is responsible for their American Indian name, the echo makers, are not the only
witnesses to the overturning of the truck. Other sets of tire tracks have been ...
What Is It Like to Be a Person? A review of
The Echo Maker: A Novel by Richard Powers New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006. 451 pp. ISBN 0-374-14635-7. $25.00
Reviewed by Gordon Pitz
On North Line Road near Kearney, Nebraska, Mark Schluter runs his truck off the road and incurs severe brain damage. The accident takes place near the nesting sites of thousands of sandhill cranes that winter each year beside the Platte River. The cranes, whose dramatic call is responsible for their American Indian name, the echo makers, are not the only witnesses to the overturning of the truck. Other sets of tire tracks have been found at the scene, and someone has left a note by Mark's bedside shortly after his admission to the hospital: I am No One but Tonight on North Line Road GOD led me to you so You could Live and bring back someone else.
The note, the cranes, and the tire tracks are elements of the mystery surrounding the accident. But the real story of The Echo Maker: A Novel is the mystery of what it means to be a person, how we define our relationships with others, and how we distinguish reality from imagination and pretense. Mark's sister Karin abandons her job and returns to Kearney to take care of her younger brother. Her good intentions are challenged, though, when Mark refuses to recognize her as his sister. Yes, she looks like Karin, she sounds like Karin, but she is an imposter—she does not feel like Karin. The local surgeon concludes that Mark is suffering from Capgras syndrome, a rare disorder caused by an inability to generate appropriate emotional responses to familiar objects. As Mark recovers, he shows the same reaction to his dog, whom he probably loved more than any human, and to his modular home, a proud symbol of freedom from domineering and abusive parents. He believes that both are copies of the originals that have replaced the real things. And so Mark has his own mystery to solve: Who has been substituting these ersatz copies, and why, and what does it have to do with the operation recently performed on his brain? The note, the cranes, and the tire tracks bear on his mystery, too. Desperate for help, Karin contacts the famous cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber, author of best-selling books that describe the strange and disturbing consequences of brain disorders. His books convince her that Weber is the only person who can help her brother. To her surprise, Weber agrees to visit Mark. What Karin does not know is that Weber is undergoing an identity crisis of his own. His most recent book has been panned by reviewers, and he is trying to deal with his own insecurity. His critics suggest that modern developments in neuroscience have left him behind, and he has been accused of using patients to advance his own career. It seems his interest in Mark's condition is a response to concerns about his own reputation and does not reflect any sincere desire to help Mark recover. The character of Gerald Weber inevitably brings to mind the real-life author of accounts of neurological disorders, Oliver Sacks. In fact, one of the incidents that has embarrassed Weber is a parody in The New Yorker featuring “the woman who used her husband as a tea cozy,” an obvious allusion to Sacks's (1985) own best seller. Powers seems to have based his characterization of Weber on two other neurologists, though. Gerald Edelman is noted for his work on the biology of consciousness, and he shares with Weber not just a first name but the title of a book, Wider than the Sky (Edelman, 2004). Powers has also made extensive use of the work of V. S. Ramachandran. He mentions Ramachandran's work directly at one point in the novel, and the symptoms demonstrated by Mark Schluter are very similar to those of “Arthur,” a Capgras patient described in Ramachandran and Blakeslee (1998). Most of Powers's novels have incorporated current developments in science, from biology to artificial intelligence. Powers was a physics major as an undergraduate but turned to literature to get a better view of “the big picture.” It's no surprise, then, that he would use
neuroscience as a vehicle for understanding the most significant of human problems. He sees in Capgras syndrome a metaphor for the ambiguity of self and reality. Other neurological disorders make brief appearances—anasognosia, the denial that one is paralyzed following a stroke, and prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize faces. They reinforce the point that “self” is a fluid, ill-defined concept. At one time, Weber had written in one of his books, “The self presents itself as whole, willful, embodied, continuous, and aware” (p. 381). He understands now how misleading each of these defining attributes can be. And yet there is a bizarre logic to these disorders. They hint at an active brain struggling to make sense of the reality that it encounters. Gazzaniga (1992) coined the term “the interpreter” to describe the how the left hemisphere tries to understand the strange pattern of events it encounters when it belongs to a split-brain patient. Mark Schluter, struggling to explain why almost everything around him is a fake, reaches the depressingly reasonable interpretation that he must be dead! The fact that there is a name for this disorder (Cotard's syndrome) and for the others says more about the human's need for labels than it does for our understanding of what it means to be a person. Powers is familiar with the point made by Thomas Nagel (1974) in his classic essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” It is in principle impossible for a human to answer that question. Presumably we can never know what it is like to be a sandhill crane, either, although Powers explores the mind-set of the cranes as they engage in their migrations to and from the Platte River. Now clinical neurology suggests that we may not know even what it is like to be another person. Of course, none of these objections prevent us from speculating on the human experience and using what we see in others' lives to inform our own. The power of a good novel is its ability to help us acquire that knowledge. Powers is one of the most widely acclaimed novelists in America today, and The Echo Maker has received laudatory reviews. There have been some exceptions, though—compare Colson Whitehead (2006) of The New York Times and William Deresiewicz (2006) of The Nation—and the differences may be informative. The role of a novelist is to point the reader toward a deeper understanding of human experience. Recent discoveries in neuroscience suggest how hard it is to establish that understanding. At the same time, there is a coherent logic that connects the delusions of a Capgras patient, the anxieties of his sister, and the search for identity undertaken by an insecure neuroscientist. I suspect that the disparities in critical assessments of the novel reflect different opinions concerning the relevance of hard science to an accounting of this logic. Some readers will reject the assumption that we are nothing but the electrochemical activity of a lump of neural tissue. But the rest of us are excited by the idea that science might have something important to say about what it is like to be a person.
References Deresiewicz, W. (2006, October 9). Science fiction. The Nation, 283, 25–28. Edelman, G. M. (2004). Wider than the sky: The phenomenal gift of consciousness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gazzaniga, M. (1992). Nature's mind. New York: Basic Books. Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? Philosophical Review, 83, 435–50. Ramachandran, V. S., & Blakeslee, S. (1998). Phantoms in the brain. New York: Morrow. Sacks, O. (1985). The man who mistook his wife for a hat. New York: HarperCollins. Whitehead, C. (2006, October 22). Migratory spirits. The New York Times Book Review, p. 22.
PsycCRITIQUES
June 13, 2007, Vol. 52, Release 24, Article 16
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© 2007, American Psychological Association
