Hello all!
I have just re-read, in rapid succession, both Pattern Recognition & Spook Country, which brought up some interesting thoughts (well, to me at least). There are probably multiple threads that long ago addressed everything I have thought of, but an admittedly cursory search did not turn up anything of the sort of I was expecting/hoping to find.

So, for your delectation and debate, there is an essay which the subject line explains clearly enough. The whole thing is much to long to post here (4 complete pages, single spaced, in Word 2003), but if you are at all interested, you can go either here:
My blog
or here:
My MySpace blog
and read/comment on the whole thing!
Hope all of y'all having Spring Break are having a good one. Wish all of y'all who aren't, were.
Cheers!

I've always found it interesting that the POV character, or main POV character, in WG's novels has been a woman or girl so often. Starting with Marly in Count Zero and Kumiko in Mona Lisa Overdrive, he seems to get more and more used to them. Chevette in Virtual Light and All Tomorrow's Parties. Chia in Idoru. Then in Pattern Recognition full-out single-view-point protagonist Cayce. Hollis in Spook Country is almost a retreat, since she has to share space with Tito and Milgrim.

I think it may be irresistible for male authors, or at least some male authors, to take on the challenge of writing from a woman's point of view. I wonder if it isn't simply part of our male instincts. Women are more interesting, our genetic imperatives tell us, and therefore we want to make them our heroines.

Just something that came up when I started reading your text.

I have always loved Bonny Portmore.

I was struck, on re-reading both Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, by how the female protagonists of both are presented in their capacity as employees, as persons engaged in work. Cayce and Hollis are working. Not at jobs that most of us will have, or could ever imagine having: coolhunter? ex-rock star turned journalist? but jobs nevertheless. Both narratives occur because each is doing her job, and both are concerned with how to successfully meet the requirements of said jobs, and with completing the tasks imposed by the nature of the job. Neither novel is primarily concerned―at all―with the subjects typically addressed as essential in novels in which the principal characters are women: i.e., their emotional entanglements with men or other partners, their love-lives, their sex-lives, their families, in short, their closest, most interpersonal relationships. (It must be said, however, that this is not without precedent in Gibson’s oeuvre, however, when you consider the conditions in which we encounter both Molly (Neuromancer) and Chevette (Virtual Light)). These latter subjects make appearances in both, but are not the primary point of the action of the narrative.

While I can certainly agree with the idea that Gibson has escaped the common vernacular of the typical female protagonist I do not believe it is centrally a question of empowerment but ratheroone of story propulsion which Gibson always has been rather concerned with.

His novels do not, as a rule, meander long in any emotional territory, they are propulsive and have always been modeled on a plot-driven schema even though said plots are often rather tenuous and sometimes feel incidental to the core material of the book itself.

Int his manner, while I agree that Gibson has achieved many female protagonists that break a certain mold, I do not think he necessarily had his primary cause in doing so one of overt deconstruction of said tropes.

If he did not, does that make him less or more of a feminist author?

Is his possible lack of entertaining such notions of the cliche emotional landscapes evidence of a rather more evolved sense of the sexes as less gender defined or merely the work of an author who doesn't explore such territory as a rule?

Now, I will freely admit that there may be many other novels which have done this. While I consider myself well-read, I have not read everything there is to read, by any means. And I do not habitually read that species of fiction that seem to be, in the marketing sense, aimed at women: romance novels.

At least in terms of Cayce I can certainly suggest that she was inspired by Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49. She was a woman who worked, also "worked it" but I think that had more to do with the 1960's then it did with Pynchon's take on women.

This is the first aspect of both that makes me approach both novels as, if not definitively or openly meant as feminist, at least as texts that can be read as having come to grips with an issue at the heart of the feminist project: that women work, that work matters, and that women as workers should not be confined to any particular role(s) in such work simply because they are women.

I agree that he does accomplish this. I know nothing of what defines a "feminist" text but I would suppose that intent is a part of that definition. Just as a "post-structuralist" or "existential" text would be.

This begins to tread into the territory of authorial intent versus reader imposition. The latter I think make yup the larger portion of anything that passes for critique. It is rather rare for an author to consciously write or ascribe int their text many of the notions that the critical community pick from it. Indeed, Gibson in particular refutes didactics and consistently describes his process as largely unconscious.

Trying to get him to comment on the significance of this or that passage in a book is rather like trying to herd a cat that has little interest in you. Rather me int his case, but still...

Yet, in the context of Pattern Recognition, wherein Hubertus Bigend is the order-giver extraordinaire, it is this ability to question that constitutes Cayce’s precise value to him as an employee engaged in the search for the maker of the footage. She may question both him and his motives, but that does not stop her from asking the questions anyway. Bigend, as the head of an admittedly anomalous corporation, values the very thing that makes Cayce unlikely to ever be a good fit in a more ‘normal’ organizational structure.

I'd argue that what Bigend finds valuable is rather a trait that is oft ascribed to women: intuition. He says as much in the text, that he doesn't know so much what he wants her to do as he knows he wants her doing it in that way she has. Her job is, effectively, one of a professional intuiter (a Laney-esque water witch) and that is a rather common attribute that pop culture attributes to women.

Does this mean you are suggesting that Gibson is affirming a feminine trait not usually seen as being monetized and/or commodified by a male centric hierarchy? I can certainly see that.

b) trust the reader to overlay the situationally appropriate facial expressions and vocal cues to such a conversation testifies to his belief that readers have, on some level, observed/participated in same.

Isn't this more a product of not underestimating the imagination and intellect of the reader rather than a feminist aspect? I don't see that it has specifically to do with gender in this instance.

Your page is very pink for a feminist!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: UberDog,

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:
(...)
Your page is very pink for a feminist!

LOL

I scared her off with calling her out on the pink, alas.

What's wrong with the pink?