from Brian McHale's "Mech/Shaper, or, Varieties of Prosthetic Fiction," in The Holodeck in the Garden:  Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction, edited by Peter Freese and Charles B. Harris.  Dalkey Archive Scholarly Series, June 2004.

    The only example I can cite to date of a full-scale cloned novel is Matthew Roberson’s 1998.6 (2002), a wall-to-wall rewrite of (as its title suggests) Ronald Sukenick’s metafictional novel, 98.6 (1975).  Roberson almost, but not quite, does for Sukenick’s novel what, according to Borges, Pierre Menard did for Don Quixote: he almost repeats the novel verbatim.[1]  Almost – for in fact, he repeats it with a difference, updating it, shifting its autobiographical situations to correspond more closely to his own, and adding a further level of metafictional self-reflection, since the novel’s protagonist, called “Matt” (just as Sukenick’s protagonist was called “Ron”), is writing a dissertation about 98.6.  Roberson “covers” 98.6 in the music-industry sense, or “remakes” it in the Hollywood sense, something in the manner of Gus van Sant’s perverse shot-by-shot remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho.  An art-world analogue would be Sherrie Levine’s re-photographing of famous high-art photographs.  Matt the author writes of Matt the character,

he makes the most of what’s at hand latches onto small things pulls them together mixes them up.  Turns twists renovates …. Everything he sees he can surf sample manipulate.  He’s a recycling machine ….[2]

            Roberson, as “recycling machine,” applies all of Acker’s procedures, and others as well.  Sometimes he incorporates material verbatim from Sukenick’s text; elsewhere he models characters, situations, themes, etc. on Sukenick’s, but without directly appropriating his language.  Throughout he updates Sukenick’s milieu and material culture.  For instance, in the first section, called (in both novels) “Frankenstein,” where Sukenick samples from print media, Roberson samples instead from the Internet.  In the second section, “Children of Frankenstein,” Sukenick’s counter-cultural commune becomes, in Roberson’s remake, a house shared by a group of graduate students in which a Web-cam has been installed.  In Sukenick’s commune, characters change their names as the spirit moves them; in Roberson’s, names are changed on the communal Web-page in order to preserve anonymity; and so on.

            I reproduce in Appendix Two two passages from 1998.6, juxtaposed with their “originals” from 98.6.  In the first pair of passages, Sukenick writes of “spend[ing] the whole day watching for whales,” while Roberson writes of watching simulacral whales on cable tv and video-tape.  The experience evoked in the Sukenick passage is first-hand, even when it evokes the failure of anything to happen (“the no whale feeling”), while Roberson’s experience is second-hand and mediated (“simulation feeling” which “comes from dealing with copies in the absence of originals”).  Roberson interpolates several sentences in which he reflects on his second-hand obsession with Sukenick’s whale obsession.  “The spouts are gigantic ejaculations,” Sukenick writes, “of course he knows it’s just breathing but it’s a special breathing” and so on.  Roberson recasts this in the conditional mode: “the spouts if he could really see them would be giant ejaculations,” and so on.[3]

            In the second pair of passages, from the last pages of both books, Roberson substitutes his own geographical situation (“along the western shore of Lake Michigan”) for Sukenick’s (“on the side of San Francisco Bay”), and interpolates his tv viewing: “I’m watching some tube,” “I’m watching cartoons on tv,” “on comes Gilligan’s Island,” and so on.  Sukenick incorporates a piece of “found” text – liner notes from a Jesse Fuller album (set in capital letters).  Roberson quotes this material verbatim, but negates it (“IT’SNOTJESSELONECATFULLER” etc.), then proposes Bugs Bunny as an alternative (“IT’SACTUALLYBUGSBUNNY” etc.).  Instead of opening “this morning’s mail,” Roberson “connect[s] to the internet I’ve got emails.”  Instead of thinking about an article by Ihab Hassan, as Sukenick does, Roberson thinks about Sukenick himself.  Where Sukenick enters “The State of Israel,” with a pun on “is-real,” Roberson enters “The State of Televisrael.”  Finally, Sukenick closes with phrases reminiscent of Beckett: “playing the blues letting it go it is as it is.  Another failure.”  Roberson finishes almost identically, yet with a difference so subtle one wonders whether it is intentional or merely an oversight: “having my doubts letting it go as it is. Another failure.”[4]

            Shapers, in the world of Sterling’s Mech/Shaper cycle, are often afflicted by existential anxiety, suffering a sort of perpetual identity crisis – which is only to be expected when, as is sometimes the case, the Shapers in question are members of a large clan of identical cloned siblings.  Roberson’s novel seems to be similarly afflicted with a sense of its own contingency, and more than that, of its own unlikeliness. “I wouldn’t have thought it could be done,” Sukenick himself writes in a blurb from the jacket of Roberson’s book.  Cloned books, like cloned individuals, seem to exist subjunctively, in a mode of “as-if,” under erasure.