Mental Ecology

BOOK REVI EWS Mental Ecology David Cowart The Echo Maker Richard Powers Farrar, Straus and Giroux http://www.fsgbooks.com/ 464 pages; cloth, $25.00 Before Freud or Lacan, literary artists observed and instinctively made stories out ofthe primal divisions within the self. The real impact of the famous Robert Louis Stevenson tale lies in a simple, terrifying idea: for every Dr. Jekyll, a Mr. Hyde. Conrad, too, knew that every consciousness has its secret sharer. Poe, Gogol, Nabokov—they all understood, with Rimbaud, that Je est un autre. In recent years, neurological science has caught up with literature and psychoanalysis. As Paul Broca, Jules Cotard, Oliver Sacks, and others have shown, the French poet had it right: "I" is an other. Not that science always capers in the wake of art. Often as not, in fact, the literary artist has functioned as conduit for the latest scientific thinking . Absorbing the implications of Copernican astronomy , a great seventeenth-century poet gravely announces that "new philosophy calls all in doubt.'' When a Thomas Pynchon makes fiction accommodate thermodynamics and the chemistry ofaromatic polymers, he does what Donne and Shelley did before him: he invades the precincts of science in a quest for the real. Richard Powers, most brilliant of the "Sons of Pyn," has made a career out of transforming ever more recondite ideas into fictions that dismantle the wall between the Two Cultures. He has written about medical pathology and the social and environmental folly that fosters it (Gain [1998]), about virtual reality (Plowing the Dark [2000]), about research into the building blocks of life (The Gold Bug Variations [1991]), about artificial intelligence (Galatea 2.2 [1995]), and about history and its photographic simulacrum (Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance [1985]). In The Echo Maker, his ninth novel, Powers parses subjectivity. He imagines and fleshes out a case history that, exposing everything provisional in the self, chronicles a brain-damaged man's "attempts to tell himselfback into a continuous story." Always interested in the claims of storytelling as instrument oftruth (a major theme in Operation Wandering Soul [1993]), Powers scrutinizes identity itselfas supreme fiction. If the self is really a narrative, he asks, who is its author? "Where," he asks, "are the neurological correlates of consciousness?" Powers complicates these questions by characterizing the self as an ecosystem and framing his story of a head trauma victim with that of a threatened Platte River habitat for migratory waterfowl, notably Sandhill Cranes, a species threatened with extinction after surviving for sixty million years. "[Fjeathered dinosaurs," the narrator calls them, "a last great reminder oflife before the self." As Bach's Goldberg Variations was counterpointed against the supernal order of the double helix in Powers's The Gold Bug Variations, so here does the author ingeniously conflate two disparate economies, ecologies of earth and mind. A major thematic thread, then, associates ecology (specifically the wetlands ecology that has sustained the Sandhill Cranes) with the organization— itselfan ecology, a housekeeping—ofconsciousness and identity. The story reminds its readers that they err to take either of these ecologies for granted, to think the brain's wiring immune to short circuits or to think that the earth abides when we subject it to spoliation. Their habitats destroyed, whole species disappear forever; one good trauma to the head, by the same token, and you're another person. Powers scrutinizes identity itself as supremefiction. Twenty-seven-year-old Mark Schlüter rolls his truck one February night and suffers precisely such a head injury. Emerging from a coma, he begins to make his way back to ambulation and speech, but he suffers from the delusion that substitutions have been made for his sister and his dog, not to mention his "house, the subdivision, maybe even the whole town." They have become uncanny echoes. Neitherhis sister, his friends, nor his physicians can persuade him that pathology lies behind his strange conviction, which in fact derives from Capgras Syndrome, "one of the most bizarre aberrations the self could suffer." Mark's story becomes the vehicle for a meditation on neurological science, a fictional version, as it were, of one of the bizarre stories in Oliver Sacks's The...