Algorithm
by Jean Mark Gawron
magine what life would be if Earth were governed by an algorithm. Life would be stagnant and predictable, possibly even a bit decadent, because the code would manage human events to the extent that nothing out of the ordinary could ever happen. Embedded in the code, however, is a flaw allowing for a certain amount of uncertainty to circulate throughout the rigid structure. Such is the world portrayed in Jean Mark Gawron’s Algorithm, a proto-cyberpunk novel from the 1970s that draws heavily on computer programming and language theory that shows why uncertainty is not only inevitable, but maybe also desirable in the maintenance of human societies.
The plot revolves around a rumor that an assassin will be visiting the city of Monotony during the annual Carnival celebration. The main characters in the narrative go on the hunt to track down the assassin, each having their own personal motivation for doing so. Their hunt reveals a lot about who each one of them is and what they hope to achieve if they catch the assassin.
One of the first things to note is the multiple layers of the setting. Monotony is actually a misspelling and mispronunciation of “Manhattan” and the inhabitants believe they are the distant ancestors of New York City, a place that has vanished long ago in the past. They speculate that Monotony is located someplace south of the historic Manhattan. Otherwise it is a mixture of ancient Rome and a high-tech urban dwelling in the future. Like Rome, Monotony is built on several hills. On one of them Whore Hall is located, a giant temple structure with columns that could easily serve as a temple to Venus. Like both Rome and New York, it is in part a canvas for writers of graffiti. Other resemblances to Rome are the city walls and gates of entry as well as the network of caves and catacombs below. These underground tunnels connect up to the interior of the Pleasure Dome where most of Carnival is celebrated, a combination of ancient Pagan festivities and the Acid Test dances of the 1960s or rave scenes from the 1990s. Inside the city walls there is also a Roman-style amphitheater, the place where the story begins and ends. Notice the three levels of the city: the hill tops, the level ground, and the subterranean tunnels; they are symbolically important to the meaning of the story.
Then there are the characters. The man of most consequence is Danton, named after the French Revolutionary leader who got sent to the guillotine for trying to stop Robespierre’s Reign of Terror. Gawron’s Danton is less incendiary though as he is the leader of a biker gang called the Proets. It isn’t exactly clear what the Proets are actually about as they don’t seem to actually write any poetry, prose, or anything else. One character also points out that they are never actually seen riding their motorcycles even though they are always in close proximity. In one passage they do discuss putting on a play though. But Danton is definitely a writer because we learn he suffers from writer’s block. He hopes to find the assassin because he believes it will either inspire him to write again or else leave his past behind and become poetry rather than writing it, a hint that Danton may be a prophet. Danton is not from Earth; he was brought there as a missionary soldier and left behind when the WUTs invaded Earth.
The WUTs are people from the other planets in the solar system who have formed a unified government. They are again planning on invading Earth and they have sent a spy named Potocki to report back on the conditions there. Potocki provides some insight into the nature of life on Earth. For one thing, he explains the meaning of the word “assassin” and plants doubts in the other characters’ minds as to whether there really is an assassin coming or if the word has alternate meanings to what they think it means. Another observation he makes is that the citizens of Monotony are passive observers and do little to take charge of life in their own city. They don’t need to because the algorithm does the governing for them. Finally, he expresses confusion over how they survive since they have no religion and no god and he believes such a thing is necessary to stabilize society. What he doesn’t realize is that they are ruled by an algorithm that renders religion unnecessary.
Other characters of note are the Juggler, a man who encounters Danton at several points throughout the story. He acts as though he wants to be the assassin, but he never seems to fulfill the role. There is also a paranoid schizophrenic named Savage who believes he is the assassin, but, like the Juggler, he also never proves to be what he believes he is. Then there is Guillemet, whose name means “quotation marks” in French, a seven foot tall giantess who has aroused the romantic interest of Danton. She is employed as a bodyguard and hopes to kill the assassin to protect the people of Monotony, although her true intention nis to get away and find a better place to be.
Furthermore, we learn the life story of Novak, the mathematician who wrote the algorithm that controls Earthly society. While writing the code, Novak was having marital problems and then one day when he entered a cave beneath the city wall, he got attacked by a monster that slashed his face with its claw. Novak received a laceration from his ear to his chin in the shape of a question mark. So while writing the code, this frustration, the attack, and the injury unconsciously found their way into the formula as a flaw that injected a principle of uncertainty into the algorithm. Since the code governs through repetition, Danton visits the same cave later on and encounters something that attacks him there just as Novak got attacked. It is uncertain whether this was a serious attempt at assassination or not.
Since Novak knew he was going to die, he built a computer named Alphy to embody his algorithm and regulate society. Alphy has two main terminals, one in a hidden section in the catacombs, the other in Whore Hall where it is monitored by the brothel madame whose name is Wunder. Alphy acts as the dramatic chorus of the novel, but speaks over everybody’s heads in a complex and abstract language that often confuses more than it clarifies contrary to the traditional purpose of a chorus. It is hard to tell if there is more signal than noise in what it communicates, but a couple ideas do emerge to help in explaining the meaning of it all. One is an explanation of quantum mechanics and the search for a grand unified theory. The dilemma of that branch of physics is that subatomic particles at the micro level of matter act in unpredictable ways that make little sense to their observers. In contrast, objects at the macro level are predictable because they follow the established laws of physics. There is no known way, as of yet, to explain the connection between the macro and micro levels of existence. If we graft this onto the society of Monotony, we get a similar dilemma. To Potocki, the spy from the WUTs and to the reader, the characters in the book have erratic behaviors patterns, motivations, intentions, and emotions that are difficult to apprehend. We try to make sense of these people even though they don’t act in ways that are familiar to us, just like subatomic particles that baffle the observations of physicists Even worse, the act of observing alters the behavior of the observed. On another level, the pursuit of the assassin alters the way that the assassin appears to its pursuers. To what extent do our observation of the characters in this novel alter our perception of the lives the lead? Are we, the readers, the macro level that is disconnected from the micro level of the world they inhabit? Is that why they are difficult to comprehend?
Another major explanation we get from Alphy is that the word “assassin” has no fixed meaning. As the characters try to discover who or what the assassin is, the definition of the word changes too. This is initially pointed out when Potocki explains that “assassin”, :killer”, and “murderer” may all be related categorically, but they don’t necessarily mean the same thing. This appears to be an illustration of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of language games. Wittgenstein claimed that words, in and of themselves, have no meaning and only an arbitrary connection to whatever it is they are meant to signify. Semantically, the meaning of a word is entirely dependent on its context and how it is used in a sentence, its semantic environement. Hence, the uncertainty over the word “assassin” and who decides who the assassin is. Many people in the story die or get killed, but probably none of their deaths would be considered an assassination especially because many of them are accidental. Two characters claim to be the assassin, but neither of them are. Wunder could be the assassin even though she doesn’t actually kill a person. It is also suggested that the assassin is a mathematical formula or possibly the grand unified theory that unifies the behavior of matter at the micro and macro levels. By extension, is the assassin an interpretation of the novel that ties all its confusing elements together into a neatly packaged whole that makes complete sense? Why would you even use the word “assassin” to signify such an idea? It is only suggested by Alphy though and never fully explained, leaving interpretations open to question.
So if Wittgenstein’s language theory is the theoretical underpinning of this novel, what is the implication for Novak’s algorithm that governs Monotony? First off, syntactical structures are algorithms that are filled in with lexical items to form sentences. So the connection between algorithms and language is clear. A computer code is an algorithm whose structures are filled in with lexical items formed by numbers, letters, commands, diacritical marks, algebraic formulas, symbolic logic, mathematical structures and so on and so forth. If the lexicon of language is semantically unstable in its meaning, and computer code is written using a language, albeit one of its own (actually if you study the history of computational linguistics and transformative generative grammar you will know that computer code is written relative to English), then computer coded algorithms are permeated with uncertainty despite their relatively stable structural appearance. So while Monotony is guided by a repetitive algorithm, we get a connection from Rome to Manhattan to Monotony, Novak and Danton are joined by their actions, and the WUTs are going to repeat their invasion of Earth with the anticipation that the results will be similar the second time around. The macro cycles of history are stable and redundant while the micro particles, the individual people, behave according to their own motivations which are context-dependent and sometimes opaque to outsiders. If you can separate the noise from the signals provided by the author, the meaning of the novel emerges as a theoretical outline inherent in the sometimes inexplicable occurences in the story. We might conclude that the uncertainty principle contained in Novak’s algorithm is what prevents life in Monotony from stagnating to the point of collapse. The pursuit of the assassin and the coming invasion of the WUTs are what gives the characters’ actions direction, meaning, and purpose. Of course, this interpretation could be entirely wrong, maybe even a self-serving projection of my own inability to find meaning in my boring, repetitive life. And besides, algorithms, like cultural patterns, only function by being invisible to plain sight. The certainty of interpretation may be an impossibility.
This is not a novel for everybody. The author immediately drops you into an unfamiliar world without a map or any guide posts to show you where you are going. He throws massive amounts of information at you, forcing you to make decisions about what is junk and what isn’t. There are repetitive symbols like triangles, compasses, and the number three that pop up all over the place without any clear connection, making you wonder if there even is a connection or if you are trying to find one where there isn’t, just for the sake of honing the chaos into comprehensibility. This is a book of information overload without a clear meaning and no explicit explanation as to what it is about. You as a reader have to connect the dots without even knowing with certainty that you are connecting the proper dots in the proper way. It doesn’t spoon feed you a story or an explanation and may be too cerebral for your average science-fiction reader since it approaches the maximalist complexity of writers like Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace. And like those authors’ major works, this is a book that needs to be read twice in order to really be understood. It probably isn’t as good or as saturated in meaning as a Pynchon novel, but it does reach in that direction.
So Algorithm is a big postmodern mashup that combines elements of hard science fiction, cyberpunk, psychedelia, Federico Fellini-style phantasmagoria, order and entropy, and communication theory derived straight from The Crying of Lot 49. It’s abrasive, frustrating, and mystifying, but if you like solving complex puzzles and language games, especially ones involving fuzzy logic and out-of-the-box thinking, the challenge of it all makes it worthwhile. Lazy readers stay away. This one is hard work.
The plot revolves around a rumor that an assassin will be visiting the city of Monotony during the annual Carnival celebration. The main characters in the narrative go on the hunt to track down the assassin, each having their own personal motivation for doing so. Their hunt reveals a lot about who each one of them is and what they hope to achieve if they catch the assassin.
One of the first things to note is the multiple layers of the setting. Monotony is actually a misspelling and mispronunciation of “Manhattan” and the inhabitants believe they are the distant ancestors of New York City, a place that has vanished long ago in the past. They speculate that Monotony is located someplace south of the historic Manhattan. Otherwise it is a mixture of ancient Rome and a high-tech urban dwelling in the future. Like Rome, Monotony is built on several hills. On one of them Whore Hall is located, a giant temple structure with columns that could easily serve as a temple to Venus. Like both Rome and New York, it is in part a canvas for writers of graffiti. Other resemblances to Rome are the city walls and gates of entry as well as the network of caves and catacombs below. These underground tunnels connect up to the interior of the Pleasure Dome where most of Carnival is celebrated, a combination of ancient Pagan festivities and the Acid Test dances of the 1960s or rave scenes from the 1990s. Inside the city walls there is also a Roman-style amphitheater, the place where the story begins and ends. Notice the three levels of the city: the hill tops, the level ground, and the subterranean tunnels; they are symbolically important to the meaning of the story.
Then there are the characters. The man of most consequence is Danton, named after the French Revolutionary leader who got sent to the guillotine for trying to stop Robespierre’s Reign of Terror. Gawron’s Danton is less incendiary though as he is the leader of a biker gang called the Proets. It isn’t exactly clear what the Proets are actually about as they don’t seem to actually write any poetry, prose, or anything else. One character also points out that they are never actually seen riding their motorcycles even though they are always in close proximity. In one passage they do discuss putting on a play though. But Danton is definitely a writer because we learn he suffers from writer’s block. He hopes to find the assassin because he believes it will either inspire him to write again or else leave his past behind and become poetry rather than writing it, a hint that Danton may be a prophet. Danton is not from Earth; he was brought there as a missionary soldier and left behind when the WUTs invaded Earth.
The WUTs are people from the other planets in the solar system who have formed a unified government. They are again planning on invading Earth and they have sent a spy named Potocki to report back on the conditions there. Potocki provides some insight into the nature of life on Earth. For one thing, he explains the meaning of the word “assassin” and plants doubts in the other characters’ minds as to whether there really is an assassin coming or if the word has alternate meanings to what they think it means. Another observation he makes is that the citizens of Monotony are passive observers and do little to take charge of life in their own city. They don’t need to because the algorithm does the governing for them. Finally, he expresses confusion over how they survive since they have no religion and no god and he believes such a thing is necessary to stabilize society. What he doesn’t realize is that they are ruled by an algorithm that renders religion unnecessary.
Other characters of note are the Juggler, a man who encounters Danton at several points throughout the story. He acts as though he wants to be the assassin, but he never seems to fulfill the role. There is also a paranoid schizophrenic named Savage who believes he is the assassin, but, like the Juggler, he also never proves to be what he believes he is. Then there is Guillemet, whose name means “quotation marks” in French, a seven foot tall giantess who has aroused the romantic interest of Danton. She is employed as a bodyguard and hopes to kill the assassin to protect the people of Monotony, although her true intention nis to get away and find a better place to be.
Furthermore, we learn the life story of Novak, the mathematician who wrote the algorithm that controls Earthly society. While writing the code, Novak was having marital problems and then one day when he entered a cave beneath the city wall, he got attacked by a monster that slashed his face with its claw. Novak received a laceration from his ear to his chin in the shape of a question mark. So while writing the code, this frustration, the attack, and the injury unconsciously found their way into the formula as a flaw that injected a principle of uncertainty into the algorithm. Since the code governs through repetition, Danton visits the same cave later on and encounters something that attacks him there just as Novak got attacked. It is uncertain whether this was a serious attempt at assassination or not.
Since Novak knew he was going to die, he built a computer named Alphy to embody his algorithm and regulate society. Alphy has two main terminals, one in a hidden section in the catacombs, the other in Whore Hall where it is monitored by the brothel madame whose name is Wunder. Alphy acts as the dramatic chorus of the novel, but speaks over everybody’s heads in a complex and abstract language that often confuses more than it clarifies contrary to the traditional purpose of a chorus. It is hard to tell if there is more signal than noise in what it communicates, but a couple ideas do emerge to help in explaining the meaning of it all. One is an explanation of quantum mechanics and the search for a grand unified theory. The dilemma of that branch of physics is that subatomic particles at the micro level of matter act in unpredictable ways that make little sense to their observers. In contrast, objects at the macro level are predictable because they follow the established laws of physics. There is no known way, as of yet, to explain the connection between the macro and micro levels of existence. If we graft this onto the society of Monotony, we get a similar dilemma. To Potocki, the spy from the WUTs and to the reader, the characters in the book have erratic behaviors patterns, motivations, intentions, and emotions that are difficult to apprehend. We try to make sense of these people even though they don’t act in ways that are familiar to us, just like subatomic particles that baffle the observations of physicists Even worse, the act of observing alters the behavior of the observed. On another level, the pursuit of the assassin alters the way that the assassin appears to its pursuers. To what extent do our observation of the characters in this novel alter our perception of the lives the lead? Are we, the readers, the macro level that is disconnected from the micro level of the world they inhabit? Is that why they are difficult to comprehend?
Another major explanation we get from Alphy is that the word “assassin” has no fixed meaning. As the characters try to discover who or what the assassin is, the definition of the word changes too. This is initially pointed out when Potocki explains that “assassin”, :killer”, and “murderer” may all be related categorically, but they don’t necessarily mean the same thing. This appears to be an illustration of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of language games. Wittgenstein claimed that words, in and of themselves, have no meaning and only an arbitrary connection to whatever it is they are meant to signify. Semantically, the meaning of a word is entirely dependent on its context and how it is used in a sentence, its semantic environement. Hence, the uncertainty over the word “assassin” and who decides who the assassin is. Many people in the story die or get killed, but probably none of their deaths would be considered an assassination especially because many of them are accidental. Two characters claim to be the assassin, but neither of them are. Wunder could be the assassin even though she doesn’t actually kill a person. It is also suggested that the assassin is a mathematical formula or possibly the grand unified theory that unifies the behavior of matter at the micro and macro levels. By extension, is the assassin an interpretation of the novel that ties all its confusing elements together into a neatly packaged whole that makes complete sense? Why would you even use the word “assassin” to signify such an idea? It is only suggested by Alphy though and never fully explained, leaving interpretations open to question.
So if Wittgenstein’s language theory is the theoretical underpinning of this novel, what is the implication for Novak’s algorithm that governs Monotony? First off, syntactical structures are algorithms that are filled in with lexical items to form sentences. So the connection between algorithms and language is clear. A computer code is an algorithm whose structures are filled in with lexical items formed by numbers, letters, commands, diacritical marks, algebraic formulas, symbolic logic, mathematical structures and so on and so forth. If the lexicon of language is semantically unstable in its meaning, and computer code is written using a language, albeit one of its own (actually if you study the history of computational linguistics and transformative generative grammar you will know that computer code is written relative to English), then computer coded algorithms are permeated with uncertainty despite their relatively stable structural appearance. So while Monotony is guided by a repetitive algorithm, we get a connection from Rome to Manhattan to Monotony, Novak and Danton are joined by their actions, and the WUTs are going to repeat their invasion of Earth with the anticipation that the results will be similar the second time around. The macro cycles of history are stable and redundant while the micro particles, the individual people, behave according to their own motivations which are context-dependent and sometimes opaque to outsiders. If you can separate the noise from the signals provided by the author, the meaning of the novel emerges as a theoretical outline inherent in the sometimes inexplicable occurences in the story. We might conclude that the uncertainty principle contained in Novak’s algorithm is what prevents life in Monotony from stagnating to the point of collapse. The pursuit of the assassin and the coming invasion of the WUTs are what gives the characters’ actions direction, meaning, and purpose. Of course, this interpretation could be entirely wrong, maybe even a self-serving projection of my own inability to find meaning in my boring, repetitive life. And besides, algorithms, like cultural patterns, only function by being invisible to plain sight. The certainty of interpretation may be an impossibility.
This is not a novel for everybody. The author immediately drops you into an unfamiliar world without a map or any guide posts to show you where you are going. He throws massive amounts of information at you, forcing you to make decisions about what is junk and what isn’t. There are repetitive symbols like triangles, compasses, and the number three that pop up all over the place without any clear connection, making you wonder if there even is a connection or if you are trying to find one where there isn’t, just for the sake of honing the chaos into comprehensibility. This is a book of information overload without a clear meaning and no explicit explanation as to what it is about. You as a reader have to connect the dots without even knowing with certainty that you are connecting the proper dots in the proper way. It doesn’t spoon feed you a story or an explanation and may be too cerebral for your average science-fiction reader since it approaches the maximalist complexity of writers like Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace. And like those authors’ major works, this is a book that needs to be read twice in order to really be understood. It probably isn’t as good or as saturated in meaning as a Pynchon novel, but it does reach in that direction.
So Algorithm is a big postmodern mashup that combines elements of hard science fiction, cyberpunk, psychedelia, Federico Fellini-style phantasmagoria, order and entropy, and communication theory derived straight from The Crying of Lot 49. It’s abrasive, frustrating, and mystifying, but if you like solving complex puzzles and language games, especially ones involving fuzzy logic and out-of-the-box thinking, the challenge of it all makes it worthwhile. Lazy readers stay away. This one is hard work.
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