The novel's central character, Robin, is a young boy with Asperger's who is obsessed with nature and cosmic galaxies, and is puzzled by the behavior of modern humans – why do Bowles's novels always have such characters, because they seem to be the reality of our situation today.
Imagination about the universe
We have a lot of ideas about the universe, both from a humanistic and romantic point of view, as well as from a physical and astrological point of view, some of which are very beautiful, some of which are very cruel - While accepting the idea that we will find another habitable twin planet as the exploration of the universe unfolds, while thinking about extraterrestrial life and the laws of the dark forest, while fantasizing about the other side of the wormhole in the movie, imagining the magical existence of the multiverse, and finally accepting that everything that the Great Tear or Heat Death theory tells us will eventually annihilate nothingness. We are constantly exploring and thinking about the universe, and we have all kinds of assumptions about this mysterious and infinite thing, but we never seem to have imagined the possibility that we cannot understand everything in the universe at all. We always think that we can give an explanation of the universe through science and reason, for better or worse, but it is difficult to realize that there are a large number of beings in the universe that contradict this.
This is the reason why there are many characters with communication and cognitive disorders in Richard Powers' novels, because if you want to abandon anthropocentric ideas and try to look at the universe with a new mode of thinking and perspective, the first thing you need to do is to give up your original cognition and start from a state of ignorance of everything.
"But we may never find them, can we?" – that's the first thing Robin says in the novel. He was a nine-year-old boy with Asperger's, a freak and even a retarded in the eyes of others, and his favorite thing to do was to observe the night sky with his father with a telescope or to wade into the forest in search of nature's mysteries. In "Confusion", Robin's words are simple, immature, but philosophical. After his father, an astrobiologist, gave Robin an accurate answer, telling the boy that there were countless planets in the universe that we humans would never find, Robin gave a philosophical response - "But they are all over the place, right?"
Richard Powers.
What is everywhere? What does he see in his eyes? These are the places where the novel "Confusion" begins to attract the reader, although we can clearly perceive that Robin is the embodiment of the spokesman of nature, from what he calls the vast living space, the soul everywhere, The mysteries that are both distant and close to us are the parts of life that we would overlook, but when these words pop out of the character of a young boy with Asperger's, it is as if we have found a drawbridge between the human mind and the wisdom of the natural world, but the only connection, through this character to understand the ecology of nature, the universe, and those who are regarded as freaks.
Understand another perspective and wisdom
Robin's father, Theo, was an astrobiologist — a science that wasn't particularly rigorous in the eyes of his colleagues who worked in science. In order to help his son Robin maintain a healthy mood in life, Theo has to take his son to the forest regularly to withdraw from human society with him and feel the existence of life in the natural world. At the same time, Theo often tells stories about distant planets in the universe at night, which are like fairy tales from The Little Prince from our conventional perspective:
A planet called Devo, which looks barren but can be seen with a microscope, is inhabited by microorganisms, it is three times the age of the Earth, but the journey of life has only just begun on this desolate planet, a dark planet called Lafasha, almost the most lifeless place in the universe, but there are strange life forms living at the bottom of the sea, on the planet Peragos, dozens of intelligent beings scattered can speak millions of languages, a planet made of pure diamonds, such a planet may never be discovered by us humans, or there may exist more than 10,000 in the galaxy, on the planet StasisEach species inhabits its own fixed zone, where everything is exactly the same as the earth, except for the absence of any higher intelligent beings, and yet it seems so calm and beautiful......
Theo tirelessly tells these magical planetary stories to his son Robin, in order to maintain Robin's emotional stability and keep the child alive. Robin is a very easily lost child, and if these stories disappear one day, then he will feel extremely lonely, and he will feel that he is living in a cage where there are only human beings and no other possibilities exist, and this will have very terrible consequences for a child with Asperger's. This is not the first time that Richard Powers has created characters with Asperger's disease, we can see this kind of character in many of his works, on the one hand, Richard Powers has a kind concern for children with this symptom in reality, and on the other hand, we can also find that Asperger's is actually like the natural world we live in from the perspective of pure literary reading. It always responds to us with an autistic attitude, it is silent, it has great difficulty communicating with us humans, but its inner world can be extremely rich, thinking and loaded with vision and wisdom that is completely different from ours.
In addition to humans and the natural world, Confusion touches on many other global topics that we are facing. Facing the questions before us, such as worldwide epidemics, the age of species extinction, artificial intelligence, etc., Bowles's literary approach is not to guide us to dissect them in a deeper light, but to ask us a confused and angry question through Robin's vision of why we humans can pretend to turn a blind eye to these problems. In the story of "Confusion", the barriers we face with Robin are the deep-rooted pragmatism of modern society, and Robin's reflections, as well as the story of the environmental girl in the novel, can be regarded as meaningless actions if judged from a practical point of view. What will be the impact of a few hundred butterflies in the forest on human beings? What practical benefits can more flowers and plants in the forest bring to human beings? Even space exploration has encountered many obstacles in today's real world, and the United States in the Trump era has cut a lot of NASA funding, and people no longer understand why they should waste a lot of taxpayers' tax dollars and invest money in something that may never be observed. What is the real point of figuring out how many light-years away a lifeless star is?
On May 16, 2023, the James Webb telescope discovered the presence of water vapor for the first time in the planetary belt between Jupiter and Mars. Photo/IC photo
These are the things that puzzle and anger Robin in the novel, who doesn't understand how his own kind, the adults who actually wield power, can turn a blind eye to the existence behind these problems. Another thing Theo has been hiding from Robin is that Robin's mother is the one who is in this predicament, she can't understand human behavior, and as an adult, she understands how powerless those fairy tales are in the face of a pragmatic world, and she finally chooses suicide in despair. Theo is trying to protect his children, he takes Robin to discover novel species in the forest, and looks for a place where the earth will no longer be lonely in the planetary story he has woken, but as the story of the novel progresses, Theo gradually understands that he can't keep Robin in the protective cover of the family forever. Robin re-engages his mother's legacy with similar recoded neurotherapy, and he takes to the streets to start a lonely salvation movement, holding up a placard on behalf of the natural world that reads "Please save us" and trying to raise money. The eviction of the police and the indifference of the pedestrians showed that he was unlikely to gain any supporters. The confusion would continue, and Theo knew that his son would one day understand that the stories of those planets were purely imaginary, and that the things that angered him would continue to appear in the world.
If there is anything that this novel can bring us to reflect on, it is that after following Robin through this complete story, some readers may understand that those seemingly crazy words, extreme words and deeds are not necessarily crazy words, and behind these phenomena are the incomprehensible behaviors of our human beings as a whole. And Robin's spiritual world is also telling us another fact, that is, practicality is not the only purpose of human activities, our exploration and conservation behavior is not simply to add a few pieces of data to the universe planetary data and species list, but to maintain the sense of wonder of human life through the rediscovery and exploration of this world, and to find the soul and meaning of human life in the process of perception. As Theo, the father in the novel, says, "Robin is right: we need a universal compulsory course on neurofeedback training, just like passing a constitutional test or getting a driver's license." The template animal could be a dog, a cat, a bear, or even one of my son's favorite birds. Anything that allows us to experience the feelings of others. ”
Written by Miyako
Editor/Zhang Jin, Liu Yaguang
Proofreading/Xue Jingning, Fu Chunxuan