Reading the Brain That Writes (Its) Self

UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Brains with character: Reading and writing neuronarrative Yaczo, T.F. Publication date 2015 Document Version Final published version Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Yaczo, T. F. (2015). Brains with character: Reading and writing neuronarrative. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:29 Sep 2021 Chapter One Reading The Brain That Writes (Its) Self Karin Schluter first encounters the neurologist Dr. Gerald Weber not in person but on the page. Weber’s books, Wider Than The Sky and The Three-Pound Infinity, “compiled a travelogue of every state that consciousness could enter,” and “from his first words” she immediately feels “the shock of discovering a new continent where none had been” (Powers, Echo 117). The accounts Weber writes “of split brains fighting over their oblivious owners,” “of a man who could speak sentences but not repeat them,” and of “a woman who could smell purple and hear orange” reveal to her “the brain’s mind-boggling plasticity and neurology’s endless ignorance” (117-18). Taken by the stories, Karin “read every word of both books, her synapses changing as she devoured the pages” (118). Karin’s encounter is accidental—her boyfriend, Daniel, gives her Weber’s texts—as well as the result of an accident: driving his truck late one night outside of Kearney, Nebraska on an empty road, her twenty-seven year-old meatpacker brother Mark Schluter gets into a nasty skid-and-flip that lands him—alive, but with severe head trauma—in the hospital. Mark slips into a coma, and Karin, the only other family member Mark has, quits her job to come and care for him. Mark regains consciousness weeks later and, although he cannot remember what caused him to lose control of his truck, begins showing signs of recovery. One crucial detail emerges, however: Mark cannot recognize his sister Karin. He constructs “everything else: who he was, where he worked, what had happened to him,” but Mark insists “Karin was an actress who looked very much like his sister” (75). The hospital’s doctor, Christopher Hayes, diagnoses this brain-damaged Mark as “manifesting a condition called Capgras syndrome,” and explains the symptoms to Karin: “He knows he has a sister. He remembers everything about her. He knows you look like her and act like her and dress like her. He just doesn’t think you are her” (75-76). Months pass, Mark’s body heals, but he continues to consider Karin “an imposter” (86). Witnessing Karin’s distress over Mark’s continued refusal to recognize her and Dr. Hayes’s inaction—“How did that man ever get certified? He won’t do anything. ‘Wait and watch,’” Karin bellows (116)—Daniel brings Karin to Weber’s books. Inspired by reading them, Karin concludes that “Dr. Weber had never visited any land quite like the one her brother now inhabited” (117). So she writes an email about Mark’s Capgras to the “apparently well-known cognitive neurologist from New 34 York,” pleading for his attention and intervention in the face of Hayes’s inattention (118). Dr. Weber does visit Nebraska, but what he encounters through Mark’s condition transforms his own literary habitat, driving him to rewrite and re-inhabit the meanings between narratives of neuroscience and neuroscience’s narratives. From this deceptively straightforward premise, Richard Powers launches his ninth novel, The Echo Maker, published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 2006 and winner of the National Book Award the same year.6 Powers’s neurologist-writer character Dr. Weber in The Echo Maker is a figure self- consciously aware of the stakes of constructing brains with character in culture today. His books (within the world of Powers’s book), which animate his own pseudonymous patient- characters for the purposes of narrating popular tales about the wonders of neuroscience and the connections that readers have to those abstract characters (much like Oliver Sacks), wield a power to change readers’ brains by making readers aware of the brain’s powers of transformation. As Karin’s “synapses [were] changing as she devoured the pages” of Weber’s tales, so too marks the wager that Powers’s brain with character—Dr. Weber—makes on its readers. The crisis that Dr. Weber faces, a crisis that also turns outward toward a reader of the The Echo Maker, is how to write one’s self if it is one’s brain that writes the self. Weber becomes a character who cannot write his own sense of self because of an increasingly clear threat that his brain out-writes or overwrites his sense of self. The threat is less of a problem of hierarchy than it is about the plastic links between the page (reading and writing narrative !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 6 The title derives from the Cherokee name for the Sandhill Cranes, whose migration through Nebraska’s Sandhill region provides location for the novel as well as thematic partitions for its five sections. The cranes’ annual convergence at the Platte River and its numerous lakes and ponds in the Sandhills—one of the most important wetland ecosystems in the United States that covers an area ten- to twenty-thousand square kilometers larger than the Netherlands—has happened for “sixty million years,” and feeds the novel’s central metaphors of memory, evolution, and habitation in the face of environmental destruction through human development (Powers, Echo 4; Powers, Interview). Memory, evolution, and habitation work their way through the plot of The Echo Maker’s two main mysteries. Solving the riddle of what (or who) caused Mark’s accident drives much of the many characters’ actions in the novel. The second mystery sprouts from Mark’s brain damage, which incites Weber’s own inability to distinguish himself from his deteriorating sense of brain-composed self in the world around him. This mystery is not built around matters of fact resolved in the catharsis of procedural information recovery, but instead builds matters of concern into which readers are implicated and whose synapses change as pages are devoured. 35 characters) and the prefrontal cortex (reading and writing brains with character). Weber’s character in The Echo Maker performs the struggle of acknowledging and articulating neural plasticity through one’s sense of self, in one’s self-composure. “Since meeting his ruined Nebraska meatpacker,” Weber realizes, he “could no longer tell the difference” between “science” and “stories” (452-53). From his medical training and his writing career in the academic genre, “He lost himself in lobes and lesions” (460). But from his encounter with Mark, “the world had broken out in Dickens and Dostoyevsky,” and he struggles to re- compose his sense of self, grappling with a ‘neuro-’ awareness that “The self was a mob, a drifting, improvised posse. No self without self-delusion” (453). The precision of neuroscience leaves Weber alienated from the narratives he previous wrote about patients and the narrative he once thought described his consciousness. Weber “begins to sense things with his emotional intelligence that his cognitive processes have previously hidden from him” (Powers, Interview). A master of the game of fiction, Richard Powers stages The Echo Maker through an extended meditation on this impasse of alienation regarding the brain. Enfolding topics like brain damage and plasticity with neuroscientist characters comfortably locates the novel within the scope of neuronarrative, whose definition, Marco Roth prescribes, is a “novel of how brains can take themselves as objects” (Roth, Reply). Indeed, as I note in the Introduction, The Echo Maker features on many critics’ lists of neuronarratives (see pages 25-26). But my own encounter with the novel, and especially with the character Dr. Weber, discovers more than an example of neuronarrative. The complex narrative trajectory that both describes and enacts Weber exposes the plastic conditions of reading and writing brains with character. “Powers is so important,” Bruno Latour observes, “because he refuses to situate fiction in an easy position in addition or in contrast to science. …fiction is not what he is after, but rather the common source of fiction and fact” (10). The plasticity performed through Weber in The Echo Maker bequeaths a parable about genre in a neurobiological contemporary: that we do not only adjust ourselves to inhabit the received frames of genre, but that we also adjust those receptions to innovate the generic frames of those inhabitations. “Powers asks what it is for a character to exist at all,” writes Latour, “when so much of existence depends upon the things one is attached to—the most important connection being the biological basis of life itself” (3). 36 This chapter’s first section analyzes how The Echo Maker stages and incorporates neurological plasticity in the character of Dr. Weber. I dialogue with Marco Roth over a neuronarrative classification to forage for more operations in the accusation of genre than limits on reception and expectation.

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