5. Of Cranes and Brains

Abstract

With The Echo Maker (2006) these explorations of the novel’s investment in giving narrative voice and form to concerns with belonging reach our late-modern present, depicted by Richard Powers in an intricate double perspective: as an encompassing ecosystem in which human troubles shrink in geological scale, and as a tenuous product of a specific narrative economy—that of the human brain. There is a striking congruence to these themes that begs to be read as counteracting the “hyper-liquefying” tendencies of late modernity. Speaking from a world in which daily routines and social relations have become intangible, short-lived and unpredictable to an unprecedented degree, the novel insists on the stoic materiality of that world and pairs it with a narrative activity that is located not in the lofty realm of the psyche but in the materiality of the brain. And if the brain’s narrative capacity is firmly grounded in the materialist worldview of cognitive science, the novel renders it, quite naturalistically, as a product of evolutionary contingency. Powers is known as a “content-intense” and “brainy” writer. He thinks of the novel as “a supreme connection machine—the most complex artifact of networking that we have developed” (Williams 104), and of connectivity as the baseline of late-modern problems with belonging.1 His fiction seeks to enhance the novel’s