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6 / The Dominant Tense: Richard Powers and Late Postmodernism Born in 1957, Richard Powers is the most publicly visible heir to the tradition of postmodern self-reflexivity outlined in the preceding five chapters , and his stature as one of the most important writers of his generation now seems assured: his honors include a MacArthur “genius” grant and a National Book Award, he has a growing popular readership, and an emerging critical industry is devoted to his work. He came of creative age in the Reagan era when the Cold War was reheated (his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, was published in 1985), and he has been profoundly influenced by the writers I have been discussing. Along with David Foster Wallace, he is the novelist most often imagined as the descendant of Pynchon and DeLillo, though that debt should not be taken to imply that Powers is merely a modernized version of the two, and he shares with Wallace and a long list of younger writers a sense of just how central the nuclear age was for the postmodernist writers who preceded him. Like those of Pynchon and DeLillo, Powers’s complicated novels try to grasp the complex systems that obtain under conditions of globalization and global threat, and his fiction has continually returned to the intersections of the human and the technological in an era of big science, and to the guilty consciences that these intersections produce. Perhaps his most distinctive feature is his thematic and conceptual range: the history of corporate personhood, the history of visual art, the nature of consciousness, the possibilities of virtual reality, the history of race in the United States, the discovery and impact of DNA, the impact of epochal change, the world wars, the Cold War, and literary history. The Dominant Tense / 125 But Powers, despite his capacious grasp of the realities that bind Americans to place, genetics, history, and structures of power, and despite his interest in some of the most pressing political issues of modern times, is also noticeably more committed to the ontological possibilities of aesthetic production than any of the writers I’ve discussed, with the exception of Barth, and more than any of these authors, he paradoxically locates his work precisely at the intersection of fabulous invention and the burdens of real history.1 In his novels, concrete history intersects with the possibility of alternate worlds, and understanding how these two commitments—to the factual, historical, and tragic, and to the possibility of literary enchantment—interact is key to any attempt at understanding Powers’s work. The possibilities of the imagination are central to his novels, and even at their most pessimistic moments , Powers and his characters find solace in fabulation. The aim of this chapter is to reveal Powers’s implicit historicization of his interest in fabulation, and to grasp how Powers sees the intersection of concrete history and reflexive experimentation in political and ethical terms: as I will show, the nuclear age fundamentally shapes Powers’s distinctive aesthetic, and explains his extraordinary commitment to the possibilities of the imagination. It is in his 1988 novel Prisoner’s Dilemma that Powers comes closest to explaining his interest in the intersection of “real” history (the history that, as Jameson says, always hurts) with fabulatory storytelling. The commitment to fantastic narrative invention in the novel becomes a way of surviving that history, and in Prisoner’s Dilemma Powers explains his own narrative commitment to the combination of history and invention as a direct result of the Cold War. Narrative is powerless to enact change in the real world; narrative is the only tool we have to enact change in the real world. This is the paradox that emerges in Powers’s work; and in Prisoner’s Dilemma, which was published in the last full year of the Cold War, we see the links between narrativity and the maintenance of futurity as a potential zone of human affairs, and also the ways in which this intersection of ethics and escapism has been produced by the nuclear age. While less obviously autobiographical than Galatea 2.2, and less directly fanciful than Operation Wandering Soul, Prisoner’s Dilemma is where Powers comes closest to explaining the origins of his particular brand of narrative styling, and this novel, with its active reflections on the relationship between the history of the first nuclear age and fabulatory storytelling, represents a perfect summary of the preceding chapters even as it extends them...

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