Cyberpunk: A Return to Myth
Defining the New Myth
If cyberpunks would be a part of this new myth, whether that be in reality or in cyberpunk fiction, exactly what would they be a part of? What is a myth, and how does it afford him transcendence? Myths are, basically, "stories of how things came to be" (McArthur 675), or "stories... as a means of interpreting natural events in an effort to make concrete and particular a special perception of human beings or a cosmic view" (Holman 317). Frye differentiates myths as dealing with gods, and romance as "displac[ing] myth in a human direction" (137).
For cyberpunk literature, or Neuromance, the displacement would be in the opposite direction, towards the divine world found in cyberspace and away from the pure human realm. Cyberpunk is a story not of how things came to be, but of what they are becoming (a theme seen in the quote opening this thesis). It is a story of man becoming divine through his interactions with the machines. If, as Frye says, myth literature tells stories about gods, and progresses away from myth to romantic stories about humans (188), then Neuromantic literature is about humans moving back towards myth. Cyberpunk is a new myth-in-transition, about a fusion and twisting of the difference between god, man, and machine. In Pat Cadigan's "Rock On," the main character can link herself up to a computer, playing music through her own mind. Here, she does exactly that:
In the beginning, I thought, and the echo was stupendous. In the beginning...the beginning...the beginning...Cadigan's character uses a fusion with musical instruments and computers to blur the distinctions between man, machine, and god, and by the end of the story one is not sure if the main character is a "sinner," a "synner" (a pun on the word "synthesizer"), or a god. Neuromantics find their power through this fusion with the machine; it takes them on a journey towards Godhood. It enables their myths to be born, and to evolve. "Why should our bodies end at the skin?" (Haraway 178) is the penultimate cyberpunk declaration. Haraway continues, speaking about the positive erasure of gender and other markings of humanity:
In the beginning, the sinner was not human...
It was a crime, but all I could do was take them and shake them. Rock gods in the hands of an angry sinner. (38)
I would suggest that cyborgs have more to do with regeneration...We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender...I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. (181)Though Haraway does not seek godhood through a cyborg nature, the key to this statement, (and, indeed, her entire "Manifesto for Cyborgs"), is the fact that being a cyborg, being a god, and being human are different. Cyberpunk is, after all, a path towards godhood, not godhood in itself. Haraway does seem to suggest the possibility of godhood, even if she herself refuses it. Cyberpunk literature offers a chance at transcending the human form through a "regeneration" through technology rather than a purely spiritual "rebirth," and that transcendence is a major part of the myth that it is becoming. Frye places Adam "on top of the wheel of fortune, with the destiny of the gods almost within his reach" (212). Whereas Adam failed to reach godhood, and fell, the Neuromantic of cyberpunk fiction does not fail; he can actually become god.