Diamond Starts Rough, Ends Well-Polished

I found Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age to be a laborious read in the opening chapters, as terms he coined in this futuristic society cannot be defined in our current dictionaries.  It was a struggle to comprehend his precise meaning from the fragments of context initially provided.  It was similar to watching Google Earth’s aerial map come slowly into focus with many sections in complete darkness, others blurred and evolving into better pixelation, while a few are sharp and familiar.  I did not appreciate this bizarre cultural landscape until I let go and read quickly, trusting that the black and sparsely sketched details would become clear later.

I was intrigued by two particular connections between this, our last text, and our first text, Heart of Darkness.  At the opening of Part The Second, Stephenson introduces the society of the Drummers (255-58).  Conrad’s description of the primitive Africans shares much with these scenes.  They are both mysterious, rite-centered, corporate and accompanied by the incessant pulsing of drums.  Both people groups are portrayed as godlessly immoral, degraded, overtly sexual and menacingly dangerous.  On page 321, Stephenson pens, 

Now, there was a time when we believed that what a human mind could accomplish was determined by genetic factors.  Piffle, of course, but it looked convincing for many years, because distinctions between tribes were so evident.  Now we understand that it’s all cultural.  That, after all, is what a culture is--a group of people who share in common certain acquired traits.

There was a time--Conrad’s time, and that of his critics whose essays we studied--when African drumming races were thought to be inferior from birth.  Stephenson’s society grown beyond that simplistic reasoning, and has come round to the view, expressed in this quote, that certain “tribes” are still inferior from birth--not through their inherited DNA, but through their inherited “traits”.  Many long essays could be argued on both sides of the this conclusion, beginning with various definitions of traits within a culture.  In The Diamond Age, these tribes are still based loosely on race and geographical ties, but more connected through their technological status.

I was also delighted to see Stephenson’s representation of the Internet information exchange thought the castle image (389) and Nell’s struggle to decode the encryption (390) as it directly relates to topics we’ve explored in several other courses in the DTC program.  By the end, it was an interesting voyage to pass rapidly through the short chapters, vicariously experience Nell’s development through her private interaction with the primer, and appreciate the incredible creativity Stephenson brings to this novel built from his vast storehouse of technical expertise.