Echoes of Memory, Echoes of Music

Abstract

Ellen Y. Siegelman , “Echoes of Memory, Echoes of Music,” JUNG JOURNAL, Summer 2007, 1:3, 46-54. Review of Richard Powers, The Echo Maker. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. This complex novel, which won the National Book Award in 2006, crosses many genres. It is an enthralling mystery story told from the points of view of each of the three main characters. One of these is Mark Schluter, a 26-year-old expert driver who has inexplicably crashed his truck in Kearney, Nebraska. Kearney is the site of the annual winter stopover of thousands of sandhill cranes before they head north to the Arctic Circle. Mark regains consciousness and the power of speech gradually; in the meantime his sister Karin has driven down from South Dakota. Mark is diagnosed with “Capgras syndrome” caused by the accident — a neuropsychological disorder characterized by failure to recognize the people closest to him. Thus he believes his sister is a clever fraud, an impostor, a double who looks and talks like Karin but has been planted to deceive him. The heartbreak this causes Karin is related from her point of view. In addition to Mark and Karen, the third central character is Gerald Webber, an Oliver Sacks-like researcher and popularizer of stories about anomalies of consciousness, who is called in to consult on Mark’s case. Besides being a mystery story, the book is also the kind of case history that will fascinate the psychologically minded, as readers learn that other characters — and perhaps we ourselves — may suffer from mild versions of misidentification syndromes. The fallibility of memory and consciousness is a major theme. From a more formal point of view, the book is also an attempt to use musical motifs to tell the story of a threatened species, the sandhill crane, the oldest continuing bird species, “kin to the pterodactyls.” Powers, himself a musician, uses musical means and motifs to tell this story: Each of the book’s five sections begins with a kind of “over-ture” written from the point of view of an omniscient narrator, exalting the cranes (the “echo makers” of the title) and taking us into the world of myth and legend. Here, too, the theme of echoes and doubles recurs, as the cranes echo and mirror each other in their courting dances.