Author Archives: Rachel

Since I just took a class on Proust, I feel compelled to comment on the significance Lentz’s “Marcel” quips. “Marcel” refers to Marcel Proust, author of In Search of Lost Time (or A La Recerche du Temps Perdu). In Search of Lost Time, is a semi-autobiographical novel (or fictionalized autobiography) in which the first-person narrator shares the author’s name. “Marcel” is the nickname Lentz gives to the protagonist of Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2, a character who also happens to be an author named Richard Powers.

The first point most critics make about In Search of Lost Time is that the reader should be careful not to conflate “Marcel” the narrator with Marcel Proust the author. While the two share certain biographical details, there is no getting around the fact that one is a character constructed by the other, and that whatever resemblance there is between “Marcel” and Proust is complicated by the broader and decidedly fictional context of the novel.

The Proust allusion in Galatea 2.2 may be Powers’ way of slyly reminding his readers (or at least the literary-minded ones) to approach his book with similar caution, as well as a way to comment on the self-reflexive weirdness of his own fictionalized autobiographical project.

In Search of Lost Time is about a lot of things (and I do mean a lot. It’s seven volumes long) but it’s first and foremost a reflection on the nature of memory and time, and the possiblity of art as a salvation from the ephemerality induced by both. Proust was interested in analyzing (in a literary way) the mental mechanical process of memory, particularly what he called “involuntary memory”: apparently spontaneous or unconsciously triggered recollections induced by sensory experience, as in the well-known “madeline episode,” in which biting into a tea cake triggers a flashback (mental and narrative) to events of the protagonist’s childhood.

Memory is also an important theme of Powers’ book, particularly the relationship between memory and technology, the mechanism of memory and the mechanism as memory. Information technology, databases and neural nets all figure as a way for Powers/”Powers” to analogically/metaphorically grapple with his own project as a writer, particularly once Lentz ropes Powers into his scheme to build a neural net to simulate literary interpretation.

Powers reflects on the complexity of the project in this cryptic passage: “It struck me. To train our circus animal in Faulkner or Thomas Gray, we would first have to exhilarate it with the terror of words. The circuits we laid down would have to include the image of the circuit itself before memory overhauled it. The net would have to remember what it would be again, one day, when forgetting set in for good.” (56)

In this passage Powers creates a fascinatingly twisty analogy between the program and the nature of human consciousness. His realization is triggered when he learns that memory is effectively a form of inscription: “Every sentence, every word I’d ever stored had changed the physical structure of my brain.” He concludes that their interpretive machine will have to be similarly “fluid.” He seems to be arguing that in order to interpret literature, the machine will inevitably become conscious of its own inscribed/literary nature, and thus self-conscious (!!) Self-consciousness and/or self-simulation is definitely a key theme in Galatea 2.2, particularly as it pertains to Powers’ first-person narrative about designing a machine which may or may not be destined to replace him.

This brings me back to what Hayles is getting at when she talks about the importance of technology in the construction of subjectivity and the feedback loop between “the body” and “the machine.” One of the many “machines” in Powers’ novel is the novel itself. The act of observation not only changes the thing observed, it also changes the observer, and when the observer is the thing observed, that’s a recipe for some majorly recursive fiction.