Gibson on "the videotape" as a paranoid's bohemia

[Prashant Kumar]

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fiction-no-211-william-gibson


INTERVIEWER

Had you already begun to write Pattern Recognition before 9/11?

GIBSON

I had but as soon as that happened just about everything else in the
manuscript dried up and blew away.

INTERVIEWER

Why did the September 11 attacks have such an effect on you?

GIBSON

Because I had had this career as a novelist, Manhattan was the place in the
United States that I visited most regularly. I wound up having more friends
in New York than I have anywhere else in the United States. It has that
quality of being huge and small at the same time—and noble. So without even
realizing it, I had come to know it, I had come to know lower Manhattan
better than any place other than Vancouver. When 9/11 happened it affected
me with a directness I would never have imagined possible.

In a strange sort of way that particular relationship with New York ­ended
with 9/11 because the post–9/11 New York doesn’t feel to me to be the same
place.

INTERVIEWER

Are you glad you wrote a book that had so much 9/11 in it?

GIBSON

I’m really glad. I felt this immense gratitude when I finished, and I was
sitting there looking at the last page, thinking, I’m glad I got a shot at
this thing now, because for sure there are dozens of writers all around the
world right this minute, thinking, I have to write about 9/11. And I
thought, I’m already done, I won’t have to revisit this material, and it’s
largely out of my system.

INTERVIEWER

Alongside that public narrative runs a very private one, with Cayce chasing
through the maze of the Internet after the source of some mesmerizing film
material she calls “the footage.”

GIBSON

Having assumed that there were no longer physical backwaters in which new
bohemias could spawn and be nurtured, I was intrigued by the idea and the
very evident possibility that in the post-geographic Internet simply having
a topic of sufficient obscurity and sufficient obsessive interest to a
number of geographically diverse people could replicate the birth of a
bohemia.

When I started writing about the footage, I don’t think I had ever seen a
novel in which anybody had had a real emotional life unfolding on a
l­istserv, but I knew that millions of people around the world were living
parts of their emotional lives in those places—and moreover that the
Internet was basically built by those people! They were meeting one another
and having affairs and getting married and doing everything in odd
special-interest communities on the Internet. Part of my interest in the
footage was simply trying to rise to the challenge of naturalism.
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