Plowing the Dark by
Richard Powers
Recently, some friends
and I travelled to Beirut for a few days and took the road
to Damascus; the same road along which Brian Keenan was driven
to safety from his abduction. It was an eerie experience,
trying to imagine how Keenan must have felt during his captivity,
and realising that no amount of speculation could possibly
ever come close to capturing the reality of that ordeal. One
would imagine, then, that only a supremely confident author
might attempt to convey such an experience as a fiction, yet
in his new novel - Plowing the Dark - this is exactly
the risk that Richard Powers takes. Such a risk is a calculated
gamble, because the stake he will forfeit is the power of
his own imagination to do justice to his material. Moreover,
he has calibrated his tale of solitary confinement with the
story of a graphic artist who also occupies an empty space;
that of a virtual-reality cavern, where virtual worlds were
reportedly being constructed in the late nineteen-eighties.
Indeed, in the techno-graph of the last twenty years, VR was
reputedly only a matter of time, set to enchant and enthrall
the general public by century's end. The story goes that it
failed to live up to the hype and disappeared, but, conspicuously,
the world of virtually real entertainment has failed to materialise
in the public domain in any form except arcade games, and
this in part constitutes a key element in Powers' book.
Plowing the Dark
is composed of two parallel narratives. One documents
the psychological apocalypse incurred by kidnapping, and yet
manages to use such a story to underpin the second narrative,
which questions the relations between art, technology and
finally, politics. In the first of these twin narratives,
Adie Klarpol is an ex-art school student with technophobia,
who is co-opted by an old fellow student into a think-tank
of computer wizards attempting to perfect the world's first
virtual-reality environment on the shores of Puget Sound.
This idealistic and self-conscious woman learns how to construct
her favourite paintings on the walls of an empty space known
as the Cavern. At first ignorant of "the code for cat and
apple and bucket and tree and abandoned doll" she shares "no
mother tongue" with any of the other operatives. However,
as she begins to learn the mechanics, her initial preference
for the authenticity of paint and canvas - and the concomitant
necessity for Romantic suffering in art - are set to one side.
Beginning with a wonderfully informal treatment of the art-versus-technology
debate, the novel then lends its subject matter proper complexity
by setting it off against historical context in the collapse
of communism, the spread of global capitalism and the ethical
dilemma of unwittingly developing potential warfare tools
through VR experimentation. Certainly, the disappearance of
VR-related news 'bytes' is downright disturbing in this latter
regard.
In the cavern, early
in the book, VR is accurately identified as painting without
the paint when one of the engineers states that
art
explodes at exactly the same moment as tool based culture.
That cave pictures prepared the leap, after a million and
a half years of static existence. That pictures were the
tool that enabled human liftoff, the Ur-tech that planted
the idea of a separate symbolic existence in the mind.
Her reservations thus
challenged, Adie begins to explore all of the possibilities
that VR affords and becomes captivated by its representational
possibilities. Soon she is thrilled by "the cheer of software
engineers down the hall, delighted in some hard won extension
of their dominion deeper into the kingdom of comprehension,"
for it is the sound that might lead to a new breakthrough
in her virtual Van Gogh painting with its creaking floorboards
and audible breeze.
In the course of this
narrative, Powers masterfully alleviates any frustrations
that the readers might develop as a result of their own computer
illiteracy. One of the difficulties in documenting such a
world is in satisfying a reader's desire to fully understand
it, without log-jamming the story. Here the author finds a
balance by giving just enough technical information to authenticate
the environment without frightening the technophobe reader,
and just enough information to assure the inquisitive kind
that "You can't possibly understand. There are too many layers
now, between you and the artifact. Assemblers, compilers,
interpreters, code generators, reusable libraries, visual
programming tools."
In the second narrative,
Adie's employment coincides with the kidnapping of Taimur
Martin by Islamic fundamentalists in Beirut. This English
teacher then finds himself chained to a radiator in what amounts
to a dilapidated empty room where he must survive the years
by the power of his imagination alone. Both individuals imagine,
both fill an empty space with images drawn from experience
in the real world. In this regard, structurally, the two main
narratives are punctured by frequent descriptions of rooms
- the warm room, the therapy room, the imagination room -
but all rooms are "never anything o'clock" as they represent
a meditation on time in a simulated universe. Tellingly, Powers
describes the imagination room as a "paradise of detachment.
The room of no consequence in the least. Of making no difference
in the whole known world" when it actually represents the
space where imagination and technology meet, a room as easily
made in the cavern as in Taimur's isolated mind. It is also
in these rooms that Powers touches the reader's imaginative
capacity. The result is at once disorientating and pleasant,
not knowing where you are going or 'who' you are reading in
the narrative, finally becoming aware that you are reading
yourself, or reading your own imaginative potential, spurred
on by Powers' convincing descriptions. Essentially, all of
these rooms are Powers' stake in the game of imagination.
Using his rhetorical abilities to command the readers' attention
for what appears to be nothing more than description's sake,
the walls of these imagined rooms, of real rooms, political
walls and geographic borders all shift in a final and unexpected
plot twist. Indeed, the shifting walls of imagination's room
lead to one of the most moving final paragraphs ever read
by this reviewer.
Consequently, the
novel's twin narratives ply the same terrain: human imagination.
Both represent imagination in a world so rapidly changing
that by the end of the novel the potential uses of VR return
us to the same art-versus-war paradigm that Brecht wrestled
with in his plays. But if for Brecht, war was a necessary
adjunct to a thriving economic environment, for Klarpol it
is the realisation that, à la Baudrillard, the Gulf War is
essentially a virtual one. With technology beaming bytes of
destruction all around the globe, she slowly begins to realise
that the very technology she works with may prove instrumental
in advancing the manner of that war. As well as watching the
Gulf War from the Cavern, the computer kids also witness the
resistance in Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin
Wall. This sequence of historical events that mark the collapse
of communism and the rise of global capitalism, take on a
sense of inevitability after the fact. This is conveyed by
the manner in which global communication is effected through
the mass media while "a dozen stunned lives, huddled in a
picture pitched tent, trapped in the rising information flood"
look on helplessly. However, images of grief for "the lost
Imam" swiftly supersede these specters of Marx and replace
them with the rise of a new, previously 'unseen' adversary,
Islam and the East. All the while Taimur Martin plays out
his solitary torment in an empty Beirut room, on one occasion
reciting what he can remember of A Midsummer Night's Dream
while the plaster of his imprisoning walls remains steadfastly
unmoved.
Juggling with the
implications of this historical process, Powers delicately
paints many of its tributaries without crystallising technology
as the inevitable tool of capital and military tyranny. Straddling
a fine balance between the positive possibilities of VR and
its potential misuse, Powers articulates the parameters of
the global scenario and intimates the uses to which VR could
be put, yet without proselytising or offering socio-political
judgement. Speaking of the virtual-reality environment, one
of his characters maintains that "You are inside a building.
You are inside a book. Inside a story that knows you're in
there, a tale ready to advance in any direction you send it."
This is Powers' position in relation to his own book: he can
shape the action but can only send it in directions that cannot
be foreclosed. Given that the experiences are not his own,
all he can do is represent the twin worlds of his narrative
by employing language to do justice to both topics. If he
were to fail, then the world's hostages would be forever slighted,
and the nebulous relations between art, virtual reality and
capital would elude their delicate elucidation.
Moreover, like one
of his characters, he recognises seismic possibilities for
the future of VR. The jaded and acerbic Ulsterman Ronan O'Reilly
uses Yeats to illustrate the aesthetic appeal of the technological
in art by pointing out that in Yeats' vision of Byzantium,
this neo-Romantic poet settled finally for the symmetry and
crystal clarity that a mechanical bird would allow for.
Further, Yeats is
also significant regarding prediction, the other aspect of
technology that could change our world forever. Yeats' idea
of cyclicality - à la Vico - has influenced O'Reilly - a mathematician
- into attempting to predict the future by programming and
processing historical variables. O'Reilly believes that "the
mind is the first virtual reality. It gets to say what the
world isn't yet" and so he examines the principle of reversibility
in historical terms while Adie "recapitulates the Quattrocento
assault on plastic realism" as she mixes and matches art styles
and movements trying to find new binary codes of virtual painting.
As O'Reilly tries to confirm that "the world is a numbers
racket all the way down," Adie's imagination generates a new
reality as art; Platonic mimesis in reverse. This stroke of
cleverness on Powers' part adds some weight to O'Reilly's
belief that "the computer changes the tasks. Other inventions
alter the conditions of human existence. The computer alters
the human." Ultimately, he believes that they are working
on time travel: "the matter transporter. Embodied art; a life-size
poem that we can live inside...The defeat of time and space.
The final victory of the imagination." Similarly, the author
recognises the importance of a "life-size poem that we can
live inside" when a character surmises that
art
is not capable of teaching. It contains no formal knowledge
about the world. No predictions. Nothing falsifiable. Nothing
repeatable. It's not about anything except itself. Other
art. And even about that, it's at best equivocal.
So Powers litters
his text with intertextual references - paraphrased painting
titles, novel titles, embedded lines from poetry, particularly
Yeats, philosophic texts - all interwoven in the fabric of
his story and producing a rich web of artistic resonance.
The point here is, that those who control technological experiment
ignore the history of artistic achievement at their peril.
Without the artistic talent of an Adie Klarpol, virtual reality
will never approximate the real, but without her moral imperative
it could turn the virtual into a real nightmare. Further,
he proves his own competence to pass judgement in this regard
by interweaving one discourse with another. Thus, in the best
traditions of Blake, he articulates two contrary states of
the human soul. His philosophical discourse on the ethical
dimension of technological advancement - articulated in the
language of technology - is counterpointed with the language
of human suffering. Indeed, there is a microcosm of what the
book does in macrocosm when he describes both the programming
and realisation of Van Gogh's Room at Arles. This virtual
room is created through
a
library of interactive definitions animating the rooms'
moving parts. Through the staked pains of software's sieve
- check lower bound X; check lower bound Y; check lower
bound Z; check upper . . ., set StepRate . . ., fix ShadeOffset.
. ., for RotItem from -180 to 180.
Then his figurative
description of Van Gogh's painting, which is meant to signify
the virtual room that has been created, stresses the fundamental
importance of aesthetic appreciation on the development of
the creative human spirit:
The
tenant has bent this apartment with his breathing. He proves,
before the scientists, that space is curved. The chairs, the
bed, the tilted table: each stick of furniture passes its
own law of gravity. Each would-be solid lays down its own
perspective, its various vanishing points scattered like buckshot
in the hinted distance. Walls and ceiling amble together by
the art of compromise. The shutters give up on accommodating
their casement, by turns closing inward and throwing themselves
open to the Provençal breeze.
However, in the manner
of his description he has also indicated the alteration of
perspective that computer-generated design introduces. Ultimately,
he does justice to Van Gogh's painting as a work of beauty,
but in the process he distinguishes how the computer is altering
the humanist dominant in aesthetic theory, irreversibly.
In Plowing the
Dark, Richard Powers succeeds on twin fronts in restating
the positive and negative capacity of human imagination in
emphatic terms. Primarily, in narrating the worst of human
experience, he has staked his own ability to transmit that
horror to readers as a positive statement about the vivifying
powers of imagination and human empathy. By imagining a world
of virtually unimaginable suffering, and by using his imagination
to make that world palpable for readers, Powers has written
a fitting testament to those who have been held hostage. Additionally,
his novel makes clear that it is a twenty-first-century imperative
for the computer to make imagination real, but - lest we are
all held hostage to its impending possibilities - the imagination
which is to be virtualised must be both ethical and integral.
To paraphrase Yeats, once out of nature, can we leave the
worst of it behind?
Dr. Rodney Sharkey teaches literature
and humanities at Eastern Mediterranean University
Plowing the Dark by Richard
Powers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000: Published
in Europe by Heinemann, July 2001)
Article reproduced
from CIRCA 101, Autumn 2002,
pp. 95-96.
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