“The Fantastic”: Richard Powers’s Challenge to Mimetic Realism in Plowing the Dark

Abstract

Investigating Richard Powers's interrogation of mimetic realism in Plowing the Dark, this essay argues that his conscious positioning between realism and speculative genre facilitates his central criticism of compulsive representation as the desire for mastery and perfection. In Plowing the Dark, Powers calls into question the traditional notion of realism, which he suggests to be not as the timeless and universal mode of expression but as a particular philosophical construction and aesthetic technique conspiring with modernity. The novel illustrates some of the current new media technologies' reckless aspirations for perfect representation, cooperating with the imperialist impulse to conquer and objectify the world by putting it into a controllable picture. As a critique of this representationalism, Powers employs mise-en-abyme structure at the novel's climax describing the fantastic convergence between two storylines. This is not a simple metafictional instance but his precise challenge to mimetic realism whereby the seamless representational frames are disrupted to prevent total representation of reality and complete immersion into story. Furthermore, Powers uses virtual reality as a speculative technology, which exists in the real world but has not been developed to the extent described in the novel. Recalling Tzvetan Todorov's concept of the fantastic, the speculative technology blurs the boundaries between real and imaginary and questions the idea of the real, placing the novel in kinship with cyberpunk genre.