Jeff Noon's Vurt: A Critical Companion
by Andrew C. Wenaus – a collection of essays and an interview that will
appeal to both scholars and general readers interested in exploring
this fascinating novel.
Insights are sprinkled throughout each
essay, accompanied by extensive scholarly references and footnotes. But,
again, don't be discouraged – this book will be a treasure for any
general reader, like myself, who want to take a deeper plunge into
Noon's captivating work. To provide a modest taste of what's to be
encountered, I'll link my comments with a direct quote, one for each
chapter. And I'll wrap-up by sharing an excerpt taken from the
interview.
1. Introduction
“Ultimately, the overarching trajectory of this book considers how Vurt's
singular, intrepid experimentalism set in motion Noon's ongoing
commitment to breaking our storytelling habits, embracing the
unpredictable, and, by confronting the obstacles that make the present
feel otherwise hopeless, engaging in the difficult task of
transformation and imagining a better future from the unique perspective
only experimental art can offer.”
Ever since the internet
emerged thirty years ago, there has been an undeniable homogeneity in
our media-saturated experience. Thus, Jeff Noon's vision is particularly
relevant—a vision that calls for a literary, mythic, and aesthetic rite
of passage that fully engages our imagination. Sure, such a novel
challenges fixed, established categories, but blasting our lives and
culture open to their very core is exactly what is needed if we are to
move into an unexplored future with courage and creativity.
2. Black Market Dreams: From Cyberpunk to the Avant-Pulp
“Central
to Noon's compositional method is the snipping, pasting, mutating
dismantling, and reconstructing from the whole of literature. He seeks a
kind of literature that “has more edges and borderlines than all other
genres put together.” If our stories are out dreams made into objects,
literature for Noon is like entering, creating, and exchanging in a
black market of dreams, free from institutionalized control, from which
he can borrow, dismantle, sample and rebuild anew.”
Andrew
expounds on this vision throughout the chapter, touching on how, for
Noon, reality itself is strange and mysterious, and this very
strangeness is something to celebrate. Indeed, Vurt is a prime example of the ways a novel “should challenge and revolutionize every aspect of everyday life, it should never affirm the way thing are; it should instead point toward the way things could be.”
3. Totally Feathered Up in Bottletown: Imagining Manchester
“Noon asks us how we distinguish place from our perception of that place. Vurt is very much about the tension between escape and confrontation. From this tension, Noon considers how new literary technologies offer alternative ways of telling stories.
These new ways of telling and reading help to re-imagine the gritty,
dirty, and chaotic city as fecund with marvelous discoveries,
encounters, and revelations. To do so, he treats the novel's setting as
duel: physical place and literary place.”
As we
read about Scribble and the other Stash Riders, we have a vivid sense
that we're in a very real Manchester with all its cement, stone, and
filth - a solid Manchester that grounds the story. However, when
Scribble and the others turn inward, the magic begins to flow. Oh, yes,
when they realize they must do more than just endlessly repeat their
usual patterns and routines; when they realize the key is to recreate
and re-imagine Manchester through their imagination, especially by
creating new stories about the city and their place within it.
4. Orpheus and His Limbie Decks: Avant-Pulp Bricolage and Rites of Passage
“Noon observes how associational writing and bricolage can paradoxically create the new,
hybrid, and mutant meanings from the fragments of the past. Ultimately,
though, this kind of myth-making functions as a rite of passage:
journeys into the otherworld, reassembling the available narrative
pieces found there, and returning from the otherworld with the
reconfigured knowledge (a new story), dramatized conscious and
unconscious transformations in the artist, and, in turn, society.”
In
this chapter we take a closer look at Jeff Noon's method of using music, art and language itself as the raw material to cut up and scramble, a
methodology that hits the bullseye since freshness and newness in art
derive “through novel shocking juxtapositions of what is already there.”
Andrew also relates Scribble seeking Desdemona, his sister lost in the
world of Vurt, to Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces
with a particular focus on the Orpheus myth. One overarching theme:
Scribble learns that what he really seeks is not a return to some
nostalgic past but rather a moving onto the path of “chaotic creativity
under endless construction.” A more exact meaning of this statement is
picked up in the next chapter.
5. Fractal Narrative and Chaos Theory: The Formal and Thematic Paradox of Escapism
“Ultimately,
Noon employs chaos theory and fractal geometry to consider the
characters' compulsion to escape and the ultimate impossibility of doing
so. If one cannot escape the past, Vurt demands that we confront it to create the future.”
And
a further expansion on the above: “Rather than escapist, Noon's work
estranges the everyday with narrative repetitions and permutations in
place of a traditionally structured story with a beginning, middle, and
conclusion. In other words, Vurt is inspiring a call to action and a workshop to imagine and implement alternatives.”
Jeff
Noon even puts a spin on Joseph Campbell: rather than seeing the rite
of passage happening in an unchanging, absolute monomyth, in light of
chaos theory and the nature of fractals, the monomyth must transform in
order to, in turn, effect transformations in the hero or artist.
6. Conclusion: What Literature Thinks - Vurt and Neuroemancipation
“The
novel leads to a resolution once Scribble realizes his situation is one
of loopy self-reflexivity that cannot be escaped. There is “No Future”
of the kind he irrationally desires. There is, however, a different
future that he must accept and imagine anew.”
If Scribble's
plight reminds you of your own life, all the more reason to pick up this
companion book and give it a read - and then read Vurt once again.
Interview
Jeff
Noon on his own inspiration and writing: "I am first and foremost a
storyteller. In some ways I'm still a 1970s writer, because this was the
decade in which I learned how to be an artist. You never lose those
first impulses. If I had to distill that decade's artistic credo down to
a sentence it would be something like: "Art gives expression to the
people's soul." A ridiculous thing to say, these days! But there it is: I
still carry some of that impulse with me, as I carry on. So take that,
and mix it with whatever might be picked up along the way, through the
years. We are not one thing: but many. We are multifold.
British author Jeff Noon, born 1957
Andrew C. Wenaus, author, scholar, composer, performer currently teaching at the University of Western Ontario, Canada
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