “Doorman at the Slithy Tove was a fat white rabbit” with a “large pocket watch in his big white mittens.”21 He enters the rave: “there must have been five hundred people in there, that small space; friends, lovers, enemies, husbands, wives, second cousins, groupies, agents, roadies, managers, fur dressers, bone-buriers, flea pickers, glitter dogs and litter men, DJs, VJs, SJs, mothers, smothers, ex-lovers, record pushers.”22 While Scribble has been clean from feathers for eighteen days, the club has feathers raining from the ceiling; Bliss (a kind of vaporized ecstasy) moves through the air conditioning. It is not the kind of environment where sobriety is possible; instead, it is a musical, poetic, associational, and transformative space beyond the liminal red rope. Scribble has, indeed, entered into another reality that is always already exactly where he is. The key scene in the club is when the Game Cat lets Scribble know that the Vurt is already in him (Scribble having been bit by a dreamsnake and, miraculously, survived). It is here that we confirm Scribble’s katabasis is anabasis (and vice versa). He is, paradoxically, occupying multiple levels of reality: the “real” world and the imaginative, mythological, otherworld. While on the balcony to find some quiet after a non-consensual brush with a Thunderwings feather, Scribble feels he is “flying over the dancing.”23 While he sees a whole cast of familiar characters and friends on the dancefloor, he also sees himself: “and look, there was scribble, taking a feather into his mouth. No! No way! I was here, up on the balcony, not down there! I wasn’t down there!”24 As he fights to orient himself from the balcony, he simultaneously disappears amid the fog down on the dancefloor: “I watched myself vanish, into the crowd, into the smoke. And that was better. To be the only one again, to be in one piece again.”25 Appearing and disappearing similarly, the Game Cat appears before Scribble for the first time. The Game Cat here and throughout acts as the Virgil to Scribble’s Dante. In the club, the Cat tells Scribble that he can  Noon, Vurt, 131.  Noon, Vurt, 131. 23  Noon, Vurt, 133. 24  Noon, Vurt, 133. 25  Noon, Vurt, 133. 21 22

4  ORPHEUS AND HIS LIMBIC DECKS: AVANT-PULP BRICOLAGE AND RITES… 

65

enter and exit the Vurt without feathers. Having been bit by a dreamsnake and survived, Scribble, like the Game Cat and the archetypal storyteller, is set apart or “chosen” to seek the knowledge of transformation. Scribble is uncomfortable with this: he thinks things are “getting worse” because he keeps “slipping in and out”26 of the Vurtual otherworld. He recognizes that he is not living on the edge of the threshold of two separate realms but is, instead, “living inside the edge!”27 Convincing Scribble that things are not getting worse, the Game Cat suggests that living inside the edge— the threshold that is neither above nor below—is a sign of things “getting better.”28 Scribble is slowly learning that he cannot escape into or from the Vurt but must learn to reconfigure the various relations that arise from their interaction. As if seeing himself in the crowd, occupying two locations at once, was not enough to convince Scribble, the Game Cat points his attention to Desdemona “waiting there, in the middle of the crush perfectly still, her yellow blouse flecked with blood, and her face scarred and cracked … beckoning to me, from the dance floor, her two arms outstretched, urging” like Eurydice calling out to her musician-husband Orpheus. As Scribble comes to terms with his Orphic role as bricoleur and storyteller of Madchester, he also sees Desdemona disappear, as he did, “into the smoke and blood”29 of the hallucinatory dancefloor. However, Scribble has not fully understood his role as storyteller and bricoleur as he still seeks stasis, stability, and eternity. Here, we see Scribble’s attraction to the pulsations of rave and techno: the repetitive loop operates as the perfect model for paradox and contradiction where entrapment and emancipation are superimposed. The dancefloor in Vurt, this closed liminal space beyond a threshold, becomes the site where content mirrors form. Music, like literature, has both emotional and intellectual effects. Scribble is frustrated, however, with both music and literature: he wants to use them to change reality, rather than simply allowing them to alter his perception of and attitudes towards experience. But, like everything in Vurt, this is a process. What Scribble will learn from both the liminal space of the dancefloor with its repetitive  Noon, Vurt, 140.  Noon, Vurt, 141. 28  Noon, Vurt, 141. 29  Noon, Vurt, 142. 26 27

66 

A. C. WENAUS

rhythms is what he will also learn from literature: that what he seeks is not a return to the nostalgic past but the virtuous path to chaotic creativity under endless construction. In this way, we see Scribble’s desire torn between two potentialities of rave music: a centralized authoritarian control through repetition (his desire to harness and control the past and stall the present) or new modes of inward composition and nuance (his transformation and ability to change). Theodor Adorno famously thought badly of repetitive, pop music. A group of individuals moving in unison to the centralized command of repetitive sounds signalled the fascist potential of twentieth-­ century mass communications. Adorno’s critiques, pessimistic as they are, did nevertheless prove accurate if we consider the shift rave culture underwent: from love and abandon to violence, crowd control, and mass commodification. Alternatively, in Jacques Attali’s seminal study Noise (1977), repetition is considered from a different perspective and one that Scribble must ultimately choose. Rather than condemning repetition to control and commodification, Attali draws attention to the importance of repetition, which invites variation and transformation within the constraints of closed, reiterative loops. Repetition invites an art of discipline, constraint, and focus: the composer and performer of rave and techno—and we might add the analogue of the author writing within the constraints of the novel—must work to nuance inwardly, within the closed-loop. As a result, repetition may temporarily reorganize chaos within the loop but must endlessly engage in this reconstruction to avoid the tedium of melancholic repetition. As the Orpheus of our text, Scribble is the artist seeking his lover and muse, desiring what is no longer physically present yet feels ever-­consuming. Like Eurydice, Desdemona will always, and tragically, slip away from Scribble. But when he muses, “Things we want the most, things that slip away,”30 he exposes himself as an immature artist. As the naïve artist undergoing a rite of passage, Scribble will eventually learn that art is not about the triumph of order over chaos but the coming-to-terms with the ever-shifting nature of chaos and disorder. Indeed, while the naïve storyteller seeks to set in stone and eternally possess the desired object, the mature storyteller-as-bricoleur accepts the slipping away and endlessly remixes that which is already at hand. It is, after all, the impossible desire

 Noon, Vurt, 142.

30

4  ORPHEUS AND HIS LIMBIC DECKS: AVANT-PULP BRICOLAGE AND RITES… 

67

and the spontaneous, unpredictable instances of grasping at a fleeing desire that acts as an infinite source of creative energy. One way to think about this is to turn to Félix Guattari’s identification of art as a “chaoid.” A chaoid can be defined as “a temporary organizer of chaos, a fragile architect of shared happiness and a common map of the imaginary.”31 Berardi writes that Guattari refers to artistic creation as “the production of refrains, perceptive tunings of a peculiar kind, which are constantly on the run, and incessantly renewing themselves.”32 Art, Berardi continues, “is the process of producing refrains, the creation of tuned rhythms. With the word ‘refrain,’ Guattari refers to rhythmic rituals, temporary and singular projective structures that make harmony … possible.”33 Scribble desperately wants art to do what only the naïve artist wishes: to produce the eternal. Of course, we know that nothing in Vurt is eternal, and everything is constantly in a state of upheaval, both emotionally and in the crumbling, glass-strewn Manchester. However, Berardi continues, “the structures produced and determined by desire are not eternal, and they are not models preexisting the singular imagination.”34 Scribble cannot have Desdemona back: he cannot write, exchange, or dance her back into existence. But, this is the point that he needs to learn. As the artist, Scribble will learn that he cannot sculpt chaos into order, flux into stability, or absence into presence in any lasting way. He must learn that the art of “remixing the night” must mean precisely not changing the past but proclaiming instead that the “things we want most, the things that slip away” are the impossible objects of art. Scribble is to learn that while the dancefloor and the novel are closed hermetic spaces beyond a liminal red rope, such portals to alternate experiences are ultimately pathways of confrontation and transformation. The technology of storytelling, then, is not about possessing the object of desire; it is about confronting the very process of desire. In the next chapter, we will consider how Noon literalizes the topsy-turvy anabasis/katabasis movement of the novel yet further by applying it to the novel’s form using the quintessential geometrical shape used to represent chaos theory: fractal geometry.

31  Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, trans. Francesca Cadel and Guiseppina Mecchia (South Pasadena: Semiotexte, 2009), 135. 32  Berardi, The Soul at Work, 135. 33  Berardi, The Soul at Work, 135. 34  Berardi, The Soul at Work, 135–136.

CHAPTER 5

Fractal Narrative and Chaos Theory: The Formal and Thematic Paradox of Escapism

Abstract  This chapter examines the tension between escapist melancholia, on the one hand, and how avant-pulp narrative, on the other, confronts the realities from which we seek release. Noon antagonizes this conundrum at the level of both content and form. Rather than composing Vurt according to the conventional narrative arc (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement), Noon structures the novel as a fractal: a paradoxical structure that has an infinite perimeter but finite area (it is infinitely complex, and yet never exceeds its boundaries). Ultimately, Noon employs chaos theory and fractal geometry to consider the characters’ compulsion to escape and the ultimate impossibility of doing so. If one cannot escape the past, Vurt demands that we confront it to create the future. Keywords  Chaos theory • Fractal geometry • Nonlinear dynamics • Trauma • Escapism • Paradox • Vurt feather (meanings) • Edward Lorenz • Vurt • Jeff Noon • Benoît Mandelbrot • Mandelbrot set • Feedback loops • Self-reflexivity • Recursive iteration • Science fiction A frequent, often misleading, criticism of sf is that it is escapist in nature. Spaceships, aliens, intergalactic adventures, and so on are predictable, consumable, immature modes of “blasting off” and escaping our everyday

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. C. Wenaus, Jeff Noon’s Vurt, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07029-7_5

69

70 

A. C. WENAUS

boredom and anxieties. While many works of sf are rapidly written, easily consumable, predictable formula pieces that serve this very purpose, Vurt confronts the problem of literature as escapist. As wildly entertaining and imaginative as Vurt is, Noon employs escapism to critique it. What a story is about is only one of many things he asks us to consider. Beyond this, he asks us to think about why we tell and retell the stories we do and examine how breaking narrative conventions and telling new, strange stories may help us re-enchant the way we see and live in the world. Rather than imaginatively blasting off into outer space from the comfort of our living rooms, Noon seeks solace, acceptance, and consolation by looking inward to the unpredictability of the imagination. Lamenting how our stories mirror preconceived expectations, Noon breaks this cycle of repetition by having the imagination mirror the imagination itself, resulting in feedback loops: ever-mutating, spiralling, kaleidoscopes of unpredictable wonder. Vurt addresses the ways that mourning, melancholia, and grief tempt us to escape, rather than face, trauma and loss. As a result, the desire to escape is at the centre of the novel’s content; however, Noon simultaneously addresses escapism’s impossibility through narrative form. A narrative arc’s conventional “shape” will include an exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement. To guide and organize this unpredictable, slippery narrative, however, Noon turns to a very different kind of narrative “shape”: the mathematical structure of a fractal—the kaleidoscopic psychedelic structure that endlessly repeats itself in self-similar ways no matter how far we zoom into, or out from, it. The fractal is both a shape from which there is no escape and one of infinite possibility, wonder, and beauty. Rather than a story that wraps up, concludes, and restores order, Vurt forever seeks resignation and consolation through storytelling. In his Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979), Darko Suvin remarks that sf is at its best when it allows readers to rehearse political and historical alternatives imaginatively. Suvin calls this the literature of cognitive estrangement. The process of cognitive estrangement, or denaturalization, helps us look at the past, present, and future from novel perspectives and offer imaginative insight into how stories can transform, rather than avoid, the everyday. From this perspective, the cognitive estrangement enabled by sf helps us imaginatively rehearse alternatives to inherited social, political, personal, and historical actualities. Rather than escapist, Noon’s work estranges the everyday with narrative repetitions and permutations in place of a traditionally structured story with a beginning, middle, and

5  FRACTAL NARRATIVE AND CHAOS THEORY: THE FORMAL… 

71

conclusion. In other words, Vurt is inspiring: a call to action and a workshop to imagine and implement alternatives. From Vurt onwards, Noon’s writing remains interested in the mathematics of nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory as a guiding principle for imaginative approaches to literature. A remarkable effect of reading Vurt is the way that it feels at once slippery, chaotic, and unpredictable and, simultaneously elegant, meticulously repetitive, and masterfully crafted. The novel feels disordered, yet it is ordered according to the narrative’s structural principle, constantly looping back upon itself, repeating itself, while both delighting and struggling to move on. The novel feels like a dream, like anything could happen, yet it is also doomed to repeat itself with variations. That chaos and fractal geometry govern the novel’s setting, content, and form is simply a recipe for a great novel, but also a reminder of the complexity and turbulence inherent in human relationships, trauma, and the struggle to avoid endlessly repeating the past. This repetitive, structural determinism is intimately linked to the theme of the novel. In an interview with Anthony Johnston, Noon remarks that If you actually examine Vurt, there are serious things going on in there which nobody ever talks about. It’s about escape, and facing up to the realities of what it is you’re trying to escape from. This is something that happens again and again in my work; it’s one of the themes that I pinpointed as being a typical Manchester story. The need to escape from your situation.1

What makes the theme of escape so poignant in Vurt is that the novel’s fractal structure makes the possibility of escape impossible. Scribble’s problem is that he is not ready, psychologically or emotionally, to imagine alternatives. He has lost something in the past, and he is hopelessly looking for it in all the wrong (Vurtual) places. No matter how strange, alien, delightful, or dreadful their Vurtual experiences, the characters always end up, to their surprise and disappointment, back where they started, incapable of moving forward, finding closure, or achieving solace. Interestingly, and a classic Noonian paradox, Vurt’s wildly original style and form offer alternate options for the future of sf writing while, at the same time, challenge the effectiveness of new stories to implement political, historical, social, and emotional alternatives beyond the page. 1  Anthony Johnston, “Jeff Noon: Needle in the Groove: Liquid Culture,” Spike Magazine, August 2000, https://spikemagazine.com/0800jeffnoon/.

72 

A. C. WENAUS

Scribble is trapped by his chaotic and traumatic past and the loss of his sister/lover, Desdemona. His very worldview is stuck in a loop, and he repeats his pain and loss endlessly, trying to change what happened instead of moving forward. However, this is not simply Scribble’s problem; it appears to be a ubiquitous concern for Manchester and its inhabitants. To step outside a worldview—particularly a deterministic and repetitive one— is a fundamentally paradoxical act since the sight of perception (the mind) is at once mutable and fixed. N. Katherine Hayles writes that the innocence of chaos is an assumption that is most tenable when one believes that the self is not itself constructed by the same forces that are replicated in theories and in the social matrix. When theory, self, and culture are caught in the postmodern loop, the construction of chaos cannot be unambiguous, because it derives from and feeds into the same forces that made us long for escape.2

Noon narrates this desire to escape with the feather hallucination episodes in the novel. In particular, the feather “Blue Lullaby” places special emphasis on escaping stress and daily burnout. The Game Cat explains that “BLUE LULLABY is for when life gets bad. When life deals a stupid hand. If you should ever find your give-a-fuck factor has gone down to zero, this is the feather for you.”3 This feather, Game Cat continues, is like being wrapped up in “blankets and cuddles” and makes the bad seem, “well, you know, kind of good all of a sudden.”4 Blue Lullaby “can cure the tiny troubles; it fucks out on the big troubles, just makes them worse. … [T]he Cat doesn’t like these let’s-make-everything-sweet feathers. Life’s to be lived, not to be dreamt about.”5 The takeaway: escaping problems begets deeper problems. It is no surprise, then, to learn that there are Vurts-within-Vurts-within-Vurts, ad infinitum. While the Vurt hallucinations are seemingly infinite, there is a sense of paradoxical claustrophobia to the novel6 since the characters are incorporated into a postmodern, fractal closed loop from which escape is seemingly impossible. 2  Katherine N.  Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 293. 3  Jeff Noon, Vurt (London: Pan, 2001), 91. 4  Noon, Vurt, 91. 5  Noon, Vurt, 91. 6  Ironically, the Game Cat may not be aware that the “[life] to be lived” to which he refers may in fact be within the hallucination or dream of the “young boy” (1, 327). Nevertheless,

5  FRACTAL NARRATIVE AND CHAOS THEORY: THE FORMAL… 

73

This is where Noon’s fascination with chaos theory, in general, and fractal geometry, in particular, comes in. Despite its intimidating name, the basics of chaos theory are pretty simple. It aims to explain how a small change in a system can cause big, unpredictable effects in the same system. The most famous example of this is called the Butterfly Effect attributed to meteorologist Edward Lorenz: the tiny changes in the atmosphere caused by a butterfly flapping its wings could have effects as huge as causing a tornado on another part of the planet. As James Gleick remarks, chaos theory was developed in the scientific community to examine “the irregular side of nature, the discontinuous and erratic side.”7 The theory seeks the inherent order in disorder. While chaos theorists were typically found in universities and research institutions’ labs, by the 1980s and 1990s, the concepts—particularly the beautiful, psychedelic computer-­ generated images, models, and graphics representative of these concepts— held a special appeal to certain countercultures. Noon’s interest in chaotics—a term “used to talk about the implications of chaos theory in the broad cultural context”8—comes from his involvement in the art, punk, and rave subcultures of Manchester during the 1980s and 1990s. With chaos theory, scientists considered the positive value of chaos; what was once considered interference, noise, and annoying excess became a source of order. Artists and cultural theorists also saw the positive value in chaos; however, they saw it not as a new source of order but a means to subvert established order and imagine alternatives. In sf studies, alongside Hayles’s work, one of the best and most sustained readings of chaos theory and fractal geometry and sf is Donald Palumbo’s Chaos Theory, Asimov’s Foundations and Robots, and Herbert’s Dune: The Fractal Aesthetic of Epic Science Fiction (2002). Palumbo examines Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, Robot, and Empire novels, Frank Herbert’s Dune series, and Joseph Campbell’s monomyth. Like Noon, Palumbo recognizes that literature, where form mirrors content, can be considered fractal. However, while Palumbo examines the large self-similar structures of metaseries (trilogies-within-trilogies), Noon eschews large, meta-structures of book series to consider the fractal pattern of a novel and its relation, not simply this passage does suggest that he is aware that simply moving from one Vurt to another—or one iteration to another—cannot, due to their fractal structure, be equated with escape. 7  James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987), 3. 8  Gordon E. Slethaug, Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics in Recent American Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), xii.

74 

A. C. WENAUS

to other literature, but the cognitive apparatus of the reader as a literary technology. In short, Palumbo considers the broad-scale fractal patterns in sf series. Alternatively, Noon looks inward, moving deeper and deeper into the fractal patterns that arise from reiterative, ever nuanced storytelling. Indeed, while both Palumbo and Noon cite Campbell’s rite of passage through the monomyth, Noon explicitly demonstrates that even the monomyth itself—as a kind of natural structure according to Campbell—is itself not a structural absolute, but that which itself must transform to beget transformations in the artist (or hero). Noon’s chaotics lie somewhere between these two tendencies: we can see that there is order in disorder and, at the same time, there is disorder in order. In short, when applied to human experience, chaotics offers metaphors for the ambiguity, messiness, and ambivalence of life. Human perception is unreliable, limited, emotional, inconsistent, and unpredictable. Yet, we often concede that science is solid, stable, unchanging truisms equivalent to reality when, technically, they are not. Rather, science offers evolving models of reality. As a result, Vurt reminds us that our unpredictable minds are materially part of and respond to the wildly strange, unpredictable, and messy reality that chaos theory and the new sciences aim to measure, model, and understand. This is why Noon’s fiction, though informed by science and mathematics, feels so dreamlike: it is joyful and mournful, meticulously crafted and wildly unpredictable, hilarious and grave. Noon imagines the chaotic universe not only as an opportunity to rupture arbitrary structures but, as Hayles puts it, as a “complex configuration within which order is implicitly encoded.”9 As a result, Noon adheres to representational strategies more appropriate than literary realism to a chaotic reality. If there is no way to escape, perhaps there is order to be renovated, remixed, and restored within the closed system. Consider the use of the feather as the central metaphor for escapism: it is striking for both its delicacy and its superimposed meanings. The feather is a great example of Noonian wordplay. The feather/plume metaphor informs the story in five ways: the first three reflect the word Old French cognate, “plume,” while the remaining two refer to purging. The first refers to a central image of chaos, “a plume of smoke [rising] smoothly from an ashtray, accelerating until it passes a critical velocity and splinters into wild eddies.”10 The second meaning is appropriate for writing fiction: 9

 Hayles, Chaos Bound, 25.  Gleick, Chaos, 122.

10

5  FRACTAL NARRATIVE AND CHAOS THEORY: THE FORMAL… 

75

the plume as a writing implement. Thirdly, to plume, as a verb, refers to a feeling of ease or satisfaction with oneself. There are two additional meanings related to purging or release relevant here: first, “spitting feathers” can refer to an expression of anger or rage. And, finally, a feather is known to be used by the ancient Romans to purge or vomit to ease illnesses of the stomach: consider this line from Tacitus on the murder of the emperor Claudius: “As if he were helping Claudius in his efforts to vomit, Xenophon, it is thought, put down his throat a feather smeared with fast-­ working poison.”11 Most certainly, Scribble is seeking an analogous purge or release though specifically of an emotional kind. All meanings knot with one another and remind us of the central theme of Vurt: the act of writing is equated with accessing virtual reality to escape or solve problems that are otherwise beyond one’s control. In either case, however, Scribble is stuck in a closed loop with his story. Recall that the opening sentence of Vurt, “A young boy puts a feather into his mouth,”12 precedes the first chapter. Correspondingly, the last chapter is followed by “a young boy takes a feather out of his mouth.”13 As Butler notes, this framing device suggests that the whole narrative may be the Vurt hallucination—the closed-loop experience—of an unnamed boy.14 In part, the novel’s remove from ordinary reality lends itself to a narrative structure that moves between Vurts, meta-Vurts, meta-meta-­ Vurts, and so on ad infinitum (or, Vurts-within-Vurts-within-Vurts-­­ within-Vurts and so on). Vurt occurs entirely within a virtual space that shifts into further meta-virtual spaces. Consequently, the relationship between different levels of realities represented by the repetitive narrative structure of Vurt demands a shift in the way we think about our relationship to virtual spaces of varying kinds. After all, even the most ordinary scene in a novel finds itself in a novel, and the way we see the world is a mental representation of a mind-independent reality. In short, all perception is virtual; neuropunk emphasizes this point and Noon engages it directly by structuring Vurt as a narrative fractal.

11  Cornelius Tacitus, The Annals: the Reigns of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero, trans. John Yardley and Anthony Barrett (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 268. 12  Noon, Vurt, 1. 13  Noon, Vurt, 327. 14  Andrew M. Butler, “Journeys Beyond Being: The Cyberpunk-Flavored Novels of Jeff Noon,” Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives, eds. Graham J. Murphy and Sherryl Vint (New York: Routledge, 2010), 76.

76 

A. C. WENAUS

Chaos theorists developed fractal geometry as a supplement to Euclidean geometry to examine irregular and complex structures in nature. Fractals are shapes or structures that display similar detail at any degree of magnification. The term fractal, coined by mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975, is derived from the Latin adjective fractus, “from the verb fragere, to break.”15 Mandelbrot found two English cognates, fracture and fraction, that communicated the proper connotations. An interesting and mind-boggling feature of a fractal is that it occupies a finite area. Yet, the length of its perimeter is infinite. Gleick cites one of the most simplistic fractal structures, the Koch curve, to illustrate this paradox: “begin with a triangle with sides of length 1. At the middle of each side, add a new triangle one-third the size; and so on. The length of the boundary is 3 X 4/3 X 4/3 X 4/3 …—infinity. Yet the area remains less than the area of a circle drawn around the original triangle. Thus an infinitely long line surrounds a finite area.”16 The second notable quality of a fractal is self-similarity. Self-similarity is “symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside pattern. … Monstrous shapes like the Koch curve display self-similarity because they look exactly the same even under high magnification. … Its images are everywhere in the culture: in the infinitely deep reflection of a person standing between two mirrors, or in the cartoon notion of a fish eating a smaller fish eating a smaller fish eating a smaller fish.”17 These complex qualities are achieved through simple recursive iteration. Leonard Smith describes recursive iteration like this: “you put a number in and you get a new number out, which you put back in, to get yet a newer number out, which you put back in. And so on.”18 With this in mind, it makes sense that, no matter how far you zoom into a fractal, the same patterns emerge again and again. We also note why structuring a narrative as a fractal, rather than an arc, is appropriate for Noon’s examination of the paradoxes of escape through repetition, remix, and permutation. Indeed, fractals are valuable metaphors for postmodern structures of all kinds. Hayles argues that postmodern spaces are those that cannot be

 Gleick, Chaos, 98.  Gleick, Chaos, 99. 17  Gleick, Chaos, 103. 18  Smith, Leonard. Chaos: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 33. 15 16

5  FRACTAL NARRATIVE AND CHAOS THEORY: THE FORMAL… 

77

described using traditional Cartesian models,19 while McHale remarks that despite the anti-realistic quality of postmodern writing, the mode nevertheless “turns out to be mimetic after all … at the level of form.”20 Not only is fractal geometry “emerging as an important area of research because it is one way of conceptualizing and understanding postmodern space,” writes Hayles, but it is also “a source of this space.”21 Likewise, a fractal’s self-similarity quality on all iterative scales is useful for examining narratives that shift in and out of various reality levels without physically going anywhere. The spatiality expressed in Vurt estranges reality through surreal events and unpredictable structure, and fractal geometry is the inspiration and guide for some of these destabilizations. While Butler suggests that, in general, “spatial metaphors will always let us down,”22 fractal geometry suggests a spatiality that is formulated on, as Scott Bukatman says of the most famous fractal, the Mandelbrot set, “an object that is not an object, a bounded form which contains the infinite.”23 That is, a closed loop from which there is no escape, yet seductive in its endlessness: perhaps, despite repetition-with-variation, something desired will arrive if only one keeps seeking. Since the entire narrative of Vurt is arguably estranged from “ordinary” reality, the reader may be apt to think differently about the novel’s conception of space. Noon’s framing device suggests that even the non-­ hallucinatory scenes in Vurt may be the hallucinations of the otherwise unnamed “young boy” and consequently occur solely in simulations of ordinary space. As hinted at above, all Vurt hallucinations in the novel take place in a meta-Vurt, while the evidently “meta-Vurt” scenes induced by the “Curious Yellow” feather24 take place in what is a “meta-meta-Vurt.” The spatial structure of Vurt may be systematized as follows: first, there is the real, non-fictional space in which the reader’s mind perceives the 19  Hayles cites Jean Baudrillard’s precession of simulacra, “where there are only copies of copies in an endless display of self-similar forms,” none of which can be considered the original, and William Gibson’s cyberspace, where human beings and computers become “equally sentient entities vying for control of a space that is very real but entirely different from everyday life,” as two examples of postmodern spaces. Hayles, Chaos Bound, 289. 20  Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), 38. 21  Hayles, Chaos Bound, 289. 22  Andrew M.  Butler, “LSD, Lying Ink, and Lies, Inc.,” Sci-Fi Studies, 32 no. 2 (July 2005): 276. 23  Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 114. 24  Noon, Vurt, 80.

78 

A. C. WENAUS

physical book. The young boy’s fictional space—that is Vurt’s narrative— constitutes the primary virtual space. The secondary virtual spaces correspond to the hallucinations experienced by various characters. The tertiary virtual spaces are those in which feathers are consumed by characters already in a secondary virtual space. This structural succession, in true fractal fashion, could technically continue ad infinitum. In the novel’s first Vurt hallucination scene, Scribble, Beetle, Mandy, Bridget, and the Thing-from-Outer-Space occupy what they believe to be an apartment building in ordinary, originary space. The Stash Riders have returned to their apartment, which is characterized by unremarkable objects such as “a settee,” a “window,” a “Turkish rug,”25 and so on. When Beetle force-feeds Scribble a “Skull Shit” feather,26 however, the latter notes: “I could feel it there, tickling, making me want to gag. And then the Vurt kicked in. And then I was gone.”27 At this moment, the narrative space is radically altered, though the characters themselves never physically relocate. As the feather kicks-in, Scribble describes the transformation of the apartment: Screaming down tunnels of brain flesh, putting thoughts together, building words and cries, cries of the heart. Electric impulses, leading me on, the room wallpapered in reds and pinks, blood all flowing down from the ceiling. Brid hiding behind the settee. The Beetle taking Mandy from behind the Turkish rug. A Thing-from-Outer-Space floating in the air, gently landing on the dining table. Me walking through a swamp of flesh towards the kitchen door, in search of breakfast cereal. Stepping over Beetle and Mandy, finding the kitchen door locked and barred, looking just like a wall of beef. Blood pulsing from the keyhole.28

What is notable about the first description of a Vurt hallucination is that Scribble carefully catalogues the now transformed objects in the apartment. Without moving, they are somewhere else; without going anywhere, space has been altered, shifted, or reapplied somehow. But, the narrative has been relocated only in the sense that it has moved from one fractal iteration to another. While the preceding iteration characteristics— such as the objects in the room—remain present, they are altered through  Noon, Vurt, 26.  Noon, Vurt, 27. 27  Noon, Vurt, 29. 28  Noon, Vurt, 29. 25 26

5  FRACTAL NARRATIVE AND CHAOS THEORY: THE FORMAL… 

79

successive recursion. The location has been transformed but not transferred, and the objects, orientation, and characters retain their self-­ similarity. The metamorphosis of objects in the apartment consequently provides the first example of how fractal space functions in Vurt. The settee, the Turkish rug, and the kitchen door do not, for example, become clocks or clouds. Rather they remain, in some objective sense, the same objects in the same place, yet cognitively transformed. The traditional narrative arc, the easy-to-navigate map of a city, or a well-ordered pathway from one location to another brings a sense of ease and convenience to everyday life. They impose simple order on a complex, disordered world. Hayles and Gleick both consider the analogy of movement through urban space with the help of maps and grids29 as an example of an actuality modelled scientifically, the scientific model then affirms an actuality, and so the cycle continues. For example, a cityscape may be encoded as a grid, the grid then legitimates the cityscape, suggesting a feedback loop. Grids and maps serve a similar function as fractal geometry: the two are tools for conceptualizing space and ultimately become sources for creating spatial models. However, while maps and grids bring simplicity to a complex reality, fractals employ complexity to model the order inherent in disorder. Noon extends the metaphor of the fractal not only to virtual spatiality, but to the desire for a meaningful, ordered existence; that is, this is not the Manchester we see on a map, but a Manchester of the mind. When Scribble says that all we want is “a squaring of the tides,”30 he identifies the incompatibility of his desire for simple order with the chaotics of reality. Scribble does not move into a new space that can be conceptualized according to grids; he is not, for example, moved in terms of coordinates from the room to the Arctic Circle. Nevertheless, a shift does occur. The result of recursive narrative iteration is one of dislocation, from a fractal coordinate to a self-similar fractal coordinate—the movement from Vurt to a meta-Vurt. That is, there is a shift from a typical apartment to the self-­ similar organic fleshy room. The movement through space that occurs in the novel when shifting among Vurt, meta-Vurt, and meta-meta-Vurt, and so on is best understood, not as a movement from one locale to another, but as a succession of iterations within the fractal setting that Noon establishes through his fractal narrative. And while the rules of  Hayles, Chaos Bound, 288–289; Gleick, Chaos, 97.  Noon, Vurt, 201.

29 30

80 

A. C. WENAUS

mathematics are rigid, Noon’s dreamlike narrative is slippery, highly imaginative, and chaotic. Having written a novel that presents a narrative structure that shifts along a succession of metaphorical iterations, Noon puts a sample of text in and gets a new sample of text out à la metamorphiction. By rewriting a sample of the text itself, producing meta-texts or meta-­ Vurts, the narrative represents and depends on self-similarity, like a fractal. As a result, fractal geometry does not only guide the setting of Vurt. Noon also has form and compositional method mirror one another. Perhaps the most notable example of the novel’s fractal structure and its relation to escapism and estrangement in storytelling can be found in the mirroring chapters “My first words”31 and “Tapewormer.”32 In these chapters, Scribble enters the Vurt realm by ingesting a Tapewormer feather. In doing so, his ultimate goal is to rewrite the past, recede into memory, and rework the novel’s opening; that is, to rewrite the past to change the present. The chapter “My first words” is Scribble’s account of writing the opening lines of Vurt: “I remember thinking that if I ever get out of this with a body and soul still connected, well then,” he writes, “I was going to tell the whole story, and this is how it would start.”33 The following sentence is identical to that which opens the first chapter of the novel: “Mandy came out of the all-night Vurt-U-Want, clutching a bag of goodies.”34 But rather than continuing with his writing, Scribble drops another Vurt feather into his mouth, hoping he can rewrite the past from the past’s future (i.e. the present). That is, rather than making an attempt to consolidate his past through writing and self-reflection, Scribble simply desires to escape and experience the opening of the novel differently, or as he puts it: “to feel the fade before the hit.”35 Juxtaposing the “Stash Riders” episode (the opening chapter of the novel) with the “Tapewormer” chapter clarifies the space that structures the narrative. The space Scribble enters in “Tapewormer” cannot be regarded as a traditional narrative flashback or a narrative shift in chronology, nor can the obvious differences be blamed on Scribble’s unreliable narration. Rather, the similarities the reader notes between the “Tapewormer” episode and the novel’s opening result from the  Noon, Vurt, 170–172.  Noon, Vurt, 173–188. 33  Noon, Vurt, 7. 34  Noon, Vurt, 7, 171. 35  Noon, Vurt, 172. 31 32

5  FRACTAL NARRATIVE AND CHAOS THEORY: THE FORMAL… 

81

correspondence between the narrative structure and the fractal quality of self-similarity along different stages of iteration. “Stash Riders” begins with the sentence, “Mandy came out of the all-night Vurt-U-Want, clutching a bag of goodies.”36 It differs from the first line of “Tapewormer” by the substitution of a name: “Desdemona37 came out of the all-night Vurt-­ U-­ Want, clutching a bag of goodies.”38 In “Stash Riders,” the opening line is followed by a scene describing the slums of Manchester— complete with “a genuine dog, flesh and blood mix” and a homeless “robo-crusty” with “a thick headful of droidlocks and a dirty handwritten card—‘hungry n homeless. please help.’”39 The “Tapewormer” account, however, is without description of the city; the opening line is simply followed by the statement, “[there] was no trouble, a nice clean pick-up. Des is an expert and we love her for that.”40 The discrepancies between the descriptions of Desdemona, the “expert,” and Mandy, who is “all twitching steps and head-jerks,”41 do not, however, affect the structural similarities between the two sections. The descriptive omission of the city in the second account also serves this agenda. While structurally the two passages are inextricably self-similar, the differences in recalling the events result from Scribble’s desire to rewrite events. At the opening of “Stash Riders,” Mandy is assigned to pick up an English Voodoo feather, an act she fails to accomplish. The Stash Riders are left waiting in the van for the new girl. Beetle was up front, ladies’ leather gloves pulled tight onto his fingers, smeared with Vaz. … I was in the back, perched on the left-side wheel housing, Bridget on the other, sleeping. Some thin  Noon, Vurt, 7.  The reference is to Shakespeare’s Othello (1603): the unshakeably faithful Desdemona remains loyal to her delusional and jealous husband even as he takes her life. Noon’s naming of Scribble’s lover as Desdemona is consequently ironic. Desdemona readily accepts Scribble’s self-sacrificing exchange of himself for her, which allows her to exit the Vurt and return to Manchester. Her devotion, unlike that of Shakespeare’s heroine’s, is entirely to herself. For an excellent examination of Noon’s engagement and reworking on Othello, see Sujata Iyengar, “The Post-Shakespearean Body Politic in Jeff Noon’s Vurt,” Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare, 33 no. 10 (2015): https://journals.openedition.org/ shakespeare/3546. 38  Noon, Vurt, 173. 39  Noon, Vurt, 7. 40  Noon, Vurt, 173. 41  Noon, Vurt, 7. 36 37

82 

A. C. WENAUS

wisps of smoke were rising from her skin. The Thing-from-Outer-Space lay between us, writhing on the tartan rug. He was leaking oil and wax all over the place, lying in a pool of his own juices.42

The “Tapewormer” episode, on the other hand, unfolds a little differently. Scribble writes, [W]e rode the stash back to the flat, the fearless four of us: Beetle and Bridget, Desdemona and I.  The Beetle was up front, the van pilot, Vaz-­ smeared for extra performance. I was on the left-side wheel housing, Brid was on the right. She was fast asleep, so what’s new? Desdemona was sitting between us, slightly forward, with the treasure sack in her lap.43

The first passage notes that they are “waiting in the van for the new girl” while the second omits any mention of waiting altogether; additionally, the latter passage replaces the unsuccessful Mandy with the successful Desdemona. Of course, if a character went into the all-night Vurt-U-­ Want, the other characters waited in the van; the omission is Scribble emphasizing what he wants—the structural actuality of the events, again, remains self-similar. How Scribble treats the naming of the characters in the two passages is also significant. While in the first passage Scribble dismisses Mandy by calling her “the new girl” rather than by her proper name, he seems to treat the naming of characters with more care in the second. The characters are paired according to their emotional connections with one another: “Beetle and Bridget, Desdemona and [Scribble],” while in the first passage, each character is treated in isolation from the others. Nevertheless, the two accounts’ fractal nature is determined by a formal and contextual self-similarity. The deterministic self-similarity among different successive iterations of the fractal story becomes increasingly apparent in “Tapewormer.” In the van, on the route back to the apartment, Desdemona displays the “Takshaka Yellow” feather: “Takshaka Yellow,” she said, all quiet like. There was a suck of breath as we all breathed it in, all those perfumes, those pleasures to come. “Takshaka?” I said, unbelieving.  Noon, Vurt, 7.  Noon, Vurt, 173.

42 43

5  FRACTAL NARRATIVE AND CHAOS THEORY: THE FORMAL… 

83

“Takshaka fucking Yellow!” screamed the Beetle, letting the wheel slip for a second. I felt the van careen over to the pavement, and then the jolt as it took the kerb at speed. For a second or two we were travelling in chaos.44

Beetle’s interjection prompts Scribble unsuccessfully to order him to stop disrupting the harmony of the scene: “Beetle! You shouldn’t be doing that! … Because this is supposed to be perfect. … [T]his is my trip, Beetle. … Let me ride it.”45 But Beetle’s actions appear to be determined to follow the same structural pattern as that in “Stash Riders.” When Scribble ordered to stop destroying the scene that Scribble wants to take place, Beetle is unmoved: “‘Tell me why, little man?!’ he screamed. And then: ‘Awooooooh!!!!! Let’s rock!’ And he drove that van into a let’s all go out in a blaze of yellow glory.”46 Beetle’s response to Scribble’s plea for a perfectly re-imagined narrative, “Fuck perfect,”47 corresponds to the consistency of self-similar structure despite the different iterative locations on the fractal narrative. Indeed, both incidents lead to scenes of narrative self-similarity. The chapter “(Some Serious) Skull Shit” opens with this scene: Brid was slumped on the settee, slow-gazing at the two-week-old copy of the Game Cat. Beetle was standing by the window, leafing through the feather stash. He had the snake head pinned to his jacket lapel. I had the right side of my face laid out on the dining table, my left eye fixed on a small lump of apple jam. … The Thing-from-Outer-Space was lying on the floor, waving for a fix, his grease dripping onto Bridget’s Turkish rug.48

The parallel passage in “Tapewormer” is as follows: We made an easy, snakeless flight up the stairways, into the pad, which welcomed us with a show of lights. Now Brid was slumped on the settee, slow-­ gazing at a three-week-old copy of the Game Cat. Beetle was standing by the window, stroking the saffron feather.49

 Noon, Vurt, 174.  Noon, Vurt, 174. 46  Noon, Vurt, 174. 47  Noon, Vurt, 174. 48  Noon, Vurt, 26. 49  Noon, Vurt, 177. 44 45

84 

A. C. WENAUS

What Scribble attempts to retell in “Tapewormer” is ultimately in vain. Both scenes lead to unfulfilling shifts into a Vurt hallucination: in “(Some Serious) Skull Shit,” the shift is into a second iteration meta-Vurt (a Vurt-­ within-­a-Vurt), while “Tapewormer” presents a meta-meta-Vurt (a Vurt-­ within-­a-Vurt-within-a-Vurt), or third iteration of the fractal narrative. Consequently, both the space and time that the novel inhabits are determined by the quality of self-similarity in the narrative structure. From the fractal quality of the narrative down to the closed loop of the protagonist’s own consciousness, the relationship between the form, setting, and content of the novel is ultimately metonymic (i.e. like a fractal, a part can stand-in for the whole). Hayles argues that “many scientists have commented that working on chaos has allowed them to renew their sense of wonder,”50 that “chaos is an image for what can be touched but not grasped, felt but not seen,” and that it signifies something more than “novelty.”51 For Noon, chaos theory offers models for the imagination of the writer: a new kind of fiction patiently waits in the complex, chaotic, excess of contemporary life for an author to recognize its form. For Scribble, however, the order chaos theory discovers in disorder gives him false hope that he will find—literally or metaphorically—what he has lost. Scribble cannot escape the past or the present by journeying into Vurtual realms but must find consolation by acknowledging and confronting the source of his trauma: his abusive father. We will examine this tormented confrontation alongside a shift from fractal self-similarity to the “self-­ reflexivity” of another mathematical structure with which Noon is fascinated, the “strange loop,” as we wrap up our discussion in the next chapter.

 Hayles, Chaos Bound, 292.  Hayles, Chaos Bound, 293.

50 51

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: What Literature Thinks—Vurt and Neuroemancipation

Abstract  This chapter considers the way Noon imagines alternatives when there appears to be no escape. Because repetition and reiteration are central to the novel, Noon employs Douglas R. Hofstadter’s concept of the “strange loop” to investigate this impasse. A “strange loop” is a structure that, no matter how once moves through it upwards or downwards, one always lands at the point of departure. At once a metaphor for trauma, strange loops also represents an individual’s struggle for autonomy in the digital era. While digital technologies increasingly seek to “think” for us, Noon asks what literature itself can think. While Vurt can be a heartbreaking novel, it also affirms the power of creative, poetic energy, and art’s role in reshaping lived reality. Keywords  Franco “Bifo” Berardi • Neuro-totalitarianism • Neuroplasticity • Byung-Chul Han • Psychopolitics • Neurosubjection • Neuroemancipation • Digital technologies • Biopolitics • Big Data • Douglas R. Hofstadter • Strange loops • Alain Badiou • Unthinkable thought • Jeff Noon • Vurt • Science fiction Reading Vurt nearly three decades after its publication is an experience as disarming as it is nourishing. To conclude this short book, we will consider how Vurt inaugurates Noon’s ongoing project to see what literature © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. C. Wenaus, Jeff Noon’s Vurt, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07029-7_6

85

86 

A. C. WENAUS

can think and how literature thinks us. Furthermore, we will consider how through the novel’s loopy, paradoxical structuring of levels of reality, we are invited into a self-reflexive rite of passage from which we emerge equipped to think singular literary futures both on and off the page. One of the major features that have changed since the publication of Vurt is that, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, we engage daily with technologies that profoundly affect our nervous systems. Yet, the mind’s merging with digital technologies brings us closer to neither Gibson’s vision of cyberspace nor Noon’s unpredictable realm of dreams and imagination. When we look out the window, we do not see the world of Blade Runner, Neuromancer, Synners, or Schismatrix. This is, of course, a relief for most. However, neither do we see the utopian world as Asimov, Clarke, and Le Guin, or the Modernist avant-gardists envisioned. Instead, we see a world largely unchanged since the 1980s: professional precarity, the commodification of the most private aspects of our lives, gentrification, exponentially unequal distribution of wealth, and addictions to escape, substances both legal and prohibited, pornography, and nostalgia. Indeed, it is a sad state of affairs when we see in ourselves only the anxious, narcotized, ceaselessly working, overstimulated bureaucrat Sniffing General. To borrow a sentiment from cultural theorist Mark Fisher, we are confronted with the reality that the future we were promised failed to arrive. If we live in a dystopia, it is a banal dystopia. If we live in utopian times, then these times are equally banal. Yet, perhaps this is all simply a failure of the imagination. “When the punks cried ‘No Future,’ at the turning point of 1977,” Berardi writes, “it was the announcement of something quite important: the perception of the future was changing. The future … is a modality of projection and imagination, a feature of expectation and attention, and its modalities and features change.”1 The apparent banality of the state of the world need not neutralize the potency of the imagination to project novel alternatives for living and creating. Singular texts like Vurt, that is, offer new modalities for the imagination to dream of alternative futures. For Noon, the future is never this or that; it is always invented and re-­ invented in the unpredictable, ever-changing features of the now. While not a cyberpunk novel, Vurt is very much punk in spirit. The novel imagines opportunities to re-perceive the future as always arriving here 1  Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After the Future, eds. Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn (Oakland: AK Press, 2011), 25.

6  CONCLUSION: WHAT LITERATURE THINKS—VURT… 

87

and now at the site of our self-reflexive perception: our nervous systems. Like so many great artists, Noon recognizes that, in the apparent banality of any experience, also resides beauty, horror, impotence, and potentialities. Vurt is about the past: loss, trauma, and grief. It is also about the present and the future: love, consolation, and the search for knowledge and virtue. And, yet, the novel resists a closed understanding because the reiterative, self-similar, and self-reflexive levels in the novel also extend beyond the page. As readers, interpreters, mourners, and/or creators are both dreaming and part of what our stories dream. Noon asks readers to gaze through the loopy lens of the avant-pulp to bear witness to the potentialities and possibilities that we meet in the paradoxes of discordant mergers. In 1918, Tzara wrote of the anti-art movement Dada that freedom of thought and expression must be consistent with the incongruities of life itself: the “interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies.”2 A century later, this still rings true, and for Noon, or is always superimposed with an eternal and. The merging of the nervous system with digital technologies has accelerated tremendously since Vurt’s publication. The internet has increasingly become characterized as what Noon calls a confirmation machine. And, we all spend much time online both at work and in leisure. As a result, there is a special urgency for more open ways of thinking. New stories are required for this. Such stories salvage, experiment with, create, and reconstruct our neuroplasticity; new, experimental ways of telling stories prepare us for a flexible, hybrid, and endlessly plastic individuality. Indeed, reading Vurt can act as a starting place for this new kind of flexible, plastic, and unpredictable engagement with the world, art, the technology of literature, others, and ourselves. However, doing so may not be an entirely straightforward task. The encroachment of technologies that harness and steer the neuroplasticity of human beings, after all, did not simply happen overnight. “The history of the last fifty years can be read from the point of view of the relation between subjectivity and automation, the replacement of a living process by a technological artifact,”3 writes Berardi. He continues: “this process 2  Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto 1918,” The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Dawn Ades (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 42. 3  Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “The Neuroplastic Dilemma: Consciousness and Evolution,” E-Flux, 60 (December 2014): https://www.e-flux.com/journal/60/61034/the-neuroplastic-dilemma-consciousness-and-evolution/.

88 

A. C. WENAUS

poses a major threat to the autonomy of subjectivation: language, memory, and imagination are more and more performed by machines, and the human learning process is more and more pervaded by the automated process of enunciation.”4 Vurt suggests that seeking knowledge of others and ourselves in this brave new world is a virtuous pursuit: the outcome can be disastrous and/or emancipatory, grief-ridden and/or consoling. Noon argues that avant-pulp literature can generate an emancipating force with which we are invited to meet and, in turn, be transformed. The avant-­pulp seeks a plastic psyche adept at receiving and generating new enunciations. Unsurprisingly, then, like everything in Noon’s fiction, “the concept of neuroplasticity is double-edged.”5 Digital technologies can hijack our neuroplasticity; however, neuroplasticity can also be emancipated by literary technologies. Marking out two very different outcomes of the technological seizure of the nervous system, Berardi recognizes that this process, like those in Vurt, could unfold very differently. Neuroplasticity, on the one hand, can lead to neurosubjection, while, on the other, it can prompt neuroemancipation. We will begin by looking at neurosubjection and consider how Vurt transcends this process via neuroemancipation.

Neuroplasticity, Psychopolitics, and Neurosubjection: Fleshcops, Shadowcops, and the Psyche Berardi writes, “[I]f the neural system is plastic, it is possible to develop a project of neurosubjection and cognitive mutation.”6 In this scenario, the individual (or agent) becomes a subject of corporate or governmental entities at the unconscious level of neuroactivity. Berardi refers to this process as “neuro-totalitarianism”:7 an invisible infiltration of the public’s minds and souls by the logic of profit where “political domination is ­internalised and indistinguishable from the machine itself.”8 The goal is to eliminate the distinction between machines and people via largely  Berardi, “The Neuroplastic Dilemma.”  Berardi, “The Neuroplastic Dilemma.” 6  Berardi, “The Neuroplastic Dilemma.” 7  See Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Neuro-Totalitarianism in Technomaya Goog-Colonization of the Experience and Neuro-Plastic Alternative (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e)), 2014. 8  Berardi, After the Future, 23. 4 5

6  CONCLUSION: WHAT LITERATURE THINKS—VURT… 

89

imperceptible methods of persuasion. In short, even our dreams, desires, anxieties, and imaginations are being mobilized to benefit the already powerful. In his short book Psychopolitics (2017), the philosopher Byung-Chul Han offers a critique of neoliberalism’s innocuous but insidious ability to capture and steer the productive forces of our very psyches. The term “psychopolitics” here develops philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of “biopolitics.” Biopolitics, Foucault argues, begins to emerge in the seventeenth century. It is a complex and multifaceted concept, but we can define it here as the mutual merging of life and politics for our purposes. Replacing older forms of governance where the sovereign has the right to repress, destroy, or use violence as a means of control, biopolitics, instead, seizes and steers by offering and enforcing development, optimization, and security. Biopolitics can express how the state or other governing force can manage and control all aspects of life. Think of the role of the Fleshcops in Vurt (and in our own lives) as one aspect of biopolitical oppression. The Fleshcops are the “mealy mouthed,”9 “flesh and blood,”10 “real-life versions”11 of cops, stereotyped by their “bulbous” guts,12 clumsiness,13 and propensity to go “for panic mode”14 and start “firing.”15 But, this management does not only come from without (the threat of police repression); it is also a kind of governance from within whereby the subject manages and controls every aspect of their own life down to the tiniest details just in case someone is watching. But, as we will see, much of Vurt is more consistent with the psychopolitics of Han than the biopolitics of Foucault and why this is another reason the novel resonates with such timely significance today. For Han, psychopolitics extends this process beyond the body to the unconscious and the psyche itself. Psychopolitics, therefore, becomes a “more efficient technology of power.”16 In this way, we no longer need to be controlled, disciplined, and exploited by a sovereign power; we  Noon, Vurt, 49.  Noon, Vurt, 49. 11  Noon, Vurt, 9. 12  Noon, Vurt, 113. 13  Noon, Vurt, 281. 14  Noon, Vurt, 282. 15  Noon, Vurt, 282. 16  Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Erik Butler (London: Verso, 2017), 26. 9

10

90 

A. C. WENAUS

internalize these managerial processes and auto-control, auto-discipline, and auto-exploit ourselves instead, Han argues. The paradox that we face today is that we assert ourselves using the terminology and logic of data collection categories that have already been handed to us by marketing firms and media corporations; as a result, we do not emancipate or “find ourselves” but instead passionately offer ourselves back as valuable data to the very category-creating entities that limit, calculate, and rationalize our expressiveness, spontaneity, and plurality. This process is innocuous because we do not recognize it and passively participate in it. If we actively notice this process, it elicits one of two responses: first, paranoia with the realization that an external agency has infiltrated one’s private thoughts or, second, a complex self-reflexive battle with aspects of the self from within the self. We will take a look at both processes as they unfold in Vurt. The first of these responses is expressed by the paranoia Scribble and the Stash Riders experience when Mandy spots, not Fleshcops, but a Shadowcop “broadcasting from the store wall, working his mechanisms; flickering lights in smoke. And then a flash or orange; an inpho beam shining out from the shadowcop’s eyes. It caught Mandy in its flare-path, gathering knowledge.”17 That is, gathering knowledge as data. This recognition of the Shadowcop’s inpho beam elicits paranoia: noticing this, Mandy ducks “down from the beam, banging, hard-core, on the van doors.”18 Indeed, “everybody was afraid of the shadowcops” because “there was a rumour going around that they could beam right into your brains, reading your thoughts there.”19 But, as Scribble suspects, the omnipotent powers of the shadowcops are “not true.”20 Instead, shadowcops can only collect “what their beams could see … only the everyday surfaces”21 because, Scribble asserts, “shadowcops ain’t got souls.”22 He elsewhere explains that “Shadows are the thought-readers. They are born with the powers of telepathy, and their mind can bypass the vocal cords, putting words into your brain, and stealing the secrets that you thought were yours alone.”23 “Shadowcops,” he continues, “are the same, but

 Noon, Vurt, 8.  Noon, Vurt, 8. 19  Noon, Vurt, 26. 20  Noon, Vurt, 26. 21  Noon, Vurt, 26. 22  Noon, Vurt, 26. 23  Noon, Vurt, 35. 17 18

6  CONCLUSION: WHAT LITERATURE THINKS—VURT… 

91

mixed up with robo, rather than flesh,24 so they’re not as strong; they can’t go deep down, into the soul.”25 In this sense, the Shadowcops are posited somewhere between biopolitics and psychopolitics and are consistent with data capture technologies of the early twenty-first century. Shadowcops can only read “surfaces,” and their knowledge is superficial, yet its effects— self-discipline, self-control, and self-regulation—are nevertheless effective. As a result, this first kind of response to the recognition of psychopolitical infiltration, paranoia, is reasonable. Shadowcops cannot, after all, get access to the soul or, in other words, the psyche. So, Fleshcops are emblematic of biopolitical control (they regulate, threaten, and discipline the body), and shadowcops represent semi-­ psychopolitical control. Han’s psychopolitics, however, is most explicitly about technologies that regulate and steer the psyche from a without that is also a within: a complex self-reflexive battle with aspects of the psyche. Here, we can turn to the second kind of response to psychopolitical awareness in Vurt: that of a complex, self-reflexive struggle against a force that is both from without and from within. For Han, psychopolitics is an intimate process made possible by the ubiquitous use of media technologies and the collection of Big Data. The more we use online media technologies, the more online algorithms understand us. Once they understand us, these algorithmic procedures aim to direct and steer our behaviour. That is, the processes use us when we think that we are using them. Unlike Han, however, the only technologies Noon is interested in are the technologies of literature, narratives, and stories. Although the Vurt is full of “advurts,” for Scribble, the psychopolitical discipline experienced is not that of corporate or algorithmic steering of the mind. Instead, for Scribble, the intrusive agent is a reiterative retelling of a traumatic memory of not Big Data but his abusive father. Vurt emphatically asks in what ways the stories we tell ourselves, again and again, use us, control us, steer, and regulate our beliefs, values, and behaviours when we, in all honesty, believe that we are actively telling, writing, and acting our own stories. Or, in short, we write our stories as our stories write us. Like neurologically and psychologically intrusive internet technologies, a traumatic memory 24  Bridget is a shadowgirl (flesh, not robo) and can read the minds and dreams of others. She, unlike the cops, however, is a positive source of telepathy. While the shadowcops represent invasions of privacy and authoritarianism, Bridget is emblematic of empathy (to feel with or feel from within the other) and individual agency. 25  Noon, Vurt, 35.

92 

A. C. WENAUS

originates from without but then manifests itself and replicates itself from within. Just as Big Data finds its way into the psyche uninvited, narrative technologies can also tell and retell unsolicited stories. In attempting to confront this loopy within-that-is-also-without Scribble experiences, not paranoia, but the second kin of response: a paradoxical, self-reflexive feedback loop out of which there is no escape. So, let’s turn to the climax of Vurt, where Scribble attempts to “[face] up to the realities of what it is [he’s] trying to escape from.”26 Scribble, at this point, has the Curious Yellow feather in his possession—the feather that will allow him to enter the Vurt and exchange the Thing for his sister/lover, allowing her to return to the “real” world with him. The Thing has been shot and killed by the police, however. While Scribble is no longer in possession of anything that can be used in exchange, he nevertheless decides to enter Curious Yellow. The act of entering Curious Yellow without the Thing to make the exchange is of central importance for Scribble’s eventual fate. That is, negating the possibility of material exchange between the two realms signifies Scribble’s attainment of immaterial virtue and consolation. Because there is no escape or exchange possible, he must virtuously seek consolation and acceptance. This process culminates in the climactic chapter, “A Curious House.” Here Scribble enters Curious Yellow wishing to reencounter Desdemona. But what occurs instead is a confrontation with the reality of his dysfunctional family: his incestuous relationship with his sister and encounters with his abusive father. Structurally, the nature of this confrontation conforms to the chaotic and fractal structure of the novel as a whole. There is, after all, no escape. The chapter describes three iterations of the same event where the narrative moves towards a certain penultimate point, only to loop back upon itself, ultimately ending up where it began. In the last chapter, we looked at how the levels of reality in Vurt are fractal: a topology with an infinite inside but a finite outside. But, the psychopolitical conflict Scribble experiences is not simply fractal. It also corresponds to another, broader paradoxical structure: a “strange loop.” The “strange loop” is a concept originally developed by cognitive scientist and physicist Douglas R.  Hofstadter in his ground-breaking book Gödel,  Noon, Vurt, 293.

26

6  CONCLUSION: WHAT LITERATURE THINKS—VURT… 

93

Escher, Bach (1979)—a book that had a significant influence on Vurt and one that Noon holds dear.27 Hofstadter explains the structure in I Am a Strange Loop (2007): What I mean by “strange loop” is … not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive “upward” shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one’s sense of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out.28

Fractals and video feedback are appropriate examples of strange loops,29 as are the many visual paradoxes of M.C. Escher, like his lithographs of everascending and ever-descending staircases.30 One of the most significant applications of Hofstadter’s strange loop, however, is as a model for consciousness itself. Hofstadter notes that the explanations of “emergent” phenomena in our brains—for instance, ideas, hopes, images, analogies, and finally consciousness and free will—are based on a kind of Strange Loop, and interaction between levels in which the top level reaches back down towards the bottom level and influences it, [while] at the same time being itself determined by the bottom level. … The self comes into being at the moment it has the power to reflect itself.31

In this regard, Noon’s shift from the fractal quality of the novel’s structure to the more explicitly strange-loop quality of consciousness is significant. Indeed, it is this shift—from the fractal quality of the narrative to the “strange loopiness” of Scribble’s nervous system—that forces him to take a look “at himself,” seek consolation, recognize and accept the 27  Jeff Noon, “Jeff Noon’s Top 10 Favorite Fluid Fiction Books,” The Guardian, January 17, 2001, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2001/jan/17/bestbooks.fiction. Noon rates Gödel, Escher, Bach third only to The Collected Fiction of Jorge Luis Borges and The Annotated Alice by Lewis Carroll, ed. Martin Gardner. Noon remarks that “there are passages in [Gödel, Escher, Bach], without which Vurt would not exist.” 28  Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop (New York: Basic, 2007), 101–102. 29  Hofstadter, Strange Loop, 204. 30  See M.C. Escher’s painting Relativity (1953), for example. 31  Douglas R.  Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Vintage, 1980), 709.

94 

A. C. WENAUS

psychopolitical processes of narrative storytelling and self-narration. Scribble is about to learn that he cannot have what he wants, but he must learn to move on, harness his own neuroplasticity, and imagine a different future. The chapter “A Curious House” opens with Scribble, now being called by his given name Stephen, in conversation with himself at a bathroom mirror as he shaves using his father’s “open razor”—despite the fact that his father “hated [Stephen] using it.”32 Talking to himself, that is writing to himself, “Looking good, Stephen,”33 Scribble/Stephen laments that he could not get his sister the birthday gift she would have wanted. The Scribble/Stephen conversation comes to an abrupt end when he takes a “nick out of [his] face” and “when [he] looked into the mirror to stop the flow it was [his] father’s face that [he] dabbed at.”34 This first of three incidents, each corresponding to the three episodes in “A Curious House,” demonstrates how the structure of successive iterations through recursion and self-similarity ultimately determines and is determined by subject matter and imagery. After cutting his face with the razor, Scribble’s description of the blood that “fell into the water, swirling”35 visually signifies the self-similar loop that structures the narrative. The story now takes a violent shift as the father seizes the razor, intending to attack and kill his son. Scribble/Stephen urges himself to forcefully wrench himself out of the Vurt and back into the “ordinary reality” of the Curious Yellow Vurt. At this climactic moment, the narrative unpredictably loops back to where it started: “Looking good, Stephen.”36 This, of course, is what one would expect from a strange loop. A second loop thus follows the same pattern as the first. Scribble/ Stephen is having a conversation with himself in the mirror; the conversation concerns an unsatisfactory gift, or lack of a gift, for Desdemona’s birthday.37 In this loop, Scribble/Stephen is not shaving, and the imagery of the drip of swirling blood signifying the deterministic self-similarity between the structure and content of the novel is changed; instead, he is attempting to tie a “Windsor knot.”38 Again the narrative shifts to violence  Noon, Vurt, 300.  Noon, Vurt, 300. 34  Noon, Vurt, 301. 35  Noon, Vurt, 301. 36  Noon, Vurt, 302. 37  Noon, Vurt, 302. 38  Noon, Vurt, 302. 32 33

6  CONCLUSION: WHAT LITERATURE THINKS—VURT… 

95

when the reflection in the mirror is transformed from Stephen to the father. The father once more attempts to murder Scribble/Stephen, this time by choking his son to death using the necktie: “He pulled the knot tight. Tight! Pulling down on each end of the tie until my throat was closing and the breath leaving me.”39 And again, Scribble/Stephen escapes his murder by, so he thinks, “jerking out” of Curious Yellow only to realize, in this episode/loop, that “you can’t jerk out of a Yellow.”40 This realization is crucial: Scribble learns that he cannot escape the trauma he so desperately wishes to leave behind. To do so, however, he must accept that the without is within and the within is without. Who or what is controlling the telling and retelling of the story—that is, is it Scribble or a Vurt or a meta-Vurt and so on—becomes difficult to disentangle. It is here that we realize that both Scribble and the Vurt operate intimately and psychopolitically. In the third loop, we find a bit more variation. The narrative again curls back on itself: “Looking good, Scribble.”41 Neither having a conversation with himself in the mirror nor without a gift for his sister, Scribble is now with Desdemona discussing what they should do for her birthday. The gift he gives her is a feather. Regardless of these variations, a similar pattern of events follows. With the feather in her mouth, Desdemona transforms into Scribble’s father, who subsequently stabs Scribble in the back with a razor. Scribble pulls the feather from his father’s mouth and places it in his own. Rather than the imagery of swirling blood or the Windsor knot, here the loopiness takes place more fundamentally at the level of syntax: [L]ooking good Stephen cheers looking good Stephen cheers looking good Stephen cheers cheers my face bathed in yellow light which is bathed in yellow light which is … which is a man’s blade the blade swinging for me in the mirror of the mirror of the mirror curiouser and curiouser the blade swinging a thousand times as it … Layers upon layers.42

Placing the feather in his mouth may allow Scribble to momentarily attack and escape his father and enter a meta-Vurt (or meta-meta Vurt) where he can finally meet with Desdemona and initiate the exchange. She can return, Scribble still believes, to a different iteration of Vurt reality—the  Noon, Vurt, 303.  Noon, Vurt, 304. Emphasis in original. 41  Noon, Vurt, 304. 42  Noon, Vurt, 309. Emphasis in original. 39 40

96 

A. C. WENAUS

“originary” iteration—while he will stay behind. But Scribble’s consolation occurs in a self-similar, reiterative reflexivity: the strange loop of his own psyche tangled with the Vurt. The death/disappearance of the father and the separation from his sister, emotional but not psychopolitical, permit Scribble to face himself: he ultimately—though perhaps dubiously—writes that, through this separation, “[Desdemona’s] wounds have healed; so have mine.”43 While the fractal structure of the novel determines the process through which Scribble must face himself, it is the archetypically self-similar and self-reflexive strange loop of his own experience of self that ultimately constitutes the novel’s content. Scribble’s quest ends on a characteristically ambivalent note. The novel leads to a resolution once Scribble realizes his situation is one of loopy self-reflexivity that cannot be escaped. There is “No Future” of the kind he irrationally desires. There is, however, a different future that he must accept and imagine anew. This is a potent example of a psychopolitical and neuro-totalitarian conundrum. Vurt is, after all, written around nonlinear structures in both form and content from which there is no way out: from the fractal quality of the story’s structure down to the strange loop of Scribble’s own consciousness, the novel challenges us to imagine regardless if that imagination seems incompatible with an inherited experience or situation. What are we to make of this? Is it liberating or an impasse? Noon, Berardi, and the punks would say “both”!

Neuroplasticity and Neuroemancipation: Vurt and Imagining Alternative Futures So far, we have largely focused on the neurosubjection side of Berardi’s equation. It is always important to remember that such processes are ambiguous. Indeed, as early as Karl Marx’s “Fragment on Machines” from Fundamentals of a Critique of Political Economy (1858), human-machine relations’ dual potentiality—subjection and emancipation—has been under scrutiny. The alternative to psychopolitical neuro-totalitarianism and neurosubjection goes like this: “if the neural system is plastic, it is [also] possible to develop a project of neuroemancipation from our surrounding reality.”44 The path to neuroemancipation, Berardi continues  Noon, Vurt, 323. Emphasis in original.  Berardi, “The Neuroplastic Dilemma.”

43 44

6  CONCLUSION: WHAT LITERATURE THINKS—VURT… 

97

“lies in the conscious ability of the brain to reshape itself.”45 To do so, “we must walk this territory where technology meets epistemology, psychopathology meets poetry, and neurobiology meets cultural evolution.”46 Indeed, in Scribble’s confrontation with his father—an oppressive and violent force—the former learns that the Vurt cannot change the past, but the trials he faces while lost in Vurts, Meta-Vurts, Meta-meta-Vurts, ad nauseam demonstrate how this technology of the imagination can change our cognitive relation to the past, present, and future. While the bulk of the novel takes place over twenty-three days, the final section, “Day for ever”—another way of imagining “No Future”—initiates Scribble to his new task: to maintain the Vurt by sustaining the apparatus that makes possible the unbounded imagination. “What should I do,” he asks the Game Cat when he learns that he will be taking over the latter’s position. “Make sure that she doesn’t wake. The time is not right,” he tells Scribble, “we’re all in there, Scribble. Inside Miss Hobart’s head. All the Vurt. That’s where we start.”47 Scribble, the artist, writer, and poet, also masters and sustains neuroplasticity and neuroemancipation: he must, quite literally, continually nourish and care for dreaming itself.48 The exit strategies from neurosubjection, neuro-totalitarianism, and psychopolitical control offered by Han and Berardi are ultimately consistent with Noon’s avant-pulp imperative. Han suggests that we become the outsider, resist categorization, and be useless to Big Data. That is, we, like literature, should aim to become singular. Then find the other outsiders and begin forming a new social subjectivity outside the seeming ubiquity of twenty-first-century exploitation. Berardi, too, confronts the totalizing effects of neuro-totalitarianism by emphasizing the concept-creating forces of poetry, chaos, and experimental genre fiction. Like Han and Berardi, Noon ultimately confronts the determinism of trauma, neurosubjection, and neuro-totalitarianism by positing the neuroemancipatory imagination and innovation as the ultimate line of escape through innovation. Noon asks of sff to accept the loss of promised futures, both utopian and dystopian; instead, Vurt, in its conflation of time, place, orderly disorder, and poetic prose, embraces indeterminacy and unpredictability to step beyond the cultural feedback loop and forge new alternatives. Noon  Berardi, “The Neuroplastic Dilemma.”  Berardi, “The Neuroplastic Dilemma.” 47  Noon, Vurt, 325. 48  Well, of yet another level of reality, that is. 45 46

98 

A. C. WENAUS

writes, “I think it’s fruitful that people can discover new ways of telling stories. The way we live now, I call it Liquid Culture, and I think to find the prose equivalent of that is great.”49 The labyrinth of the imagination and the book are one and the same: melt the maze walls and splash around.

Conclusion: I Will The question of “what literature thinks” haunts this book. It is a provocative question, undoubtedly, but it is also productive to understanding Noon’s project. In Badiou’s essay collection The Age of the Poets (2014), he suggests that literature and poetry can think, or act as vehicles of thought, in ways radically distinct from any other knowledge-seeking discipline. What literature thinks is different from what literature knows: “It would not be hard to say what literature knows,” Badiou writes. “It knows the generic human subject. It knows its failings and its weaknesses and, on the basis of that knowledge, transforms the inevitability of resignation … to the fact that … the world never lives up to the Idea.” 50 And Vurt certainly knows this. However, literature and poetry think what philosophy, religion, the natural sciences, and mathematics cannot. Literature and poetry can think without an object or objective; it creates rather than describes or explains. Badiou writes that “the poem is an unthinkable thought,” and is “a thinking that is neither thinking nor even thinkable.”51 The paradox here is consistent with Noon’s work since, as Hofstadter writes, such contradictions and “abstractions are central, whether in the study of literature or in the study of the brain.”52 Literature is, like the self, more than the sum of its parts; it represents the ineffable, the unquantifiable, the unknowable, the mysterious, and the paradoxical. The paradox of “unthinkable thought”53 is the kind of unthinking thinking consistent with the avant-pulp. It is the kind of thinking that imagines

49  Anthony Johnston, “Jeff Noon: Needle in the Groove: Liquid Culture,” Spike Magazine, August 2000, https://spikemagazine.com/0800jeffnoon/. 50  Alain Badiou, “What Does Literature Think?” The Age of the Poets: And Other Writings on Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose, trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York: Verso, 2014), 132. 51  Alain Badiou, “Philosophy and Poetry from the Vantage Point of the Unnameable,” The Age of the Poets: And Other Writings on Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose, trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York: Verso, 2014), 48. 52  Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, 26. 53  Badiou, “Philosophy and Poetry,” 48.

6  CONCLUSION: WHAT LITERATURE THINKS—VURT… 

99

that “No Future” or “Day for ever” are, at the same time, opportunities to imagining alternative futures. Scribble will never escape his past; he cannot rewrite it or recreate it by entering Vurts and transforming stories. “Literature serves as a ‘critique,”54 after all, and, as Scribble finds out, “literature knows inside out the workings of deceit, ungratefulness, selfishness, and stupidity.”55 What Scribble learns as he composes is that “literature,” that is, the self-­ reflexive, multi-ontologically levelled Vurt, “opens up the realm of the particular … to the field of knowledge.”56 He learns his unique resignation, consolation, and the fact that one can never truly know because, like the fractal structure of the book or self-reflexive psyche, for example, “literature is an immanent reference to itself, a mark of its own selfsufficiency.”57 What Scribble knows through literature is that he cannot control the future, but he can play a part in creating meaningful ways of telling stories, living better, and seeking peace by accepting relentless change and metamorphosis. This is what Vurt, a technology of literature, thinks. The twentieth century was “the century that trusted in the future”;58 however “in the last three decades of the century, the utopian imagination was slowly overturned, and has been replaced by the dystopian imagination.”59 Many call 1977 the year where this overturning took place: the year that the Sex Pistols cried “No Future.” Shortly afterwards, the utopian imagination was subsumed by the neoliberal policies that seek to capture and harness attention and imagination. But, Noon reminds us that the future is not a thing; it is, like thought, a projection. When literature thinks the future, we are, as Berardi puts it, thinking a “mythology of the future,”60 a “cultural construction and projection,”61 and “psychological perception” of the idea of the future. Simply put, literature cannot know the future but can think alternate futures by telling stories about it. It is important to remember that Vurt ends not only as, like Daisy Love in Vurt’s prequel Nymphomation, Scribble “the innocent homeless  Badiou, “What Does Literature Think?” 132.  Badiou, “What Does Literature Think?” Emphasis added. 56  Badiou, “What Does Literature Think?” 133. 57  Badiou, “What Does Literature Think?” 135. 58  Berardi, After the Future, 17. 59  Berardi, After the Future, 17. 60  Berardi, After the Future, 17. 61  Berardi, After the Future, 17. 54 55

100 

A. C. WENAUS

runaway, becomes gradually recognisable as the future Godlike controller of the ‘Vurtworld’ in the narrative of Noon’s earlier novel.”62 The novel also ends as Scribble learns that even “day for ever” cannot “last for ever,”63 and that “No Future” also means “Unimagined Future.” Here we too learn that the novel itself, Scribble’s reality, is not only the hallucination of the young boy nor is it simply Scribble’s own (i.e. the) novel. At the novel’s conclusion, Scribble and the Game Cat enter a room “bathed in darkness,” where Miss Hobart64 sleeps. She is very old; her exact age is unknown; but she is “ages”65 and must not be woken. Scribble’s role, once the Cat is gone, is to “make sure she doesn’t wake.”66 When Scribble asks “what would happen” if she were to wake, the Game Cat replies “we’re all in these, Scribble. Inside Miss Hobart’s head. All the Vurt. That’s where we start. Do you understand?”67 Scribble now knows what literature knows because he now thinks what literature thinks: “I understand,”68 he replies. Scribble understands that he is a strange loop, a story telling itself, and one that must keep telling this story. Scribble’s own reality is his own story, that of the young boy, and that of Miss Hobart: our idea and experience of reality is a paradoxical, self-reflexive, ontologically multi-layered knot both from within and without the psyche. We are dreaming as we are also dreamed into reality, and our selves and our perception of reality is “a good story … so good that it stuck around, became truth.”69 Like the past, Scribble cannot control or steer the future. It is a keen reminder, then, that the punks proclaiming “No Future” in 1977 and the ravers’ “Day for ever” in 1993 are at once nihilistic and calls to re-project the imagination, a re-examine expectation, and re-claim openness to 62  Nickianne Moody, “Social and temporal geographies of the near future: Music, fiction and youth culture,” Futures, 30, no. 10 (1998): 1013. 63  Noon, Vurt, 325. 64  Those familiar with the Vurt tetralogy will recognize the now very old Miss Hobart as the girl Celia Hobart from Nymphomation; and, of course, Celia Hobart may be the twin sister, or mirror image, of Carroll’s Alice (note that Alice and Celia are anagrammatic of one another). In short, this is the dream of Alice’s twin sister. 65  Noon, Vurt, 324. 66  Noon, Vurt, 325. 67  Noon, Vurt, 325. 68  Noon, Vurt, 325. 69  Noon, Vurt, 185.

6  CONCLUSION: WHAT LITERATURE THINKS—VURT… 

101

otherness and unpredictability. Vurt is a timely reminder that the past, present, and future are concepts that are experienced; they are perceptions and the site of perception itself, a paradoxical strange loop. That is, the psyche itself is an illusion, and illusions are infinitely plastic. Consider the following from Hofstader: You and I are mirages who perceive themselves, and the sole magical machinery behind the scenes is perception—the triggering, by huge flows of raw data, of a tiny set of symbols that stand for abstract regularities in the world. … In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locking-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference. … Our very nature is such as to prevent us from fully understanding its very nature. Poised midway between the unvisualisable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems—vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful.70

Thinking with Vurt reminds us that we cannot control the past, present, or future. Instead, the novel posits itself, its characters, and its readers as rainbows and mirages, self-writing poetry, ambiguous, seeking both chaos and balance and, so often, beautiful. Our task is to seek new stories of our own multifaceted, fractal, strange loopy, avant-pulp individuality. The twenty-first century may not currently trust in the future; however, Vurt asks us to remember that the future is open and uncharted: it is an ever-changing idea. It will look very different from the twentieth century; its unique challenges and difficulties are already apparent. As we tell new stories and seek understandings, we should take care to “be very, very quiet” to not wake the dreamer or wake from dreaming alternatives. And, yet, Noon reminds us that we, like Scribble, the Game Cat, and Miss Hobart, are also the dreamers of reality. When asked to keep the quiet and not disturb the dreamer, Scribble replies “I will.”71 This is echoed by the disembodied, italicized “I will”:72 a voice from another level of reality. We turn the page, we read, “a young boy

 Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, 362–363.  Noon, Vurt, 325. 72  Noon, Vurt, 325. 70 71

102 

A. C. WENAUS

takes a feather out of his mouth.”73 As we set the book down, we recall that Vurt is “a rites of passage game.”74 A difficult century lies ahead of us; its challenges are exceptional and we are tasked with dreaming a better future. Like the Modernists and the pulp writers, we are tasked with imagining the new. Here we learn that the rites of passage are not only Scribble’s, but also our own. Vurt tasks us to think with literature by continuing the chain of replies beyond the page: “I will.”

 Noon, Vurt, 327.  Noon, Vurt, 183.

73 74



Appendix

“Open All Channels. Connect to Everything.” Jeff Noon in Conversation with Andrew C. Wenaus

ANDREW C. WENAUS (AW): First of all, Jeff, thank you very much for taking the time to chat. It’s been nearly three decades since Vurt made its explosive debut. While you were writing for the theatre (and had other creative pursuits, including music and painting) before becoming a novelist, Vurt is your first novel. It really is an astounding book! Did you ever imagine Vurt taking the wild journey from a small private press publication to an Arthur C. Clarke Award winner? What was that like? And, because anyone who’s read and admired your fiction knows that everything is a process of continual change and metamorphosis, could you kindly share a few thoughts on your relationship with the book since its publication? JEFF NOON (JN): Thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about Vurt. I did an online interview recently about the genesis of the book, and I found that the events of 1993 have now started to blur into a haze, and they often change positions in time. The pleasures of getting older! But I will try to pick my way through them. I studied Combined Arts: Painting and Drama at Manchester University. My number one ambition upon graduating in 1984 was to become a playwright. I was 27 years old. I had some success with my first play, Woundings, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. C. Wenaus, Jeff Noon’s Vurt, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07029-7

103

104 

APPENDIX

but then struggled to get a second play placed with a theatre. These were my years of the endless rejection slips. Eventually, in the late 1980s I ended up working at Waterstone’s Bookshop in Manchester. My first job was to look after the Science Fiction and Fantasy section. So I read a lot of the new SF books as they came in. But I’ll make clear at this point, that I had no thoughts of becoming a novelist, none at all. I still harboured dreams of being a successful playwright; but in many ways, I had given up on writing. And then a friend asked me to write him a play, to be hopefully performed on the Manchester fringe theatre scene. I chose to do an adaptation of The Torture Garden, a novel written in 1899 by French author, Octave Mirbeau. I had read William Gibson and some of the other cyberpunk writers, and I decided to rework the plot of Mirbeau’s novel, utilising some of the cyberpunk themes and setting it in the near future. But the play was abandoned partway through the writing process. I’d completed a first draft. Another friend then told me he was starting a small press, and wondered if I had a novel to write. That evening, after work, I wrote the first few pages of Vurt, using many of the ideas I had developed for the Torture Garden project. I was taken by surprise. I had very little idea of how to actually write a novel: I had read no manuals on the subject, had taken no lessons. The book arrived in a series of late-night writing sessions, working into the early hours. It was written fairly quickly, with no planning ahead, just working out ideas and events for each chapter as they came up. It was published in 1993 by the nascent Ringpull Press. Vurt was one of the first books on their list. So in all truth, I wasn’t expecting a lot to come from it. On publication, I was aware of some people talking about the novel, in Manchester. I don’t think anyone had written a book about the city, taking this particular view: that the city was a place of portals and nebulous borders. Some of the themes in the novel seemed to coincide with the Rave Era, in terms of music, fashion, drugs, and general attitudes to life, love, and youth. So I think that was its first audience: ravers in Manchester. I didn’t see how it would reach beyond that group. And then it won the Arthur C Clarke Award. The award didn’t propel the book to the bestseller lists, or anything like that, but it certainly helped to get the word out. I was 36 by then. I loved the fact that the book was reaching people: I found that very exciting, after years and years of being rejected. I’ve never been the kind of writer who writes only to express their own inner nature, or their personal belief system, or anything like that. Rather: I’m very aware, when I write, of the

 APPENDIX 

105

web of connections that links an audience to an artwork, and what it means for an audience to partake of that web. So I was happy, and proud. All those things. But … I was also very aware, having failed miserably after my initial success in the theatre, that nothing is safe, or determined. I also had a few years of bookselling behind me, so I knew how easy it was for feted authors to disappear after their first or second novel: I’d seen it happen often. I knew that a struggle lay ahead. And I was looking forward to writing another book. Over the years since publication, I’ve had a bit of an on/off relationship with Vurt. There was a time, probably coinciding with my career’s lowest ebb, when I actively denied the book’s merits. But then, as I got older, and I saw that the novel would have a continued life, I relaxed a little, and found peace with it. There was one surprising incident, after first signing with Angry Robot Press a few years ago. The publishers threw a party at their London offices, for all their writers. Suddenly I was in a room with a lot of younger authors, and I was totally surprised to hear how many of them had been influenced by my work, and by Vurt in particular. I truly thought I’d become a bit of a forgotten writer. It was very moving. I’m glad to have written a book that found an audience, that meant something to them: it’s a rare enough achievement. Especially when you consider that my one thought during those late-night sessions was to write a book that would excite Nick, my best friend of the time. Whenever I got stuck, I would ask myself: “What would Nick like to happen next?” That kept me going. So, the story had very personal beginnings, a kind of one-­ person focus. From one reader, moving outwards …. AW: … and a bit like one mind moving outwards towards other minds, moving outwards towards … and so on. The plot of Vurt, however, also emphasizes a movement ever-inward: the Vurt feathers send characters deeper and deeper into levels of their own minds. As in all your fiction, paradoxes and ambivalent impossibilities steer the “shape” of the narrative. While I’d like to return to paradoxical outward-and-inward structures in a bit, perhaps we could talk a little about Vurt’s status as a cyberpunk (or cyberpunk-flavoured) novel. I suspect that writing a genre piece (cyberpunk) was never your intention; however, Vurt does feel like what a cyberpunk novel would read like if we’d passed through the looking glass. It could be defined as slipstream or surrealism, and I think both would be accurate enough, but Vurt has a particular singularity that makes almost a genre unto itself. Vurt disorders the mind; it includes dangerous conflicts with one’s own memories and the possibility of becoming lost in

106 

APPENDIX

another realm (while at once staying right here at the very site of perception). Maybe the short way of saying this is that the Vurt is not cyberspace, but a paradoxical virtuality where past and present, reality and fantasy, desire and trauma, free will and commercial advertising and so on loop into one another and disrupt the very possibility of things never sitting still while also, impossibly, unable to move on. The de-emphasis on technology itself in place of an emphasis on the effects that a powerful technology can have on the mind is one of many things about this book that makes it so poignant. Could you say a few words about your fascination with perception and cognition? JN: During my years of trying to become a playwright, I started to jot down ideas in notebooks—one idea per page, each idea numbered. There were nine volumes of these ideas—1130 ideas in total—before I stopped recording them. In volume 4 we find idea number 385. The books are dated. I reckon idea 385 was jotted down in early 1990. Here’s the entry, more or less as written …. DREAM HUT & SNAKE SCISSORS (SF) Dream Hut set up in field near housing estate. The Snake Scissors, designed for use in the once-external war against the snakes, now used for the purposes of dream cutting, dream editing. The Dream Hut is an editing suite. To produce the new films. People line up in the field, to have their dreams edited. Technicians of the snake scissors = editors. Chimera/Cinema/Cinema X/Chimera X Now this, as far as I’m aware, was the very first entry of the Vurt, into my mind. The character Icarus Wing in the novel is one of these “technicians of the snake scissors.” As you might have guessed, the idea of the dream hut and the snake scissors came to me in a dream. It struck me as interesting enough to record, although of course back then I had no outlet for such craziness. This wasn’t a “theatrical” idea. The use of the bracketed (SF) points towards a possible future …. I don’t know where it comes from, this obsession with dreams and hallucinations. The dream: the only true evidence we have that other worlds exist, connected to reality, and yet not quite of reality. There’s probably some formative input in my life, perhaps my turning away from the world, into my own space, bedroom, mind … as puberty kicked in. I have always had a reclusive streak to me, and that still exists, to this day. Everything grows from that teenage impulse: the need to express, when expression by the usual channels—talk, gesture, social relations—often failed. And being laughed at, or bullied, at school … a mind can often turn inwards, to

 APPENDIX 

107

create new worlds to wander. It’s a fantasy, an internalised wish fulfilment. And one day, if you’re lucky, that internalised fantasy world can make its way into reality via a novel or some other channel, and be given to other people who might also find some joy and adventure within it. I have very little interest in technology. So I’ve never had the desire to explore technology as a subject matter in its own right, only what it means to people, and to society. I was aware, as an early fan of the cyberpunk writers, that technology can have an intimate relationship with the body and the psyche, and I was fascinated and excited by that idea. So when I started to write Vurt, I decided to push that central cyberpunk concept a little further: What if the technology forged an intimate relationship with the dreamworld? What then? I write to explore the possibilities of a world, a new world, to find out what happens next. Sometimes I have a vague plan, at other times, only an image, a wrong note, some intrigue. When I write a tune on the guitar, I always start with a discord: just some weird arrangement of the fingers on the frets that bristles with possibility: it wants to be something else, it wants to resolve. It’s the same with stories: an initial “what if” sets me going: then I follow the characters, reacting to events as they turn up. It’s like a chess game; myself as one player, the novel as the other, each of us making our moves in turn. I have two Laws inside my head, two methods of creation. I made these up when I was young—late teens, early twenties—and I’ve used them ever since. Every single word, idea, character, event, line of dialogue, twist and turn I’ve ever written, arrived via those two laws operating in my mind. The First Law, the Second Law, the First Law, the Second Law … and so on, my mind processing them every few seconds or so. They contradict each other, so the laws act like a perpetual motion machine, constantly pushing me onwards. This is a conscious effort on my part: it’s not subconscious. I am actively operating the Laws. Every word of Vurt was written under the guidance of those Laws. Over the years, this process has become the creative act. I can’t escape this, even if I wanted to. Without those two Laws … I might still be a writer, but a very different kind of writer. AW: Would it be fair to say that entry 385 from Vol. 4 of your notebooks is not only the inception of Vurt but more broadly also the kernel for the method of writing you’ve called metamorphiction? JN: The roots of metamorphiction really come from the formal influence of techno, house, and dub music on my work, which happened from

108 

APPENDIX

my fourth novel Nymphomation onwards, and lasted for a number of books and short stories. When I wrote Vurt I was mainly concerned with the capturing the feel of the Rave era, rather than using Rave’s artistic methods. But I was always interested in the relationship between form and content, and whether they could merge into each other. I have no memory of when my little three-line manifesto emerged: Form is the Host, Content is the Virus: Infect! Infect! Definitely after Vurt. In actual physical terms, the invention of dub fiction happened on the reading tour to promote the Disco Biscuits anthology, in 1997. I came up with the idea one night, just before I went on stage to read. When I got back home I continued work on Nymphomation, experimenting with ways of manipulating and remixing the text, to mirror the ways a DJ or producer will remix music. Metamorphiction grows out of that moment. My ideas would often come from such actions in the world, rather than from my head alone. Something of interest will happen to me, or be presented to me, and I will—quite automatically—translate it into a story, or a device for creating story. AW: In Vurt (and in the bulk of your novels, stories, and poems) characters are always searching for something. That the lost object, or feeling, or person is rarely found in a way that could be considered “closure”; however, this seems to be precisely what the novel, and literature in general, has the unique capacity to offer: the closer one comes to discovering what they were looking for, the less they know and the less certain everything becomes. Of course there is a mournful quality to your writing, but this mourning is often superimposed with a lot of humour, joy, fun, and optimism. It’s both and neither, but both and neither, and so on. The more we know, the more the parameters of knowledge expand, so we go learn more, and the parameters expand again, and so on. Or, the more we know, the less we know: a perpetual motion machine for awe! This mysteriousness is as exciting as it is encouraging for futures of endless openness. Near the end of your novel Falling Out of Cars (2002) there’s a poignant phrase: “In these days of chaos, possibilities abound.” Would you say the novel in general has the capacity to steer us away from atrophying tendencies of belief toward openness and possibility in both literature and life? JN: Yes, definitely! I think that’s central to my work, that by entering the labyrinth of a novel we can willingly get lost, and find new strange objects along the way. And meet new people. I am, at the same time, committed wholeheartedly to the idea of the storyteller, so I’m always playing experimental ideas against pure narrative drive. Finding that balance, a

 APPENDIX 

109

balance that changes for each project. The concept of the Avant-Pulp comes from thinking about those contradictory desires. I characterised it as “Raymond Chandler writing Ulysses. And James Joyce writing The Big Sleep.” Imagine those two creative acts happening at the same time, in the same novel: that would be the ultimate Avant-Pulp artefact. Taking ideas and concepts and processes from high art, and from popular art, and fusing them together. The novel might be one of the ways we can open up the possibilities of life. But only if the story offers possibilities of interpretation amid the myriad ways of reading. I’ve probably refined these concepts more over the years since Vurt was published, but I like to think of Vurt as the original spore pod, if you like. I’m still chasing those spores, every day, whenever I sit down to write. If we accept the notion of the Internet as a giant confirmation of belief machine, then let’s hope the novel doesn’t go the same way. I think it’s useful for society, that different art forms and platforms have different purposes. Open all channels. Connect to everything. I think that comes from Pixel Juice. It still seems a good enough motto—for both readers and writers—no matter what the prevailing culture may be. AW: Vurt appeared when many “postmodern” authors were also writing some exciting and experimental work. One thing, though, that really distinguishes Vurt from other postmodern novels is its optimism and trust in the power of language. When thinking of the postmodern suspicion or distrust in language, Kathy Acker’s brilliant Empire of the Senseless (1988) comes to mind: a text that collages and samples a lot from Gibson. She wrote of the novel: “I make nothing new, create nothing: I’m a sort of mad journalist.” Her claim that she isn’t creating so much as documenting or reporting is characteristic of many postmodern authors’ attitude towards language at the time: distrust in language’s ability to actually “make it new” or even to represent anything other than, well, linguistic representation. But, the avant-pulp, and your work as early as Vurt, suggests otherwise. Could you say some more about your relationship with language and whether or not you feel strongly about its ability to “make it new”? JN: I am first and foremost a storyteller. In some ways I’m still a 1970s writer, because this was the decade in which I learned how to be an artist. You never lose those first impulses. If I had to distil that decade’s artistic credo down to a sentence it would be something like: “Art gives expression to the people’s soul.” A ridiculous thing to say, these days! But there

110 

APPENDIX

it is: I still carry some of that impulse with me, as I carry on. So take that, and mix it with whatever might be picked up along the way, through the years. We are not one thing: but many. We are multifold. So, even in my most experimental and postmodern work, say Cobralingus, I still think I’m writing a story. In my mind, as I write, I’m still following those two creative laws, one of which asks me to be as inventive as I possibly can be, the other to connect that invention to the reader in as delightful a way as possible. The two different impulses are not exclusive, they are both adding their own flavour and texture to the work. Now, in some works, the inventive axis of the graph is going to have a higher value, while in other works, the storytelling axis will be higher. And the point on the graph changes over time, during the writing of the novel, and throughout the writing of many different novels. The nature of a book is discovered in the writing, so part of the immense pleasure of creating a novel is to let that relationship form itself—what kind of book will this be, where will it lie on the graph? Will it be highly experimental, like Cobralingus, or more to do with pure storytelling, like my crime novel, Slow Motion Ghosts. Or might it lie somewhere in between, like Chanel SK1N. I love all these areas of the graph equally. I guess I’m seeking (constantly seeking!) a way of merging the two: to let the experimental nature of language feed into the story, and to let the story feedback into the experimental. For instance, in my novel Creeping Jenny, there’s a 1300 word sentence. Not one person in any review has mentioned this. None of my friends mentioned it, having read the book. I explicitly asked two of them, “What did you think of the 1300 word sentence?” They both answered along the same lines, “What 1300 word sentence?” The reason why it isn’t noticed, I venture, is because the ever-­ flowing tumult of words at that point represents the overwhelming spell under which the character has fallen. Form is the host, content is the virus. There is the infection at work. Language forms the spell, and the spell casts itself over the language. These two processes happen simultaneously, and the feedback loop is set up. It’s a practical effect taking place in the world of the book … and in that other world that only exists for those continuing moments as the words hit the screen, or the page. So, if one of the tasks of narrative art is to “make new,” then that “newness” can take place on both levels: form and content. It’s sometimes useful to view the history of SF as a continuing history of experimental content.

 APPENDIX 

111

AW: One thing that your readers will recognize right away reading Vurt, or any piece of your fiction really, is the importance to both form and content of mathematical puzzles, paradoxical topologies, non-linear dynamics, and logical conundrums. While some people find paradoxes and puzzles of this kind frustrating, many others find them whimsical, inspiring, and truer to life than the tidiness of close-ended solutions. Could you say a bit about the role of these puzzles, paradoxical topologies, and admiration for the “new sciences” and mathematics of incompleteness and how all this relates to your writing and creative process? JN: I’ve visited the mountain top twice in my life: once when I managed to learn a solo guitar piece by Villa-Lobos. I’m not a natural musician, and learning that piece is the most complicated thing I’ve ever done, involving both body and mind. It lasted for about a month, in muscle memory; I’d play it every day. And then I stopped, and it vanished from my mind, and from my fingers. A similar thing happened to me when I read, and finally understood, Douglas R Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. It took me four attempts to reach the end of the book, spread out over a good few years. The book’s subtitle is “A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll.” Using the themes and practices of Escher, Bach, and Carroll as helpmates, Hofstadter explains Gödel’s Theory of Incompleteness, one of the more complex of logical arguments. Having finished the book, I understood the theory! For a period I knew what it was like to use the human mind at its higher potentials. My head buzzed with the knowledge. It was an incredible feeling. But of course, like Villa-­ Lobos’s guitar piece, the theory unravelled in my mind, one axiom at a time. And a few weeks later, it had vanished, leaving only the traces of numbers, ideas, images: a mist. When I later on came to write Vurt, I found some of those trace elements turning up. It was nothing specific, more an underlying bed of ideas. And of course Lewis Carroll is a continuing presence in my work, up to this day. If I applied the Theory of Incompleteness to Vurt, it might go like this: Reality and Dream are two closed systems. Not every truth in either system can be proved by the logic and knowledge of that individual system alone, but only by referring to axioms from the other system. Reality needs the dream world to prove itself, and the dream world needs reality to prove itself. Throughout our history we have only been able to perform these operations of truth-making in our sleep. But with the invention of

112 

APPENDIX

the Vurt feathers, a direct passage is formed, the border made porous. It’s now very easy for the separate truths to intermingle, and prove and unprove themselves, over and over again, with resulting moments of great beauty, and moments of deadly effect. Scribble’s story takes place on that borderline where dream and reality meet and merge. He is the truth-seeker. And: for each use of the word dream in the above passage, replace with the word fiction. AW: Of course we need to talk a bit about Manchester, since it plays such a central role in your work right up until the publication of Falling Out of Cars (2002). The city itself can feel like a character. Can you say a bit more about Manchester, Hulme, etc., in those days? What kind of role did the city play in your early work?JN: I had a great love for the city, in those days, for its culture, its people, and its atmosphere. When I started Vurt, it quickly became apparent that the novel and the city would intersect. After the first few chapters were written, I realised that I could use this book to talk about the city in hopefully a new way, one that reflected the scenes around me, and that would also be inspired by scenes from my earlier years. Some of the chapters in the book directly grow from episodes in my life. In that sense, it is very much a debut novel: a tangled mixture of life as lived, and crazed imagination. I lived in Hulme for a few years. It’s a large housing estate, comprising apartment blocks around a number of central crescents. These crescents were three storeys high. I lived in one of them. The estate was built to house families, but it didn’t really work out in that role, so over the years its nature changed, and a lot of students, young people, and the unemployed moved in. It was a vibrant, exciting place to live, with the usual darker aspects. I enjoyed my time there. Memories of that place seeped into the book, especially into the scenes set in Bottle Town. Hulme was knocked down and redeveloped some years later, after I’d left Manchester. Quite a few of the novel’s locations have vanished by now. I was proud to give a voice to the city, and a very particular voice to its people. And to imagine the city as a place where the portals and borderlines are shifting, and porous, and might lead to strange, unknowable, crazy, and perhaps dangerous realms. But realms above all that allowed characters to face those dangers, and be changed by them. Looking back now, decades later, and many miles away. … I still have affection for the city. It was a pleasure to write about Manchester, both its real and its fantastical version.

 APPENDIX 

113

AW: Music’s always been a big part of your fiction. Your prose is poetic and has a musical quality (most obviously on display in Needle in the Groove). Vurt takes place amid the early 1990s rave scene in Manchester; however, you’ve said elsewhere that you were not personally really involved in that scene, but were instead more involved in Punk. Could you say some more about the Rave scene? Was there something about its unpredictability, DIY ethos, and creative transgression that appealed to you? Electronic music ended up being very important to your writing, did this start with Vurt? JN: I was involved in the punk and post-punk scenes in Manchester, both as a fan, and as a musician, and songwriter. It was the one and only time in my life when I’ve felt a part of a scene or group. Or to be more precise: when I had any desire to be part of a group. I never had any great success as a musician, but I enjoyed it tremendously. The one aspect of it that I loved the most was the writing of songs—music and lyrics. The expressions and themes of those lyrics eventually transformed into stories, and more specifically … attempts at writing theatre plays. And then into short stories, and the novels. In terms of Vurt, I was definitely picking up on the atmosphere of the punk clubs I used to go to, in 1976 and 1977, and also on the Rave scene, combining the two eras. Atmosphere, noise, people’s attitudes, fashion, social mores: all these things were swirling around my head as I wrote. It seemed a very natural thing for me to do, to channel those onto the screen of my little, beat-up, second-hand computer. I loved the DIY culture that grew out of punk, and I like to think some of that seeped into Vurt. After all, the book was the product of two people, one person starting his own indie publisher, and the other suddenly trying to write a novel. … Because … because we both wanted to escape … to have a different kind of life. I wasn’t exactly a fully paid up member of the Rave scene. By then, I was just reaching that age when people start to move away from being interested in current fashions. But I observed it from very close quarters, both its good and its bad aspects. I can write about Punk from the very centre of the pogo pit; whereas with Rave I’m writing more from the dance floor’s edge. That loneliness …. My first true love in music was Progressive Rock: I was the exact right age—very early teens—to meets its golden years head on. It’s an enduring love, as compared to punk and dance music. Without a doubt my first creative law grew out of Progressive Rock. The First Law uses a Scale of Invention. In fact, the First Law’s number one job is to force me to try to

114 

APPENDIX

rise up that Scale of Invention, as far as I can. I came up with that concept from listening to and intensely analysing Prog Rock, the kind of analysis that only a 13-year-old obsessive fan can do! To this day, part of me insists that I’m actually writing a series of Prog Rock album covers. The creation of feathers as the medium for the Vurt is perhaps the Law’s first great expression. I remember that moment very well, indeed! The madness of writing, the chaotic tumble of one idea on top of another, the recklessness, the over-the-top nature of the story, the desire to stand alone, the larger-than-life aspects of the theme, the brashness, the colourfulness, the madness of trying to play in 13/8 time when you haven’t yet mastered 4/4 … you don’t learn those attitudes from Punk or Techno, which are very disciplined musics. No, that’s Prog! AW: Vurt is a transgressive book and could be reasonably characterized as transgressive literature. Formally, it is unconventional: it loops into itself and has a playful (if unsettling) meta-commentary on reading, virtual realities, and unsettles what level the novel (and the reader) is actually in. But it is also transgressive in its content. Probably the most obvious transgressive element is that the novel’s central love story (though it mirrors the myth of Orpheus’s descent into the underworld to find and rescue his lover Eurydice) is incestuous. Desdemona is largely absent from the narrative, and we never really hear her side of the story. Is the decision to have the lovers as siblings an avant-pulp homage to other works of transgressive literature? Are Scribble and Desdemona two aspects of the same (as in Jungian psychoanalysis)? Are they alchemical lovers? A relationship that stands in for impossible, irrational desire? Something else? Simply brother and sister? Could you say some more about this decision? JN: If I were writing the book today, no matter what age I might be—36 or 63—I think it’s fair to say that the incest theme would not be part of the story. So perhaps we need to look at it in terms of the early 1990s: what was it about that time that allowed a writer to venture into such territory? Back then, I had no sense in my mind of constrictions. It was a time when writers like Martin Amis and Alan Moore were popular, and as you mentioned, Kathy Acker: there was a feeling in the air, a time of pushing the boundaries in various ways. Add to this the fact that I saw myself as failure at that time, a failed playwright. And this novel, Vurt, was going to be published by a tiny first-time publisher. I didn’t expect in any way that the book would have any kind of reach, never mind success. This added to my sense of freedom: I could do what I wanted to, without fear: because it didn’t matter, anyway! The book would very probably just

 APPENDIX 

115

vanish. And then that damned First Law in my head! It was really coming into its own at that time, because I was no longer bound by the physicality of theatre, by the limits of real things in the real world: the law could now run free. And the law just kept whispering in my ear: more, more, more, more, more, go further, crazier, more extreme! More, more, more, more! Without end. For me, the incest represents Scribble’s sense of isolation, growing up: that the only person he can love, is his own sister. They have been raised in a sealed world, hermetically sealed. Where else can they turn, but into each other’s arms? And, from there, into the dark imaginative world represented by the black feathers. In real life, a brother and sister might tell each other stories, to fight against the cruelty of family life: but now the Vurt allows those stories to become more powerful, more twisted, and they can be shared and experienced. It’s very tempting. AW: Everyone loves the Game Cat. On the one hand, he is Vurt’s very own Cheshire Cat. But, the short Game Cat chapters also signal the underground Zines that were floating around at the time. Can you say some more about the Cat, the role that Lewis Carroll’s work—both wildly imaginative and mathematically inventive—has had on Vurt (or your work in general), and how the underground Zines became a central, characteristic feature of the novel? JN: It started out as a simple Game Catalogue, a way to talk about some of the feathers that made up the world. As those chapters were written, they took on a very definite voice, an individualised expression. So less of a catalogue, more of a character speaking. And then the Cat arrived fully, and took over. Pirate radio DJs, rave organisers, fanzine writers, people starting their own record labels, and small presses. And all this before the internet. Totally analogue, just people in bedsits making their own particular corner of the world as exciting as possible, and then hoping to share that world with people. The Game Cat is part of that world for me, hippy-dream entrepreneur turned self-styled guru of the strange. And then discovering beyond his world, another exists, as real as anything else. And that he might well be a door to that world, or at least a guide to it. He also represents the artist as observer of life, not partaker: another inhabitant of the dance floor’s edge. AW: The literary scene is very different today than it was in the 1990s. While today there is definitely a lot of exciting, experimental literature being published from small private presses, we’re currently living in a

116 

APPENDIX

moment where there’s a lot of focus on content rather than form, style, and innovation. Big publishers seem less and less interested in taking risks (there seems to be a particular allergy to formal experimentalism lately). Over the years, you’ve written manifestos with the goal to spark back to life the experimental, risk-taking spirit in English prose writing. JN: I use Mixcloud a lot, to listen to music podcasts. Podcasters can pick from a number of tags, to mark and describe their latest output. If you press on the “Experimental” tag, it will bring up the most extraordinary amount of genres, ranging from extreme metal, to improvised music, hardcore techno, all the way across to straight jazz and pure pop and sensitive singer-songwriters. In other words, in today’s age, people can very easily picture their taste as being experimental. I think the word has lost it essential meaning, so it’s quite difficult to talk about it, as a quality in Art. The level of invention in Art is never static: it varies over time. It’s easy enough, objectively speaking, to pick out those periods in the past when the level has been set high. When the level is high, and people talk about genius, they’re usually thinking of, say, half a dozen high-gifted individuals. When the level is low, and people speak of genius, they’re talking about thousands, if not millions of people. Culture flattens out. The internet is partially responsible for this, alongside postmodernism. This has good, and bad, effects. The good is that many more people think of themselves as being artistic, or creative. The mass arrival of the Kindle novel shows this process at work. The bad effect is … well, where are the brilliant crazy-driven unique individuals who cause the rest of us to work harder, to become more creative in our endeavours? Even if such a character arrived, it’s just too easy for their endeavours to quickly be subsumed into the constant flow of now, now, now! But you don’t have to be a genius to “wave your freak flag high,” to slightly misquote Jimi Hendrix. The unique voice is all important. Any writer who achieves that will have a chance at true expression, and at reaching an audience that responds well to those very particular themes and ideas. That audience might be ten people who visit a web site, and that’s enough, if the viewers take pleasure from it, and are changed in some way by it. And there’s always the off chance that a highly individualised and very specific fantasy might chime with millions. It does happen. But on the whole, given the age, I would go with … weirdly strange, low-­ level, many of us, each one unique. No fashions, no shared intentions, no influences, our word flags rising up high enough to be seen above the flatlands. Yes, I could revel in that.

 APPENDIX 

117

AW: Since the publication of Nymphomation, many have been wondering: “Is Jeff Noon going to return to the Vurt universe?” JN: I do have an idea for a final Vurt story. More than an idea, actually. I have a title, and various attempts at different approaches. I’d like to do it, but I have to be practical about it. All the Vurt books need to be in print, for instance. It would also need a change of approach, because I’m not the same person as I was, when I wrote Vurt, and the world is different, and I live in a different part of the country, and so on, and so forth. But I’d like to do the story one day: I feel that watching Scribble struggle towards the status of Game Cat would have some meaning for me, and hopefully for some few others. AW: Among the many people who love Vurt and your writing are aspiring writers. To wrap things up, could you kindly share a short writing game as a prompt? And/or, perhaps share a few final/concluding words on the value of literature? JN: There are two processes in the creation of a novel. The first is the creation of a main idea, a theme, an image, a spark, or seed: something that really excites you. And I mean, really! There can be no, “Oh, that’s sounds kinda interesting.” It has to be amazing, it has to grab you and not let go. This idea will function as the essential fuel of the novel throughout the writing process. And whenever you get stuck, always come back to that first inspiration, and ask the question: how does that idea want to play out? I always place ideas on the scale of invention. In my mind there are four levels of invention. This is a very personal way of viewing things, in no way meant to represent anything universal. The vast amount of ideas that we have are level one, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s how we, as human beings, social creatures, and as artists, operate on a day-to-day level. I call this the Level of Shared Ideas. We don’t need to think about levels three and four: very few people are going to come up with the Theory of Incompletenesses, for instance, which is pure Fourth level. No. … The most important barrier is the one between levels one and two. Level two is the Uniqueness level. But this is the most difficult of all the barriers to pass through. That makes it incredibly interesting, and exciting. The very act of trying to pass through the barrier will be worthwhile, as an artistic endeavour. Even if the passage fails, the act of trying to do it, adds its own share of worth.

118 

APPENDIX

Works of art that hover constantly around the barriers are always seen as being extra exciting, having some indefinable quality, or wildness to them, by the audience. Something I’ve learned: no matter how hard and how long you work on a first-level idea, it will never reach the second level of its accord, over time, as a natural evolutionary process. No, it has to start at the second level. And then you can begin. I would never start a novel, unless I had an idea that I felt was second level. So I take my basic idea or image and I apply various processes to it, to uncover the better ideas that lie behind it, hidden away. I put a lot of work into this: it might take a day, or a month: sometimes, it takes years! How do I do this? I reverse the idea, I turn it upside down, inside out. I question it constantly; I throw out all known beliefs and suppositions about the idea. I put it on the operating table and open it up. I destroy the idea, and resurrect it in a different form. I imagine the idea as a living creature. I inject it with metaphorazine and wait for the results. And so on, over and over, never being satisfied. The asking of questions is the most important. My invention worksheets are full of questions …. If this, then that, but what happens when …? But what is really being said? What does he really want? Why is she so intent on … ? What happens if the machine dreams? Not good enough! Think! Mutate. What is the secret behind the plan? What if the hero doesn’t know the secret? Do the exact opposite, and see where that takes you …. Whole pages of this questioning might take place. It boils down to a very simple concept: keep searching. The important thing is to believe and utterly believe that a better idea awaits. So I keep working at this, I never stop. If I don’t get the second level idea … then the whole project is abandoned. But sometimes … aha! And then, I’m excited. I can feel the possibilities opening up. I begin the second process: the writing of the novel …. I have various methods to develop plot ideas. One that I came up with some years ago is the Grain Web System. I’ve used it in both its specific form, and as a fluid everyday influence, over the years and through a number of books. This is how it works …. Take your second-level idea. Improvise freely upon that theme, image, concept, whatever it might be, and jot down every single thought and feeling, as they come to you. And I mean every single item. Keep a list. One line for each: keep it simple. These are the grains. Later on these

 APPENDIX 

119

grains are going to get stuck in a web. But for now, just collect them. Very, very important: do not judge these grains. All grains are equal! Everything goes on the list, no matter how silly or boring or crazy or …. You’re not thinking about the plot or characters at the moment. But as the list builds up over time, you will get ideas of characters and plot events, and these should be added to the list as well. Images, thoughts, feelings, character names, major events, tiny little details, invented brand names for imaginary products … anything and everything! Don’t try to arrange them in any kind of order, especially narrative order: just put them down, one after another. This might take weeks or months. You might forget about it, and then go back to it. But just carry on. Keep in mind always, that central first idea: think about how the grains might relate to that idea, whether in realistic or poetic terms. OK, you should have hundreds of grains by now. At a certain point— you’ll know when—it’s time to think about the web, and where those grains exist on the web. The web is the plot of the novel, but not seen as a linear line from beginning to end, but as a two-dimensional shape, an array, a map … a spider’s web. Plot this out as a map, not a line, drawing connections between the grains, wherever you place them. Draw lines, curves, weird shapes: find the secret connections that you never expected to see. Relish those! It’s probably a giant mess at this point. No matter: the plot is being revealed to you, in your mind’s eye, as a complex array of connected nodes. We have gathered our grains, stuck them to the web. Now … the System. The system is the linear plot of the novel. I see this, in my mind, as pulling a stray thread on the web and unravelling the whole thing into a single line. I do this down the page, placing events where I think they might lie in relation to other events. There’s no need to know everything; it’s better not to. But we are building up a plot, and a set of characters and a series of events that connect those characters to that plot. Here’s the best bit. There will be some grains left over, that just don’t seem to fit in anywhere, or that don’t seem interesting enough. We’re not going to throw these away. I take each one, and I use some method to place them in the system at completely random points. I don’t think about where they’re going, or how they will connect to anything else. Just drop them in. I now use this system line to write the novel. It’s my map through the various moments. If there are gaps, I make up new things to connect to the next grain. I try my very best to use everything, even if I have to

120 

APPENDIX

change things around to make it work. This is a first draft, so I have no interest at all in criticising myself, or making it better: I’m just writing! I don’t look back, I never reread until it’s all done. No ego! That’s for the second draft, when you’re going to make it all work. And for the third draft, when you’re going to perfect it, as best you can. But for now … Pure flow. Pure … awkward, clumsy, wild, unfettered flow. (Prog Rock, remember?) The grain web system acts as a guideline, as a series of inputs along the way. And those random bits that you dropped in, they’re like a series of bombs going off in your head, and in your plot. The act of trying to take account of them often leads to the most amazing revelations. And all of it … Every word … comes out of that first idea! The novel, as an art form, continues on its way. It might take a battering from new formats, it might have to react to these new formats, to endure. But it still has worth. The unfolding of a narrative inside one person’s head as they read is a unique undertaking, unlike any other medium. No other art form demands so much from our imaginations. It was a warm summer’s day. … All of us reading this, automatically, have now got a warm summer’s day in our minds, conjured up from knowledge and from memory. Each vision is unique, and yet conjoined. It was a warm summer’s day, when the first of the dreamships landed. … And suddenly, knowledge and memory are no longer good enough. The imagination takes over …. AW: Beautifully said. Thanks so much for your time, Jeff. It’s been a pleasure. JN: Thanks, Andrew. Sorry if I’ve rambled a bit: that’s the way my mind works. I’m not a very nostalgic type, but it’s sometimes useful to look back, and think on how things came into being. And then to use that knowledge to move on. I always have the next story in my sights.

Bibliography

Novels Vurt (Ringpull Press, 1993). Pollen (Fourth Estate, 1995). Automated Alice (Transworld, 1996). Nymphomation (Transworld, 1997). Needle in the Groove (Transworld, 2000). Falling Out of Cars (Transworld, 2002). Chanel SK1N (Self-Published eBook, 2012). Mappalujo (rEvolution SF, 2016). A Man of Shadows (Angry Robot, 2017). The Body Library (Angry Robot, 2018). Slow Motion Ghosts (Doubleday, 2019). Creeping Jenny (Angry Robot, 2020). House With No Doors (Doubleday, 2020). Within Without (Angry Robot, 2021).

Short Story Collections Pixel Juice (Transworld, 1998). Cobralingus (Codex Books, 2001).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. C. Wenaus, Jeff Noon’s Vurt, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07029-7

121

122 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Short Stories Remixing the Future: Dubchester Kiss (City Life, 1994). Ultra Kid and Catgirl (GQ, 1995). Artificially Induced Dub Syndrome (Techno Pagan – Pulp Faction, 1995). The Call of the Weird (The Big Issue, 1995). Tweedles (The Guardian, 1996). The Shoppers (Waterstone’s Diary, 1997). Before it Disappears (Raise, 1997). DJNA (Disco Biscuits, Sceptre, 1997). Blurbs (Random Factor, Pulp Faction, 1997). Solace (The Big Issue, 1997). Latitude 52 (Intoxication, Serpent’s Tail, 1998). Homo Karaoke (Manchester Stories, City Life Short Story Supplement, 1998). Oblivion Girls (New Writing 8, The British Council, Vintage, 1999). Blackley, Crumpsall, Harpurhey, Saturn (The City Life Book of Manchester Short Stories, Penguin, 1999). The Silvering (Looking for Alfred, Film and Video Umbrella, 2007). Now is the Time (The Illustrated Brighton Moment, Unmadeup Books, 2008). Artwork 2058: The Book of Mist (short story to accompany exhibition by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, Oct 2008). The Queen is Dead (Paint A Vulgar Picture, Serpent’s Tail, 2009). Fallout From the Dream Palace: Speaker Bug, Cloud River, Slow-Motion Renegades (Vurt 20th Anniversary edition, Pan Macmillan, 2013). No Rez (Interzone Magazine #261, 2015). Mercury Teardrops (Haunted Futures, Ghostwoods Press, 2017). Room 149 (2084, Unsung Stories, 2017). The Wellspring (The London Review, 2018). Drawn From The Eye (2001 An Odyssey in Words, Newcon Press, 2018). The Forest in the Room – (with Bridget Penney) (The London Reader, 2018). A Game of Feathers (Ravendesk Press, 2018) (Limited edition chapbook: contains 19 stories first included in the Vurt Role-Playing Game Rule Book). The Further Dark – (with Bridget Penney) (The London Reader, 2019) (Reprinted in Best British Short Stories 2020, Salt Press, 2020). Between the Words (The London Reader, 2021).

Play Scripts Woundings (Oberon Books) 1986.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY 

123

Theatre and Radio Plays Woundings The Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, 1986. Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, 1987. Leicester Polytechnic, 1988.

Vurt Schauspielhaus, Leipzig, 1999. The Contact Theatre, Manchester, 2000.

The Modernists The Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, June 2003. The Komedia Theatre, Brighton, 2013. The Komedia Theatre, Brighton, 2014.

Dead Code: Ghosts of the Digital Age The Wire, Radio Three, October 6, 2005.

Adaptations Alphabox Radio Four, Dec 14 1999; dramatised by Mike Walker).

Somewhere the Shadow The Contact Theatre, May 2001; script devised by the actors and director. Vurt, the Table-Top Role-Playing Game (Ravendesk Games, 2017).

Recordings Needle in the Groove (spoken word, music by David Toop, Sulphur Records, 2000). The Forgetting Room—Ghost Codes (spoken word, music by Jonathan Taylor, Shedloads Records, 2021).

Index1

A Acker, Kathy, 59, 109, 114 Adorno, Theodor, 66 Anabasis, 18, 61–67 Art Ensemble of Chicago, 14 Arthur C. Clarke Award, 3, 103, 104 Ashley, Mike, 32 Attali, Jacques, 66 Authenticity, 2, 6, 7 Automated Alice, 4, 11 Avant-garde, 4, 16, 17, 22, 30–33, 31n63, 40, 41, 47, 48n51, 49, 54–61 Avant-Pulp, 3, 15–17, 21–34, 44, 54–67, 87, 88, 97, 98, 101, 109, 114 B Badiou, Alain, 16, 98 Ballard, J.G., 6 Baudrillard, Jean, 77n19

Beard, Steve, 5 Beetle, 43, 44, 48, 51, 78, 81–83 Benford, Joanne, 11 Berardi, Franco (Bifo), 18, 26, 57, 67, 86–88, 96, 97, 99 Bertetti, Paolo, 32 Bester, Alfred, 10 Bethke, Bruce, 23 Beukes, Lauren, 7–10, 14 Big Data, 91, 92, 97 Biopolitics, 89, 91 Bloom, Harold, 6, 12 The Body Library, 5 Borges, Jorge Luis, 12n35 Bracewell, Michael, 55 Bricolage (Hebdige), 47, 63 Bricolage (Lévi-Strauss), 54, 63 Bridget, 78, 81–83, 91n24 Brooker, Will, 11 Bukatman, Scott, 77 Bürger, Peter, 31, 31n63 Burgess, Anthony, 12

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. C. Wenaus, Jeff Noon’s Vurt, Palgrave Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-07029-7

125

126 

INDEX

Burroughs, William S., 59 Butler, Andrew M., 11, 13, 22, 36–39, 62, 75, 77 Butterfly Effect, 73 Buzzcocks, 45 C Cadigan, Pat, 23 Calinescu, Matei, 33 Calvino, Italo, 40, 41, 41n15 Campbell, Joseph, 63, 73, 74 Canon, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12 Carroll, Lewis, 11, 12n36, 28, 44n30, 100n64, 111, 115 Champion, Sarah, 49 Chandler, Raymond, 30, 109 Channel Sk1n, 5 Chaoid, 67 Chaos, 18, 19, 28, 51, 66, 67, 71–74, 76, 83, 84, 97, 101, 108 Chaos theory, 3, 11, 15, 18, 24, 25, 50, 69–84 Cheshire Cat, 29, 115 Clark, Bill, 59 The Clash, 48 Closed system, 40, 74, 111 Cobralingus, 4, 11, 49, 55, 110 Collage, ix, 3, 14, 33, 47, 54, 56–61, 109 Complexity theory, 24 Contortions, 49 Cornell, Paul, 9 Creeping Jenny, 5, 110 Crescents, The, 38, 39, 112 Cubism, 31 Curious Yellow, 77, 92, 95 Cut-up, 54, 56–61 Cybernetics, 15, 17, 25, 26, 29 Cyberpunk, 3, 7, 11–13, 17, 18, 21–38, 45n38, 59, 62, 104, 105, 107

D Dada, 31, 87 Dante, 64 Dead Code-Ghosts of the Digital Age, 4n4 Debord, Guy, 40–44, 59 Dedalus, Stephen, 2n2 Dérive, 8, 13, 36, 41–44, 55, 72 Descartes, Réne, 26 Desdemona, 3, 18, 29, 62, 63, 65–67, 72, 81, 81n37, 82, 92, 94, 95, 114 Detroit, 49 Disco Biscuits, 49, 108 DJNA, 49 Dreamsnake, 48, 60, 64, 65 Drugs, 8, 9, 44n30, 45n38, 46, 63, 104 Dub fiction, 55, 55n3, 108 Dubmasters, 3, 48, 49 Dub reggae, 8, 48, 49 E Eliot, T.S., 57 Ellis, Warren, 10 Escapism, 11, 18, 32, 69–84 Escher, M. C., 93, 111 Euclidean geometry, 76 Eurydice, 18, 62, 65, 66, 114 Evans, Arthur B., 5 Exchange, 29, 81n37, 92, 95 Expressionism, 31 F Falling Out Of Cars, 5, 11, 108, 112 Fall, The, 45 Farrell, Jennifer Kelso, 11 Feathers, 74, 75 Fisher, Mark, 2, 86 Fleshcops, 43, 88–96 Fluxus, 59

 INDEX 

Foucault, Michel, 89 Fractal geometry, 3, 18, 28, 71, 73, 76, 77, 79, 80 Fractal narrative, 18, 69–84 Freeman, Matthew, 32 Futurism, 31 G Game Cat, 29, 32, 34, 64, 65, 72, 72n6, 83, 97, 100, 101, 115, 117 Genre, ix, 6, 13, 19, 21–23, 30–34, 48, 57, 97, 105, 116 Gibson, William, 6, 7, 9, 10, 23, 26, 28, 59, 77n19, 86, 104, 109 Gleick, James, 73, 76, 79 Gonzalez-Foerster, Dominique, 4 Gordon, Joan, 62 Gough, Val, 11 Grief, 38, 50, 61, 70, 87 Guattari, Félix, 67 Gysin, Brion, 59 H Haçienda, The, 45 Haldeman, Joe, 10 Hall, Steven, 9 Han, Byung-Chul, 7, 89–91, 97 Hanley, Roberta, 4n4 Hayles, N. Katherine, 72–74, 76, 77, 77n19, 79, 84 Hebdige, Dick, 47, 63 Historiography, 57 Hofstadter, Douglas R., 18, 92, 93, 98, 111 House (music), 46, 49, 50, 107 House With No Doors, 5 Hulme, 36, 38, 45–47, 112 I Icarus Wing, 60, 106

127

Imagination, 56–57 Information theory, 15 Iyengar, Sujata, 11, 12 J Jameson, Frederic, 24 Johnston, Anthony, 10, 71 Jones, Susanna, 4 Joyce, James, 2n2, 22, 30, 109 Joy Division, 45, 49 K Kadrey, Richard, 9 Katabasis, 18, 61–67 Keen, Tony, 11, 13, 23 King Tubby, 48 Konspiracy, 45 Kruchenykh, Aleksei, 57 L Lautréamont, Comte de, 39 LeGuin, Ursula K., 6 Lettrists, 59 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 54, 63 Ligeti, György, 54, 55 Limbic System, 36, 46, 47, 50, 51, 63 Lorenz, Edward, 73 M MacLeod, Alison, 4 Madchester, 9, 17, 35, 36, 45–51, 65 Manchester, ix, 3, 4, 9, 14, 17, 35–51, 60n12, 71–73, 79, 81, 81n37, 104, 112, 113 Mandelbrot, Benoît, 76, 77 Mandy, 27, 78, 80–82, 90 Manicured Noise, 48 A Man of Shadows, 5 Mappalujo, 5

128 

INDEX

Marx, Karl, 96 McHale, Brian, 13, 77 MC Ink (Stephen/Scribble), 1, 2, 2n2, 16, 18, 24, 27, 30, 36, 44, 46, 47, 50, 51, 54, 56, 61–67, 71, 72, 75, 78–84, 81n37, 90–97, 99–102, 112, 114, 115, 117 Mendlesohn, Farah, 11 Metamorphiction, 10, 11, 55, 55n3, 80, 107, 108 Miss Hobart, 97, 100, 100n64, 101 Modernism/modernists, 14, 32, 33, 40, 47, 57, 58, 86, 102 The Modernists, 4n4, 5 Moody, Nickianne, 11, 27, 49 Moorcock, Michael, 10 Morrison, Simon A., 49n54, 61 Moss Side, 36, 38, 45–47 Mythology, 54, 99 N Nedeljkov, Nikolina, 38 Neuroplasticity, 18, 87–98 Neurosubjection, 19, 88–97 Neuro-totalitarianism, ix, 3, 18, 19, 88, 96, 97 New Order, 45 New sciences, 15, 33, 74, 111 No Future, 46, 86, 96, 97, 99, 100 Nonlinear dynamics, 28, 71, 111 Noonian metaphor, 56 Nostalgia, 12, 15, 51, 61, 86 Nymphomation, 4, 43n23, 49, 55, 99, 100n64, 108, 117 O Orpheus, 18, 54–67, 114 Orwell, George, 6 Osbourne, 48

P Paddy, David Ian, 11 Palumbo, Donald, 73, 74 Pastiche, 14, 24, 25 Perry, Lee “Scratch,” 48 PiL, 49 Pixel Juice, 4, 49, 49n54, 55, 109 Plant, Sadie, 14n42 Poggioli, Renato, 31n63 Pollen, 4, 9, 38, 55 Portal-quest, 3, 13 Postmodernism, 6, 13, 24–25, 30, 116 Pound, Ezra, 33, 57 Powell, Steve, 4 Psychogeography, 36, 40–42 Psychopolitics, ix, 88–96 Pulp magazines, 31–33 Punk, 5, 14, 15, 41, 44n30, 45, 45n34, 47–49, 47n47, 59, 73, 86, 96, 100, 113, 114 Q Quantum theory, 15 R Rave, 14, 17, 35, 36, 38, 41, 45–47, 49, 50, 64–66, 73, 108, 113, 115 Redhead, Steve, 46n42, 48n52, 55n2, 60n10, 60n11 Relativity, 24 Remix, ix, 1, 4, 9, 10, 14–16, 18, 36, 44, 46, 49–51, 55n3, 59–61, 63, 66, 76, 108 Reynolds, Simon, 45, 45n38, 49, 50 Richter, Hans, 58

 INDEX 

Rites of passage, 54–67, 102 Robinson, Edward S., 59n9 Roland TB 303, 49 Rucker, Rudy, 23 Russ, Joanna, 10 S Scolari, Carlos A., 32 Scribble (Stephen/MC Ink), 1, 2, 2n2, 16, 18, 24, 27, 30, 36, 44, 46, 47, 50, 51, 54, 56, 61–67, 71, 72, 75, 78–84, 81n37, 90–97, 99–102, 112, 114, 115, 117 Scritti Politti, 49 Self-narration, 94 Self-similarity, 76, 77, 79–84, 94 Shadowcops, 88–96, 91n24 Shakespeare, William, 12, 81n37 Shaw, William, 4 Shelley, Mary, 6 Shiner, Lewis, 23 Shippey, Tom, 7 Shirley, John, 23 Singularity, 2, 7–9, 17, 105 Situationist International (SI), 36, 40–44, 43n20, 59 Slethaug, Gordon, 25n14, 73n8 Slow Motion Ghosts, 5, 110 Smith, Leonard, 76 The Smiths, 45 Snake Scissors, 56–61, 106 Sniffing General, 86 Stashmobile (the Van), 43, 44, 48 Stash Riders, 2, 36, 40, 43, 63, 78, 80, 81, 83, 90 Steble, Janez, 11, 22, 26, 39 Stephen (Scribble, MC Ink), 1, 2, 2n2, 16, 18, 24, 27, 30, 36, 44, 46, 47, 50, 51, 54, 56, 61–67, 71,

129

72, 75, 78–84, 81n37, 90–97, 99–102, 112, 114, 115, 117 Sterling, Bruce, 23 Strange loop, 18, 84, 92–94, 96, 100, 101 Surrealism, 22, 105 Suvin, Darko, 70 Suze, 29, 43n23 T Tacitus, 75 Takshaka Yellow, 82 Talking Heads, 49 Tapewormer, 51, 80–84 Tate Modern, 4 Taylor, Paul A., 38 Techno, 5, 14, 49, 65, 66, 107, 116 Technology of literature, 29, 74, 87, 88, 99 Thompson, Errol, 48 Throbbing Gristle, 49 Thunderdome, 45 Toop, David, 4 Transcendence, 15, 16 Trauma, 2, 3, 11, 16, 18, 19, 70, 71, 84, 87, 95, 97, 106 Tristan, 29, 43n23 Turntables, 46, 48, 56 Tush, Dingo, 51, 64 Tzara, Tristan, 58, 87 U Unthinkable thought, 54, 98 V Vaneigem, Raoul, 40, 59 Vaz, 1–19, 43, 43n23, 44, 44n30, 81

130 

INDEX

Virgil, 64 Virtual, 25–27, 40, 41, 75, 78, 79 Virtual reality, 23, 26, 27, 75, 114 Virtue, 27, 28, 87, 92 Vorticism, 31 Vurt, ix, 2, 22, 24–30, 35, 54, 70, 85–103

Weinstone, Ann, 11 Wells, H.G., 6 Wenaus, Andrew C., ix Wendig, Chuck, 9 Within Without, 5 Woundings, 4, 4n4, 60n12, 103

W Weiner, Norbert, 25

Z Zaum, 57