Diego had committed the principal subversive act: he painted the spirit of Detroit in all its unretouched particulars. Strings of interchangeable human forms stroked the assembly line—a sinuous, almost functional machine—stamping, welding, and finally producing the finished product—an auto engine. Men in asbestos suits and goggled gas masks metamorphosed into green insects. Languorous allegorical nudes mimicked the conveyor. The frescoed room showed the spirit of Detroit from a much closer distance than the comfortable, corporate copper titan I had passed on the street outside. Viewers at the unveiling found themselves inside Detroit, just as the mural-men crawled in, around, and over their creation, striking a mutually parasitic relationship with metal. Diego had painted a chapel to the ultimate social accomplishment, the assembly line, a self-reproducing work of art, precise, brilliant, and hard as steel.
Bishops and businessmen instantly mobilized to destroy the frescoes. It is not hard to read subversion and heresy into the average work of a person’s hands. The task becomes easier when the work is ambitious, joyful, and revolutionary. Rivera’s was a duck shoot. Even those who had not yet visited the museum found a garden variety of blasphemies in the work. People saw a ridiculous Saint Anthony tempted away from his foreman’s plans by an allegory nude’s legs. Depression-sensitive capitalists saw in the figures communist-inspired proto-humans. A panel showing the inoculation of a child burlesqued the Nativity.
Diego’s compliment—that Detroit reveled in the vitality of the machine age—became, in the mouths of its interpreters, an insult. Edsel, the people declared, had been taken in by a piece of dangerously populist propaganda. An organized outcry of radio broadcasts and written petitions culminated in the Detroit News saying that “the best thing to do would be to whitewash the entire work completely.”
The work stood. Those cooler minds in the opposition knew that whitewashing turns an ambiguous work decidedly subversive, whereas a busy and ambitious mural was its own death kiss. Left alone, it would date itself more and more each year, playing to an increasingly disinterested house until one day, with the roots of civilization still intact, it would pass a magic milestone and become that perfectly harmless, even socializing item, the historical artifact.
I knew nothing of all this as I stood in the mural room between trains, nor did I suspect that I would be caught up in finding out. Viewed from inside the factory, the self-reproducing machine demanded allegiance or resentment, but denied the possibility of indifference. Technology could feed dreams of progress or kill dreams of nostalgia. The old debate came alive in Rivera’s work with a new strangeness. The machine was our child, defective, but with remarkable survival value. Rivera had painted the baptismal portrait of a mutant offspring, demanding love, resentment, pity, even hope, but refusing to be disowned.
With new eyes, I noticed a minor panel on one of the small walls, off to the side of the conveyor murals. In front of a sculpted dynamo more erotically contoured than any nude, a white-haired man sat at a monolithic desk, face pinched into an amalgam of benevolence and greed—Ford or Edison or De Forest or any of a dozen crabbed industrialists and innovators.
In this face, the face of our times, lay all the evidence I would need to break the hoax, to crack the mystery. Had I recognized the composite face for what it was, I might have saved a year spent tracking down the other leads: Detroit, Rivera, Ford, the auto, mechanical reproduction, portraiture, ether, relativity. When we don’t know what we are after, we risk passing it over in the dark. The Chinese played with fireworks for hundreds of years without inventing the gun. Edison thought his moving pictures were just toys. The physician who first set out to discover appropriate anaesthetic dosages discovered, instead, addiction. And I, thinking the clues to my discomfort lay elsewhere, turned my back on this crabbed face and left the hall.
By the time I reached the far end of the adjoining hallway, I was in an extreme state of agitation. I had forgotten all about my connector. To calm myself, I began repeating an old nursery rhyme: While I was going to Saint Ives, I met a man with seven wives. Rivera’s murals had upset me deeply and I thought only of getting away from them. Putting one last corner between myself and the factory, I wheeled smack into a mounted photograph: three young men from the turn of the century stand in a muddy road, looking out over their right shoulders. I knew it at once, though I had never seen it before. How many were going to Saint Ives?
The photo caption touched off a memory: Three farmers on their way to a dance, 1914. The date sufficed to show they were not going to their expected dance. I was not going to my expected dance. We would all be taken blindfolded into a field somewhere in this tortured century and made to dance until we’d had enough. Dance until we dropped.
Critical Acclaim for Operation Wandering Soul
“An amazing cast. . . . This brilliant novel asks the reader to contemplate the power of imagination. . . . Brainy, flamboyant, luscious, assaulting—every word a performance against the coming of the night.”
—Boston Globe
“Prodigiously talented. . . . Great arcing bursts of language streak across whole chapters.”
—Time
“Richard Powers has vaulted from promise to attainment . . . our most energetic and gifted novelist under 40. . . . A shuddering climax . . . finely tuned and highly original . . . as profound as you allow it to be.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A vast, impassioned fantasy-allegory . . . amazing . . . endlessly impressive. . . . Powers has a remarkable, virtuoso voice and much to say with it.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Remarkable . . . this novel plumbs great depths. . . . A dazzling performance: delightful, dismaying, disturbing, doing all that novels are meant to do.”
—Library Journal
“Complex, wrenching. . . . As overwhelming and erudite as its acclaimed predecessor, The Gold Bug Variations. . . . Cuts deeply into the human condition.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A dazzling stylist. . . . Striking originality and power fill his pages.”
—Wall Street Journal
“One of our most talented young novelists. . . . To read a Richard Powers novel is to be dazzled by the author’s intelligence . . . to be beguiled by a decency that only intensifies the horror he describes. . . . A poignant vision of the world’s children probing the age-old granite of hopelessness for the mountain crack where the Pied Piper disappeared.”
—Los Angeles Times
“The most gifted writer of his generation. . . . Exhilarating; almost every sentence invites one to pause and measure its tautness, rhythm and wit, and to marvel at Powers’s dazzling talent. . . . What beauty there is in this book!”
—Washington Post
“A devastating phantasmagoria of words and images . . . filled with glorious examples of both high and low culture. . . . To read his work is to be wowed by his verbal muscularity. . . . Admirable . . . wonderfully original.”
—New York Times
Also by Richard Powers
Bewilderment
The Overstory
Orfeo
Generosity: An Enhancement
The Echo Maker
The Time of Our Singing
Plowing the Dark
Gain
Galatea 2.2
Operation Wandering Soul
The Gold Bug Variations
Prisoner’s Dilemma
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
OPERATION WANDERING SOUL. Copyright © 1993 by Richard Powers. Excerpt from THREE FARMERS ON THEIR WAY TO A DANCE © 1985 by Richard Powers. All rights reserved under International and P
an-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Elsie Lyons
Cover photograph © Des Panteva/Trevillion Images
First William Morrow hardcover published 1993.
First HarperPerennial edition published 1994.
Reissued in Perennial 2002.
First William Morrow paperback reissue published 2021.
* * *
The Library of Congress has catalogued a previous edition as follows:
Powers, Richard.
Operation wandering soul: a novel / Richard Powers.—1st HarperPerennial ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-097611-X
1. Critically ill children–California–Los Angeles–Fiction. 2. Physician and patient–California–Los Angeles–Fiction. 3. Pediatricians–California–Los Angeles–Fiction. 4. Los Angeles (Calif.)–Fiction. I. Title.
[PS3566.092064 1993b]
813'.54–dc20
93–49506
* * *
Digital Edition AUGUST 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-311943-7
Version 07142021
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-314032-5 (pbk.)
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