Blogging has momentum. William Gibson is on-line and operating a blog that gets updated daily. It provides for great reading from one of my favorite authors of all time. If you haven’t had a chance to check out his latest book “Pattern Recognition”, I highly recommend it. Just today, he posted the following information regarding the ending of Neuromancer. It was interesting to read his take on it, and I was encouraged to discover that my interpretation of the ending, developed over ten years ago, was in-line with his. He writes:
“And his voice the cry of a bird
Unknown,
3Jane answering in song, three
notes, high and pure.
A true name.
Anyone daydreaming of a feature film of NEUROMANCER might want to pause to ponder just how the hell one might go about depicting this climax (and it is the climax) on the screen.
As to what the word is, well, I never considered it to be a word, really, though 3Jane, teasingly, calls it one. It is in fact three notes, something akin to birdcall. The key to the cipher, that is, is revealed as being purely tonal, musical, rather than linguistic. Case’s cry, a species of primal scream, the voicing of the emotionality he’s been walled off from throughout the narrative (and his life), torn finally from the core of his being, is what actually forces 3Jane to give up the key. Call and response, of some kind. Hearing him, she can’t help herself. When she taunts him (Take your word, thief.) she’s in fact daring him, and assuming he can’t — just as she was, a moment before, daring Molly to kill her.” Gibson Blog