The Post-Shakespearean Body Politic in Jeff Noon’s Vurt

Abstract

This paper argues that Jeff Noon’s 1993 British cyberpunk novel Vurt rewrites Shakespeare’s tragedy of exogamy or racial crossing, Othello, as a triumphant fable in favor of interspecies mixing. The novel moves among 1990s Manchester, the drug-fuelled, multi-species virtual game-world or Vurt, and the deadly cultural crossings of Shakespeare’s Othello. The gang whose exploits the narrator, Scribble, documents prides itself on its racial purity, to such an extent that Scribble is in love with his own sister, Desdemona. By the end of the novel, however, Scribble discovers that the world of the Vurt favors cross-cultural myth-making over antique Englishness and hybrid adaptation (in both its literary and racial senses) over generic or genetic purity.