Nature, Human Nature, and Virtual Reality : Differance and Referance in William Gibson's Idoru

Nature, Human Nature, and Virtual Reality : Differance and Referance in William Gibson's Idoru

Idoru depicts a future in which the line between the virtual and the real is terminally blurred. Playing around with cyberspace and hyperreality, the novel makes the ecocritical reader feel that there is something absent in the novel, which is nature as well as human nature. ldoru is centered on the relationship between the world's most popular rock star Rez and the idoru (or idol), a Japanese computer-generated virtual agent. How can a human maintain an intimate relationship with and, alter all, get married to a hologram? Virtualization of Rez's human nature is the key to the curious relationship. The reputation of the rock star highly relies on the hyper-mediating manipulation of the media, which gradually renders the cultural icon compatible with the idoru's predominantly virtual form. With this "virtuaI identity" overpowering his actual identity, Rez becomes not so much a human being as a computer-generated software figure like the idoru. What Rez has to discard in order to gain a virtual "posthuman" character is human nature, becoming a Baudrillardian simulacrum by losing referentiality to his real selfhood. The novel presents two artificial worlds as major settings: the City ci Tokyo and the Walled City. The near-future Tokyo has been re-created by nano-tech robots after the devastating millennial earthquake. Natural landscape is altogether replaced by artificial cityscape in the fictional City of Tokyo. In a similar vein, the Walled City is a virtual city reconstructed in cyberspace. The novel presents the virtual Walled City as an ecstatic place in which cyberspace otaku (which means "maniacs" in Japanese) spend enormous time and energy. The problem here from an ecocritical perspective is that the otaku are preoccupied with hyper-real cyberspace to the degree that they become insensitive to or forget about actual reality. The near-future Tokyo and the virtual Walled City signify the Baudrillardian "loss of the real" in the postmodern era, which would result in the loos of the natural.