“Galatea 2.2” functions similarly. To the question “What is human intelligence?,” there are initially two opposing answers. The scientist, Philip Lentz, at first favors a purely computer-driven explanation: “The brain, Lentz had it, was itself just a glorified, fudged-up Turing machine.” The Richard Powers character, the novelist, is on the other side. “You’re not elevating the machine. You’re debasing us,” he complains to Lentz. In the course of the book, the computer that the two men build begins to develop genuinely human qualities. It “announces” that it misses Powers; it wants to be sung to, and begins to take on the properties of human memory. Both men grow fond of this simulacrum of a brain, and each switches emotional sides: the Richard Powers character eventually concludes that the machine has what can be called consciousness, while Lentz becomes more skeptical. A similar binarism is at work in “The Echo Maker,” which tells the story of a man from Nebraska, Mark Schluter, who, after a terrible car accident, is stricken with Capgras syndrome: he is convinced that his sister is an impostor. To the question “What is consciousness?,” the hospital’s resident neurologist, Dr. Hayes, seems to represent one medical extreme: consciousness is no more than the sum of the brain’s neurological parts. “All I know is what happened to his brain early on the morning of February 20,” he says. Mark’s sister, incoherent and medically illiterate, and angered by Hayes’s narrowness, represents the opposite viewpoint. Gerald Weber, an Oliver Sacks-like neurologist from New York who arrives to examine Mark, stands for the flexible middle position, in which neurology and literature can coexist: “The rapid convergence of neuroscience around certain functionalist assumptions was beginning to alienate Weber.” As a result, Weber feels that his brand of storytelling is becoming obsolete: “Instruments, images, tests, metrics, surgery, pharmaceuticals: no room left for Weber’s anecdotes.”
Powers’s scientism issues in a marked predilection for describing human motivation as the product of biology. We are all, in the end, “low-level structures.” In “Galatea 2.2,” the Richard Powers character is amorously obsessed not only with his female graduate student but with the artificial brain he has helped build, which he calls Helen. Gerald Weber repeatedly returns to Nebraska, partly to see Mark Schluter but also to pursue an erotic quest for Mark’s mysterious and alluring nurse, Barbara Gillespie. In “The Gold Bug Variations,” Stuart Ressler becomes intoxicated with the study of genetics at the same time that he becomes intoxicated with his colleague Dr. Jeanette Koss. For Powers, erotic and scientific quests are both biological at root, so his dual plots work rather like the two story lines in “101 Dalmatians”: if the two dogs’ owners, the man and the woman, manage to meet and mate, then so will the dogs. Powers is never more repetitive than when he is describing love or lust as a species of determinism. As Ressler bends to kiss Koss, “every program in his body, every enzyme, every gemule collaborates on synthesizing a single biophor: take this woman and kiss her.” When the Richard Powers character first gets close to the graduate student who consumes his thoughts, he recalls, “My skin went conductive. In the time it took me to drop another step, a bouillabaisse of chemical semaphores seeped up through my pores and spilled out to wet the air.” As Weber kisses Barbara for the first time, “he surges on the dopamine, the spikes of endorphins, his chest jerking. . . . He slips down into limbic back alleys. . . . They flood each other, waves of oxytocin and a savage bonding.”
Powers’s latest novel is even more emphatic in this regard than its predecessors. When Russell first catches sight of Candace, there is an immediate attraction: “the massive spray of fight-or-flight hormones cascading through his limbs proves it.” His eventual alliance with her is foretold by his biology. Lying in her bed, he smells “her gamey scent. He has read how people choose their mates on smell and some sixth sense, a pheromone whiff off histocompatibility complexes other than their own, but recognized. He was doomed to end up here, in her bed, from the moment they sniffed each other.”
And so on. The twist is that this biological determinism is what produces the apparently “free” human messiness of the erotic narratives. For instance, the narrator of “The Gold Bug Variations” is trying to answer a human conundrum: Why did Dr. Ressler abandon, in the late nineteen-fifties, a brilliant early career in genetic research? The answer, provided near the end of the novel, is that Ressler fell desperately in love with Jeanette Koss but couldn’t pursue the relationship, because Koss was already married. To avert the breakup of her marriage, Koss informs Ressler that she is leaving the university and moving away, with her husband. As a consequence, Ressler also decides to leave the research team, in part because he realizes that life is just too large and multifarious to be explained by one area of study:
Under the fancy language is an all-too-clear message: biology (our “giant molecules”) made Ressler a biologist. But biology (endorphins, limbic back alleys) also pushes us into human relationships and encounters (erotic, amorous) that have a way of messing things up—this is the “heft, bruise, and hopeless muddle of the world’s irreducible particulars.” So one kind of biology “made” Ressler a biologist; another kind of biology “made” him decide to swerve from what he was put on earth to do, and abandon his work as a biologist. We are determined—programmed—to be humanly messy.
Who could possibly argue with a view of life that combines a squeeze of determinism with a shake of liberty? There is nothing offensive in the familiar paradox that our apparent human freedom is highly overdetermined. Powers always discovers the happy and humane mixture, in which human beings are revealed to be a combination of the unfree and the free, the chemical and the non-chemical, the given and the found, the animal and the human. But one feels that he alights on his humane median only by making each side of that median extreme and impossible. And, after the real brilliance of Powers’s mastery of various disciplinary idioms, this humane middle can seem milkily bland, perfectly inoffensive. “Generosity” ends in just this bet-hedging spirit. Thomas Kurton’s scientific certainty has been properly cast into doubt by Thassa’s nervous breakdown and near-suicide, but the novel closes with the information that Thassa has successfully sold her eggs, and that a child with her genetics has been born. So, Powers seems to say, we shall have to wait and see which is determinative of happiness, nature or nurture; for now, however, at novel’s close, the answer must be, happily enough, “a bit of both.”
Much great fiction has been involved in working out the relationship between determinism and human agency; you could argue that this is fiction’s special province. Dreiser and Hardy were convinced determinists, but as novelists they were able to animate the fates of their characters, so that freedom and unfreedom were in dramatic, fateful play with each other. The scientifically literate French novelist Michel Houellebecq has managed the cunning paradox of espousing a violent anti-humanism while bringing to bleakly vivid life real human pathos and despair. Richard Powers compares poorly with these writers: his fictional work constantly asserts the importance of the human while never quite succeeding in enacting it. He makes beautiful connections between concepts (genetics, music, computers, consciousness, memory), but primitive and mechanistic connections between his characters. Indeed, his novels are not so much examinations of human motive as documents of bewilderment about human motive. Again and again, Powers finds himself drawn to a characterological enigma, the various answers to which he then sorts through, like a good researcher. But these enigmas arise in the first place only because he begins with such a basic concept of human motive. Richard Powers’s novels are thus unwitting, even anxious confessions of their own inability to animate his characters. So they circle around their lack, animals not quite willing to shun their own dead. ♦
