In Richard Powers’ novel Gain, Laura Body’s “one good thing” is her garden (361). Early in the novel (in a passage that seems to echo Thoreau’s chapter on “The Bean-Field”) she “kneels in her garden, kneading her fifty square feet of earth. She coaxes up leaves, gets them to catch a teacupful of the two calories per cubic centimeter that the sun, in its improvident abundance, spills forever on the earth for no good reason except that it knew we were coming.” Enjoying her hobby in the warmth of life- (or human-) prompting sunlight, she finds that “the work is play; the labor love” (Picador edition, 5). Much later in the novel, when Laura is in the final stages of treatment that will not save her from ovarian cancer, she “obsesses over the perfect ground” of her garden, thinking that, “If she could just get the soil ready again, sink her hands in wrist deep, she might be all right.” Then “one spring day” Laura (echoing Thoreau in his Walden chapter on spring?) imagines that “it smells as if no one in the world has ever sinned.” And, though she is too ill to garden, she seems to hear herself digging in the garden (361-362).
The person she actually hears digging is her daughter Ellen, who is “wearing [Laura’s] boots and gloves, jumping clumsily on the heel of the shovel. Laura wonders where Ellen would have gotten the seeds. And she wonders how her daughter has any idea of “where to put them.” But she understands that her daughter’s anger at being seen working is the garden—“You’re not supposed to look!”—comes out of Ellen’s sense that she is performing some kind of “ritual,” a reenactment of her mother’s gardening that will have an effect beyond growing plants, a reenactment that will create a “spell” that will somehow undo her mother’s suffering (362).
The “scraping” and “shushing” of the spade suggest Ellen’s inexperience with the task she has taken upon herself. And she calls out to her mother, “Am I doing it right?” (362). Ellen here unknowingly echoes the opening line of Virgil’s first georgic: “What’s right for bringing abundance to the fields” (David Ferry translation 3); she is like the farmers Virgil imagines himself addressing; she is among those “who need / to be taught to find their way” (4).
These two passages in Gain show suggest the narrative is informed by Powers’ sense of the georgic mode—writing that worries over the “right” ways to cultivate food. Georgic writing differs from pastoral writing in that it shows people involved, as Ellen is, in work. The focus of such writing on the specific work involved in gardening and farming; the georgic is a mode that often gives specific advice about how to do necessary work appropriately. But the georgic is more than a how-to mode. Ellen’s question seems to come out of concern whether she is handling the spade the way her mother used to; in part she seems to want to carry on a tradition in a way that has perhaps a metaphysical effect on her mother’s physical suffering. She is not just gardening but also performing a “ritual.”
Laura nods to Ellen that she is doing things right , thus registering the familiar, emotional connection to her daughter’s reassuring, if ineffective, behavior. “Perfect,” she thinks. But things for this dying woman are not perfect (362). She is a cancer patient in a world where things are not “okay” because they are mishandled; she is about to receive a “staggering bill” because her insurance company has decided that one of her treatments is not “an essential service” (362). And we will learn (if it has not already occurred to us) that it is Laura’s own gardening—she has used a herbicide that may be toxic for humans—is one of the possible causes of her of cancer. Her love for “Her plot of earth” has led her into an involvement with a market economy that, while seemingly giving her “everything else” (364), has “planted” (347) cancer in her. And, as Powers does in Gain, writers adopt the georgic mode to worry over whether to praise—promote—the farmers and gardeners who perform the cultural duty/diversion of growing food or to criticize the methods these cultivators see as appropriate to the task. Writers turn to the georgic mode to question if people go about the task of helping produce “abundance” in the “right” way.
–Bill
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