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By Deb Nathan
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Beginning with Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance in 1987, Richard Powers has published six scientifically savvy and emotionally rich novels. Among his best-known works are The Gold Bug Variations, concerning the decoding of genetics, art and music, and Galatea 2.2, which curiously features a narrator named Richard Powers trying to teach a computer to read literature. With a new book scheduled for publication in June, Powers is not only one of our most intriguing novelists but is becoming one of our most prolific, as well.
In his most recent novel, Gain (Picador, 1998), two seemingly unrelated narratives collide with tragic results: The first recounts the 150-year history of Clare Inc., a soap and chemical manufacturer not unlike Procter & Gamble; the other details single mother Laura Bodey's struggle with ovarian cancer. The result is a socially aware and emotionally gripping novel that is as compelling as it is disturbing to read.
As part of the University of Cincinnati's Ropes Lecture Series, Powers will be giving the lecture "Being and Seeming: The Technology of Representation." CityBeat recently spoke with Powers about Gain and his upcoming appearance at the University.
CityBeat: In Gain, Laura's son, Tim, is asked whether he prefers science or poetry, and he chooses science because, he says, you can do things with it. As a novelist who often writes about science, do you feel you can also "do things" with literature?
Richard Powers: I think most of my books have a scientific theme because science and technology are so central to our existence right now. And the 20th century and certainly the 21st century will be remembered as being dominated by this culmination of the long-developing scientific revolution and its technological spin-offs. So I don't think, if you want to say what life looks like now, you can neglect those themes. I think that we're all treating those themes in one way or another. Even the books where those themes are not overtly deployed, the book will often be describing the sense of alienation or the sense of shock or the sense of discontinuity that technology has brought about. So I don't think of myself as doing something that's separate from the standing literary task of saying who we are and where we've been put down.
The other half of your question was about the ability to do things with science, as opposed to doing things with literature. I think our ability to alter the terms of material existence has become far greater than our ability to know how we want to alter them or how we can survive that altering. So as our science gets more powerful the need for our literature to address that power becomes greater. Obviously the things that science can do and the things that literature can do are qualitatively different. One operates upon the material world, and the other operates upon human perception, the human heart. And I absolutely believe in the need to do the latter to survive the former.
CB: Clare Inc. inadvertently creates a great breakthrough in health -- the discovery of soap -- but they also begin destroying lives. Must the reality of our own technology always be so tragic?
RP: This question of the inextricable link between corporate good and corporate evil is going to be very charged in Cincinnati. I hope I don't get run out on a rail (laughing). I think there are a lot of things going on in my attempt to tell this sort of dialogue between a real individual person and that individual that a corporation is in the eyes of the law. They belong to such completely different levels of ordinal reality that they can't really acknowledge one another's existence or can't really understand the world at the level that the other understands it. One of the points of the book is that we've lost the ability to see that every aspect of our life is already written by the transformation that incorporated life has wrought. I guess, what I'm trying to awaken is a kind of renewed sense that the key to our blessings and our miseries is the result of this experiment that we set in motion a couple of hundred years ago -- whose results nobody could have anticipated. And the question is how to take that fate back into our hands and not to externalize it, and not to leave it to blind institution.
CB: There is a lot of research going on in Gain. The entire Bodey family is researching Laura's cancer. Is that the novel's message for this consumer age, that we have to know what we're buying into and where it's taking us?
RP: Absolutely. We will forever be passive victims unless we do find out everything that we can about the forces operating upon us.
CB: Of course, on the other side of that you have Benjamin Clare, whose research turns him into a kind of Mr. Hyde in his chemical dependence.
RP: By the way, that story derives from the story of several early experimenters in the field of anesthesia and that sort of dependence actually has historical precedent among those researchers. And I think that you had a good feel for it earlier when you were pointing out that the book, in invoking this imperative to learn all you can and to use that to open up this otherwise foreclosed argument between little and big, doesn't try to shut down that dialogue with either a simple condemnation or a simple accolade. But to open up the question of great and complicated relationships between the ability to do good and the ability to do harm.
CB: Aside from your lecture at UC, you're also doing a panel with critic Sven Birkerts, and I'm imagining that there will be some discussion of the future of literature and perhaps the future of the book itself. Do you foresee the day when we can all walk around with palm versions of the great classics?
RP: That day already exists. I mean, the product already exists. Whether it will become acceptable as a mass physical replacement for printed page depends upon more a matter of materials and packaging than concept. Would you want, if you had a physical book, if you had a nice hard-bound, pleasant smelling, pleasant to feel and to hold and touch copy of Moby Dick, would you be traumatized if upon a sort of spoken command it turned into Portrait of a Lady? I don't think so. I think it would be enormously pleasing to you to have any book that you might want to read in the entire library of human thought available, retrievable, searchable, orderable and portable in one physical container that's much like the one you've come to feel affection. So yeah, I don't see it as a war of books versus data. I see it as, again, a transformation in our material relationship to this ongoing conversation between all people who have ever put words down on a page, or in any medium. Do I want to be able to search and retrieve the entire archive of human thought? Yeah. Would I like it in a container that's a lot like a book? Yes. (Laughing) Beyond that I don't see much controversy.
Richard Powers lectures at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Rm. 427 Engineering Resource Center. He and critic Sven Birkerts will hold a panel discussion at 2 p.m. on Feb. 3 in Room 401A at Tangeman University Center on the UC campus. Both events are free and open to the public.
