Homework: Richard Powers, Walt Whitman,and the Poetry of the Commodity (2003)

In a novel called Gain published in 1998 by the novelist Richard Powers, there is a passage in which the heroine, a 42-year-old mother and real estate broker named Laura who has just discovered she has cancer, tries to help her 13-year-old son with his homework. She finds him at the kitchen table, frustrated, cursing the poem in front of him (I warn you in advance that the language is realistic) and starting to cry. His assignment is a poem called Crossing Brooklyn Ferry by the nineteenth-century poet American Walt Whitman. She asks him, What are you supposed to do with it? And he answers: Supposed to say what it's fucking (86). His mother has other things on her mind, as you might imagine, but she wants to keep up the pretense of normal life, so she offers to help. She looks at the poem, and we get bits of the poem juxtaposed with bits of her thoughts: certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of Not exactly what Laura had bargained for. She was never very good with words. Always hated English, social studies, all those invented topics. She couldn't wait to become an adult. When things would be real. She stares at the commodity stretching across these pages. Somehow, she's become a working adult. Somewhere, she's learned: nobody makes a living. There are no other topics but these impenetrable, urgent fakes. Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west ... Fifty years hence, she reads. She has to take the poet's word for it. It avails not, time nor place--distance avails not. She hasn't the first clue. It's like doing some kind of Martian archaeology. She's in badly over her head. She looks at the page for something to say. Her son stares at her. (87) This poetry homework seems painfully irrelevant, next to the thoughts of her diagnosis and prognosis and chemotherapy that are filling Laura's mind. In fact, the novel suggests, nothing could be more relevant to her situation, if only she could see it. But relevant in an extremely complex way. If there is any knowledge that might help her, or might have helped her, this poem may contain it. Laura uses a strange word to describe the poem: she calls it a word is a kind of clue--the sort of clue Laura herself does not see. Gain is split almost exactly in half between two narratives. One narrative is the gradual decline of Laura, beginning with her diagnosis, continuing through her treatment and physical deterioration, and ending with her death. other narrative is a rise: the rise of a pharmaceutical corporation named Clare. Clare begins as a tiny soap-making company run by two brothers in Boston in the early nineteenth century and ends up a huge multinational, selling all sorts of chemical products all over the world. two stories, Laura's and Clare's, are linked: Laura lives in a small Illinois town where Clare is the largest employer, and it is strongly suggested, though never with absolute certainty, that her cancer is the result of the that Clare produces. It is also suggested that she really didn't have any choice. Clare's chemical commodities and commodities just like them are all around her, and there seems no way to avoid using them. Little by little she comes to the realization that the world is all commodities, nothing but commodities. It is probably that realization that is starting to occur to her when she describes even a poem as a commodity. But the content of the poem is also relevant here. Notice the first lines from the poem that are quoted: The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others. These are the others that Whitman sees as he crosses on the morning ferry from Brooklyn (which was then an independent city, not yet incorporated into New York) to Manhattan. He talks about love here, but these are not his loved ones, his family or friends; they are people he doesn't know, strangers simply going to work in the morning. …