Fascinated Disgust in Richard Powers

Abstract

Iwant to say nothing about Richard Powers. But some force compels me to write. So I start in Powers’s Gold Bug Variations with Stuart Ressler riding a Greyhound to a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Illinois. Just outside his destination,

a stream of tortoises possessed of mass migratory instinct crawl over the highway in the twilight. Bottlenecked cars take turns gunning, crunching over the shells. The tortoise-trickle does not even waver. Ressler stares out the window as long as he can stomach it. For a hundred yards, he can make out the horror. The insane persistence of the parade holds him in fascinated disgust. (44)

Why start, from among the thousands of pages of fiction written by Powers, with this scene of carnage? The “fascinated disgust” that holds Ressler spellbound to the tortoises’ procession articulates a concern that resonates through all of Powers’s work. Ressler’s inability to turn away mirrors the inability of the tortoises to stop their “parade”; it mirrors the inability of the traffic to not progress toward its destination; it mirrors the impossibility of not building the highway that the traffic cannot help but drive on. Ressler’s “fascinated disgust” describes a double-edged desire—to quit and to go on, to stop and to progress—that possesses both Powers’s characters and his narrative voice.

Who gives? What is given?

—Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (110)