Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect

Given that wonder is a touchstone for natural history and nature writing of earlier generations, it’s not surprising that it is still a guiding emotion for the twenty-first-century environmental imagination. What is surprising is that wonder has not yet received the same scrutiny as other affective commonplaces such as pastoralism and sentimentality. These dispositions have lost some of their shine in environmental discourse due to cultural critiques that reveal how pastoral idylls carry the taint of classism and elide the material relations between people and place.³ Wonder, by contrast, has retained its status as an impetus to affirmative environmental relation. Reception of James Cameron’s 2009 film, Avatar, attests as much. In one rapturous review, evolutionary biologist Carol Kaesuk Yoon pronounces the movie a “biologist’s dream” because it sparks “the naked, heart-stopping wonder of really seeing the living world.”⁴ Specifically, it activates that play between recognition and surprise that also energized Newton. “With each glance,” raves Yoon, “we are reminded of organisms we already know, while marveling over the new and trying quickly to put this novelty into some kind of sensible place in the mind.”⁵ Wonder overcomes the scientist and produces in her what René Descartes also identified in this “primitive passion”: “a sudden surprise of the soul which makes it tend to consider attentively those objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary.”⁶

In the twenty-first century, wonder endures, but its task is large. Wonder must not only shake apathy toward the more-than-human world and move us to curiosity without false idealization; it must also promote concern to curb the destruction of wildlife, of undeveloped space, and of human health and livelihood. The statistics on species loss show the scale of the challenge: as of 2012, 13 percent of bird species worldwide face extinction. Approximately 25 percent of land- and sea-based mammals are in similar distress.⁷ The prognostications of Rachel Carson and fellow biologist Paul Ehrlich seem to be materializing. Birdsong is going silent. And, as the latter scientist wrote in 1968, “in spite of all the efforts of conservationists, all the propaganda, all the eloquent writing, all the beautiful pictures, the conservation battle is presently being lost.”⁸ In the war to prevent environmental collapse, Ehrlich worries that the weapons of marketing and art have not been powerful enough. Yet, forty years after his pessimistic assessment, environmental writers still pen wondrous accounts to dispel apathy. Richard Powers’s ninth novel, The Echo Maker (2006), assumes this challenge, exploring whether, more than beauty and eloquence alone, unraveling the dynamic interactions between an individual’s mind and the world it perceives might mold environmental consciousness.

Critics typically locate Powers within a postmodernist lineage, and for good reason. He violates the conventions of realist narrative through metafiction, builds many of his novels around poststructuralist reflections on linguistic meaning, and depicts how technology modifies perception and lived experience. The Echo Maker shares this postmodernist bent, as Rachel Greenwald Smith also argues, but these features serve to complicate motifs and principles that are integral to environmentalist thought.⁹ Whereas his previous work Gain (1998) shares The Echo Maker’s interest in how human behaviors like using chemical household products compromise the health of unwitting consumers, the 2006 novel more directly addresses threats to the more-than-human realm. This chapter looks through the lens of wonder to see Powers’s environmental commitments anew. This third novel, The Gold Bug Variations (1991) posits wonder about the building blocks of life itself as a counterweight to human hubris. It exalts wonder as that which redeems scientific enterprise when instrumentalism and the crushing proliferation of data threaten unadulterated curiosity. In The Echo Maker, wonder is the affective marker of the dual plots about ecosystemic and mental sickness. But even as the later text deploys and generates wonder, it delves more deeply into the affective mechanism as one that positions humans toward the more-than-human. Wonder brings to light how vulnerable bodies are metaphorically and materially imbricated in their at-risk surroundings. Yet, as the narrative details neurological function and the instability of consciousness, wonder is no longer understood as the salvific affect that it was in The Gold Bug Variations (hereafter, abbreviated as Gold Bug). Whereas Gold Bug asks, how can care arise from research into the shared genetic foundations of all life, The Echo Maker asks, how can we care for that which is other to us? Using and dismantling conventional understandings of wonder, The Echo Maker carves out an unorthodox place for itself within the tradition of environmental writing and nuances concepts such as place, connection, awareness, and care that animate environmentalist discourse. Revising these concepts, The Echo Maker probes how the mind mediates one’s relation to the environment.

This chapter begins by laying out wonder’s import to Gold Bug and then turns to The Echo Maker’s more vexed understanding of the affect. Like nature writing, the later novel aspires to incite readers’ attention to their surroundings as a way to promote ecological protection. In line with this genre, it proposes that the affect of wonder seeds environmental projects. Wonder replaces causality as the hinge between the novel’s two plots of sickness, one about species decimation and another about neurological injury. However, rather than simply urging one to wonder as Gold Bug does, The Echo Maker performs the affect. Elucidating ecological and neurological processes, the narrative bounces between lyricism and didacticism in an effort to defamiliarize everyday experience of self and place. As Newton’s animated report attests, the play between familiarity and strangeness ignites wondrous experience; I demonstrate that this play is also the mechanism of cognition itself within the novel. Capgras syndrome, the disorder at the center of the text, proves this in the negative: it disrupts the mind’s balance of the familiar and the strange. Thus, the structure of perceptual and cognitive processes and the structure of wonder are homologous. As The Echo Maker analogizes brain dys/ function and environmental experience through the familiar-strange dialectic, it posits that systems operate thanks to interconnection, but it also undermines the ecological principle that “everything is connected.” Ultimately, excessive connection making can lead to wonder’s ugly obverses: projection and paranoia. Reimagining the consequences of connection in this way, the novel also inquires whether connectedness always entails care for human and nonhuman others. Complex affective arrangements thus derail ethical energies and disturb the care that wondrous awakenings promote in Gold Bug.

Powers’s twenty-first-century ecosickness narrative deviates from the lineage of environmental writers that trust in the fidelity of the senses. It puts the baseline reliability of perception—and, thereby, awareness itself—under scrutiny. The Echo Maker is a rejoinder to platitudes about connectedness, but one that asks, can ethical concern take hold without connection and under conditions of what Dorothy Hale terms “psychological upset”?¹⁰ A National Book Award-winning novel that appears on book group lists and university syllabi, The Echo Maker is vital for the critical project of Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: to determine the ways in which narrative affects establish the interdependence of vulnerable earth and soma and shape environmental investment. As Jan Zita Grover’s and David Wojnarowicz’s AIDS memoirs prove, a putatively negative affect such as discord can break apart conceptual chains and open new ways of valuing endangered bodies and spaces. Powers’s works show wonder’s potential not only to take us on this journey toward care but also to take us in the opposite direction. As the connections that wonder generates multiply and tip one into paranoia and projection in The Echo Maker, inter-connectedness can in fact cut off generative relations of care.

From Gold Bug to The Echo Maker, readers follow the trends in scientific fascination: from genetic code in the 1950s and computer code in the 1980s to the brain in the 2000s. The 2006 novel sets an investigation of consciousness as the latest scientific frontier in an erstwhile frontier territory, Nebraska. New York neurologist Gerald Weber charts the former terrain. Lauded for his “neurological novelistic books,” Weber narrates inconceivable brain disorders that reveal the precariousness of consciousness.¹² His works earn him both critical praise and censure that brings him to the attention of Karin Schluter, who is summoned back to her hometown of Kearney, Nebraska on 20 February 2002 when her twenty-seven-year-old brother, Mark, is injured in a car accident. After Mark emerges from his coma and regains speech, it becomes clear that his physical health belies a profound alteration to his mind. He has a delusional misidentification disorder known as Capgras syndrome: although Mark’s memory remains intact, he no longer recognizes as real the people and objects that he loved most—Karin, his dog, and his modular home. He deems them impostors because he no longer feels for them what he once had. The usual affective attachments have been severed even as the perceptual pathways are unharmed. Though Weber has vowed to stop researching injured brains in favor of writing “an account of the brain in full flower,” he cannot resist the lure of seeing “up close, through the rarest imaginable lens, just how treacherous the logic of consciousness was” (102). The tale of Mark’s rehabilitation is set against two other events: the spectacular perennial migration of sandhill cranes through Kearney, and the battle between conservationists and developers for control of the Buffalo County Crane Refuge. Through the story of Kearney’s land use contests, the text introduces Daniel Riegel, Karin’s boyfriend and a devoted environmentalist who heads the Refuge, and Robert Karsh, Karin’s lover and a developer with ambitions to turn the preserve into a water park. As The Echo Maker proceeds, narrative focus shifts from Mark’s treatment to the environmental plot, a plot that eventually unlocks the mystery of why he drove his adored truck off a straight road on a cloudless night.

Across The Echo Maker’s modes of regional nature writing, detective fiction, domestic drama, and “neurological realism,” we can isolate a primary objective: through a story about altered perception, the text seeks to alter readers’ understanding of both human consciousness and environmental processes.¹³ With this objective, it owes a debt to environmental writing that, reaching back to Thoreau and John Muir, has similarly cultivated awareness of local ecosystems by kindling wonder. In the twentieth century, Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey, and Mitchell Thomashow are just some of the writers who continue to posit wonder as crucial to environmental care. Wonder is a conduit to heightened perception and, as environmental educator Thomashow asserts, “is the basis for an ethic of care.”¹⁴ To combat the atrophy of perception and spread of apathy in the face of global environmental crisis, Thomashow pens a manual for “cultivating biospheric perception” and marshals wonder as the most powerful affect for encouraging planetary gratitude.¹⁵ Carson’s The Sense of Wonder (1965), a photographic and prose journal of her wanderings on the Maine coast, fits into Thomashow’s curriculum. It chronicles her affective relation to her chosen home and exhorts readers to nurture “a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”¹⁶ Just as Carson’s sentence travels from vitality to alienation and despair, so too does the individual as she ages. Environmental experience, Carson proposes, can halt and even reverse the senescence of awe and liveliness. She anticipates Abbey’s desert reflections on “the power of the odd and unexpected to startle the senses and surprise the mind out of their ruts of habit … into a reawakened awareness of the wonderful.”¹⁷ The canon of environmental writing is replete with thinkers who make cognate claims for wonder. Formally distinct from Thomashow’s manual and Carson’s and Abbey’s life writing, The Echo Maker shares their project and develops their techniques for helping readers perceive their surroundings otherwise.

Simply put, Mark’s injury, Capgras syndrome, is an extreme case of altered perception that ravages his life even as it opens his eyes to the radiant detail of the everyday. “Damage had somehow unblocked him,” Karin remarks, “removing the mental categories that interfered with truly seeing. Assumption no longer smoothed out observation. Every glance now produced its own new landscape” (198). The fragmented perceptions of Mark’s injured brain provide a template for how the text narrates his transformation. The result is a disjointed, clipped stream of thought that stages his recovery of speech: “Echo caca. Cocky locky. Caca lala. Living things, always talking. How you know you’re living. Always with the look, with the listen, with the see what I mean. What can things mean, that they aren’t already? Live things make such sounds, just to say what silence says better” (49–50). Speech indicates that Mark is recovering his humanity, but this alien speech discloses his distance from his former self and his fellow humans. His fragmentary, chiasmic thoughts sculpt their “own new landscape” (198). As the plot proceeds, neurological dysfunction stresses Mark’s relationships and ruptures his sanity, but his splintered consciousness also activates new perceptions and flouts lay notions that sight and thought are smooth and whole. The question “what can things mean, that they aren’t already?” imagines the possibility of speaking reality into greater significance. At the same time, his insights speak to a novelistic project of inducing a peculiar form of awareness of environments and their processes that shatters apathy.

Through the question of how to transform one’s perceptions of the world, Mark’s injury-induced abilities link up to the development battles in Kearney, which occupy part 4 of The Echo Maker. As Mark’s only kin, Karin (whose orthographically distinct name evokes “caring”) accepts responsibility for his rehabilitation, but sacrifices her identity when she abandons her life in Sioux City, Iowa. When Mark’s condition worsens, Karin searches for something to salvage from futile caretaking and her diminished existence, anything “so long as it’s uncompromised and wild” (407). She advances to head of public relations for the Refuge and, in her research, unearths a method for presenting the world anew, one that depends on facts ceding to bewildering sensation.

The opening line of this excerpt achieves its full meaning when the passage concludes. When Karin can no longer process the information she is consuming, sensation springs to action and supersedes thinking. Time dilates across these lines. What appears to be a single snapshot of Karin reading enlarges when the narrator observes that Karin is “hungry all the time.” Her senses expand as well: new aromas—lavender—and a new palette—“vivid” browns—enliven her surroundings and transport her back to youth. Finally, invoking the brain damaged painter, The Echo Maker proposes that aesthetic sense takes over where data fails. The aesthetic mediates the relation between a particular individual grounded in her sensing body and far-reaching environmental processes; it “wake[s] sleepwalkers and make[s] the world strange again.”¹⁸ So strange, in fact, that Karin renounces “everything human and personal” in favor of her environmental work (408).

Karin touches on a discovery that motivates many of Powers’s novelistic projects: that scientists “can’t get into all the implications [of their research] because the implications don’t come out of well-formed questions and they’re not all answerable by reductive, empirical programs…. There are places that empiricism simply can’t get to.”¹⁹ Karin’s epiphany and Powers’s comments add to the scientists’ reflections on wonder that opened this chapter. In Newton’s account, for example, wonder initiates the desire to generate the kinds of facts that “pour out” of the tables Karin scrutinizes. Gold Bug concludes with Ressler’s discovery that producing data testifying to human exceptionalism cannot be the directive of research: “The purpose of all science, like living, which amounts to the same thing, was not the accumulation of gnostic power, fixing of formulas for the names of God, stockpiling brutal efficiency, accomplishing the sadistic myth of progress. The purpose of science was to revive and cultivate a perpetual state of wonder.”²⁰ Driven by wonder rather than hubris, the scientist will not pursue knowledge of life with the aim of “disenchanting the natural kingdom” and placing the human on its throne; she will work to establish that all creatures, like the genes that compose them, are “nothing in themselves but everything.”²¹ Wonder will arise from seeing the baseline commonality of all life and from finding in the randomness of humanity’s slight distinction a reason to revere and care rather than to master. Crucially, Gold Bug announces “the purpose of science” through Jan, as she realizes that Ressler’s musical compositions are a form of uncorrupted science. The Echo Maker shares Gold Bug’s concern that facts alone will ultimately destroy what is so wondrous. Karin “can’t believe” the data and is startled by it, but the shock of the incomprehensible “crushes” her processing abilities. Rather than disabling her, this crush is liberating. Sensation rushes in, and takes her where data cannot. Thus, while wonder makes the ordinary strange, scientific research alone cannot sustain that defamiliarization. Sensuous understanding and aesthetic creation must take over.

This realization helps account for The Echo Maker’s narrative experiments with defamiliarization. Viktor Shklovsky’s axioms about this modernist technique create a bridge between Karin’s discovery about how cognition must cede to sensation and the form of the novel. In Shklovsky’s Formalist account of defamiliarization (ostranenie, in the Russian), “art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.”²² We can read Shklovsky’s program as an aesthetic complement to Abbey’s, Carson’s, and Thomashow’s perceptual projects in that the Formalist critic identifies what is linguistically necessary for activating surprise and shaking loose calcified response. Modernist writers follow the defamiliarizing program by flouting literary conventions, eradicating cliché from speech, and using sound and shocking imagery to create a new poetic language. Through such practices, Shklovsky asserts, literature infuses the ordinary with strangeness. “De-automatizing” perception and reaction, the literary work aims “to create a special perception of the object—it creates a ‘vision’ of the object instead of serving as a means for knowing it.”²³ Karin’s revelations at the Refuge demonstrate Shklovsky’s claim that perception supersedes knowledge in defamiliarization. Karin’s epiphany induces an aesthetic urge, but does not derive from an artwork; it falls to The Echo Maker to defamiliarize Karin’s ecosystem on its readers’ behalf.²⁴

On this point, it’s important that Karin’s ecopolitical commitments revolve around conservation and habitat restoration. The Refuge’s mandate is to protect water resources for humans, but, rather than marshal water table statistics, it largely appeals to the spectacular beauty of the more-than-human—the cranes—and their somewhat inscrutable migratory and nesting behaviors. Karin enhances this strategy. Renouncing “everything human and personal” and redoubling her commitment to protecting her ecosystem (408), Karin arrives at a “‘vision’” of habitat devastation that revolves around impressions of water’s function rather than detailed hydrological knowledge. An image surfaces that crushes the “data” that threatened to crush her: “The web she glimpses is so intricate, so wide, that humans should long ago have shriveled up and died of shame. The only thing proper to want is what Mark wanted: to not be, to crawl down the deepest well and fossilize into a rock that only water can dissolve. Only water, as solvent against all toxic run-off, only water to dilute the poison of personality” (407–8). Water, repeated three times, reveals human insignificance as it erodes egoism. Water counteracts toxicity—an ability that “knowledge” of water would refute—as Karin imagines it to be an antidote to personality. Karin’s experience supports the possibility that, with “the poison of personality” extracted, humans might awaken to establishing mutually salutary relations with the nonhuman. This scene shows aestheticized environmental wonder reviving sensation and fostering ecological engagement. Shklovsky’s program thus balloons in The Echo Maker. Defamiliarization does not simply enliven perception of the everyday and draw attention to how art itself works. It also provokes reflection on the workings of the mind insofar as the account of Karin’s revived sensation rhymes with Mark’s awakening early in the novel (49–50). In other words, a “deranged” individual’s mind and his curious perceptions provide a template for the revived awareness that Karin achieves. Modernist defamiliarization thus serves The Echo Maker’s arguably postmodern project of depicting “complex processes of reciprocity in which selves and environments come to bring about and shape each other.”²⁵

The narrative stylistics that generate wonder become clearer when we determine why wonder is essential to exciting perception and ethical involvement. One of Descartes’s six fundamental passions and Aristotle’s departure point for philosophy, wonder is notable for stimulating rather than stifling intellection. “When the first encounter with some object surprises us, and we judge it to be new, or very different from what we knew in the past or what we supposed it was going to be, this makes us wonder and be astonished at it. And since this can happen before we know in the least whether this object is suitable to us or not, it seems to me that Wonder is the first of all the passions.”²⁶ Wonder, like the larger category of interest to which it belongs, “motivates exploration and learning, and guarantees the person’s engagement in the environment.”²⁷ We turn our eyes to fresh sights or see the ordinary anew in this affective state.²⁸ In the act of looking and marveling at an object or process—in Karin’s case, sand-hill cranes and their decimation and in Mark’s, his own life refracted through Capgras—we become conscious of perception itself. We are astonished not only by the wondrous object but also by our capacity for awareness and our place in larger wholes. Directing thought to mental processes and the world that sparks them, this affect can channel investment in the object or event that gave rise to it. As Robert Fuller asserts, wonder orients an individual toward “sustained rapport with—and action on behalf of—the wider environment.”²⁹ Because stories of ecosickness do not only imagine the imbrications of bodies in their local environments but also bridge the gap between small- and large-scale systems, it comes as no surprise that The Echo Maker experiments with wonder as care’s helpmate.

The Echo Maker thematizes the production of wonder through Karin’s conversion to conservation politics and formalizes wonder in a narrative mode that galvanizes the emotion. Diegetically and stylistically, then, wonder and practices of aesthetic defamiliarization are coupled. In particular, the text defamiliarizes everyday perception by joining storytelling, empirical thought, and poetic vision to spark readers’ interest in neuro- and eco-biological systems. Specifically, it alternates between an expository mode, through which it unfolds elements of the plot and relates specialized understanding of brain function and habitat destruction, and a modernist, lyrical mode that, through unfocalized narration, adds mystery to technical knowledge.³⁰ The former mode adheres to what Powers calls a “closed, limited third-person focalization.”³¹ This is one of the respects in which the 2006 novel deviates from its 1991 precursor. Even as Gold Bug moves between Jan’s first-person narrative set in the 1980s and Ressler’s scientific bildung from the 1950s, the voice in these two sections remains consistent, as if Jan is, in effect, writing her friend’s biography. Powers introduces more narrational variety into The Echo Maker. Elliptical passages filled with fragmentary, repetitive sentences open all but the third of the novel’s five parts. In these preludes to the plot involving Karin, Mark, and Weber, the narrator muses on the sandhill cranes’ annual staging along the North Platte River and their evolutionary history. In contrast to the certainty of the narrator that elucidates neurobiology, the voice in these sections is tentative and shows that knowledge of crane ethology is limited.³² It’s as if this narrator responds to Ressler’s dread that, in the biotech labs of the future, “what can be filled in of the map will be filled in” by leaving room for the unfathomable and astounding.³³ Even as the lyrical narrator offers us information about migratory patterns, it reinforces limitations to understanding. Take the opening lines of part 2: “[The cranes] head for the tundra, peat bogs and muskegs, a remembered origin…. There must be symbols in the birds’ heads, something that says again. They trace one single, continuous, repeating loop of plains, mountains, tundra, mountains, plains, desert, plains” (96, 98). The vague “something” and the searching but hopeful “there must be” intimate the cranes’ mystique, and the lyrical narration compensates for its incomplete knowledge about crane migration by supplementing it with images “to make the world strange again.”

Alternating between the voice of information and the voice of verse, The Echo Maker also straddles the line between “accountability to matter and to discursive mentation,” as Lawrence Buell puts it.³⁴ Like the nonfiction texts that Buell endorses in The Environmental Imagination (1995), Powers’s novel answers to the “matter” that the researches of neuroscience and zoology help explain, but it also fashions images to help readers “see what without the aid of the imagination isn’t likely to be seen at all.”³⁵ Hence there is a place for both mimesis and invention in environmental writing, especially if we distinguish mimesis from bald imitation and favor Buell’s thesis that, through stylization, mimesis can effect the “dislocation of ordinary perception.”³⁶ By this account then, mimesis can promote Shklovskian defamiliarization, so long as prose experiment enlivens the presented matter. The Echo Maker’s opening performs “dislocation” in this way. “A neck stretches long; legs drape behind. Wings curl forward, the length of a man. Spread like fingers, primaries tip the bird into the wind’s plane. The blood-red head bows and the wings sweep together, a cloaked priest giving benediction. Tail cups and belly buckles, surprised by the upsurge of ground. Legs kick out, their backward knees flapping like broken landing gear” (3). Depicting a crane’s landing, these lines take the reader on a flight through metaphor as they render the mechanics of flight. The unfocalized narrator first anthropomorphizes the bird—feathers as “fingers,” wings the height of a man—but concludes by mechanizing its anatomy.³⁷ Clipped sentences draw the reader’s attention to the very act of attending: the narratorial eye takes in whole patterns in the preceding paragraph but settles here on the anatomy of the single creature. The impersonal narrator promotes wonder by crossing referential registers. “Primaries” is an ornithological term for the large feathers required for flight, but the phrase “blood-red” that appears in the subsequent sentence calls up the word’s chromatic meanings. The text similarly activates the layered connotations, geometric and aeronautical, of “plane.” The ambiguity of “primaries” and “plane” is not settled. That is because it and the linguistic acrobatics on display in this cropped paragraph are designed to go beyond information and inspire wonder at seemingly prosaic animal behavior and to kindle the revived vision that Karin later models.

The oscillation between familiarity and surprise that constitutes the affect of wonder is crucial to both the passage describing bird flight and Karin’s experience at the Refuge. As Philip Fisher explains in his philosophical treatise on the emotion, wonder arises when we sense the “radical singularity” of an object that still delivers the “surprise of intelligibility.”³⁸ The object cannot be so drastically singular that the mind fails to find a kernel of familiarity within it. For this reason, Fisher proposes that the wondrous occupies a middle place between the predictable and the irrational, between perception and intellection, and between aesthetics and science. It depends on a balanced ratio: the wondrous phenomenon takes one out of the ordinariness of everyday events—a swath of rainbow, bird migration—which at once makes one’s surroundings surprising and, in a second move, reconfirms one’s place in the world and ability to apprehend it. Succinctly put, “the relation of certainty to surprise … is the relation of wonder.”³⁹ Certainty and surprise, familiarity and strangeness: this dyad is the motor of wonder, and it governs The Echo Maker’s dual narrative structure and style.

Powers constructs his text to prime readers for the affective relation of wonder. That is, the modernist passages that defamiliarize Kearney’s riparian ecosystem train readers for the task of interpreting Karin’s epiphany four hundred pages on. The lyrical narration instills the notion that the natural world is eternal yet incomprehensible, unpresentable save through metaphor, and autonomous from human dictates. A passage that renders the bioregion and the novelistic itself strange establishes the timelessness and opacity of the nonhuman, and it is particularly remarkable because it interrupts the main diegesis:

Wonder is not only the affect of defamiliarization; its workings are homologous to the model of cognition that The Echo Maker proposes. Pursuing this homology, I complicate my claim that the novel accords with Gold Bug and fits into the canon of works that mobilize wonder as a trusty conduit to environmental commitment. It is the affective hinge of ecosickness because it articulates environmental consciousness in terms of the human body in a state of disorder. Ultimately, however, the novel’s reflections on those dysfunctions reveal the flip side of wonder and challenge this affect’s role in paving the path to care. Wonder just might indicate a “readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought,” as Michel Foucault attests, but does it always provoke us to then don the mantle of involvement?⁴⁰

Capgras syndrome brings to life a nightmare: everything you love becoming emotionally foreign. According to philosopher William Hirstein and neurologist V. S. Ramachandran’s description of the disorder, the afflicted person no longer feels the emotion that he knows should attach to a loved one, and “the only way the patient can make sense of the absence of this emotional arousal is to form the belief that the person he is looking at is an imposter.”⁴³ Despite the person’s ability to recognize another’s physical appearance, he or she cannot trust in that one’s “psychological identity.”⁴⁴ Capgras, therefore, exposes the instability of the “logic of consciousness” because it reprioritizes emotion and knowledge and substitutes false stories for “emotional arousal.”⁴⁵ Through the delusional misidentifications that characterize Capgras, The Echo Maker advances the notion that unimpaired brains also function by smoothing over inconsistencies and maintaining a mental status quo. At an unnamed university in Stony Brook, New York, Weber teaches that the mind’s main objective is precisely this, to ensure consistency at all costs: “‘The job of consciousness is to make sure that all of the distributed modules of the brain seem integrated. That we always seem familiar to ourselves…. We think of ourselves as a unified, sovereign nation. Neurology suggests that we are a blind head of state, barricaded in the presidential suite, listening only to handpicked advisors as the country reels through ad hoc mobilizations’” (363). The brain is an isolated, imperious leader, likened here to George W. Bush planning his post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In Weber’s lesson, the brains of individuals with Capgrastype neural damage continue their primary task of ironing out the wrinkles of thought, heeding only “handpicked advisors” despite contradictory input from the wider world. Capgras is an irresistible case for Weber because the brain insists on self-familiarity in the absence of a familiar attachment to beloved objects. In other words, the mind believes itself even though it no longer believes in those it would normally trust.

Weber demystifies the idea that only the neurologically ill must accommodate mental fragmentation when he recalls Sarah M., a patient with “a rare, near-complete motion blindness” called akinetopsia. “Sarah’s world had fallen under a perpetual strobe light. She couldn’t see things move. Life appeared to her as a series of still photographs, connected only by ghostly motion trails…. And yet, strangest of all: Sarah M. alone of all the world saw a kind of truth about sight, hidden from normal eyes. If vision depends upon the discrete flash of neurons, then there is no continuous motion, however fast the switches, except in some trick of mental smoothing” (107).⁴⁶ Her brain cannot carry out the neural process that welds the discrete units of vision into a seamless whole. A region-specific brain injury renders Sarah M.’s world radically strange, but this strangeness in fact accentuates the mechanism of “normal” sight. The Echo Maker thus interpellates its audience into a community of dysfunction.⁴⁷ Though Capgras is the clinically diagnosable disorder on which the novel centers, Sarah M.’s case shows that even baseline function exhibits the structure of so-called sickness. In other words, perception is impaired in that it depends on a “trick” of negotiating the familiar and the strange. In The Echo Maker, then, toggling between these poles is the form that ecosickness takes, but it is a sickness shared by all.⁴⁸ The neurological processes of perception and cognition and the affective structure of wonder are homologous, and they together govern environmental consciousness.

Wonder is not only central to environmentality because it enchants the subject’s world. The novel proposes that the interplay between familiarity and strangeness that constitutes this emotion and visual processing also structures place sense.⁴⁹ This dyad thus governs how The Echo Maker figures the body and the individual’s experience of his surroundings. The correspondence between these domains comes into focus as Weber travels from New York to Kearney and continues mulling Sarah M.’s case: “She was there, in Weber’s strobing mind, when he stepped into the jetway at LaGuardia, and gone when he found himself, that same afternoon, dead center in the evacuated prairie, with no transition but a jump cut” (107). The narrative transposes the operations of sight onto those of thought through the image of the doctor’s “strobing” mind and onto those of movement as Weber hops from city to country. The photographic and cinematic metaphors that figure akinetopsia—“still,” “motion trails”—also characterize the disorienting experience of travel—“jump cut.” The flight carries him from the stability of professorial life in New York to the turmoil of intertwined medical, familial, and sexual dramas. But it is not only the abrupt transition that disturbs the traveler. Movement itself is a haunting. Traces of the “ghostly” accompany us as we enter new surroundings, which we experience as “motion trails.” Later in The Echo Maker, the postcard, an artifact of travel, reinforces this point:

Somewhere … Weber described discovering a largely intact and responsive hand blossoming across the face of an amputee, Lionel D. Touched high up on the cheekbone, Lionel felt it in his missing thumb. Grazed on the chin, he felt it in his pinkie. Splashing his face with water, he felt liquid trickle down his vanished hand.

Weber shut off the shower and closed his eyes. For a few more seconds, warm tributaries continued to stream down his back. Even the intact body was itself a phantom, rigged up by neurons as a ready scaffold. The body was the only home we had, and even it was more a postcard than a place. We did not live in muscles and joints and sinews; we lived in the thought and image and memory of them. No direct sensation, only rumors and unreliable reports.

(260)

The body, which is itself an epiphenomenon of the true stuff of consciousness, is both as familiar as home and as unfamiliar as a far-flung destination. Remnants of the past help smooth over perceived changes in our surroundings to create a feeling that is as fluid as the tributaries of water that wet Weber’s body. The same process, that is, the negotiation of familiarity and strangeness, governs both perception of the body (which the narrator figures as a place) and perception of the places one inhabits. The Echo Maker’s observations about travel externalize the mind’s fluctuations between the unexpected and the readily recognizable as it perceives its surroundings.

Once Weber has landed in Nebraska, the built environment activates the play between familiarity and strangeness that inspires The Echo Maker’s accounts of wonder and cognition of body and place. Upon arriving in Kearney, Weber selects a hotel for its alluringly ambiguous sign, “welcome crane peepers” (107). He learns that it refers to Buffalo County’s standout feature: the staging ground to which thousands of sandhill cranes migrate every February and March. The spectacular attraction that the sign announces belies the motel’s more prosaic interior: “once inside the MotoRest lobby, he might have been anywhere. Pittsburgh, Santa Fe, Addis Ababa: the comforting neutral pastels of global commuting” (108). In other words, Weber finds himself in a “non-place” that, in anthropologist Marc Augé’s account, is at once disturbingly recognizable and affectively neutral. (In this respect, the apperception of non-places is akin to Capgras.) Like the corporate hotels and transit hubs that Augé houses with his concept, the infrastructure that grows to support crane tourism has an eerie familiarity. Non-places “produc[e] effects of recognition…. A foreigner lost in a country he does not know (a ‘passing stranger’) can feel at home there only in the anonymity of motorways, service stations, big stores and hotel chains.”⁵⁰ Powers’s narrative, focalized through Weber, iterates Augé’s observations: “the usual gamut of franchises—motel, gas, convenience store, and fast food—reassured the accidental pilgrim that he was somewhere just like anywhere. Progress would at last render every place terminally familiar” (166). Cookie cutter development along Interstate 80 threatens to efface the signature of this Midwestern place. The blandness of “a diffident commercial strip marked by a forest of metal sequoias bearing harsh, cheery signage” sharply contrasts Weber’s initial perception of the plains as a land so foreign he needs a passport to gain entry (166). Similarly, the featureless amenities of crane tourism contrast the striking red crests of the birds that adorn tourist brochures in the MotoRest, and these stale amenities threaten to diminish the very water and land resources that support the cranes and maintain the strange singularity of the migration.

Weber’s movement between Kearney’s organic and built environments triggers cognitive transit between familiarity and strangeness. The cranes’ behavior and history expand on this dynamic. In the oneiric depictions of the sandhill cranes that preface the narrative of Mark’s recovery, The Echo Maker indicates a deep reason why these two sensations infuse place just as they guide cognition and constitute wonder. The persistence of bird migration gives Buffalo County an air of familiarity, while the magnificence of the birds’ staging patterns astounds the viewer. The novel’s opening captures the effects arising from the cranes’ perennial choreography: “Cranes keep landing as night falls. Ribbons of them roll down, slack against the sky. They float in from all compass points, in kettles of a dozen, dropping with the dusk. Scores of Grus canadensis settle on the thawing river. They gather on the island flats, grazing, beating their wings, trumpeting: the advance wave of a mass evacuation. More birds land by the minute, the air red with calls” (3). The narrator breaks out of the temporality that dominates the rest of the text, switching from the past tense to present narration. The present progressive tense of the excerpt’s first and last lines amplifies this temporality and “keep” reinforces it.⁵¹ “This year’s flight has always been,” the introduction continues. “Something in the birds retraces a route laid down centuries before their parents showed it to them. And each crane recalls the route still to come” (4). A crane is a living, kinetic record of the instincts the species has accrued over millennia; therefore, its past and future suffuse its present. Fully encoded in the birds, this record is partially illegible to the voice that narrates these passages. The birds, centuries-old visitors to the North Platte, continue to strike spectators as alien. The inevitability of their migration’s “continuous, repeating loop” yields surprise, marked by the synesthetic phrase “air red with calls,” and, as I noted earlier, the narrator’s uncertainty (98).

The patterns of human cognition harmonize with the patterns of crane movement, yet The Echo Maker refrains from idealizing human attachment to place. Rather, the text contrasts humans and cranes based on whether their environments are salutary, a contrast that pivots on geographical determinism.⁵² The narrative counter-poses the birds’ irrepressible, awe-inspiring fit with the bioregion to Karin and Mark’s unwilled submission to a home that damages them. Soon after the text relates the cranes’ embeddedness in Nebraska’s evolutionary fabric, Karin defines home as “the place you never escape, even in nightmare” (8). She focalizes a description of Kearney’s downtown core that recasts the idea of a “remembered origin” as an unshakable yoke: “She cut through downtown Kearney, a business district hosed for as far into the future as anyone could see. Falling commodities prices, rising unemployment, aging population, youth flight, family farms selling out to agribusiness for dirt and change: geography had decided Mark’s fate long before his birth. Only the doomed stayed on to collect” (28). While the town is an agent insofar as residents stagnate under its influence, it is powerless to resist the economic changes that are leaving it behind. Midwesterners can no longer collect on the promise that the land will nourish their future. Karin’s view of geographical influence under centralized industrial agriculture inverts the idealism of early American agrarians such as Thomas Jefferson and writer-farmer Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. Leo Marx expounds on the latter’s assertions that “men everywhere are like plants, deriving their ‘flavor’ from the soil in which they grow. In America, with its paucity of established institutions, however, the relation between mankind and the physical environment is more than usually decisive…. At bottom it determines everything about the new kind of man being formed in the New World.”⁵³

Over two hundred years after the publication of Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), The Echo Maker still holds that the environment sculpts the character of its inhabitants. However, the earth no longer has a “salubrious effluvia” that produces a “new kind” of cultivating and cultivated man.⁵⁴ Instead, Karin fingers the place itself as a blight on the new crop of settlers. Like other Generation X Nebraskans, Mark is a farmer manqué without a land inheritance. His mental disintegration expresses the decay of the earth signaled by the growth of agribusiness (the Iowa Beef Processors plant that employs Mark and his friends)⁵⁵ and tourism (the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument, “‘the only monument in the whole world that straddles an interstate’” [38–39]).⁵⁶ The novel fictionalizes the real erosion of the family farm due to the concentration of corporate agricultural practices that decimate profits for small-scale farming and lead younger generations to abandon farm life in bankruptcy or fear thereof.⁵⁷ Depicting the decline of independent agriculture in the U.S., the novel does not thereby idealize ties to the land. Rather, environmental determinism deromanticizes the notion that the land as currently sculpted by agribusiness and tourism can any longer improve somatic and socioeconomic health.

Across its disparate narrative lines—from a man’s misidentification disorder to Midwesterners’ alienation from a salutary home to cyclical bird migrations—The Echo Maker envisions a disturbing form of estrangement: estrangement from the most familiar. Taking apart the novel’s affective and perceptual motors—that is, the toggling between familiarity and strangeness that comprises wonder and mental processes—shows how wonder affiliates the novel’s environmental and medical plots around their affective continuity rather than causality. This correlation does not signal the harmonious synthesis of human and environment, however; it recasts environmentalist accounts of ecological awareness. The rest of this chapter establishes that, while seeing the ordinary as strange can, as Thomashow writes, sink you into “the place from which you originate” and inspire reverence,⁵⁸ the everyday defamiliarizing processes of consciousness threaten the conversion of that disposition into an ethics of care. Environmental thinkers might promise that, through “a place-based perceptual ecology … you learn how to pay closer attention to the full splendor of the biosphere as it is revealed to you in the local ecosystem,” but the lessons of neuroscience teach that nothing is “revealed to you” in its pure state.⁵⁹ As The Echo Maker expounds two other tropes common to environmental thought, connection and care, it posits that there may be “no direct sensation, only rumors and unreliable reports” (260).

As a new addition to the family of nature writers descending from Thoreau, The Echo Maker picks up on the tension between connection and disconnection that animates this literature. The novel validates the claim that thinking nature often entails thinking the mind. That is, as Sharon Cameron observes, “to write about nature is to write about how the mind sees nature, and sometimes about how the mind sees itself.”⁶⁰ In Powers’s novel, these two inquiries interdigitate as the text makes wonder the emotional fulcrum of environmental engagement. The Echo Maker diverges from the nature writing tradition, however, by suggesting that this engagement depends on the picture of the mind that one draws. It pins the potential upset of environmental involvement on the very toggling between familiarity and strangeness out of which wonder and connection making arise. In the final analysis, a sense of connectedness fails to solve the difficulty of getting outside of the self to care for others. This is because systemic and affective complexity proliferate as the vectors of connection multiply and produce negative emotional states.

In a 1999 interview, Powers defines the novel as “a supreme connection machine—the most complex artifact of networking that we’ve ever developed.”⁶¹ Four years later, he reasserts, “Ultimately my books are about connection. They turn upon the truth that there is no independent mode of existence.”⁶² Powers’s fascination with systems that exhibit dependent complexity is apparent in the foci of Galatea 2.2 (neural nets), Gain (the tentacular reach of a multinational corporation), Plowing the Dark (virtual reality programming), and Generosity (the neuroscience of altruism). The Echo Maker extends the connection trope into neurological and ecological domains and envisions interdependence occurring on three levels: within the neural system, between humans, and between species in an ecosystem. As it theorizes the relays between brain, self, and human and nonhuman other, the novel argues that the flicker of familiarity and strangeness models the ebb and flow of connectedness and that this movement generates the paranoia and projection that can jam one’s ability to connect with others.

Weber disseminates The Echo Maker’s view of neural interconnectedness. As we have already seen, his holistic account of brain physiology emphasizes that the brain cobbles together wholeness out of fragmentation. “We were not one, continuous, indivisible whole,” Weber insists in his book, The Country of Surprise, “but instead, hundreds of separate subsystems, with changes in any one sufficient to disperse the provisional confederation into unrecognizable new countries” (171). Take vision as an example. It “requires careful coordination between thirty-two or more separate brain modules…. Only: the many, delicate hardwires between modules can break at several different spots” (149). According to this modular view, dependent connectivity is integral to the system’s functioning but makes it especially vulnerable to collapse.⁶³ Weber goes against the functionalist tide of neuroscientific research that, in the early 2000s, is locating the seat of personality traits, abilities, and beliefs in an isolated brain area. In his first conversation with Chris Hayes, Mark’s neurologist in Kearney, Weber challenges the novice doctor’s conviction that Capgras is purely neuronal:

“There’s a higher-order component to all this, too. Whatever lesions [Mark] has suffered, he’s also producing psychodynamic responses to trauma. Capgras may not be caused so much by the lesion per se as by large-scale psychological reactions to the disorientation…. Clearly Mark Schluter’s Capgras isn’t primarily psychiatric. But his brain is struggling with complex interactions. We owe him more than a simple, one-way, functionalist, causal model.” …

The neurologist [Hayes] tapped the film on his light box. “All I know is what happened to his brain early on the morning of February 20.”

(132–33)

Hayes’s gesture reveals his myopia: he limits the area of concern to the scans bounded by the light box, ignoring the interactions between different components of the neural system. Despite the technical sophistication of neurological research and practice, Hayes’s view is ultimately regressive. He rides what Ian Hacking has dubbed the “neo-Cartesian” wave in biomedicine “whereby bodies are just machines in space, composed of machine parts, while the mind, the soul, is something else.”⁶⁴ We have to adjust this model for brain science. In neo-Cartesian neuroscience, the mind is a brain composed of manipulable components, and function and dysfunction depend on the workings of these components or brain “regions.” They turn on or off, dim or glare, to the benefit or detriment of vital functions like memory, fear, and recognition. As Lisa Zunshine notes, functionalism is ultimately part of a quest for essences that, she argues, in a seemingly essentializing move, results from “the quirks of our cognitive architecture.”⁶⁵ Weber adheres to a different model: he is a holist.⁶⁶ Holists look behind the seemingly direct relationship between a perturbation to a system and its response at the intermediate, stochastic events between cause and effect. While a specific region of the brain certainly endured material damage, the system’s response to the injury is likely a more proximal cause to Capgras than the injury itself. Narrating the homologies between mental processes and relations to human and more-than-human others, The Echo Maker shares Weber’s holism. Injury and response must be approached in their relation to each other, to their local and wider environments, and to the people that become enwrapped in them. Stories are vectors for this understanding because they accommodate multidimensionality. They “narrate disaster back into livable sense” as they help us tell “ourselves backward into diagnosis and forward into treatment” (414).⁶⁷ As will be clear in my later reading of The Echo Maker’s ending, Weber’s faith in storytelling reaches its limits when stories confront the “disaster” of environmental threats and the patterns of human behavior that lead to them.

Weber’s holistic stance is of a piece with the work of neurophysiologist Giacomo Rizzolatti and philosopher Corrado Sinigaglia on mirror neurons. Their research postulates that mirror neurons “allow our brain to match the movements we observe [others perform] to the movements we ourselves can perform, and so to appreciate their meaning. Without a mirror mechanism we would still have our sensory representation of the behavior of others, but we would not know what they were really doing.”⁶⁸ Humans and other species of animal are able to move and speak because they have encoded another’s prior performance of these behaviors. Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia conclude from this that mirror neurons are “at the root of our capacity to act as individuals but also as members of a society” and that connection is indispensable for awareness of our social being.⁶⁹ They conclude the preface to their study with the fundamental claim that mirror cells “show how strong and deeply rooted is the bond that ties us to others, or in other words, how bizarre it would be to conceive of an I without an us.”⁷⁰ They are optimistic that understanding mirror neurons can foster empathy within human communities, an expectation that Weber momentarily shares when he muses that greater awareness of our shared mental deficits might enhance identification with others (234). Yet, when The Echo Maker portrays the ramifications of Capgras and interdependence across systems, it exhibits less confidence that connection is always so ethically and socially salutary.

In The Echo Maker’s calculus of connection and disconnection, contagion is the negative of the mirror neuron concept and invites skepticism about the upshot of interdependence. Several months after Mark’s accident, his rage at the “fake” Karin intensifies, and Karin acknowledges the toll of his sustained doubt: “The Capgras was changing her, too. She fought against her habituation…. For a little while longer, she knew the accident had blown them both away, and all the selfless attention from her in the world would never get them back. There was no back to get them to” (236–37). Proximity to her brother’s disease recalibrates Karin’s brain. Due to her resolute attention to Mark, she “catches” an inverted version of Capgras through which she sees her post-injury brother as more truly Mark than the insistent memory of the original. Weber also integrates himself into Mark’s disorder, not only as healer but also as likely cause for its continuation. The longer that he entertains Mark’s explanations for his disorientation—that he’s been “programmed in a government machine” or has “been living in a video game,” for example—the more seriously Weber weighs whether “maybe he’d been helping the man create this illness. Iatrogenic. Collaboration between doctor and patient” (303).⁷¹ Of course Weber exaggerates his influence on a condition that antedates his arrival, but his egoistic reflections highlight the novel’s argument that the neural system generates feedback, which then encompasses entities that are ostensibly external to it. Not only is Mark’s brain “producing psychodynamic responses to trauma” and “large-scale psychological reactions to the disorientation,” his caretakers’ “infected” minds are as well (132). Connection is certainly “at the root of our capacity to act as individuals [and] also as members of a society,” as Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia hold.⁷² However, The Echo Maker pushes against the idea that connection is mutually beneficial and instead reports the potential harms of connection that intrude on the practice of care.

The Echo Maker therefore puts to the test the central tenet of the ecological perspective on connection that the novel advances through Daniel Riegel. In part 1 the narrator introduces Daniel as a magnanimous ascetic who lives in a “dark monk’s cell” and supports Karin even though she had cheated on him six years ago (70). Karin focalizes the first, ambivalent descriptions of Daniel when she shares with him her admiration for Barbara Gillespie, Mark’s overqualified rehabilitation nurse.⁷³ Barbara nurtures her patient with total ease, and Karin considers whether fate has brought the nurse to the Schluters. As she relates this idea, “Daniel stood and walked to the window, stark naked, oblivious. Like a wild child. The chill of his apartment didn’t touch him. He tried on the idea. She loved that in him, his eternal willingness to try her on. ‘No one is on a separate path. Everything connects. His life, ours, his friends’ … mine” (72, ellipsis in original). Daniel assures Karin that Barbara and Mark are indeed entangled in a single web of relations when he delivers lines that chime with the first of Barry Commoner’s “laws of ecology”: “Everything is Connected to Everything Else.” This law proclaims “the existence of the elaborate network of interconnections in the ecosphere: among different living organisms, and between populations, species, and individual organisms and their physico-chemical surroundings.”⁷⁴ Evoking Commoner, Daniel recites an ecological perspective that, as we saw in chapter 2, resounds in U.S. environmentalist discourse.

Karin may believe this theory of interconnection, but the habit of living relatedness exceeds her. During a rare argument with Daniel, “pointlessness flooded her, the futility of all exchange…. She felt a deep need to break everything that pretended to connection…. Love was not the antidote to Capgras. Love was a form of it, making and denying others, at random” (268). Karin troubles Commoner’s law through the language of fakery: if humans “pretend to connection” and “mak[e]” others, connection is in fact egoistic. These phrases intimate that what Daniel perceives as the bond between humans and nonhumans is merely projected longing. Through Karin’s eyes, “everything is connected to everything else” to the extent that thinking and desire make it so.

Such give-and-take on connection also occurs at the level of metaphor. Powers tempts readers to idealize connection by weaving the ecological perspective into The Echo Maker’s tapestry of images, but the color of those images hints at the violence of connection and the vulnerabilities that it engenders. The first thread of this fabric appears early in the book when the narrator describes Mark after his operation: “His head was shaved, with two great riverbeds scarring the patchy watershed. His face, still scabbed over, looked like a ten-inch peach pit” (38). Mark becomes Kearney’s riverine environment via description, but this “scarring” river is grotesque and divisive rather than serene and harmonious. In a TV interview, Weber reads a passage from The Country of Surprise in which a cognate environmental simile explains the operations taking place inside the head. “We’re more like coral reefs. Complex but fragile ecosystems …” (186). An injurious topography (scarring rivers) figures Mark’s surface wounds while internal neurological injuries prompt an image of vulnerability (coral reefs) to explain consciousness. Ultimately, The Echo Maker exhibits a feature common to the ecosickness narratives of Jan Zita Grover, David Foster Wallace, and Leslie Marmon Silko: damage or susceptibility to damage taints the metaphors that set up the kinship between the human and the more-than-human. Like the familiarity and strangeness dyad, these topographical metaphors establish the pervasiveness of ecosickness, homologize somatic and environmental damage, and recast connection as potentially harmful.

Through its dueling positions on connection—on the one hand, Weber’s holistic account of the brain, Daniel’s ecological perspective, and the metaphorization of the human through natural topography; on the other hand, Karin’s skepticism and the negative tone of those metaphors—The Echo Maker intervenes in humanist observations about ecological science. By recoding ecological principles such as connection, the text follows a practice proposed by Dana Phillips, who admonishes cultural critics “to realize that ecology is not a slush fund of fact, value, and metaphor, but a less than fully coherent field with a very checkered past and uncertain future.”⁷⁵ Environmentally oriented authors and critics have “seized upon ecology as an accessory and complement to their own brand of professional discourse because of their commitment to environmentalism, and because they have thought that ecology offers scope for the vibrant depiction of a natural world conceived of organically.”⁷⁶ Yet they have ignored debates within and outside of ecological study over the veracity of contested concepts such as harmony and homeostasis.⁷⁷ As chapter 2 detailed, when we challenge these concepts we also must rethink how we represent environmental relation and promote environmental care. Ecology does not provide a stable vehicle for equating textual operations to environmental ones. Portraying an environment and a mind out of balance, The Echo Maker admits the appeal of the sentimental view of ecological harmony and invokes connection as a motif for expressing environmental investment that has been expedient for at least the last two centuries. However, in detailing cognitive processes the narrative uncovers the limitations to connectedness and bolsters Phillips’s case against unreflective use of ecological metaphors. The text acknowledges that interconnection is required for different types of systems to function, but, as it depicts the emotional entailments of oscillating between familiarity and strangeness within the brain and across the self-other boundary, the novel shows those connections to be friable and dangerous.

Karin indicates one reason why connection misfires to obstruct true care. Musing on developer Robert Karsh’s influence over the public, she concedes that “we love only what we can see ourselves in” and invent what we see based on our own interests (343). Ultimately, associating connection with projection, The Echo Maker ponders whether seeing connections is another way of thinking that everything is about you. The condition of paranoia, which is a symptom of Mark’s Capgras, and the affect of paranoia, which spreads to those proximate to him, also point to the ugly obverse of the connection making that had seemed so generative in wonder. Eve Sedgwick elaborates the structure of paranoia in terms instructive for understanding this disposition in Powers’s text. Paranoia is relational. It “tends to be contagious. More specifically, paranoia is drawn toward and tends to construct symmetrical relations.”⁷⁸ In this respect, it attests to the peculiar transmissibility of affect, its capacity “to enter into another.”⁷⁹ Paranoia is also mimetic. As I observe the paranoiac’s absolute doubt, I absorb and imitate his stance toward the world.⁸⁰ In these ways, the attributes of paranoia repeat the attributes of connectedness that The Echo Maker expounds. In addition to being mimetic, the paranoia of Capgras produces fear of imitation as one of its symptoms. Mark imagines that Karin and his dog are copies, and, as his disease mutates, he becomes convinced that Daniel is reproducing himself and stalking Mark. Generating and projecting (false) familiarities, Mark’s brain keeps experiences of the new and strange at bay. That is, it feeds any information Karin advances to rebut his accusations back into the story that his brain has constructed since the injury. Unlike Grover and Wojnarowicz, whose suspicion produces the new in their AIDS memoirs, Mark is taken over by an indomitable paranoia; his brain scrambles the input that would reconfigure his convictions and introduce surprise. Paranoia, therefore, makes everything excessively familiar, but to the point of alienating the individual from all others. As Mark’s condition evolves to include paranoia along with Capgras, access to productive wonder is blocked because his mind enfolds the potentially strange into his habituated patterns of paranoid thought.

While explicating complexity, a task that has alternately attracted and irritated critics of Powers’s work, The Echo Maker generates friction between ecological interconnectedness and egoistic or paranoid forms of connection making.⁸¹ The novel adopts the ecological perspective that “we’re all connected” as the ready explanation for neurological processes and the interactions between humans and the environment, but it hits on the snags of connection when it elaborates projection and paranoia. Advancing a tradition of environmental thought, The Echo Maker imagines that the wondrous oscillation between the familiar and the strange primes us to engage with and care for the nonself, but this mechanism can tip us into affective positions that cut us off from others. Unlike affects such as disgust, which in Wallace’s Infinite Jest balances closeness to and detachment from the outside world, wonder, gone wrong, blocks attachment. It shades into projection as we make the other conform to our own desires and into paranoia as the strange becomes excessively familiar. These states then seal off openness to the outside world. Powers’s novel introduces the possibility that connection can generate two opposing effects on self-other dynamics: connectedness brings us into relation with our fellow humans and the more-than-human realm and thereby develops our minds, and yet connection takes us further into ourselves. Gold Bug concludes with Jan’s revelation, “nothing deserved wonder so much as our capacity to feel it,” that wondering at our own wonder might just put care before cold information.⁸² The Echo Maker takes up the task of palpating human wonder, but the connections on which wonder depends become a problem for care rather than its helpmate. By cautioning readers about the insulating aspects of connection making, The Echo Maker contributes to debates on whether environmental discourse too readily trusts that a sense of interdependence cures apathy and detachment and posits that connection can divert rather than direct care.

Can an ethic of care gain traction in the unstable movement between familiarity and strangeness, between wonder and paranoia, between connection and disconnection? The call to care motivates action in The Echo Maker’s medical and environmental narratives, and, in both plots, the tensions of these dialectics govern a person’s ability to tend to the external world. Even a novice reader will note that Powers’s novels detail the promises and pitfalls of rampant technoscientific development. Less obvious from a cursory read is how often such patently cerebral texts reflect on care for the other. His works mull over this knotty question: Does care threaten personhood or constitute it? Across his oeuvre, Powers places this question at the center of narratives on “the ethic of tending.”⁸³

It is this ethic that concerns Jan O’Deigh as she immerses herself in the history of genetics research and “learn[s] that I live in an evening when all ethics has been shocked by the sudden realization of accident.”⁸⁴ The erstwhile librarian “feel[s] sick beyond debilitation to think what will come, how much more desperate the ethic of tending is, now that we know that the whole exploding catalog rests on inanimate, chance self-ignition…. We’ve all but destroyed what once seemed carefully designed for our dominion. Left with a diminished, far more miraculous place—banyans, bivalves, blue whales, all from base pairs—what hope is there that heart can evolve, beat to it, keep it beating?”⁸⁵ The destruction Jan mentions is twofold: genetic research has eliminated the idea that the human species is an inevitable outcome of an intentionalist plan and humans have eliminated their companions on the planet. Jan wonders how the discovery that all of life reduces to the base pairs of DNA will translate into a care ethic rather than solipsism and the destruction of the more-than-human. Gold Bug presents a clear trade-off, but one without an easy resolution: care takes us out of the solipsism that genetic discoveries seem to induce, but giving the self over in care threatens individual autonomy. One of the novel’s minor characters, Annie Martens, exhibits a “great capacity for care,” but “the need to distribute surplus care led her to sacrifice personal preference to subscribed taste…. Nothing mattered except giving compassion in the available dialect.”⁸⁶ The challenges of care, then, add another dyad to those that this chapter has explored thus far, and one that will interest Wallace in Infinite Jest: the pull between autonomy and the relinquishment of selfhood.

Karin’s vexed relationship to Daniel stages this problematic in The Echo Maker. When Daniel introduces her to Weber’s work, she feels both grateful for and shackled by his munificence. “She was in Daniel’s debt again,” she regrets. “On top of everything else, he had given her this thread of possibility…. Of all the alien, damaged brain states this writing doctor described, none was as strange as care” (94). The focalization of this last sentence is noteworthy. We initially assume that Karin, whose point of view we move in and out of, is the source of this thought along with the others cited earlier. But because Karin has not yet read Weber’s books at this point in the story, she does not yet have the neurological knowledge necessary to observe that no brain state is “as strange as care.” A heterodiegetic narrator speaks this dictum to present the idea that care is an odd state because it requires at least a minimum of self-renunciation. Daniel’s magnanimity, like Capgras and akinetopsia, is an improbable disorder that compromises autonomous selfhood. Even Daniel admits as much when describing his meditation practice: “‘It makes me more … of an object to myself. Disidentified’” (43, ellipsis in original). Detached from himself qua self, Daniel relinquishes habits of mind. It “‘makes my insides more transparent,’” he haltingly explains. “‘Reduces resistance. Frees up my beliefs, so that every new idea, every new change isn’t so much … like the death of me’” (43, ellipsis in original). Daniel here admits that connection is threatening if enlightening: when we confront the other and the “new ideas” that she puts before us, we risk self-annihilation. In light of the strangeness of care, Daniel’s reparative selflessness appears even more aberrant.

If Daniel is a paragon of willed self-erasure, Mark exemplifies the breakdown of the will and figures the violability of the person and loss of control. He cannot orient himself in his now unfamiliar surroundings; moreover, he cannot control treatment of the primary injury and has no say in his therapy. Having lost his medical self-determination, Mark is no longer what Nikolas Rose terms a “biological citizen,” someone who can “elaborate a set of techniques for managing” to optimize his somatic state.⁸⁷ In Mark’s case, both health and personhood are under strain. For the Capgras patient, the state of being “disidentified” to which Daniel aspires amounts to near disintegration even as it forces him to rely fully on his own perceptions and to exclude others’ intelligence. In a moment of desperation, Mark expresses this disintegration to Weber in the plea, “‘Where’s me?’” (415). Through Mark and the other cases that Weber recounts, The Echo Maker corroborates Susan Sontag’s observation that “illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick…. Sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”⁸⁸

Through Capgras, Mark journeys across this border, from a “unified, sovereign nation” into territory trampled by “ad hoc mobilizations” (363). Along the way, he loses membership in the “kingdom of the well” and in the human kingdom, a transformation that takes place through description. Stepping up to Mark’s hospital bed, Karin greets “a face cradled inside the tangle of tubes, swollen and rain-bowed, coated in abrasions. His bloody lips and cheeks were flecked with embedded gravel. The matted hair gave way to a patch of bare skull sprouting wires. The forehead had been pressed to a hot grill. In a flimsy robin’s-egg gown, her brother struggled to inhale” (7). Technomorphism alternates with zoomorphism in these early descriptions. Initially a deconstructed machine, Mark mutates into the cinematic version of Frankenstein’s monster after “they slit his throat and put a bolt in his skull” (9). Karin catches a glimpse of him, but then “look[s] away, anywhere but at his animal eyes” (7). As Mark struggles to regain speech, the animal metaphors intensify: “The days of rehab drill numbed with crushing repetition. An orangutan would have started walking and talking, just to escape the torture…. Mark stared at her moving mouth, but wouldn’t imitate. He just lay in bed murmuring, an animal trapped under a bushel, afraid that the speaking creatures might silence it for good” (34). Mark’s cyborgism and animality stand in for his devastation and helplessness. Rather than substantiating Donna Haraway’s influential thesis in “A Cyborg Manifesto” that the cyborg opens up a new (partial) subjectivity defined by the possibility of “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries,”⁸⁹ The Echo Maker here suggests that transgressing boundaries that delimit humanness can be severely disabling rather than enabling and generative.

Despite this disagreement, both Powers’s novel and Haraway’s manifesto contest the liberal ideology of self-possession. This ideology fractures in the novel, as it spins scenarios of ecosickness in which injury, on the one hand, and the desire to care, on the other, impinge on autonomy. The text demarcates the line between self-possession and its loss or sacrifice by examining freedom in light of the exigency of acting. Powers’s books frequently puzzle over the urgency of action in the context of rampant technoscientific development and intervention. In Gold Bug, Stuart Ressler watches debates on the need for a nuclear test ban treaty and is torn between scientists’ resolute search for information at all costs and a more humanitarian call for restraint. He eventually adopts the latter perspective, asking, “Aren’t we graced with some degree of foresight? Is what we can do always what we must? … Until this moment, he was certain that the highest obligation of science was to describe objectively, to reveal the purpose-free domain. But here are [Edward] Teller and [Linus] Pauling carrying on on national TV as if some things were more urgent than truth, as if we’re condemned always to fall back on the blind viewpoint of need.”⁹⁰ Ressler’s provocative questions raise a series of paradoxes. Experimental science, for some the apotheosis of human agency and self-determination, is “condemned” to continue on its unrelenting path to uncover truths. Willed action is ultimately compulsive. The Echo Maker puts these quandaries in the hands of the two doctors who spar over Mark’s treatment plan. When Dr. Hayes rejects cognitive behavioral therapy, Weber reflects that, while an ideal treatment may not exist, “the first rule of medicine was to do something. Useful or worthless, however irrelevant or unlikely—act” (173).⁹¹ This dictate is worrisome because it rhymes with the Hippocratic principle “to do good or to do no harm” even as it jettisons it.⁹² In pursuit of care, the doctor’s will supersedes the patient’s best interests. Posing such questions over biomedical intervention, The Echo Maker reproduces the tangle of ethical concerns that grew up in Gold Bug: the pull between agency and self-restriction under the pressure to act. The later novel’s dual narratives of sickness play out the vexing conundrum of whether humans can reasonably shackle the self in their efforts to care best for the other.

Karin’s schooling in habitat decimation and resulting environmental awakening introduce this question into the text’s environmental plot. The Echo Maker opens with an ecological reverie in a modernist, lyrical style that sparks environmental attention, but the urgency of environmental damage surfaces in didactic moments that elucidate Kearney’s resource and land use disputes. Daniel reports, “‘[Developers] have their eye on some parcels of land for a new project. Some open tract, near the river. We blocked them two years ago. Snatched four dozen acres out from underneath them. They’re gearing up for war again … They’re looking at riverfront. And whatever they build will increase usage. Every cup that comes out of that river reduces flow and encourages vegetative encroachment’” (265–66). Paradoxically, the erosion of the crane’s habitat harms the birds even as it makes their perennial staging more spectacular and wondrous. “‘The river slows; the trees and vegetation fill in,’” Daniel continues. “‘The trees spook the cranes. They need the flats…. They used to roost along the whole Big Bend: a hundred and twenty miles or more. They’re down to sixty, and shrinking. The same number of birds crammed into half the space. Disease, stress, anxiety. It’s worse than Manhattan’” (57). Daniel anthropomorphizes the birds’ reactions to overcrowding in order to heighten the need to protect their habitat. The patterns of water and land consumption indicate that the cranes cannot endure indefinitely, despite the lyrical narrator’s amazement at their evolutionary persistence.

Karin stifles a laugh at Daniel’s metaphor of cranes becoming neurotic city dwellers, but several months later she feels the seriousness of the matter. Stemming the river’s overuse is now unignorable, and her job has become a vocation. For the first time since leaving social work to become a customer service representative at a computer company, Karin feels pulled to “larger service” and advocates for something beside herself and her kin (15). “What had begun as an invented job, the charity of a man who wanted to keep her nearby, had turned real. It was no longer even a question of meaningful work, of self-fulfillment. As absolutely delusional as it would have sounded to say aloud to anyone, she now knew: water wanted something from her” (398). And what water wants is for her to remain on her natal grounds and relinquish the idea of self that she had pursued in abandoning Kearney. Spreading the Refuge’s message is not egoistic or a step in an individualist project of upward mobility. Rather, her occupation has acquired the force of need at the expense of any plans for the self.⁹³ To grasp her newfound environmental engagement, Karin must anthropomorphize the environment—give it a voice that mutes her own—and hear it summon her to its aid. Karin correctly observes that hearing a call from water is fantastical; after all, what water really needs from her and from all humans is not to be needed. In fact, people have put the cranes and their habitat in the perverse position of relying on the benevolence of their own abusers. This irony strikes readers when the narrator sketches Daniel’s hope for humanity: “Daniel needed humans to rise to their station: conscious and godlike, nature’s one shot at knowing and preserving itself. Instead, the one aware animal in creation had torched the place” (57). Weber’s and Karin’s responses to somatic and ecological injury announce the necessity of taking action, but also draw out the positions of domination and practices of projection that come with connectedness.

Like sickness, care undermines the autonomy of the person, an autonomy that can also cut one off from the outside world. Yet, by figuring the debilitating effects of neurological disorder, The Echo Maker advises that we should not idealize the total relinquishment of autonomy. Neither a critique of liberal individualism, then, nor a call to self-renunciation, the novel engages in the same oscillatory thinking about care that it engages in when working through the familiarity-strangeness and connection-disconnection binaries. As characters follow an itinerary from perception of environmental and medical dilemmas to involvement in them, the narrative opens up the complexities that destabilize these positions. It testifies to what Robert Pogue Harrison sees as “the care-dominated nature of human beings,”⁹⁴ but shows environmental thinkers that care is not a “natural” outcome of wonder-filled attunement to complex connectivity.

Undoubtedly, Daniel, Karin, and Barbara are all committed to preserving the crane’s staging grounds, and yet all three pronounce the inevitable futility of their mission. With the novel’s conclusion, readers discover that Barbara, Mark’s nurse, came to Kearney as a journalist. Tasked with writing a fluff piece on crane tourism, she is drawn instead to the broiling water preservation and development issues. “‘I dug a little,’” she tells. “‘It didn’t take much to find the water. I dug a little more. I learned that we were going to waste that river, no matter what I wrote. I could tell a story that broke people down and made them ache to change their lives, and it would make no difference. That water is already gone’” (435). In a minor metafictional moment, the text announces the foregone conclusion that growth and consumption will triumph over restraint and preservation. Barbara echoes Karin who, in the moment of her epiphany, acknowledges the “futility of her work” (407), given that the river is “down to gallons here. Hours and ounces” (446).⁹⁵ With this observation, the book closes with both Mark and the North Platte bioregion living on borrowed time. Mark’s treatment with the antipsychotic drug olanzapine and mild electroshock therapy is working, and he now recognizes Karin. However, through prolepsis, the narrator warns that “in three months, her brother will be gone again, or his sister will, someplace the other won’t be able to follow. But for a little while, now, they know each other” (447). The Echo Maker ends on a note of ephemerality that pointedly contrasts the eternality of its lyrical opening. Read side by side, the novel’s introductory and concluding pages produce another contest: wonder competes with pessimism as its extreme form risks paranoia.⁹⁶

The Echo Maker does not so much resolve the affective and ethical quandaries that ecosickness introduces as it plays them out to expose their facets. Rather than provide readers with emotional templates for fulfilling ethical imperatives, it probes the perceptual and affective adjustments that occur as individuals manage response to injury and threat.⁹⁷ What does it mean to awaken to the connections between self and human and more-than-human other at the same time as one awakens to the vulnerabilities and paranoia that connectedness introduces? How can a model of consciousness and an affect built around vacillation yield the minimum of stability required for action? In the final analysis, the motivating affect of Powers’s “vision of wonder on a bleak Nebraska prairie” disrupts a tradition of quickening environmental consciousness through this inspiring emotion.⁹⁸ U.S. nature writers have trusted that, in Scott Slovic’s words, “the kindling of consciousness—one’s own and one’s reader’s—is a first step” to curing environmental ills.⁹⁹ Powers’s contemporary environmental fiction confounds the next steps as it theorizes the constituent unreliability of consciousness and the workings of connection that upset care. Anchoring environmentality to cognitive processes, the novel performs the misfire of affect that it narrates through Mark’s Capgras syndrome. The Echo Maker suggests that, when the writer “kindles consciousness,” he cannot be certain what will end up aflame. These unexpected outcomes of narrative affect lead to the next chapters on Wallace and Silko. In Infinite Jest the aesthetic of disgust promotes attachment against endemic detachment, while the generalized anxiety of Almanac of the Dead stymies the revolutionary action that the novel chronicles and anticipates.