Cyberpunk and Frye's Theory of Literature
Naming the Cyberpunk: The Neuromantic
Having dismissed "anti-hero," "hero," and each of Frye's categories in turn, it is essential that we find some way of naming the cyberpunk character. Discovery of an appropriate name makes the placement of the cyberpunk on the chart more valid. Fortunately, such a name has been suggested by more than one critic, although the term has never been "officially" accepted. The term is derived, appropriately enough, from the title of the definitive cyberpunk novel: Gibson's Neuromancer.
The title of "Neuromantic" is appropriate for more than one reason, not the least of which is the use of the term by many critics. For example, Bruce Sterling tells us in his preface to Mirrorshades that the term "Neuromantic" was one of the original labels for the first cyberpunk writers on the scene in the early 1980's (ix). Miryam Glazer hails Gibson as a "postmodern New-Wave Romanticist" (155), and speaks of Gibson's "Neuromantic vision" (163). Glazer's assertion is that cyberpunk is, essentially, the opposite of true romance. Though Glazer's romance is based on the Romantic writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and not in the fairy tales that Frye suggests, her point is well taken. Romantics, Glazer says,
culled their visions of a rejuvenated humanity participating fully and joyously...life is turned inside-out in Gibson's world, and, in the process, becomes...ironic.In Gibson's world, this Romantic faith in the inner life and, with it, the human imagination, as wellsprings of positive human and social transformation, have all but disappeared...In the end, his "Neuromanticism - a "New Romanticism" of the nerves, "the silver paths" - is also a "Necromanticism," a "lane to the land of the dead." (157-8, quoting Neuromancer 243)
As I said earlier, cyberpunk literature tends to turn inwards, to the nerves and cyberspace, whereas romance tends to look outwards, to the land of imagination and spiritual fulfillment. This difference is the "key to understanding the nature of the change from the optimism of Romanticism to the resignation of Neuromanticism" (Glazer 158). The "Necromanticism" Glazer speaks of also attests to this lack of optimism in Neuromanticism; by traveling through cyberspace into the nerves and synapses of the body, one engages in a sort of magical journey. The cyberpunk's journey into the heaven of cyberspace is not just electronic. Obviously, when one can become a god inside cyberspace, existing in pure electronic form, we are dealing with something beyond the physical realm, something akin to a spiritual journey, as in the voyage of the soul to the underworld in Greek myth, or the journey of a soul into heaven in the Christian Bible.