William Gibson's Pattern Recognition and the Return of History

William Gibson's Pattern Recognition contains extensive descriptions of consumer objects that reference the horrors of the past while eliding their reality. This extensive motif in the novel seems an echo of Francis Fukuyama's argument that the end of the Cold War had seen the triumph of political democracy combined with consumer capitalism in an end-point for history itself. Such illusions were profoundly destabilised by the 9/11 terror attacks, a central event in Gibson's novel, and Pattern Recognition is one of several 9/11 novels that seek to understand that day's events through a concern with history. Here, Cayce's dual search for the mysterious footage and her missing father leads her to both an engagement with the realities of historical trauma and a fulfilment of her own desire to mourn.