Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)
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Agrippa (a book of the dead) is an artist's book created by William Gibson. It was published in 1992 in two limited editions (Deluxe and Small) by Kevin Begos, Jr., Publishing, New York, New York. The deluxe edition comes in a heavy case designed to look like a buried relic and includes pages of DNA sequences set in double columns of 42-lines each like the Gutenberg Bible, copperplate aquatint etchings by Dennis Ashbaugh, and a poem by Gibson on a self-erasing diskette. It was originally priced at $1500 (later $2000). Each copy is partly unique because of handmade or hand-finished elements. The small edition, set in single columns and without etchings, was sold for $450, while the bronze-boxed collectors copy retailed at $7,500.[1] The exact number of extant copies is unknown. Publicly accessible copies are available in the New York Public Library and the Waldo Library at the Western Michigan University.
[edit] Theme and Form
The construction of the book and the subject matter of the poem within it support each other, conceptually. The poem is a detailed description of several objects, including a photo album and the camera that took the pictures in it, and is essentially about the nostalgia that the speaker, presumably Gibson himself, feels towards the details of his family's history: the painstaking descriptions of the houses they lived in, the cars they drove, and even their pets. In its original form, the text of the poem was supposed to fade from the page and, in Gibson's own words, "eat itself" off of the diskette enclosed with the book. The reader would, then, be left with only the memory of the text, much like the speaker is left with only the memory of his home town and his family after moving to Canada from South Carolina, in the course of the poem (as Gibson himself did before the Vietnam war).
The poem also contains a motif of "the mechanism," a common theme for Gibson, and indeed all of the cyberpunk writers (Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, etc.). The mechanism, which is "Forever / Dividing that from this," (Pt II, L 4-5) can take the form of the camera, the brand name of which provides the title for the poem, or the ancient gun that misfires in the speaker's hands. Technology, 'the mechanism,' is the agent of memory, which transforms subjective experience into allegedly objective records (photography). It is also the agent of life and death, one moment dispensing lethal bullets, but also likened to the life-giving qualities of sex. Shooting the gun is "Like the first time you put your mouth / on a woman" (Pt II, L 41-42).
The poem is, then, about not just memory, but how we form memories from subjective experience, and how those memories compare to mechanically-reproduced recordings. In so much as memories constitute our identities, 'the mechanism,' strongly associated with recording in this poem, also represents the destruction of ourselves via recordings that can replace our subjective experience, hence both cameras and guns are part of the same mechanism, dividing that (memory, identity, life) from this (recordings, anonymity, death).
[edit] References
- ^ Lindberg, Kathryne V.. "Prosthetic Mnemonics and Prophylactic Politics: William Gibson among the Subjectivity Mechanisms". boundary 2 23 (2): 44–83.
[edit] External links
- Agrippa's full text at Gibson's own site.
- The Agrippa Files an online homage to, and archive of, the book's many forms
- Cyber Lit Roughly contemporary review of the book.
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