what's in a brain ?

A few days ago I watched the last Eastwood's film, Changeling –watchable enough but not his best work, Clint still knows how to shoot but hasn't been really inspired for a while, and he now indulges in many facilities–and, as I was sitting in the theatre it called to my mind the book I've been reading since last week. In Changeling, Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie)'son is kidnapped. The LAPD (already as corrupted as in a James Ellroy's crime novel) needs some good media coverage and decides to show off a solved case by bringing the boy back to his desperate mother, but, as the kid returns home, Christine Collins doesn't recognize him, and insists on saying that the boy who claims to be Walter, isn't her son but a fraud. When she becomes too vocal, and therefore embarrassing, she's thrown into a mental institution. But of course she's right, her cause is just and Hollywood demands that justice must be done.

In Richard Powers' The Echo Maker, Mark, one of the central characters/voices suffers from Capgras syndrome. After a car accident, Mark emerged from a coma, recognizing everybody but his most beloved ones: his sister Karin and his dog Blackie. To his eyes they look like almost perfect doubles of the sister and pet he cherished, and he's convinced that they are impostors. Soon, in order to explain the emotional disconnection he feels, he considers himself to be the victim of a huge conspiracy.

But there's much more in this wonderful book than a mere neurological thriller. There are echoes within echoes, several sorts of disconnection, various degrees of a more general condition, interlocked metaphors.
Without stating it, Richard Powers literally auscultates the post-9/11 America. The cranes' migration is a key metaphor the whole book is based on, or rather a kind of leitmotiv thoughout the story; they come and go, giving the novel its title. Once upon a time some people from an Indian clan called themselves the Cranes, aka the echo makers.

And is it me or does Karin sounds a little bit like crane? Also the phrase "the echo maker" calls to my mind Nietzsche analyzing (or rather attacking)Wagner's music, but that's another story.

I could go on parsing the book, drawing parallels and playing with the echoes that Powers dropped here and there. This book is like a big game for me but it is also an educational and pleasant reading. There's obviously a lot of research behind the story, but it is never tacked onto the rest, it doesn't dehumanize the characters, and it never hampers the poetical prose. Richard Powers is a talented writer, not a pretentious one. He makes you forget about the wires beneath the flesh. Maybe because, unlike Mark, we actually want to be fooled.

Eventually there's one echo that he must not have meant to make–a connection that probably exists in my head only wherein often connections take place– an echo that I enjoy although it confused me at first. The book has been published in France this year, got terrific reviews, and Richard Powers has done some great interviews, but I didn't buy it when I spotted it in my favourite bookshop. So much gets lost in translation, the title to beging with(La Chambre des Echos isn't a bad title but it limits the sense), so I ordered it on Amazon and I read it in English to enjoy the author' s musical style. The first page disconcerted me until I remembered what the word "crane" means (I did see crowned cranes in Tanzania after all and learned many bird names at the time before forgetting them all !). And I find rather amusing that "crâne" is also a French word meaning skull or head. The echo maker indeed.

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 rumours and unreliable reports.

Okay I may be falling for Richard Powers, a little bit...

PS: I bought a poster-copy of Bosch's painting (a few experts say it might not be one of his works though), The Extraction of the Stone of Madness (The cure of Folly), at El Prado's shop many years ago, and it has been on the wall above my desk since ever. What's in a brain? A question teachers often ask when swimming in Marking Hell.

PPS: The picture of Bosch's painting vanished and I hate seeing that empty spot, so I have to edit this post, 3 weeks later, which is probably going to screw up the chronology on my blog.