Richard Powers's Narrative Impulse
Jill Owens, Powells.com
With every new novel, Richard Powers's intelligence is acclaimed with ever greater superlatives. For his latest, The Echo Maker, the Los Angeles Times says "Powers may well be one of the smartest novelists now writing." Powers lives up to the praise by writing, in dazzling, poetic language, about subjects ranging from virtual reality to classical music, corporate capitalism to the genetic code. His novels explore sweeping, global concerns, but their essential questions often come down to what it means to be human, to live in concert with each other in our larger world.
The Echo Maker is the story of Mark Schluter, a 27-year-old man who has a mysterious accident in his hometown in Nebraska, the site of the magnificent Sandhill Crane migration along the river. When he comes to, he has developed Capgras syndrome, a condition in which loved ones – and only loved ones – are seen as imposters played by look-alike actors, or perhaps robots. In Mark's case, this "imposter" is his only surviving family member, his sister Karin, who has left her provisional life behind to help him recover. In a plea for help, Karin contacts a Gerald Weber, a famous neurologist reminiscent of Oliver Sacks, to join the family and examine Mark's bizarre case.
It's a fascinating set-up, and the novel delivers completely, weaving an engrossing, enlightening, and tender mystery out of strands of ecology, neurology, and the very nature of identity. Powers's prose is a marvel, lyrical and lucid. If you haven't yet read this extraordinary author, which Kirkus calls "one of our best novelists," The Echo Maker is the ideal place to begin.
-
"A remarkable novel, from one of our greatest novelists, and a book that will change all who read it." Booklist (Starred Review)
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Untitled Document
Jill Owens: How did you become interested in neuroscience writing?
Richard Powers: I had flirted a little bit with it about a decade
ago — a little bit more than that now, I guess — in researching Galatea,
which had a cognitive science component to it. I knew that I wanted to come
back to it again someday from a biological side rather than a cybernetic approach.
I'd been reading steadily in it for a long time. In fact, it was a recovery
of material that had interested me way back when I was still considering very
scientific careers, and reading a lot of the old classics — A.
R. Luria and that sort of neuropsychological literature. Then a little bit
later, Michael Gazzaniga
and folks like that.
So the idea that the self is this ad hoc, continuous improvisation had been
in my mind for a long time, and in a strange way, the theme really grew out
of Time of Our Singing. Because
that book is so concerned with identity as an improvisation, as a work in progress
that's perpetually changing over the course of time, it drove me back to the
more foundational scientific ways of asking that same question: Who are we?
Who do we recognize? Who do we fail to recognize? How do we construct a self
that seems solid and continuous and whole to us, even when it's not?
Jill: I hadn't thought about the thematic connection with Time of
Our Singing, but it's definitely there. Was that the trigger for The
Echo Maker, or was there anything more specific?
Powers: I think that's the general priming. While working for two or
three or four years on a book, and turning the story around and around, as an
exploration of certain networked concerns I begin to realize that there are
many other different ways of coming at those same anxieties, those same hopes
and those same fears. I keep this running notebook throughout the composition
process. Half of the notebook is usable in terms of the present project and
the other half is just spillover, other ways of thinking about those concerns
in different domains.
I think as the book was spilling outwards, back towards these earlier concerns
of cognition, I had that prime going, and then it was really my stumbling across
the cranes — the Sandhill migration in Nebraska — that made me start
thinking about very deep-seated and primal processes of memory and familiarity
and migration. It was the discovery of this alien kind of intelligence, this
bird intelligence, that looks like us but it isn't us at all — that kinship
and de-familiarity all at the same time. It made me think, I've got to get back
to reading more intensely on recognition as a neurological phenomenon. The discovery
of Capgras was the perfect relief for this: looks like a loved one, looks like
nearest of kin, but must be an imposter.
Jill: How did you first hear about Capgras syndrome?
Powers: I honestly can't tell you the first time that I ran across it.
I guess the first time that it probably stuck was reading V.
S. Ramachandran. Once I came across it there, it was one of those phenomena
that seems to surround you once you recognize it.
Jill: That happened to me with the word "semaphore," which
I didn't know before reading The
Gold Bug Variations, and then it was everywhere — there's a Semaphore
Restaurant in Portland, for example.
I described the plot of The Echo Maker to several friends, and no one
seemed to have heard of Capgras previously.
Powers: That's terrific; that's hilarious. Yes, it's a very rare condition,
and it's certainly not among the publicly known neural deficits. I'm not sure
it's all that well understood, as the book itself suggests, because it can have
these different etiologies, so it may not even be a single condition. It may
be separate kinds of conditions that produce the same symptom.
Jill: In Portland, there's a school — actually not far from our offices —
which is one of the largest known roosts for Vaux's swifts in the world.
Powers: Oh, really?
Jill: They swoop down the chimney at sundown every night for a few weeks; I've
never seen it, but it's supposed to be beautiful. I was thinking about that
in connection with the cranes, and the fact that they're now roosting in a school,
rather than hollow trees, the way they used to, points to how much damage we've
done to migratory paths.
Powers: But it also points in an interesting way to the suggestion that nature
is very happy to use us. We are just another environmental pressure, that, in
the long lens, will produce response.
Jill: The Echo Maker drives home again and again the point that
we are primarily animals, through the juxtaposition with the cranes to our reptilian
brains. Mark's thoughts, while he's still unconscious after the accident, almost
suggest evolution, that before language returns to him, he's still in some sort
of pre-human state.
Powers: The prose is an attempt to recreate that return from a complete
loss of conscious mental functioning, or any sense of anchored self. Yes, and
there is a way in which it's a recapitulation of the original process of self-assembly.
There's a lot of suggestion on the part of the different stories of the characters
in the books that baseline consciousness is always just a step away from other,
stranger, earlier, lower processes that are part of us, but that we have to
do a whole lot of footwork in order to hide, to keep invisible.
Jill: Do you think language, and, further, story, narrative, is one of the
major factors that makes us human?
Powers: Yes, but I also think that there are analogies to language in the non-human
world. So I would be reluctant to say that it's exclusively a divider. It's
also a connector in some ways. We've gotten better in recent years in figuring
out exactly how language-like certain aspects of animal communication really
are. Will the construction of the self always rely on story and consequently
on language? Yes, that has to be true. But if we listen hard enough, then we
can hear those language processes outside of ourselves as well.
Jill: I was in Germany and the Czech Republic recently, and I'd never been
to a country before where I didn't speak the dominant language. It was fascinating
to be thrust back completely onto visual cues and body language.
Powers: Oh, how interesting. Were you out there long enough to feel some odd
sense of estrangement when you heard English again, as the common language?
Jill: Yes. And by the end of the time that I was in Berlin, you start to pick
up pieces of words that you know, and hearing them in other parts of words —
by the end I was thinking, I could do this. Three months, I'd be fine.
Powers: Of course! [Laughs]
Jill: But the experience really emphasized for me how much our identity
is tied to language.
Powers: Oh, yes. You should try going out there for a year, or even six months,
and just feeling like you've been stripped back to grade school. It's extremely
disorienting and upsetting, but extremely revealing, too, about how we hold
ourselves together.
Jill: In The Echo Maker, one of the questions Dr. Weber was asked
at the neurological conference was this: Is there any evidence that narrative
impulse preceded language? I was curious about his answer.
Powers: I think there is, yes. I'm no expert, but I think there is a kind of
growing consensus that there can be thought, and even shaped thought — narratively
shaped thought — without actual conversion, without actual transformation in
language. In other words, we can already feel beginning, middle, and end, logical
chain, causality, consequence, those kinds of things, even without putting them
into words.
Jill: What is, ultimately, so seductive about story, so primal about narrative?
Powers: It's explanatory. It's a shaping device that orders the world. For
instance, they've determined that cranes and other migratory birds make these
huge migrations of thousands of miles, but they do it by navigating via local
landmarks. So somehow, they're able to communicate, to teach their young, on
the basis of a kind of symbol-space — first this, then this, then this, how
to make these necessary movements across the entire globe. And there's a lot
of suggestion that syntax grows out of the machinery for spatial orientation.
Left, right, above, beyond, behind — these kind of spatial orientations underpin
the deep structure of language.
When you think about the function of language to create a syntactical, meaningful
sentence, to order elements in such a way as to suggest some kind of whole coherent
thing, coherent in time or coherent in logic or coherent in some other kind
of arrangement of data, to think that it's spatial is very revealing, isn't
it? That narrative is somehow a spatial arrangement of all our observations
about the world. There's a great book by Frank
Kermode, I don't know if you've ever come across it — The
Sense of an Ending?
Jill: I haven't, though I like him.
Powers: He's got a wonderful formulation there. He says basically, We are born
in the middle of things, we live in the middle of things, and we die in the
middle of things.
Jill: Constantly in medias res.
Powers: Yes. And that's an extremely unsatisfying reality for us, because
we know that our life has a finite envelope. If it doesn't correspond somehow
to things out there, there's a loss of meaning. So we shape our sense of the
envelope of our life and the envelope of our days to somehow correspond with
each other. We create a migratory path, and we project it outward into the world
as our source of explanation and our source of orientation. The amazing thing
about the story of the self is that it's perfectly capable of continuously revising
that beginning and that middle and that end, the reason why the middle looks
like it does, and the prediction of what the next step is going to be, or what
the previous step meant. It's capable of continuously revising that, and still
creating an edifice that seems continuous and coherent.
Jill: It's a wonderful ability, when you think about it.
Powers: And terrifying when you lose it. One of the things I hope for in the
story is that the portrayal of this pathological condition, this rare and really
bizarre condition, will still nevertheless somehow feel familiar.
Jill: I think that worked; it's unsettling how familiar it can feel.
Powers: Good!
Jill: Bookforum called the characters in this book "almost ostentatiously
average" for you, which I would agree with. Was that a conscious decision
for this novel?
Powers: [Laughs] Well, between you and me, the narrative envelope
for the Powers character — I don't see it as much as some people
do. I have from time to time explored gifted people, and they've perhaps been
the most prominent characters, the characters that most people think of more
immediately when they think of the books, but over the course of the previous
eight books, there have been a lot of average people. People trapped in one
way or another, trapped in the confines of their own limits and their own flaws.
So the idea that a Powers book is always going to have a genius protagonist
has been a little bit overstated.
But Mark does feel different to me than anybody else that I've created, with
the possible exception of Laura Brodey's kids in Gain.
Obviously, because of the impairment, it's an attempt to create a double-voiced
prose that doesn't operate according to the rules of normal, conscious logic,
the normal chaining that we would consider to be recognizable. There are also
questions of his socioeconomic standing: he works in a slaughterhouse, he's
dropped out of school, he couldn't make it through college. These are things
that I haven't explored consciously in other books with a major protagonist.
Using him as a central intelligence for this book felt very liberating for me.
Jill: Each character's private life and interior dialogue, though, is just
as rich, whether they're working in a slaughterhouse or in neuroscience.
Powers: That's great to hear. I've said this in other contexts: any human being
who does learn language, who does create a self, and who does successfully —
or only partially successfully — navigate a society is unspeakably complicated,
inconceivably networked to everything. In that sense, there is a genius in all
of us, and explored sufficiently deeply, we're all going to be stunned at the
complexity of the network that any self creates to link itself into the world.
Jill: One reason I've always liked your writing — and it was particularly
interesting because of the direct subject matter of identity, in this book —
is that it feels like thinking. At some point the reader begins to pick up the
shortcuts, the fragments, the connections, that your characters are making in
their own minds.
Powers: I'm delighted to hear that that's engaged you. The technique basically
resembles a close limited third-person focalization. Whether it's Mark, or whether
it's Karin, or whether it's Gerald, there's a central intelligence through whom
the given scene is focalized and organized. But the prose itself, rather than
being narrated by an external narrator, is this hybridized inside/outside voice.
It's a real double-voicing, so that a sentence that narrates even a simple action
— somebody walking across the room, or shaking hands with somebody — is an
attempt to partially participate in consciousness of the protagonist. Not stream-of-consciousness,
but also not the traditional kind of external third-person narration.
So that's tricky, because it's living in this halfway state. The ideal for
me is the kind of reader who attunes to those rhythms and realizes, rather than
getting simple depictions about the world, they're getting a reflected depiction
of the sensibility that's organizing the world.
It's interesting to see the way that double voice gets read in different contexts
by different people, but the risk is that somehow author position and character
position get conflated. Somehow that sensibility, unless it's really quarantined
from the other narrations in the book, is going to seem as if it's being declared,
from the outside. So for me, every construction of a narrative voice is a new
experiment, a new challenge to tweak those variables and see what can be produced
and what risks are involved.
Jill: There's a beautiful long passage in The Echo Maker about
the mythical and symbolic roles that cranes have played, across cultures and
times. What, if anything, do you think plays that role for us in contemporary
America? What is our folklore, or magic, or practical religion?
Powers: What a great question. In some ways, in some subsets of America,
it's the technological sublime. The idea that we're creating machinery that's
going to allow us this huge prosthetic extension that will allow us to become
finally who we think we are. The whole Transhumanist movement, for example.
In an interesting way, that movement can look very religious; it can look like
old styles of religious transcendentalism. But both of them seem alienated from
nature to me. The most religious formulation and most technological formulation
really begins and ends with the human. It's about us being separate from and
unique and removed from the rest of creation. The dangers of that kind of privilege
or that separation — you know, pulling us, pulling our node out of the
network —
Jill: Right: either above or below.
Powers: Yes, exactly — creates weird kinds of fundamentalisms, creates weird
senses of destiny that are a little deranged. Meaning always depends on our
feeling connected to something larger than us. But if our fundamental sense
of what it means to be human is predicated on the belief that it's something
qualitatively different than anything else that exists, it's hard to know what
that bigger thing is supposed to be.
Jill: I'd read that you think of this novel as a post-9/11 novel. The
war, security, conspiracies of all sorts, float under the surface of the other
major plotlines.
Powers: The familiarity and estrangement that we talked about earlier
are played out against this period immediately following 9/11 up to and including
the invasion of Iraq, when, I think, we were all suffering from a kind of pathological
estrangement. We didn't feel like ourselves. The things that were happening
in the country and in the world were familiar and yet profoundly disorienting
and unrecognizable. It was unavoidable for me not to enter into these back door
questions of, Are we still recognizable to ourselves as a political entity?
Do stories that we have about America still make sense and still apply?
The focalizing of all these events by the different characters in the story
in this crucial time period when the entire sense of American narrative is changing
reflects that kind of unbridgeable gap between the local and the global. That
fourth of July celebration, in the novel, where there's a momentary glance between
brother and sister that says, You don't recognize this place either.
I think we're still living with that.
Jill: The question almost becomes, What is an appropriate mental
state to have in America right now?
Powers: That is the question.
Jill: We tend to think more locally, and we don't generally take into consideration
our connection with the larger culture, what's happening on a national stage.
Powers: And we have to. They're absolutely reciprocal processes.
Jill: In a profile of Bill Clinton that was in last week's New Yorker,
someone made the observation that if Monica Lewinsky hadn't been working in
the White House, our world would probably look completely different than it
does today — which stopped me cold. That one event so small had that profound
an effect on the larger picture — and that every action does, really.
Powers: That's the John
Muir idea. I can't remember the exact quote, but the gist of it is, The
more I try to understand anything in isolation, the more I realize it's connected
to everything else there is. That sense that, in all the science fiction
time travel stories, if you step off the path, you're going to come back to
a world that's completely unrecognizable.
Did you see the story this morning about Clinton and Chris Wallace having a
showdown on Fox?
Jill: No, I haven't seen it yet.
Powers: It's so interesting; again, it's part of this trying to narrate
the non-narratable, the inconceivable story of where we are. I guess in this
interview that they taped on Friday, Wallace brought up the hot-button issue
of whether it was the Clinton White House's fault that Al Quaeda wasn't stopped
before 9/11. It grew very heated. Clinton was absolutely adamant that this is
an after-the-fact narration meant as a hit job, a blame-passing hit job. It'll
be really interesting to see the interview once it's aired.
Jill: It highlights the war over accuracy, reality, narrative, in our country
over the past few years — and I suppose always, really, but it's seemed much
more obvious over the past few years than ever before. Maybe I just hadn't been
paying as much attention until now.
Powers: It's an awfully interesting question, and I feel that, too.
I don't know whether it is a function of age, but I think it's also a function
of technology. There are ways and speeds at which the past gets laid down and
integrated and narrated and analyzed and partitioned and reconnected and revised
that didn't exist before. Numbers of people weighing in in public fora that
didn't exist before. You could almost say that the rising levels of stridency
and partisanship, not just domestically but internationally, probably at every
level of social life, may result from this sense that the volume is going up,
that things are happening faster and louder. So you end up having to narrate
faster and more stridently, and more rigidly and more oppositionally, just to
keep afloat.
Jill: When Karin's showing Dr. Weber the cranes, she speaks of a lack
of need, at the majesty of the spectacle — What could one possibly need,
with this in the world? The book ends with Weber's actual, very specific
need for his wife.
Powers: Yes; for his wife to recognize him, to assert him as still being who
he is.
Jill: By the end of the book, most of the characters have essentially had to
break down, to break through what their own concepts of themselves were, in
order to find some kind of livable truth.
Powers: Yes. To find some degree of recognition of the tenuousness of
the process of self-narrating, and some degree of acceptance of the improvisatory
nature of the self. It's that vulnerability, that giving up, of narrative, that
allows you to be more fluidly part of narratives that go beyond you. That's
what the birds are doing to Karin at that point. What difference does it make
who I say I am if I am part of this?
Jill: I ran across a fascinating dialogue between you and Bradford
Morrow, in which he described reading Lolita
when he was younger, and then re-reading it when he was older. It seemed to
me a perfect illustration of the power of words — static as they are —
to show us how much we diverge from ourselves, recreate ourselves over time.
Is there a book like that for you?
Powers: As you were talking about that, the one that jumped into mind
as really being a lot different on the second read was Proust.
I read the whole Remembrance
of Things Past twice, and the first time was floored by the music and the
movement of the thought. Then the second time, the whole level of comedy and
social satire was so much more pronounced to me.
Jill: What are you reading these days?
Powers: I've been reading some manuscripts for writers who have sent
me their work, so I've been pretty actively working on giving some feedback
to folks' work-in-progress. Beyond that, I'm reading a terrific book by David
Treuer, called The Translation
of Dr. Apelles. The prose is exquisite. There's a richness and a sophistication
to it quite unlike anything I've seen.
Jill: Have you read This
Is Your Brain on Music?
Powers: No; I just got a copy of it, but I haven't started it yet.
Jill: It's quite good. I just picked it back up last night, after putting it
down for awhile, and realized that it combined two subjects you've written about
extensively — neuroscience and music.
Powers: Sounds perfect! [Laughs] Actually, when it came in, I
thought, oh, too bad it didn't come out eight months earlier; I could have profited
from it. I'll definitely have a look; it sounds really great. Most of his examples
are taken from popular music?
Jill: Yes. There are some classical examples, too, but mainly pop.
On
a final, more personal note — you're often compared to Don DeLillo because
of similarities in theme and range, but you're linked in my mind because you're
two of the only fiction writers who, when I'm reading your books, I'm torn between
continuing to read and putting down the book to start writing.
Powers: That's great. That's about the nicest compliment I could imagine.
That's a wonderful thing to hear.
| 
Don't Miss
