Looking-Glass Space in “Pattern Recognition” by William Gibson

Abstract

The paper deals with the poetics of the novel, based on the principles of literary cyberpunk. William Gibson, the founder of cyberpunk as a genre, in the novel “Pattern Recognition” used the looking-glass image of Lewis Carroll’s book “Through The Looking-Glass And What Alice Found There” as a leitmotif, reminiscently curved and shown only in the mind of the main character Case Pollard. The paper analyzes the semantics of the leitmotif of looking-glass and its functionality in the novel, as well as the conformity with the principles of transrealism and posthumanism. The state of the main character is not explained by some acts or periods of the day, but by hormonal disorder; the scientific awareness is intertwined with the metaphoric field. Thus William Gibson’s artistic style acquires obvious features of cyberpunk. If Alice was just a weird kid who invented the world of fairy-tale creatures, Gibson’s character Case lives in a transreal world, full of various man-made modifications of space and humans.
 The modern Case-Alice does not invent anything, because the fairy-tale situation of her life is already embedded in the nature of civilizational development. Case as a heroine of the novel fully complies with the requirements of transrealism: she is not ‘normal’, she has a diagnosis and medical history. Тhe ‘F: F: F’ program (fragments) is created by an autistic Russian girl. The neurotic characters that Case meets are atypical, all in their own way. That is why the world around modern Alice, who is Case at the same time, is distorted by the abnormality, which is not hidden by the heroes. The cyberspace of modern human existence transforms all the sores of society into customary artificial symbols of degradation – posthumanistic codes.