Gibson's Invisible City

Laura Lee

In William Gibson's Neuromancer, the city is an indiscriminate sprawl of virtual projections and imaginary boundaries. In comparison with Italo Calvino's work "Invisible Cities," Gibson's book presents the urban environment as a topology of signal s and nodes, a design t hat is structured from these nodes internally and then crystallizes as a matrix. We see how the "city" becomes a mental projection of those within it through the creation of virtual worlds, where cyberspace becomes a house of sorts, a house of the mind - -- In its etymological roots, "building" means "to be, to exist, to grow." Insomuch as cyberspace comes to represent human perception in the digital age, we see how Gibson's urban sprawl comes to define Case's coming-of-age in the cyberworld. His growt h, which results in the "self-awareness" achieved by the end of the book, results from his own cognitive mapping of his environment, as he travels through virtual worlds, encounters other human entities, and is psychologically stimulated by these encounte rs.

The architectural construct of cyberspace represents the human structuralization of human consciousness and experience. The fact that cyberspace in Gibson's book involves other entities beyond human understanding demonstrate's Gibson's take o n the shift in power structures in this world from humans to alien entities. In "Literary Architecture" (Frank) we see how humans perceive their environments in terms of boundaries they create in perceptions:

"Man's main difference is that he imagines his consciousness or experience to be bounded in particular space, (walls, bodies, time) while what is outside his personal realm he imagines to be boundless."

The fact that Gibson's cyberspace stretches beyond the r ealm of human consciousness creates a world of heightened anxieties. The signals and signs that characterize the cyberspace are given and received withouth knowing the "receiver" or "giver" of those signals. In Neuromancer, alien invasion promise s danger and anxiety of uncalculable degree to humans that dwell in this architecture, which becomes throughout the novel, an architecture of fear and despair. Calvino's novel describes the new interactions within these invisible cities:

"At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape... the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made o f fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them."

In a world that has grown out of the human proportion, characters are engulfed by alien encounters and cons tant stimulation from mysterious realms of projection. Perhaps the most poignant of all experiences within this invisible system, is the potential of losing the capability of human interaction and happiness in this connection with others. In Calvino's b ook, he describes Raissa, the city of Sadness:

"In Raissa, the city of sadness, there runs and invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it dra ws new and rapid patterns so that at every second, the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.

Gibson's dystopic world is one in which characters are continually isolated from one another, where invisible "thr eads" do in fact exist, though they are untractable. Describing cyberspace as a shared experience, we are equally aware, that the relation of one to the system is isolationist. As millions might read the same novel, and interact wit h the text, these millions are sharing the experience of reading that text at the same time as being isolated from one another. This "invisible thread" binds each participant in cyberspace to similar experience, but it is not shared experience: