| Author |
Title |
Publisher: |
Date |
Format |
| William Gibson |
Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) |
Kevin Begos |
1992 |
Poem |
| Suggested
By: Alan Liu |
Added:
3/9/2000 |
| Last Modified:
9/18/2002 |
Comments:
(Mini-review by Alan Liu)
Evocative, unique poem of 305 lines by the author who invented the term "cyberspace" and who stands at the head of the cyperpunk tradition of science fiction (Gibson is the author of Neuromancer).
The poem is a meditation on memory and "the mechanism"--the latter appearing in the poem both as an abstract universal principle and as particular mechanisms. The themes of memory and mechanism converge in Gibson's rendering of his family's history by means of the camera(s) that produced a photo album owned by his father. Flipping through the pages of the album, Gibson interleaves among family snapshots the mental images of his own boyhood, his genesis as a writer, and his journey to Toronto to dodge the draft. A comparison may be made to William Wordsworth's autobiographical "Tintern Abbey" (which I have taught in conjunction with "Agrippa"). Just as "Tintern Abbey" rises at strategic moments above any particular "picture of the mind" to offer universal insight, so "Agrippa" frames its particular snapshots within an intuition of the universal. But the difference is that universality for Wordsworth was the organic harmony of nature--"A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things"--whereas for the poet of the cyberage it is "the mechanism."
In the background of "Agrippa" stands the mechanism of "Papa's Mill 1919." (Compare John Constable, the English Romantic painter, whose best work was set in the landscape of the Stour River valley dominated by his father's mills.) And in the foreground--like highlights or lens flares over a picture--are the mechanisms of the camera and the gun. The camera appears in the poem as
The mechanism: stamped black tin,
Leatherette over cardboard, bits of boxwood,
A lens
The shutter falls
Forever
Dividing that from this.
And the gun, which stands to Gibson as the Stolen Boat in The Prelude to Wordsworth, brings Gibson into absolute communion with mechanism:
The gun lay on the dusty carpet.
Returning in utter awe I took it so carefully up
That the second shot, equally unintended,
notched the hardwood bannister and brought
a strange bright smell of ancient sap to life
in a beam of dusty sunlight.
Absolutely alone
in awareness of the mechanism.
(The setting of Gibson's boy-and-gun romance in the U.S. South makes the gun episodes of the poem an interesting teaching companion to William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, where Ike McCaslin--another late Romantic--must lay down his gun and other technology in order to see the bear and deer of nature direct.)
Perhaps even more compelling than Gibson's meditation on "mechanism," however, is his poem's practice of mechanism. The poem was published in electronic form on a diskette embedded within an avant-garde, limited-run artist's "book" with etchings by Dennis Ashbaugh. The file on the diskette was self-encrypting so that it could only be read once on the screen, after which it disappeared. "Agrippa," in short, may be thematically about mechanisms that memorize (like the camera), but it is mechanically about the ephemerality of mechanical memory (and, by extension, of frail human memory as itself the predecessor mechanism).
The poem's conditions of publication, however, mean that it is difficult if not impossible to verify its authoritative text or, for that matter, even the fact that the full book with engravings ever appeared. There are myriad copies of the poem on the Internet, but none are legitimate or authoritative. All are by definition illegitimate offspring of the read-once-only original.
For fuller discussion of the publication of the poem, see Peter Schwenger, "Agrippa, or, The Apocalyptic Book," South Atlantic Quarterly 92 (1994): 617-26. See also this online note. In addition, there are resources on Gibson and Cyperpunk.
Considered purely as a text poem, "Agrippa" is on balance powerful and successful, though it has some faults (especially the spectacularly jejune and jarring lines, "Like the first time you put your mouth / on a woman," at the climax of the gun episode). For a curricular project like Transcriptions, however, which makes the case that both the tools and themes (or media and content) of literature are more splendid when aware of each other, "Agrippa" is the perfect pedagogical mechanism. |
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