Cyberpunk: A Return to Myth
Introduction
With our axes in place, it seems even more logical to place the Neuromantic character between the Ironic and the Divine. The strongest argument for such a placement is Frye's own suggestion that irony returns in a cyclical fashion to myth. I have suggested such a position, and shown where it might fit; it is now essential to show how cyberpunk accomplishes this return to myth. Cyberpunk suggests a lot more than hints and inklings of myth; mythic elements are prevalent in cyberpunk, and demonstrate an entirely new mythology. The presence of scientific elements might confuse the issue: as James Prothero says, "somehow we have assumed that our scientific civilization has put us beyond having or needing a mythology" ( 32). This is not at all the case. Rather than destroying myth, "science and technology have become our defining teleology" (F7), says Georgy in a newspaper article. Frye tells us in Anatomy of Criticism that science fiction has an "inherent tendency to myth" (49). Prothero agrees with such a belief, stating that "science fiction and fantasy are present-day forms of mythology" (33). Even Jacques Ellul predicted such a phenomenon in 1954:
Nothing belongs any longer to the realm of the gods or the supernatural. The individual who lives in the technical milieu knows very well that there is nothing spiritual anywhere. But man cannot live without the sacred. He therefore transfers his sense of the sacred to the very thing which destroyed its former object: to technique[technology] itself...there is no question of a technical religion. (143-45)Ellul's words speak of a very real technological religion; they apply equally well to a technological genre of fiction, particularly one which is as based in reality as cyberpunk is. While Ellul predicted such a technical religion with many misgivings, and with much apprehension, the mythology afforded by cyberpunk fiction is not feared by cyberpunks. It is much better than a society without mythology, as Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell talked about in The Power of Myth:
Moyers: What happens when a society no longer embraces a powerful mythology?This hopelessness and godlessness is what many fear cyberpunk fiction represents. It is not godlessness that cyberpunk brings, however, but a new hopeful mythology. Through the science aspect of cyberpunk, the punks of the world are given a new myth, a new hope, as Pat Cadigan said in our interview:
Campbell: What we've got on our hands. If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.
Moyers: And you'd find?
Campbell: The news of the day, including destructive and violent acts by young people who don't know how to behave in a civilized society. (Campbell 8)
MikelJr: Do you think that we've lost our myths in the wake of science?Cyberpunk affords us that opportunity to reach for the divine because it does offer us a new mythology. Easterbrook speaks of a "Cyberpunk mythos" (379), and quotes William Gibson as speaking of a "'mythology of computers'" in an interview (380). Easterbrook continues to speak of Gibson's "celebrated conjectures about technological change," saying that they are the product "of open mythologizing," creating something which he then describes as "a mythos of surface" (381).
Cadigan: Oh, good heavens no. Our myths are like the flip side of science. Science is what differentiates us from the animals. Myths - and other kinds of art - are how we reach for the divine. (Interview)
I spoke earlier of the presence of the artificial intelligences of cyberspace, and of the fact that these artificial intelligences were viewed by cyberpunk characters as very real divinities. This isn't merely a case of mistaken identity. When we look at cyberpunk through the eyes of mythology, and place cyberpunk literature in Frye's scheme of things, Easterbrook's words ring truer than ever. Cyberpunk really does begin to resemble a new mythological world. Technology does not erase the world of myth and magic; it alters it. We have all of the key elements of a new myth: there are the gods in the heaven of "cyberspace," represented by the AI's; the agents of the gods, akin to priests and prophets, such as Case in Neuromancer, who are necessary in order for the AI's to perform their duties in the realms below; the monsters of voodoo and other mythologies resurfacing as "ghosts," and "zombies," (McHale 170);"dead manifest[ing] themselves to the living" (McHale 171) as deceased characters find new life in cyberspace; a means of "transcendence," a way to travel to the heavens and join the gods, escaping hell; even a new "virtual morality," based in the belief that if you do the right things for/to the right people, success is yours.
These last two are, I believe, the keys to the new mythology that cyberpunk literature suggests. Throughout cyberpunk , as I've mentioned earlier, a theme of transcendence almost always appears. Characters in cyberpunk fiction constantly try to escape from their human bodies, and this escape comprises one of the "benefits" of the new mythology. The escape is via a computer link to their brains, allowing cyberpunk characters to transcend the body. Just as Buddhist monks try to achieve Nirvana by transcending the self, so do some Neuromantics try to escape; it is a religious experience for them, a chance to achieve union with the universe and achieve immortality. Whether roaming cyberspace as a bodiless, ethereal entity, or adding on the newest prosthetic limbs, Neuromantics want to become a part of the mythology around them. After all, "[their] technology might have a greater potentiality for transcendence than [they] do" (Grant 47), and so they eagerly hook themselves up to cyberdecks and cyberlimbs, looking for transcendence and hope. This bears some attention - if the Neuromantic's religion has failed and God is dead, what is left for the cyberpunk character, if anything? Is there a glimmer of hope in what the critics have called a hopeless world?
Greg Bear's "Petra" is a story about what's left after the great death of God, the "Mortdieu". In this post-apocalyptic world, the remnants of what was once human society live in shattered churches and cathedrals. Here, the main character, who is himself a fusion of man-carved stone and flesh, speaks with what is left of God:
He shook His head slowly. "You seem a wise enough creature. You know about Mortdieu."Living in a world where the supposed illusion of God's existence has been disproven by Nietzsche, the cyberpunk character's ideas about morality and faith disappear, becoming illusory, intangible, and worthless. Where can the Neuromantic find his hope in a world, such as Greg Bear's, where even Christ is unable to do anything? As Joseph Campbell says, speaking of the impact of science on myth:
"Yes."
"Then you should know that I barely have enough power to keep myself together, to heal myself, much less to minister to those out there." He gestured beyond the walls...
I was stunned. I sat down hard on the stone floor, and the Christ patted me on my head as He walked by. "Go back to your hiding place; live as well as you can," He said. "Our time is over." (121)
With the loss of them [myths] there follows uncertainty, and with uncertainty, disequilibrium, since life, as both Nietzsche and Ibsen knew, requires life-supporting illusions; and where these have been dispelled, there is nothing secure to hold on to, no moral law, nothing firm. (Myths 10)The only means for transcendence left is through the new god, technology. And look at what technology can do for cyberpunk characters: they can extend life; replace hearts and lungs with artificial ones; destroy diseases; communicate instantly with anyone, anywhere on or off the planet, via cyberspace; travel at thousands of miles per hour through the solar system in spacecraft. Neuromantics even have the power, should they so choose, to destroy creation with an atomic bomb or worse weapons. What cyberpunk represents is the transfer of this massive power to the punks, the people without myth.
And these punks are literally "eating it up," making it a part of themselves. With the potential to become an �bermensch, moving beyond the limits of the human body on to something greater, why would any one of these punks refuse the chance? After all, if "you don't control technology, it will control you" (Elmer-Dewitt 65), and it is better to take control of the machine than to become controlled by it; an example is the film Terminator, in which "the computers are now the master and humanity the slave" (Rushing 70).
The punks in cyberpunk fiction want to be a "machine," but it is a personal, free-thinking machine, not a part of a government bureaucratic "machine." Take Marc Laidlaw's story, "400 Boys," for example, in which a gang speaks of an encounter with a more technologically advanced gang. One gang member refers to the enemy as "boys"; another disagrees, saying they were "Gods" (59). With technology, even boys can be seen as gods, something beyond human. Rucker tells us, comparing cyberpunk ideas to the real world, that "We're becoming cyborgs. Our tech is getting smaller, closer to us, and it will soon merge with us" (66). Donna Haraway says that "[b]y the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs" (Haraway 150). Being a cyborg isn't just about having a better body though; it's about becoming part of a myth. And, as Ellul tells us,
The tool of our day enables man to conquer...The victory of our day belongs to the tool...The individual obeys and no longer has victory which is his own. He cannot have access to his apparent triumphs except by becoming himself the object of technique and the offspring of the mating of man and machine. (146)