A Requiem for the Fall of the Petal:
A Review on William Gibson's Pattern Recognition

Shige (Coyote) Suzuki

　One of the historical images which gravely inscribed people's mind at the beginning of the 21st century is the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 in New York. With the repeated media footage in which the two airplanes crashed toward the World Trade Center and the collapse of the towers, every person inevitably put oneself in the position to find a meaning or theory to understand the incident. In his first "post-millennium" novel, Pattern Recognition, William Gibson makes his female protagonist witness this unforgettable historical incident along with the concurrent micro-event of "a single petal fall" (135) at the display window of an antique shop in SoHo. As an artist highly-sensitive to media and information, Gibson surely is responding to the tragedy in New York when he refers to the catastrophe in Pattern Recognition as "[a]n experience outside of culture" (137). To use Gibson's well-known words, the 9/11 is a nodal point after which "nothing is really is the same" (195).

　Unlike the futuristic settings of Gibson's previous novels, Pattern Recognition is set in the "now" of the post-9/11 present. Gibson introduces his novel's heroine, Cayce Pollard as a "coolhunter" (2), whose job is to find potential trends on and relaying that information to PR firms for commodification. As a "dowser in the world of global marketing" (2), Cayce has an intuitive talent for recognizing the next big cultural trend; this is obviously an enormously this is obviously an enormously valuable 'talent' in today's global, media-hungry economy; and her intuitions and decisions are always correct. But there is a downside to this unique gift --- she can't stand what she is able to recognize so acutely. In a Gibsonian touch of magic realism, Cayce has a severe a physical revulsion whenever she is directly exposed to any major corporate logos and trademarks in the presence of the Michelin Man, Tommy Hilfiger, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci and Mickey Mouse and the like, and Cayse violently ill.

　Presenting from Cayce's point of view the main narrative revolves around Cayce's new assignment she's reluctantly accepted from Hubertus Bigend, a corporate advertising mogul, to find the maker of the mysterious fragmented film footages on the net. Cayce embarks on a quest for locating the maker of the footages with the aids of street youth and a friend (alias Parkaboy) at the "Fetish:Footage:Forum" (3) on the web. As her outfits are aptly nicknamed as "CPUs" (8) (Cayce Pollard Units), Gibson assigns her the similar role of CPU (Central Processing Unit) to process and find a pattern from acquired information abound her. However, as Cayce goes into the labyrinths of such quintessentially postmodern cities as London (described as "mirror-world"), Tokyo and Moscow, Cayce gradually falls into the in-between, liminal positions where she sways between the same two possibilities Oedipa Mass encountered in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49: either All the incidents around her have connections with each other, or they are just a coincidences. Constantly concerned throughout her quest about the possibility of she may be experiencing a paranoiac "apophenia" (defined in the novel as "the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things" [115]), Cayce eventually learns something more about her father who is presumably dead in the incident of the 9/11.

　Pattern Recognition is the first novel by which Gibson challenges to appeal to the audience of mainstream novels. In this novel, Gibson fundamentally abandons the SF tropes and futuristic high-tech gadgets and focuses instead more directly on describing our reality without the safety need of SF to fall back on. To write the current human situation, Gibson doesn't have to depend on the futuristic Sci-fi concoctions because our contemporary society already provide technologies and high-tech gizmos: portable DVD players, notebook computers, LCD displays, and cellular phones.

　Gibson has always had the sharpest ear of any of his contemporaries for "techno-poetics," and here this results prose that is especially attuned to the new sort of poetics that are emerging within the area of the Internet communication--included words, idioms, metaphors and rhetorical conventions which have been appropriated from the web culture: Google, URL, spam, Netscape, Hotmail, eBay, emoticons, IP address, CGI, dot-com, search engines, thumbnail, jpeg and the like. The repeated verbfied noun, "Googled" (50), is a typical example of them. Moreover, not only are pervasive these new media terms in the novel, but an e-mail address and a digital watermark become important major clues which open a gate for Cayce to find the maker of the footage.

　Although Gibson still deals with the familiar issues of information technology and its cultural effects on humanity, the thematic focuses in Pattern Recognition gravitates toward in the domain of the media, the Internet (sub-)culture and global capitalism. At one level, Pattern Recognition is about economical and cultural globalization in parallel with the evolution of the global information network. Following his literary ancestor, Thomas Pynchon, who has countercultural resistance to repressive systems and compassion to the marginalized, Gibson inserts the imaginary depiction of a number of Asian physical laborers by Cayce at the moment of the rejection of the design of a corporate logo at an office in London (12). In the world of global marketing, a mere decision on logo has the power to affect the life and fate of people living in remote places. In addition, Gibson illustrates how the globalization exponentially homogenizes cultural differences in each place. The global ubiquity of Western or American culture is brought forth. The "mirror-world" which enables us to situate ourselves in the contrast to other culture, is disappearing by "the spectral hand of global marketing" (341).

　As the numerous references in the novel such as WWII, the Cold War, and shadowy world of espionage and international conspiracies, 20th century history around the globe has been indelibly smeared with blood. These violent and sneaky political conflicts such as the two World Wars and the Cold War seem to be gone by now. But in the age of global information network, the negative heritage of the previous century; the intelligent agencies engaging the surveillance on information traffic such as Echelon, NSA (National Security Agency), and SIGINT (Signals intelligence) still exist. While Gibson writes about these global socio-cultural conflicts and the tragedy of 9/11 at the dawn of the 21st century, he also depicts the personal and physiological healing of his protagonist. Cayce's healing can be read as Gibson's hope for healing the dead in the 20th century; at the same time, Pattern Recognition might be a requiem for the dead souls for the 9/11 as Cayce is "weeping for her century, though whether the one past or the one present she doesn't know" (356).

"A Requiem for the Fall of the Petal: A Book Review on Gibson's Pattern Recognition" 　American Book Review, 2003 November/December (Volume 25, Issue 1)