Cyberpunk and Frye's Theory of Literature
Stage 2: Romantic
Cyberpunk characters, therefore, are human, even though they are superior in some ways to other humans in the story. This would seem to fit the definition of the hero of "romance," which Frye defines as a person who is "superior in degree to other men and to his environment," and who "moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended" (33). Frye gives Beowulf as an example of such a hero; in this epic story, Beowulf swims miles below a lake, slays dragons and monsters, and possesses superhuman strength, marking himself as superior to the others in the story. Cyberpunk characters, too, are markedly superior to others around them.
Indeed, if cyberpunk characters are superior to other men, they need only conquer the environment to act as a romantic hero, according to Frye's definition. The modern-day cities and sprawling malls and factories demonstrate the subjugation of the environment that cyberpunks actively participate in, and cyberspace not only conquers the environment, but transcends it. In a virtual paradise world of computers, the "natural laws" are, indeed, suspended. A character can zoom across the earth like a beam of light, or can even be hacked to pieces, as in Stephenson's Snow Crash, with "no flesh, blood, or organs...visible... [n]othing more than a thin shell of epidermis" (102). In cyberspace, the laws of nature are truly suspended, and so one would suspect that a cyberpunk character might indeed be Frye's sort of romantic hero.
Such a theory is not entirely without its supporters. Cyberpunk characters have been compared to the "wandering adventurer-heroes" of romance (McHale 153), and Gibson's novels are said to have their deepest roots in "late eighteenth and nineteenth century Romanticism," as his heroes "venture anew into the Romantic heartland" (Glazer 156). Themes of transcendence, particularly in Gibson's novels, have been said to point "back to the romantic trappings of [science fiction]" (Hollinger 206). There is, evidently, something of romance in cyberpunk fiction. Cyberpunk characters are not, however, romantic heroes of any sort.
A cyberpunk character is superior in kind to other men, as well as in degree. This is different from the romantic hero, as Frye sees it. To be superior in degree, one must possess abilities or rank which are greater than normal men. Case's ability to commit crimes in cyberspace is certainly a superiority in degree; not all human characters in Neuromancer have this ability, giving Case an edge. Superiority in kind is present as well, as I said - consider Molly's razor fingernails in Neuromancer. By augmenting the human body, the cyberpunk hero becomes superior in kind as well as degree, and thus differentiates him/herself from the romantic hero. Case, since he achieves a certain state of transcendence in cyberspace, either approaches or reaches a different state of being. Does he achieve godhood? I don't believe he does, though he may come rather close. Case is, after all, a human being in the real world. He does not have any cybernetic augmentations like many other cyberpunk characters, and neither do Hiro in Snow Crash, or YT in Virtual Light, or Cassie in Clipjoint, though all of them do rely heavily on technology. Even though the cyberpunk character is usually superior in kind, the key to differentiating cyberpunk literature from romanticism must be found elsewhere. That key lies in the setting.
The romantic hero moves, as Frye says, in a world where the laws of nature are suspended. Frye suggests a pastoral type of setting, naming the "magic forest" specifically, and suggesting that the romantic hero achieves a sort of union with nature, moving "outward," so to speak. Cyberpunk characters lack this externalized union with a natural world; their union is with the world of cyberspace, inside a computer-generated landscape. It would be possible to argue, however, that if we are comparing the natural world of the romantic with the virtual world of cyberspace, the romantic hero's union with nature can be compared to the cyberpunk's union with cyberspace. This would be true, but we cannot leave it at that. As Miriyam Glazer argues, the difference lies in the "qualitative and substantive alterations generated by the technolog[y]" (158). Technology generates a "decaying and peripheral" world of nature, an artificial, immoral, internal world (162). Nature is quite the opposite, as one would expect - it is natural (obviously), normal, full of natural rather than man-made laws (even if these laws are slightly suspended), and external.
Therein lies the difference. In cyberpunk fiction, the bonding and union is internalized and reversed from the state of things in romanticism. Where a romantic hero once bonded with nature and journeyed through a natural world of fairies, enchanted forests, and elves, the cyberpunk hero now travels in the world of his own mind. Romance, for the cyberpunk hero, becomes a "case of nerves" (Csicery-Ronay 193), and the seeming "superiority" over the natural laws of the environment becomes ironic, particularly when one considers that the realm in which one is superior is a virtual one. Can one truly be superior over a virtual world built in the universe of the computer, a world which does not really exist? To say such thinking is ironic would be an understatement.
To be sure, one can be superior in cyberspace; Stephenson's Snow Crash, for example, has a protagonist who is a warrior in cyberspace and an unemployed pizza deliverer in the real world. Superiority does exist, but cyberspace is, ultimately, very different from the real world.