Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

246Demonic Texts and Textual DemonsA typical Neuromancer sentence: “Cold steel odor.” 194 No verb, just adjectivesand nouns crammed into one tight, condensed packet of information.The synesthetic logic is efficient: ‘steel,’ the middle term qualifies both‘cold’ and ‘odor’ – both of them connect with steel, and as the context isCase going through an operation, the sentence functions also metaphorically.Steel bites between the sensations of skin and smell, linking to thesurgery and the theme of man-machine heterogeneity. Similar metaphoricheterogeneity operates in many figures of speech in Neuromancer: gettingnervous is ‘coming apart at the seams,’ healing someone is ‘fixing’ him, andpersonal traits are ‘the way you’re wired.’ 195 The ambivalently demonic positioningof technology corresponds to textual polyphony and its network ofelements, figuratively, linguistically and narratively amalgamated with eachother.The traumatic limit that Neuromancer explores is mainly situated betweenthe spiritual and the corporeal. The narrative effects a deconstructionof this limit; it textualises the spiritual efforts in sensuous imagery, and material(body/machine) in spiritual terms. The juxtaposed opposites beginleaking into each other, the mere density of overlapping connections creating“new” reality where the difference between real and appearance “doesnot matter.” But it remains a topic for discussion.‘What happened to you, back there, man? You flatlined.’He shook his head. ‘I dunno, yet. Wait.’‘Okay. We get a cab or something.’ She took his hand and led himacross Jules Verne, past a window displaying the season’s Paris furs.‘Unreal,’ he said, looking up again.‘Nah,’ she responded, assuming he meant the furs, ‘grow it on a collagenbase, but it’s mink DNA. What’s it matter?’ 196In narrative terms, both the spiritual and the material can only appear asrepresentation. Cyberspace is a narrative space, and William Gibson has saidthat computers in his books are “simply a metaphor for human memory. I’minterested in the hows and whys of memory, the ways it defines who andwhat we are, in how easily memory is subject to revision.” 197 Neuromancerinvolves its reader in a discussion of how to approach and understandagency; if identities are based on memory and memory is only representation,there is no reason why history could not be rewritten. If there is no“other” outside the information system, there could be no stable position tostand against forgery or misappropriation of power. Neuromancer seeminglyendorses the “information religion” backed by the claims of the ArtificialThat kind of freedom can be dangerous because you don’t have to justify what’s happeningin terms of the logic of character or plot.” (McCaffery 1991, 272-73.)194 N, 42.195E.g., N, 40-41. For more examples, see Csicsery-Ronay 1991, 190.196 N, 149.197McCaffery 1991, 270.