Galatea 2.2

Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2 is an elaborate and highly artificial textual game. As the title announces, we're in a computerized update of the Pygmalion myth, although one closer to Shaw's version (there are overtones of Henry Higgins) than the classical legend. Our narrator--also, as it happens, named Richard Powers--is a novelist who has, somehow, found himself in a visiting appointment at the Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences, located in U. (No, nothing missing: Powers just calls it U.) Scientist Philip Lentz drafts him for an experiment with overtones of Frankenstein as well as Pygmalion: they're going to build an AI capable of "writing" literary criticism well enough to pass a Turing-style test. While Lentz handles the tech, Richard handles the language. The theory behind their Eventually, the computer graduates from basic sentences to "reading" the Western literary canon, with not altogether foreseen results.

As all this goes on, Richard also reminisces about his failed relationship with C. and worries about his increasingly grim case of writer's block. He's particularly anxious about the first sentence of his new novel, which he thinks he may have plagiarized. (And he has, but it takes some time for him and us to find the source.) It will come as no surprise that Richard's learning curve, as it were, mimics that of the AI. Like the AI, Richard must make sense of a number of contradictory and obscure "inputs"--from the sensual to the textual--and often fails to understand until it's too late. Indeed, Richard fails to understand the experiment itself until the end of the novel:

"It wasn't about teaching a machine to read?" I tried. All blood drained. "No." "It was about teaching a human to tell." Diana shrugged, unable to bear looking at me. The fact had stared me in the face from the start and I'd denied it, even after A. made the connection for me.

Richard may have thought he was Pygmalion or Frankenstein, but he was as much Galatea as the AI. Indeed, he finally "comes to life" again at the end of the novel: once liberated from his stolen first sentence, he finds himself with an idea for a new novel--which, we suspect, is Galatea 2.2.

Powers has a stew of themes at work here. Biographical interpretation. Forgetting and loss. The nature of identity. The extent to which literature can support the reader in the face of historical trauma. Exile. Cognition. Making connections. The relationship between author and reader. In theory, all of these themes connect. In practice, the novel struck me as slightly underdeveloped in some areas--there's perhaps just a little too much going on. Take, for example, the metafictional reflections on authorship, in which we're presented with a "Richard Powers" who writes Richard Powers' novels (but who also, clearly, is not the Richard Powers). Metafiction is one of the more potentially arid narrative strategies in a writer's repertoire, and that's how it felt here. We're simultaneously invited to fill in the blanks (especially given characters named "C." and "A.") and warned against making simplistic associations between author and narrator, "real life" and representation. But...why, exactly? That is, is Powers telling us anything that we don't already know from many years of postmodern fiction? I was much more impressed by how Powers handles forgetfulness, which the narrator comes to see as both destructive (e.g., Philip Lentz's brain-damaged wife) and essential to cognition itself. Lentz may nickname the narrator "Marcel," but it appears that no narrative--or action--is possible without a certain element of memory loss.

This novel spends a considerable amount of effort on the process of distancing its readers, something it achieves by (over-)indulging in paragraphs like this:

C. read Buddenbrooks and Anna Karenina. She reread Little Women. Everything made her weep. Everything. Well before the last page, she would drag her heels. Her bookmark tracked across the spine of a paperback like Zeno's arrow, frozen in infinite halfway points on its way to the mark. The first four hundred pages zoomed by in two or three nights. The last forty could tie her up for a month. (97)

I was parodying this style a bit in my list of themes. While Powers occasionally breaks into longer periods, he spends most of the novel in simple sentences and sentence fragments, rarely breaking out the semi-colon. The result feels deliberately flat and mechanical, which I'll concede is appropriate for a novel involving a computer and a somewhat anesthetized narrator. But this is an instance in which my ability to concede the author's point doesn't extend to much enthusiasm for the result. It doesn't help that Powers keeps breaking into what Trekkers like to call "technobabble." Again, good for verisimilitude, not so enjoyable--or, for that matter, intellectually provocative--to read. I came away from this novel feeling that I had read something admirable, but not something to which I would willingly return.