chats
National Book Award Novelist Richard Powers - Chat Transcript
Berlin
November 23, 2006
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Moderator: Welcome, Richard Powers, and congratulations. Last week you received the National Book Award for fiction for The Echo Maker. This is the sixth time that one of your books has been short-listed for a national book prize, but the first time you have won. The list of fiction nominees this year was described as “a field of solidly literary competitors” -- but it did not include some more well-known authors who published bigger bestsellers this year. Is this a new trend?
Richard Powers: What makes the NBA award a really interesting award is that it is judged by writers and not by critics. Five judges read between 300 and 500 books and they are under no pressure from either publishers or news media to narrow their list down to 5 choices. In the last couple of years the judges have selected writers who are known to the literary community but not necessarily to the wider public. That could change next year when there are 5 new judges.
Moderator: This is how you have described The Echo Maker: "It is about the brain and the self and the way in which we need to invent solidity and continuity. It is also about ecology and what it is that alienates us from the rest of creation." Is there anything you would like to add?
Richard Powers: It is also about life in the U.S. after the attacks of 9/11. The book begins shortly after the attacks and ends on the first day of the invasion of Iraq. So just as how the individual characters search to locate their senses of self, so the country as a whole struggles to find itself again in a changed landscape.
Question: So, in how far do individual and national identity relate to each other in the novel?
Richard Powers: The novel represents a young man suffering from Capgras Syndrome. In this syndrome, the sufferer can recognize everyone except those who are closest to him. In short, it is caused by a disruption between intellectual and emotional recognition. The young man, Mark, looks at his sister and says: This looks like my sister, sounds like my sister, and acts like my sister but she doesn`t feel like my sister. In the absence of emotional recognition, he decides she is an impostor. But all the other characters find themselves feeling much the same way about life in America in 2002. The country looks like America, sounds like America, but it doesn't feel like it's their country.
Question: In The Echo Maker, Mark’s delusions basically plunge everyone around him into a profound crisis of identity. What do you think, in how far do we need “the other” to know ourselves?
Richard Powers: That is exactly the question at the heart of the book. Mark's malady demonstrates that our sense of self as something that is whole, solid, and continuous is really an illusion. Rather, as the other characters also discover, the self is a very tenuous improvisation. This improvisation depends continuously on others. We make ourselves as an ongoing process in collaboration with everyone we come across. As a result, the book explores the question of empathy: Is it possible for us to see the world through someone else`s eyes? In America since the attacks, there has been much talk of evil, as if evil is an external force in the world directed at us. Instead, the book raises the possibility that evil might be just the refusal to see ourselves in others and to realize how much of our self invention depends on the stories of others.
Question: Is thus, as you put it in Galatea 2.2, all "human knowledge social"? And does this mean that you oppose postmodernism’s distrust of reference?
Richard Powers: I believe that the recent advances in neuroscience over the last couple of decades might actually provide an interesting response to postmodernism`s distrust of reference. Many new findings point out that the brain makes and uses symbols, not arbitrarily but in shared ways. An interesting recent discovery called mirror neurons suggests ways in which we actually simulate other people’s actions inside our own brains. These and other neurological foundations for social knowledge will challenge postmodernist theorists in interesting ways in the future. And they also give great hope to those who believe in the power of literature!
Question: Karin Schluter attributes a lot of her problems to her overly religious upbringing. What role did religion play in your childhood? And what role does religion play in today`s America in your opinion?
Richard Powers: You are absolutely right about the role of religion in the story. And I believe that you need to think about religion when thinking about the current social and political landscape of the country. The odd thing is, the world`s great religions all preach empathy and connection and all of them acknowledge the self`s dependence on others. But in a climate of fear and fundamentalism, people can sometimes invoke religion as a way of separating themselves from others. My story tries to find a way back to the expansive and ecological connectedness that the religious impulse inside our brains can produce.
Question: You not only describe Mark Schluter`s recovery; in some rather brief passages you give him a voice. Early on he speaks a very scattered language, but gradually he is able to put together more complete sentences and to make more sense. This comes across as a very convincing approach to make your reader respect this rather crazy person. My question is how were you able to construct this kind of speech? Did you invent it? What kind of research did you do to be able to slip into his mind?
Richard Powers: Thanks for those good words about the early passages of double voicing while Mark is still in his coma. They were tricky to do, because it is hard to use words to suggest a preverbal shattered consciousness. To create them, I listened to transcripts of brain-damaged patients and also tried to introspect on the strange interior language of sleep and states of illness, extrapolating on those shattered states of consciousness that we sometimes experience.
Question: Why is speech in the Mark's chapters mostly indirect and without quotation marks? Is this a distancing mechanism?
Richard Powers: I use indirect and unquoted speech in Mark`s sections to suggest his own interior mental confusion about what is happening to him and what is going on in the outside world. But it is also another device to suggest the ways in which the inner voice of the self depends upon and is constructed out of the voices of others "out there."
Question: Similar to the memories of the cranes in The Echo Maker that know the route without ever having traveled it?
Richard Powers: Exactly! Interestingly, Mark`s Capgras Syndrome results from a disconnection between his cerebral cortex (that part of the brain that makes us most uniquely human) and his amygdala, a structure we still share with the cranes. Hence so much of the story concerns the attempt to reconnect human intelligence with the intelligence of other creatures with whom we share the planet.
Question: Some of your novels have very elaborate but also very transparent narrative structures (e.g. The Gold Bug Variations, Gain and Plowing the Dark). On the one hand these architectures seem to open up metafictional dimensions, because the reader becomes aware of their artificiality, on the other hand your storylines and characters still are predominantly realistic. My question thus is: how do your narrative patterns relate to the world outside the text? Do you want to emphasize the constructedness of fiction and the impossibility of real mimesis? Or do you want to impose these narrative patterns onto a seemingly random reality, thus making experience meaningful?
Richard Powers: Wonderful question about narrative form! Part of the pleasure in writing each book comes from the search to discover the proper form for each book`s thematic content. In the case of The Echo Maker, the storytelling nature of consciousness itself becomes the theme of the tale: How does one part of the brain put together all of these hundreds of other chaotic parts into a continuous and meaningful story? That`s why I use the ancient genre of mystery story as my form here. But to answer your question: yes, I want the reader to be inside the story dramatically while at the same time hovering above it in an awareness of structure. It`s exactly that relationship between content and vehicle, exactly that awareness of how we shape the stories that keep us together that the books try to invoke.
Question: Interesting, especially since one of the major features of the mystery story is its constructedness.
Question: It seems to me that auditory perception (of music, voices, sounds, noises) is an essential way for you to understand the world and convey meaning in your novels. How does the aural sense figure into your writing process, into your aesthetics? What are the formal, aesthetic links between music/sound and literature? Are there any limits to what literature can represent?
Richard Powers: Music is an essential part of my daily writing process. Often, writing a scene requires that I first find its theme song. Also, I now compose using speech recognition software. This allows me not only to hear the voices of my characters out loud but also to think and compose with an ear toward very long musical phrases and "movements." As for the limits to literary representation: perhaps there are some in theory but I can`t imagine our minds ever reaching them in practice. Reading and writing will always be large enough to take us anywhere we think it is important to go.
Question: The New York Times, I believe, called you one of the greatest living writers in the U.S. Now that you have won the National Book Award, does this put a lot of pressure on you and your work? How do you handle fame?
Richard Powers: Fortunately, the problem of fame is never a very large one for fiction writers! The award has been wonderful, but you are only "queen for a day." And I look forward to going back into solitary confinement for 2 or 3 years while making the next book.
Moderator: Thank you very much, Richard.
