It has been a pretty crazy month. I finished writing my dissertation for my Masters, while also beginning to get ready to head back to the States. Things being what they are, I have not been able to finish the post I was planning for you. I was going to do a brief review of all of the movies I have seen over the summer, but since there is a pretty large number, and I want to do them justice, I am going to put that off, potentially until next month. Anyway, in the mean time, I have a bit of a different post. These are notes I made for a presentation I gave on Snow Crash by Neil Stevenson in my Cyberculture course I took last year. While they might be a bit fragmented, hopefully it provides an interesting look at the interaction between myth and literature in the cyberpunk text.
Enjoy.
Snow Crash- Hiro
Protagonist and the Hacker as Trickster
In our first reading from Timothy Leary, he equates the
cyberpunk with the Japanese archetype of the ronin, then points to similar
characters within western culture.
“The West has many historical parallels to the ronin archetype.
The term free lance has its origin in the period after the crusade when
a large number of knights were separated from their lords…Maverick, derive from
the Texan word for unbranded steer, is used to describe a free and
self-directed indivitual.” (254)
The ronin, freelance, and maverick types, however, all bear
similarities to another archetype, that of the mythological Trickster. One of the most fascinating aspects of Snow
Crash is the distinctively mythological
nature of the story. By tying in
references to Sumerian and Judeo-Christian mythologies, Stephenson is able to
weave his story with a sense of history and weight. But Stephenson is not simply rehashing old mythologies, he
is recontextualizing them into a modern framework. One way in which he does this is embodying the mythological
figure of the trickster into the computer programmer, in particular, in Hiro
Protagonist.
In her essay “Hackers as Tricksters of the Digital Age,”
Svetlana Nikitina outlines four basic characteristics of a trickster myth. These are:
1. The
motif of duplicity (propensity for lying and deceit)
2. The
motif of boundary crossing (propensity for long-distance travel and connection making);
3. The
motif of subversion of power (propensity for pranks and deconstruction of power
hierarchies);
4. The
motif of creativity and craftsmanship (propensity for finding creative
solutions and making
original discoveries).
Motif of Duplicity
As opposed to morality, which we will discuss in a moment,
duplicity is more about the process of deception in order to accomplish certain
goals. Nikitina describes it this
way,
“As Hermes uses cowhides to conceal his identity and as
Coyote, a trickster god in Native American folklore, impersonates a Creator,
hackers assume different names and personae (such as Skel, Dark- Viper,
Executioner, Genocide, Prophet) when they emerge in the silicon
underground.”
While Hiro tends to be very honest about his identity, he is
not above using his skills for disguise and deceit,
“In other
places, invisible avatars are illegal.
If your avatar is transparent and reflects no light whatsoever- the
easiest kind to write, it will be recognized instantly as an illegal avatar and
alarms will go off. It has to be
written in such a way that other people can’t see it, but the real estate
software doesn’t realize that it’s invisible.” (353)
But there is also a sense in which Hiro’s duplicity is not
entirely the result of his desire to deceive others, but may, in fact, be a
result of a lack of self-awareness,
“You’re a really smart hacker and the greatest sword fighter
in the world—and you’re delivering pizzas and promoting concerts that you don’t
make any money off of.” (410)
Motif of Boundary Crossing
This is the most obvious and developed Trickster trait
developed in Hiro. Both in
Metaverse and Reality, Hiro is the most widely traveled character, entering
forbidden locations in the Street like the Dark Sun and the tunnels of the
Graveyard Daemons, to traveling from LA to Canada to the Raft, Hiro is
constantly crossing physical borders.
It is not just the physical boundaries, however, that the trickster
transcends. Nitkitina,
“Trickster is a boundary crosser. Every group has its edge,
its sense of in and out, and trickster is always there, at the gates of the
city and the gateways of life, making sure there is commerce. He also attends
the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We
constantly distinguish – right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty,
male and female, young and old, living and dead – and in every case trickster
will cross the line and confuse the distinction. Trickster is the creative
idiot, therefore, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser, the
speaker of sacred profanities. Where someone’s sense of honorable behavior has
left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action,
something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic
embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity,
contradiction and paradox.”
Hiro crosses racial boundaries; being of mixed ethnicity, an
“Army brat,” who works for the Mafia and is a resident of Mr. Lee’s Greater
Hong Kong. As a perpetual
outsider, he is most comfortable with boundaries and the potential for
transgression,
“Besides, interesting things happen along
borders—transitions—not in the middle where everything is the same.” (122)
Hiro is also constantly transcending boundaries in the
Metaverse, and between the Metaverse and reality. With many of the previous hackers we have encountered in our
reading, there has been a division between the mind of the hacker in the net,
and the body of the hacker, with the mind generally being privileged over the body. In Hiro, however, both mind and body
are important, and his great strength is that he is able to move fluidly from
the Metaverse to reality and back again, as he does when attempting to rescue
Juanita and YT on the Raft.
It is in the Metaverse, however, that Hiro demonstrates the
trickster ability to transcend barriers most clearly. He has access to the tunnels used by the Graveyard Daemons,
an ability that no other person has.
He also can “hack” his way into closed systems,
“This is a hack.
It is really based on a very old hack, a loophole he found years ago
when he was trying to graft the sword-fighting rules onto the existing
Metaverse software…That is the whole purpose of a wall in the Metaverse; it is
a structure that does not allow avatars to penetrate it. But like anything else in the
Metaverse, this rule is nothing but a protocol, a convention that different
computers agree to follow…When you are connected to the system over a satellite
uplink, as Hiro is, out here on the Raft, there is a delay as the signals
bounce up to the satellite and back down.
That delay can be taken advantage of, if you move quickly and don’t look
back. Hiro passes right through
the wall on the tail end of his all-penetrating katana.” (435)
While the laws of the Metaverse require adherence to certain
rules and protocols, Hiro is able to trick the system and transgress borders.
Motif of Subversion of Power
While the world of Snow Crash is precludes the institutions against which a trickster would normally
transgress, there are several examples of Hiro rebelling against institutional
power. First, in his position as
an independent hacker. Hiro could
make good money if he was willing to write code for a corporation, but he
considers such institutions devoid of creativity, and would rather work as a
pizza deliverer than work for such a corporate entity,
“There’s no place for a freelance hacker anymore. You have to have a big corporation
behind you.” (70)
Even within the Metaverse, however, Hiro transgresses the imposed
rules of institutions. Upon
entering the Dark Sun, Hiro opens Bigboard, a program that allows him to see
the names of the other people in the club.
“It’s all unauthorized data that Hiro is not supposed to
have. But Hiro is not some bimbo
actor coming here to network. He
is a hacker. If he wants some
information, he steals it right out of the guts of the system—gossip ex
machina.” (55)
This program is illegal and highly disruptive to the
system. 5David has informed Hiro
that his program causes a glitches in the system, but HIro prefers to get his
information by his own skill, rather than relying on 5David.
Motif of Creativity
The fourth characteristic that Nikitina outlines is that of
creativity and craftsmanship. Here
again, Hiro stands out from some of the previous hackers we have
encountered. Gibson’s hackers are
very reliant upon programs created by others for their major incursions into
the depths of the matrix. Hiro
Protagonist, however, is a highly creative force. He helped design the Metaverse, and because he is very self
reliant, ends up writing his own programs in response to his situations.
“And in Flatland, when you need a tool, you just sit down
and write it. So Hiro starts by
writing a few simple programs that enable him to manipulate the contents of the
scroll without ever seeing it.” (352)
Indeed, when the Stephenson first introduces us to Hiro at
the beginning of the story, he does so with the statement,
“If life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning
education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator’s report card would say: ‘Hiro is so bright
and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills.’” (3)
Creative, but lacking cooperation skills could be the
business card for archetypal Trickster; constantly innovating and pushing the
boundaries, but doing so in such a way as to offend everyone around him.
Some Other Traits
Those are the four traits that Nikitina describes, I would
like to add two more to the list.
First, the concept of the trickster as a guardian of the
dead. I mentioned this earlier
when talking about the crossing of borders, but it bears a further look. In classical mythology, Hermes would
guide the souls of the dead into the underworld. This has direct similarities to Hiro’s role in the Metaverse,
where he constructed the Graveyard Daemons, and the tunnel system that allows
the disposal of destroyed avatars.
Hiro is, in effect, the guide to the Underworld in the Metaverse, a fact
that comes clear in his battle with Raven, where he tells YT:
“I control the Graveyard Daemons. So all I have to do is kill the bastard once.” (439)
The second idea is the link between the hacker, the
trickster, and language. One of
the most common appellations for a trickster is “silver tongued,” and more
often than not, it is quick wit and fast talking that get tricksters into and
out of trouble in stories.
Stephenson makes this connection through Enki, the Sumerian trickster
god and master of language,
“Enki somehow understood the connection between language and
the brain, knew how to manipulate it.
The same way that a hacker, knowing the secrets of a computer system,
can write code to control it—digital nam-shubs.” (277)
Hiro also maintains some of the silver tongued glibness of a
Trickster. When attempting to buy
the display model of a prototype motorcycle, he easily enters the role of a con
man, ingratiating himself with the salesman, implying relationships with the
manager, and paying a slightly higher price in order to avert suspicion about
his actions.
Conclusion
In many ways, Hiro embodies a re-conception of the
traditional Trickster fro the modern audience. He is talented, intelligent, capable, but still dangerous
and unpredictable. The moment when
he first kills a man in Reality is startlingly uncomfortable, as he has no
sense of guilt over his actions, and his initial response is merely to compare
it to his previous experience in the Metaverse. It is moments like this where Hiro truly embodies the Trickster
spirit, because, as Nikitina puts it, “Trickster gods defy our expectation of
divine benevolence and challenge us to be prepared for deceit and pranks as
part of the god’s exercise of creative powers.” While one might enjoy the trickster, one does not trust
him. While Hiro Protagonist is one
of the most likeable characters we have encountered in cyberpunk, it is good to
look on him with a certain amount of distrust in the reading, and to realize,
as much as you might like him, you probably wouldn’t want to rely on him in
real life, and this is why he is the person he is; the Deliverator, the best
sword fighter in the world, a brilliant hacker, unemployed, living alone.
Well, back to reality.
