By
Lisa
Swanstrom
ABSTRACT:
When the idoru Rei Toei appears in the chic environment of "The Western World" club in William Gibson’s Idoru, her hologram body flickers in the ambient light like swirling snowflakes suspended in a glass dome. As Colin Laney watches her from the corner of his eye–pretending not to, trying not to, but compelled to watch her nevertheless–he experiences a transcendent moment. In this instant Laney recognizes that the idoru Rei Toei, an elaborate, elegant, and complexly patterned data construct, is something ineffable and real–something more than the sum of her flickering and light-washed informational parts. This revelation disrupts him, leaves him skittish, off-kilter, and cold.
The physically present Rei Toei, defined in Idoru as "…a personality-construct, a congeries of software agents, the creation of information-designers," (92) marks a significant departure in Gibson’s fiction, since to read his prose is to usually embark upon an adrenaline-high exploration of cyberspace, a place that demands the abandonment of the body, and a place that is frequented by jaded, street-wise technophiles who seem all too willing to abandon their flesh for freedom. Yet the idoru Rei Toei inserts herself stubbornly into the real world, calling attention to her presence, her penetrating gaze, her luminous body. Standing outside of cyberspace, the idoru problematizes Gibson’s status as the premiere author of the "flesh-eating 90s," a status which has been conferred upon him as a result of his conception of cyberspace as a place that offers a seductive effacement of the flesh in favor of a flying, weightless mind no longer beholden to body or earth.
Yet despite Gibson’s compelling (even seductive) writing style, which at times does offer the reader a satisfying, bodiless journey, it is my sense that the notion of disembodiment as a liberating and emancipatory existence cannot be taken for granted in his work. Because, even as they exult in the freedom that cyberspace affords, Gibson’s characters exhibit a complex, troubled, and uneasy attitude towards disembodiment. Furthermore, the nature of cyberpunk fiction (typically identified as dark, dystopic, nihilistic) itself problematizes a simple Cartesian split. Rather, such fiction, as it stands in relation to is science fiction predecessors, makes the body itself a locus of experience, rather than a mere "life support system of the mind" and reveals the body as a site of creation, imagination, and shared sensory awareness.
Thus, by providing a general description of cyberpunk fiction in contrast to its science-fiction predecessors in terms of Cartesian concerns, and by examining the unease that disembodiment engenders in Gibson’s Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, and Idoru, it is my attempt to determine how the notion of a complex, embodied human sensibility is present from the beginning and emerges quite completely in Gibson’s work, culminating with the debut of the rock star bride, the idoru Rei Toei.