Eleven-year-old Peter Els hears the last movement of Mozart’s Jupiter symphony for the first time:

The shuffled half scale gathers mass; it sucks up other melodies into its gravity. Tunes and countertunes split off and replicate, chasing each other in a cosmic game of tag. At two minutes, a trapdoor opens underneath the boy. The first floor of the house dissolves above a gaping hole. Boy, stereo, speaker boxes, the love seat he sits on: all hang in place, floating on the gusher of sonority pouring into the room.

Five viral strands propagate, infecting the air with runaway joy. At three and a half minutes, a hand scoops Peter up and lifts him high above the blocked vantage of his days. He rises in the shifting column of light and looks back down on the room where he listens. Wordless peace fills him at the sight of his own crumpled, listening body. And pity for anyone who mistakes this blinkered life for the real deal.¹

Early in this novel, Richard Powers introduces us to the ecstasy available to some people who open themselves to art. The passage actually continues to cover several more minutes of Peter’s mystic experience, but at the end, we learn something else about such ecstasy: you cannot regain it by replaying the music. For Peter, this effect comes only from the originality and newness of the experience. Orfeo explores the joy of discovery that can be found in both art and nature. We see gradations of pleasure felt both at understanding and creating. However, such pleasures are circumscribed and opposed by patterns of human meaning-construction and human behavior. Cognitively, we “understand” something by fitting it into a known pattern, and we frequently respond to situations by trying to exert control or force. This opposition of force and ecstasy lies at the heart of this novel.

In the past, most of Powers’s novels argue that we should study art or nature so deeply that we can revel in wonder at discovering things that are new to us.² This can be in scientific research (The Gold Bug Variations), in virtual reality artwork (Plowing the Dark), in music (The Time of our Singing), or in the sheer wonder of life (Generosity). He treats that profound joy as the emotion about which we should reorganize our lives and culture, rather than pursuing the transient and meaningless pleasures of consumerism.

The alternative to ecstasy that Powers usually offers is service: we among the fortunate few should devote ourselves to bettering conditions for the majority who lead damaged and tragically limited lives.³ His social vision is extremely bleak and angry. As Operation Wandering Soul puts it, “the species is clinically psychotic. Pathetic, deranged, intrinsically, irreversibly mercury-poisoned by nature, by birth… Mental thalidomide cases, every last mother’s son, as far back as accounts take things” (165). The suffering may come from natural problems (disease), but more often Powers explores racism, war, economic oppression, pollution, and eagerness to exploit scientific study for profit. Even art, as created in Virtual Reality in Plowing the Dark will be exploited by the Military. In Orfeo, concern with oppressed people does flare up over the slaughter of the Branch Davidians at Waco in 1993 (and their historical forerunners at the 1534 Siege of Münster), but they are not prominent throughout. Overall in this one novel, Powers shifts his moral focus away from the dreadful sufferings endured by most of the world’s population. As the title Orfeo suggests, music ostensibly takes center stage.

Powers pays particular attention to novelty and to our drive to impose known pattern on anything new. Novelty represents the source of that wonder and joy.⁴ Pattern is what we impose on all novelty to explain it to ourselves. Give us a new animal or plant and we assign it a genus and species. In doing so, we destroy some of that thrilling newness, and therefore lose some potential pleasure. True, we enjoy discovering how the new item fits a known pattern, and neurocognitively, we survive because of our brain’s ability to identify pattern, so pattern is necessary, not an evil in itself; Powers does not create a false binary opposition. However, relying too heavily on pattern can deaden our responses to things observed, particularly in art.⁵

Beyond novelty and pattern lies power or force or control, the dangerous cluster of closely related terms in this novel’s politics. We see power or force exercised when something new and unusual is forced to fit an inappropriate pattern, as when Peter Els is forced to fit the popular idea of a bioterrorist. In The Gold Bug Variations, scientist Stuart Ressler essentially discovers DNA but backs off and gives up science. He argues against the genetic engineering that he foresees, saying, “It’s not science. Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery” (411). “The point of science was to lose ourselves in the world’s desire” (413). In Orfeo, Powers shows us this interplay of force and wonder in art, and gives us a new version of his angry politics, but he encases it in an Orphic pattern. When we recognize this compositional tactic of meshing the unpalatable with the well-known and cherished, we will see more clearly the failings of his protagonist, Peter Els, who tries to force his audiences to accept new music, something that seems to them unpatterned and therefore indigestible. We will also see the failings of surveillance society when dealing with an unusual but harmless citizen who does not fit known patterns.

Els is a composer of avant-garde music. Indeed, he has succeeded in focusing so intently that he has achieved transcendent moments of wonder and ecstasy in three forms: in his family life, in music, and in science. Since his marriage ends in divorce, let me deal with that brief interlude. Els’s source of wonder is his baby daughter. He and she compose on her toy piano and xylophone, and he marvels when she uses the colors on her xylophone keys and spaces between alphabet blocks to create a system of notation, a readable pattern (186). Wonder enfolds him that she does this only a few dozen months away from herself being a single cell. Without prompting, she invents the very idea of notation. He lost that relationship with his daughter and the wonder it generated when his wife divorced him. She was tired of supporting him, and irritated by his refusal to compromise his musical ideals and take a job teaching traditional compositional values and patterns in some local university.⁶

Music is Els’s earliest and primary source of ecstasy. Thanks to his experience with Mozart, he makes novelty unconstrained by expectations the key to his philosophy as a composer. What he wanted to produce in his audiences was awe, surprise, suspense, refreshment, sense of the infinite, fear, change, and beauty (346). Most listeners can no longer derive that from the often-heard classics, so Els thinks to produce it through the unanticipatable sounds that do not obey old rules of form, genre, and pattern. He studies research done on the physiological responses to sound—how some intervals literally make us sad, others, happy; “a six-chord sequence could chill a soul or make it see God” (332).⁷ He also ponders the political repression of music in the case of Shostakovich and Stalin, and “that endless need to legislate sounds” through history (282).⁸ Els wants to tap into those musical powers and use them to bring pleasure, but his avoidance of recognizable pattern in his composing reduces his ability to pass these joys on to others.

Els is similarly thrilled by his scientific studies, particularly when they remind him of music. “To Els, music and chemistry were each other’s long-lost twins: mixtures and modulations, spectral harmonies and harmonic spectroscopy. The structures of long polymers reminded him of intricate Webern variations” (57). He enjoys learning that people are making music from fractals, the digits of pi, the solar wind, voting records (330). “Brain waves, skin conductivity, and heartbeats: anything could generate surprise melodies. String quartets were performing the sequences of amino acids in horse hemoglobin” (330–331). “Genomics was right now learning how to read scores of indescribable beauty. Els just wanted to hear, before the light in his tent went out” (143). Like Singularity’s prophet Ray Kurzweil, who sees computational power in every atom of a piece of granite, Els senses that all Nature is something we should learn to listen to rather than just exploit. A dog splashing in a duck pond produces ripples that “contained enough data to encode an entire opera” (331). He heard “soundtracks extracted from DNA” on the radio (333), and he realized that DNA was the “one durable medium” (333). By coding some sequence—anything—into a bacterium, he will produce a scientific and musical novelty that enchants him, and it will arguably intrigue some future student of that bacterium.

New York Times reviewer Jim Holt eloquently argues that Els’s altering DNA for artistic reasons is obscene. The practice, however, has become commonplace, and I detect no revulsion in Powers’s description.⁹ DNA carries enough junk that the music evidently can ride along harmlessly. Els is, after all, creating a new form of art, and many aspects of art involve imposing force of sorts, whether mining and grinding compounds for colored paints, melting ore and casting metal, or shaping landscape in Land Art, as Robert Smithson did in his “Spiral Jetty” or Michael Heizer is doing in his “City.” Powers seems to distinguish between using such force for commercial exploitation and enrichment of the creator or industry as opposed to creating art for future viewers to wonder it. Els is not trying to enrich himself, and were he to stumble across something exploitable, he might, like Stuart Ressler, quit science, or switch to something with less applicable potential. At what point force becomes unethical is arguable, but Powers does not seem to be disturbed by Els’s tinkering.

Pattern is what Els struggles against in his music, and we might wonder why. He is not personally a law-breaker. His upbringing was conventional, and his one tiny act of teen rebellion (refusing to come when called) seemed to contribute to his father’s dying of a heart attack, so one might expect him to shrink back into safe obedience. All of Els’s musical impetus, however, goes toward rebelling against the old and creating something new. His most successful work is an opera about the Siege of Münster, in which a religious splinter group desperately seeks transcendence through new forms of worship and governance, and is massacred by the surrounding rulers in the name of political and religious orthodoxy. To him, discovery of the new brings variations on ecstasy, transcendence, and wonder, whether in science or art or religion. What bothers him is the human determination to make everything fit into familiar patterns.

Els admits late in life that listeners cannot learn to love just anything. He finds that most people are best satisfied with known patterns. Els’s brother and boyhood friends once tied him down and forced him to listen to popular music, but where they think that no finer music exists, Els can only hear “harmonic jail” in the boringly simple bass chords (20). Similar resistance would arise for a fan of Finnegans Wake being forced to read a Harlequin Romance; the formulas leading to predictable resolution do not interest someone with sophisticated tastes. Many challenging novels exist, however, between those extremes, and Els seems blind to the potential that an equivalent musical middle ground would offer for educating his audience to relish his preferred kind of music. Evidently, most of us respond to music much the way we do to scientific phenomena; we want to fit both into patterns we have already learned. We may not need to label something a concerto or a septet, but we want to know that this kind of tonal combination will lead to that sort of resolution. Lacking an audience that can listen the way Els himself does, he opts for the novelty of inscribing music into DNA.¹⁰

Powers introduces another factor into this apparent war between novelty and pattern and the effects of force. Whereas Els wants ecstasy, that experience has its opposite in anguish. Els is highly susceptible to anguish. Many Powers protagonists are cripplingly sensitive to the suffering of others. Els does not show this trait to the same extent as “Rick Powers” of Galatea 2.2 or Richard Kraft of Operation Wandering Soul, but his sensitivity flares up just as his operatic collaboration with Richard Bonner approaches opening night. The U.S. Government attacks the Branch Davidian compound at Waco and shoots and burns alive a religious group rebelling against orthodox patterns in order to seek transcendence. Els does his best to close the opera down, revolted at what he considers the ghoulish interest that will bring opera-goers to see it specifically because Waco has happened. He does not want to feed their appetite for a horror that feels comfortable because it befalls folks who are not like Metropolitan Opera goers. While he cannot prevent its initial brief run, he refuses to let other opera houses put on productions, a refusal that completely baffles and infuriates his collaborator Bonner, for whom this is also the most effective creation of his life. Bonner is “pure energy” (197), and that energy fuels Els when the two manage to work together. Bonner is also madcap and vicious, and their previous collaboration ended with the drunken Bonner saying that Els’s music is only “steamy, creamy, lovely shit” (217). Els gives up composing after their opera disagreement, and his eventual turn to biogenetics lets him compose in a new register. If science and music are somehow twins in his mind, he shifts from one to the other after anguish has made him give up on music.

Force emerges as a key issue toward the end of the novel. Els’s grotesquely inept people-skills are misinterpreted by the police. They force on him the label bioterrorist, and he finds himself being hunted by the irresponsible press and gun-happy troopers. The press never retracts stories when they are found to be incorrect, so public hysteria rises. He has few options. He could arrange a quiet surrender and spend the rest of his life and all his money trying to clear his name, and then die penniless and forgotten. His daughter wants him to go this route. After all, Els is guilty of nothing except taking a trip and seeing family and friends when he was warned to stay available in his hometown. What he has done with the bacterium is not illegal. More sinisterly, if he decided to enter the clutches of the law, he would probably be judged guilty and imprisoned, no matter how harmless his activities. The legal system does not resist hysteria very well. Alternatively, he can take Bonner’s enthusiastic advice and produce “Killer Theater” (338). Bonner always wants the most dramatic and anarchic actions. Bonner glories in the idea of “Music to panic a whole country” (345). “You have to do this. The largest audience for an experimental piece in history” (347). After releasing tweets to gather a following, Els follows Bonner’s advice.

Because of his status as composer and the novel’s title, we automatically link this end to the Orphic pattern of sparagmos or dismemberment by a mob. Had Orpheus lived to a ripe old age in connubial bliss (or single, or married for a second time), his legend would not be all that well known. Its dramatic, violent, bloody ending somehow makes his life more valuable, and his oracular role makes it mysterious as well. After all, both Odysseus and Aeneas deal with the underworld, but those episodes are comparatively obscure. The sparagmos intensifies the value of Orpheus and his skills—by robbing us of them. What makes this ending to Els’s life meaningful is that it becomes a protest against the government’s misuse of power, a protest, however, that necessitates Els’s own death.

Notes

1. Richard Powers, Orfeo, 17–18. [^{^}]
2. J. D. Thomas argues that Powers celebrates science by superimposing religious transcendence upon science. [^{^}]
3. For the tension between these two imperatives, seeking wonder and offering help, see Kathryn Hume. [^{^}]
4. Joseph Dewey (4) argues that such cerebral quest for knowledge and novelty can lead to indifference, insulation, or narcissism, and that Love is necessary. [^{^}]
5. Viktor Shklovsky asserts that art’s function is to make us recover that sense of newness. [^{^}]
6. In general, Powers upholds the human bond and love over intellectual constructs, notably in The Gold Bug Variations and Galatea 2.2. D. Quentin Miller and N. Katherine Hayles both comment on Powers’s preference for certain human qualities over posthuman values. [^{^}]
7. Whether sadness or happiness are universal responses to major and minor is debatable. See Philip Ball. Other experiments show that western listeners, at least, prefer frequency combinations that do not set up beats, a preference that may grow out of our auditory system, though may also be to some extent conditioned (See Josh H. McDermott et al.). Since classical music has used consonant combinations over and over, Els’s search for novelty undoubtedly led him to those that had been avoided for physiological as well as cultural reasons. His fascination with newness perhaps overrode any preference he might originally have felt for consonance. [^{^}]
8. Extended work with music can even alter brain structure, but any extended specialization tends to do that; the learning of all London streets by taxi drivers changes their brains, as does achieving fluency in several languages. [^{^}]
9. The Economist published on such amateur biohacking in 2009; see http://www.economist.com/node/14299634. For an almost identical experiment to that of Els, see Katherine Xue’s account of a Danish Christmas poem being inserted into E. coli. MIT scientists have recently turned E. coli bacteria into “tape recorders” to store usable, erasable information (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141113142006.htm). Steve Tomasula analyzes the phenomenon of a man grafting his own DNA into a petunia. What Els does may make some readers uneasy, but amateurs and professionals are doing it regularly. [^{^}]
10. How a future researcher would know to turn a sequence of DNA that did not fit known patterns into tones is unclear to me, but music would surely be more easily recognized if it were a tune like Yankee Doodle than “birdsong, a threnody, the raw noise of this arboretum, music spun from the brain” (333), all of which Els considers for possible transcoding. [^{^}]
11. Patrick Colm Hogan, pp. 11–12 discusses most listeners’ tendency to become angry and bored while listening to highly experimental music; we cannot code what we are hearing and make sense of it, so the very novelty becomes sameness and hence boring. He makes the point that the compositional “grammar” understood by the composer is far more complex than the listeners’ “grammar,” and so they cannot parse what they hear. [^{^}]
12. See Walter A. Strauss for these dark descents in Novalis, Mallarmé, and Rilke. [^{^}]
13. Kim Paffenroth and Daniel H. Gower have explored zombie themes in Orpheus novels. [^{^}]
14. In her NPR review, Helen McAlpin talks of “Els’s descent into Hades” as meaning the world of surveillance gone mad. Scott Korb’s review in Slate emphasizes that “the fleeing Els, like Orpheus, cannot help but look back.” [^{^}]
15. See the Raintaxi Interiew with Allan Vorda, where Powers says, “Since my story is concerned with one man’s attempt to locate and reproduce the transcendent power of music, and since it also concerns a flight through the underworld of the contemporary culture of fear while attempting to resurrect a lost past, the legend was made to order. Nothing can compare to music in its power to raise the dead.” [^{^}]
16. For the use of that motif in modernist works by Rimbaud, Hart Crane and others, see Merrill Cole. [^{^}]
17. In addition to being relatively harmless, it has the distinction of producing a blood-colored growth on bread that may be responsible for various medieval miracles of the Host bleeding. For a picture of this phenomenon, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serratia_marcescens#mediaviewer/File:Bloody_bread_-_Serratia_marcescens_in_action.JPG. [^{^}]
18. Relying on Pierre Bourdieu, Lawrence Venuti (37) reinforces the distinction that elite taste rests on cultural knowledge and awareness of form, whereas popular taste reflects uncritical identification with characters as if they were real people. [^{^}]
19. In the interview with Sven Birkerts, we see how Powers tries to balance the despair at what he sees: “I would say that you can earn your right to feel good about the world by taking a full look at the worst. And you reinvent your capacity for engagement in the face of despair by stepping back and recalling that despair, too, is a coping story that you’ve told yourself.” Scott Hermanson argues that non-linear science with its sensitivity to input (chaos theory) does make a place for individuals to act meaningfully. [^{^}]
20. For a more complete list of Powers’s witty and devastating criticisms, see Hume, pp. 2–3. [^{^}]

References