Secret Kinship With The Other — by Richard PowersPerhaps genes aren’t the only thing that we’ve been shaped to try and save. Maybe altruism evolves to recognize affinity, joint purpose, shared values. Maybe nothing elicits a sense of relatedness more deeply than feeling our dependence on other living things. A predator depends entirely on its prey; that, too, is a kind of blood bond.
I am a novelist. All day long, I try to inhabit the hearts and souls of people who have never existed in the hopes that existing people might find, in these made-up lives, fictive kin who resemble their friends and provisional families in that realm of consensual fiction that we call the real world. In my fiction, kinship forms through conflict. Through the play of dramatic tension between seemingly inimical values, my characters come to recognize the keys to themselves that others hold.
Secret kinship with the Other—even with the ultimate enemy—is the lifeblood of fiction. (Surely you had to suspect, with a name like Darth Vader, a coefficient of genetic relationship hiding somewhere in the closet?) Leslie Fiedler once made the case that a great number of the canonical works of American literature have involved a plot in which a white person and a nonwhite person, thrown together in emergency, develop mutual dependence. Fiction challenges the barrier between “us” and “them.” It puts relations through the wringer, mangles them, and leaves the idea of family flattened but so much larger.
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