The Ubiquity of Strange Frontiers: Minor Eschatology in Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker

Abstract

Frontiers are ubiquitous in Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker (2006). This essay first considers the recurring epistemological frontiers in American literature and culture, including within the scholarly American Studies tradition that located ever-present links between Puritan millennialism, American Romanticism, and the settlement of the American continent. Powers’s novel can be read as one example of an equally rich (though often neglected) counter-tradition that attends to negative spaces of that “unfamiliar here and now” instead of sublime landscapes and the untamed wilderness. Though this counter-tradition is hardly apolitical, it refocuses its politics on the everyday instead of the American millennium, and on the proximate instead of the distant, substituting the imperial appetites of the all-consuming settler subject for the embodied, proprioceptive confusions of the domestic subject. I argue that Powers re-conceives the major American literary-cultural eschatologies that assume a spatial and temporal frontier separating the known from the unfamiliar. Here, unknown space is re-encountered as ubiquitous and diffusive, so that one can cross such a frontier into strange, unfamiliar space and time virtually anywhere. In the novel, the passage into an unfamiliar here and now, where governing epistemic paradigms break down, can occur in the middle of “nowhere,” or even in the supposedly happy confines of the middle-class home.