Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

"I, uh, doubt it. Helen, do you know the Violent Femmes?"

Helen contemplated. "Who know?"

"She makes that mistake all the time. I can't seem to untrain her."

"Don't," A. said. "But do tell her a little about what people really read."

"She'll get everything on the list."

"Whose list? Let me see that." A. took the crib sheets I'd put together, Helen's prep for the test I'd taken, once upon a time. A. studied the titles, as if she hadn't just passed the exam herself. At length she looked up. "I hate to be the one to break this to you. Your version of literary reality is a decade out of date."

"What, they've issued a Hopkins upgrade since my day?"

A. snorted. "They should."

"Don't tell me you didn't have to read him."

"Nobody has to read anyone anymore. There's more to the canon than is dreamt of in your philosophy, bub. These days, you find the people you want to study from each period. You work up some questions in advance. Get them approved. Then you write answers on your preparation."

"Wait. You what? There's no List? The Comps are no longer comprehensive?"

"A lot more comprehensive than your white-guy, Good Housekeeping thing."

"You mean to tell me that you can get a Ph.D. in literature without ever having read the great works?"

A. bent her body in a combative arc. Even her exasperation turned beautiful. "My God, I'm dealing with a complete throwback. You're not even reactionary! Whose definition of great? Hopkins ain't gonna cut it anymore. You're buying into the exact aestheticism that privilege and power want to sell you."

"Wait a minute. Weren't you the woman who was just teaching me how to play pinball?"

A. did her Thai dancer imitation. She blushed. "Yeah, that was me. You got a problem with that?"

"All of a sudden you want to set fire to the library."

"Don't put words in my mouth. I'm not trying to burn any books. I'm just saying that books are what we make of them. And not the other way around."

I took the list back from her. "I don't know much about books. But I know what I like."

"Oh, come on! Play fair. You make it sound as if everything anyone has ever written is recycled Bible and Shakespeare."

"Isn't it?"

She hissed and crossed her fingers into a vampire-warding crucifix. "When were you educated, anyway? I bet you still think New Criticism is, like, heavy-duty. Cutting-edge."

"Excuse me for not trend-surfing. If I fall far enough behind I can catch the next wave."

Self-consciousness caught up with me. We shouldn't be arguing like this in front of the children. I reached down and turned off Helen's microphone.

A., in the thrill of the fight, failed to notice. "Those who reject new theory are in the grip of an older theory. Don't you know that all this stuff" — she slapped my six pages of titles—"is a culturally constructed, belated view of belle lettres? You can't get any more insular than this."

"Well, it is English-language culture that we want to teach her."

"Whose English? Some eighty-year-old Oxbridge pederast's? The most exciting English being written today is African, Caribbean—"

"We have to give her the historical take if she—"

"The winner's history, of course. What made you such a coward? What are you so scared of? Difference is not going to kill you. Maybe it's time your little girl had her consciousness raised. An explosion of young-adulthood."

"I'm all for that. I just think that you can get to the common core of humanity from anywhere."

"Humanity? Common core? You'd be run out of the field on a rail for essentializing. And you wonder why the posthumanists reduced your type to an author function."

"That's Mr. Author Function to you, missy."

A. smiled. Such a smile might make even posthumanism survivable. I loved her. She knew it. And she would avoid the issue as long as she could. Forever.

"So, Mr. Author Function. What do you think this human commonality is based on?"

"Uh, biology?" I let myself sound snide.

"Oh, now it's scientism. What's your agenda? Why would you want to privilege that kind of hubris?"

"I'm not privileging anything. I'm talking about simple observation."

"You think observation doesn't have an ideological component? Stone Age. Absolutely Neolithic."

"So I come from a primitive culture. Enlighten me."

She took me seriously. "Foundationism is bankrupt," she said. Her zeal broke my heart. She was a born teacher. If anyone merited staying in the profession, it was this student for whom themes were still real. "Why science? You could base your finalizing system on anything. The fact is—"

"The what?"

A. smirked. "The fact is, what we make of things depends on the means of their formulation. In other words, language. And the language we speak varies without limit across cultures."

I knew the social science model, knew linguistic determinism. I could recite the axioms in my sleep. I also knew them to be insufficient, a false split. And yet, they never sounded so good to me as they did coming from A.'s mouth. She convinced me at blood-sugar level, deep down, below words. In the layer of body's idea. I tried to catch her eyes. "You love this stuff, don't you?"

She flinched: What kind of discredited rubbish are you talking now?

"You're not really going to go into business, are you? Give all this up?"

"I like theory, when it's not annoying me. I love the classroom. I adore teaching. But I like eating even more."

Subsidies, I wanted to tell her. What we make in fiction, we can plow back into teaching and criticism. Scholar-gypsies. Independents. There was some precedent, once.

"So what do you want from me?" A. asked.

My head whipped back. She'd heard me thinking.

"Where do I come in?" she pressed.

It took me a couple of clock cycles to recover. Helen, she meant. The exam.

I couldn't begin to say where she came in. What I wanted of her. I wanted to learn from A. some fraction of those facts I dispensed so freely to Helen. I thought she might lend me some authority, supply the missing lines of the functional proofs. I saw us jointly working out warmth, glossing intimacy, interpreting the ways of humility, of second chances, indulgence, expansiveness, redemption, hope, provincialism, projection, compassion, dependence, failing, forgiveness. A. was my class prep, my empirical test of meaning.

But Helen did not need a teacher steeped in those predicates. She already read better than I. Writing, she might have told me, was never more than the climb from buried love's grave.

I tried to tell A. where she came in. I limited myself to a quick sketch of the comprehensive high noon. I told A. that we needed a token human for our double-blind study. That we just wanted to ask her a couple of questions. Trivial; nothing she hadn't already mastered.

"Hold on. You want to test me — against a machine?" Coyer now, more flirtatious than I had yet seen her.

The Hartrick family's appearance outside the office saved me from debacle. "Hello," William announced, peeking in. "Did you know a feather would fall as fast as this entire building, if you dropped them in a vacuum?"

"Where are you going to find a vacuum big enough to drop this building?" I asked.

"NASA," William chanted, defensively singsong. "You know how to get oil out of shale?"

"You know how to spell 'fish'?"

"They're both out of control," Diana apologized to A. A. laughed in sympathy.

I made the introductions. William produced pocket versions of Mastermind and Connect Four, letting me take my pick. He proceeded to trounce me. I might have stood a chance, but for distraction. Something had happened to Peter that I struggled to place. Hand in his mother's hand, he took first, tentative steps.