“Clean Hands”: Post-Political Form in Richard Powers’s Gain

Abstract

Richard Powers's 1998 novel Gain is composed of two main narratives: nearly two-hundred year history of Clare, Inc., a fictional American corporation, and story of final few months in life of Laura Bodey, a Lacewood, Illinois woman stricken with ovarian cancer, probably due to exposure from local Clare chemical plant. Interspersed between two narratives are bits of free-floating text depicting Clare packaging, advertisements, brochures, scripts for TV commercials, press releases, and other public relations media. One of novel's most obvious formal peculiarities is fact two main storylines never truly intersect: executives at Clare are never aware of Laura as an individual, and Laura is never able to confront executives personally, nor discover exact cause of her illness. In an interview, Powers comments: book implicitly promises that all open frames will come together. challenge of a book that's created out of two incommensurable frames is to show how they entangle without contriving a say, in form of a lawsuit. Gain suggests that any lawsuit resolution would be a red herring. A lawsuit is not to give Laura any redress. No lawsuit is to change of existence or recast between personal and (Last) Actually, novel does feature a lawsuit--a class-action suit filed in name of those sickened by Clare chemicals, including Laura Bodey--but, just as Powers suggests, this lawsuit never culminates in a dramatic between defendants and plaintiffs, in or outside courtroom. Instead, corporation settles, suddenly and inexplicably, and Laura can only surmise that the common stock has fallen to unacceptable levels ... an offer is more cost-effective solution (333). anti-climatic quality of this resolution underscores what a courtroom might obscure--that no lawsuit is going to give Laura any redress. The lack of any kind of dramatic between Laura and Clare suggests, moreover, that no such could resolve novels central conflict. That is, this omission signals that novel is not ultimately concerned with conflict between an individual consumer and individual corporation, but with, as Powers puts it, the of existence, broader dialogue between personal and corporate. Powers's comments suggest, furthermore, that deferring a dramatic serves not only a rhetorical function, directing attention to larger social processes on display, but also a mimetic one, representing a hard truth about these rules of existence: in era of multinational corporations, relationship between powerful and powerless is increasingly mediated and complex, making confrontation more and more unlikely. By counterposing act of representing complex processes against traditional ... contriving [of] confrontation, Powers evokes long-running debates about relationship between social and aesthetic form. To gain a critical perspective on his aesthetic strategies, it's worth briefly recalling Georg Lukacs's intervention in these debates. While Lukacs acknowledges that global economy is (already, in 1932) too complex and decentralized to depict in terms of character relationships, he argues that representing this sum of facts about global economy is not same as representing social totality (Reportage 74).Totality, in Lukacs's account, is dialectical unity of social form and content, the inextricable coalescence of accident and necessity (58). Capturing it means capturing the relationship of characters to objects and events, a dynamic interaction in which characters act and suffer (Narrate 112)--the turbulent, active interaction of men (126). In Gain, I argue, this antagonism is missing. …