Plowing the Dark
Computers make possible new, more efficient, more convincing dreams. Richard Powers’ novel, Plowing the Dark, hymns the long slow drama of the development cycle, dwelling on the technical details as lovingly as a geek in debug mode, catching the lyric moments of ecstatic progress, recording the delusions that lead the industry forward, and the minimalist human interplay among the teams that clash, and struggle across this uncharted continent.
His team is developing a virtual reality environment, and Powers has been there, soaked up the wordplay, the technology, the half-intermittent forward progress. The technology is the major character here; what plot there is resembles the memos from team meetings, reporting slow incremental advances, sudden breakthroughs, long, long hours tweaking code.
Powers makes the project the center of the book—not the characters, who are just decorated skill sets, with snappy insider jokes masquerading as dialog. The slow growth, the amazing features being added, the technical difficulty—these are the themes that Powers serenades. He loves the Cavern, the virtual environment the team is building, and he fondles every image, technical term, and bit pipe in the project. He meditates on the way the high-tech feeds Hollywood, the military, the financial worlds, and responds to their feedback.
For example, Powers describes a new movie as “a heavily chromed rendition of the new Aladdin and his wonderful data glove.” Immediately, he laments that the team is being “left in collective imagination’s dust.” And within a few lines, one of the interchangeable geeks is saying, “We’re engineering the end of human existence as we know it.” You have to give Powers credit for breadth of vision. He captures the crazed megalomania of geeks on a roll, the fantasies that fuel the 90hour weeks, working in the screen so long you do not know if it is light or dark outside.
The project administrator, named like a Dickensian character for his dominant idea, Freese (time to freeze the software, no?), goes on the lecture circuit, sketching out his idea of the future;
The computer would go transparent, more invisible than all its crude, qualified precursors in representation. Talking to data would be like talking to a friend over the phone. Explorers would move through a literal forest of numbers, strolling through their woody representations and singling out by sight or sound or smell the significant trees, the hidden arbors.
Powers recognizes that this kind of “techno-evangelizing” smells of salesmanship, and he indulges the impulse, while using the project as a kind of magnifying glass on our culture, doubting while enjoying, digging in while backing out. He reflects on our fondness for imagery, religious taboos on graven images, visualization tools. But this book is not a cultural critique, an attack on computers, or a political argument. It is a total immersion.
The language obscures the action, deliberately. Whole pages of commentary go by without our knowing who is talking. Not easy, when one group of characters works in the computer world, and the counterpoint character is a nebbish suffering in an Islamist safehouse. Powers often keeps the language working on both tracks, so we are not always sure where we are—just as if we were in the Cavern, the team’s Platonic cave in which we can watch the streaming imagery real time, thanks to Powers’ verbal arabesques.
Powers ignores conventional plot. His heroine is a set of skills, drawn from commercial art in New York to the VR project in Seattle, tied to one of the team members and a composer who is dying of MS—but I make her life seem more interesting than it is in the novel. She disappears at the end, discouraged by the fact that her work is serving the military, and making a profit. So what? We do not care that she leaves. She has been, simply, a device to get us in the door of the project itself.
And another character endures captivity in Lebanon, the prisoner of some crazed Islamic fundamentalists. We see hope take over then leak away, and memories come and go, as his personality is stripped away, and he begins to be pure existence—until he slips through his dreams into the VR world on the other side of the globe. The hallucinatory prose suggests he is really there, but not there, like a mouse racing along the baseboard.
These two so-called plots are more like leit-motifs in Wagner: they go on forever, and get nowhere fast. So willful is Powers’ disregard for conventional character and plot that we too begin to track the progress of the team, rather than their lives; and we enjoy losing our bearings in this text stream.
Bright, verbally adroit, technically obsessed, Powers weaves words in space, freed of their bearings, loosened from the gravity of conventional functions such as description, narrative, and dialog. So what is a book, he seems to be asking. A sequence of verbal signs, a mirage of imagery, an illusion of coherence—a brief tour of another person’s central processing unit. His personality has filtered out a lot—most of the aspects of ordinary life sanctioned by the 19th century novel. But the words remain, sparkling with referents, and the ideas, quick, momentary, glancing, like bits turning on and off. Like a crazed pioneer, ignoring civilization back in the cities of Europe, Powers presses on, working his way through stumps and furrows, clearing new land for others to farm, plowing in the dark.
Plowing the Dark, Richard Powers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0312280122/ref=pd_sim_b_5/103-5339970-4845447?%5Fencoding=UTF8&;;;v=glance
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