Genetics and the Novel: Reimagining Life Through Fiction 3031531000, 9783031531002

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements
Contents
Introduction: Books of Life in the Long Century of the Gene
Genetics in the Novel: Materiality and Representation
A Very Short Literary History of Life and Genetics
Chapter Outlines
References
Simon Mawer’s Book of Life: Mendel’s Dwarf as Fictional Genetic Life Writing
Writing Life in Mendel’s Dwarf: Notes on Form
Problematic Essentialism: Genetic Gaze and Social Being
Life in Time: Embodiment, Kinship and Ethics
Reading the Biological Text: Mendel’s Dwarf as Autozoegraphy
References
“There is grandeur in this view of life”: Ian McEwan’s Poetics of Chance and the Forms of Genetic Determinism
Structural Determinations: Chance, Genetics and Literary Representation
Enduring Love: Initial Conditions and Possible Outcomes
In Saturday, There is Grandeur in This View of Life
Evolutionary and Medical Genetics
Coda: Genetic Life in Solar, Nutshell and Machines Like Me
References
Genetics’ Perilous Analogies: Metaphors of Life in A. S. Byatt’s Quartet
Metaphoric Matter: Science, Poststructuralism and Byatt’s Philosophy of Language
Slippery Signifier: The Snail as Scientific and Aesthetic Model Organism
“Seeing the likeness in the difference”: George Eliot, Derrida and Byatt’s Life of Forms
Conclusion: Byatt’s Metaphors of Life and Self-Conscious Organic Forms
References
Ecologies of Life: Genetics in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy
Ecologies of Life: Genetics at the Intersection of Ecocriticism and Posthumanism
Epistemologies of Intervention: Life in Oryx and Crake
Saint Crick and Life with a Capital L: New Genetic Dogma in The Year of the Flood
MaddAddam: Literature, Ecology and the Future of Life
References
Conclusion: Levels of Life in the Novel
References
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND MEDICINE

Genetics and the Novel

Reimagining Life Through Fiction

Paul Hamann-Rose

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine Series Editors

Sharon Ruston Department of English and Creative Writing Lancaster University Lancaster, UK Alice Jenkins School of Critical Studies University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK Jessica Howell Department of English Texas A&M University College Station, TX, USA

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting, prize-­ winning series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerging topics as well as established ones. Editorial board: Andrew M. Beresford, Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University, UK Steven Connor, Professor of Living Well with Technology, King’s College London, UK Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Stony Brook University, USA Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Professor of English and Theatre Studies, University of Oxford, UK Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK Susan Squier, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Pennsylvania State University, USA Martin Willis, Head of School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University, UK Karen A. Winstead, Professor of English, The Ohio State University, USA

Paul Hamann-Rose

Genetics and the Novel Reimagining Life Through Fiction

Paul Hamann-Rose University of Passau Passau, Germany

ISSN 2634-6435     ISSN 2634-6443 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ISBN 978-3-031-53099-9    ISBN 978-3-031-53100-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53100-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Francesco Riccardo Iacomino/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgements

First and foremost I have to thank Ute Berns at the University of Hamburg for her kind and invaluable support. Her eye for detail and clarity has inspired my thinking about the project from the beginning. I further thank Susanne Rupp and Felix Sprang without whose insightful readings this book could not have been brought to its present conclusion. I am grateful to the whole group of scholars working on the GetPreCiSe project on genetic privacy at Vanderbilt University who have welcomed me repeatedly over the years. I have learned more from them than I could say. I am particularly indebted to Ellen Wright Clayton and Jay Clayton for their hospitality and advice. Jay Clayton shared his wealth of experience with me and taught me how to be a better scholar and writer. His views on the potential of literary scholarship to contribute to debates about genetic science and bioethics have deeply empowered my work. In the process of writing this book, I have benefitted from the insights offered by my colleagues and students at various conferences and universities. Special thanks have to go to Natalie Roxburgh, Clare Hanson, Lara Choksey and Katharina Boehm. This book is dedicated to my wife.

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Contents

 Introduction: Books of Life in the Long Century of the Gene  1 Genetics in the Novel: Materiality and Representation   7 A Very Short Literary History of Life and Genetics  20 Chapter Outlines  28 References  30  Simon Mawer’s Book of Life: Mendel’s Dwarf as Fictional Genetic Life Writing 37 Writing Life in Mendel’s Dwarf: Notes on Form  40 Problematic Essentialism: Genetic Gaze and Social Being  44 Life in Time: Embodiment, Kinship and Ethics  56 Reading the Biological Text: Mendel’s Dwarf as Autozoegraphy  66 References  71  “There is grandeur in this view of life”: Ian McEwan’s Poetics of Chance and the Forms of Genetic Determinism 75 Structural Determinations: Chance, Genetics and Literary Representation  78 Enduring Love: Initial Conditions and Possible Outcomes  82 In Saturday, There is Grandeur in This View of Life 102 Evolutionary and Medical Genetics 104 Coda: Genetic Life in Solar, Nutshell and Machines Like Me  121 References 125

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Contents

 Genetics’ Perilous Analogies: Metaphors of Life in A. S. Byatt’s Quartet131 Metaphoric Matter: Science, Poststructuralism and Byatt’s Philosophy of Language 135 Slippery Signifier: The Snail as Scientific and Aesthetic Model Organism 145 “Seeing the likeness in the difference”: George Eliot, Derrida and Byatt’s Life of Forms 158 Conclusion: Byatt’s Metaphors of Life and Self-­Conscious Organic Forms 174 References 176 Ecologies of Life: Genetics in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy179 Ecologies of Life: Genetics at the Intersection of Ecocriticism and Posthumanism 183 Epistemologies of Intervention: Life in Oryx and Crake  189 Saint Crick and Life with a Capital L: New Genetic Dogma in The Year of the Flood  206 MaddAddam: Literature, Ecology and the Future of Life 213 References 225  Conclusion: Levels of Life in the Novel231 References 238 Index239

Introduction: Books of Life in the Long Century of the Gene

Explorations of life are essential to the novel. According to a long history of scholarship, the novel might also be the literary form most suited to the task. Critics and historians of the form, from E. M. Forster through Ian Watt to Edward Said, have recurrently claimed the category of “life” in order to explain the novel’s particular literary contribution. Citing Forster, Watt propounds the novel’s temporal organisation of life, its “portrayal of ‘life by time’”, as distinguishing the form’s special character (1957, p. 22). For Watt, this emphasis on temporality propels the novel, “more than any other literary form”, to investigate the development of characters over time within their historically specific everyday lifeworlds (ibid.). Like Watt, Said traces the novel’s concern with teasing out “pattern[s] of human life” from characters’ unfolding stories back to the form’s realist beginnings and its early quest to negotiate the social and political transformations of a burgeoning bourgeoisie (2006, p.  4). In his Late Style, Said is more interested, however, in proposing a larger argument about the novel’s investment in the physiological transformations that shape human lives as lived experiences over time. He describes the novel as “the Western aesthetic form that offers the largest and most complex” treatment of what he calls, borrowing François Jacob’s phrase, “la logique du vivant” (ibid., p. 5). Said’s use of the geneticist’s concept to make sense of the novel’s preoccupation with life remains analogical, pointing to the principle of a pattern of life rather than engaging the proposed pattern itself. In this © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Hamann-Rose, Genetics and the Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53100-2_1

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book, I demonstrate how the novel’s exploration of the “logic of the living” changed profoundly when genetics actually became the most powerful discourse for explaining the processes of life. Ever since the molecularisation of life in the second half of the twentieth century, genetics has questioned previous assumptions about life, both human and animal, but also about the concept of life itself. In light of genetics’ radically new understanding of such fundamental aspects of life as the internal organisation of living organisms or the development of both individuals and species over time, an interest intimately shared by the novel, historian of science Evelyn Fox Keller has described the twentieth century as the “century of the gene” (2000, p. 1). Keller’s widely received assessment points to the central status assumed by the gene within the discourse of genetics and, given the unabated attraction of the gene in the twenty-first century, it seems warranted to now speak of a long century of the gene. The rise of large-scale sequencing technology—as employed by the Human Genome Project (1990–2003) and by now an established biomedical practice, not to mention popular genealogy practice—has further given rise to the sense of a beginning age of the genome (Müller-Wille and Rheinberger 2009, p. 98; Atkinson et al. 2009; Choksey 2021).1 In the wake of these developments, genetics has become central to explanations of not only biological but also increasingly of social and cultural phenomena. This extension of genetic reasoning beyond the confines of the science proper, as we shall see, has often been highly problematic in its reductionist appropriation of what are in fact extremely complex biological processes. Fierce debates about the extent to which genetics determine a person’s social development have accompanied the discipline since its beginning. These debates have been not only about the mechanics of reproduction and inherited traits but more chiefly about competing conceptions of life. These competing notions of life also inform the novel’s engagement with genetics. A foundational conception of how life is organised influences a host of other assumptions and opinions. This is why a discussion of a genetic understanding of life is intrinsically about more than biology. In the first 1  Genomes describe all the DNA “embedded in the set of chromosomes found in the nucleus of every cell of an organism” (twice if it is a somatic cell) (Barnes and Dupré 2008, pp. 75–76, 84). A species genome, like the human genome, is usually an abstraction aggregating material from several individuals. For the problematic selection bias of the Human Genome Project see, for instance, Choksey (2021, pp. 13, 88).

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decades of the twentieth century, following the institutionalisation of genetics as a discipline in 1900, the debate about whether, following Jean-­ Baptiste de Lamarck, acquired characteristics could be inherited led to serious conflict among biologists and cultural commentators. As illustrated in Arthur Koestler’s vivid retelling of the feud between Paul Kammerer and the inventor of the term “genetics”, William Bateson, the debate’s high stakes derived from its political implications; heredity was central to the question of how human societies could change (Koestler 1971). A similar dynamic underlies the twenty-first century iteration of this controversy through the potential of epigenetics to shed light on forms of heredity and development that bypass or influence genome expression. In both historical debates, a genetic vision of life has raised questions about individual human liberty and the responsibility of communities to address the impact of biology on social life, whatever the individual political position. In the chapters that follow, this multifarious impact of an overarching genetic conception of life on various social and personal issues, what I refer to as the diverse levels of life, will be shown to play a central part in the novel’s negotiation of life in the genetic age. The significance of biological life for the political sphere and the wider influence of genetic renegotiations of life in particular have recently thrust life to the forefront of critical studies and discourses. Many of these critical endeavours are informed by a focus on biopolitics. Following Michel Foucault’s initial theorisation of biopower as the state’s increasing control of citizens’ biological life, predominantly through reproductive regulations and hygiene, it has been especially Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life”, to describe the state in which a citizenry has been reduced to the minimal conditions of biological existence, which has newly invigorated interest in the biopolitical paradigm (Agamben 1998; see also De Boever 2013). Critics such as Paul Rabinow have then highlighted the new modes of biopower enabled specifically by the geneticisation of life, such as the increased level of control afforded by genetic information on health, reproduction and identity (Rabinow 1996). Increasingly, investigations of  biopower’s classical site of governmental intervention have been replaced by a concern with how genetic knowledge and technology have become subject to private and commercial control. Since the discovery of the biochemical structure of DNA in 1953, the molecularisation of life has led to an ever more sophisticated array of technologies that allow for the interference in and manipulation of previously unavailable vital processes. Nikolas Rose, for instance, in his The Politics of Life Itself:

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Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (2007) points out how the newly possible intervention into living organisms, be it for medical or other reasons, carries political and ethical implications for societies as well as individuals confronted with these new possibilities. In her Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (2008), Melinda Cooper takes up another prominent critical thread and comments on the increasing commodification of life in the proliferating industries of reproduction technologies and biomedical engineering (see also Franklin and Roberts 2006). Genetically modified food presents another such commercialised intervention into the processes of life (Zwart 2015; Simpson 2022). Beyond such important recognitions of the political consequences of a genetic view on life, the immense success and attraction of a genetic definition of life, as well as its many formulations and influences, has been the subject of excellent studies in the fields of science studies and the philosophy and history of biology (see especially Evelyn Fox Keller’s Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines (2002), Lily E. Kay’s Who Wrote the Book of Life: A History of the Genetic Code (2000) and John Dupré’s Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (2012)). Accounts by geneticists and Nobel laureates who were directly involved in the recent advances in genetic science further emphasise the centrality of the notion of life for the genetic innovations of the current age (see Michel Morange’s Life Explained (2008) or Paul Nurse’s What Is Life? Understanding Biology in Five Steps (2020)). In literary and cultural studies, however, this centrality of life for the genetic shift in much contemporary thinking has largely gone unnoticed. Literature and genetics is a thriving field of scholarship.2 In her Narrative in the Age of the Genome: Genetic Worlds (2021), Lara Choksey traces the challenge of genomic science for narrative traditions built on liberal humanism and describes the various effects of genomics on representations of the self, racism, sexuality and gender, as well as economic and environmental crises. Josie Gill’s Biofictions: Race, Genetics and the 2  Major recent publications include: Jay Clayton: Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture (2003); Everett Hamner: Editing the Soul: Science and Fiction in the Genome Age (2017); Josie Gill: Biofictions: Race, Genetics and the Contemporary Novel (2020); Clare Hanson: Genetics and the Literary Imagination (2020); Lara Choksey: Narrative in the Age of the Genome: Genetic Worlds (2021); Sherryl Vint: Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction (2021); Jerome De Groot: Double Helix History: Genetics and the Past (2023).

 INTRODUCTION 

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Contemporary Novel (2020) also emphasises the interrelation of race and genetics in cultural narratives appropriating biological science. Gill’s stress on the centrality of the novel form in the cultural signification of genetic science is an important reference for my own argument about the unique formal predisposition of the novel to engage the discursive and epistemic complexity inherent in genetic visions of life. Clare Hanson’s Genetics and the Literary Imagination (2020) is concerned with the reductionist logic of many genetic theories and reconstructs how this alienated authors in their thinking about the implications of genetic science for such staples of literary fiction as identity, agency and morality. Only with the arrival of post-genomic concepts of genomic dynamism and epigenetics, Hanson claims, did fiction and genetics find more common ground. Sherryl Vint’s Biopolitical Futures in Twenty-First-Century Speculative Fiction (2021) uses speculative fiction to highlight the biotechnological and biopolitical commodification of biological processes that marks one of the most incisive shifts in Western thinking about economic value and the labouring body. Vint’s posthumanist perspective employs a conception of life that focuses on biology as an engineering science in order to account for the increasing blurring of living and inert matter demanded by the new biopolitical regime. In all of the studies above the epochal reconceptualisation of life itself through genetic paradigms and practices either lingers at the edge of their analyses or implicitly underlies their evocation of the age of the genome. My own book sheds light on a plethora of previously overlooked aesthetic and conceptual innovations produced by the tension Hanson identifies between the traditional humanist narratives of the novel and the reductionist ideas and interventionist practices generated by genetic science. In most cases, the novel will be shown to not simply embrace the new genetic propositions but to appropriate and critically examine them. Foregrounding the multifaceted impact of the genetic concept of life on the novel, and the various responses it elicits, this book gives centre stage to one of the key ideas of our time and the narratological and formal effects it produces. This perspective reveals a multitude of genetic imaginaries that previous studies have so far neglected to investigate, from a new genetic genre of life writing to an aesthetics of planetary life in the process of transformation. Repositioning genetic responses to age-old questions about the nature of life from the neglected periphery to the limelight of scholarly concern, this book reveals how the novel’s manifold engagements with genetic

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ideas, structures and social, political and planetary implications unfold from the primary attraction of a new and encompassing understanding of life itself. In the following chapters, I present readings of select novels from Margaret Atwood, A.  S. Byatt, Simon Mawer and Ian McEwan. These novels stand out for their exemplary engagement with a genetic vision of life. They represent a cluster of conceptual and formal responses to this new vision that can be traced, in more or less accentuated ways, in too large a body of novels for me to include. I try where possible to make references to additional examples of what I hold to constitute a major new trend in the novel. I have to acknowledge that my chosen corpus of novels exclusively represents a Western perspective on life in genetic fiction. I have selected these novels because I hold them to be exceptionally rich examples of an epistemic and aesthetic refiguration of the novel’s key conflicts and concerns. But genetic perspectives in the novel are of course not exhausted by Western perspectives; quite to the contrary, as I have argued elsewhere, the novel is a particularly potent form for the encounter of non-Western and Western genetic imaginaries (Hamann-Rose 2021a). It is my hope that the exemplary case studies collected here pave the way for an ever-­ expanding investigation of how genetic discourses of life have reshaped the novel within and across cultural spaces and traditions. My primary focus throughout this book is to show how the novel’s exploration of life has been transformed by genetics. As the following chapters will outline, this transformation of the novel affects how it deals with central questions of social and cultural existence such as the formation of individual and communal identities. In the history of genetics, propositions about how a genetic understanding of life impacts issues of individual freedom and social organisation have often been highly controversial, especially in the context of race and gender. Again and again, reductive and misguided genetic accounts have been offered to justify entrenched social differences, overwhelmingly to the detriment of those already deprived of agency. Highlighting discriminatory narratives fuelled by biological reductionism is therefore crucial to my project. At the same time, this book is not specifically about such genetic discourses of race, gender or disability, even though their critical discussion informs my individual readings. These issues are hugely important and others have analysed them much more comprehensively (see, for instance, Nelkin and Lindee 1995, Hanson 2013, Gill 2020, Choksey 2021). More importantly, however, these issues are not at the forefront of my argument

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because I trace how the novel engages the foundational assumptions about genetics which give rise to genetic explanations of social life in the first place. In the frame of the novel, genetics is continually confronted with other conceptions of life, from established humanist and religious accounts of human development to various other personal as well as philosophical perspectives on the “patterns of life” traced, questioned and reconfigured by the novel. My approach to capturing this renegotiation of life in the novel through genetic science is twofold and combines a strong historicist outlook with a strong interest in the novel’s formal responses to a genetic logic of the living.

Genetics in the Novel: Materiality and Representation A key concern for the novel in the age of genetics is the relation between material phenomena and their representation. This relation is arguably foundational to the contemplation of art as such, going back to Aristotelian notions of mimesis, and of linguistic systems more generally. The rise of genetic explanations of life, however, has thrust this perennially troubled relation between word and thing, meaning and matter, to the forefront of the novel’s reflection on life. There are two principal reasons for this. The first is that genetic discourses of life have re-emphasised the material human body—as individual being as well as generational conduit—as a core source of meaning. For when biological processes become central to larger cultural debates about the organisation of human—and nonhuman lives—this challenges the novel to revisit its modes of representing biological materiality. In this book, I analyse major ways in which the novel has taken on this challenge. In Chap. 2, I address the question that arises in this context about what it means to tell a story of a human life that integrates the biological into the literary conventions of the biographical. Here, I draw on Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf (1997) to outline what I describe as the new genre of fictional genetic life writing. In Chap. 5, I turn to Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003–2013) to explore the search for an aesthetics of planetary life that emerges as crucial to contemplate the all-encompassing threat of global environmental crisis. In her trilogy, Atwood images an aesthetics of life informed by genetics that traces the various interrelations and levels of responsibility that bind together her vision of the totality of life forms. In Chaps. 3 and 4, I pursue

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what possibly amounts to materiality’s ultimate entanglement with artistic representation: in my discussion of Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (1997) and Saturday (2005) and A.  S. Byatt’s so-called quartet of novel (1978–2002), I outline their explorations of, respectively, genetic-­ evolutionary predispositions for narrative and a vision of aesthetic organicism founded on the continuity of genetic and human languages. The second reason why genetics has renewed the novel’s interest in matters of representation are the representational aesthetics already shaping the genetic discourse itself. In its attempts to articulate knowledge about human development and health, genetic science relies on intricate, historically moulded modes of enquiry and representation. If there is one thing the concerted efforts of science studies, the history and philosophy of science, as well as historical epistemology have demonstrated, it is that scientific knowledge is highly mediated in its access to the natural world. Within the frame of the novel, therefore, diverse modes and systems of representing life converge. This convergence of the discourse of genetics and the aesthetics of the novel sometimes, as Hanson has suggested, takes the form of a competition between different ways of perceiving the world. More frequently, as this book shows, this convergence also produces compelling new aesthetics that reimagine life in the novel. As will be apparent from these remarks, my analysis of the novel’s representations of genetics’ propositions about our material lives combines historicist and formalist methodologies. These two approaches have frequently been placed in opposition, and historical cultural criticism has by far outnumbered more formal investigations in the last decades. In this section, I will briefly explain why I hold that historical and formal methodologies are not oppositional but must in fact be conjoined if one sets out to trace the ways in which genetic notions of life have been reshaped by the aesthetics of the novel. The question of art’s reference to its empirical surrounding has proved most divisive for historical and formal perspectives. Much of the aesthetic’s radical work, Isobel Armstrong argues, has been neglected on the basis of a “hermeneutics of suspicion”, which associates form with the exclusionary politics that has for so long made art solely a realm of the privileged (2000, p. 1). Focusing on the novel’s formal negotiation of genetics within such an exclusionary aesthetic ideology would extract the aesthetics from the political ramifications of the novel’s historical genetic references. Armstrong, in contrast, outlines a theory of the aesthetic that does not attempt to separate empirical reference from representation. Instead, she

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locates the origins of aesthetics precisely at that point where empirical historical reality confronts the possibilities of its representation (ibid., p. 17). In this way, a work’s aesthetics actively participate in making sense of its empirical outside while transforming it at the same time. Re-emphasising the aesthetic without relinquishing the artwork’s imbrication in its historical discourses and social politics has been a characteristic feature of much of the “New Formalisms” that have grown in visibility since the turn of the millennium (Bogel 2013, pp. 2–5).3 As both Bogel and Armstrong point out, this return to form is one in magnitude since analyses of form and aesthetics have never gone away, nor has aesthetic production clandestinely ceased (ibid., pp. 2–3, Armstrong 2000, p. 2). Bogel rightly cautions, “[i]f historical arguments too often minimize or dilute formalist assumptions and achievements, contemporary formalism must not replay that bias in another key” (2013, p. 5). Complicating rather than rejecting referentiality is then key to many new formalist agendas. In this study, I similarly argue for the need to consider form and historical discourse together. Much of the formal innovations in the novels I discuss remain indexically related to the originary genetic propositions they engage. Inversely, the aesthetics of the texts shape how genetic ideas and practices are portrayed, and a formal analysis reveals the way in which this portrayal is constructed, as well as exploring the conditions upon which value and meaning are attributed to genetic conceptions in the social-affective sphere of the novels’ lifeworlds. Discovering how the novel refracts genetic discourses and evaluates their real and imagined impacts on human and nonhuman life I hold to be one of the crucial contributions literary scholarship can make to the larger debates about the interplay between biological science and cultural meaning. I argue that a focus on the formal representations of genetic explanations of life in the novel is central to this process. I agree with Paula L. Moya when she states that the principal task of the literary critic in what she calls “socioformal” readings is to show “how the thematic and formal features of a text mediate the historically situated cultural and political tensions expressed in a work of literature” (2016, p. 10). At the same time, I contend that reading for an artwork’s contribution to a larger cultural 3  As Marjorie Levinson outlines, there are also strands within what she calls “normative new formalism” that strongly insist on the boundaries between text and empirical environment, just as there is a strong tradition in new historicism to engage form as productive of historical meaning (2007, pp. 559–560, 563).

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discussion about genetic science and technology need not diminish the aesthetic innovations the work produces in the process. New formalist approaches, as Marjorie Levinson outlines (2007), have been contesting the status of art in literary studies if formal scholarship considers all kinds of texts. I hope that my interpretations of the novels in the following chapters exemplify that while I do not hold form to be exclusive to art, formal analysis can be as revealing of social criticism as of a new aesthetic. Caroline Levine’s understanding of form in Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015) has been particularly influential in bridging aesthetic and real-world patterns of signification and meaning. Levine’s perspective is particularly attractive because she argues that certain forms exert a shaping influence beyond the confines of the literary text, which is made to intimately resonate, quite literally, with its social and cultural— and, I might add, scientific—contexts. These forms are only ever temporarily stable and produce new meanings and realities through their unpredictable collisions in texts and society (2015, pp. 21–24). Levine’s work has been enthusiastically received but has also encountered substantive criticism, from the charge of a lacking sense of hierarchy in the organisation of forms (Tucker 2006) to a reluctance to further engage the social complexity revealed through formal collisions (Long 2017). I find Levine’s work most fruitful in my study when I apply her sense of formal analogies on a smaller scale than she seems to intend. In my third chapter, I identify in McEwan’s Enduring Love and Saturday formal analogies between discourses of genetic development and the narrative emplotment of the stories. Focusing on genetic and literary representations of chance, I draw on one of Levine’s central formal categories—the whole—in order to show how the novels think through the notion of aesthetic unity by way of the notion of genetic teleology built into the organism. McEwan’s aesthetics are revealed as informed by historically specific genetic discourses, underlining my argument about the necessity of combining historical and formal analysis. At the same time, the novels’ aesthetics, colliding genetic and aesthetic forms, are shown to enact a complex interrogation of the genetic determinism the 1990s so recurrently ascribed the new genetic view of life. The novel is exceptionally well suited to produce such critical social knowledge about new propositions about life. Following Mikhail Bakhtin, the novel is generically dialogic in form and thus able to test social and scientific discourses against each other (Bakhtin 1981, pp.  273–279); it therefore offers a multi-perspectival view of genetic understandings of life. A major consequence of this formal affordance is the genre’s capacity for

 INTRODUCTION 

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critique. Charlotte Sleigh, for instance, argues that the novel is uniquely able to probe moral and cultural consequences of scientific propositions through “modelling their outworking in real life” (2011, p.  15).4 The thick cultural contextualisation of science in the novel is also the reason, as Jay Clayton has importantly argued, why literary explorations of science, and their analyses in literary scholarship, are distinctly well-equipped to participate in urgent bioethical and science policy discussions about new and emerging biotechnologies (Clayton 2007; see also Squier 2004 and Hamann-Rose 2022). Such social critique of the life sciences through fiction is especially striking in the novel since, as Arne De Boever points out, the form is deeply informed by the biopolitical institutions that coincided with its formation (2013). As De Boever adds, however, the novel recurrently resists against “its biopolitical origins” (ibid., p.  10). The novel’s formal flexibility, together with its representational scope and affective-­ epistemological contextualisation, mark its particular value for exploring present and potential impacts of genetic science and practice on culture and society. The novel has produced the by far most complex cultural treatment of the new genetic conception of life. The mid-1990s witnessed a major increase in novels that negotiate competing discourses of genetics with unprecedented sophistication, both with regard to their scientific subject matter and their multifaceted geneticist characters via whom the central societal and philosophical issues surrounding genetics and genetic engineering are brought to the fore.5 These “science novels” fulfil an important socio-cultural function in what Ulrich Beck has called “late, or reflexive modernity”, an era paradoxically shaped by society’s growing scepticism towards science and its simultaneously increasing reliance on scientific knowledge and technology (Mayer 2016; see also Schaffeld 2016 4  How exactly and to what extent novels can envision such scenarios of potential consequences is too large a topic to be discussed here in any detail. One exemplary position in this debate is Tilmann Köppe’s notion that fictional texts are able to produce “practical knowledge” by confronting readers with different possible evaluations of a given scenario, thereby challenging readers to reconsider their own positions (Köppe 2008, p. 60). See also HamannRose (2021b). 5  How new a trend it is to find complex characterisations of scientists in fiction, whose work practices and spaces are also thematised, is evident from a claim made by Gillian Beer as late as 1987: “We shall not find in literature widespread reference to the ordinary doings of scientists. We shall look in vain for novels and plays set in the laboratory, unless it is a laboratory at the moment of war” (1990, p. 794).

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and Kirchhofer and Roxburgh 2016). By imagining consequences of genetic technology and by probing implications of genetic knowledge, the novels considered in this study renegotiate life through genetics. The result, however, is not a one-sided literary “geneticisation” of life, that is, a retelling of life in genetic terms.6 Rather, the texts enact a critical and frequently self-reflexive investigation, by a multiplicity of voices, into the question and implications of genetic discourses. The texts’ genetic imaginaries and metaphors defamiliarise established ideas about life as well as highlight the extent to which concepts from genetic science have already been firmly established in contemporary cultural thinking and discourse. In its turn, the molecular understanding of life has in its multiple guises challenged the novel to find new forms of exploring the biological, philosophical and socio-cultural complexity of these vital discourses. In my analysis of how the novel responds to the new genetic conceptions of life, I rely on the extensive body of scholarship that has elucidated the discipline’s own representational aesthetics. In her impressive 2002 study Making Sense of Life, Evelyn Fox Keller has demonstrated how important these aesthetics were for the success of the genetic view of life. Keller investigates the epistemological conditions that enabled different concepts over the last century to be accepted as explanations of life in biology. More generally, as Mark A. Bedau explicates, definitions of life, also in philosophical traditions not directly informed by biology, have commonly suggested a list of criteria an organism or entity must meet in order to be regarded as alive, such as self-organisation, metabolism, autopoesis, an ability to evolve, or a sense of teleology (2012, pp. 1–2; see also Gánti 2010). In contrast, singling out the work of genes to explain life’s essential processes, Keller concludes, became so widely accepted because the metaphors utilised in the genetic discourse, such as “information” and “book of life”, satisfied researchers and quickly found traction in the public sphere (2002, pp. 3–7). More specifically, much of the success of these and other genetic metaphors, like the genetic “blueprint” or “instruction manual”, derives, in Lily Kay’s excellent phrase, from a “conflation of analogy and ontology”, that is, from treating these metaphors as literal representations of genetic materiality (2000, p. 331). Kay’s Who Wrote the Book of Life is a supreme example of a poststructuralist enquiry into the central metaphors shaping twentieth-century genetic discourse and practice that explicitly “does not 6

 For the concept of “geneticisation” see Lippman (1991).

 INTRODUCTION 

13

deny that objects such as genes or proteins exist external to thought” (2000, pp. xvii–xviii). Poststructuralist criticism concentrates on the cultural-­discursive production of scientific knowledge yet usually recognises, despite frequent accusations of the contrary, that such forms of knowledge engage a material reality beyond linguistic representation. The novel emerges as a prime site for dispersing the genetic metaphors’ conflation of analogy and ontology, self-reflexively noting the epistemological and aesthetic processes at play in genetic discourse, while also forging new metaphoric connections and meanings from the scientific discipline’s genetic imaginaries. The power of the genetic metaphors helps to explain the incredible proliferation of genetic explanations for social and cultural phenomena in public discourses. It is unlikely that genetic theories about biological life would have become as prevalent without the power of the images shaping its representation. Genetic metaphors such as of a genetic “book of life”, which problematically implies an ability to simply “read” and also “edit” living processes, were instrumental in popularising genetic discourses and proliferating genetic explanations. This power of the genetic image to explain and convince dovetails with a highly efficient reductionism. Siddhartha Mukherjee calls the gene “one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science” (2016, p. 9). The gene is dangerous because, like the atom and the byte, it “begins its life as a rather abstract scientific concept, but grows to invade multiple human discourses— thereby transforming culture, society, politics, and language” (ibid., p. 9). Mukherjee traces the appeal of the gene as the basis of life itself back to biological reductionism: because biology is “inherently hierarchically organized: understanding the smallest part is crucial to understanding the whole”, the gene increasingly became the explanatory source for an ever-­ widening sphere of phenomena, far beyond the limits of the discipline of biology (ibid. p. 12). The Human Genome Project (HGP), the multi-billion dollar effort to compile a complete sequence of the human genome, provides an example of the gene’s profound scientific and socio-cultural impact. The visions and discourses associated with the project were amplified by the media coverage on occasion of the HGP’s completion of a first draft of the human genome in June 2000, in time for the centenary of the foundation of genetics as a discipline. The following example from the Guardian is particularly awash with contemporary sentiments about the magnitude of the project:

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Scientists have just finished deciphering the genome—the book of human life. Their DNA blueprint will change everything. The once undreamed-of knowledge has already begun to alter agriculture, forensic science, archaeology, biology and medicine. In the next decades it will fuel new multi-billion pound industries based on the software of life. It will begin to improve human health and prolong human life. It could even begin to dictate the future, and shape the lives of the as-yet-unborn. It will begin to alter—in the most profound fashion—the way humans think about themselves, and all life on the planet. (Radford 2000)

The life that is affected by the genetic breakthrough of the HGP, so the article argues, is both biological and social to the point of including “all life on the planet”. Drawing on various images of the genome—“the book of human life”, “blueprint”, “software of life”—the article imbues the notion of life with both biological and socio-cultural meaning by pointing to the multiple areas in which the new knowledge will find application. Genetics is cast to offer superior insight into an almost infinite spectrum of the phenomena of life and a power to change and predict them at will. The HGP, very much a product of 1990s genetics, was characterised by its monumental technical scope and its primary focus on genes. In this regard, it followed contemporary genetics’ molecular dogma and worked under the assumption that the essential processes of life, including the transmission and variation of traits, and the stability and survival of the organism, could be explained via genes (King et al. 2013; Morange 1998, p. 1). This molecular outlook on life is discernibly marked by reductionism. The 1990s then, unsurprisingly, witnessed a flood of publications, both from within and without the discipline, criticising the notions of genetic essentialism and determinism that arose from reductionist genetic explanations, especially of cultural aspects of life. Dorothy Nelkin and Susan Lindee’s The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon, Ruth Hubbard and Elijah Wald’s Exploding the Gene Myth and Richard Lewontin’s Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA are prominent examples of that trend. Critical examinations of the real and fantastical claims and promises of the medico-economic genetic enterprise continue to appear regularly today, alongside works propounding promises of a genetic future. Overly deterministic accounts of human genetics have been widely debunked by now, however. The general opinion nowadays both in professional and informed lay circles tends towards a non-essentialist understanding of the role of one’s genetic constitution, exemplified in the

 INTRODUCTION 

15

widespread rejection of a genetic basis for race, individual aptitude and behaviour (Marks 2002; Koenig et al. 2008; Condit 2019). Or if a genetic contribution to behaviour and talent is proposed, it is considered as only one factor among many, including cultural, economic and environmental influences (Harden 2021). A focus on environmental influences on genome expressions has been explicitly foregrounded by the rise of research into epigenetics, a new framing of the nature-nurture debate from within the discipline of genetics (Hanson 2015). A more moderate view of the role of DNA in the body and its interaction with the environment has thus been formed, attuned to the specific ways in which genes can be observed to make their mark on individual lives and society, from medical single-gene disorders and other, more complex genetic associations with human diseases, agriculture and GMOs (genetically modified organisms) to economic and law-­enforcement contexts in which genetic markers of identity, kinship and risk for certain afflictions have very real and far-reaching consequences. Genetic perspectives and explanations of life thus continue to shape individual and collective lives. At the same time, the status of the gene within the larger genetic discourses has been repeatedly called into question. The results of the HGP already undermined the reductionist genetic dogma by finding much less genes in the human genome than expected. Rather than providing definitive answers, the project has predominantly posed new questions about the functioning of the genome in an ever more complex network with other cellular mechanisms (Keller 2000, p. 5). This further challenged the concept of the gene which had already gone through major revisions. In the early days of molecular genetics, the so-­ called one gene-one protein hypothesis, which gave rise to the one gene-­ one trait formula, had  suggested a very clear causality between gene function and its effect, the idea being that one gene codes for a specific protein which then triggers a plethora of other mechanisms within the organism, all taking their cue from the gene.7 Following the completion of the HGP, the concept of “post-genomics” suggested a research agenda that pointed away from the gene-centrism of the HGP and towards a systems-approach to integrate the gene into the 7  One of the major early challenges to this hypothesis arrived in the form of François Jacob’s and Jacques Monod’s discovery that not all genes are directly involved with the production of proteins but that there are in fact “structural” and “regulator” genes, the latter regulating the function of the former (Keller 2000, p. 55).

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ever more complex network of all the biochemical processes in an organism (Richardson and Stevens 2015, p.  3). In the “postgenomic age”, Richardson and Stevens assert, the concept of the gene as the central unit of life has been “radically undermined” (ibid., p. 3; see also Keller 2000, p.  5). What has emerged from this is a stress on the complexity of the organisation of an organism’s life. In light of this, John Dupré suggests that life should be understood less as an entity or condition and points to the “profoundly processual nature of living things” (2012, p. 8). Recently, in Addy Pross’s definition of life, the principle of replication assumes central status, with genetics and other biochemical processes interacting to achieve the astounding feat of maintaining the stability of the living organism (Pross 2016). Within such complex vital processes, it is unclear whether the concept of the gene, with its connotations of stability and explanatory primacy over life, should not better be replaced by new concepts and new terms, as Keller called for in 2000 (Keller 2000, p. 147). At the same time, Keller concedes that there are many reasons why it seems unlikely that the gene will be substituted with another concept in the near future: “The image of genes as clear and distinct causal agents, constituting the basis of all aspects of organismic life, has become so deeply embedded in both popular and scientific thought that it will take far more than good intentions, diligence, or conceptual critique to dislodge it” (ibid., p. 136). While scientifically the gene has grown ever more contested, the concept’s continuing and even growing cultural appeal testifies to its impact on thinking about life beyond the discipline of biology (Richardson and Stevens 2015, p. 233; Müller-Wille and Rheinberger 2009, p.  10; Dupré 2012, p.  52; Mukherjee 2016). These remarks might seem to indicate a growing rift between genetic and literary perspectives on genetic discourses of life. Intimations of conceptual differences between fiction and science inevitably resurrect the spectre of C.  P. Snow’s notion of the two-cultures (Clarke and Rossini 2011, p. xv). While I of course recognise the differences in truth claims, methods and contexts between genetics and the novel, I believe them to share a fundamental interest in exploring the material and communal organisation of life, not to mention their shared keen investment in modes of representation. Rather than manifesting two separate cultures, I see them as two related if intricately different perspectives on a shared problem. What is more, their formal and discursive convergence in the novel produces a powerful composite perspective that neither could have

 INTRODUCTION 

17

articulated on their own. In this I follow canonical assumptions from the field of literature and science, especially Gillian Beer who convincingly suggests to view the status of scientific knowledge in literature not along strict binaries of true versus fictional but introduces the productive concept of “fugitive appropriation” to conceive of the transfer of ideas from a scientific to a literary context (Beer 1990, p. 797). Beer notes: “scientific ideas and methods are at their most powerful in literary works when it is possible to loosen the terminology and punningly transgress the terms provided” (ibid., p. 787). The novels in this study routinely evidence such transgressions of genetic concepts by embedding them into new contexts of meaning and signification. Highlighting the crucial role of metaphors in such transgressive processes of transformation, Michael Whitworth remarks: “Metaphors abstracted from science are no longer wholly identical to science, nor are they wholly divorced from it” (2001, p.  7). The concept with which to envision best the relation between genetic knowledge and the literary text seems therefore that of a continuum of reference to the original scientific context rather than a binary separation of scientific and non-scientific or factual and fictional. This spectrum acknowledges that genetic ideas and concepts are no longer identical to their epistemic form in the scientific context once they have been transferred into fiction. Yet at the same it underscores their continued scientific reference, albeit in a state of tension as to their status as scientific fact. As a consequence, the genetic knowledge in, say, Mendel’s Dwarf is neither to be understood as being identical to its articulation in the institutions of genetic science nor “wholly divorced from it”. My conception of this shared continuum between genetics and the novel is controversial, however. Didier Fassin, in his Life: A Critical User’s Manual (2018), writes insightfully about the philosophical history of the concept of life, its contemporary political significance as a reflector of human inequality and the value attached to human life as an abstract concept. But when he argues that understandings of life in biology and the novel, especially since the molecularisation of biology, have become “irreconcilable” in their differences, his argument falls short of the aesthetic and discursive reality of the novel (2018, p.  10). He identifies two distinct “dimensions of life” which he ascribes the novel and biology respectively. He suggests two sets of monikers for this binary, either “biology” versus “biography” or “naturalist” versus “humanist” (ibid., p. 10). These binary concepts, according to Fassin, no longer sufficiently overlap as to allow a fruitful conversation: “The life studied by the bio-physicist no longer bears

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any relation to that imagined by the novelist, even if some novelists incorporate biological elements into the fabric of their narratives, and some biologists venture, with varying success, into literature” (ibid., p. 10). The novels investigated in this study contradict Fassin’s argument. The dualism he outlines provides valuable heuristic concepts for my analysis of the novels, but it is the hallmark of these texts that they aesthetically enact various modes of integrating the purported dualism between biological and biographical approaches to life. Simon Mawer’s novel, Mendel’s Dwarf, discussed in the second chapter, serves as a paradigmatic example of a meaningful conversation between cultural and biological conceptions of life, which, I argue, the text embodies by inaugurating the genre of fictional genetic autobiography. Fassin himself concedes that “the multitude of meanings encompassed by the word itself” intermingle and overlap (2018, p. 5). Richard Toellner similarly argues that it is impossible for the biological concept of life to fully escape the plethora of meanings and associations from beyond the purely scientific (2004).8 Yet while Fassin interprets this multiplicity of meanings, ever-oscillating between life as lived existence and biological process, as a problem for the philosopher’s mission of identifying a clear conception of life, I see it as a uniquely fertile ground for the literary imaginaries of genetic life explored in this book. It is, after all, a defining feature of literary negotiations of science that they inevitably infuse scientific ideas with social, cultural, political, ethical and even erotic meanings. The particular characteristic of literary treatments of genetic life is that the notion of life is already inherently embedded in productively converging contexts of meaning and imagination. However, to identify specific convergences between biological and socio-cultural contexts and discourses in the novels I investigate, I will draw on two sets of concepts to distinguish between the different dimensions of life. Firstly, I will heuristically utilise Fassin’s categories of biological and biographical interpretations of life to differentiate between those aspects in the texts which either evoke explicitly reductionist molecular understandings of the processes of life or, respectively, those parts of life 8  These everyday meanings of “life” can be broken down into three interrelating categories: first, life as a state of being and in contrast to death, to which such questions as the nature and meaning of life can be related; second, life as in everyday practices and actions, which corresponds to such issues as life’s adequate description and classification; and third, life as a period of time and source of the question of life’s origin (Toellner 2004, pp. 97–98).

 INTRODUCTION 

19

commonly framed by biographical accounts of an individual’s life story. The latter category of biography, by association, also includes life’s ethical dimension, exemplified, for instance, in the question of what constitutes a good or fulfilled life. In addition, I will draw on the concepts of zoe and bios, which are largely identical with the categories of biological and biographical but boast a longer and more complex philosophical history. Aristotle distinguished between “biological life (zoe ̄) and political life (bios)” (Mills 2011, p. 124). In this conception, as Hannah Arendt elaborates in The Human Condition, bios is similar to the biographical as it denotes the “events which ultimately can be told as a story, establish a biography” (1958, p. 97). Zoe, in contrast, demarcates “mere” life, that is, the basic “biological process of the living organism” (ibid., pp. 97–98). What is more, it is zoe understood as “life itself” which not only characterises the fundamental and inescapable “biological process of the human body”, Arendt explicates, but through the shared processes of life itself “man remains related to all other living organisms” (ibid., p. 2). Arendt, and Giorgio Agamben after her, relied on this differentiation of bios and zoe to argue for the detrimental consequences of separating a political life out of the physiological realm of the living. As a result, Arendt argues, a hierarchy between “mere” labour and more recognised work evolves which denies all those access to political power who cannot transcend the rudimentary level of labouring to survive (1958, pp. 7, 98). Agamben, in Homo Sacer, pursues a similar argument through his concept of “bare life”, which, as Arne De Boever explains, is “neither zoe ̄nor bios, but rather the politicised form of natural life” which arises when the issue of an individual’s most basic survival becomes a matter of political power (2011, p. 30). Both Arendt and Agamben critically examine political convergences of bios and zoe, thereby demonstrating that their distinction is always fluid. Or, as Arendt more sinisterly notes, the human condition is defined by the “constant, unending fight against the processes of growth and decay through which nature forever invades the human artifice” (1958, p. 100). In fact, already in Aristotle’s original theorisation of bios and zoe the two categories overlapped as bios contained a proto-biological concern with the differences between individual organisms (Charles 2010). The geneticisation of life has brought about a new, incisive convergence between bios and zoe, which is at the heart of the literary explorations of genetics analysed in this study. Sarah Franklin has lucidly written about the multiplicity of new “ways in which life itself can be owned, capitalised and patented” in the genome age (2000, p.  184). The concept of life itself

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denotes a category of both general and individual significance. It encompasses all living organisms and marks the sphere in which both the individual and the totality of living beings are renegotiated through the discourses and interventionist practices of a genetic conception of life. Franklin notes how bio-commercial and larger cultural appropriations of genetic knowledge and practice have affected a rethinking and, through technologies and imaginaries of genetic engineering, a remodelling of human and nonhuman life. As a result, “life itself emerges as a contested template of cultural values and social practice” (ibid., p. 215). For most of its history, the novel has been a key forum in which this contest between different values and social imaginaries about life has been played out. What is more, throughout this history, the novel has engaged biological conceptions of life as part of this contest of values and socio-cultural imaginaries. To support this claim, I will briefly sketch the literary history of life and genetics.

A Very Short Literary History of Life and Genetics The Romantic period marks the beginning of a literary contemplation of the then nascent scientific project to define the nature of life. As Sharon Ruston elucidates: “By the year 1800 a new concept of life had emerged, likening animals to human and even plant life. For the first time, life was considered a universal state, and the political ramifications of this idea are seen clearly in the literature of the period” (2005, p.  3; see also Berns 2017, pp. 140, 151–53). One salient reason for the widespread literary engagement with the new scientific debate about an encompassing nature of life—and for the literary tendency to politicise this debate—was that life as a concept strongly reverberated in both scientific and social contexts (Ruston 2005, p.  2; Mitchell 2013, pp.  4–5), just as its genetic understanding does today. While “the search for a principle of life can be seen as a motive for much of the scientific work of the period” (Ruston 2005, p.  4), Romantic scientists clashed over mechanistic and vitalist understandings of vitality. Yet even prominent proponents of a mechanistic view of life frequently displayed some affinity with the vitalist assumption that the true nature of life lay outside the grasp of positivist science (Richards 2002, pp. 3–4; Ruston 2005, pp. 12–13). Vitalist ideas had considerable impact on literary aesthetics beyond providing a wealth of new metaphors and allegories, most notably by engendering the idea of aesthetic forms as expressive of and imbued with animation. This life of poetic forms, and

 INTRODUCTION 

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the life of metaphors in particular, fashioned art as a direct extension of the artist but was also taken to explain how a work of poetry unfolded its own generative powers in society and culture (Ruston 2005, pp. 7, 163). Goethe’s theoretical vision of an “Urpflanze”, a kind of original plant from which all others emerged, not only illustrates vitalist Romantic science but is explicitly addressed in Byatt’s quartet. Robert Richards explains: “Goethe’s theory, and the tradition it spawned, arose out of a decidedly Romantic sensibility”, which, in a top-down manner, took empirical observations of living organisms as proof of a pre-formed theory of an animating life-force (2002, p. 2). In Byatt’s quartet, then, Goethe’s vitalist “Ur-plant” is re-framed through genetic discourse, replacing its immaterial original life-force with a biochemical vision of life and DNA as the universal, bottom-up source of all living matter. Yet, as my analysis of Byatt’s quartet will show, Romantic notions of a life of poetry continue to resonate—via George Eliot—in what I call Byatt’s self-conscious organic forms, which self-reflexively embody the conflicted ontologies of genetic metaphors of life. Romantic and modern molecular biology are further connected, despite their very different assumptions about life, by similar questions. “Before the nineteenth century”, Ruston points out, “life had been considered the body’s natural condition, and death the mysterious and unaccountable Other. This changed as Romantic scientists recognized that the state all matter tended towards was that of death and dissolution, and life became the subject of scientific speculation” (2005, p. 4). In like manner, in 1944, Erwin Schrödinger in his book What is Life? asked how life could preserve its remarkable stability across innumerable generations in the face of the second law of thermodynamics and its principle of the entropic dispersion of energy inherent in all physical matter. As a physicist, Schrödinger suggested that the mechanisms behind life’s stability were down to crystallised particles. His ideas proved paramount in inspiring biologists and biochemists in the 1950s, among them Watson and Crick, to understand the processes of life in chemical terms, thereby preparing the ground for the geneticisation of life in the second half of the twentieth century (Keller 2000, pp. 21–25). This molecular view of life contrasts Romantic theories about a vital force keeping living matter from declining into death. Molecular biology, however, retains the Romantic focus on the processes inherent in life as opposed to using death as Other to define life. This is why in this study I am similarly unconcerned with death and theories of life heavily invested in the notion of death, even though it is technically

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true—a technicality admittedly profound—that death demarcates the concrete limits of all living things. Molecular biology’s material emphasis on the gene as the foundational unit of all life contradicts, to my mind, Robert Mitchell’s claim that a “vitalist turn seems to be under way” in contemporary biology and, as a result, in contemporary literature drawing on biological ideas (2013, p.  1). Mitchell locates this alleged new vitalism, which re-emphasises Romantic vitality, in “an understanding of ‘life itself’ as a source of mystery and provocation for thought and experimentation”, inspiring in both scientists and artists “a search for new concepts and experiences” (ibid., pp. 2, 3). There is a similarity in the way Mitchell describes the epistemological and aesthetic function of a conception of life that provokes new insights and experimental practices by virtue of its elusiveness and the epistemological role of metaphors in biology, as described by Keller and Kay with regard to the “gene” or the “book of life”. However, the slippages between biological metaphors of life and their real-world referents, which have proved as problematic as advantageous in advancing molecular biology, have perpetuated and expanded a foundational molecular understanding of all living processes, rather than drawn their energy from an enigmatic notion of life external to science. A recourse to vitalism neglects that it is the encompassing molecular scope of the new definitions of life, not any mysterious elusion of scientific explanation, that has productively provoked recent aesthetic and epistemological innovation. Vitalism as a concept might be useful to describe contemporary developments in genetics and the novel in the context of new organisational paradigms emerging out of a post-genomic emphasis on cellular networks beyond the gene (Rabinow and Caduff 2006). Even these networks, however, champion complexity from a distinctly materialist perspective and their explicit literary impact is still to be recorded—although studies of literature and epigenetics have broken important ground in this area (Hanson 2015; Middleton 2015; Hanson 2020; Choksey 2021). Pross’s explanation of life through the principle of biochemical replication, as I have already mentioned, is inherently materialist despite its emphasis on complexity. In the different context of new information technology and artificial intelligence, as Mitchell himself points out, notions of machines as exhibiting living processes could be seen as a new form of posthumanist vitalism (see also Lash 2006). In that regard, fictional imaginations of posthuman machine life could be argued to re-engage Romantic vitality. However, Katherine Hayles, one of the key figures in theorising the

 INTRODUCTION 

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supposedly neo-vitalist view of information technology (Lash 2006), insists that there remains a significant difference between life in an organism and a computer: as she told me during a conference on posthumanist aesthetics in Aarhus, Denmark, in 2017, only one of the two runs on electricity. You can always pull the plug on the machine. The living machine is hence still a metaphor. Contemporary genetic fiction also reimagines other vitalist traditions through genetics. Conceptions of some kind of vitality in all matter, in fact, reach back to Aristotle but received major emphases in the Romantic period (Berns 2017, p. 152); and, as Ruth Livesey has shown, survived well into the nineteenth century in the early fiction of George Eliot and beyond. Like Eliot, who explored the ethical consequences of a vitalist understanding of the relatedness of all kinds of living beings (Livesey 2019, p.  133), Virginia Woolf has been observed to engage vitalism by depicting “an embodied attentiveness to surroundings and other sentient life forms” (Sultzbach 2016, p. 92). Both Eliot’s Victorian and Woolf’s modernist perspectives have been refashioned through genetic discourse, as this study will show. Eliot’s vitalist and ethical vision of inter-species kinship is replaced in Byatt’s quartet by a genetic account of human-­animal relatedness. As Byatt herself has commented: “Eliot sensed what DNA shows—that all living forms are quite clearly related” (Byatt 2000, p. 66). In McEwan’s intertextual reworking of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in his novel Saturday, he similarly substitutes Woolf’s modernist vitalism with a genetic understanding of life and species relations, an understanding that also characterises his novel Enduring Love. While in McEwan’s text the human figure is central, I argue that Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy then envisions a radically expanded genetic relatedness between human and nonhuman life and probes the limits of the anthropocentric limits of the novel form. The Victorian period is further remarkable for highlighting how a biologically informed view of life impacts associated assumptions about heredity and kinship. Darwin’s evolutionary theories appear to expunge any trace of vitalism from their causal understanding of life through natural selection (Morton 1984, p. 30). Victorian biology and Romantic vitalism are, however, not quite as antithetical as is often assumed. The principal reason for this vitalist return was the lack of a systematic explanation of the mechanism of heredity in Darwin’s evolutionary account of life (ibid., p. 25). It is precisely because of the importance of heredity for an evolutionary theory of the development of organismic life that the literary

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concerns with life and heredity so strongly converge in this period; without an explanation for the hereditary transmission of evolutionary variations, the theory of natural selection fails to account for why a variation in one generation would present an evolutionary advantage in the next. While a notion of hereditary stability and change is vital for Darwin’s theory of evolution to work, the absence of proven hereditary laws—only to be provided by Gregor Mendel—gave rise to considerable scientific and literary speculation. Theories of hereditary mechanisms majorly informed the eminent late-­ nineteenth-­century concerns with eugenics and evolutionary degeneration in both science and literature (Greenslade 1994; Morton 1984). Foreshadowing later twentieth-century interests in sociobiology and genetic determinism, which I will return to in my analysis of McEwan’s genetic fiction, nineteenth-century writers from Oscar Wilde and “T. H. Huxley to Zola found an almost hypnotic appeal in the prospect of reducing to simple laws even the most complicated patterns of inherited behaviour” (Morton 1984, p.  149). Thomas Hardy and Samuel Butler offer additional examples of writers deeply engaged with questions of heredity and a causalist understanding of life; Hardy, relying on August Weismann’s theories, pessimistically envisioned a hereditary tragedy in Tess of the D’Urbervilles whereas Butler, following a Lamarckian belief in the hereditary role of the environment, painted a more optimistic picture of future human life in The Way of All Flesh (ibid., pp. 176–77, 205). In contrast to McEwan, or Byatt—Hardy’s poem “Heredity” is reproduced in the quartet—neither Hardy, Butler nor any of the other nineteenth-­ century authors had at their disposal a clear understanding of hereditary mechanisms. Often, though not Hardy, they relied on a flawed sense of a “blended” heredity, derived from Darwin, Francis Galton and others, with detrimental consequences. The idea of offspring as an indeterminate blend of their parents, which allowed for the hereditary role of the environment, fuelled social, cultural and political anxieties about degeneration and gave eugenics movements credibility (Morton 1984, p. 145; see also Karschay 2015). The fundamental flaws underlying theories of eugenics and degeneration were only exposed by the rise of Mendel’s hereditary laws and the founding of the discipline of genetics in 1900. Nonetheless, eugenic thinking has survived well into the twentieth century, as Clare Hanson’s study of eugenics in post-war British literature amply evidences (Hanson 2013). Neither, as Morton points out, did the rise of Mendelian genetics put paid to literary imaginaries of heredity: “The truth is, rather, that after

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the establishment of Mendelism both speculative and purely literary interest in biological theory continued unabated” (1984, p. 213). The questions about the mechanisms of biological life and heredity that evolutionary biology had raised and which had spawned theories of degeneration and eugenics continued to engage novelistic explorations of genetics at the beginning of the twentieth century. Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is an example for an early twentieth-century depiction of eugenic practices, although framed here as the flawed enterprise Mendelian genetics had uncovered it to be (Morton 1984, p. 215). At the same time, there is a literary history of heredity, also relating back to the previous century, primarily concerned with heredity as ancestry, genealogy and kinship (Gilmartin 1998; Morgentaler 2000). In contemporary fiction, such familial and ancestral concerns with heredity and kinship find a new poetics in the metaphors and discourses of genetic science. In the first half of the twentieth century, explicit references to the only just emerging science of genetics remains limited predominantly to evolutionary themes in early science fiction. In these early twentieth-century works of science fiction (SF), growing out of evolutionary fantasies like H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), genetics at first “merely gave a new air of authenticity to an old storyline” (Clayton 2013, p. 326). Jay Clayton explains: Belief that survival of one species and the extinction of another vindicated the superiority of the winner had been a common confusion since Darwin’s day. Genetics allowed novelists to transpose the conflict inward. Rather than externalizing the struggle among species to interplanetary warfare, SF could bring the battle down to earth, as it were, shifting the strife to the personal realm and locating superiority in mental attributes. (Ibid., p. 326)

While genetic science brought about a significant shift in the level of evolutionary processes, the actual role of DNA in evolution remained uncertain well into the 1940s, which “left SF writers with two different mechanisms for imagining genetic change”, namely the nineteenth-­ century concepts of “eugenics and mutation” (Clayton 2013, p.  323). The association of genetics with these often negatively connoted remnants of the previous century contributed to a widespread “suspicion of genetic engineering” in the fiction of the time, which would, however, “not survive the excitement surrounding Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA” in 1953 (ibid., pp. 323, 326).

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The accelerating popularisation of genetic knowledge in the second half of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, and its challenge for the novel to engage this new view of life, is often divided into four phases following major advances in the field (van Dijck 1998, p. 3; see also Everett Hamner’s alternative, if related, history of particular modes of genetic fiction in his 2017 Editing the Soul: Science and Fiction in the Genome Age). First, from the late 1950s to the 1960s, in the aftermath of World War II, genetic science was framed in moral terms and, as Wald and Clayton state, there was marked interest in fiction and film of the period in the “social consequences of human evolution, either spontaneously or as a result of genetic engineering” (2007, p. xi). The second phase, in the 1970s, saw popular genetic discourses move to ecological concerns about the environmental safety of increasingly sophisticated genetic engineering projects (Roof 2011, p. 128). The literary negotiation of genetic discourse at that time shifts the emphasis to controlled genetic modification and an intensified exploration of the genome as a metaphor for human diversity, raising questions of migration and race (Clayton 2013, pp. 328–29). This was followed by the third phase in the 1980s, when a growing biotechnological application of genetics sparked widespread cultural negotiations of the discipline. Finally, the fourth phase was inaugurated in the 1990s when the Human Genome Project began its widely mediatised work (Wald and Clayton 2007, p. xi). The current moment can productively be regarded as an extension of this fourth phase, although both the rapid and exponential growth in highly precise genetic engineering technology, especially around the gene-cutting technology of CRISPR-Cas9, as well as the post-genomic focus on gene-protein, gene-cell and epigenetic gene-environment interrelations, provide potential grounds for the identification of a fifth phase in the cultural history of genetic discourse. This is still too early to tell, even though recent years have already seen increased critical interest in representations of epigenetics. Clare Hanson’s work on literary negotiations of epigenetic paradigms has been a driving force in this context, exploring how literature has imagined gene-environment networks. Explicit references in fiction to epigenetic research are rare but research in literary epigenetics offers valuable insights into literature’s anticipations of the growing focus on the environment within genetics (Hanson 2020; Choksey 2021). In other, less precise, usages, the concept of epigenetics has developed into a shorthand denoting any kind of gene-environment interaction. It is telling that the only explicit reference to epigenetics in the

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novels I investigate occurs in the very last book of Atwood’s trilogy. It remains to be seen how the literary history of epigenetics unfolds. Genetic conceptions of life and its associated notions of heredity produced new literary forms of representing and thinking about human and nonhuman life. In addition, genetic discourses and metaphors incited new forms of aesthetic self-reflexion in the novel, such as Clayton identifies in Richard Powers’s novel The Gold Bug Variations (1991), which engages a genetic temporality of life to fashion the novel itself as a life form (Clayton 2002, p. 46; see also Hamner 2017 on Powers’s Orfeo (2014), p. 192). The novels analysed in the coming chapters will be shown to exemplify and expand this unprecedented level of aesthetic, cultural and epistemological complexity in literary treatments of genetic science at the end of the twentieth and at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Contemporary literary attention to genetic conceptions of life bring to mind D. H. Lawrence’s much earlier description of the novel as “the one bright book of life”. The idealism charging Lawrence’s elegant phrase is problematised by Byatt’s quartet, as I will elaborate in the fourth chapter. Lawrence’s dictum serves to stress how accurately his combination of life and the novel form anticipated the complex literary fascination with genetic understandings of life in recent novel writing. Lawrence, in The Rainbow (1915), unwittingly anticipates the revolutionary new view of life the century would unravel: ‘No, really,’ Dr. Frankstone had said, ‘I don’t see why we should attribute some special mystery to life—do you? We don’t understand it as we understand electricity, even, but that doesn’t warrant our saying it is something special, something different in kind and distinct from everything else in the universe—do you think it does? May it not be that life consists in a complexity of physical and chemical activities, of the same order as the activities we already know in science? I don’t see, really, why we should imagine there is a special order of life, and life alone—’ (1915, p. 371)

In the novel and Lawrence’s pantheist universe, Dr. Frankstone’s materialism epitomises the wrong kind of approach to life, which is underlined by the thinly veiled allusion to Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein as well as to Romantic notions about life as electricity. However, the twentieth century seems to have proven Dr. Frankstone right; life has indeed appeared as “a complexity of physical and chemical activities”, expelling the vitalism of a “special order of life”. In that sense, contemporary novels about genetics emerge as books of life in a way Lawrence never could have imagined.

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Chapter Outlines Each of the following chapters focuses on one or multiple novels by a single author which address central motifs and cultural anxieties arising from the molecularisation of life. The order of the chapters is largely chronological, although there is some overlap because many of these texts were published in close succession. Byatt’s quartet, published between 1978 and 2002, and thus both one of the oldest and youngest works in the corpus, could easily have inaugurated my analyses but, for reasons that will become apparent, very organically found its place between the chapters on McEwan and Atwood. Instead, Simon Mawer’s novel Mendel’s Dwarf (1997) will act as the starting point of my study because its genre illuminates, in a particularly striking manner, the convergence of biological and biographical dimensions which characterise the twentieth-century molecularisation of life. My focus in this chapter is on how this convergence takes shape through the novel’s fictional autobiographical perspective. I argue that the text articulates a new genre, which I call fictional genetic life writing. In order to describe the key characteristics of this genre, I draw on critical observations of a recent biological turn in nonfictional life writing, which manifests itself in a significant biological revaluation of the very notion of “life” in life writing. My delineation of fictional genetic life writing further relies on a discussion of the formal similarities—and differences—between fictional and nonfictional autobiography. Approaching Mendel’s Dwarf as a geneticised form of life writing allows me to show how the novel draws on genetic discourses to rethink notions of identity and kinship while critically examining assumptions of genetic determinism. The text coordinates socio-cultural and genetic dimensions of life through their embodiment in the protagonist and autodiegetic narrator Benedict Lambert, who is not only afflicted by a genetic condition but also a practising geneticist. Lambert’s thoroughly geneticised autobiographical narration vividly exemplifies a genetic perspective on biological and biographical life and its innovative representation in contemporary fiction. In the third chapter, I discuss Ian McEwan’s two novels Enduring Love (1997) and Saturday (2005), while in the form of a coda I also outline the contours of his genetic thinking in Solar (2010), Nutshell (2016) and Machines Like Me (2019). I focus primarily on Enduring Love and Saturday because in both of these texts I identify complex formal analogies between genetic and aesthetic structures. These structural analogies are shown to

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explore and critique discourses of genetic determinism through the central role chance and randomness play both within the organism at the genetic level and in the aesthetics of plot. My close readings of the two novels are informed by a critical survey of thinking on randomness in genetic processes and literary form. The deep structural relations between genetic and literary manifestations of chance emerging from this survey shed light on a significant common ground between processes of life and their literary representations. Both Enduring Love and Saturday aesthetically foreground and make visible this structural common ground. However, the two texts differ with regard to the genetic paradigms they negotiate, with dramatically divergent aesthetic and conceptual consequences. While the one engages a sociobiological outlook on genetics and a medical genetic gaze informs the other, together they broach important ways in which a genetic understanding of life has an impact on human ethics and politics. My fourth chapter then turns to A. S. Byatt’s quartet of novels comprising The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002). My analysis of Byatt’s quartet extends this study’s formal-aesthetic investigations of genetic discourses by bringing into focus the text’s foregrounded and multifaceted exploration of genetic metaphors of life. This reading of Byatt’s novels lays bare their complex and conflicted perspective on the capacity of language to represent material reality, both affirming and dispersing the “conflation” of genetic ontology and analogy characterising much genetic discourse. In my investigation of the text’s metalinguistic negotiation of genetic metaphors, I bring into dialogue scholarship on the interrelations between literary and scientific metaphors, poststructuralist positions on linguistic representation, and Byatt’s own epistemology of (genetic) metaphors as it emerges in the quartet and through her nonfictional writing. This critical approach elucidates the central role played by the figure of the snail in the quartet’s historicisation of the prominent molecular metaphor of DNA as the language of life. Introducing a new critical concept, I argue that the snail’s metaphoric function in the text can best be described as that of an “aesthetic model organism”. In the final section of the chapter, I probe the quartet’s outlook on relations between biological reality and artistic representation by identifying correspondences—as well as differences— between Byatt’s text and both George Eliot’s and Jacques Derrida’s conceptions of organic forms and organic linguistic structures. Ultimately, I suggest that through its exploration of genetic metaphors of life, Byatt’s quartet elaborates a sophisticated concept of self-conscious organic form.

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In the fifth chapter, I use Atwood’s trilogy, comprising the novels Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013), to highlight how rethinking life through genetics proves particularly consequential in the age of mass extinctions and other manifestations of anthropogenic climate change. Genetic understandings of life reveal fundamental relations between human and nonhuman life forms which question long-held conceptual divisions between Homo sapiens and all other species on the planet. In Atwood’s text I outline an especially salient example of a radically expanded genetic imaginary that connects all living beings within one conception of life. I begin by delineating the role of genetic science in the critical contexts of posthumanist and ecocritical theory, then discuss recent scientific work on ecological genetics and the genomic mapping of the biosphere. Atwood’s imagined posthumanist ecologies of life emerge as transgressive extrapolations of current genetic thinking and illuminate the political, ecological and ethical ramifications not just of the genetic connections between all life forms but of an increasing commodification and biopolitical manipulation of life itself. The aesthetic dimension of the novels’ renegotiation of life is particularly striking here, ranging from its generic mixture of science fiction, utopia and dystopia, its self-reflexive contemplation of the roles of narrative and art in a genetically engineered future, to the metaphorical as well as literal creation of inter-species hybrids or chimeras. The trilogy’s complex imaginative treatment of genetic discourses and technologies exemplifies an important ecological exploration of genetic science today, which further underlines the critical potential of the novel form to contribute to cultural and socio-­ political debates about future life on the planet. This future-oriented engagement with genetics in the trilogy not only presents a fitting and evocative end point to this study but also completes my excavation of the major formal and thematic concerns of the negotiation of genetic conceptions of life in the contemporary novel. In conclusion, I offer a brief overview of the diverse levels of life explored by the novel in the age of genetics I discuss in this book.

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Simon Mawer’s Book of Life: Mendel’s Dwarf as Fictional Genetic Life Writing

Biographical writing invariably produces accounts of life. Tracing an individual’s lived existence in the time and space of a particular culture and historical period lies at the heart of such writing. Biographies and autobiographies share this focus on life anchored in time and space with the novel. And just like novels, biographies focus on individual characters even though their historical and cultural vistas may exceed the story of the individual. For Samuel Johnson, the biographer is “a writer of lives; a relater not of the history of nations but of the actions of particular persons” (Johnson qtd. in Winslow 1995, pp. 5–6). Recent scholarship in the field of life writing has broadened Johnson’s definition. The biographer not only recounts the socio-cultural “actions” that define a person’s life but usually also reflects on how people’s bodies come into being, grow up and age. In this chapter, I aim to take this biological turn in studies of life writing one step further by reading Simon Mawer’s novel Mendel’s Dwarf as fictional life writing. This fictional (auto)biography also displays a focus on the body but goes beyond adopting a generally biological perspective on life and contemplates its protagonist’s cultural and corporeal existence through the specific prisms of genetic science. As a result, the protagonist’s account of his own life conjoins biological and biographical dimensions. The novel thereby powerfully contradicts Didier Fassin’s argument, which I have outlined in the previous chapter, that understandings of life in biology and the novel have become irreconcilable. Instead, the text © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Hamann-Rose, Genetics and the Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53100-2_2

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produces new ways of knowing and representing the complex interrelations between biological and biographical dimensions of life. Genetics provides new perspectives on life writing, both at large and for forms of life writing in the novel in particular. The genomic substance of life has itself been considered as a form of life writing, documenting the lives of generations in four basic nucleic acids. The genome’s reductionist grand-scale view of the past, as Lara Choksey points outs, bears the risk of displacing individual human memory with an almost ahistorical sense of the past as enshrined in the continuous present of the genomic sequence (Choksey 2021, p. 87). Jay Clayton has pointed out that the genome in fact conflates not only past and present but the future too, from influencing the way we age or whether we get sick to the future development of the species. “Genome time” makes past and future available in the present (Clayton 2002). While in this way the past has become subsumed under the present, forensic genetic technologies and genetic discourses of relatedness have also given rise to manifold new histories of individuals, families and the human species (De Groot 2023). Such new conceptions of the past offer powerful new imaginaries for the novel’s perennial concerns with how we relate to our ancestors and how our lives are lived in and through time. In his most recent novel Ancestry (2022), Mawer exemplifies this potential of genetics to reimagine the aesthetics of family history: In one sense, of course, we carry our past within us, in the nucleus of every cell in our bodies—that acronymic DNA that we have been bequeathed and that, in turn, we cut and shuffle and deal out for our children like so many packs of cards. (Mawer 2022, p. 1)

Even though Mawer readily concedes that “there are other things besides” genetics which are passed down through the generations, his novel produces a particular genetic temporality as a form of connection that binds the many different characters in the story together. In this chapter, I turn to Mawer’s earlier novel Mendel’s Dwarf and argue that it illustrates how genetics has transformed not only the novel’s aesthetics of the relation of past and present lives but also the very notion of life engaged in life writing. Recent forays into the growing impact of genetics on biographical writing help elucidate the aesthetic strategies I identify in Mawer’s novel. G. Thomas Couser summarises the most salient resonances between discourses of DNA and practices of life writing. Significantly, he pays attention in particular to the metaphor of the genome as a book of life:

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What is the relation between what is commonly referred to as the ‘Book of Life’ (the human genome) and what I think of as the ‘book of life’ (what we might call ‘the human scriptome’—autobiography and other related forms of life writing)? Let me note […] several separate but overlapping senses in which DNA functions as a kind of nonverbal life writing: first, the sense in which genes themselves may decisively influence one’s identity and life course; second, the sense in which gene tests may influence one’s sense of identity and life course; and third, the way in which the cultural construction of genetic information may influence identity and life course. (Couser 2001, pp. 185–186, emphasis original)

In a similar fashion, the novel Mendel’s Dwarf connects and interrogates the notions of a genetic and an autobiographical book of life. What is more, all three senses identified by Couser in which “human genome” and “human scriptome” converge will be shown to inform Mawer’s novel. Importantly, the text self-reflexively examines cultural constructions of genetic discourses, Couser’s third sense, to critically reflect on the extent to which genes and genetic testing can be considered to “influence one’s identity and life course”, Couser’s second and third senses.1 The ethical and emotive pressure associated with genetic testing is especially foregrounded in the narrative. The text’s representations of the affective dimension of genetic screening procedures not only provides a complex contribution to the highly visible cultural debate about such practices but also link it to a major new trend in autobiographical writing about personal experiences of genetic risk (Couser 2001, p. 191). This impact of genetic discourses on life writing in the novel, as well as in autobiographical writing more generally, exemplifies what sociologists Carlos Novas and Nikolas Rose have described as the “birth of the somatic individual”. They locate this geneticisation of identity, especially as it emerges through considerations of genetic risk, within “a wider change in the vision of life itself—a new ‘molecular optics’. Life is now imagined, investigated, explained, and intervened upon at a molecular level” (Novas 1  Couser identifies additional avenues through which DNA has come to reshape life writing, from genetic fingerprinting, also called an “autoradiogram”, as its own form of life writing, to the use of DNA testing to confirm identities and kinship relations in biographical and autobiographical writing (2001, pp. 186–187). While these particular aspects go beyond the themes explored in Mawer’s novel, they testify to a larger cultural context in which genetic discourses have acquired an increasing relevance and prevalence in a multiplicity of forms and practices of life writing.

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and Rose 2000, p. 487). As more and more diseases and conditions come to be associated with genetic risk factors, Novas and Rose argue, these recent advances produce a “mutation in personhood […] in which new and direct relations are established between body and self”. In their view, “[g]enetic ideas of personhood are already beginning to infuse the[] languages of somatic individualization, inscribing an indelible genetic truth into the heart of corporeal existence” (ibid., pp.  487–488). Such new forms of somatic individuality, Novas and Rose posit, also create new possibilities for genetic agency or “responsibility” in dealing with emerging genetic information about one’s body and the options available to act on this new knowledge (ibid., p. 502). Yet, as will become apparent, it is precisely these forms of agency which cause Mawer’s—newly somaticised— protagonist considerable ethical and emotional distress. Through these and other convergences of biological, cultural and ethical discourses in the protagonist’s life writing, Mendel’s Dwarf critically negotiates the new modes of somatic individuality that emerge out of the new “molecular optics” on life itself.

Writing Life in Mendel’s Dwarf: Notes on Form The concept of somatic individuality illuminates investigations of the body in both the novel and other forms of life writing. However, the relation between representations of the body in fact-based life writing and my conception of the fictional literary form shaping the representation of genetic life in Mawer’s novel requires further explanation. Even though the term “life writing” has been in use since the eighteenth century, the concept has witnessed a distinct revival in biographical research over the last decades. It designates not only biographical and autobiographical writing but encompasses more inclusively also such diverse articulations of life and experience as diaries and letters or their related forms in visual and electronic media (Winslow 1995, p. 25; Rieder 2007, pp. xiii-xiv; Hornung 2015, p. 38). Recent commentary on the increasing biological dimension of life writing, then, has primarily focused on the intersection of life writing and life science. Describing what could be considered a deep-rooted affinity between the two writing practices, Mita Banerjee summarises: “Both life sciences and life writing create narratives of human life” (2013, p. 537). Going beyond postulating a mere affinity between the two perspectives, novelist Siri Hustvedt argues that the “narrative record of individual experience would seem to apply directly to the dynamic reality of

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human biology and to furthering an understanding of the material organism” (cited in Banerjee 2013, p. 548). Hustvedt speaks from experience, having linked science and life writing in her account of her attempt at making sense of a sudden and medically puzzling fit she suffered during a public appearance. Works like Hustvedt’s The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves (2010), weaving together personal and scientific discourses, have been at the centre of research agendas in the field of biographical studies, enquiring into the narrative methodologies shared by life writing and the life sciences. As a contributor to this research, Alfred Hornung concludes that one of the main effects of biologised life writing is the popularisation of scientific knowledge, as it “enhances the scientific findings for a larger audience” (2015, p. 41). Hornung adds that life writing does not simply reproduce scientific discourses, however. Instead, “life writing offers the chance to respond to criticism of scientific theories within a narrative framework” (ibid., p. 42). The affordance to popularise and criticise is here considered only with regard to factual life writing. Yet a similar case for fictional life writing can be made. Fictional life writing also connects biological and cultural discourses, albeit here any popularisation of science is usually more side-effect than primary goal. Both fictional and nonfictional life writing share the ability to critique science from within a scientifically informed narrative of individual experience—rather than for instance demarcating science as the other of cultural discourse. My particular focus is on life writing in the novel whose temporal scope and affordance of character development bears a striking formal resemblance to much biographical writing. Narratological similarities between the novel and most (nonfictional) life writing have indeed been widely acknowledged. In his editorial to a special issue of the journal Biography on life writing and science fiction, John Rieder appropriates an insight from genre theory and argues that it is actually only the reader’s perception of the narratives that distinguishes between factual life writing and fictional novel. On the level of narrative technique they can be undistinguishable (2007, pp. vi, xv). Helga Schwalm similarly comments on the unstable generic distinctions between autobiography and autobiographical novels; and Donald Winslow argues that it is no wonder that “[t]he mixture of fact and fiction is as old in life-writing as it is in history” given that biographical writing and the biographical novel as independent genres emerged alongside one another during the eighteenth century (Schwalm 2023, np.; Winslow 1995, p. 5).

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This narrative family resemblance between novel and life writing renders productive the recent scholarship on biologised life writing for my analysis of Mendel’s Dwarf as genetic fictional life writing. If what connects life science and life writing is the construction of biologised narratives of human life, then, I argue, the conception of biological life writing offers a template through which to make sense of Mendel’s Dwarf. Of course, such a transposition from the factual references of life writing to the fictional realm of the novel suggests an ontological shift. Yet, as becomes apparent in their narrative similarity, this shift from life writing to novel is highly unstable and depends more on the reader’s perception than textual markers. At the same time, the novel’s use of forms of life writing, specifically of autobiography, endows the novel’s science with a more heightened referentiality than it would have had otherwise. Contemporary readers of the novel were likely to recognise some of the genetic discourses in the novel from widely mediatised advances of genetic science, such as the Human Genome Project. This grounds the novel’s genetic aesthetics of life firmly within the genetic science of its historical moment. But I want to go one step further. I argue that the biological perspective of life writing occasions a renegotiation of the very conception of what it means to represent human life. The genetic perspective adopted by Mawer’s geneticist protagonist transforms the stuff of life usually associated with autobiographies—Johnson’s “actions” and experiences—and undermines perceived boundaries between biological and cultural understandings of life. The protagonist and autodiegetic narrator in Mendel’s Dwarf is Benedict Lambert, geneticist and achondroplastic dwarf. Retrospectively and in temporally disjunctive episodes, Lambert recounts his life up until an unspecified present, though vaguely contemporary to the late 1990s. So far, the novel unproblematically corresponds to Heidi Pennington’s definition of a fictional autobiography as “a first-person retrospective account of the imaginary narrating protagonist’s life through narrative conventions shared with the classical autobiography” (2018, p.  5). To complicate matters, however, Lambert also acts intradiegetically as the biographer-narrator of Gregor Mendel, the Moravian monk who in the mid-nineteenth century laid the foundations for genetic science. Mendel is also Lambert’s great-great-great uncle. As the two narrative strands roughly alternate in the novel, the autobiographical narrative unfolds

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alongside the biographical one. Donald Schier describes this as the “parallel life of Gregor Mendel” in the novel while in Winslow’s life writing terminology, the novel’s Mendel narrative intriguingly oscillates between what Winslow calls “dual biography” and “parallel lives” (Schier 1999, p. xciii; Winslow 1995, p. 15). The dual biography usually retells the lives of two closely related individuals while the “parallel lives” story generally pairs figures whose lives resemble each other in some way but who are not actually related. Since Mendel and Lambert are both scientists and related, their narration must be seen to inhabit a middle ground between the two types. In this fashion, Mendel’s significance for Lambert’s life and identity is stressed and an invitation relayed to the reader to consider their genetic and proto-genetic practices in tandem. Eckart Voigts identifies Mendel’s Dwarf as an example of an “important neo-Victorian subgenre of scientific bio-fiction, that is, fictionalisations of biological science and scientific biographies” (2014, p.  81). Framed through the discourse of neo-Victorianism, the novel’s past genetic science is emphasised over its contemporary scientific perspective, so that the latter becomes a focus only in the particular way it renegotiates a historical period from a present-day perspective. Seen in this light, Lambert’s “contemporary inquiry” functions in “typical neo-Victorian fashion” as a generic narrative framing device, connecting the past with the present (Voigts 2014, p. 86). The drawback of a neo-Victorian approach to the novel lies hence in its neglect of the significance of Lambert’s genetic perspective in its own right. This precludes the critic from considering the obverse interpretation which I propose, in which, instead, Mendel’s work provides a historical epistemological framing for Lambert’s contemporary cutting-edge genetic science. Lambert’s role as autodiegetic narrator cannot be reduced to being a mere biographer of his famous ancestor. The novel gives an equal share of narrative space to Lambert and Mendel’s lives in the first half of the novel and Lambert’s narrative actually comes to dominate the second half. In light of this, I contend that reading the text through the genre of autobiography best captures the novel’s composition. In this framework, the focus is placed squarely on the character of Lambert and, as I will argue, it is his character’s life story that focalises the novel’s genetic conceptions of lives connecting and unfolding in time.

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Problematic Essentialism: Genetic Gaze and Social Being “Fictional autobiographies are always”, Heidi Pennington states, “stories about identity” (2018, p.  5), and Mendel’s Dwarf makes no exception. Pennington further points out that fictional autobiography “thwarts […] essentialist assumptions about identity” because it self-reflexively highlights the constructedness of identities through the label of fiction (ibid., pp. 17, 43). This metafictional dimension of the genre frequently correlates with a metanarrative level in the texts that underlines the formative role narratives of selfhood play for the construction of socio-cultural identities (ibid., p.  39). These genre markers illuminate Mendel’s Dwarf as fictional autobiography. The fictionality of Lambert’s identity is exposed, ironically, when Lambert insinuates his existence beyond the text. For example, Lambert assumes the reader to have seen a BBC documentary about him or invites the reader to look at the clock tower of Mendel’s monastery together (9, 263). The novel’s metanarrative remarks, as well as the protagonist’s characteristic “hyperrational and hypercynical first-­ person narration” (Voigts 2014, p. 86), draw attention to the formal strategies and discourses through which Lambert’s identity is being forged. This self-referential narratological dimension of the novel produces a formal resistance against the notion of an essential self, independent of cultural articulation. Crucially, this formal structure then also critically interrogates the impact of essentialising genetic discourses on constructions of identity. The proposition of an essential self is addressed at the very beginning of the novel, in the first chapter, entitled “Genome”. Note the first sentence: Doctor Benedict Lambert, the celebrated Benedict Lambert, the diminutive Benedict Lambert, the courageous Benedict Lambert (adjectives skating carefully around the essence of it all) stands to address the members of the Mendel Symposium. (1)2

Several attributes are evoked to describe him but “the essence” remains a lacuna. The attributes draw on his professional life as a “doctor”, they 2  I cite the novel from the 2011 edition published by Abacus. All subsequent page references will be provided in parentheses.

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dovetail social (“celebrated”) with physical stature (“diminutive”) and they ambivalently—because patronisingly—assume that is must take “courage” for a man like him to climb the podium. Avoiding “carefully” whatever would encapsulate Lambert’s public persona best, the passage intimates that what ultimately lies at the heart of his selfhood is stigmatised and taboo. The reference to “it all” is curiously vague though, as if resisting the ready equation of Lambert with what is left unsaid. As the narrative unfolds, or upon re-reading the novel, it is clear that it is his dwarfism that is here implied as denoting the essence of his being, but the first-time reader has yet to learn of the nature of his condition. While there is thus the suggestion of an essence, it is undisclosed. The unspeakable here remains unspoken and the reader is left to wonder for a few further pages until references to a “massive forehead and blunt, puglike features” and being “one metre twenty-seven centimetres tall” (3) indicate that he could be a dwarf. The tension that builds up before this—for want of a better word—revelation, derives mainly from Lambert’s lecture itself. He causes considerable anguish in his audience arguing that it was Mendel’s proto-genetic science that enabled a proper understanding of physical abnormality as it was displayed in nineteenth-century freak shows: “where people with deformities were exhibited for all the world to gaze at in horror and revulsion and amusement. People like me” (2). Without disclosing what it is about him that makes Lambert compare himself in this fashion, the lacuna of the first sentence is sustained. Holding back on mentioning his condition, the text gives weight to it and establishes its social significance for Lambert’s life before it has even become clear what the condition is. When we do learn of it, its status as the major defining characteristic of his life is already firmly in place. His genetic condition, framed by the science his ancestor Mendel began, thus seems to substitute the lacuna with his dwarfism as the essence of his being. The narrative instance complicates such an assessment. For, though I have earlier said that the novel is Lambert’s fictional autobiography, the narrative occasionally reverts to a third-person narration, as the first sentence here testifies. Focalised, in Rimmon-Kenan’s terminology, as external focalisation from within (Rimmon-Kenan 1999, pp. 74–76), Lambert is beheld from outside, but it is his perception the text presents as he subjects the audience to his classificatory genetic gaze:

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There before the good doctor, ranged in rows like sample tubes in a rack, are all the phenotypes one could wish to see: male and female, ectomorphic and endomorphic, dolichocephalic and brachycephalic, Nordic, Mediterranean, Slav, Mongoloid (three), Negroid (one). There are chins cleft1 and normal, hair curly2 and straight, eyes blue3 and brown and green, skins white, brown, yellow, and black,4 crania bald5 and hirsute. It is almost as though the organisers […] have trawled through the whole gamut of human variation in order to come up with a representative genetic mix. […] …and yet there is a constancy that is obvious to all, but consciously perceived only by the truncated figure up on the podium: each and every one of the earnest watchers is subsumed under the epithet phenotypically normal. (1–2, emphasis and footnote numerals original)

Lambert is indirectly portrayed here, in the language of genetics, as phenotypically deviant. Reducing the members of his audience to phenotypic traits, complete with annotated footnotes elaborating on their type of heredity, renders these individuals as representations of genetic categories in the same way as he is taken to represent achondroplasia. The significant difference is that, given the unmarkedness of the “normal”, no one in the audience would be considered to be defined by eye colour or baldness alone. In Lambert’s case, one, admittedly consequential, genetic condition stands as the indelible mark of his identity. Or so at least the quoted heterodiegetic perspective on Lambert suggests. The use of the thirdrather than the first-person narrator further underlines the gulf that exists between him and the audience who to him, at least genetically, represent all mankind. When Lambert veers off the expected course of his lecture and the audience is left to wonder where he is taking them, the sense of his isolation is increased because the reader for a moment becomes part of the audience. They, too, do not know that by painting the scene of the Klosterplatz in Mendel’s hometown, he prepares his comment about the freak shows. The reader might even also wonder how he or she would fit into Lambert’s phenotypic categories. The third-person narration works to emulate a position of scientific detachment. The footnotes further imitate the scientific form and the authority that comes with it, while being clearly marked as literary appropriations as they lack properly scientific references. Most importantly, however, the external focalisation from within highlights that the attributes conferred upon him come from outside, just as he imposes his genetic diagnosis on the members of the audience. His ironic

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tone—“as though the organisers […] have trawled through the whole gamut of human variation”—further suggests that there might be an underside to this procedure. The list of classifications Lambert calls up can be expected to have several effects on readers: some of the terms will be familiar while others, like “brachycephalic”, designating a broad rather than long head shape, will strike as alien, and “Negroid” and “Mongoloid” will rightly appear suspect. These problematically racialising anthropological categories here foreshadow Lambert’s later discussion of the eugenic abuses of genetics during the Third Reich. The narrator’s use of these racial categories might be taken to underline the larger theme of classificatory stigmatisation in the passage. In light of his vehement criticism of Third Reich eugenics, however, Lambert’s unqualified use of these categories here, however subversively, might indicate his own flawed awareness of genetic discrimination. This early representation of a genetic gaze in the novel highlights a view of society purely based on people’s genetics. A geneticised perspective on characters pervades the text: the hotel receptionist (6), Lambert’s teacher (46), the reporter from the BBC (261), all are presented in genetic terms (see also Soares 2013, p. 122). Generated mainly by Lambert’s first-­person narrative, these genetic portraits are expressive of the dominance of genetics in his outlook on the world. It is at times difficult to differentiate between what is actually Lambert’s own perspective on his genetic condition and what is his reflection of an outside perspective on his own person. His cynicism is evidence of how much he has internalised the social rejection he encounters from the outside. In contrast to Lambert’s autodiegetic narration in most of the novel, the third-person narrative of the beginning elevates the genetic gaze to a more abstract epistemological approach, evoking a science that reduces human individuals to “sample tubes in a rack”. The novel’s beginning acts as an exposition, introducing not just the protagonist and his social environment but also the main theme of what is to come: the social, epistemological and experiential contexts of a geneticising gaze—both from without and from within—on a human life. After this opening exposition, the novel turns from a third-person to a first-person narration, heralding more clearly the form of fictional autobiography. Yet because the novel sporadically adopts a third-person narrative voice when recounting Lambert’s life, Pennington’s argument about the anti-essentialist thrust of the genre is complicated. Her argument rests on the observation that in full knowledge of the hero’s fictionality, the

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unfolding narrative of identity construction lays bare how the same formative strategies apply to our nonfictional identities. In Mendel’s Dwarf, these usual strategies, such as retrospective emplotment or a particular tone—such as Lambert’s cynicism and self-deprecating wit— are complemented by a biologising genetic discourse. The novel’s pronounced referentiality to nonfictional science invests this geneticisation of identity with an extra-textual authority from beyond the confines of its fictional setting. At the same time, the novel’s ultimate fictionality and alternative identity formations question this authority, both in the world of the text and, by implication, in the reader’s own. The novel’s use of footnotes is a case in point: they pose as references to a reality beyond the text but the reader can never be sure about their accuracy; especially as it is not entirely clear if it was Lambert who annotated his own text in this fashion—which would certainly befit his didactic manner—or whether it is the work of some biologically keen but equally fictitious editor.3 The novel’s self-­ conscious narrative is in tension with the mediated status of its scientific truth claims. Lambert often seems to have framed his life completely in the language of genetics. Lambert recurrently places great emphasis on the genetic causes for this appearance. In the chapter “Mutation”, for instance, it is “the malign hand of the [genetic] mutation” which is responsible for his physical “distortions” (11). In another passage, he refers to himself as a “dominant” dwarf (21). The description playfully distinguishes himself from the recessive dwarf peas his ancestor Mendel was investigating in the experiments that eventually led to the discovery of the so-called Mendelian laws of biological inheritance. At the same time, the notion of a “dominant” dwarf spells out, in classical genetic discourse, that his condition is the direct result of having inherited the gene for achondroplasia, which is dominant rather than recessive—meaning that it will inevitably cause the condition when inherited. Lambert most succinctly—and most reductively—traces his identity and appearance back to his genetic condition when he sums up his work as a geneticist by stating: “I search for the gene that caused me” (99).

3  The 2011 edition contains a footnote (120) not featured in the original version (see, for instance, the 1999 edition, p.  115) correcting Lambert on the number of genes in the human genome based on information accessible only after the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, so six years after the original publication of the novel.

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Lambert’s genetic reductionist sense of self is both cause and regular object of his pronounced cynicism. When his headmaster at school tells him that his condition is “a problem you have to live with”, Lambert replies sarcastically: “I told him I’d not realised that before and thanked him very much for sharing his insight with me” (22). This is an early glimpse of Lambert’s “bastions of cynicism” as Lambert himself later calls his protective strategies against self-pity (114). The headmaster’s remark further implies that Lambert’s genetic condition is inseparable from the rest of his existence, infusing the verb “live” with a social as well as biological meaning. What is most striking about this encounter in the text is Lambert’s internal commentary: “A problem you have to live with. That’s a good one, isn’t it? It isn’t something I live with, as I might live with  a birthmark or a stammer, or flat feet. It’s not an addition, like a mole on my face, nor a subtraction, like premature baldness: it is me” (22–23, emphasis original). In his characteristic irritation, Lambert takes apart the headmaster’s semantics, insisting that his condition is neither anything he lacks nor has in excess but is the very foundation of his sense of self. In the mathematical metaphor, he literally equates his identity with a genetic conception of himself. Benedict Lambert subjects himself to the genetic understanding of life that defines his professional perspective as a geneticist. The text explicitly explores the permeable boundary between “Ben the scientist” and “Ben the dwarf” (119). When Lambert is invited to dinner at Jean’s, his future lover’s, house—the name so blatantly punning the author metafictionally asks the reader not to laugh (76)—he is asked to explain the causality behind the fact that she has one blue and one green eye. Having explained the matter to Jean at one of their lunches—she works as a librarian at his institute—he now repeats that the phenomenon is considered a “genetic mosaic” (108). When another dinner guest somewhat embarrassingly compares Jean to the mosaics she and her husband saw on holiday, her remark throws in relief the metaphoric element of the genetic term. Lambert takes this even further by exclaiming mosaics to be one of “the classical monsters of the gene world”. Whereas earlier he explained the genetic meaning of the term to be “a melding of cells with different genetic complements” during embryonic development (96), the dinner table conversation with its inclusion of non-scientific voices accentuates the analogical dimension of the concept of a genetic mosaic. The protagonist takes pleasure in the linguistic riches of the genetic idiom without explicitly reflecting on their implications for the

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production of scientific knowledge. The novel, in contrast, can be shown to self-­reflexively employ Lambert’s lacking self-consciousness in this regard to examine the different meanings of genetic discourses in scientific and cultural contexts. In his role as scientist at the table, he pronounces Jean’s green eye “a chance mutation” and comments: “I shrugged it off, as you do with mutations” (108). These reactions stand in marked contrast to the life-long suffering “his” genetic mutation has afflicted upon him. And he does point out: “all the time we were, of course, skirting cautiously around another issue as though edging along the brink of a precipice: my own” (108). Lambert’s allusion to the genetic mutation behind his condition here illustrates that it is only as the trained geneticist that he can shrug off a mutation, suggesting that it is really the regular mechanisms of inheritance and development that interest him. Personally though, the notion of a mutating gene carries a meaning for him that diverges from the purely scientific and singles out the cultural ramifications of this one particular genetic mutation. Recalling the novel’s first sentence and its skating adjectives, Lambert’s reference to his genes here equally endows his genetic deviance with a significance the geneticist’s detached perspective and terminology fails to capture. As a result, the scene not only interrogates the role of language in the production of genetic knowledge, through the metaphor of the genetic mosaic, but also explores the starkly different meanings of genetic discourses in scientific and personal contexts. The complex entanglement of Lambert’s identity, his professional life as a geneticist and his life with a genetic condition, comes to a head when his research has enabled him to find the gene coding for his condition. For at this stage in the novel, the discovery of the gene at the physiological root of his limited stature and deformed body is presented as tantamount to discovering the material substance of his deeply geneticised identity. The discovery is officially revealed in a lecture Lambert gives at his institute. Stressing his role as geneticist over his personal investment in the research, the narrative again reverts to a third-person narration (205). Albeit speaking in his professional capacity, Lambert sanctions what the audience is already doing anyway, namely to consider his research as a quest for the cause of his existence. Still, the lecture is given by Lambert the scientist who details precisely the trajectory of the research. Returning to a first-person narration, Lambert then presents the gene in its alphabetised sequence as

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a message from this enigmatic, molecular world: 5´…GGC ATC CTC AGC TAC GGG GTG GGC TTC TTC CTG…3´ and this, the cry of the beast: 5´…GGC ATC CTC AGC TAC AGG GTG GGC TTC TTC CTG…3´ That is it. Can you spot the difference? In all the thousands of letters that make up the message, just one change spells disaster. (208, my emphasis)

Having projected the sequences onto the wall of the lecture hall, he comments to the reader: “Each and every member thinks: There, but for the grace of God, go I” (209). This is the ultimate conflation of Lambert’s identity with the mutated gene at the root of his condition. Despite this, the text skilfully evades making Lambert the author of the conflation, as if it meant to hold back his underwriting of the claim. Equally, calling the molecular world “enigmatic” disturbs the ostensible clarity of the sequence. Yet despite these subtle hints at an alternative perspective on the equation of Lambert with the sequenced mutation, the weight of the passage lies on the genetic representation of his identity. And if the genetic perspective is characterised by a propensity to reduce complex physiological processes to the level of biochemistry, then the passage above presents the ultimate reductionism of Lambert’s identity in the form of a nucleotide triplet: “AGG”. The reductionist foil proposed here is thus not merely applied to a bodily process but extends to the cultural and social complex that is Lambert’s sense of self. The equation of Lambert’s identity with a segment of genomic sequence illustrates in a hyperbolic fashion the cultural phenomenon Novas and Rose have described as the “birth of the somatic individual”. Lambert’s fictional character, however, exceeds the mere illustration of a sociological event. Instead, the novel thinks through the social meaning of such an event in the daily life of its protagonist. Throughout the text, Lambert is shown to suffer from discrimination. Yet, as Lambert himself suggests with references to nineteenth-century freak shows, this sort of discrimination based on bodily deviance is not an invention of the gene age. What is new is the authoritative language available to describe the condition. This language—and the knowledge behind it—proves a double-edged sword in the novel. On the one hand, understanding the mechanisms of achondroplasia allows Lambert, as he says, “acceptance of a kind” (3). On the other, the genetic idiom reifies the social stigma attached to his appearance via the authority of science. In the novel’s representation of this new perspective, these two conflicting positions are dynamically conjoined in the text’s

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life writing aesthetics. Through Lambert’s combined roles of geneticist and dwarf, his account of his life produces a critical feedback loop that interrogates the cultural meaning and authority of Novas and Rose’s notion of a new “molecular optics” on life. Before I elaborate how the novel articulates both the geneticisation of Lambert’s identity as well as a critique of such genetic rewriting, I want to introduce an argument made by John Rieder that helps elucidate the significance of Lambert’s somatic individuality for the novel as fictional life writing. Writing on the resemblances between life writing and fiction, Rieder stresses that those narratives focused on illuminating someone’s life story, both fictional and nonfictional, centre on the “question of what a given matrix of subjectivity, discourse, and power makes possible for a person to offer as his or her own story” (Rieder 2007, p. xi). In the discursive matrix of Mendel’s Dwarf, genetic discourses exert such a shaping influence on the kind of narrative Lambert can produce about his own sense of self. On the one hand, the discipline of genetics has allowed Lambert to become a scientist and the ways of knowing and writing he has acquired through his training now inform his narration. On the other hand, genetic language has given new and authoritative means to those wishing to discriminate against people like him. The conflict between genetic reductionism and alternative cultural signification defines the contours of his life writing. Scientific reductionism denotes the methodological paradigm of breaking down complex networks of interaction into smaller and smaller distinct subsets. Lambert’s research labours under just this paradigm: his aim is to find the cause for achondroplasia and his method consists of searching for genetic markers of the condition in DNA from affected individuals. After ever more specific tests, he has identified a strip of nucleotides he now knows to be the point of ultimate reducibility of the processes leading to his condition. Presenting his research to his colleagues and pointing to the AGG triplet as the cause for achondroplasia, Lambert accepts the logic that a more or less undisturbed trajectory exists between the molecular triplet and the final organism’s phenotypical expression of dwarfism. Yet Lambert himself draws attention to the causal gulf that has been bridged by this reductive reasoning: “Ah, there’s the rub. We’ve found the mistake, we’ve identified the error, but how does that become me? How does the single spelling mistake end up as a total distortion of the whole meaning of the book?” (211). Lambert emphasises that genetics still has not been able to explain how the smallest units of life eventually give rise to its

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most complex organisation at the level of the organism by musing that such an achievement would surely secure one “a Nobel Prize or two” (212). Already earlier in the novel, Lambert has attested to the limits of genetic knowledge when, after stating that “sexual dimorphism is under the control of a pair of chromosomes, the X and the Y”, he asks: “but what is it that controls desire? That is a question that has defied the greatest geneticists of our time” (26). There is hence an open admission of the limitations of genetic explication in the novel, also with regard to his own genetic condition. This is striking as Lambert’s question, “how does that become me?”, unanswered by genetics, is of course provided with an elaborate answer by a fictional character’s account of his life and development in the form of the novel. The limitation of genetic knowledge is thus confronted with a cultural narrative of becoming that is saturated but not contained by genetic discourse. In this instance, novel and genetics come to the fore as alternative approaches to an enquiry that drives both science and the life narrative. Importantly, the novel here already offers a complex contemplation of both the biological and biographical dimensions of life, while it is unclear if the scientific approach ever will. The fatalistic acceptance of his own genetic predetermination Lambert so readily displays throughout the novel stands in dramatic contrast to the novel’s critical representation of the epistemological and cultural limits of genetic knowledge. What he seems to deplore most is the lack of agency he feels towards his condition. Whenever Lambert is called “brave”, once after his keynote lecture and once by his lover, he replies: “In order to be brave, you’ve got to have a choice” (5, 111). Notably, agency for him seems to consist above all in bringing forth the absence of achondroplasia rather than informed life strategies in the face of a newly formed genetic “responsibility” (Novas and Rose 2000, p.  502). Further exemplifying Lambert’s predominant reliance on a genetic understanding of his self, any mention of the debate between nature and nurture, which has perennially accompanied genetic discourses, is conspicuously absent from his narrative. Lambert only mentions the terminology once to stress that Mendel differentiated between the two concepts (87). For his own gene-­ centric perspective on his dwarfism, the idea of nurture does not seem to matter. This denial of nurture is observable in Lambert’s retelling of his own reproductive coming-into-being. While secretly studying a sample of his own sperm under the microscope in his school’s deserted biology lab, he is certain that “my future life had been determined seventeen years before,

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when a sperm such as one of these had nosed its way up my mother’s fallopian tube and encountered a wandering, wondering ovum with its delicate cumulus of follicular cells” (30). He even dismisses the importance—to the extent possible—of the sexual encounter: “Forget about copulation. The moment of true penetration is when the lucky sperm, the poor Noah, nudges against the ovum and explodes its capsule of digestive enzymes” (30).4 Lambert clearly detaches himself from the idea of such formative impact on the conceived during the act of reproduction as is famously in evidence in Tristram Shandy or as has been central to numerous historical theories of conception going back to Aristotle. More recently, considerations of epigenetics have again foregrounded the impact of non-genetic factors on the development of the embryo in utero. For Lambert, all is genetics: “The chromosomes, intricate spools of nucleic acid and protein, move together into a single, fateful conjunction; and Benedict Lambert has begun” (30). While the young Lambert’s only scientific access to his genetic material is through the lens of a microscope—remaining hidden in a “galaxy of spermatozoa” (30)—the geneticist Lambert has shifted from a visual to a biochemical contemplation of DNA. Lambert’s reductionist understanding of his self through genetics has remained the same. The novel’s focus on cultural meaning undermines Lambert’s position, however. The reductionist move of stylising the triplet AGG as the epitome of Lambert’s existence throws in stark relief the incongruent representation of a life’s complexity in the form of a three-letter sequence. In Lambert’s reductionist perspective, one genetic deviation presides over all other facets of his life. While Lambert’s cynicism frequently evokes such a reading, he continuously strives for means of identification beyond his physical appearance. Both his work and, even more forcefully, his love affair and the prospect of fatherhood afford him a sense of self not derived from his genetic condition. Lambert’s encounters with other dwarfs also speak towards his desire of a self not framed through genetics. Comparing the first of these 4  The “poor Noah” analogy is borrowed from a poem by Aldous Huxley which Lambert cites just before this passage: “A million million spermatozoa/ All of them alive:/ Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah/ Dare hope to survive” (29 emphasis original). Taken from Huxley’s 1920 “Fifth Philosopher’s Song”, the stanza evokes the fatalist tone of the poem which goes on to contemplate the great men, the “Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne”, that could have been chosen from the mass of spermatozoa instead of the unworthy one that came to be born in their place (qtd. in Squier 1996, np.).

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encounters to “looking in a mirror”, he then wonders “what the real Benedict Lambert would have looked like, the one that is trapped within this absurd, circus body” (123). He also imagines such hidden personas for the other dwarfs he meets: “She was strangely beautiful, as though you could see through a glass darkly, through mere contorted flesh and bone, to the normal woman hidden within” (126). The idea of a “real” Benedict Lambert again reduces his current incarnation to an unrealised version of what could have been, fortifying his resignation. What is more, in his description of the woman his notion of a “normal woman hidden within” reproduces a problematic normative idiom which he himself continually struggles to escape. However, the reverse concept of abnormality receives a positive framing when it is over deviances of some kind that Lambert is able to bond with others: the prostitute he visits suffers from “testicular feminisation syndrome” (83) and his lover Jean has a blue and a green eye. His relation to the “abnormal” is thus an ambivalent one. While he frequently puts forth his stunted figure as his defining feature and source of his ostracised social self, he explores an identity beyond his physical frame and reframes his physical peculiarities as the foundation for alternative social connection. As Lambert’s autobiographical account unfolds, his general social behaviour further undermines his otherwise striking sense of genetic determinism. He even admits that “instances of clearly inherited behavior are few” (264). And he repeatedly returns to the question of the heritability of genius, discrediting Galton’s work on genius and Cyril Burt’s work on the heritability of intelligence (244–246) and stating that it is still unclear whether genius “is in the genes or in the upbringing” (43). The genetic determinism he grapples with is all-encompassing only insofar as he considers everyone to be victim to “whatever selection of genes” one is given (23). The significance of this selection then varies from individual to individual. To his mind, the tragedy of his particular genetic mutation is the extent and irregularity of its outward manifestation. Lambert’s conception of a strong genetic determinism is hence closely bound up with his own particular condition and sits uneasily with other, more undifferentiated articulations of genetic predestinationism as the key to human behaviour. One might refer to Lambert’s kind of genetic determinism as a specifically medical type of genetic discourse. In the next chapter, this need to differentiate between different variations of genetic determinism will again be important in my analysis of Ian McEwan’s Saturday where

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medical and evolutionary genetic determinisms imply different temporalities and produce different formal resonances in the novel’s aesthetic. In Mendel’s Dwarf, such nuanced conceptions of determinism are easily missed, for several reasons. Structurally, the one genetic trait of Lambert’s dwarfism comes to function in the novel as a collective literary symbol for the influence of genes and is thus infused with a significance exceeding the explicit issue of how the mutation’s impact on Lambert’s life is negotiated in the text. Then, Lambert’s own vociferous emphasis on his genetic condition is likely to obfuscate the specificity of the genetic-cultural constellation he embodies. What is more, Lambert himself quite unscientifically tends to generalise, for example when he posits that the people around him “are no less victims of their genes than I. It is just that my condition is more apparent and is considered a defect” (264), directly contrasting his own admission that by overly concentrating on the outside body “you can begin to dismiss the person underneath” (274). After all, he equally dismisses his own personhood, along with everyone else’s, when he describes his own appearance as a representation of a universal genetic yoke. Because Lambert is clearly fascinated by his research, his reverent enthusiasm for the genetic idiom tends to work in favour of a deterministic reading of the powers of the genome. On the one hand, the novel propounds “the idea of bio-determinism” (Voigts 2014, p. 88). On the other, the novel critically reflects on the fact that Lambert’s genetic framing of his life story is grounded in both a particular scientific culture of reductionist reasoning and a cultural sphere that embraces this reductionist science to holistically define Lambert’s social being in terms of his DNA.

Life in Time: Embodiment, Kinship and Ethics While Lambert’s embodiment of a specific genetic mutation may amplify a sense of genetic determinism and distract readers from some of the more nuanced arguments in the novel, his genetic perspective on a developing, embodied life is a powerful literary strategy in bringing the genetic discourse to the forefront of Mendel’s Dwarf. Characters, and especially scientist characters, are important inroads into fictional negotiations of science (Kirchhofer and Roxburgh 2016). With Lambert, it is not only his profession that makes him a useful character through which to explore the cultural ramifications of genetic knowledge but also his own body. Lambert represents not only the discipline of genetics but also acts as a living embodiment of a genetic understanding of life. This aesthetic feature of

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the novel’s performance of genetics finds a fitting expression when the conference organiser exclaims about Lambert’s lecture: “Molecular genetics right there on the podium” (220). Within the genre of the autobiographical narrative and its quest for formations of identity, this embodied genetic conception of life is entangled with its social and cultural meanings, as I have shown with regard to Lambert’s conflicted sense of self. The exploration of deterministic modes of thinking in cultural and scientific discourses of genetics is one way in which the novel uses the character Lambert as a structural investigative device. Lambert’s fashioning of his own kinship relations marks another central site for the negotiation of genetics in the novel. Kinship is significant here not only as a major factor in constructions of identity—and thus ingrained into the genre of life writing—but also as a useful analytic category through which to illuminate another facet of the interplay between biological and cultural significations of genetics in the novel. For, as Sarah Franklin has shown with regard to anthropology, genetic discourses have rekindled debates about the tension between biological and social categories of kinship and about the nature-culture divide more generally. Franklin argues that the various new forms of rethinking kinship via molecular biology have occasioned new and varied challenges to what is considered a social or natural relation. These new forms of kinship range from medicalised genetic ties between family members, with a focus on genetic risk, to genetic ancestral genealogies (Franklin 2003; see also Hamann-Rose 2021 on a new postcolonial aesthetics of kinship in recent fiction). All of these new modes of conceiving of kin could, with Novas and Rose, be called instances of “genetic connectedness” (2000, p. 490). In Mendel’s Dwarf, the new genetic language of kinship brings forth articulations of both community and difference. Lambert’s conception of kinship is thoroughly geneticised. Yet in his case, the language of genetics does not necessarily express connectedness. About his parents, who are not dwarfs, he says: “I might have fifty percent of my genes in common with each of my parents, but I don’t share that particular one with either of them. I couldn’t have come from them without a mutation” (13–14). So while the overwhelming majority of his genes is a marker of kinship to his parents, which he does not deny, his sense of relation to them is defined by the one difference not shared by either of them: the mutated gene. As the mutation is sui generis, it becomes an embodied symbol for his alienation from his family and, by extension, a marker of his isolation from other social kinds of kin in the roles of husband and, at least at the beginning, father.

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Kinship in the novel is frequently tied to outward appearance. One’s looks are imbued with a genetic signification not just in the opening scene when Lambert subjects his audience to his geneticising gaze. For Lambert, “the most noticeable aspect of genetics is family resemblance” (211). In this way, kinship is presented as a prime site for the negotiation of genetics’ cultural meaning. When it comes to family resemblance, genetic meaning is channelled through visual markers. Of his parents, Lambert says: “I don’t even look like them. Oh sure, I share certain features with them— the dark hair, the brown eyes, my father’s cleft chin, that kind of thing— but there is no structural resemblance. I don’t look like my father or mother or my sister. I don’t have my mother’s nose or my father’s jawline or my grandfather’s cast of brow. I am on my own” (11). Some markers of resemblance here—the cleft chin, the hair colour—recall the Mendelian heritable traits outlined in the novel’s opening sequence. In this passage, however, difference again trumps similarity on a genetic scale that branches out to include an extended family history. The genetic features he does share with his family, and which thus connect him with the family’s shared past, fade into the background in the face of his phenotypical appearance of the achondroplastic dwarf. Genetic kinship here is selective and evokes changing temporal connections. Lambert’s emphasis of one genetic marker over others strands himself in the isolated presence of his own genome time. Lacking a feeling of connection based on visual similarity, he confesses: “I had that sense of dispossession from the very start” (212). And his parents also seem to have been troubled by this absence of familiarity, leading his mother “to assure everyone with an air of desperation that I possessed Great-uncle Harry’s BIG TOE” (211), only to claim some form of connectedness. For the most part, genetic ties in the novel gain significance through their visible manifestations. At the same time, Lambert resists the possibility of claiming kinship with other achondroplastic dwarfs, a form of kinship that would not only be social but, as they all share the same mutated gene, would offer the inverse relation to his parents, who share everything but this one gene. Yet, Lambert shuns all but two genetic connections, to his son and, for the larger portion of the novel, to his great-great-great-uncle Gregor Mendel: “By some quirk of history, caprice or fate, whim of genetics and inheritance, Gregor Mendel and I are related. We have genes in common: to be precise, three percent. I am Gregor Mendel’s great-great-great-nephew” (17). Curiously, here the 3% he shares with Mendel count where the 99% that tie him to his parents are rejected. The reason why he accepts his

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kinship with Mendel more readily is their shared professional interest in the modes of heredity. In a stunning emphasis on the non-biological factor of a common research field, the importance of Lambert’s genetic relation to Mendel is intensified. The kinship relation between Lambert and Mendel is thus a co-product of biological fact and cultural context, once more illuminating the convergence of biological and biographical dimensions of life in Lambert’s autobiographical writing. The intermingling of social and biological determinants of kinship in Lambert’s claim on Mendel pales in the face of the challenges to notions of natural relatedness that arise through his son. Lambert donates his sperm to father a child with his lover Jean, who uses in vitro fertilisation and advanced genetic testing. Schier notes the prominence of this episode in the novel and how it “[joins] the various themes of the book”: “Lambert’s child himself is not merely the product of Lambert’s sperm, but primarily of his knowledge and his skill in manipulating by twentieth-­ century techniques the genetic laws of great-great-great uncle Gregor” (Schier 1999, pp. xciii, xciv). Lambert’s child thus marks the contemporary end point of the novel’s historical arch from the theoretical beginning of genetic thinking to its modern technological interventions into the reproductive processes of life. Among the themes that come to a head in Jean’s pregnancy are not only Lambert’s embodiment of the genetic science—and its future development into an engineering science—but also the questions of where to draw the line between biology and culture, and of how this nature-culture renegotiation affects notions of kinship. The practice of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) in the novel is coupled with the relatively recent possibility of pre-implantation-diagnostics (PID). PID describes Lambert’s ability to test the fertilised embryos for his condition before they are implanted into Jean’s uterus. He is able to do this at all because he has identified the gene that codes for achondroplasia. The application of both IVF and PID have consequences for Lambert’s kinship relation to Jean and the child. On a social level, Lambert is kept from claiming the role as father to the child because Jean already has a husband, who is infertile and is not told about the swapping of the sperm. On an ethical level, Lambert’s ability to select an embryo is doubly dubious because, firstly, he carries out the medical procedure without the official approval of an ethics committee and, secondly, because his selection entails discarding embryos that would have developed to be like him. He is thus forced to decide if he finds a life lived with the condition of achondroplasia inherently less worthy than a life lived without it. This choice is the crux

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at the heart of his existence and illustrates the stakes of a genetic understanding of life that both defines his condition as an aberration and offers the means to eliminate it in the future. The PID also showcases that the genetic nature of the test sets it apart from other medical procedures. This is because, as Franklin and Roberts point out, the anxiety around testing for genetic risk “derives from the assumption that [the genes] make us who we are to begin with” (2006, p. 74). So when Lambert contemplates to eradicate the possibility of passing on a genetic risk that has thoroughly somatised his own sense of self, the resulting dilemma is ethically charged; not only because it implies that his own life is less worth living, but also because it reflects on the power of science to alter human life at a fundamental level. When Lambert describes the mechanics of the test, he comments on this ethical dimension of the procedure but obscures it at the same time. While the cell multiplication of the fertilised egg is still “natural enough”, Lambert then wonders: “but is the magnified eye that gazes down at them natural? Is the light that floods them with photons for the brief examination?” (229). There is an explicit sense of an intrusive scientific apparatus in the description of busy hands and tools, when “the glass needle, as brilliant and sharp as a lance, skewers an embryo’s zona pellucida” (229). Yet the depiction of the scientific routine then acquires a monotony to the effect that, as Lambert remarks, “you lose yourself in the method, in the regimented sequence of events, in the order and the organisation. You forget about lost lovers. You forget about ethics. You forget that you are picking at the genetic material of your own potential children” (229). The text, which continues to describe the scientific routine of the test and provides the reader with the Western Blot diagram showing the test results, exemplifies the danger of losing sight of the ethical impact of scientific research by burying Lambert’s initial expression of unease at the unnaturalness of his practice in the intricacies of enzymes and base pairs. In order to remind the reader of the ethical charge of his dilemma, Lambert then directly addresses the reader: Benedict Lambert has the possibility of beating God’s proxy and overturning the tables of chance. He can choose. […] So what did he choose? That’s your test. Eight green bottles sitting on the wall; eight plastic tubes sitting in the refrigerator. […] I know you don’t really need this; you’re already up there with me, aren’t you? You’re already confronting nature from the awesome viewpoint of God. (250)

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The passage is a complex mixture of third- and first-person narration, inviting a more objective analysis of the ethical ramifications of the character’s options through the more detached perspective. On multiple levels the novel invites the reader to confront their own assumptions about the issue and to assume the place of the fictional protagonist. Lambert outlines the options at hand: he can either select a non-affected or an affected embryo or choose randomly, the latter recreating the supposedly natural process, disabling agency and “genetic responsibility”. The call to the reader to reflect upon their own views is repeated by the chapter’s closing without Lambert revealing what he has chosen. By withholding this information, the author underlines the difficulty of this choice and once more invites readers to consider their own responses to this ethical dilemma. Ultimately, the novel remains ambivalent about what would be the ethically correct choice in this situation. At the same time, the text seems geared to elicit in readers an empathic response to Lambert’s decision to select an unaffected embryo. While one might assume that the cynical Lambert may possibly enjoy the agency of stepping into God’s shoes, he never explicitly states his reasons. Though the text suggests that his primary reason was his love for Jean, since only the possibility that he might have chosen any but the healthy embryos already causes her considerable anguish and pain (257) and recalls to the reader her first pregnancy that was terminated precisely because there was a risk that the child would inherit the mutation (189). Apart from illustrating the very personal and affective dimension of the new reproductive technology in this way, the novel’s emphasis on Lambert’s ethical dilemma in choosing an embryo also acts as a platform to contrast diverse cultural reactions to the new genetic technologies which have only increased in sophistication since the novel’s publication. Among these cultural reactions to genetics’ technological abilities, invocations of eugenics stand out. In the novel’s depictions of both Mendel’s and Lambert’s scientific practice, eugenics is the spectre that seems to haunt their work. As regards Mendel, Voigts summarises that “[i]n terms of his science, Mendel emerges as a humane but unwitting precursor of eugenics” (2014, p. 88). Lambert, in a lecture on the “new eugenics”, draws a direct line from the early eugenic projects of the nineteenth and twentieth century to the more hidden new eugenics of the late-twentieth century (see also Soares 2013, pp. 129–30). While depicting both as abuses of genetic science, Lambert acknowledges the often-­ unwitting role scientists have played in human tragedy when he recognises

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that Mendel’s proto-genetics “would ultimately lead to the ovens of Auschwitz” (236). This trajectory is of course a reductionist account of the complicated path from the abstract discovery of laws of heredity to their corrupt operationalisation for the justification of mass discrimination and genocide. In his 2009 novel The Glass Room, Mawer revisits the propaganda driving fascist science before and during the Second World War in its attempt to legitimise a deranged political vision of biological superiority among human races. There, Mawer expands on the time’s social and political culture and its misguided use of science to highlight hereditary racial features, all in service of upholding the “purity of the races” (2009, p. 239). In Mendel’s Dwarf, Lambert declares that “old eugenics died with the Third Reich” but that “the new eugenics is with us” (283) in the form of sex selection in sperm donations and genetic pre-implantation tests. He then envisions a near future in which “you will be able to choose other qualities in the embryo [apart from sex]: the child’s eye colour, hair colour, skin colour, and height” (285). Such control over physical traits, with its ideology of human enhancement, is especially provocative to Lambert who, as Voigts underlines, “embodies the chance variability of nature and exists as a challenge to the human desire to engineer, structure and narrativise a telos into nature according to crude notions of normalcy” (2014, p. 87). Yet in an ironic twist, while Lambert condemns the new eugenics of consumer demand, the narrative alternates between the lecture hall and the hospital where his child is being born back in England, the child who embodies precisely the kind of interventionist practice Lambert has just outlined. The child’s controlled inception manifests an instance of controlled evolution and undermines the challenge to normative narratives of human nature his father’s chance mutation represents. The text thus sets up a contradiction between Lambert’s proposed ethical position and his actions. This contradiction is never fully resolved but constitutes a productive tension in the novel, reflecting the gulf between abstract ethical ideals and the moral and emotional urgency of caring for a child’s health. An additional chasm is opened up between his difficult personal choice and a profit-governed biomedical marketplace potentially producing a privileged genetic elite. Lambert and Jean’s embrace of IVF and PID, as well as Lambert’s love for the child, could be interpreted to accord with Nicholas Agar’s conception of “liberal eugenics”; with Agar asking for a differentiation between the biopolitical restriction of reproduction in the

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old eugenics and the creation of new reproductive possibilities through genetic testing (Agar 2004). Even though Lambert would most certainly feel unease about the label of eugenics being applied to his decision. His charge against the new eugenics together with his decision to choose one specific embryo over another illuminate the slippery slope between ethical arguments for more control in matters of reproductive health and eugenic philosophies of enhancement. In another interpretation, Lambert’s claim of his paternity is so charged with a feeling of pride and emphasis on his new kinship relation as the child’s father, that despite all previous intimations of unnatural practices, the child’s existence seems fully naturalised. It is indeed striking how the novel after Lambert’s lecture never revisits any of its major implications. When he declares “the future of mankind” (286) to be in their hands, that is, the hands of market-driven geneticists, his fear resonates with Habermas’s vision of a posthuman future in which the introduction of reproductive choice undermines human nature, namely the natural “givenness” of the genetic material (Habermas 2003). And, to recall, in his scientific practice Lambert repeatedly identifies what he considers as unnatural interventions into the processes of life. At other times, however, Lambert seems to suggest the category of the natural to be rather too restrictive: “But what is natural? Nature is what nature does. […] Is in vitro fertilisation and the growth of multiple embryos in culture, is all that natural? […] Was Great-great-great-uncle Gregor’s artificial pollination natural?” (226–227). He intimates that while not traditionally natural, the scientific manipulations of life may not be unnatural either and hence calls for a rethinking of what “natural” actually means. This line of reasoning evokes the posthumanist thinking of such figures as Donna Haraway and Cary Wolfe (see also Chap. 5). They seek to find new ways to think nature and the human through decentring both terms and embedding them in (cyborgian) networks of interconnectedness in which technology and biology are co-constitutive of human life. The novel thus contains diverging readings of the new genetic practices—all channelled through the figure of Lambert. In one possible reading, the final naturalisation of the parent-child relationship retrospectively mutes the conflicting attitudes towards its reproduction as previously displayed in the novel, obfuscating the child’s posthuman status. In another, possibly more interesting reading, the absence of alienation in the text’s depiction of Lambert’s relation to the child indicates that a subtle rewriting of nature has taken place by the end

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of Mendel’s Dwarf. Frances Bartkowski has tellingly included the novel in her posthumanist study of new kinship relations arising from new reproductive technologies. Bartkowski highlights the novel’s depiction of IVF as indicative of a concept of kinship that “names what we choose in relation to what is given” (2008, p. 150). Lambert chooses to see his connection to Adam, his son, as equal to that between him and his own father. What seems to count is the sharing of genes not the method by which the child was conceived.5 First, the child’s eyes are a genetic marker of non-­ kinship with Jean’s husband, Hugo, who “has learned his Mendel enough to know his child ought not to have been born with brown eyes” (Bartkowski 2008, p. 151). Then, after Hugo in a fit of revenge has killed Adam, Lambert remarks: “From Mendel to the future, the tenuous chain of descent, the passage of DNA down the generations, was soon broken” (309). Although the passage of DNA ends here, the genetic and temporal link from Mendel over Lambert to Adam, evincing kinship from the past and into the future, is affirmed. The genetic tie is actively chosen to be significant, bolstering up Lambert’s own sense of identity as a father, and the intervention into the reproductive process is accepted as an expansion of the concept of the natural, defying a rigid binary division of culture and nature. The novel’s imagination of kinship highlights genetic discourses as culturally meaningful resources of social relation. Genetics is shown to not simply complement but reshape cultural appropriations of the natural. Illustrating Rabinow’s idea of biosociality, Adam represents a remaking of life “modelled on culture understood as practice”, that is, modelled on an interventionist approach to biological matter. Nature is “remade through technique”, just as culture is naturalised by geneticising life (Rabinow 1996, p. 99). Mendel’s Dwarf introduces a clear historical framing of this cultural transformation. The novel tells the stories of two lives, but it is only Lambert’s that is thoroughly framed through genetics. This is only historically accurate as a geneticised telling of Mendel’s life would after all be an anachronism. Still, Lambert cannot help rendering Mendel’s own protogenetic thinking about heredity in the language of genes and 5  In contrast, Soares interprets the novel’s representation of Lambert’s intervention into the supposedly natural processes of reproduction in more binary terms, suggesting that Lambert’s elimination of randomness is ultimately punished through the death of his son (2013, p. 131).

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chromosomes, wondering if “the particular sets of chromosomes that came together then bring with them Gregor Mendel’s particular future?” (30). In addition, Lambert fashions his kinship with Mendel in genetic terms. So Mendel’s life is also subjected to the genetic gaze, albeit only to a minor degree and always from a clearly marked position in his biographer’s twentieth-century time-frame. Mendel himself models nature just as much according to his scientific beliefs as Lambert does—but the significant difference is that for Mendel the inclusion of human life in his thinking is marginal at best and his experiments are restricted to the life of plants and small mammals. He does study a group of circus dwarfs but concedes that “[o]f course, none of this is certain” (133). One of the principal effects of this doubling of life narratives is that Lambert represents a larger shift in the historical development of genetic science: and as the research focus extends from plant and animal to human life, the moral stakes rise accordingly. Besides drawing attention to the genetic frame of reference pervading Lambert’s autobiographical strand, which lacks an equivalent discourse in Mendel’s biographical narrative, the juxtaposition of the two stories emphasises the historical specificity of scientific practice which I have explored more fully elsewhere (Hamann-Rose 2019).6 I will concentrate here only on the general effect of this historical perspective. On one level, the non-geneticised account of Mendel’s life demarcates Lambert’s modern genetic subjectivity as a culturally specific phenomenon. On another, the contrasting scientific practices in the novel—compare, for example, Mendel’s empirical breeding experiments with Lambert’s high-tech lab machines—underline that the genetic concepts of today are entangled with and contingent upon modern technical methods. This is most dramatically visible in the interventionist genetic discourse that comes with the technological ability to test for Lambert’s genetic mutation, and which ultimately occasions a rethinking of the very nature of life. This perspective endows the geneticisation of Lambert’s life with an acute historical specificity. Mendel’s historical methodology is also associated with the novel’s geneticisation of Lambert for another, more playful reason: he works with dwarfs. “The novel is full of ironic parallelism, from the very fact that Mendel experimented with garden pea ‘dwarfs’” (Voigts 2014, p.  88). 6  Mawer himself has explored Mendel’s place in the history of genetic science in his separate publication Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics (2006).

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The analogy set up between Lambert the dwarf and Mendel’s dwarf plants—and at one point circus dwarfs—resonates in the novel’s title. Lambert is Mendel’s Dwarf in the sense that they are related but also in a more complex way. The understanding of Lambert’s achondroplasia in the novel is a result—by a complicated historical journey—of Mendel’s experiments with dwarfs. Lambert is thus also one of his ancestor’s dwarfs in the capacity of one studied by the science Mendel revolutionised. The analogy here suggests Lambert as an object of study, which he no doubt is in the novel, first and foremost for himself, but the objectification inherent in the process also carries problematic overtones that recall how Lambert suffers from the sort of social stigmatisation that reduces him to his genetic condition. There is a sense of this already in Lambert’s school days when after a biology class the other boys begin to shout: “He is one of Mendel’s dwarfs!” (21). Later, a humorous reversal of the analogy takes place when Lambert describes Mendel’s lecture: “Mendel’s own diminutive figure is silhouetted against the picture as though dwarfed by his discovery” (202). Here, the image of the dwarf is turned on its head and applied to Mendel himself who is outgrown by the prospective influence of his research. Ironically, Lambert as representative of the future’s genetics in this scenario sheds all diminutiveness and towers over his forefather. The image of the dwarf in the novel is thus the site of a complex aesthetic negotiation of the relation between the text’s two central characters. The relation that comes to dominate the figure of the dwarf however is Lambert’s personification—both literally and epistemologically—of the research model that would lead Mendel to articulate the foundational laws of genetics, the laws which then propel the paradigm shift in the study and understanding of life.

Reading the Biological Text: Mendel’s Dwarf as Autozoegraphy The representation of life itself takes two forms in Mendel’s Dwarf. The first represents conceptions of life itself through Lambert’s insider perspective into the field of genetic science. As a geneticist, Lambert not only subjects his surroundings and himself to a genetic gaze but offers a didactic exposition of genetic conceptions of biological life. He is didactic here in the best sense of the term, not as dogmatist but as teacher of genetic knowledge which he imparts as much to Jean and his lecture audiences as

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to the reader. This epistemic didacticism is strongest in the chapter entitled “Linkage” (115). The chapter headings are generally genetic and biological terms and evocative of a symbolic meaning for the subsequent chapter. Linkage for instance is a genetic expression for the phenomenon that some genes are connected on a chromosome to be inherited together. While it is not immediately clear what this refers to in the chapter as a whole, it ties in with the exposition of specialised genetic knowledge in the chapter. Other headings are more clearly relatable to their chapters, “Recombination” (221) for instance, recounts the IVF procedure during which genetic material from Jean and Lambert is literally recombined to produce a new human life. “Linkage” does resonate with one of Lambert’s metaphoric explanations of how genes work, namely by comparing the nucleotide sequence of DNA to the “sleepers of a railway” (118). The most significant metaphor Lambert uses in this chapter to describe the workings of genes is not the railway however but the genetic text. The metaphor of genetic text is a recurring gesture in the novel towards a particular understanding of life itself. The rhetoric and genesis of genetic conceptions of life have been deeply influenced by textual metaphors, as Lily Kay has elaborately shown with regard to the “book of life” metaphor (see Chap. 1). In the Linkage chapter Lambert subscribes to the book of life imagery when he describes the four nucleotides of DNA as “the alphabet of life” (118). He then goes on to define the genetic sequence as a “language” (120) that is “universal” (121) and underlies plant just as animal and human life. Accordingly, Lambert frames genetic mutations or other genetic aberrations here and throughout the narrative as “spelling mistake[s]”, that “fuck for luck” (119, 230, see also 123, 208). The pun intimates that such a misspelling is a curse. This highlights one of the consequences from the representation of biological life as a text written in the language of genes: the textual metaphor supports a conception of biological determinism. The idea of a genetic book of life implies that its text is made available for perusal, offering up the “instruction book” (123) containing all the information needed to produce the finished life form or individual. Lambert explains to Jean that the genetic message contains the “instruction to make you: a phenotypically normal woman, brown haired, slim, good-looking, nervous, selfdeprecating, confused about her husband” (119). While in the end he veers off the purely biological discourse to make a statement about her marital problems rather than about biology, the scope of the genetic instruction suggested here could hardly be more encompassing. The

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suggestion is that by reading the book of life, DNA, it has become possible to understand the fundamental principles of biological life. This representation of life as life itself, or zoe, through the metaphor of text merges in the novel with its representation of life as bios. As I have outlined in the first chapter, zoe is usually associated with the fundamental biological processes of life while bios denotes a socio-cultural way of life. The convergence of the two concepts in the novel through the metaphor of life as a text or a book plays out in multiple ways. To begin with, the understanding of the biological text introduces the idea that life can be intervened upon at the level of its genetic text, in other words, that it can be rewritten. This is what happens in the reproductive intervention during Adam’s conception. The central tenet of Lambert’s introduction to genetics is that life understood as genetic text becomes readable and rewritable. In Lambert’s pun on “fuck for luck” the link between the textual understanding of biological life and the sense of determinism he embraces for much of the novel is already apparent. The idea of DNA as the book of life becomes significant for his understanding of his own life—in all its biological and cultural dimensions—exemplifying how his individual identity politics engages the textual representation of life itself. Lingering associations of genetic textuality with the divine book of life underwrite rather than resist the determinist dogma in the novel. This remnant theological connotation directly affects Lambert’s representation of life. Note the following description of genetic practice: “We have read the texts. Like latter-day Bible scholars, like exegetes, we have read the words of the scroll of life” (208). Lambert claims that while previously the “secret of life” had been “enshrined in the tabernacle on the altar, in a sliver of wafer”, the secret has now been “stripped open for mankind to read, in polyacrylamide denaturing gel” (139). He may claim that science has transcended the old paradigms, but his scriptural imagery of DNA unconsciously appropriates a lingering sense of divine authority. Lambert tellingly speaks of the genetic laboratory as “a cathedral of the new age where priests and scribes decipher and translate the texts, and find damnation written there just as clearly as they ever did in medieval times” (70). Even if Lambert, who is otherwise not a very religious man, probably does not really mean to suggest God as an actual factor in nature’s processes— boasting elsewhere of having “called God’s bluff” (182)—his discourse directly infuses the genetic text of life with a sense of divine destiny. And Adam’s death can even be read as divine punishment for the wilful intervention in God’s creation since Lambert at some stage asks: “Wasn’t

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choice what betrayed Adam and Eve?” (250). In light of the religious imagery in the novel it becomes apparent that a clear distinction between the novel’s representation of biological life and its entangled refraction in cultural contexts can only ever be heuristically achieved. The reliance on textual and openly theological rhetoric shows Lambert’s exposition of his genetic understanding of life to be inextricably linked to prior cultural notions of a divine origin and organisation of life. The textual understanding of life is revealed as co-constituting the general and individual sphere of Lambert’s thinking about life. The modes of reading and writing life genetically become meaningful also on a more abstract scale with regard to the novel’s form as life writing. In Lambert’s genetic autobiography, the metaphor of the book of life comes to inform the writing of Mendel’s Dwarf as a book of life. Life writing essentially constitutes a mode of textually representing a life; a mode that in the novel finds an analogous expression in the writing of life understood through genetics. The analogy is ontologised, however, in the concept of DNA as text. Lambert explains to Jean that “there isn’t a fundamental you that stands outside all this”, that is, the genetic information, “like a reader looking at a book” (119). Because the “message is the molecule” (119), her—and by extension his—life is the book. In light of the novel’s complex exploration of how genetic discourse is culturally meaningful for Lambert’s existence, however, I argue that this ontological view of the genetic book of life, as well as its implied reductionism, is critically diversified and de-essentialised in Mendel’s Dwarf. In other words, in the novel the genetic text of life also emerges as a representation of life rather than the thing itself, just as Lambert’s embodiment of a genetic understanding of life is a literary mode of representation. Life in Mendel’s Dwarf is written, in the genetic idiom, both on a conceptual level as a particular understanding of life and on a narrative level as the representation of Lambert’s life story. Yet, life is also read in the novel. Lambert, in a remarkable moment of possible metafictional self-awareness, describes the practice of searching for his mutation as “textual analysis gone mad” (208). He is thus involved in the act of reading the text of life, just as the reader of Mendel’s Dwarf is involved in the act of reading his life narrative. And just as Lambert’s mode of reading is conditioned by genetic practice, so is the reading of Lambert’s life in the novel conditioned by generic expectations of autobiographical fiction. The major innovation of the novel is that the representation of life through the genre of life writing is transformed by the addition of a genetic perspective on the life narrated

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in the novel. Reading for genetics thus becomes part of the genre of life writing. The genre of fictional autobiography affords Mendel’s Dwarf its rich investigation of the cultural meanings of a genetic view of life. Autobiographical life writing inevitably negotiates life both in the abstract and in lived and concrete particularity. The form’s generic affordance of highlighting abstract approaches to and conceptions of life has made life writing especially productive in imaginations of the posthuman. Locating Mendel’s Dwarf within this emerging critical and aesthetic field offers another perspective on the novel and provides an outlook on present and future developments in the field of genetic fictional life writing. Life writing practically by definition contains an affinity with posthumanist thinking. The genre is characterised by the writing and rewriting of lives in accord with historically specific discourses and assumptions about life, and human life in particular. As Gillian Whitlock explains, “what it means to be human is a question that is fundamental to autobiographical narrative, and embedded in the history of autobiography in Western modernity” (Whitlock 2012, p. v; see also Herbrechter 2016, pp. 2–3). Life writing’s self-reflexive character therefore emerges as especially productive for posthumanist critique, which questions “the life of the human being as a unique subject” and “gestures towards different conceptions of living and non-living matter” (Whitlock 2012, p. vii). Hornung similarly notes “valuable and potentially enlightening approaches to the study of ‘bios’ in all variations of biology and forms of auto-bio-graphy” arising from posthumanism (2015, p. 51). While the posthumanist challenge to conceptions of life in Mendel’s Dwarf is restricted to new reproductive technologies, the posthumanist emphasis on biology in life writing underlines my argument that in the novel’s genetic representation of life itself, or zoe, life writing is no longer limited to the negotiation of purely socio-­ cultural life, or bios. Instead, biological notions of life itself mingle with, extend into and co-constitute the novel’s representation of bios. As a result, Lambert’s autobiographical narrative could also provocatively be called an autozoegraphy. The concept of autozoegraphy forcefully emphasises the attention paid in Mendel’s Dwarf to a genetic understanding of life itself.7 Autozoegraphy, just as its traditional counterpart, autobiography, is fraught with 7  Arne de Boever similarly highlights a recent focus on life itself in the novel. Drawing on Derrida’s reading of Plato’s word for painting, “zoographia”, de Boever suggests the con-

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emphasising one dimension of life over the other, while Mendel’s Dwarf achieves to productively and critically converge the biological with the biographical dimensions of life. Another shortcoming of autozoegraphical writing as a concept is that the notion of an autobiography of life itself might erroneously suggest that it is life itself narrating its own story. This would correspond to Couser’s sense of the human genome as a form of life writing, which I discussed in the beginning of this chapter. Yet, when autozoegraphy is understood as denoting an individual’s negotiation of how biological conceptions of life itself, or zoe, shape and infiltrate their socio-cultural life, or bios, then the new genre label allows to pinpoint the specific generic and epistemological innovations apparent in the geneticisation of life in Mawer’s novel. Finally, the novel’s genetic approach to life writing not only radically combines biological and biographical dimensions of life but undermines the two dimensions’ separation in the first place. Stefan Herbrechter, for example, posits that, following Darwin, an individual’s autobiography is always also part of a wider species history: “There are at least two versions of autobiography in every human subject—the individual biography and the autobiography of the species, which stand in a kind of dialogue with each other and which are largely determined by biology, genetics and evolution” (Herbrechter 2016, p. 5, emphasis original). In Mendel’s Dwarf, this Darwinian sense of a biography of the species is more genetically fashioned as a Mendelian biography of human kinship, but equally places biology at the very heart of biography. As a result, the novel’s geneticised life writing not only critically explores a historically specific dialogue between biology and biography, but also suggests how any individual biography is implicated in the material dimension of life itself.

References Agar, Nicholas. 2004. Liberal Eugenics: In Defence of Human Enhancement. Oxford: Blackwell. Banerjee, Mita. 2013. Panel on Life Sciences and Life Writing. In American Lives, ed. Alfred Hornung, 537–560. Heidelberg: Winter. Bartkowski, Frances. 2008. Kissing Cousins: A New Kinship Bestiary. New York: Columbia University Press. cept of “zoographein” to capture the novel’s forms of life writing (De Boever 2013, pp. 8–9). De Boever is not concerned with life writing as a textual genre, however.

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Choksey, Lara. 2021. Narrative in the Age of the Genome. London: Bloomsbury. Clayton, Jay. 2002. Genome Time. In Time and the Literary, ed. Karen Newman, Jay Clayton and Marianne Hirsch, 31–59. London: Routledge. Couser, G. Thomas. 2001. Genome and Genre: DNA and Life Writing. Biography 24: 185–196. De Boever, Arne. 2013. Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel. London: Bloomsbury. De Groot, Jerome. 2023. Double Helix History: Genetics and the Past. London: Routledge. Franklin, Sarah. 2003. Re-thinking Nature-culture: Anthropology and the New Genetics. Anthropological Theory 3: 65–85. Franklin, Sarah and Celia Roberts. 2006. Born and Made: An Ethnography of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 2003. The Future of Human Nature. Cambridge: Polity. Hamann-Rose, Paul. 2021. New Poetics of Postcolonial Relations: Global Genetic Kinship in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome. Medical Humanities  – Special issue on Global Genetic Fictions 47: 167–176. ———. 2019. Genealogies of Genetics: Historicising Contemporary Science in Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf and A.S.  Byatt’s A Whistling Woman. In Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction: Human and Temporal Connectivities, ed. Nina Engelhardt and Julia Hoydis, 113–131. London: Palgrave. Herbrechter, Stefan. 2016. Narrating(-)Life  – In Lieu of an Introduction. In Narrating Life – Experiments with Human and Animal Bodies in Literature, Science and Art, ed. S. Herbrechter and E. Friis, 1–13. Amsterdam: Brill. Hornung, Alfred. 2015. Life Sciences and Life Writing. Anglia 133: 37–52. Hustvedt, Siri. 2010. The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves. London: Sceptre. Kirchhofer, Anton and Natalie Roxburgh. 2016. The Scientist as ‘Problematic Individual’ in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction. ZAA 64: 149–168. Mawer, Simon. 2022. Ancestry. London: Little, Brown. ———. 2009. The Glass Room. London: Abacus. ———. 2006. Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics. New York: Abrams. ———. 2011 [1997]. Mendel’s Dwarf. London: Abacus. ———. 1999. Mendel’s Dwarf. London: Penguin. Novas, Carlos and Nikolas Rose. 2000. Genetic Risk and the Birth of the Somatic Individual. Economy and Society 29: 485–513. Pennington, Heidi L. 2018. Creating Identity in the Victorian Fictional Autobiography. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

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Rabinow, Paul. 1996. Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality. In Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rieder, John. 2007. Life Writing and Science Fiction: Constructing Identities and Constructing Genres. Biography 30: v–xvii. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. 1999. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Routledge. Schier, Donald. 1999. A Genetic Parable. The Sewanee Review 107: xcii–xciv. Schwalm, Helga. Autobiography. In The Living Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn et  al., Hamburg University, https://www-­archiv.fdm.uni-­ hamburg.de/lhn/node/129.html. Accessed 21 July 2023. Soares, Andréia A. 2013. Imagining Humans in the Age of DNA: Genetics and Contemporary British Fiction. Imperial College London, PhD dissertation. Squier, Susan M. 1996. Babies in Bottles. Penn State News. http://news.psu.edu/ story/140821/1996/09/01/research/babies-­bottles. Accessed 19 March 2020. Voigts, Eckart. 2014. Bio-Fiction: Neo-Victorian Revisions of Evolution and Genetics. Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations, ed. Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, 79–92. London: Routledge. Whitlock, Gillian. 2012. Post-ing Lives. Biography 35: v–xvi. Winslow, Donald J. 1995. Life Writing: A Glossary of Terms in Biography, Autobiography and Related Forms. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

“There is grandeur in this view of life”: Ian McEwan’s Poetics of Chance and the Forms of Genetic Determinism

There was the powerful sensation that mankind was mere flesh, mere mechanics at the mercy of randomness and chaotic nature. Simon Mawer, Mendel’s Dwarf 48

Simon Mawer’s protagonist in his novel Mendel’s Dwarf refers to the incongruous coupling of randomness and deterministic causalities as the “tyranny of chance” (2011, p. 8). He thereby emphasises the central role of chance in a genetic understanding of how life is reproduced through the inheritance of genetic material from one generation to the next. At the same time, the overall tone of his view on heredity, as captured in the epigraph above, presents randomness as a form of fate. This sense of biological predetermination is strengthened in the cited passage by the protagonist’s reductionist perspective on bodily “mechanics”. In this paradoxical understanding, the unpredictable inheritance of DNA turns into a vehicle of predestination. Core tenets of molecular biology support this line of thought. The theory proposed by pioneering geneticist and Nobel laureate Jacques Monod in Chance and Necessity (1970) is an exemplary articulation of this understanding which I will revisit in more detail below. Mawer’s novel and Monod’s scientific treatise draw attention to the central oppositional interplay of random and predetermined processes in genetic explanations of living organisms. In public debates, the emphasis has historically often been laid on the genome’s predictive capacities with © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Hamann-Rose, Genetics and the Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53100-2_3

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regard to human development, giving rise to popular invocations of so-­ called genetic determinism. In Mendel’s Dwarf, as the previous chapter has shown, the concept of chance plays a role in the novel’s discussion of genetic determinism but mostly remains anchored in the text’s content-­ level engagement with genetics. In this chapter, my focus shifts to the way in which two novels by Ian McEwan employ chance as a central formal element in their interrogation of genetic determinism. In Enduring Love (1997) and Saturday (2005), McEwan’s poetics of chance reveals a complex critique of molecular explanations of life and the deterministic rhetoric they have frequently inspired. Exploring aesthetic and genetic structures of chance and determinism, these novels embody a new form of confronting the biological and cultural dimensions of life in the novel. With Enduring Love published before and Saturday after the completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP) in 2003, these two novels present compelling test cases through which to investigate to what extent the genetic discourse in McEwan’s writing has changed over time, particularly in reaction to the major blow to notions of genetic determinism dealt by the HGP’s findings. The simple fact that instead of an expected 100,000 a “mere” 20,000 genes were identified caused many to revaluate the HGP’s extravagant promises of medical innovations, particularly in the field of gene therapy, as well as the undertaking’s gene-centric deterministic rhetoric. Ever since the rise in news coverage of emerging genetic science in the late 1980s and early 1990s, commentators have attacked essentialist portrayals of human genetics. Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee’s definition of genetic essentialism, which is an encompassing term for all kinds of deterministic interpretations of genetic science, has proven programmatic: genetic essentialism “reduces the self to a molecular entity, equating human beings, in all their social, historical, and moral complexity, with their genes” (Nelkin and Lindee 1995, p. 2). Works by Nelkin and Lindee, Ruth Hubbard and Elijah Wald, and Richard Lewontin are prominent examples of academic and scientific criticism of such essentialist conceptions of genetics (see Chap. 1). Subsequent to the HGP, new research into epigenetics and environmental factors in heredity further destabilised the foundations of deterministic conceptions of gene functions. Recent scholarship further suggests that public commitments to deterministic and essentialist understanding of genetics are neither as pervasive nor actually as committed as commentators in the 1990s feared (Condit 2019). However, despite decades of criticism, the concept of genetic determinism has had a profound impact on the Western cultural

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imagination. And the concept continues to thrive in many contexts; the idea that genes tell us something essential about our health and personality underlies many of the new direct-to-consumer DNA-testing kits available for online purchase. The US company Orig3n, for example, advertises to determine children’s talents for sports or languages as part of their “Child Development” DNA-kit.1 In a literary context, McEwan’s two novels and their explicitly deterministic discourses are ample evidence of these discourses’ cultural impact. Enduring Love and Saturday foreground concepts of genetic determinism, which is why readers and critics have been led to believe that the novels do in fact subscribe to these views. According to Greg Gerrard, for instance, Enduring Love is “McEwan’s most overtly Darwinian novel” and “celebrates the saving power of scientific rationality” (2010, p. 233; see also Rose and Rose 2009, p. 9). In this interpretation, there may indeed be “grandeur in this view of life”, to take up the character Henry Perowne’s citation of Darwin in Saturday. A deterministic view of molecular life has substantial implications for the humanist values of autonomy, free will and political equality. Yet both novels’ structural representations of chance, together with other factors, complicate Darwin’s sentiment and ask if there is not also a dangerous reductionism in an all-too grandiose view of life as molecular, despite the later novel investing heavily in a deterministic outlook on genetic science. Representations of chance, I argue, are the novels’ central formal vehicle through which they perform their criticism of genetic determinism. Chance is such a central category in genetics that it is surprising that there has as yet not been any systematic study of how genetic randomness has been treated in literary aesthetics. My critical assessment of randomness and genetic essentialism in Enduring Love and Saturday is crucially informed by their aesthetic form, especially by their randomising—and therefore de-essentialising—temporal and plot structures. I explicitly consider plot through the notion of emplotment and hence as an element of the text’s structural aesthetics, rather than focusing on plot as a primarily content-oriented phenomenon. Further analysis reveals that the two novels’ essentialist discourses rely on different genetic paradigms, which in each case imply specific temporalities and causal relations. These different paradigms can in each case be shown to resonate with the respective text’s aesthetic composition. The novels thereby not only illustrate that 1

 https://shop.orig3n.com/products/child-development. Accessed on 17 July 2023.

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discourses of genetic determinism are in fact manifold to begin with, but they additionally demonstrate that literary fiction is attuned to scientific ideas in very precise ways down to the level of form.

Structural Determinations: Chance, Genetics and Literary Representation The relationship between chance and a predetermined order in a biological system of life finds its most prominent early formulation in Charles Darwin’s proto-genetic theories of evolution. His theory of natural selection relies on chance to produce mutations which then serve as the basis for selection. Darwin first conceived of chance events merely as events whose causes had not been understood (Michelini 2015, p. 389). He later replaced this notion of chance as ignorance with a concept of randomness as a fact of the physical world. Variation was “not a matter of design” but functioned “like a lottery” (Beatty 2013, pp.  147, 150). John Beatty’s analogy between variation and gambling is productive because it speaks to the lack of any teleological design in Darwin’s evolutionary theory. In Gillian Beer’s elegant phrase, there is “no conclusion in Darwin” (Beer 1985, p. 11); the story of evolution continues ad infinitum. From Darwin’s theory of evolution followed a larger foregrounding of randomness as a constitutive element of human existence. As Julia Jordan explains: “Chance in the origins of life thus became inextricable in the post-Darwinian nineteenth-­ century understanding of the world, an association that instilled in us a knowledge of the intimidatingly one-in-a-million shot that we all miraculously achieve in being born at all” (Jordan 2010, p.  21). Advances in physics, from the nineteenth-century discovery of the second law of thermodynamics—whose theory of entropy entailed that the world could never be entirely predictable—to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and the advent of chaos theory in the late twentieth century, further cemented chance as a “fundamental, unavoidable reality” (Coffman 2014, pp. 378–379). As biology itself evolved and developed its prevalent molecular paradigm, chance continued to play a major role in genetic conceptions of evolution. Jacques Monod, in Chance and Necessity, explains how evolutionary processes rely first on genetic mutation, then on the conservative and contained self-organisation of living organisms. Monod states that

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once recorded in the DNA structure, the singular accident, and as such essentially unpredictable, is mechanically and faithfully replicated and translated, namely both multiplied and transposed in millions or billions of exemplars. Taken out from the reign of pure chance, it enters into the reign of necessity, of the most remorseless certainty. (Monod cited in Merlin 2015, p. 408)

While the mutation itself is non-teleological, the organism thrives on “goal-oriented behaviour at the level of the gene” (Clayton 2002, p. 40). Monod differentiates these directed biological processes from more metaphysical notions of teleology and suggests the term “teleonomy” to describe their systematic directedness (Merlin 2015, p.  407). Despite Monod’s differentiation, however, molecular emphases on the integration of chance into an encompassing end-directed biological process continues to prove conducive to notions of genetic determinism (Clayton 2002, p.  40). Chance’s destabilising force is subsumed under the organism’s “necessary” internal order. This incorporation of randomness into a system of predictable genetic trajectories is reproduced in the paradox Mawer’s protagonist outlines in Mendel’s Dwarf. Recent studies, as Francesca Merlin elucidates, challenge Monod’s strict dichotomy of chance and necessity as causal factors in biology. In certain circumstances, molecular mechanisms will increase the organism’s mutation rates in response to environmental pressures, suggesting a causal interdependence between chance mutation, selective advantage and internal biological organisation (Merlin 2015, p. 411). The role of chance in biological theories changes over time but the framework for its role is defined by a varying constellation of randomness and predictability. Akin to such theories about the internal organisation of organisms, the form of the novel can similarly be characterised by the way chance configures its internal aesthetic organisation. Paraphrasing Frank Kermode, Gillian White describes fiction as “the genre in which chance and fate most visibly pivot through their dialectical situation” (White 2018, p. 531). Like biological understandings of randomness, these aesthetic configurations of chance are historically specific and reflective of particular cultural as well as scientific conditions and assumptions. The kind of randomness shaping McEwan’s representations of genetic determinism differs from the biological concepts they engage in one crucial aspect. Chance in literary texts always only figures as a representation of the random. Literature is inherently representational, so why should

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this matter? It matters because, according to the leading critical narrative, when chance is integrated into an aesthetic construction, its subversive potential is curtailed by the work’s overall artistic structure, its “whole” to borrow one of Levine’s central forms (Levine 2015). Chance and its correlative concept of the accidental are defined by their lack of an identifiable or imminent cause (Butter 2015, p.  120; Molesworth 2010, p.  14). Chance events occur “for no apparent reason” (Jordan 2010, p. 3).2 Yet in the realm of the literary, true randomness is restricted on both the authorial and the formal level. Besides exceptions in which aleatory forces have shaped the composition of a particular piece, events in fiction occur because an author decided that they would, barring intentionally random writing practices like automatic writing or, more recently, digital variations of the choose-your-own-adventure books. Even when leaving questions of authorial intent aside, an artwork’s overall structure tends to recuperate chance into a meaningful whole. This dynamic is particularly prominent in literary structures of plot and temporality. Jesse Molesworth persuasively argues that narrative emplotment in fiction is always at least minimally teleological in that a narrative’s ending retrospectively fashions all events in the story as directed towards this final point in the plot (Molesworth 2010, p. 102). Or as Leland Monk declares: “the disruptions occasioned by ostensible chance events in narrative are always and already in the process of being recuperated by some sense of formal coherence and design” (1993, p. 8). Paul Ricoeur similarly notes that the “paradox of emplotment is that it inverts the effect of contingency […] by incorporating it in some way into the effect of necessity or probability exerted by the configuring act” (Ricoeur 1994, p.  142). Emplotment entails “the process of finding teleological significance within the merely accidental” (Molesworth 2010, p. 13). The argument proposed by Molesworth and others about the formal recuperation of chance into an aesthetically determined whole suggests a rather inflexible and restrictive understanding of literary form. After all, one of the achievements of literary theory has been to celebrate the multiplicity of possible meanings and interpretations of a literary text. Literary theory capitalises on what Christina Lupton, following Richard Rorty, refers to as the contingency of “the relation of all language to the world” (Lupton 2018, p.  376). The arbitrary relations at the heart of semiotic 2  Another related term is “coincidence” which Molesworth defines as the “simultaneous occurrence of two events lacking any obvious connection” (Molesworth 2010, p. 14).

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signification challenge an understanding of artistic form that champions the role of artistic unity in fiction and its implication of narrative teleology. The complexity of meaning escapes predictability. However, for a discussion of representations of randomness in fiction it is productive to maintain, if somewhat heuristically, a narrower, more dialectic definition of form that recognises the tension between the opposing forces of contingency and structuration at work in a text. A focus on the relative stability and predictability of form allows to better elucidate the subversive power of contingency and chance. Caroline Levine’s social-formalist readings explicitly emphasise “the aleatory possibilities that lie in the encounters among forms” (Levine 2015, xii–xiii). Levine rejects the notion of an artistic whole, positing that “[r]eaders and writers, embodied and located in time and space, bring specific knowledge and experience to any aesthetic object, activating and reshaping its meanings in ways that shift over time and across cultures” (ibid., p. 24). She argues that instead of a “bounded wholeness”, narratives contain multiple colliding and overlapping but recognisably stable forms (ibid., pp.  21, 24). Levine’s work helps underscore that attention to formal pressures on representations of chance do not eclipse the unpredictable meanings that may erupt from these pressure points and may end up affirming rather than denying contingency. Several critics have outlined modes of depicting chance and contingency in fiction in spite of the novel’s formal resistance to both (Beer 1985; Jordan 2010; Smith 2010; Butter 2015; Ryle 2018). Chance is primarily a causal factor so it is no surprise that Jordan and others frequently concentrate on the level of plot. In her seminal work Darwin’s Plots, Gillian Beer explores the mutual influence of new evolutionary thinking and nineteenth-century aesthetics. One of the main sites of literary appropriations of evolutionary thought she identifies is located at the level of structure: “The methods of scientists become the methods of emplotment and scientific theories suggest new organisations for fiction” (Beer 1985, p.  161). Despite Darwin’s non-teleological reliance on chance, his powerful interpretative model offered a strong causal explanation of evolution that shaped contemporary plot constructions: Plot in nineteenth-century fiction is a radical form of interpretation: it fixes the relations between phenomena. It projects the future and then gives real form to its own predictions. It is to that extent self-verifying: its solutions confirm the validity of the clues proposed. (Ibid., p. 162)

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At the same time Beer foregrounds novels that resist the tendency of plot to overdetermine its causal interpretation of life. In Daniel Deronda, Beer illustrates, George Eliot embraces the role of chance in Darwin’s thinking more fully even than in Middlemarch. Daniel Deronda thrives on a “multiplicity of possibilities, on coincidence as a creative force, on the absorbing unpredictability of what is to come” (ibid., p.  191). Beer is not primarily concerned with chance but with plot and its relation to teleology. Yet her remarks on the emplotment of evolutionary concepts illuminate how the nineteenth-century novel responded to a changing perception of contingency and determinism in the natural universe. As evolutionary thinking created new room for the unpredictable as a constitutive element of life, literary structures reacted in kind. During the twentieth and in the early twenty-first century, paradigm-shifting developments in the life sciences have again recalibrated the discipline’s understanding of natural causalities. McEwan’s structural analysis of genetics zooms in on these new explanations of life and their particular configurations of chance and determinism.

Enduring Love: Initial Conditions and Possible Outcomes The novel Enduring Love is set up as a battle on multiple fronts. Following the balloon accident that dominates the text’s inaugural chapter, the protagonists’ relationship comes under siege from a stalker. Near the end of the narrative, the conflict erupts in a violent exchange—shots are fired— between the protagonist-narrator Joe and his stalker, Jed Parry. Beyond such action-driven encounters, the text’s deeper frontlines are drawn on epistemological grounds. The triangulation of Joe, his partner Clarissa and Parry probes the different epistemic systems they come to represent. Respectively, they stand in for scientific reason, humanist hermeneutics and religion, though simple ascriptions of these labels are problematised as the novel progresses. Each character brings to bear a different system of causal explanations on the text’s debate about the opposing poles of chance and determinism. Much of this debate comes in the form of contrasting interpretations of the initial balloon accident but the conversation about the possible predetermination as well as the meaning of the event quickly grows to incorporate a more fundamental contemplation of human life and behaviour.

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The narrative’s overall structure follows the events unfolding after the balloon accident. David Malcolm has described the novel as recounting events “in a logical-chronological, linear fashion” yet concedes that the “action of Enduring Love is open […] to the charge of fragmentariness” (2002, pp. 159, 161; see also Smith 2010, p. 78). More specifically, the narrative entails circular movements, which continually gravitate back to the initial accident, instances of foreboding, metanarrative interventions, flashbacks as well as acts of retrospective emplotment by the characters themselves. Together, these narrative elements challenge the perceived linear causality of events. Numerous chance events further destabilise the narrative’s causal order, amplifying the visibility of contingency. Explicit discussions of contingency by the narrator and between characters in turn enhance the disruptive force of chance in the story’s plot. This emphasis on randomness resonates deeply with the novel’s strong interest in genetic explanations of human actions. Plot in Enduring Love performs a powerful counter-discourse to the deterministic logic expressed in Joe’s new genetic perspective on human evolution. Joe’s worldview heavily relies on the deterministic genetic theories of human behaviour expounded by sociobiology or, as the discipline is also called, evolutionary psychology. As the novel attests, the discipline has proved a major source of fascination for its author and, as Clare Hanson has shown, McEwan returns to it repeatedly across his career (Hanson 2020, p. 88). In the novel, it is this sociobiological outlook which crucially informs Joe’s interpretation and consequently, as narrator, his emplotment of the balloon episode and its aftermath. As the accident comes to embody the force of contingency both as narratological and epistemological phenomenon, Joe’s treatment of the accident, as character and narrator as well as in contrast to Clarissa’s and Parry’s perspectives, enacts a complex critique of the deterministic structures underlying sociobiological genetic thinking. While the balloon accident crystallises the novel’s engagement with sociobiology early on, the discipline—and its role in Joe’s worldview—is more broadly introduced as the text progresses. To fully excavate the sociobiological resonances of the opening scene, it is helpful to briefly establish the discipline’s general presence in the text. Through his work as a science journalist, Joe offers an explicit historical contextualisation of evolutionary psychology:

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Biologists and evolutionary psychologists were re-shaping the social sciences. The post-war consensus, the Standard Social Science Model, was falling apart and human nature was up for re-examination. We do not arrive in this world as blank sheets, or as all-purpose learning devices. Nor are we the ‘products’ of our environment. […] We come into this world with limitations and capacities, all of them genetically prescribed. Many of our features, our foot shape, our eye colour, are fixed, and others, like our social and sexual behaviour, and our language learning, await the life we live to take their course. But the course is not infinitely variable. We have a nature. (69–70)3

Besides testifying to the popularity of evolutionary psychology in the 1990s, Joe’s remarks in this passage outline the impact biological thinking had on a discipline that had been devoutly anti-biological. Just how fervently the established social sciences resisted only the faintest importance of biology in the development of an individual is emphasised in McEwan’s own essay “Literature, Science and Human Nature”, alongside the eventual recognition of human biological universals in anthropology (2005, pp. 14–15). Joe’s exposition of sociobiology does not suggest that human behaviour and appearance are entirely genetically predetermined but that significant genetically prescribed limitations influence their development. This passage is where Joe most explicitly asserts his confidence in evolutionary psychology. The construction of the passage allows for some distance between the summary of sociobiology and Joe’s private convictions but the numerous other instances in the novel in which Joe draws on just these kinds of evolutionary explanations indicate that he believes them. Confronted with Parry’s fervent religiosity, for instance, Joe considers a “genetic basis for religious belief” which could be compounded with an evolutionary advantage in the strengthening of community (159). Or, when he becomes aware of his growing anxiety that Parry might be following him and he frames his fear as exemplifying one of many emotional responses genetically inscribed within the human species: “Wasn’t it an elemental emotion, along with disgust, surprise, anger and elation, in

3  I cite the novel from its 1998 edition (London: Vintage). All subsequent page references will be provided in parentheses.

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Ekman’s celebrated cross-cultural study?” (43, 46).4 Besides, Joe makes good money from the fact that “science book editors […] were banging their desks for every possible slant on neo-Darwinism, evolutionary psychology and genetics” (70). In the “Acknowledgements” page that follows the narrative in Enduring Love, McEwan cites a sizeable portion of science books on evolutionary psychology as material that informed his composition of the novel. The books complement the historical intellectual contextualisation of sociobiological thinking which Joe provides. What is more, these books establish evolutionary psychology within a broader tradition of geneticised thinking based on the new molecular paradigm of life. Besides works by E. O. Wilson, the entomologist who almost single-handedly established the discipline of sociobiology and who is directly referenced in the novel (70), McEwan’s background reading includes Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal, an introduction into evolutionary psychology which explains that “evolutionary psychologists are trying to discern a second level of human nature, a deeper unity within the species” and that psychological differences between individuals “boil down to the genes, of course (where else could rules for mental development ultimately reside?)” (1994, p. 9). Wright’s elucubrations resonate directly with Joe’s proclamation of a biological human nature and a genetic basis for human psychology, behaviour and ethics (see also Head 2007, p.  122). Similarly, Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct, another title from McEwan’s reading list, argues that the human capacity for language derives from innate biological conditions produced by natural selection. Joe explicitly uses Pinker’s concept of a pre-­ verbal cognition he calls “mentalese” (1994, p. 167). The works informing McEwan’s rendition of evolutionary psychology embrace evolutionary explanations of human behaviour quite enthusiastically even though more critical reactions accompanied the discipline ever since the first backlash to E. O. Wilson’s suggestion that his observations on ants might also be fruitfully applied to humans. Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, for example, wrote in 1999 that “[l]ike its predecessor, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology depends on poorly specified notions 4  In his essay “Literature, Science, and Human Nature”, Ian McEwan provides a contextualisation of “Ekman’s celebrated cross-cultural study”. The “great American psychologist of the emotions, Paul Ekman”, McEwan explains, was instrumental in the late 1950s in establishing the view that, irrespective of culture, humans share a biologically fixed range of emotional expressions, the view Joe elicits in this passage (2005, pp. 9, 17).

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of complexity and adaptation and asserts without any hope of proof that traits judged to be adaptive can only have been established by natural selection as opposed to, say, learning by individuals and groups in a social environment” (1999, p. 129). The crucial point of contestation for them is that “a plausible evolutionary explanation must be more than a mere narrative, providing a reconstructed historical sequence of characteristics driving the evolutionary history of a species” (ibid., p. 127). They criticise that evolutionary psychologists construct evolutionary narratives without any basis in biological fact. In Beyond Evolutionary Psychology, George Ellis and Mark Solms reiterate Lewontin and Levins’s criticism and challenge the claim of an innate language predisposition as expounded by Pinker, positing that “[g]enes determine outcomes to some extent, but a key feature of brain development is plasticity in response to interactions with the environment” (2017, p. 2).5 The only work from McEwan’s reading to caution against a genetic determinism of the kind critics from Lewontin to Ellis and Solms have taken issue with is Walter Bodmer and Robin McKie’s The Book of Man: The Human Genome Project and the Quest to Discover Our Genetic Heritage. Yet while Bodmer and McKie reject the notion of genetic determinism, their rhetoric reinvigorates deterministic thinking: “DNA is the true chemical of life, for it is the essential component from which organs are made. In it is encoded the genetic language that controls our destinies” (1994, p. 10). Reading Enduring Love alongside Bodmer and McKie’s book further illuminates the novel’s discussion of sociobiology as representative of a larger molecular view of life. However, McEwan’s background reading and its lack of sustained critique of evolutionary psychology appears to directly inform Joe’s enthusiasm for a particularly reductionist frame of evolutionary explanations of human behaviour. The balloon accident at the beginning of the novel introduces the theme of sociobiology and at the same time presents its central focal point. Joe draws on sociobiological explanations to account for human cooperation—as well as for its failure—during the accident. The first chapter’s narrative voice fluctuates between Joe’s internal focalisation and his projecting himself into the literal bird’s-eye-view of a buzzard hovering above 5  Clare Hanson, in her work on literary negotiations of epigenetics, also relies on plasticity, particularly on Catherine Malabou’s biological and philosophical framing of the concept (Hanson 2020). Hanson’s emphasis on the important influence of environmental alongside genetic factors corresponds to Ellis and Solms’s claim that “affect shapes intellect through developmental processes with a key causal factor being social experiences” (2017, p. 14).

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the scene of the accident: “I see us from three hundred feet up, through the eyes of the buzzard we had watched earlier, soaring, circling and dipping in the tumult of currents: five men running silently towards the centre of a hundred-acre field” (1). In Beer’s work, the loss of narrative omniscience is associated with a corresponding loss of the ability to definitively disentangle different causal explanations (1985, p. 186). When Joe assumes the bird’s perspective he strives for a level of clarity his actual position on the ground, amidst the confusion of the accident, denies him. To be sure, the bird is also caught in a “tumult of currents”, so not entirely above the course of events and their causes either. Recalling the historical rise of randomness as an explanatory force, it could be argued that the clarity of omniscience is forever exiled to the realm of fiction, which makes this passage as much an imaginative exercise on Joe’s part as an oblique commentary on the state of epistemic certainty at the end of the twentieth century. At the opening of the novel, the narrator still confidently asserts: “The beginning is simple to mark” (1). This certainty is quickly revealed as deceptive. In this first sentence, the narrator not only points out the onset of the narrative itself—in a metanarrative gesture—but also frames subsequent plot events as easily re-traceable to “this pinprick on the time map” (1). This is the point at which contingency and thus the possibility of “other outcomes” (2) is seemingly replaced by an inevitable trajectory of consequences. Levy refers to this as the novel’s “contrary constructions of time” (187) and Smith identifies here a “tension between an apparent determinism, […] the contingency of the situation and the possibility of other sequences of events” (80). Yet only a few pages later the narrator concedes that in fact several moments could qualify as marking the beginning of the story, depending on how far one is willing to retrace previous conditions and events (17). Any beginning is thus reconceived as arbitrary since there are always antecedent causes. In public discourse, this flawed logic of arbitrary beginnings is often referred to as the “butterfly effect”-view of history, in which the littlest of incidents through an infinite succession of causally linked events can bring about grand-scale effects. The logic is flawed because only through retrospective narration can such causation take shape; the first event in the chain cannot be said to have caused the last. Joe’s metanarrative deliberations about where to begin his narrative lay bare what Paul Ricoeur called the paradox of emplotment, to wit the deceptive causality produced by retrospective narration. As Joe explains: “A beginning is an artifice, and

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what recommends one over another is how much sense it makes of what follows” (17–18). In this view, the novel’s ending determines the beginning. Joe’s comment about the value of one narrative structure over another elucidates that, as narrator, his personal sense-making is directly implicated in his narration. Ricoeur’s notes on emplotment are again helpful here. Ricoeur is primarily concerned with the ways in which emplotment produces selfhood. His emphasis on a “narrative conception of the connectedness of life” (1994, p. 145) recalls the biographical dimension of bios encountered in my discussion of Mendel’s Dwarf. (Just like Mawer’s novel, McEwan’s Enduring Love also couples bios with the biological dimension of life, or zoe, particularly in Joe’s geneticised narration of his life.) Ricoeur argues that while narration is productive of identity, existing assumptions about identity influence the emplotment of the narrative of the self (ibid., p. 148). Beyond identity, Ricoeur’s remarks on a narrative bias throw light on the influence of personal motivations, on the part of the narrator, on the process of emplotment. In Joe’s case, “the initiative belonging to the character coincide[s] […] with the beginning of the action” (Ricoeur 1994, p.  147) thus indicating that the novel’s plot already reflects Joe’s interpretation of the events and their causal interrelations. As we will see, the novel’s conflicted representation of the balloon accident as both unruly chance event and inevitable, fated tragedy suggests that Joe himself is torn between opposing causal explanations of the incident. The causality put in place by retrospective reasoning performs something akin to what Ian Hacking has famously referred to in the title of his 1990 study as The Taming of Chance. Hacking coined the now widely used phrase in order to describe how the rise of statistical methods and probabilistic models in the late nineteenth century, while acknowledging the role of chance in the world, effectively curbed chance of its unruly character by subjecting it to mathematical laws of probability. Lara Choksey attributes a similar effect of statistical ordering to the sequencing of the human genome. The genomic view of human life risks subsuming individuals under a macroscopic data stream of genetic information, imposing linearity and order on the unruly complexity of human identity and development (Choksey 2021, pp. 88, 99). Choksey importantly identifies how the novel has frequently resisted the genome’s linear narrative, for example by disturbing the causality of plot events and by dispersing the

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linear progression of time (ibid., pp. 15–16, 67–68). McEwan draws on exactly these causal and temporal dimensions of the novel’s form to stage his contemplation of genetic randomness and its effect on human life. In particular, he investigates the extent to which the novel’s form seems to curb genetic contingency retrospectively towards a sense of genetic fate. Hacking’s notion of “taming chance” has proven productive in describing almost any situation in which the force of the random has been recuperated into a framework of prediction or causation. Hacking’s metaphor is especially apt for capturing Joe’s and Clarissa’s attempts to come to terms with the incisive balloon accident. Joe even explicitly describes how they retrospectively “began to tame [the accident] with words” (29). Their desire to impose control over the traumatic event and their memories of it comes strongest to the fore in a scene later that day in their kitchen when they re-tell each other their experiences of the incident again and again. On an inter-character-level, this scene mirrors the influence of personal desire and understanding on narrative emplotment that also shapes the entire novel. Joe remarks that upon retelling, “our story was gaining in coherence”: “Over the days and weeks, Clarissa and I told our story many times to friends, colleagues and relatives. I found myself using the same phrases, the same adjectives in the same order. It became possible to recount the events without re-living them in the faintest degree, without even remembering them” (36). In the process of reporting the accident, its horrendous insight into the random forces that, in Joe’s words, determine “who was alive or dead at any time” (19) is muted within an imposed narrative causality. The opening chapter boasts several additional strategies through which the overall narrative curtails the subversive power of chance, at least two of which are prominent in the following passage in which Joe again draws attention to his act of narration: I’m holding back, delaying the information. I’m lingering in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible; the convergence of six figures in a flat green space has a comforting geometry from the buzzard’s perspective, the knowable, limited plane of the snooker table. The initial conditions, the force and the direction of the force, define all the consequent pathways, all the angles of collision and return, and the glow of the overhead light bathes the field, the baize and all its moving bodies, in reassuring clarity. I think that while we were still converging, before we made contact, we were in a state of mathematical grace. (2–3)

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The first important aspect to note in this passage is the recuperation of chance into a framework of predictability. The metaphor of the snooker table replaces the chaos on the ground with a stable and predictable set of variables (see also Smith 2010, p. 82). One might argue that as the snooker table’s geometry is only visible to the bird in the sky; its “reassuring clarity” is already treated by the text as a somewhat suspect source of comfort. On the surface, however, the image functions as a classical example of the taming of chance; mathematical estimates of where the chance event will lead suppress the unanswerable question of why it is there in the first place. The second aspect to note is that in this passage there is again clear evidence of Joe’s retrospective, end-oriented emplotment. He openly manipulates the flow of information to the reader, stretches time to contemplate the unfolding of events. His emphasis on the “prior moment” whose contingency he contrasts with the events he is about to relate, imbues any “posterior moment” with a firm sense of predetermination. Over the course of the chapter, and indeed the whole novel, Joe underscores this sense of fatedness by repeatedly referring to the incident as “fatal” (14, 83, 127). Commenting on the group of people running to the rescue of the boy in the balloon’s basket, Joe confidently states: “We were running towards a catastrophe, which itself was a kind of furnace in whose heat identities and fates would buckle into new shapes” (3). His invocation of fate is frequently coupled with narrative foreshadowing as for instance when he describes the first time Joe and Clarissa even notice the balloon: “The encounter that would unhinge us was minutes away, its enormity disguised from us not only by the barrier of time but by the colossus in the centre of the field that drew us in with the power of a terrible ratio that set fabulous magnitude against the puny human distress at its base” (2). Joe’s choice of words is telling because the image of the hinge—relating to a course of action which the accident unhinges—conjures up a mechanical causality of events that is now out of kilter. Joe’s repeated references to fate and causality eclipse, at least for the moment, the possibility of any other outcome of the accident other than the tragic death of one of the rescuers and the starting point of Parry’s manic obsession with Joe. Joe’s anxiety about his role in the death of John Logan, the man who held onto the rope for too long, is another reason why he keeps circling back to this opening moment in the story. At the start, several men tethered the balloon to the ground by holding fast the ropes hanging from the basket. When a gust of wind hit the balloon and catapulted it upwards,

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one after the other let go. Joe explains how it made sense, from an evolutionary vantage point, to break the covenant once someone had let go of his rope: Co-operation—the basis of our earliest hunting successes, the force behind our evolving capacity for language, the glue of our social cohesion. Our misery in the aftermath [of the accident] was proof that we knew we had failed ourselves. But letting go was in our natures too. Selfishness is also written on our hearts. This is our mammalian conflict—what to give to the others, and what to keep for yourself. (14)

Joe invests the scene with pathos and frames the group’s actions as a representation of “morality’s ancient, irresolvable dilemma: us, or me” (15). Joe suggests that his behaviour is ultimately driven by a hard-wired impulse for self-protection, evoking, as Hanson shows, contemporary discourses of the “selfish gene” (2020, pp. 91–92). This sociobiological reasoning is at least partly an attempt to absolve him of feeling guilty (Horton 2013, p. 701; Smith 2010, p. 155), even though his emotions clearly evince that he does not quite manage to allay his guilt. Logan’s death, in this line of thinking, is explainable because in “John Logan, husband, father, doctor and mountain rescue worker, the flame of altruism must have burned a little stronger” (15). The fact that a multitude of non-genetic explanations might account for this social dimension of Logan’s life here underlines the extent of Joe’s reliance on reductionist genetic reasoning. If Logan’s and, for that matter, Joe’s actions are determined by evolutionary patterns of behaviour, embedded at the level of their genetic make-up, then the accident’s outcome does indeed appear very much as fate. Retrospective narration, invocations of fate and an evolutionary sense of predetermination mutually enforce each other in the novel. In this account of the incident, the initial element of chance seems almost forgotten. Joe at first still acknowledges chance alongside genetic motivations as defining the scene: “Coincidences of time and place, a predisposition to help had brought us together under the balloon” (10–11). Yet over the course of narrating the accident, chance appears truly tamed as narrative recuperation of contingency as well as invocations of genetic determinism take over. Like the chance mutation that propels evolution but is subjugated to the reign of necessity within the organism, the balloon accident seems finally only to re-affirm the mathematical, biological and narrative structures it briefly disturbs. However, the novel’s

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metanarrative awareness of its retrospective absorptions of contingency destabilises conceptions of the accident as following predetermined narrative and biological outlines. The first chapter inaugurates further challenges to deterministic structuration. To begin, contingency and chance are stressed thematically throughout. The balloon itself acts as a symbol of chance not only because of the accident but because it is filled with helium, “that elemental gas forged from hydrogen in the nuclear furnace of the stars, first step along the way in the generation of multiplicity and variety of matter in the universe, including our selves and all our thoughts” (3). The balloon is imbued with the ultimate contingency of the Big Bang. David Rudrum observes that this emphasis on contingency is fundamental to Joe’s worldview: “his entire belief system—taking in the birth of the universe from an unforeseeable chance explosion, the development of life from a series of freak permutations, and the uncertainty and contingency of quantum physics […]—is predicated on a universe in which everything happens by chance, and nothing by design” (2013, p.  427). Contingency is highlighted repeatedly and even when it is foregrounded only to mark the moments before fate sets in, its recurrent presence in the text resists its supposed elimination by fate. This lingering resistance of contingency to necessity is further underlined by the narrative stretching of time before and during the accident. Joe lingers “in the prior moment because it was a time when other outcomes were still possible” and the freezing of time narratively disrupts the linear representation of the temporal sequence of the accident’s unfolding. Joe repeatedly interrupts the narrative’s temporal structure, both arresting the flow of time—“let me freeze the frame—there’s a security in stillness” (12)—and extending it: “Those one or two ungrounded seconds occupy as much space in memory as might a long journey up an uncharted river” (13). Eric Levy describes the effect of this representation of time when he states that “the balloon ‘catastrophe’ eventually distorts awareness of time, such that the present is beset by past and future” (2009, p. 171). Levy argues that this temporal construction in the novel “liberates the will to act more freely”, including imagining alternative courses of events (ibid., p. 172). The novel’s complex temporal construction with its disruptions of narrative progression introduces a sense of indeterminacy in the representation of events and destabilises the narrative determinism Joe’s invocation of fate produces. The slowing down of the narrated time further destabilises the sense of teleology thus elicited (e.g. 17). In chapters 12

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and 17, temporality becomes especially scattered, jumping from present to past events and back in a frequency that confuses temporal progression and redirects the focus to Joe’s attempts to come to terms with the emotional climate between Clarissa and him. The circular temporality in these passages opens up space for introspection and testifies to Joe’s desire for things to be different between them. This desire invokes contingency in the form of alternative futures, which, as Levy notes, he imagines at various points in the novel, for instance regarding his career (Levy 2009, p.  177). Together, these formal-temporal emphases of contingency put pressure on narrative teleology. The narrative report of the initial balloon accident is further disturbed by digressions, for example about Clarissa’s research as a Keats scholar and Joe and Clarissa’s life together (7–8). Such narrative challenges to linearity and thus to impressions of clear causalities continue throughout the novel and I will return to this structural form of the text’s critique of determinism especially in the context of the novel’s ending. Logan’s death is the most shocking element in Joe’s experience of the accident and the chapter’s solemn conclusion. The notion of shock, both to character and reader, illustrates a performative dimension of the accident curiously neglected by most studies of literary representations of chance. The accident and the novel’s opening chapter derive much of their force from what has been referred to as the “suddenness” of the chance event in fiction (Pflaumbaum et al. 2015, p. 12). The accident might retrospectively be imbued with meaning and a sense of fate, but in the moment it nevertheless references the sudden force of the random readers might know from their own lives. The suspense in McEwan’s chapter is sustained by the many possible outcomes readers may envision for the people involved. Because at least first-time readers do not yet know the novel’s ending and how it might revaluate what happens in the course of the narrative, chance events like the balloon accident retain some of their unruly nature in the process of reading. While the narrative construction of the first chapter gives some credence to Joe’s deterministic genetic outlook, the disruptions in narrative and temporal structures as well as the reiterated presence of an incisive chance event ultimately articulate a critique of evolutionary psychology’s emphasis on genetic predispositions as fate. The novel’s discussion of sociobiology’s genetic determinism develops further as the text progresses. This literary investigation is embedded in a larger historical context as well as in a two-cultures debate about the

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validity of different kinds of knowledge about life, but the opening chapter already crystallises the novel’s major epistemological conflict which cuts across its aesthetic and discursive structures. Clarissa’s birthday lunch is not only a climactic scene in the text because it stages the failed attempt on Joe’s life, at least Joe assumes the attack was actually aimed at him, but it also brings together two of the novel’s central concerns: narrative and genetics. While Joe infuses the scene with a sense of foreboding and enunciates his desire for a different outcome, which is inevitably denied, Clarissa’s godfather facilitates a reference to the time’s scientific context: “Professor Jocelyn Kale, Clarissa’s godfather, had been appointed to an honorary position on the Human Genome Project” (162). His gift for Clarissa is a brooch that becomes the novel’s most concentrated representation of a genetic understanding of life. The narrator describes the ornament’s exquisite details: Two gold bands were entwined in a double helix. Crossing between them were tiny silver rungs in groups of three representing the base pairs, the four-letter alphabet that coded all living things in permutating triplets. Engraved on the helical bands were spherical designs to suggest the twenty amino acids on to which the three letter codons were mapped. In the full light gathered from the table-top, it looked in Clarissa’s hand more than a representation. It could have been the thing itself, ready to cook up chains of amino acids to be blended into protein molecules. It could have divided right there in her hand to make another gift. (163)

The attention to detail strikes a marked contrast to the anxious tone and intermittent distracted recollections that define the rest of the scene’s narration. Further, the material representation of a double helix, which Clarissa pins on her blouse, is imbued with a vitality that mirrors its symbolic significance as the molecule of life. Prompted by the gift, Jocelyn “talked about the discovery of DNA” (164) which consolidates DNA as the key to understanding life: “He [i.e. the Swiss chemist Johann Miescher] assembled a team and set about working out the chemistry of what he called nucleic acid. Then he found them, the substances that made up the four-letter alphabet in whose language all life is written—adenine and cytosine, guanine and thymine” (164). The scene’s emphasis on past and present genetic science introduces an important context to Joe’s recurring references to genetic understandings of his and others’ behaviour. Evolutionary psychology in the novel is linked to the high-profile

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enterprise of the Human Genome Project and given additional weight by association. Just as the initial balloon accident, the lunch episode highlights the text’s characteristic retrospective narration. Clarissa, Jocelyn and Joe each produce different accounts of the incident, a divergence emblematically and ironically encapsulated by their disagreement about the type of ice cream served for dessert. Joe identifies an evolutionary basis for such divergent perspectives: “We’re descended from the indignant, passionate tellers of half truths who in order to convince others, simultaneously convinced themselves. Over generations success had winnowed us out, and with success came our defect, carved deep in the genes like ruts in a cart track—when it didn’t suit us we couldn’t agree on what was in front of us. Believing is seeing” (181). Joe here evokes the possible evolutionary predisposition for narrative—and narrative manipulation—that drives much of neo-Darwinian literary scholarship (see Holmes 2011). He then selfconsciously notes: “But what interests of mine were served by my own account of the restaurant lunch?” (181). His question finds an answer in his emplotment of the lunch scene which constructs a clear sequence of events and casts Parry as the villain behind the actions. His account is validated when additional knowledge comes to light but, immediately after the attack in the restaurant, his belief that his own is the only correct interpretation of what happened illustrates precisely the behavioural premise he just outlined and casts doubt on the reliability of his narrative. Clarissa and Joe’s disagreement over the lunch incident points to the larger two-cultures debate the novel constructs around their—and Parry’s—conflicting interpretations of the balloon accident and the events that ensue from it. This two-cultures debate in the novel has been extensively researched (Greenberg 2007; Carbonell 2010; Horton 2013; Scherr 2017; Hanson 2020). I only aim to comment on that debate’s impact on the novel’s interrogation of contingency and evolutionary genetic determinism. Clarissa’s reaction to the initial balloon accident and the death of John Logan establishes her as the personification of the humanist scholar: “‘It must mean something,’ she said” (32). Joe, cast to epitomise the scientist’s view, rejects her metaphysical appeal and frames the accident as a freak chance event devoid of any ultimate meaning: “Logan’s death was pointless—that was part of the reason we were in shock” (32). Frequently, Joe’s categorical reliance on reason rather than affect to process

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experiences is shown to be inadequate. Not only does he, seemingly despite himself, repeatedly display intensely emotional reactions to events. He also explicitly and self-consciously remarks on his shortcomings when Clarissa offers caresses rather than analysis to come to terms with the trauma of the accident: “Why didn’t I think like this? We needed love” (33, emphasis original). Clarissa’s representation of the humanist literary scholar suggests that one of the chief values of literature is the perspective it opens up on the importance of love (Greenberg 2007, p. 98) and, by extension, of an emotional form of understanding that is not inimical to reason (Hanson 2020, p. 92). The text investigates varieties of love, from romantic and sexual to obsessive and parental, as well as the desire and cost—an ambivalence captured in the title’s pun on “enduring”—of maintaining loving relationships under pressure from external events and internal tensions like the different worldviews Clarissa, Joe and Parry come to represent. In the aftermath of the accident, and neatly gendered, Clarissa’s emotional sensibility is contrasted with Joe’s allegedly more masculine attempted recourse to reason (see also Davies 2003). Parry, whose homoeroticism presents a transgressive counter-point to Joe’s desired masculinity, is paired epistemologically, as Curtis D. Carbonell affirms, with Clarissa’s humanism in the text’s enactment of a two-cultures debate. With both Clarissa and Parry cast as heteronormative masculinity’s other, science continues to be stylised as a male discipline in the text, even though the novel ultimately suggests, as critics have pointed out (Greenberg 2007, p. 96; Head 2007, p. 134; Horton 2013, pp. 706–707; Smith 2010, pp. 156–58), that an adequate understanding of the world requires both rational and affective knowledge. Clarissa’s insights into the limitations of Joe’s mindset include his subjective emplotment of events. As she states in her letter: “I don’t accept that it was always inevitable that Parry was going to hire killers or that I should end up being threatened with a knife” (218). While accepting that Joe was right about Parry and the danger he represented, she also rejects only blaming Parry for the final outcome of events. Whereas Joe orders the sequence of everything that followed the balloon accident according to a causality he derives from Parry’s obsessive fixation, which Joe identifies as de Clérambault’s syndrome, Clarissa re-emphasises the contingency of events Joe’s emplotment obscures. At the end of the novel Joe’s rationalism is vindicated but it is also the cause of the couple’s uncertain future as Clarissa is no longer sure whether “our love was

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the kind that was meant to go on and on” (219). Parry’s pathological love for Joe, in contrast, remains unbroken as the letter testifies that constitutes the novel’s second appendix. Just like Joe, Parry is engaged in plotting the course of events according to his worldview, albeit one that clashes with Joe’s. Jonathan Greenberg goes so far as to call them both “prisoners of their own narrative constructions” (2007, p. 95; see also Ksiezopolska 2016, p.  88). Whereas Parry mocks Joe’s scientific rationalisations of contingency: “It all happened by blind chance?” (135), Joe explains that Parry’s “was a world determined from the inside, driven by a private necessity” (143; see also Rudrum 2013, p. 427). Joe is aware that his is a world equally determined by a specific outlook but considers his scientific rationalism to be benign and superior to Parry’s religious mindset. This interpretation is challenged by the novel’s investigation of the limits of scientific knowledge and the importance of affect in processing individual experience. The novel’s critical analysis of reason and science’s purported epistemic superiority over other forms of knowledge is crystallised in the novel’s investigation of sociobiology and genetic determinism. Clarissa’s role as humanist other to Joe’s scientific rationalism comes to a head in her rejection of reductionist genetic explanations for human behaviour. For Clarissa, evolutionary psychology is “rationalism gone berserk”, “the new fundamentalism”: “Now you’ve got us trapped in our genes, and there’s a reason for everything!” (70). Clarissa argues that human meaning exceeds biological modes of explanation; the significance of a smile transcends a possible evolutionary account of its development. Without voicing any explicit doubts regarding the existence of biological human universals, she delimits the extent to which they make sense of human behaviour. Even Joe comes to accept the need to complement reductive science with more indeterminate human meaning. Commenting on his earlier reactions to watching John Logan hold onto the balloon, Joe states: “Such is his genetic investment, I remember thinking stupidly” (19). As Dominic Head rightly argues: “The thought is ‘stupid’, because it is out of place. In the single sentence McEwan highlights the tension between a cold scientific rationalism and the actuality of lived experience, which demands another, more emotional kind of engagement” (2007, p.  128; see also Horton 2013, p. 704). In addition, the fact that Joe realises his inappropriate reaction evinces the epistemological broadening of his perspective as he lives through the novel’s events and which now informs his retrospective narration.

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Horton draws attention to another passage in the novel that voices a critical attitude towards sociobiology. When Joe squats in a small forest to defecate, intimating a kind of interdependence between natural and human environments, between all life forms, he however comes to the conclusion that: “We were no longer in the great chain. It was our complexity that had expelled us from the Garden” (207). Horton argues that here “humility takes the place of rationalist confidence, reaffirming the text’s ultimately critical view of evolutionary psychological reasoning” (Horton 2013, p. 705). I find Horton’s reading of the passage compelling because it underlines the coldness and “the futility of the scientific narrative” in the face of the complexity of nonhuman life (ibid.). However, I note, like Waugh (2005, pp. 66–67), a more ambivalent, even arrogant tone in the emphasis on human’s complexity and the haughty allusion to the fall of man, despite Joe’s invocation of the “mess of our own unmaking” to which this complexity has given rise (207). In contrast to posthumanist critiques of human exceptionalism that utilise genetic discourses to establish flatter ontologies of life, as evident in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy discussed in Chap. 5, genetic science in Enduring Love emphasises a hierarchical evolutionary understanding of inter-species relatedness. Or, to put it differently, Joe’s post-Enlightenment melancholia complicates the criticism of evolutionary psychology. However, I agree with Horton’s remark that “given the novel’s clear enthusiasm for science […] it is worth asking how extensive [its] critical scepticism [of rationalism and sociobiology] finally is” (706). Horton argues that the text performs a postmodern investigation of the neo-­ liberal, individualist ideology that underpins Joe’s claims on the authority of science by contrasting it with Clarissa’s female, emotionally more complex epistemological position, without clearly favouring one or the other but showing that each has its limitation (2013, pp.  706–707; see also Head 2007, p. 134; Greenberg 2007, p. 96). In contrast, I see the dialogic quality of the novel’s epistemological investigation—epitomised by the characters’ debate about the meaning of the balloon accident and its aftermath—indicative less of a postmodern paradigm than, following Bakhtin, of the novel genre’s inherent dialogism. I agree with Horton that any definitive interpretation of the novel as either critical or supportive of reductive genetic modes of explaining human sociality will be spurious at best or beside the point. Ultimately, the text’s epistemological enquiry into the knowledge produced by the humanities and the sciences respectively goes deeper than a mere dialogic exposition. The most substantial

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criticism of genetic determinism, I hold, is performed instead at the level of the novel’s formal emplotment. This formal critique, in turn, is framed by the text’s thematic emphasis on the impact of narrative on scientific reasoning. Joe is working on a journalistic project about the role of narrative in science. He is struck by the fact that he can narratively manufacture compelling arguments either for or against the significance of narrative for scientific methodologies. Joe’s engagement with the issue highlights narrative as an epistemological category and shows that storytelling in science cannot itself be described without recourse to narrativisation. This critical awareness of the manipulative nature of narrative enacts a criticism of sociobiology’s own reliance on plausible narrative constructions as evidence for its claims about human development. Recalling Lewontin and Levins, this reliance marks the discipline’s inherent weakness: “a plausible evolutionary explanation must be more than a mere narrative” (1999, p. 127). It is conspicuous that Joe never explicitly includes evolutionary psychology in his roll-call of disciplines relying on narrative modes of epistemic organisation. After all, he himself refers to evolutionary accounts of the adaptive advantages of self-persuasion as “pure armchair science” (104). There is hence a more extensive critique of sociobiology’s storytelling impulse implicit in the novel that Joe chooses not to make explicit. Yet this fundamental critique erupts repeatedly through the novel’s formal emphasis on chance and its disruptions of linear causality and temporality. This structural challenge to a genetically deterministic view of life is again foregrounded in the complex narrative ending of the novel. The main body of the novel’s narrative ends with Joe and Clarissa spending the day at the Thames with John Logan’s widow and children. While this cannot be said to present an inevitable conclusion to the novel, its bringing together of characters affected by the initial accident produces a smooth narrative arc, even though the narrative does not end there. Head argues that this offer of closure in the main text is only minimally undermined by the two appendices—a psychiatric report and a letter— that extend the text’s storyline (2007, p.  140; see also Scherr 2017, p.  183). I find this assessment inconclusive since on a formal level the appendices put into question where the novel as aesthetic unit really ends and how impactful the notion of the aesthetic whole is for the novel’s retroactive recuperation of its chance elements. Does the novel exemplify the traditional view of contingency being tamed by narrative predetermination, or does it showcase Levine’s argument about the never-stable

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unity of texts, whose forms continually collide in new ways within their changing contexts of reception? Mirroring Joe’s paranoid search for interpretative clues to make sense of Parry’s threat, my own reading of the novel activates what Fredric Bogel has called “textual infatuation”, a critical mode of being hyperattentive to texts’ particular rather than general aspects (Bogel 2013, p. 14). Such a reading undermines the defining significance otherwise often attributed to the text’s unifying whole. In this critical vein, the final appendices in the novel extend the narrative’s previous string of particular challenges to any overarching sense of causal and temporal boundedness. James Phelan suggests that the novel might be “strategically incoherent” (2013, p. 67). Head argues further that the text’s “central structural irony” is its investment in “the idea of radical uncertainty” while “there is still a clear indication in the narrative of a ‘correct’ interpretation of the main events” (2007, p. 140). I would qualify that the novel’s structure offers a more complex formal critique of Joe’s deterministic interpretation of Parry’s behaviour than Head makes out (see also Morrison 2001, p. 256). The appended psychiatric report no doubt contributes to validating Joe’s interpretation but the text’s biased emplotment and temporal instabilities complicate on a formal level the endorsement of Joe’s reductionist rationalism on the content-level. The first appendix is the fictional psychiatric paper about Parry—which metafictionally frames the novel but was mistaken for an authentic report by a number of reviewers (Head 2007, p. 138)—and the second is a letter from Parry to Joe written three years after the main events and reiterating Parry’s enduring love for Joe. The inclusion of the two appendices is unexpected and their ontological status within the narrative ambiguous. The intrusion of an authorial figure, other than Joe, organising the material provides a challenge to the very notion of narrative closure. I read the appendices as yet another figuration of narrative contingency; the rift between the main body of the narrative and these micronarrative addenda opens up an imaginary potentiality to think of alternative outcomes. At the end of the main text, Joe and Clarissa separate but, as the psychiatric report attests: “R and M were reconciled and later successfully adopted a child” (242). The eventual reunion of Joe (Rose) and Clarissa (Mellon) could not have been anticipated and even this piece of information leaves much of their future happiness open to speculation. This one of the novel’s three potential endings once more problematises the formal retrospective recuperation of chance into an aesthetic whole.

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What is more, the novel’s surprising narrative continuation functions as a formal expression of the ending’s counter-evolutionary argument. That Joe and Clarissa adopt a child—while convincing because Clarissa cannot bear children—is ironic because it serves no direct evolutionary purpose and continues the text’s critique of evolutionary explanations of human behaviour (Waugh 2005, p. 65; Greenberg 2007, p. 114; Scherr 2017, p. 183). The previous ending of the main text already establishes Joe and Clarissa’s delight in the well-being of children not their own when they play and spend the day with John Logan’s children. As Head argues, “the tenderness of both Clarissa and Joe towards the children of others—a response without personal genetic investment—becomes pointed” (2007, p. 129, emphasis original). Head stresses that this does not negate genetic predispositions but integrates them within a socio-cultural matrix: “The novel performs the social effort required in human ethics, which now necessitates a recognition of the inherited human nature constructed by genetic science, and a self-conscious progression beyond that recognition” (ibid., pp. 140–141). The text’s final portrait of a morality not immediately dictated by an evolutionary genetic predisposition thus retrospectively frames Joe’s genetic interpretations of, for example, John Logan’s altruism as reductive and problematic, without discarding it completely. The caesura in the novel’s narrative between the main text and the appendix corresponds to the caesura that Joe and Clarissa’s adoption represents in the evolutionary temporality that accompanies Joe’s usual genetic reasoning. Together, these breaks provide a formal echo of the novel’s final reiteration of a non-reductionist evolutionary paradigm, or even for a non-evolutionary paradigm, for comprehending human behaviour. The analogy I identify between the novel’s structural organisation and its negotiation of genetically deterministic evolutionary arguments establishes Enduring Love as a highly complex epistemological construction. In the novel, acts of narration both consolidate and challenge genetic as well as narrative teleology. The novel’s overall structure is neither clearly deterministic nor does it develop a state of narrative dissolution characteristic of modernist experimental fiction. Instead, the text exemplifies a narrative tension between causal and contingent ordering principles, which in the novel become associated with different systems of thought. At the beginning of the novel, Clarissa frames Joe’s rationalism as “a kind of innocence” (33). At the end of the novel, Joe is no longer innocent in his rationalism, but it remains his dominant worldview. In this regard, Joe’s subscription to central tenets of evolutionary psychology corresponds to

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views expounded by McEwan in his “Literature, Science and Human Nature”: “Each of these two elements, genes and culture, have had a reciprocal shaping effect, for as primates we are intensely social creatures, and our social environment has exerted over time a powerful adaptive pressure” (2005, p.  11). Both Joe and McEwan express a belief in the evolutionary formation of human beings and allow for the adaptive influence of culture, which brings McEwan to propose that “[o]ne might think of literature as encoding both our cultural and genetic inheritance” (ibid., p. 11). With Enduring Love, McEwan has produced a text whose formal resistance to teleology complicates the aesthetic forms such an encoding of evolutionary inheritance in literature might take. The text’s structure, at once expression of and resistance to Joe’s deterministic frame of mind, ultimately offers the more complex understanding of the epistemological limitations of genetic determinism. While evolutionary accounts of human behaviour are neither rejected nor unreservedly accepted in the novel, its formal structure profoundly challenges any attempt to narratively contain an understanding of life that does not allow room for contingency—biological or otherwise.

In Saturday, There is Grandeur in This View of Life With the novel Saturday, published eight years after Enduring Love, Ian McEwan returns to the topic of genetic science. Interpretations of the novel as expressive of post-9/11 anxiety and trauma (Tew 2005; Brown 2008; Bradley 2009; Foley 2010; Hillard 2010; Butler 2011; Spahr 2012; Gauthier 2013) as well as investigations of its representation of consciousness and neuroscience (Stedman 2008; Green 2010; Freißmann 2012; Rogers 2014; Courtney 2014; Roxburgh et al. 2016; Strauß 2016) have emerged as the two most prominent critical approaches to the text. Most often, discussions of genetics in the novel have been limited to illustrations of the protagonist’s scientific outlook. I argue that the text’s engagement with genetic science goes beyond a characterising function and in fact constitutes a sophisticated interrogation of the aesthetic forms and potential social consequences of a genetically deterministic understanding of life. While reductionist thinking is subject to the same kind of critique as in McEwan’s earlier encounter with genetics, there is a profound formal difference between Enduring Love and the later Saturday. The latter’s emplotment and overall aesthetic consolidate rather than question a deterministic interpretation of genetic science.

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The novel offers a strikingly different structural negotiation of genetic fate than Enduring Love. In Saturday, contingency is once more foregrounded through a central chance event whose repercussions structure the story (see also Tew 2005, pp.  21–22). However, in contrast to the earlier novel, explicit formal resistance against the protagonist’s genetic reductionism fades towards the end of the novel and the disruptive forces of chance are much more fully curbed and reintegrated into an aesthetic whole that retrospectively unifies its individual formal and thematic elements into one signifying unit. The novel’s formal determinism closely resonates with the genetic condition at the heart of the narrative. The condition’s particular structure in turn appears to formally legitimise the genetic determinism inscribed into the novel. Critics have been starkly divided over the novel’s position towards genetic determinism. Alexander Scherr notes that the novel’s “reviewers have been at odds over the question of whether the novel affirms or undermines its protagonist’s Darwinist worldview” and cites Elizabeth Kowalski Wallace who, representing one side of the debate, states that “McEwan takes no obvious critical distance from his protagonist’s limitations” (Scherr 2017, p.  122). Patricia Waugh similarly holds that “McEwan appears to share his neurosurgeon-protagonist’s materialist optimism […], believing that science might, one day, explain […] the hard-wiring for our normative behaviours, for what we ought to believe in and what we ought to do” (Waugh 2011, p. 139). Scherr, in turn, argues for the opposite, holding that the novel does provide a critical perspective on Henry Perowne’s reductionist frame of mind, reflecting a widely adopted view among critics (Root 2011, p.  68; Groes 2013, p.  114; Rogers 2014, pp.  182–183; Courtney 2014, p.  177; Roxburgh et  al. 2016, p.  75). Scherr, Wallace and Waugh, however, all conflate Perowne’s Darwinism with his extensive references to genetics—and are not alone in doing so (see also Garrard 2010, pp. 235–237; Amigoni 2011, p. 121; Root 2011, p. 65). As will become apparent, this perspective falls short of the novel’s scientific and epistemic complexity—as well as its aesthetic negotiations of this complexity. The critical conflation of Darwinism and genetics may also explain the disagreement among scholars about the novel’s stance on biological determinism. As the following analysis will demonstrate, McEwan’s presentation of genetic and evolutionary science appears in a new light when the text’s structural form is revealed to resonate explicitly with the novel’s medical genetic discourse, rather than with a general evolutionary-genetic

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outlook. The novel’s form, while including points of resistance against determinism, finally works to underline rather than undermine deterministic structures—both aesthetic and genetic. A critical focus on these formal elements highlights the strong deterministic currents in the text and complicates those readings which attest the novel a highly ambivalent position on determinism. Those readings tend to pay less attention to the work’s overall artistic coherence and plot, often reducing form to character constellation, and thus to the two-cultures debate between the protagonist, a neurosurgeon, and his daughter, a poet.

Evolutionary and Medical Genetics In Saturday, formal and conceptual negotiations of chance are again at the heart of the novel’s central discussion of morality and the explanatory power of genetic science. The text’s aesthetic construction ties together British and global politics on the brink of the Iraq war, the political interrelation of public and private spheres, the neurological workings of the mind as well as the interplay of chance and determinism in science and art. The nodal point of this entanglement is the chance collision of Perowne’s and Baxter’s cars in a side-street off from the anti-war protests that quite literally provide the political background to the car accident and the epistemological and ethical enquiry for which it becomes the principal vehicle. At the time of the accident, the novel has already established Perowne as an outspoken proponent of genetic determinism and a wider scientific materialism. As a neurosurgeon he is used to explore the mind via its physical dimension of the brain. He explicitly states that “the mind is what the brain, mere matter, performs” (67).6 The novel’s representation of Perowne’s own consciousness reflects his materialistic view of the mind, too. Through heterodiegetic narration and internal focalisation, and the extended use of free indirect discourse and stream-of-consciousness techniques, the text signals its focus on modes of literary representation of thought. The frequent depictions of Perowne’s thought processes as tangible processes—his “thoughts have a reeling, tenuous quality” which he then manages to “sharpen” (22, 57)—reflect his own materialist understanding of mind. The text’s slowing of narrated time, as Hannah Courtney convincingly shows, is another facet of the work’s literary exploration of 6  This and all subsequent citations from the novel are taken from the 2006 Vintage edition and are provided in parentheses.

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current insights from neuroscience about “the relativity of time as experienced by the human mind” (2014, p. 186). Perowne’s understanding of consciousness is indicative of the biological-materialist approach to human behaviour that also informs his subscription to genetic determinism. Courtney suggests that the novel’s first sentence already introduces the theme of biological determinism, here in a neuro-chemical guise (2014, p. 176). Perowne “wakes to find himself already in motion” (3), suggesting that his consciousness lags behind what with Katherine Hayles one might call the “cognitive nonconscious” that drove his body out of bed (Hayles 2017). His wonder at this phenomenon reveals him as the “habitual observer of his own moods” and illustrates his fundamentally scientific-­ reductionist perspective on human behaviour in general when he muses: “Perhaps down at the molecular level there’s been a chemical accident while he slept” (5). Perowne’s molecular vision includes a genetic understanding of kinship and individual talent. Comparing himself to his two children, Perowne expounds: It’s a commonplace of parenting and modern genetics that parents have little or no influence on the characters of their children. You never know who you are going to get. Opportunities, health, prospects, accent, table manners—these might lie within your power to shape. But what really determines the sort of person who’s coming to live with you is which sperm finds which egg, how the cards in two packs are chosen, then how they are shuffled, halved and spliced at the moment of recombination. Cheerful or neurotic, kind or greedy, curious or dull, expansive or shy and anywhere in between; it can be quite an affront to parental self-regard, just how much of the work has already been done. On the other hand, it can let you off the hook. The point is made for you as soon as you have more than one child; two entirely different people emerge from their roughly similar chances in life. (25)

Perowne does not entirely dismiss the role the environment can play in a person’s psychological and social development. As a case in point, he later describes how it was due to the sense of order and structure he learned from his mother that he “feels at home in an operating theatre” (155). But in his eyes the more significant part of a person’s nature is a result of his or her genetic configuration. Importantly for the novel’s negotiation of contingency, Perowne’s causal understanding of character reconciles a deterministic view with a simultaneous acknowledgement of chance,

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enshrined in the aleatory image of a deck of cards. His proposition of the “tyranny of chance”, to use Benedict Lambert’s phrase from Mendel’s Dwarf, also reconciles a scientific determinism with an atheistic rejection of any form of external teleology. In one of the text’s dialogic moments of voicing criticism of Perowne’s reductionism, his daughter Daisy questions the veracity of his rationalism, referring to his defence of evolution’s truth value as “genuine old-time religion” (56). As Scherr points out, Daisy functions to delineate the “blind spots in her father’s positivism” (2017, p. 132). Scherr interprets this critique of scientific positivism as indicative of the novel’s Latourian awareness of Perowne’s rejection of modernity’s epistemological underbelly (ibid., pp.  127–132), revealing Perowne’s mindset as evincing what Everett Hamner in his post-secular framework calls “objectivism” (2017, p. 45). And Perowne admits that his certainty that scientists will eventually discover the materiality of the mind is, at this stage in history, “the only kind of faith he has” (255). Perowne concedes that “statistical probabilities aren’t the same as truths” (57) but his expositions of genetic determinism as truth ultimately eclipse his simultaneous recognition of contingency as a fundamental fact of life. He takes pleasure in the “random ordering of the world” and states that “at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures; the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god” (128). Perowne recognises the reality of chance but recuperates its disorder into the patterns and laws that for him structure the natural world. At the same time, at the end of the novel, he describes a person’s genotype as “the modern variant of a soul” (279), thus infusing the genotype, an essentially contingent formation, with a quasi-divine quality of predestination. That he perceives this order out of chaos to be beautiful is suggested when he contemplates his son Theo’s musical talents. Theo’s talents and personality are first demarcated as the outcome of chance: he is as “unlike his sister Daisy as randomness will allow” (25). Theo’s love of blues and its reduced and regimented tonal repertoire, evincing order and a seeming contradiction to Theo as a “free spirit” (26), initially puzzles Perowne: But is there a lifetime’s satisfaction in twelve bars of three obvious chords? Perhaps it’s one of those cases of a microcosm giving you the whole world. Like a Spode dinner plate. Or a single cell. […] When player and listener together know the route so well, the pleasure is in the deviation, the unex-

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pected turn against the grain. […] So it is, Perowne tries to convince himself, with clipping an aneurysm: absorbing variation on an unchanging theme. (27)

While it is not made explicit, the notion of “variation on an unchanging theme” invites both evolutionary and genetic analogies, with variation produced by either the patterns of natural selection or the unchanging theme of ever-new combinations of the four nucleic acids of DNA. Perowne’s later joy at the infinite richness of the music Theo distils from “twelve bars of three obvious chords” further underlines the infinite potential and attraction a pre-patterned system like an organism or a genotype holds. Furthermore, the concept of the microcosm reverberates with the passage from Saul Bellow’s Herzog from the novel’s epigraph which introduces the theme of an individual representing a larger moment in history: “What it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organised power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization”. The reference to mechanisation could be seen to underline the novel’s focus on causal sequences but, more significantly, the epigraph fashions Perowne as representative of a particular, historically specific moment and its perspective on life at the turn of the new millennium. The type of genetic discourse Perowne employs when he contemplates his children and their genetic legacies differs from the two evolutionary genetic discourses the novel also explores. Although his reference to “variation” evokes both genetic as well as evolutionary analogies, evolutionary discourses of genetics in the novel are distinguished by particular temporalities. Perowne’s genetic framing of kinship and personality in his children is marked by a temporal focus on the individual and their immediate ancestors. Evolutionary genetic discourses in the novel, in contrast, rely on more extended temporalities. This distinction acquires historical depth when one considers that both evolutionary theory and classical, Mendelian genetics existed as separate disciplines for a significant period before they were productively conjoined in the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis during the first half of the twentieth century. The evolutionary discourses in the novel further divide into two variants. The first expresses a general evolutionary perspective on the historical development of life on the planet. The second variety is sociobiological and traces human behaviour back to its evolutionary origins and analyses it according to criteria of evolutionary advantage. These three types of genetic discourses—(explicitly)

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genetic, evolutionary, sociobiological—occasionally overlap in the novel but fulfil very different functions. The first, non-evolutionary genetic discourse will be shown to resonate most strongly with the text’s overall aesthetics, especially once it acquires a specifically medical contextualisation through Baxter during the accident. The novel’s genetic and evolutionary discourses strongly coalesce in Perowne’s contemplation of Darwin. Perowne cannot shake a citation from The Origin of Species: “There is grandeur in this view of life” (55). For Perowne, this grandeur is manifest in what he describes as Darwin’s conclusion: “endless and beautiful forms of life, such as you see in a common hedgerow, including exalted beings like ourselves, arose from physical laws, from war of nature, famine and death” (56). Perowne makes explicit that post-Darwinian scientific advances have further refined this evolutionary understanding of the unordered natural world when he refers to the future scientific explanation of consciousness: “Just like the digital codes of replicating life held within DNA, the brain’s fundamental secret will be laid open one day. […] There’s grandeur in this view of life” (254). It becomes clear that like Enduring Love, Saturday negotiates an understanding of genetic science and genetic determinism that is reflective of a larger molecular understanding of life. In Saturday, however, this genetic understanding of life is explored both through an immediate, individual timeframe as well as through the extended temporal scope of evolution. Thinking in evolutionary time scales, Perowne in Saturday, like Joe in Enduring Love, also draws on sociobiological explanations explicitly for human behaviour. Pondering the origins of his anxiety, here strongly connected to the terror wreaked by Saddam Hussein, Perowne notes that “there must have been a survival advantage in dreaming up bad outcomes and scheming to avoid them. This trick of dark imagining is one legacy of natural selection in a dangerous world” (39). One of the many points in the novel where politics and science are interwoven, this passage indicates how far Perowne’s sociobiological understanding of human nature also shapes his political thinking (Scherr 2017, p.  122). Root conclusively points out: “Like Enduring Love’s Joe Rose, Henry Perowne believes it important to live each moment with a conscious awareness of the role evolution had played in bringing the present into being and that it continues to play in determining how we live” (2011, p. 65). Root’s sociobiological reading of the novel is particularly fruitful with regard to the events following the car accident when Baxter’s behaviour prompts Perowne to adopt a Hobbesian view of the individual and society: “self-interested

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social organisms find it rational to be violent sometimes” (88). Root notices that Perowne’s sociobiological thinking also finds an echo in the novel’s structure: “Competition is not just on Henry’s mind but also structures the narrative. Henry’s day takes the form of a series of contests” (Root 2011, p. 65). The car accident not only invites sociobiological interpretations but, more importantly, introduces a medical genetic discourse through Perowne’s diagnosing Baxter with Huntington’s disease. When Perowne is unwilling to pay Baxter for the accident he thinks Baxter has caused, Perowne risks a severe beating from Baxter and his thuggish associates. Underlining the contingent nature of the event, the novel does not clarify if anyone can really be blamed for the accident. At first, Perowne draws on a sociobiological interpretation of the menace posed by Baxter and his goons: “this ancient genetic patrimony that also oils the machinations of bullfrogs and cockerels and stags”, while also conceding that there is a socio-cultural dimension to their behaviour, declaring that “despite the varied and casual dress code, there are rules as elaborate as the politesse of the Versailles court that no set of genes can express” (86–87). However, Perowne’s genetic discourse acquires a medical inflection when he is threatened by Baxter and Perowne exhibits what is by now his characteristic medico-scientific outlook by analysing his opponent’s comportment and appearance (90–94). Perowne’s diagnosis is characteristically represented through free indirect discourse: If a parent has it, you have a fifty-fifty chance of going down too. Chromosome four. The misfortune lies within a single gene, in an excessive repeat of a single sequence—CAG. Here’s biological determinism in its purest form. More than forty repeats of that one little codon, and you’re doomed. Your future is fixed and foretold. (93)

He concludes that Baxter suffers from early-onset Huntington’s, a neuro-­ degenerative disease, and uses this knowledge to tip the situation in his favour by confronting Baxter with this diagnosis which, with Baxter humiliated in front of his associates, indeed allows him to escape further violence (94–96). Huntington’s is a particularly resonant and exemplary genetic condition in the novel’s discussion of biomedicine because it was the first medical condition to be genetically sequenced. Previously, critics have subsumed Perowne’s attestation of “biological determinism in its purest form” under his overarching Darwinian outlook.

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Yet the genetic determinism at play in Baxter’s condition is instead of a medical nature. This differentiation is significant because, first, it further branches out the novel’s panoply of genetic discourses and, second, the medical genetic determinism associated with Huntington’s is of a different kind than Joe’s sociobiological determinism in Enduring Love. In addition, the medical condition again contrasts a species-level temporality in evolutionary genetic paradigms with an individual-level temporality of personal genetic predisposition. One of the most striking differences between these two kinds of genetic determinisms is that the medical determinism is considerably less controversial. Huntington’s disease is one of a number of single-gene mutations which, when inherited, present, as Bodmer and McKie phrase it, a “lethal heritage” (1994, p. 70). With the discovery of the mutated gene causing Huntington’s in 1993, one can now test for it and because there is as yet no cure, a diagnosis proves indisputably deterministic (ibid., p. 77), even though already at the time of the novel’s composition environmental factors were suggested to potentially impact the age of onset of the disease (Hanson 2020, p. 106n41). The relatively uncontroversial nature of this kind of genetic determinism lends greater credibility to the more evolutionary and behavioural interpretations of genetic determinism in the text. That the specific context of Huntington’s genetic dimension has until now escaped critical attention attests just how easily it has been incorporated into Perowne’s Darwinian perspective. The significance of this differentiation of genetic idioms in the novel is not, however, to insist on scientific specificity for the sake of precision alone, which would be a form of analytical pedantry. Rather, the particular kind of genetic determinism associated with Huntington’s can be shown to affect the novel’s aesthetics in a way that depends on its particular temporality and incorporation of contingency. The complex structural analogy in Saturday between the novel’s discussion of genetic determinism and its formal negotiation of chance centres on Perowne’s collision with Baxter and links the text’s subsequent events with the logic of Baxter’s genetic mutation. At first, the accident seems to highlight contingency as a counterweight to Perowne’s deterministic outlook. Susan Green notes accordingly that “Henry’s antagonist, Baxter, represents randomness, the environmental and genetic ‘random ordering of the world’ […], and is a serious impediment to the progress of Henry’s journey during his Saturday” (2010, p. 64). Green does not further explore this link between contingency, genetics and plot

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but her analysis underlines their aesthetic linkage during the accident. The contingency of the event, also in a representational sense, is emphasised by the fact that the novel is narrated in the present tense, which produces a heightened sense of immediacy and unpredictability in the narration. Moments of textual suspense thus automatically become moments of contingency, as possible futures are imaginable. The accident as textual event therefore undermines an analogy between genetic and formal stability, as in Enduring Love. And there are additional moments in Saturday when contingency is stressed, for instance when Perowne contemplates an alternative, care-free outcome to his day (82) or when he at the end considers the unpredictable future as “a horizon with indistinct possibilities” (82, 276). However, the overall aesthetic construction of the text, in particular its analogies, character constellations and narrative structure, exhibits a strong internal coherence which works against its moments of contingent disorder. As a result, the accident’s disruptive force is curtailed once it acquires its neat narrative function within the work’s overall narrative arc, just as Baxter’s gene mutation, itself a result of aleatory heredity, gives way to biological determinism. This deterministic outlook on life finds a formal echo in the text’s aesthetic order. The text’s particular emplotment, including acts of foreboding that rely on knowledge inaccessible to Perowne, fortify an impression of its artistic unity and coherent constructedness. For example, before Perowne even leaves the house in the morning, he hums a “wartime tune” (57) and his choice of song is significant. He hums to the tune of “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when” (57). Neither Perowne nor the reader can know at this stage just how prophetical this song will prove, prefiguring that Perowne does indeed meet Baxter again at the end of the story when Baxter and his thugs invade Perowne’s house and hold his family hostage. Further, Perowne keeps spotting red BMWs as he drives across London after the accident, the kind of car Baxter drives. These sightings more openly function as a foreshadowing of future menace in the form of Baxter’s return. Finally, Theo’s warning about Baxter additionally prepares the reader for the ultimate arrival of the intruders (Head 2007, p. 192). The episode of the accident itself also resonates with the novel’s larger construction. Just before engaging with Baxter, Perowne comments that in the coming exchange “nothing can be predicted, but everything, as soon as it happens, will seem to fit” (87). This remark turns out to be highly self-referential on a formal level as the later narration of Baxter’s

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invasion attests: “It is, if course, logical that Baxter is here. For a few seconds, Perowne’s only thought is stupidly that: of course. It makes sense. Nearly all the elements of his day are assembled” (206–207). The novel’s plot acquires a strong sense of inevitability and aesthetic coherence (see also Smith 2010, p. 140). This coherence is further strengthened by the fact that at the end of the novel, as Head elucidates, Perowne is given the opportunity to atone for his abuse of his medical expertise in the encounter with Baxter, having exposed his condition to his companions, by operating on Baxter (Head 2007, p. 194). Sitting at Baxter’s bedside, almost at the very close of the narrative, Perowne’s choice of language while he thinks about his day tightly connects the course of the day’s events back to his initial encounter with his patient as well as to the novel’s central genetic analogy. He finds himself next to Baxter “almost by accident” (262). Of course, so the novel has made abundantly clear, nothing about this day has been truly accidental. The novel motivates this inevitability of the day’s outcome in several ways. Firstly, Perowne feels responsible for what happened, somehow thinking that by provoking Baxter he put his family in danger: “But for all the reductive arguments, Perowne can’t convince himself that molecules and faulty genes alone are terrorising his family and have broken his father-in-­ law’s nose. Perowne himself is also responsible” (210). While the real physical danger to his life relativises his responsibility, the novel might criticise his reductionist mindset here, since humiliating Baxter did spark his desire for revenge. Alternatively, the inevitability of the day’s outcome is less a result of anything the protagonist did, and rather the novel’s expression of a deterministic view of the world and of genetics and biology in particular. The text’s formal recuperation of contingency resonates strongly with Baxter’s genetic condition because the accident that brings Baxter and Perowne together echoes the mutation at the basis of his malady. The text frames this analogy by referring to Baxter’s genetic mutation as a “misfortune” (93), as “the tiniest of faulty cogs” (94). Other products of genetic determinism are even explicitly referred to as accidents: Perowne describes how “[b]y some accident of character, it’s familiarity that excites him more than sexual novelty. […] But there’s nothing he can do about himself” (40). And later he evokes “the accidents of character and circumstance” that “alter fates” (65). In this manner, the accidental becomes semantically allied both with the textual event of the car accident and the root of Baxter’s dire genetic prospect. As a consequence, the genetic determinism

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associated with Baxter’s condition and the sense of aesthetic determination of events in the novel mutually reinforce one another. The novel’s dialogic structure articulates a notable counter-discourse to Perowne’s reductionism, particularly through his juxtaposition with his daughter Daisy. The general political background to the day’s events, the ever-present anti-war marches and global news, acts as another, if more diffuse, voice that critically reflects on Perowne’s reductionist outlook. In the context of the global threat of terror and war, Perowne’s scientific reductionism appears insufficient and myopic, as Daisy is at pains to point out. The narrator’s voice additionally contributes to the novel’s dialogic structure, carefully distancing the narrator from Perowne’s opinions on the role of genetic predispositions in the constitution of social reality: It can’t just be class or opportunities—the drunks and junkies come from all kinds of backgrounds, as do the office people. Some of the worst wrecks have been privately educated. Perowne, the professional reductionist, can’t help thinking it’s down to invisible folds and kinks of character, written in code, at the level of molecules. It’s a dim fate, to be the sort of person who can’t earn a living, or resist another drink, or remember today what he resolved to do yesterday. (272)

The narrator’s emphasis on Perowne as a “professional reductionist” who “can’t help” reducing the complexity of social phenomena to molecular processes subtly frames this perspective as limited but also as a seemingly natural consequence of Perowne’s medical practice. This narrative framing, along with the novel’s other dialogic voices, suggest a level of scepticism against Perowne’s reductionist genetic determinism. However, as already pointed out, on the level of form, this quite subtle resistance is countered by a strong analogy between Perowne’s deterministic discourse and the text’s aesthetic determinism. As a result, the novel, not unproblematically, inclines towards an emphasis of deterministic structures and modes of thinking. The novel’s temporal structure appears to provide another, formal, resistance against the text’s embrace of determinism. There are moments in the narrative when Perowne’s subjective experience of time finds a reflection in a slowed down representation of events (Courtney 2014; Marcus 2013, p.  97). Such temporal suspensions of plot progression would indeed appear to disrupt the text’s deterministic structure by drawing attention away from the event and towards modes of emotional and

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intellectual understanding of what has happened (Courtney 2014, p. 180). However, these moments when time is extended are frequently also those moments when the text’s reductionist-diagnostic mode is most pronounced. Both during the accident and during the home invasion, Perowne provides his most deterministic accounts of Baxter’s behaviour. Confronted by Baxter in his own home, in the split second after the intruder has hit Perowne’s father-in-law in the face, Perowne’s thoughts interrupt the action and further explore his diagnosis of the desperation he suspects behind Baxter’s violence: Anyone with significantly more than forty CAG repeats in the middle of an obscure gene on chromosome four is obliged to share this fate in their own particular way. It is written. No amount of love, drugs, Bible classes or prison sentencing can cure Baxter or shift him from his course. It’s spelled out in fragile proteins, but it could be carved in stone, or tempered steel. (210, emphasis original)

Perowne’s comments reinforce his already deterministic portrayal of Baxter. The phrasing of “It is written” evokes both the metaphoric understanding of the genome as the book of life and the religious connotations of that metaphor which compound a notion of predestination (see also Smith 2010, p.  135; Rogers 2014, p.  164). Perowne’s deterministic assessment of Baxter is further legitimised as Baxter’s medical fate is never actually questioned in the novel. In the scene itself, the frightened family seem to act out the helplessness Baxter must, according to Perowne, feel in the face of his genetic fate. In effect, then, the narrative temporal extension, rather than undermining the thrust of the text’s deterministic structure, provides the setting for an emphasis of genetic determinism on the level of content. Even as the text integrates genetic forms of determination into its artistic form, however, the bigger question the novel as a novel appears to ask about genetic science, under full mobilisation of its aesthetic arsenal, concerns the ethical consequences arising from a biologically determinist worldview. Head argues that Saturday utilises the inherent tension between chance and order characteristic of the novel form to “reflect a new kind of social order”. In this manner, genetic determinism replaces previous notions about the constitution of society yet allows the prospect of medical interventions as a way out of the genetic destiny (195). He then notes how in the course of the novel, chance and aesthetic form

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“collapse into consolation” and links this with a new understanding of social formation explored in the text: “Contingency, in the sense of a roll of the genetic dice, then points to a new kind of social patterning, not discernible in the social ‘chaos’ that writers previously sought to draw on. This implies a different sense of social responsibility, demonstrated in the duty Perowne feels to treat Baxter in the final section of the novel” (Head 2007, pp. 194–195). For Head, Perowne’s final treatment of his attacker marks not only the formal culmination of an aesthetically coherent whole, in the form of “the perfection, in a moral sense, of having Perowne treat his adversary in a spirit of atonement for his own genetic privilege”, but also that “the genetic lottery is now being deciphered, and the possibility of intervention through medical science is glimpsed” (ibid., pp. 194–195). It appears to me that in order for his ethical reading of novel’s larger project to cohere, Head too readily attests the novel as a whole an endorsement of the predictive capacities of genetics. The novel contains strong expositions of genetic determinism, supported by its formal structure, but as an epistemological construction, Saturday includes too many voices and structural elements opposed to such biological predestination for it to constitute the basis for the text’s imagination of a new social order. Moreover, Perowne’s final medical intervention does not in any way address or attempt to reverse the genetic foundation of Baxter’s condition. Perowne saves his life by tending to his broken skull but does not mend his genetic affliction. Exploring “the ruthless contingencies within which biological determinism occasionally operates” (Garrard 2010, p. 236), Saturday employs its literary form to engage both biological and philosophical understandings of life, tracing the effects of a deterministic view of life on the people living it. The novel reveals that Perowne’s materialist-reductionist approach to social order and the ethical implications of the “grandeur in this view of life” are myopic and ignore the role of the imagination. In fact, he misses, as Rogers usefully adds, that Darwin’s elegant phrase is a textualization—a literary formulation—of a scientific ethos. As such, it behaves as other literary forms. Just as Perowne’s own appropriation of the phrase from the Darwin biography indicates, literature can infiltrate the minds of even the most resistant readers, giving them ideas and language they did not previously have to navigate their world, and by doing so it can quite literally ‘change their mind’. (182)

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Perowne neglects the literary dimension of Darwin’s key phrase in the same way as he asserts that he is “living proof” that people can live without stories (68), a claim which is repeatedly contradicted in the novel, most significantly through Perowne’s own continual narrativisation of his experiences (Rogers 2014, p. 176; Roxburgh et al. 2016, p. 75; Scherr 2017, p. 131). Perowne’s ethics, then, are not derived from empathy based on the imagination, but rather strikingly emerge from his reductionist worldview. His genetic view of life directly informs his morality. Sarah Strauß argues that Perowne’s genetically deterministic perspective on Baxter lacks an ethical appreciation of the latter’s predicament (2016, p. 151). But—on a strictly personal level—Perowne’s decision to help Baxter is the expression of a code of ethics based on the recognition of genetic difference and different genetic potential. His feeling of responsibility and guilt about his involvement in the accident and the events that followed from it figure as a symbolic representation of what one might call his genetic shame. He feels responsible because he understands himself genetically lucky, a privilege conveyed by the genetic lottery. Perowne’s decision, then, to operate on Baxter, blatantly transgressing professional ethics, indicates a moral drive based not on imaginative empathy but on his recognition of his own social and biological advantage. Contemplating Baxter and others whose misfortunes are “down to invisible folds and kinks of character, written in code, at the level of molecules”, he concludes that for some “all you can do is make them comfortable somehow, minimise their miseries” (272). However, Perowne’s ethical sense of responsibility for Baxter hides a problematic difference in social status between them. And Hanson argues that the novel’s depiction of the socially disadvantaged Baxter as also genetically disadvantaged introduces at least a politically conservative perspective on the ability to affect social change in light of biological predispositions, and at worst an echo of eugenic thinking (2020, pp. 106–108). There is, as Laura Salisbury points out, “something troubling, upon which the novel only half reflects, about the working-class man serving as a neurologically, materially driven prompt […] to the middle-class man’s internal mentalized reflections” (2015, p. 92), which here include an image of a genetically pre-patterned society. This uneasy hierarchy of power, knowledge and physical constitution is underlined by Perowne’s atavistic descriptions of the violent Baxter’s “simian air” and his “vaguely ape-like features” during the accident (88, 97), bringing to mind McEwan’s canine imagery in his  portrayal of the nationalist crowds harassing the protagonist in

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Berlin in his novel Black Dogs. Perowne’s choice of words, whether intended or not, reflects critically back on his sense of superiority, which, to paraphrase his diagnosis of Baxter, suggests that Perowne himself suffers from certain “delusions of grandeur” (91) and casts doubt on the moral virtue of his decision to operate after all. The novel’s explicit resistances to Perowne’s genetic reductionism fade towards the end of the novel and only remain as implicit resonances at the close. The circadian novel’s formal symmetry, the text begins and ends with Perowne in his bedroom, lends final weight to its deterministic discourse. Arthur Bradley berates the novel’s “clean lines” and “perfect symmetry”, which he interprets as clashing with its insistence on reason and science (2009, p.  30). Yet the text’s “perfect symmetry” appears more organically motivated than Bradley makes out. The novel self-referentially reflects on its form in an exposition of its aesthetic programme that, to my knowledge, has as yet been overlooked. When operating on Baxter, Perowne as usual decides to listen to classical music and opts for Bach’s Goldberg Variations, though “not the showy unorthodoxies of Glenn Gould, but Angela Hewitt’s wise and silky playing which includes all the repeats” (250). Not only does the reference to “repeats” establish a semantic link between the music and the excessive repeats at the basis of Baxter’s genetic mutation, but the musical repeats correspond to the novel’s numerous structural loops, from Perowne’s first and second meeting of Baxter to the ending’s return to the night-time bedroom setting of the beginning. Just as in Bach’s piece “the Aria returns, identical on the page, but changed by all the variations that have come before” (254), the striking similarities between opening and closing of the novel, with Perowne looking outside his bedroom window, constitute an analogous construction. Just the Aria is changed the second time round, as is Perowne’s understanding of Arnold’s poem during Daisy’s second recitation, so Perowne himself, despite the formal symmetry of space and time, has changed as a consequence of his day. His sense of certainty, both political and epistemic, has been challenged by the day’s events and conversations (Groes 2013, p. 114). His deterministic outlook proves unwavering but at the end of his day he feels “fear” and uncertainty: “He’s weak and ignorant, scared of the way consequences of an action leap away from your control and breed new events, new consequences, until you’re led to a place you never dreamed of and would never choose—a knife at the throat” (277). The formal symmetry of the novel and the fact that Perowne is safely back in his bed prove a counterweight to his anxiety. Yet this

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anxiety still reverberates in his closing echo of James Joyce’s “The Dead” and its evocation of his mortality: “at last, faintly, falling: this day’s over” (279). The novels Enduring Love and Saturday trace different social, cultural and epistemic meanings of genetic science and explore the role of literary form in the face of these new scientific realities and imaginaries arising from a molecular understanding of life. Scherr refers to Enduring Love as an “epistemological fiction” because it raises questions about the way narrative not simply shapes but can be observed to produce knowledge whose truth claims thereby become a matter of perspective (194–195). The novel’s narrative medium is the epistemological toolbox used to enact a literary thought experiment about the veracity and impact of sociobiology’s scientific claims. Joe simultaneously employs sociobiological explanations of human behaviour in his narration and researches the role of storytelling in the production of scientific knowledge, thereby casting doubt on evolutionary psychology’s purely narrative reasoning. But there is more to the formal complexity of the novel than an epistemological enquiry into the limits of narrative in both the arts and the sciences. At the centre of the text’s formal exploration of genetic determinism, in the guise of evolutionary psychology, lies the form’s inherent conflict between chance and narrative coherence. The central chance event in the novel, the balloon accident, and its aftermath, provokes in each of the principal characters a particular way of narratively framing randomness, each according to the system of thought they come to represent. Clarissa’s humanism struggles to accept the accident’s brutal contingency, illustrating the human cost of blind chance while seeking to construct a meaningful narrative around the accident. Parry’s religious perspective rejects chance and interprets the novel’s events as indicative of a divine plan to unite him and Joe. Joe’s scientific outlook, finally, seems to acknowledge the truly random as a fact of the natural world but through his sociobiological reasoning reinstates a genetically informed causal interpretation of the accident and its repercussions. Joe’s narrative emplotment of the story is marked by a metanarrative awareness of his retrospective narration and the constructed causality this imposes on the story’s chance events. As a result of this self-reflexive emphasis on randomness, as well as the novel’s indeterminate ending, the initial balloon accident’s contingency in Enduring Love is never fully contained by the story’s emplotment and becomes emblematic for the text’s internal resistance to deterministic structures, both genetic and aesthetic ones.

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In Saturday, literary form focuses, in a neo-modernist manner, on aesthetically engaging the complex experience of life in the modern age. The intertext of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is particularly revealing of the novel’s deep concerns about what might provocatively be called, following Perowne, the constitution of the modern soul. Such metaphysical rhetoric was already highly conflicted in Mrs Dalloway where science, industry and a feminist scepticism about the institution of the church dominate the depiction of Clarissa’s world (Graham and Lewis 2013; Griesinger 2015). Nevertheless, a remnant metaphysics surfaces in Woolf’s character Peter Walsh whose “soul must brave itself to endure” before he enters the private/public sphere of Mrs Dalloway’s party, and in Clarissa’s fearing for “the privacy of the soul” at the same time as she condemns “love and religion” (Woolf 2000, pp.  139, 180). Against this intertextual background, Perowne’s fashioning of the “genotype [as] the modern variant of a soul” evokes a similarly lingering metaphysics, this time through genetics (279). His self-depiction as a “god” watching over the people passing underneath his window upholds the metaphysical resonances of Woolf’s text, which here render his deterministic materialism as a new dogma (13). Mrs Dalloway and Saturday share an engagement with science and its insights into the human mind on the levels of form and content (for Woolf, see Crossland 2018). In Woolf’s conception of life, it is the “vitality” of the city and the bustling people that demarcates the sphere of the living (2000, p. 7). What in Mrs Dalloway is only the briefest anticipation of the future revolution of “the Mendelian theory” (ibid., p. 30), becomes the defining discourse of life in Saturday, with biology informing the text’s ethical and psychological enquiry. In this context, Root remarks “how narrowly Henry’s biological determinism understands the relationship between consciousness and the world” in contrast to Mrs Dalloway (2011, p. 74), and Waugh notes the materialist turn in McEwan’s reworking of Woolf’s concerns (2011, p. 140). As a novel, Saturday contemplates how the dominant biological conception of life of its time may shape literary form, literature’s exploration of knowledge and human ethics. Like Enduring Love, Saturday constructs a dialogic encounter of opposing perspectives on the issue of genetic determinism. While Perowne is, at the end, an even stronger proponent of this outlook than Joe, the text nevertheless enunciates a critique of his reductionism, showing its limits, epistemic blind spots and ethical shortcomings. In a stark contrast to the earlier novel, however, Saturday’s formal analogy between Baxter’s genetic fate and the overall determinism of the plot offers considerably less

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structural resistance against the protagonist’s prognosticative philosophy. While the narrative contains moments of contingency, most prominently in the car accident, and temporal disruptions, the text’s overall aesthetic coherence reintegrates these structural discordances into a unified whole in which all individual aspects appear internally and aesthetically motivated. This wholeness is, of course, not absolute; Levine’s argument about the contingently colliding forms and contexts of readers’ engagement with a work of fiction remains valid. However, the novel’s self-reflexive emphasis on its unifying aesthetic must be taken into account. The novel’s plot collapses causal and aesthetic structures and the narrative ending is predicated on the accident just as Baxter’s genetically predetermined future hinges on an accidental mutation on chromosome four. As a result of this formal coherence, Saturday gives genetic determinism considerably more weight than Enduring Love. The difference in formal emphasis on genetic determinism between the two novels also correlates with the different kinds of genetic discourse they address and the particular temporalities these discourses entail. In Enduring Love, genetic discourse is predominantly drawn from evolutionary biology. The temporality associated with evolutionary arguments is superindividual in that it exceeds the timeframe of any one human being. Hence, Joe’s sociobiological explanations continuously gesture towards the evolutionary past and his metanarrative remarks about the potential open-endedness of his account underlines the temporal scope of this novel beyond the confines of individual experience. The temporality associated with Huntington’s disease in Saturday, in contrast, is intensely individual because it is a matter of chance if a person will be afflicted. This individual timeline resonates deeply with the text’s one-day temporal outline and its exclusive focalisation on Perowne. Huntington’s much less controversial genetic determinism is thus further emphasised by the novel’s neatly bounded temporal structure. Examining each novel’s temporality renders visible the formal correlations between McEwan’s two texts and their respective genetic idioms, which illustrates that in these works specific scientific modes of thought evoke correspondingly specific aesthetic responses. Rather than simply contributing to the works’ overall complexity, these intimate connections between literary text and scientific knowledge highlight how the novel form can illuminate specific epistemic dimensions of scientific paradigms, as for instance, the different temporalities they imply. The novel is thus empowered to formulate, with a trenchant level of particularity, ethical questions arising from genetics’ perspective on human life.

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Coda: Genetic Life in Solar, Nutshell and Machines Like Me Enduring Love and Saturday present McEwan’s most formally complex and in-depth treatments of genetic science. His discussion of genetic concepts, however, has continued in his writing, most notably in the novels Solar (2010), Nutshell (2016) and Machines Like Me (2019). In Solar, the subject of genetic determinism is again highlighted when the protagonist, Nobel laureate in physics Michael Beard, remarks at a press conference that according to cognitive psychology men and women demonstrate statistically different aptitudes for the natural sciences. His comments spark a fierce media backlash: “In the more serious press, he was described as a physicist turned ‘genetic determinist’, a fanatical sociobiologist whose ideas about gender difference were shown to be indirectly derived from social Darwinism, which in turn had spawned Third Reich race theories” (137).7 Genetic determinism is here explicitly depicted as a gravely exaggerated notion, not only with regard to Beard’s actual argument but in general. It is also contextualised as inherently appalling. Beard’s theory as to why his remarks caused such uproar links genetics, as in some passages of Mendel’s Dwarf, with the abuses of genetic discourse perpetrated by the Nazis: The Third Reich had projected a prohibitive shadow more than half a century long over genetics where it touched on human affairs—at least, in the minds of those outside the subject. To suggest the influence of genetic influence, genetic difference, of an evolutionary past bearing down in some degree on cognition, on men and women, on culture, was to some minds like entering a camp and volunteering to work with Doctor Mengele. (Solar 143–144)

His theory, however, is mildly rejected by his “biologist friends”; according to them: “That was old hat, that was seventies stuff, there was a new consensus now, not only in genetics, but in academic life in general. He was too bitter” (144). The novel does not make explicit what the new consensus is but most probably, considering the intellectual climate of the late 2000s, it refers to an accepted scepticism in the field of genetics and

7  This and all subsequent citations from the novel are taken from the 2010 Vintage edition and provided in parentheses.

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in socio-cultural commentary generally about the genetic predisposition of behaviour in any substantive form. And yet, the novel does not entirely dismiss the notion that biology does play a part in human lives as its depiction of the social anthropologist Nancy Temple demonstrates. Temple explains that she “could best explain her field by outlining a recent project, a four-month in-depth study of a genetics lab in Glasgow as it set out to isolate and describe a lion’s gene, Trim-5, and its function. Her purpose was to demonstrate that this gene, or any gene, was, in the strongest sense, socially constructed. Without the various ‘entexting’ tools the scientists used […] the gene could not be said to exist” (131). Representing the starkest form of social constructivist approaches to scientific knowledge, which the more moderate social constructivists like Bruno Latour would reject, Temple proves a counterweight in the novel to Beard’s indications of genetic determinism. Solar suggests that both positions are off their mark, given the critical response each elicits within the narrative. The scientists in the room uniformly oppose Temple’s perspective, as one would expect them to. One of the scientists’ responses contains an intertextual reference to Saturday; insisting on the independent reality of genetic processes he asks: “Where does that leave Huntington’s, for example?” (132). The reference to Baxter’s genetic condition and its uncontroversial single-gene origin suggests that Solar does not dismiss the significance of genetic influences on life. The novel merely articulates a decidedly less deterministic interpretation of what genetic science has to say about the social and cultural existence of its characters and readers. The novel Nutshell, McEwan’s idiosyncratic contemporary rewriting of Hamlet from the perspective of a nine-months-old Hamlet in utero, also features genetic discourse. Here, genetic knowledge is deployed by the— rather precocious—protagonist to define and contemplate his conflicted kinship network. Thinking about his father, whom his mother plots to kill, he refers to him as my genome’s other half, whose helical twists of fate concern me greatly. It’s in me alone that my parents forever mingle, sweetly sourly, along separate sugar-phosphate backbones, the recipe for my essential self. I also blend John and Trudy in my daydreams—like every child of estranged parents, I long to remarry them, this base pair, and so unite my circumstances to my genome. (10)8  This and all subsequent citations from the novel are taken from its 2016 Jonathan Cape edition and provided in parentheses. 8

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The language of genes provides him with a vocabulary to express his kinship ties. In the image of the “base pair” he conflates the biochemical substance of DNA with an image of his reunited parents. While on a dramatically lesser scale than either Enduring Love or Saturday, genetic discourses nevertheless figure as part of the novel’s aesthetic imaginary and epistemic scope. The embryonic Hamlet considers evolutionary narratives about the differences between maternal and paternal investment of resources in reproduction, he alludes to Richard Dawkins’s theory of “selfish genes”, the biological “destiny of sex and gender”, but also to the gene-environment interrelation that produces what he deterministically calls his “essential self” (33–34, 144–145). Through this latter interest in epigenetic forms of development, Clare Hanson elucidates, the protagonist comes to reject the precepts of evolutionary psychology and of selfish genes (2020, pp.  110–113). The novel’s performance of the embryo’s self-formation, Hanson adds, further underlines this investment in epigenetic processes that complicate any simplistic sense of genetic predisposition (ibid., p. 112). Nutshell gives weight to both genetic and environmental explanations of human behaviour and development and foregrounds the question of their mutable interdependence. In Machines Like Me, most recently, McEwan offers a text-intrinsic historicisation of evolutionary psychology through the eyes of the novel’s protagonist, Charlie: By the time I was in my mid-twenties, evolutionary psychology was beginning to reassert the idea of an essential nature, derived from a common genetic inheritance, independent of time and place. The response from the mainstream of social studies was dismissive, sometimes furious. To speak of genes in relation to people’s behaviour evoked memories of Hitler’s Third Reich. Fashions change. But Adam’s makers were riding the new wave of evolutionary thinking. (25)9

Since Charlie at the time is 32 years old (12) and the year is 1982 (24), this places the emergence of evolutionary psychology in the mid-1970s and thus coincides with E. O. Wilson’s ground-breaking, and highly controversial, study Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975. Charlie’s commentary brings to mind not only McEwan’s diagnosis of a biological revision of the “Standard Social Science Model” in both his essay “Literature, Science and Human Nature” and in Joe’s peroration, but also  This and all subsequent citations from the novel are taken from its 2019 Jonathan Cape edition and provided in parentheses. 9

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Michael Beard’s reference to a eugenic heritage as the cause of the contemporary opposition against genetics he identifies. McEwan’s historical framing of evolutionary psychology, in a novel that is itself an alternative historical re-imagining of Britain under Thatcher, expresses an astute awareness of sociobiology’s historically specific circumstances which resonates with the critical depiction of evolutionary differences among humans in Solar. And Charlie’s rejection of, for instance, an evolutionary explanation for why fingers wrinkle in the bath seems to be directed at his intertextual predecessor Joe Rose and his reliance on evolutionary narratives: “I didn’t believe it, but I liked the story, the way it lay beyond disproof” (132). At other moments, however, Machines Like Me’s exploration of the highly intelligent and humanoid robot Adam, who represents “the new wave of evolutionary thinking”, creates a bridge back to the old evolutionary narratives. The novel’s title already indicates a shared dimension between machines and human beings and this link is played out implicitly by an analogy of genes and digital bytes. This analogy is rather ironic because, in contrast to genetics’ incorporation of informational concepts from computer science and communications theory in the latter half of the twentieth century, here, in turn, the machine’s programming is likened to genetic processes. When Charlie and his neighbour, Miranda, together select Adam’s personality traits, Charlie imagines the process as a kind of reproduction—he is also sexually attracted to Miranda, and the novel’s dramatic climax entails a love triangle between Miranda, Charlie and Adam. Charlie thinks of Adam as a sort of child in whose programming Miranda’s and his personalities have been recombined in a mirror-image of human genetic reproduction (66). While Charlie rejects evolutionary explanations of behaviour, he believes in the genetic transmission of character traits. In consequence, Charlie’s selection of Adam’s personality traits presents a striking continuation of McEwan’s contemplation of the interrelation of genetics and chance. Only that Charlie’s hand in the programming of Adam effectively eliminates randomness as a factor in the emergence of character. Indicating the novel’s sustained analogy between genetic and digital programming, Charlie, in fact, feels uncomfortable defining Adam’s personality by himself: “Why leave it to me?” He remarks: “My friends, family and acquaintance, all had appeared in my life with fixed settings, with unalterable histories of genes and environment. I wanted my expensive new friend to do the same” (7). His decision to outsource half of Adam’s settings to Miranda further evidences his desire

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to not be in full control of Adam’s programming. For Charlie, chance is an essential element in the genetic makeup of living beings and the machine’s lack of randomly emergent characteristics unsettles his view of Adam’s seeming aliveness. In Machines Like Me, a genetic understanding of life is thus confronted with a vision of a living machine which draws attention to the two concepts’ shared metaphors. When Alan Turing in the novel proclaims that “language is as open a system as life” (178), he connects the new powers of digital evolution in AI with the infinite possibilities of genetic variation. His statement vividly recalls the earlier passage when Charlie and Miranda decide on Adam’s personality, which investigates the metaphoric conception of a genetic programme through its posthuman embodiment in a machine. On a more fundamental level, Turing’s statement also points to the reliance of genetic and computer science on linguistic structures for their articulation as human knowledge and meaning. Thus triangulating language, genetics and AI, the novel demonstrates its capacity to engage the epistemic and cultural configurations that inform both biological and digital conceptions of life. In the chronology of his works, McEwan’s continued engagement with genetic discourse in Solar, Nutshell and Machines Like Me does not produce a simple historical narrative of the status of genetic knowledge in his writing. Just as the later Saturday proves more supportive of genetic determinism than Enduring Love, despite the findings of the Human Genome Project, Solar’s criticism of genetic predestination did not inaugurate a rejection of genetic imaginaries in McEwan’s work; quite the opposite is true. However, his expansive treatment of specific genetic positions in the earlier novels is refigured in the later works where genetic imaginaries reverberate in the language, metaphors and discursive fragments. These later genetic figurations are expressive of the general trend of genetic discourse over the past decades to fundamentally infiltrate the cultural vocabulary and its imagination of kinship relations, character and the future evolution of life.

References Amigoni, David. 2011. Evolution. In The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science, ed. Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini, 112–123. London: Routledge. Beatty, John. 2013. Chance and Design. In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Darwin and Evolutionary Thought, ed. Michael Ruse, 146–151. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Beer, Gillian. 1985. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Ark. Bodmer, Walter and Robin McKie. 1994. The Book of Man: The Human Genome Project and the Quest to Discover Our Genetic Heritage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bogel, Fredric V. 2013. New Formalist Criticism: Theory and Practice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bradley, Arthur. 2009. The New Atheist Novel: Literature, Religion, and Terror in Amis and McEwan. The Yearbook of English Studies 39: 20–38. Brown, Richard. 2008. Politics, the Domestic and the Uncanny Effects of the Everyday in Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Critical Survey 20: 80–93. Butler, Heidi. 2011. The Master’s Narrative: Resisting the Essentializing Gaze in Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Critique 52: 101–113. Butter, Stella. 2015. Contingency, Forms of Life, and Fiction: The Role(s) of Literature in the Process of Modernization. In Emergent Forms of Life in Anglophone Literature: Conceptual Frameworks and Critical Analyses, ed. M. Basseler et al., 119–139. Trier: WVT. Carbonell, Curtis D. 2010. A Consilient Science and Humanities in McEwan’s Enduring Love. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 12: np, https:// doi.org/10.7771/1481-­4374.1425. Accessed 6 June 2019. Choksey, Lara. 2021. Narrative in the Age of the Genome. London: Bloomsbury. Clayton, Jay. 2002. Genome Time. In Time and the Literary, ed. Karen Newman, Jay Clayton and Marianne Hirsch, 31–59. London: Routledge. Coffman, James A. 2014. On the Meaning of Chance in Biology. Biosemiotics 7: 377–388. Condit, Celeste M. 2019. Laypeople are Strategic Essentialists, Not Genetic Essentialists. Looking for the Psychosocial Impacts of Genomic Information, special report, Hastings Center Report 49: S27–S37. Courtney, Hannah. 2014. Distended Moments in the Neuronarrative: Character Consciousness and the Cognitive Sciences in Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Mindful Aesthetics: Literature and the Science of the Mind, ed. C. Danta and H. Groth, 173–187. London: Bloomsbury. Crossland, Rachel. 2018. Modernist Physics: Waves, Particles, and Relativities in the Writings of Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davies, Rhiannon. 2003. Enduring McEwan. In Posting the Male: Masculinities in Post-war and Contemporary British Literature, ed. D.  Lea and B.  Schoene, 105–23. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Ellis, George and Mark Solms. 2017. Beyond Evolutionary Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foley, Andrew. 2010. Liberalism in the New Millenium: Ian McEwan’s Saturday. JLS/TLW 26: 135–162.

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Freißmann, Stephan. 2012. Fictions of Cognition: Representing (Un)Consciousness and Cognitive Science in Contemporary English and American Fiction. Trier: WVT. Garrard, Greg. 2010. Reading as an Animal: Ecocriticism and Darwinism in Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan. In Local Natures, Global Responsibilities: Ecocritical Perspectives on the New English Literatures, ed. L. Volkmann et al., 223–42. Amsterdam: Brill. Gauthier, Tim. 2013. ‘Selective in Your Mercies’: Privilege, Vulnerability, and the Limits of Empathy in Ian McEwan’s Saturday. College Literature 40: 7–30. Graham, Elyse and Pericles Lewis. 2013. Private Religion, Public Mourning, and Mrs. Dalloway. Modern Philology 111: 88–106. Green, Susan. 2010. Consciousness and Ian McEwan’s Saturday: ‘What Henry Knows’. English Studies 91: 58–73. Greenberg, Jonathan. 2007. Why Can’t Biologists Read Poetry? Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love. Twentieth-Century Literature 53: 93–124. Griesinger, Emily. 2015. Religious Belief in a Secular Age: Literary Modernism and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Christianity and Literature 64: 438–464. Groes, Sebastian. 2013. Ian McEwan and the Modernist Consciousness of the City in Saturday. In Ian McEwan: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. S. Groes, 99–114. London: Bloomsbury. Hacking, Ian. 1990. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanson, Clare. 2020. Genetics and the Literary Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holmes, John. 2011. Victorian Evolutionary Criticism and the Pitfalls of Consilience. In The Evolution of Literature: Legacies of Darwin in European Cultures, ed. N. Saul and Simon J. James, 101–112. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hamner, Everett. 2017. Editing the Soul: Science and Fiction in the Genome Age. Philadelphia: Penn State University Press. Hayles, Katherine N. 2017. Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Head, Dominic. 2007. Ian McEwan. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hillard, Graham. 2010. The Limits of Rationalism in Ian McEwan’s Saturday. The Explicator 68: 140–143. Horton, Emily. 2013. Reassessing the Two-Culture Debate: Popular Science in Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time and Enduring Love. Modern Fiction Studies 59: 683–712. Jordan, Julia. 2010. Chance and the Modern British Novel: From Henry Green to Iris Murdoch. London: Continuum. Ksiezopolska, Irena. 2016. To Endure Love: Mental Illness and the Unreliability Syndrome. In Novelistic Inquiries into the Mind, ed. G. Maziarczyk and J. K. Teske, 77–94. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars.

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Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Levy, Eric P. 2009. Postlapsarian Will and the Problem of Time in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love. Renascence 61: 169–191. Lewontin, Richard and Richard Levins. 1999. Evolutionary Psychology. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 10: 127–130. Lupton, Christina. 2018. Literature and Contingency. Textual Practice 32: 375–379. Malcolm, David. 2002. Understanding Ian McEwan. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Marcus, Laura. 2013. Ian McEwan’s Modernist Time: Atonement and Saturday. In Ian McEwan: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. S.  Groes, 83–98. London: Bloomsbury. Mawer, Simon. 2011 [1997]. Mendel’s Dwarf. London: Abacus. McEwan, Ian. 2019. Machines Like Me: And People Like You. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 2016. Nutshell. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 2010. Solar. London: Vintage. ———. 2006 [2005]. Saturday. London: Vintage. ———. 2005. Literature, Science and Human Nature. In The Literary Animal, Darwinian Perspectives in Literature, ed. J. Gottschall and D. S. Wilson, 5–19. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. 1998 [1997]. Enduring Love. London: Vintage. Merlin, Francesca. 2015. Monod’s Conception of Chance: Its Diversity and Relevance Today. Comptes Rendus Biologies 338: 406–412. Michelini, Francesca. 2015. Zufall und Teleologie. Von Darwin zu Spinoza und zurück. In Contingentia: Transformationen des Zufalls, ed. H.  Böhme et  al., 387–408. Berlin: de Gruyter. Molesworth, Jesse. 2010. Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Realism, Probability, Magic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Monk, Leland. 1993. Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British Novel. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Morrison, Jago. 2001. Narration and Unease in Ian McEwan’s Later Fiction. Critique 42: 253–268. Nelkin, Dorothy and Susan M. Lindee. 1995. The DNA Mystique: The Gene as Cultural Icon. New York: Freeman. Pflaumbaum, Christoph et  al. 2015. Ästhetik des Zufalls: Einleitung und Auswahlbibliographie. In Ästhetik des Zufalls: Ordnungen des Unvorhersehbaren in Literature und Theorie, ed. C. Pflaumbaum et al., 7–28. Heidelberg: Winter. Phelan, James. 2013. McEwan’s Enduring Love: A Rhetorical Reader’s Response to ‘Appendix I’ and ‘Appendix II’. Anglistik 24: 67–79. Pinker, Steven. 1994. The Language Instinct. London: Penguin. Ricoeur, Paul. 1994. Oneself as Another. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Rogers, Janine. 2014. Unified Fields: Science and Literary Form. Montreal: McGill-­ Queen’s University Press. Root, Christina. 2011. A Melodiousness at Odds with Pessimism: Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Journal of Modern Literature 35: 60–78. Rose, Hilary and Steven Rose. 2009. The Changing Face of Human Nature. Daedalus 138: 7–20. Roxburgh, Natalie et al. 2016. Universal Narrativity and the Anxious Scientist of the Contemporary Neuronovel. Mosaic 49: 71–87. Rudrum, David. 2013. Shooting a Donkey: Accidents and Mistakes in Austin and McEwan. Philosophy and Literature 37: 421–434. Ryle, Martin. 2018. Contingency in/of the Text: Aristotle, Hardy, Perec. Textual Practice 32: 455–469. Salisbury, Laura. 2015. Translating Neuroscience: Fictions of the Brain in the 2000s. In The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, ed. Nick Bentley et al., 83–113. London: Bloomsbury. Scherr, Alexander. 2017. Narrating Evolution: Agency, Narrative Thinking, and the Epistemic Value of Contemporary British and American Novels. Trier: WVT. Smith, Bradon T.  L. 2010. “It is Written”: Representation of Determinism in Contemporary Popular Science Writing and Contemporary British Fiction. Downing College, PhD dissertation. Spahr, Clemens. 2012. Prolonged Suspensions: Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan, and the Literary Imagination after 9/11. NOVEL 45: 221–237. Stedman, Gesa. 2008. Brain Plots: Neuroscience and the Contemporary Novel. In The Literary Mind, ed. J. Schläger and G. Stedman, 113–124. Tübingen: Narr. Strauß, Sarah. 2016. Neuroethical Reflections on Body and Awareness in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Ian McEwan’s Saturday. In Presence of the Body: Awareness in and beyond Experience, ed. G.  Hofmann and S.  Zorić, 139–153. Amsterdam: Brill. Tew, Philip. 2005. Exploring London in Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005): Trauma and the Traumatological, Identity Politics and Vicarious Victimhood. In London in Contemporary British Fiction: The City beyond the City, ed. Nick Hubble and Philip Tew, 17–33. London: Bloomsbury. Waugh, Patricia. 2011. Mind in Modern Fiction: Literary and Philosophical Perspectives after Darwin. In The Evolution of Literature: Legacies of Darwin in European Cultures, ed. N.  Saul and Simon J.  James, 125–140. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ———. 2005. Science and Fiction in the 1990s. In British Fiction of the 1990s, ed. Nick Bentley, 57–77. London: Routledge. White, Gillian. 2018. Poetics of Contingency. Textual Practice 32: 529–550. Wilson, E. O. 1975. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap. Woolf, Virginia. 2000 [1925]. Mrs Dalloway. London: Penguin. Wright, Robert. 1994. The Moral Animal. New York: Pantheon.

Genetics’ Perilous Analogies: Metaphors of Life in A. S. Byatt’s Quartet

A. S. Byatt begins her essay “Ancestors” by asserting that powerful pre-­ existing narratives shape the individual fictions produced by a culture at a certain moment in time. The essay is aptly entitled “Ancestors” for it contemplates the upheavals in the novel that emerged, as Byatt claims, once Darwinian biology had replaced the Bible as the primary cultural narrative giving structure to human existence, at least, one might add, in the West. Most notable is Byatt’s diagnosis that it “seems inevitable” that new ideas about the relation of human beings to the world as well as to one another and to their own minds and bodies, such as enshrined in Darwinian evolution, “should give rise to changes in the forms, as well as the subjects, of fiction” (Byatt 2000, pp. 65–66). This affirmation of the role of the life sciences for the literary imagination befits an author whose “recurrent foray into scientific domains has become a hallmark of her fiction” (Walezak 2018, p. 106). In her novel Babel Tower (1996), a stockbroker attending an extra-mural class on literary fiction in the 1960s exclaims that “novels are about so little of the world” and challenges the form to branch out and include, among other things, “the discovery of the DNA”, because otherwise, he asks: “Why should I bother?” (222). In light of the expansive exploration of genetics in her novels, Byatt seems to agree. For Byatt, twentieth-century advances in genetic science continue to propel the Darwinian biological rewriting of foundational cultural narratives. Her remarks in “Ancestors” neatly connect back to my analysis of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Hamann-Rose, Genetics and the Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53100-2_4

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Ian McEwan’s poetics of chance when she states that “the twentieth-­ century Darwinian novelists seem to have shifted their interest from the law of development to the operations of hazard” and names Enduring Love as an example for this shift (2000, p. 84).1 Her essay further anticipates some of my thoughts in the next chapter on Margaret Atwood’s ecologies of life: Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy affirms Byatt’s speculation that “[r]ecent discoveries about the great extent to which DNA patterns are shared by all creatures have perhaps changed writers’ ideas of the natural world” (ibid., p.  80). Most importantly, however, Byatt’s essay outlines a history of the novel’s engagement with biological conceptions of life to which her own novels add a distinct and important voice. Byatt’s substantial contribution to the novel’s investigation of the twentieth-century molecular understanding of life unfolds across her so-­ called quartet of novels which comprises The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002).2 From the beginning, as Byatt herself has commented, the tetralogy is entangled with genetic discovery: “My quartet of novels begins in 1953, the year of the coronation of the new Queen Elizabeth and the year when Francis Crick and James Watson described the structure of DNA” (Byatt 2005, p. 294). From this temporal coincidence, the novels’ treatment of genetic science grows into a multifaceted interrogation of heredity, kinship, biological determinism and genetic scientific practice. Most significantly, though, the quartet integrates the central metaphors of genetic science into its larger discussion of metaphor as the principal if problematic node of contact between language and material reality. Some of these aspects have received critical attention (Cambiaghi 2003; Brown 2007; Johnson 2010; Alfer and Edwards 2010; Soares 2013). But much of the quartet’s representations of a genetic logic of the living, especially as it develops throughout the whole of the tetralogy, have as yet been left unexplored.3 As a result, the full metaphorical resonance of genetic imaginaries of life in the quartet has largely escaped scholarly notice. This metaphorical dimension needs to be addressed more fully in a text that 1  As I outline in the previous chapter, I disagree with Byatt insofar as I argue that Enduring Love engages conceptions of life as subject to both regulated and random genetic organisation. 2  All references to the individual titles in Byatt’s quartet, if not discernible from the context, will be marked as follows: V (The Virgin in the Garden), SL (Still Life), BT (Babel Tower), WW (A Whistling Woman) plus page. 3  Clare Hanson’s Genetics and the Literary Imagination (2020) proves a rare exception here.

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self-consciously insists that language inevitably branches out to form new metaphoric connections. Attention to the quartet’s exploration of genetic metaphors further reveals the work’s rich reconfiguration of how the novel contemplates life in the age of genetics. The nature of metaphor, more generally, is a central concern in Byatt’s overall oeuvre but is foregrounded in the quartet where some of her characters openly condemn the dangers of metaphor especially in a scientific context (Dusinberre 1982; Hansson 1999; Campbell 2004; Alfer and Edwards 2010). As each novel in the tetralogy develops a particular perspective on the relation between language and reality, especially biological materiality, it is the inner workings—and perils—of metaphor and analogy that mark the overarching theme of the series; I will later return to the exact relationship between metaphor and analogy in the text. Zooming in on the nature of representation, Byatt’s quartet explores different kinds of knowledge and interrogates the historically changing forms of knowledge within particular systems of thought, like genetic science. The quartet’s own aesthetic forms become both mirror and vehicle in this multi-volume epistemological project. This dynamic is nowhere more apparent than in the tetralogy’s use of the snail as a metaphor. The snail morphs into a protean reflector of multiple epistemic contexts and connects the quartet’s aesthetics with its investigation of language and knowledge. In one of its most salient incarnations, the snail functions as a metaphor of life, in which divergent conceptions of life from biology and non-scientific contexts suggestively converge, thus delineating similarities and differences between otherwise divergent systems of knowledge. Yet the snail does not simply represent a floating—or slippery—signifier. My first principal argument is that the snail’s function in the text can best be described as a scientific and aesthetic model organism. The geneticists in the quartet observe the snail as a scientific model for Darwinian evolution. The novels’ investment of the snail with a multiplicity of metaphoric meanings in addition to its scientific significance, however, fashions the small animal also into an aesthetic model organism through which the novel explores the interrelations of language, science and other forms of interacting with the world. The snail becomes a vehicle through which to interrogate both biological and socio-cultural, or, to use Fassin’s categories (see Chap. 1), both biological and biographical dimensions of a genetic understanding of life.

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As aesthetic model organism, the snail’s embodiment of genetic discourses of life—and of DNA as a language of life in particular—marks the novels’ most condensed exploration not only of a correspondence but also of a potential continuity between biology and culture. Such a continuity is poised to radically undermine the very separation of biological and biographical dimensions of life. In genetic science proper, the metaphor of DNA as a text gradually assumed ontological status within scientific epistemology, describing a fact rather than drawing on a textual analogy to describe living processes. This assumption remains influential today but was especially prevalent during the 1960s when the majority of the quartet is set. As Lily Kay states: “Genomic textuality had become a fact of life and commercial futures, a metaphor literalized, with all the humbling limits this conflation of analogy and ontology entails for textual and material mastery of the ‘book of life’” (Kay 2000, p. 331). As I will show, it is this “conflation of analogy and ontology” that renders particularly attractive the notion of a genetic language of life in Byatt’s struggle to represent material reality. My second principal argument is that although the quartet can be shown to disentangle analogy and ontology in its genetic metaphors, and even to contextualise them historically, genetic textuality remains a privileged, if self-conscious, site for the representation of biological materiality in the novels. What might at first appear paradoxical will become clear in my discussion of Byatt’s poetics. Emphasising a textual organisation of biological processes in turn allows the quartet to re-examine the relationships between biology and art and between body and mind. In doing so, the quartet not only presents a key work in Byatt’s career-long interest in the relations of intellectual and bodily life. Byatt’s textual metaphors of life in the quartet will also be shown to revisit George Eliot’s conception of organic artistic forms, which Byatt’s own aesthetics can be seen to appropriate through contemporary genetic science. At the close of my argument, I will draw on Jacques Derrida’s long neglected work on the textuality of DNA as a foil to illuminate Byatt’s self-reflexive treatment of what Derrida considered as the structural and evolutionary continuity between DNA and human language: a textual basis of life itself. Derrida articulated his thoughts on genetic textuality at about the same time as Byatt began work on the quartet in the 1970s. It is particularly striking that Byatt ultimately emerges as more mindful than Derrida of the historical specificity and instability of the metaphor of DNA—and life—as text. The quartet illuminates how in the age of genetics, the novel’s figuration of life productively (and often critically) disperses molecular and aesthetic forms of textuality into ever new combinations.

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Metaphoric Matter: Science, Poststructuralism and Byatt’s Philosophy of Language The quartet’s negotiation of the metaphoric description of biological life is informed by its exploration of the mimetic potential of language in general and the novel form in particular. This exploration brings into focus the quartet’s position on the troubled relation between poststructuralism—or its correlative, postmodernism—and science. The tetralogy’s formal postmodern self-referentiality seems to sit uneasily with its investigation of scientific expositions about a material biological reality beyond the text. This tension can be traced back to a conflict in the quartet between postmodernist forms and poststructuralist philosophy. Postmodernism and poststructuralism both foreground the linguistic constructedness of human understandings of the world. But in contrast to postmodernist thinking, poststructuralist critics nevertheless tend to subscribe to an ontological reality outside of the linguistic structures they investigate. As we have already seen, Kay’s poststructuralist analysis of the discursive dimension of genetic knowledge exemplifies this recognition of a reality external to textual representation. Among Kay’s inventory of foundational genetic metaphors is also, significantly in Byatt’s context, the concept of information. Playing with various meanings and discursive origins of “information”, Byatt employs what appears to fall into the category of a postmodern literary technique. In fact, the tetralogy has frequently been described as a postmodern text (see Stewart 2009, pp.  497–98; Hansson 1999, p.  453; Butter 2004, p.  374; Alfer and Edwards 2010, pp. 69–70). Yet the epistemological concerns of this playful metaphoric web function more adequately as a poststructuralist literary strategy. The text’s language-philosophical positions—on form- and content-­levels—strike a balance between formal play and ontological curiosity, as critics have previously noted.4 In the quartet, the difference between its postmodernist and poststructuralist attributes is therefore an

4  Juliet Dusinberre has called The Virgin in the Garden “both experimental and realist” (1982, p. 55). Jane Campbell elaborates on this stylistic mixture using Byatt’s own remarks from the essay collection Passions of the Mind: “Byatt developed a characteristic blend of traditional and postmodern techniques that she calls ‘self-conscious realism’” (Campbell 2004, p. 5). Campbell explicates the term stating that “Byatt’s position with respect to the tradition-versus-postmodernism debate […] is, like her relationship to feminism, one of both/and, not either/or” (ibid., p. 5).

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ontological rather than an aesthetic issue. The quartet’s aesthetics resonate fully with its poststructuralist concerns. In the first novel, The Virgin in the Garden, language is most saliently interrogated through the poet and playwright Alexander Wedderburn and the young Frederica Potter, who functions as the focal character throughout the quartet. The story traces her development from school girl in the 1950s through university, marriage, motherhood and divorce in the 1960s, and, in a final glimpse, to life as a literary and cultural critic in the 1980s. Frederica’s centrality is contested, however, by a large additional cast of recurring characters, including her siblings Stephanie and Marcus, as well as the scientist Jacqueline Winwar. Jacqueline’s narrative presence in particular, both through events in her private life and her work on snails, comes to equal Frederica’s in the final novel; this leads Alexa Alfer and Amy de Campos Edwards to suggest that the quartet, “it seems, is not Frederica’s bildungsroman after all” (2010, p.  88). In The Virgin in the Garden, however, the narrative is focused on Alexander’s play about Elizabeth I, which is to be performed for the occasion of Elizabeth II’s coronation and in which Frederica stars as the young queen. The play is rich in metaphors, beginning with its title, Astraea, a reference to “Virgo-­ Astraea”, the virgin goddess, here resonating with the figure of the virgin queen (11). The highly metaphoric conception of the entire verse drama, of which the reader is only given elusive fragments, originates in Alexander’s ambitions to create a “renaissance of language, florid and rich and muscular. The untouchable complete man-woman under whalebone” (417). The reference to opposite roles combining in the figure of Elizabeth I encapsulates Alexander’s desire to recreate a melding of language and reality he believes has been lost since the Elizabethan Age. In the novel, this nostalgia is informed by T.  S. Eliot’s argument in “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921) about the “dissociation of sensibility” corrupting poetic language since the seventeenth century. Eliot famously argues that prior to this development, an undissociated sensibility allowed poets to rely on true connections between words and their referents in the world. Even though Byatt is deeply critical of Eliot’s historical division of the feeling and the thinking body, she has repeatedly attested  to the influence of Eliot’s argument (see, e.g. her essays “Still Life/Nature morte” or “Soul Searching”). Byatt recounts that Eliot’s claims have sparked a life-long concern in her writing with what binds bodies and minds together in an overarching conception of life (Byatt 2004). This question about the ties between biological and cultural life, as well as the question’s long historical tradition are central to the quartet as a whole.

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In The Virgin in the Garden, Alexander endorses Eliot’s sentiment, despite longing for emotions and words to be as “jointly knit” as he finds them to be in a speech by Elizabeth I (321). Frederica instead criticises Eliot’s argument (V 317–318; SL 345). Alexander certainly does not achieve any resurrection of such immediate relations between signifier and signified. Mournfully, he comments on his central but “laboured metaphor, grasped too early in the writing”, namely that of “blood out of stone”, alluding to the virgin queen’s vow not to marry and bear children (417). The play’s nostalgia for a seemingly lost connection between language and life spills over and informs the whole novel. To name just one example: Frederica’s sexual development is first juxtaposed with her portrayal of the virgin queen, who pronounces that she “will not bleed”. This proclamation is later ironically undermined off-stage when Frederica bleeds copiously as she loses her virginity (421, 556–557; see also Campbell 2004, pp. 63–65, 235)—while the actress playing the older virgin queen becomes pregnant during rehearsals (483). The overall effect of this metaphoric patterning is an emphasis on the internal workings of metaphor, showcasing its productive but ambiguous combination of entities that are both similar and different. This ironic treatment of metaphor in the first novel inaugurates the quartet’s underlying concern with the nature of representation. Alexander’s love of “things” (178, emphasis original), echoed in the philanthropist Crowe’s collections of fine objects, further underscores the text’s epistemological and representational investment in the materiality of the world. Still Life, the second novel, continues the first novel’s examination of language’s referentiality through metaphor, but attempts to reverse the approach taken in The Virgin in the Garden. The desire for words to be imbued with a real-world referent is exemplified in Frederica’s wish at Cambridge for poetry to show “pens as pens, hats as hats, keys as keys” (256). In contrast to the previous novel’s explicitly nostalgic if self-­reflexive investment in “florid and rich” language, Still Life is supposed to be an experiment in writing without metaphor. In one of several metafictional asides, the narrator outlines the initial conception behind, and ultimate failure of, relinquishing metaphor: I had the idea that this novel could be written innocently, without recourse or reference to other people’s thoughts, without, as far as possible, recourse to simile or metaphor. This turned out to be impossible: one cannot think at all without a recognition and realignment of ways of thinking and seeing we have learned over time. We all remake the world as we see it, as we look at it. (131)

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The narrator expounds metaphor as a defining feature of language and thought, an assertion repeated by Byatt in “Still Life/Nature morte”, where she reiterates both the intention of writing a novel “which would try to forgo metaphor” and the admission of the “failure of that project” (1993a, p. 9). In Still Life, such metalinguistic reflections are mirrored by another of Alexander’s plays. This play, titled The Yellow Chair, after the eponymous painting by Vincent van Gogh, dwells on the painter’s time in the South of France and offers an anatomy of the representation of things in art, for which the chair of the painting provides the leitmotif. As the title indicates, figurative art features prominently in the novel, which interrogates the nature of representation in the tradition of the classical paragone dispute by contrasting the novelistic forms with another medium (Davey 1998, p. 1544). When Alexander attempts to express what he perceives as painting’s superior access to reality, he again struggles to find the right words for his play: “At first he had thought that he could write a plain, exact verse with no figurative language, in which a yellow chair was the thing itself, a yellow chair, as a round gold apple was the thing itself or a sunflower a sunflower” (2, cf. 199–200). The “gold apple” in this passage exemplifies the difficulty not only of writing without metaphor but also of reading without forging new connections beyond “the thing itself”. On the one hand, the metaphor hidden in the colour attribute “gold” chips away at the envisioned ability to abstain from figurative language; if, on the other hand, as Alexander’s project invites, the reader imagines an apple literally made of gold, the reference conjures up associations with myths and fairy tales. Alexander makes the impossibility of writing without metaphor explicit, prefiguring the narrator’s and Byatt’s comments to the same effect: “But it couldn’t be done. Language was against him, for a start. Metaphor lay coiled in the name sunflower, which not only turned towards but resembled the sun, the source of light” (2). Not only is metaphor here shown to be an essential component of language, but as Alexander continues, metaphor is described as infinitely inviting connections with other metaphors and signs: “One thing always linked to another thing” (2–3). In “Still Life/Nature morte”, Byatt equally recalls the spontaneous and uncontainable formation of connections between images in her writing as soon as she tried to forgo figurative language: “The cyclamen would not stay at the level of exact description” (1993a, p.  13, emphasis original). Several examples of such figurative interlinking are provided in the novel’s prologue alone. The novel itself quotes a number of van Gogh’s personal

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letters which are themselves multi-layered manifestations of referentiality within the framing narrative. In addition and more specifically in this context, they recall the painter’s identification of the vegetation around Avignon with the “same cypresses and oleanders” Petrarch used to see as he lived there (3). Just as for van Gogh a tree is not just a tree but a connection with the Renaissance, so Frederica and Alexander, as they consider the olives in a van Gogh painting, “could not not recall the Mount of Olives, the Garden of Gethsemane” (8, emphasis original). Such connections between objects, representations and images become paradigmatic for the entire quartet as a complex web of metaphorical interrelations emerges. To paraphrase the novel, Alexander’s reference to metaphor lying “coiled” in the name sunflower, can now not not recall the snail shells already depicted and prefigure those yet to appear. Still Life uses scientific discourses and taxonomy to further develop the notion inaugurated by The Virgin in the Garden that metaphors elucidate the nature of linguistic representation by showcasing both difference and similarity between two objects. Frederica’s brother, Marcus, introduces a scientific perspective into the keenly literate Potter household in which his gift for mathematics and lack of literary sensibility mark him off as an outsider. In The Virgin in the Garden, Marcus is seen to suffer from his ability to visualise geometric forms and mathematical formulas. While helping him to come to terms with the physical reality that surrounds him, this ability threatens to consume him in a process he refers to as “spreading himself” (30; see also 31), an event that causes him to completely lose touch with his surroundings. Fascinated by Marcus’s visions, one of his teachers, Lucas Simmonds, draws Marcus into his half scientific, half mystic-­religious experiments (see also Hanson 2020, p. 58). At first this seems to stabilise the boy but ends in his mental breakdown following the teacher’s sexual advances. In Still Life, Marcus slowly recuperates and finds a new source of psychic stability in the taxonomic naming of grasses: “Naming and distinguishing between the grasses gave him a pleasure which complemented the pleasure he took in his maths” (362; see also Alfer 2001, p. 51). Marcus, the narrator explains, is ignorant of the idea that “matter escapes our naming, bulges beyond it” (364). For him, once categorised, the different types of grasses could be “seen clearly”: Alopecurus—Fox-tail grass Phalaris—Canary-grass Phleum—Cat’s-tail grass Lagurus—Hare’s-tail grass (363)

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In the novel, Marcus’s categories of grasses extend far longer, thereby also visually highlighting the epistemological order inherent in taxonomic organisation. The narrator again comments overtly on the scene, extending the metalinguistic discourse begun by the earlier metafictional commentary: “I had the idea, when beginning this novel, that it could be a novel of naming and accuracy” (364). This emphasis on naming is realised through Marcus’s taxonomy but also recalls Frederica’s proclamation that “she liked naming names” (4). And the novel as verbal construct indeed attempts to execute the narrator’s imagined style, heavy in nouns and adjectives, as the narrator’s descriptions of grasses illustrate (289). Yet, in the end the narrator admits, the list of grass names in mind, that “even in the act of naming we make metaphors” (365). As Byatt relates: “These names are all small metaphors—human perceptions, the nit, the little swelling, seeing the likeness in the difference of foxtail or haretail and grass” (Byatt 1993a, p.  20). But Byatt’s engagement with taxonomy in the novel as well as in her essay manifests more than a reiteration of the ubiquity of metaphor in linguistic representations of reality. Byatt’s taxonomic experiment comes to epitomise how she conceives of literary referentiality in the quartet. Her notion of “seeing the likeness in the difference” of foxtail and grass through their metaphoric juxtaposition effectively encapsulates this philosophy. Alexa Alfer argues that Byatt embraces George Eliot’s conception that “distinction and combination” are at the heart of language and representation (Alfer 2001, p.  52). Drawing on Eliot’s essay “Notes on Form in Art”, Alfer identifies the grass names in the novel as “mimetic icons, productively referential, giving local embodiment to the impossible, paradoxical ‘relation of words to things’ to the precise extent that they allow us to perceive identity and difference not only between foxtail and grass, but also between word and thing, ‘simultaneously and dependent on each other’” (ibid., p. 54). The word relates to reality at the same time as it declares the impossibility of that relation. This rich paradox emerges as the principal way in which the quartet constructs a sense of referentiality between language and world, and thus as the quartet’s principal poetics of metaphor. For Byatt, the metaphoric grass names represent, paradoxically and self-­ reflexively, what she calls elsewhere “the relation of words to things, inventive, imprecise, denotative, practical, imagined” (Byatt 1993a, p. 20). She wants at least to assume that “words denote things” (ibid., p. 11). Recalling Byatt’s concept of “self-conscious realism” (Campbell 2004, p. 5), this— emblematically poststructuralist—dialectic of insisting on representing the

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world while self-consciously considering the limits of that representation encapsulates the epistemological work of metaphor also in the quartet and beyond the taxonomy of grasses. The quartet’s metaphoric matrix continues to expand in the later novels but poetological and metafictional discussions of metaphor recede into the background. Other negotiations of language predominate the texts in the face of a perceived Babylonian chaos of representation. This invoked chaos spans from contrasting truth claims, concerns about the limits of free speech in the obscenity trial around Babel Tower’s novel-within-the-novel, Babbletower, to the legal discourse of Frederica’s divorce proceedings, and includes a debate about a genetic-neurological basis of language (see also Cambiaghi 2003, p. 290; Alfer and Edwards 2010, p. 67). This debate proves a key strand in Byatt’s underlying concern with connecting the life of the body with the life of the mind. An explicit negotiation of a poetics of metaphor persists in the two novels’ investigation of scientific metaphors—first, in Babel Tower, through the eyes of the philosopher Vincent Hodgkiss, then, in A Whistling Woman, from the perspective of the neuroscientist Hodder Pinsky. In Babel Tower, a conversation about the possibility of probing the material matter of the mind, of identifying the “molecules of memory”, turns towards the idea that “learned information, as well as genetic coded information, might be retained in and transmitted by very large molecules, such as the DNA and RNA” (250). This would enable “the structure of our own consciousness” to be located in “these amazing macromolecules” (250). The philosopher Hodgkiss, however, is unconvinced and sounds a note of warning: The question is, whether the word information means the same in all cases, that of immunology, that of the DNA, that of the mind of the scientist building a computer, or whether you are all thinking by analogy, which is dangerous. (251, emphasis original)

While Marcus agrees with Hodgkiss, the neuroscientist Bowman tellingly ignores his interjection, suggesting that he sees no epistemological uncertainty in the concept of information.5 Hodgkiss is undoubtedly correct in that the word “information” does not mean the same in all the listed cases, 5  See also Hanson on Byatt’s critique of applying “cybernetic models to biological processes” (2020, p. 67).

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exactly because, as a metaphor, its tenors or objects differ in each case. Hodgkiss speaks of analogy rather than metaphor, but the terms are mostly synonymous in this context. Gillian Beer suggests that in contrast to metaphor, there “is always a sense of story—of sequence—in analogy, in a way that there need not be in other forms of metaphor” (1985, p.  80). Hodgkiss’s use of the term, however, does not reflect this differentiation. Insightfully, Beer continues: “Whereas in metaphor resistance as well as accord must persist, in analogy complete resolution is the sought-for end—albeit an end which can rarely, if ever, be reached” (ibid., p.  80). Accordingly, Hodgkiss’s use of analogy would seem apposite since it is exactly the scientific assumption of the “complete resolution” in analogy he takes issue with. My preference for metaphor in turn indicates my focus on what is “precarious” in analogical relations (ibid., p. 80, emphasis original). I will return to the metaphor of information, highlighted by Hodgkiss, in my discussion of DNA as information and book of life. For the moment it suffices to note that Hodgkiss introduces into the quartet the self-­ reflexive position that metaphoric thinking in science can mislead or even obfuscate and be, in that sense, “dangerous”. In A Whistling Woman, Hodder Pinsky, for the reader, recalls Hodgkiss’s warning when he emphasises the “dangers of analogy” in science (355). Pinsky speaks at an interdisciplinary mind-body conference that dominates much of the novel’s plot and whose cataclysmic final disintegration into a chaotic clash between academic establishment and 1960s counter-culture marks the quartet’s ultimate climax. In contrast to Hodgkiss, Pinsky acknowledges that “[h]uman beings could not think without […] metaphors and analogies” (353). What is more, Pinsky recognises that metaphor has a legitimate function in scientific discourse and practice, albeit within limits: There were also uses, and objections to uses, of metaphors from systems of human communication. Words like programme, code, information, transcription, encryption, message, translation, were not invented to describe either the operation of the neurones of the brain, or the physical mechanisms of computing-machines. They were derived from factual descriptions of writing and speaking, from human language, talking about itself. (354)

To be sure, Pinsky’s claim that words like information are derived from “factual descriptions of writing and speaking” can be critiqued because it is unclear in what way the notion of information is indeed a “factual”

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description of writing and speaking rather than another metaphoric approximation. And while the term information indeed gained prominence—and entrance into molecular imaginaries—through emerging communications theories of the 1950s and 1960s (see also Byatt 2005, p. 296), its origins actually go back to predominantly theological contexts, which still resonate in the notion of genetic information as the book of life (Kay 2000). The quartet itself reflects on this as I will show. Nevertheless, Pinsky’s recognition of the possible uses of metaphors in science is in accord with corresponding canonical assumptions in the history and philosophy of science. In general, as Michael Whitworth claims, “all scientific theorization is dependent on metaphor” because metaphor enables “the definition of the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar” (2001, pp. 5, 10). Evelyn Fox Keller, in her book Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology, similarly states: As the ubiquitous presence of metaphor attests, the classical distinction between literal and metaphorical holds no better in scientific than it does in ordinary language. Some of the force of descriptive statements, then, derives from the role of metaphor in constituting similarity and difference, in defining the ‘family resemblances’ that form the bases on which we categorize natural phenomena […] and in motivating the performance of particular experiments or the construction of particular technical devices. (Keller 1995, p. xi)

Keller exemplifies this force of metaphors in genetic science. She explains that the concept of information, as appropriated from communications theory, proved immensely productive for genetic research because it offered a way to completely locate everything that was needed for the organism to develop into its final state of complexity within the cell nucleus, within the structures of DNA. This conceptual move allowed the discipline an array of new research questions, which led to new research methodologies that eventually produced the explosion of genetic research in the second half of the twentieth century. Keller also points out the “difference” enshrined in the metaphor in its molecular context. In communication theory, information is merely a unit of transmission whereas the content of genetic information is vitally important since it has direct physiological consequences. Information proved a successful concept because this imprecision allowed the discipline to break new ground. At the same time, of course, the adoption of the discourse of

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information by genetic science also led to the rise of deterministic thinking in genetic discourse and its popular appropriations. Genetic information was just too neat and comprehensive a concept not to give weight to the notion that the better part of human development was predestined. Keller’s emphasis that the force of scientific metaphors derives from their constitution of “similarity and difference” reverberates with Byatt’s poetics. Both acknowledge that language “does not simply construct reality” and zoom in on the ways in which language attempts to connect with reality. Any such attempt reacts to the material reality because representation requires a certain amount of “cooperativeness of the material at hand” (Keller 1995, p. xiii). The character Pinsky in Byatt’s novel comes to a different conclusion. He pursues “a science of mind that dealt with things that were only approximately objects of language at all. We name them, but their names neither contain, nor confine them” (353). While he admits that he cannot do without language in order to describe phenomena of non-verbal cognition, language is for him not a privileged though conflicted access point to reality, as it is for Byatt and Keller. Rather, language, or, more specifically, analogy, stands in the way of that access: He spoke of the dangers of analogy in the comparison of the possibility, in the neurobiological world, of describing what went on in terms of simple electromagnetism and chemical reactions, to the simplifying descriptions of economics […]. The difference was endlessly more instructive than the analogy, said Hodder Pinsky. The analogy is made by the slipperiness of thought with words. We need linguistic philosophy to sort out the beautiful and fatal snarls we are fated […] to entwine ourselves in, with words. But thought is not words, life is not words. (355, emphasis original)

For Pinsky, it is the job of philosophers to “sort out” the imprecisions of language to arrive at the hidden reality beyond the words. Pinsky, in name and philosophy, Byatt has explained, is an amalgamation of Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky (Byatt 2005, p.  296). Pinsky joins the list of the quartet’s scientist characters, like Gerard Wijnnobel and his dream of a “biological-cognitive Theory of Everything” (26), who, though by no means treated dismissively or shown to be ignorant, hold onto a certain belief in the possibility of an unmediated access to the world. Pinsky’s warning against analogy is contextualised epistemologically through the quartet’s poetics of metaphor. It is also ironically framed by

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the ubiquity of metaphor in the text. Further, Frederica, who is in the audience, later professes her ignorance of much of Pinsky’s argument but feels inspired by the “new metaphors” of “genes, and chromosomes, and the language of the DNA” (355, 411). Frederica, the embodiment of literature, for whom forms such as metaphor represent a way of thinking (410), is here shown to embrace as a source of new meaning what for Pinsky is the necessary evil of analogy. She recognises what Whitworth outlines as the power of scientific metaphors: “Not only can scientists understand new phenomena in terms of familiar material objects and social institutions, but non-scientists can defamiliarize the familiar, reconceiving it in metaphors provided by new scientific theories” (Whitworth 2001, p. 12). Frederica discovers one incisive consequence of the new scientific metaphors: “It is not only that we now have different ways of talking of the body […] but that […] we now have dramatically new ways of experiencing and interacting with that body” (Keller 1995, p. xvii). Of course, while Frederica at the end of the quartet is thrilled by the prospect of engaging the new metaphors of science, the text has done exactly that all along. The quartet’s engagement with the new molecular metaphors of life finds its most complex negotiation in the figure of the snail, whose function in the text can be best understood, I suggest, as a literal and metaphoric model organism.

Slippery Signifier: The Snail as Scientific and Aesthetic Model Organism In the quartet, snails appear in a multiplicity of guises and contexts. As Jennifer A. Johnson points out, there is a “complex mesh of references to thrushes and snails throughout” Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman (Johnson 2010, p. 58)—I will extend this argument to the entire tetralogy and excavate the pivotal role of the snail in the text’s exploration of genetic metaphors of life. Johnson concisely summarises that snails in the quartet are “connected with science, literature, sex, legends and beauty as well as symbolizing the fragility of life in the face of inevitable violence, either on the thrush’s anvil or due to the cruelty of men”. She adds that “the snail functions both on a literary level as a symbol of life and, in a scientific sense, as a means of studying genetics and neuroscience” (Johnson 2010, pp. 58, 69). I agree that snails, genetic science and discourses of life are

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intricately connected in the text, but I contend that with a view to the quartet as a whole it is more accurate and productive to conceive of the snail as a metaphor rather than a symbol of life. A symbol, J. A. Cuddon explains, “differs from an allegorical sign in that it has a real existence, whereas an allegorical sign is arbitrary” (1999, p. 885, emphasis original). As Hansson states, this is exactly why the allegorical and the related metaphorical mode prove to be more useful epistemological operators: “In contrast to symbols, which are generally taken to transcend the sign and express universal truths, allegories and metaphors divide the sign, exposing its arbitrariness” (1999, p. 454). The snail perceived as metaphor more adequately captures the range of different meanings and epistemological concerns which it focalises, not least the metaphoric conception of life’s genetic textuality.6 In the quartet, the snail as genetic metaphor diversifies the multiple different meanings of a genetic understanding of life through the multiple contexts in which the snail is featured. In this process, the snail both creates interconnections—as well as contrasts—between its diverse contexts and highlights their shared reliance on genetic paradigms. The principal effect of such metaphoric cross-connections is an emphasis on the epistemological dimension of the snail as an object of knowledge. In accord with the quartet’s suggestion of a multiplicity of different knowledge systems, this object will be shown to escape any singular ascription of meaning. As the polymath-character Gerard Wijnnobel asserts: knowledge is “not sealed in self-contained little boxes” (SL 214). In the tetralogy the snail functions both as a scientific and an aesthetic model organism. The main difference between the two kinds is the extent to which the snail either emphasises a specific genetic discourse or produces a comparison between two or more genetic and/or cultural discourses. Because the snail as metaphor characteristically disregards such categorical boundaries, even the snail as scientific model organism will be observed to forge metaphoric links with other incarnations of the snail in the text.

6  I similarly agree with Johnson that in Babel Tower’s novel-within-the-novel, Babbletower, the snail can be seen as a symbol for the mystical conception of life in the depicted society’s rituals. Yet, again, the snail as symbol fails to account for the conceptual interrelations forged in the snail as metaphor between the mystical and molecular understandings of life and the epistemological questions raised by these metaphoric interrelations.

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In its most extensive treatment in the tetralogy, the snail serves a group of population geneticists as scientific model organism for their study of Darwinian evolution. Foreshadowed by Jacqueline and Marcus’s teenage field studies of ants in Still Life (225; see also V 300), Jacqueline and her colleague’s empirical observations of two species of snails on the Yorkshire moors occupy a considerable portion of the narrative in both Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman. The narrator in Babel Tower explains: “Jacqueline is monitoring two colonies of Helix hortensis and two of Helix nemoralis, studying the genetic changes in the populations, which can be read in the varied bands on the creatures’ shells” (53, emphasis original). The act of “reading” the genetic changes on the snails’ shells emphasises “the snail itself [as] a text” (Campbell 2004, p. 233) and evinces an understanding of the small mollusc through the metaphor of DNA as a form of writing. Jacqueline and her colleague, Luk Lysgaard-Peacock, do not question this metaphoric understanding of genetic writing; they simply accept it as a research tool. For them, the snail organism—or, more precisely, the “population genetics of snails” (55) in their part of the moors—represents an exemplary model through which they “hope to see Darwinian selection in action” (356): by correlating the snail populations’ development with the decreasing numbers of thrushes in the area. Their study of the snail as a scientific model organism has a real historical counterpart. As Roberta Millstein shows, work on Helix nemoralis as a model for evolutionary processes sparked “The Great Snail Debate” of the 1950s (Millstein 2008). The novel retains the use of the earlier Latinate name for the snail, Helix, which had already been changed to Cepea in the 1950s. In her essay in Nature, Byatt relates that she encountered the name helix first, finding inspiration in how the name “could be fitted into both my paradise garden imagery and my realist scientific tale” (Byatt 2005, p. 295). When Byatt learned of the intermittent name change, she chose to retain the by then archaic Latinate version so as not to lose the metaphoric connection between the snail’s name and the double helix of DNA (ibid., p.  295). The quartet reflects the name change belatedly when it starts to refer to the snail as “Cepea nemoralis” by the beginning of A Whistling Woman (17). This concern with scientific nomenclature not only recalls the examination of naming inaugurated by Marcus’s taxonomy of grasses. The shift from Helix to Cepea also illustrates the quartet’s larger investigation of historical changes in scientific discourse and practice. The snail’s changing genetic research contexts in the quartet function as the text’s primary vehicle for the historicisation of genetic knowledge

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and practice. While Luk and Jacqueline at first study the snails empirically, observing them on the moors, Luk later reluctantly adopts the new genetic sequencing tools that “replace all the local observation, recording and guesswork” (WW 68). In both methodologies, the snail functions as a model organism for the study of evolution. This parallelism emphasises that the real-world molecularisation of biology has reshaped rather than eliminated the use of model organisms in scientific research (Rine 2014, p. 549). The epistemological assumptions about the gene, however, differ dramatically between Luk’s observational and molecular research practices. In the first instance, in accordance with the tenets of “classical genetics” (Keller 2000, p. 2), the gene functions as a statistical entity; while in the second the gene is considered through its material biochemical constitution. This attention in the quartet to the differences in genetic practice and conceptualisation of the gene that accompanied the shift from classical to molecular genetics lay bare the historically specific conditions upon which the articulation and authority of genetic knowledge depend. Thus historicising epistemology itself, the novels reflect what Hans-­ Jörg Rheinberger has called “the most important contribution of the twentieth century to the philosophy of science” (2010, p. 8). Exemplified by Luk’s move from counting snail patterns to sequencing their genomes using electrophoresis (WW 68), Byatt’s tetralogy traces a genealogy of genetic science, in which she reveals that the production of scientific knowledge depends on historically specific epistemological assumptions which are bound up with the changing technologies and practices of scientific investigation (see also Hamann-Rose 2019). Such an understanding of historical scientific development diametrically opposes any simplistic notion of scientific progress by demonstrating that scientific knowledge, while highly referential, always remains historically contingent. The common concern driving investigations of the snail as either statistical or molecular genetic model organism, in the quartet, is the study of genetic heredity and kinship, which, when mapped over time, reveal evolutionary patterns. Historical epistemology notwithstanding, the snail as scientific model organism hence highlights a particular genetic discourse about heredity and kinship which finds prominent cultural appropriation in the novels. While heredity is a concern in all parts of the tetralogy, the characters’ increasing genetic understanding of hereditary relations complements the text’s scientific history of genetic science with a cultural history of the assimilation of genetic knowledge.

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Babel Tower’s opening image of snails on a thrush’s anvil—the traditional name for the stone used by the bird to crack open the snail’s shell— includes a reference to the snails’ genetic ancestors, highlighting the theme of representing kinship and heredity through genetic discourse: “Their lips are pure white (Helix hortensis) and shining black (Helix nemoralis). They are striped and coiled, gold, rose, chalk, umber, they rattle together as the quick bird steps among them. In the stones are the coiled remains of their congeners, millions of years old” (1, emphasis original). The word “congener” construes the snails and their fossilised ancestors as members of the same taxonomic genus, the word’s true meaning, but “congener” also contains the word “gene”. The latter reshapes this taxonomic relationship through the perspective of genetic relationality. As already stated, however, concerns with heredity and kinship are not limited to the snails, but recur throughout the tetralogy and are frequently negotiated in genetic terms. The two later novels generally approach topics of family legacy and relatedness more overtly through genetics. In The Virgin in the Garden, set in 1953, genetic discourse is still minimal. The biology teacher Simmonds, however, already speculates that one’s future might one day be read from one’s genes (447). Yet, even though Simmonds suggests this potential genetic science as a finally reputable version of the mystical reading of entrails, his connection of the two practices as well as his own pseudo-scientific interests fashion genetics as a suspect science in the tetralogy’s first volume. Heredity, in The Virgin in the Garden, is already an important theme, just not perceived through genetic concepts. Frederica’s father, Bill, for example, contemplates his legacy through his children and feels like they are failing him (259). His concerns with his legacy prepare his turning to Thomas Hardy’s poem “Heredity” at the end of Still Life after the death of his daughter Stephanie. The familial hereditary continuity expressed in the poem gives solace to grief-stricken Bill, especially the line “I am the family face/Flesh perishes, I live on” (SL 429–430). The resonances between the poem and the quartet’s interest in genetics remain implicit—Hardy was a keen student of August Weismann’s proto-genetic research but, like Bill, he belongs to a pre-genetic world. The quartet’s investment in genetic discourse changes abruptly with Still Life. The novel begins to think inheritance increasingly in genetic terms. The shift becomes apparent when Hardy’s proto-genetic emphasis on the continuity of the “family face” is actively reframed. The narrator

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prefigures Hardy’s “family face” in a vision of genetic continuity: “And as the immortal life of the genotype is transmitted, some say, so the phenotype, the individual body, becomes redundant” (286). And Frederica, for instance, declares: “The life of English literature lived in her like genes for red hair and irritable movements of the hands and mouth” (SL 320). Family resemblances like irritable gestures and individual traits like hair colour are depicted as genetic. Her passion for English literature is only analogically tied up with genetic discourse but nevertheless expressed through it. In Babel Tower, then, kinship is repeatedly designated through genetics, for instance when Alexander ponders his claim on his son, which “was in a sense ludicrous, since it was a claim based on a moment of pleasure and the accident of genes” (142). Or when Alexander notices Stephanie’s daughter, whom he has never seen but thinks he recognises through her family resemblance: “He knows her, he can read her genes in her face, in her skin, in her lips, even in the movements of attention of her head” (183; cf. WW 215). Luk, as the novel’s senior geneticist, leaves no doubt about the genetic basis of kinship: “‘Everyone has ancestors,’ says Luk Lysgaard-Peacock, looking at the faces with a geneticist’s eye” (240). In A Whistling Woman, Luk repeats his understanding of kinship as figured through genetic relations (187). Luk’s acceptance of Frederica’s son, Leo, at the end of the quartet, however, also envisions a non-genetic conception of family and kinship. Visions of genetic kinship thus feature centrally in Byatt’s examination of how genetic propositions refigure interpersonal connections within an encompassing molecular discourse of life. The tetralogy’s exploration of heredity and kinship through genetics is closely bound up with concerns about genetic determinism. Frederica’s analogical description of her love of literature as genetic, for instance, leaves her wondering: “Where is the borderline between nature and culture?” (SL 320) Characters in the novel are described both as if their behaviour and proclivities could be genetically prescribed, and also as if the complete opposite were true. Bill’s daughters, Frederica and Stephanie, seem to have inherited their father’s love of literature (see also Cambiaghi 2003, p. 283), while Marcus’s gift for mathematics breaks with the Potter family’s shared literary interests. At first, Frederica, “appeared […] not to have inherited the family teaching compulsion” (SL 67) while she is later shown to take up teaching, which is, after all “in her blood” (BT 221). The twins, Paul and John Ottokar, as twins an ideal and established model for the study of genetic predispositions, look the same and are held

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together by a strong emotional bond, while at the same time displaying very different interests. John later utters an ambivalent perspective on genetic determinism when he comments on Luk’s work as a geneticist: “What you’ve worked out is an explanation of everything. From the point of view of cells and organisms. Makes all sorts of ideas meaningless. Kindness, love. God” (WW 322). For him, genetic explanations threaten to displace all other forms of understanding of human interaction and human meaning (see also Soares 2013, pp. 149–151). He does not refute such genetic explanations. Rather, he struggles to accept what he perceives as their consequences: “I see they’re right but they just take away—the meaning” (323). Campbell convincingly argues that the ambivalence expressed in this passage does not negate the influence of genetic constitutions on human behaviour but warns against the danger of a gene-centric solipsism that falls short of the complexity of human meaning (Campbell 2004, p. 252). There appears to be an ingrained ambivalence in the quartet regarding the deterministic influence of genes, as the examples above amply attest. The very instability of linear accounts of personal and family history in the quartet, as Natalie Riley has shown, further undermines any simplistic notion of genetically predetermined human development in the novels (Riley 2021). In the text, Frederica suggests that the question of nature versus nurture might ultimately be too reductive. On the occasion of her niece’s baptism, she remarks: “The pattern of the genes is biological, is chemical, is human history. Naming is cultural, also history, another pattern” (SL 304). Biological and cultural perspectives here present two complementary rather than two opposing epistemologies of human history. Significantly, the snail’s function as a scientific model organism in the quartet not only foregrounds a genetic understanding of human life and heredity, but also, more generally, provides the grounds for an ecological rethinking of human-animal relations. For example, Luk’s research of snails strengthens his evolutionary outlook just as his genetic perspective transforms his ecological vision. When Frederica asks Luk how genetic science has changed his view of human beings, he replies that genetics has made him realise another level of inter-species’ relatedness, “how we are all constructed by the coded sequences of the DNA—hermaphrodite slugs, sexed slugs, Helix hortensis and ourselves” (BT 463). He states that such an understanding of human-animal kinship “does diminish your sense of your own importance” (BT 464).

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This understanding is embedded within a larger ecological context in the novel. From the beginning, Luk and Jacqueline’s research on the moors is informed by their reading of Rachel Carson’s 1963 eco-­manifesto Silent Springs and her focus on the havoc wreaked on the natural world by the use of pesticides (BT 56; see also Alfer and Edwards 2010, p. 83). The use of pesticides is explicitly connected to their studies because as pesticides poison and diminish the thrush numbers, so they affect the numbers of snails (see also Johnson 2010, p. 67). But, as Marcus points out in Babel Tower, in the end, all species are affected by seepage of toxic chemicals into ecological systems, especially on a genetic level: “Fall-out changes genes. Chemical mutagens change genes. Something that has taken millions and millions of years to make forms that work—we can just destroy—or turn into monstrosities—in a twinkling” (56, emphasis original). This perspective, reiterated by Frederica at the end of the novel, connects snails, other animals and humans through their shared exposure to pollution which potentially changes their genetic makeup (357). Genetic discourse is here explicitly used to represent a continuity between human and nonhuman life forms. In A Whistling Woman, this notion of genetic relatedness is repeated in the evocation of genetic ties between birds and humans (409), which gives genetic materiality to the metaphor of the bird-women in Flight North, the novel-within-the-novel. These bird-women, or Whistlers, in turn, refer back to the novel’s title, and embody the quartet’s underlying theme of the evolving but conflicted nature of female power in post-­ war Britain (see also Campbell 2004, p. 259). The snail as scientific model organism highlights important genetic concerns and their cultural appropriation in the quartet, from heredity and kinship to ecology. The snail as aesthetic model organism, in turn, relies on the figure of the snail to forge new metaphorical connections between individual genetic and cultural discourses. Already at the level of the text’s presentation of the snail as scientific model organism, the snail performs such an aesthetic function. By depicting the snail as a model in the two historically specific contexts of, first, population genetics and, later, molecular genetics, the snail becomes a metaphor for diverging interpretations of living matter in biology. This is in contrast to the other scientific model organisms mentioned in the text, the “planaria” and “flatworms”, which each only resonate in one particular field of research (BT 250). Just as a model organism in science has the purpose of allowing the exemplary study of larger systems, the aesthetic model organism affords the text an exemplary metaphoric vehicle for the interrogation of different ways of

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knowing the world. Like the scientific model organism, and analogy more generally in Byatt’s work, the aesthetic model organism uncovers the complex relations of difference and similarity between an object and its representations in an exemplary manner that gestures beyond this specific representation and towards the novelistic form itself. Against the background of the text’s historicisation of genetic science via the aesthetic model of the snail, the snail as metaphor actually acquires a historical-epistemological specificity that changes its meaning and materiality depending on whether the snail is seen on the moors or in a Petri dish. These different meanings cannot be completely separated. The diverging historical interpretations of the snail continue to oscillate within its metaphoric frame. The excess meaning created by this poetic oscillation, in which neither interpretation is ever fully silenced, reflects that scientific knowledge always carries the weight of its history, which, in turn, is reconceived through the lens of present knowledge. This poetic oscillation of historically different meanings does not imply, however, that a postmodern relativism renders past and present interpretations of genetics as equally valid. The multiple meanings of the snail rather seem to function like the competing meanings of the ants in Byatt’s novella “Morpho Eugenia”. There, as Hansson argues, “the reader can discover several meanings in dialogue with each other, and the hierarchical relation between a monologic ‘message’ and the allegorical form that obscures it collapses. This is precisely the mark of postmodern allegory” (1999, p. 455). While the metaphor of the snail does problematise any absolute truth claims, its historically specific scientific meanings do retain a sense of “hierarchical relation”. The novels make clear that Jacqueline and Luk’s form of population genetics truly becomes “redundant”—though not without cost—in the face of the new molecular methods (WW 68). Finally, the historicisation of genetic discourse through the snail highlights the historicity of the metaphor of DNA as the textual basis of life. At the beginning of Babel Tower, the notion of DNA as a form of writing first appears as part of a historically indeterminate mixture of different writing systems on the thrush’s anvil: “Here are broken alphabets, α and ꝏ, C and T, A and G. Round the stones are the broken shells, helical whorls like empty ears in which no hammer beats on no anvil” (1). The passage brims with allusions and metaphors, among them the reference to the four nucleic bases of DNA, whose double-helical structure is here linked with the “helical whorls” of the snail shells on which Jacqueline and Luk later read the snails’ genetic constitution. As the quartet’s historicisation of

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genetic science progresses in the last two novels, the metaphor of DNA as a text, historically vague in this initial passage, is later historicised with regard to its material substance. In light of the quartet’s historically divergent genetic understandings of the snail, the question of the materiality of the genetic “alphabet”, the metaphor’s real-world referent, is forcefully put: are we to imagine the alphabet as an abstract and theoretical entity, like the population geneticists, or, like the molecular geneticists, as a material, biochemical substance? The question cannot and need not be resolved. Instead, over the course of the quartet, the metaphor of the “alphabet” is contextualised within the history of genetic science and is poised on the tipping point of one of its key epistemic transformations. Byatt’s use of the snail as aesthetic model organism connects the diverse individual meanings attached to the snail in the four novels of the quartet. These diverse contexts in which the snail figures range from genetic science, mystical spirituality, sexuality and reproduction, especially hermaphroditism, to mathematics and aesthetic form. All these individual contexts are interconnected through the snail, creating a multiplicity of suggestive interrelations between them. If this is how the snail functions as aesthetic model organism, Byatt’s aesthetic use of a model organism is not entirely without precedent, namely Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies. Daniel Harris has analysed how the “the marine worm” in that novel functions as a model for the text’s interest in the processes of political reform (2016, p. 64); and Kingsley’s novel is in fact mentioned in the quartet, though not the worm. While the use of the model organism in Kingsley’s text brings to mind a larger tradition of political allegories, I argue that its allegorical reliance on an organism that is itself already a scientific model organism turns the marine worm into a more complex metaphor. The worm’s function in Kingsley’s novel, I contend, is similar to Byatt’s vastly more multifaceted reliance on the snail. The range of the snail metaphor in the quartet is so broad, in fact, that one might suggest that the text sketches another taxonomy, now of snails. The snail as model organism so appears as a more versatile and dialogic metaphor as the grasses in Marcus’s taxonomy. The geneticist Luk Lysgaard-Peacock connects earlier with later incarnations of the snail in the quartet. Luk Lysgaard-Peacock’s prominence in the later novels is oddly prefigured in the quartet’s first novel before he ever makes an appearance: In The Virgin in the Garden, Marcus dreams “of a peacock, shrieking hideously, banging a glass container on a rock like a thrush with a snail” (215). Marcus’s dream foreshadows later concerns

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in the tetralogy and comments on his troubled relationship with his teacher, Lucas Simmonds. While the image of the shrieking peacock is echoed in Frederica’s complaint that she sounds like a peacock on stage, the more profound resonance here is with the genetic research of snails and thrushes later in the quartet. The glass container in the dream is a reference to the pseudo-scientific experiments conducted on Marcus by Simmonds who tries to prove the existence of telepathic communication by placing objects in glass beakers which Marcus then has to name (346, 394). The metaphoric connection forged between Marcus’s dream and Luk’s later genetic research, firstly, renders Simmonds’s interpretations of natural phenomena retrospectively irrelevant and indeed pseudo-­ scientific—the beaker later suggestively breaks in reality (454); and, secondly, draws attention to the metaphoric resonance itself. Utilising such metaphoric resonances across the tetralogy, the figure of the snail combines conceptions of life from radically different epistemic contexts. While the genetic representation of the snail engenders a negotiation of a genetic understanding of life, the novel-within-the-novel in Babel Tower, Babbletower, introduces the snail as a metaphor of life in a mystical-spiritual understanding. (Babel Tower itself displays small snail icons to separate Babbletower from the rest of the novel.) In the novel-­ within-­the-novel, a community of people from all social strata flee the terrors of the French Revolution to set up a utopian society, whose ideals quickly disintegrate to reproduce the horrors and violence they had fled. The society’s leader, Culvert, believes in the pacifying effect of communal rituals. Snails feature prominently as symbols of “spirit-life” in one of these rituals, the carnivalesque “old Feast of Misrule” (260, 262). The snails not only symbolise life, however, but also its opposite, death, since they are thought to “go between us and those who sleep under the earth” (262). This representation of snails as mystical interpreters between the realms of life and death is juxtaposed with their embodiment of a genetic understanding of life. The two conceptions of life stand in productive tension, representing different epistemological perspectives. Combined in the snail’s shifting matrix of meaning, the mystical-religious connotations of Culvert’s conception of life clash with the text’s otherwise genetic descriptions of living processes. This clash throws into relief the theological traces that continue to linger in the metaphor of a molecular book of life. Emphasising these conflicting dimensions of the metaphor is the principal epistemological affordance of the snail as aesthetic model organism.

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My conception of the snail as aesthetic model organism also highlights the multifaceted function of the form of the spiral, which is embodied by the snail in its shell and which provides the novels with yet another vehicle to link the snail with the spiral structure of the double helix of DNA. The quartet’s use of the spiralling form of the snail shell also finds expression in Byatt’s own understanding of the snail as the quartet’s “solid metaphor” (Byatt 2005, p.  295). One particularly striking way in which the snail metaphor “solidifies” in the quartet is through the text’s spiralling structure. Several critics have noted that the four beginnings of Babel Tower—“Or it might begin” (2, 4, 10)—evoke the helical structure of both the snail and DNA, thus again combining the two meanings of the helix in the novel (Cambiaghi 2003, pp.  285–286; Todd 1997, p.  63). Further, all the storylines emerging from these beginnings prominently feature snails as central motifs (Johnson 2010, p. 60). This structure creates a neat formal coherence to the text’s otherwise unruly multiplicity. Arguably, the overall formal investment in a coiling structure in the tetralogy extends beyond Babel Tower. Dusinberre holds that the complex temporal structure of The Virgin in the Garden exemplifies Gabriel Josipovici’s concept of the “spiralling mode” of modern literature (Dusinberre 1982, pp. 57–58). Josipovici uses the term to describe a literary structure that “keeps turning and returning to its roots” (Josipovici 1979, p. 268). He identifies this mode, through which “a way forward is discovered, a grasping, hesitant spiralling”, in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets as well as in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu (ibid., 268), which are both prominent intertexts of the quartet (V 319; Campbell 2004, pp. 63, 75, 244; Alfer and Edwards 2010, p. 44). Considering that Byatt has discussed other aspects of Josipovici’s work, it is quite possible that she was aware of his argument about a modern literary spiralling structure (Byatt 1993b, p. 177). The quartet continually returns to central motifs like the snail or central issues like the social status of women and reconfigures them as it progresses. Mara Cambiaghi, for example, records, in Babel Tower, a “densely layered plot, grafted by a process of accumulation of characters and details, never-ending and spiralling, like a musical fugue or, tellingly, Pieter Brueghel’s painting The Tower of Babel, or, again, the double helix of the DNA enclosing the genetic code of the species” (Cambiaghi 2003, p. 280). This panoply of spiralling structures in the text constructs a complex formal web of interrelations and, in particular, gives further formal resonance to the metaphoric link between the snail and the structure of DNA. As a result, DNA not only appears as a form of writing on

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the snail shells, but the metaphor of its linguistic structure is also amplified through the quartet’s aesthetic form. This linguistic concretisation of the metaphor of DNA as a language through the form of the spiral raises another, indirect dimension of the snail as aesthetic model organism. In what could be described as an epistemological chiasmus, the issue of a genetic basis of language presents the obverse of the debate about the materiality of DNA as a language. The quartet’s champion of a genetic view of language is Gerard Wijnnobel. “There is much talk, in his world”, Wijnnobel recounts, “of language as either a crystalline, immutable structure, or as order-from-chaos, a flame-­ like structure, that holds its changing shape in the winds of its environment. Aesthetically”, the narrator adds, “Gerard Wijnnobel would like to believe in the flame, in the shifting, variable, changing form. Intellectually, he believes in the crystal” (BT 193). He is convinced “that the grammatical forms and structures we use are innate, are part of the structure of our brains informed by our genes” and subscribes to Noam Chomsky’s theory about an innate “universal grammar” (BT 186, 192). Wijnnobel’s interest in an organic order of language reverberates with his work on the mathematical Fibonacci sequence (BT 191–192). The sequence consists of an ascending order of numbers which, when represented geometrically, form a spiral structure—presenting yet another resonance for the snail as aesthetic organism. Several characters in the quartet, Marcus in particular, study the sequence as a way to find some kind of order in the seemingly disorderly reality of the world—many natural structures display patterns that correspond with the Fibonacci sequence.7 Wijnnobel’s interest in the genetic origins of language follows a similar motivation of seeking order in chaos. His studies figure explicitly as a continuation of his grandfather’s scholarly quest to find the “Ur-language” from before the fall of the Tower of Babylon, a language in which language and world still “coincided” (190). This “Ur-language” also recalls the quartet’s two references to Goethe’s search for the “Ur-form” or “Urpflanze, the Typical Plant” (SL 286, V 301). Goethe imagined this to be an original plant from which all others emerged, an idea which, in Still Life, is discussed in connection with modern genetic theories of plant

7  The Fibonacci spiral figures repeatedly in the quartet’s later novels (BT 356, WW 34, 220), also again in the explicit context of snails (WW 67). See also Byatt’s comments on the Fibonacci number’s role in the text (Byatt 2005, p. 295).

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development (286). The language of the genes, the quartet suggests, could be seen as fulfilling the roles of both “Ur-language” and “Urpflanze”. Wijnnobel’s reference to the “crystalline” nature of language in Babel Tower further recalls comments about the link between genetics and cognition from Still Life: “Human cognition has been called ‘order from noise’: or it may be, contrariwise, the patterning of the world with a constructed map, crystallised in the genes, repeating laws already informing the growing mind” (287). Characteristically, the quartet does not clearly elevate or dismiss either of these oppositional stances about what comes first, order or noise; although, as Clare Hanson argues, the text “inclines towards the crystal position” of underlying structures (Hanson 2020, p. 62, also pp. 83–86). As with the snail as model organism more generally, the quartet focuses on testing competing theories and meanings against each other. Ultimately though, the quartet gives credence to the notion that some structures of language and cognition are biologically prescribed. This emphasis on at least some genetic basis for language, in turn, lends support to the ontological conception of DNA as living textual information and, as will be shown, to Byatt’s exploration of organic literary forms.

“Seeing the likeness in the difference”: George Eliot, Derrida and Byatt’s Life of Forms By the time the philosopher Hodgkiss draws attention to what he perceives as the dangers of the “information” metaphor in genetic discourse, in Babel Tower, the two preceding volumes in the quartet have already used the concept in various contexts, both genetic and non-scientific. These earlier uses critically shape the later meanings of information and provide the material, in the complete quartet, for the kind of metalinguistic analysis of the concept provoked by Hodgkiss. Further, these earlier meanings of information inaugurate the quartet’s self-reflexive grappling with an organic understanding of literary form, which considerably extends the scope of the quartet’s investigation of genetic metaphors of life. The novels not only explore the specific ontologies with which these metaphors are imbued in scientific as well as cultural contexts. They also draw on these genetic imaginaries to revisit fundamental assumptions about a possible continuity between art and biology beyond analogy.

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In The Virgin in the Garden, the concepts of form and information are approached from several perspectives but a critical engagement with their theological resonances proves particularly revealing of those same resonances in the later concept of genetic information. When Lucas Simmonds begins his experiments with Marcus, the latter’s mathematical visions already trouble his relation to physical reality. Fascinated by Marcus’s geometric visions, Simmonds sees in the boy the incarnation of his faith in a mystical-divine order, which he believes can be accessed by gifted individuals like Marcus. He outlines his beliefs to his new disciple: “Now, in the beginning God formed, or informed, do you see—FORM, IN FORM—the inert mass of things. If you are not informed by God, you can be informed by lesser, or worse things, or both” (78). Accordingly, for Simmonds, Marcus represents an “inlet for force or form” which allows him to “have direct access to the thought forms, the patterns, that inform and control us” (78, 81). In Simmonds’s understanding, the concept of information denotes a universal process of divine—or at least spiritual— bringing-into-being, which inheres in  both physical and mental phenomena. This use of the notion of “information” can be further contextualised through Byatt’s remarks on the Fibonacci spiral, which, she explains, “informed (to use an old seventeenth-century word for shaping from within, like the soul in the body) all sorts of natural phenomena, from climbing plants to the sprouting of twigs round stems, from snails to pine cones and sunflowers” (Byatt 2005, p. 295). Byatt’s remark foreshadows the links forged by the quartet between the different contexts in which objects or organisms are “being informed”, either by DNA, mathematics or divine forces. Not unlike a view of the novel as inherently searching for the patterns of human life, Simmonds regards individual forms of the world as expressions and extensions of an underlying power or “pattern”. His idea of a divine presence in all matter and form later reverberates in the narrator’s comments, in Still Life, that, in the Renaissance, language was believed to be God-given, “part of a divine language which was the Word informing inchoate matter” (365), thus spelling out the historical tradition of positing an ontological link between language and reality. This understanding of form and language in crucial regards resembles the quartet’s later representation of DNA as an immanent pattern that is also said to “inform” the structure of organisms. Through the text’s neuroscientific interest in a genetic basis for language, this later representation even recalls Simmonds’s argument about pre-patterned “thought forms”.

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While the later interpretation of information appears much more convincing to scientific minds than Simmonds’s, his sense of divine preformation lingers on in the genetic sense of the term. The quartet’s juxtaposition of Simmonds’s religious conception of information with the concept’s later genetic interpretation, by elucidating their similarity and difference, reiterates the epistemological process the text already ascribed to metaphor. In the quartet the use of the metaphor of information to circumscribe the matter and function of DNA is not restricted to its scientific characters. This branching out exemplifies the cultural assimilation of the metaphor— if possibly somewhat anachronistically—as far back as the 1950s. Alfer and Edwards’s association of the metaphors of genetic information and genetic language solely with the scientists in the quartet (2010, p. 73) has them overlook the use of the same metaphor by non-scientist characters as well as by scientist characters in non-research-related aspects of their lives. This omission leads Alfer and Edwards to assert too quickly that the quartet ultimately denies the metaphor of DNA as textual information any and all ontological status: “Byatt recognises that Luk’s alphabet comparison is essentially a figure of speech, but nevertheless insists that it is a meaningful one” (ibid., p. 74). Zooming in on those instances in the quartet where genetic textuality is not explicitly framed through a metalinguistic discussion of scientific metaphor reveals that the quartet, in fact, invests this “figure of speech” with considerably more literal significance than has previously been noted. There are several such literal references to biological information in the quartet. Excavating them shows just how dramatically prevalent the metaphor of DNA as information actually is in the text in general and how widespread the metaphor’s ontological usage in particular. In Still Life, Stephanie is pregnant with her daughter and, with regard to the growing foetus, the text elaborates that “inside Stephanie the cells hurried and informed each other” (287). The genetic connotations of this use of “informed” are clarified when in the same passage her infant son’s developing perception of the world is framed by this already familiar remark: “Human cognition has been called ‘order from noise’: or it may be, contrariwise, the patterning of the world with a constructed map, crystallised in the genes, repeating laws already informing the growing mind” (SL 287). In my first citation of this passage, its notion of genes as crystals indicated a geneticised view of language and the mind. Now the passage additionally reveals that this influence exerted by the genes takes shape, in

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accordance with the conception of DNA as information, by “informing the growing mind”. This sense of human development, both during pregnancy and afterwards, as dictated by genetic information is further elaborated in Babel Tower. Even though Frederica does not explicitly draw on the notion of information, her reliance on a linguistic conception of genes clearly partakes in the same metaphoric cluster drawing on the conception of DNA as an information system that can be represented as text: What is really fused, is the sperm and the ovum in the zygote, Frederica thought with a certain intellectual rigour. Not man and woman, but cells. Language fails man and woman trying to transcend it and themselves. But the genes go coiling, spiralling, joining, building sentences and phrases of life with their primeval alphabet. Two halves become One. (312–313)

Frederica’s contemplation of human sexuality and reproduction draws on a linguistic conception of DNA, an understanding powerfully encapsulated in her sense of the genes as building “phrases of life”. What is more, in the passage, the language of genes appears to afford a kind of unity between organisms that eludes non-genetic language. I will return to this assertion, which, in a novel, is undeniably provocative. And again, in A Whistling Woman, Jacqueline perceives her own pregnancy through the lens of DNA as information: She stared at images of dividing cells, of curved seahorse-like chains of cells with huge bland eyes, of limb-buds and vanishing tails, and transparent frog-fingers and ghost-mouths forming busily out of formlessness, as the messages sped from cell to cell, and the division and building increased and increased. (180)

Her reference to the “messages” that “sped from cell to cell” echoes the context of communication theory from which the related metaphor of genetic information originated. All three women, Stephanie, Frederica and Jacqueline, are represented as perceiving the development of their pregnancies through the perspective of genetics, and specifically the molecular metaphor of linguistic information. While the quartet’s investigation of the “dangers” of the information metaphor in genetics implicitly includes these instances of the metaphor’s appropriation, these markedly literal usages of the metaphor evince how extensively the language of

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genetic science has entered personal and non-scientific reflections on such intimate and fundamental aspects of life as reproduction and human development. Frederica’s notion that an accurate language of life is rather to be found in the genes than in culture—and by extension art—where it “fails man and woman trying to transcend it and themselves”, is not quite her final word on the matter. Rather, the statement results from an acute sense of frustration with the adequacy of language to represent her emotional reality, especially in the context and aftermath of her divorce trial. But Frederica’s emphasis on the genetic “sentences and phrases of life” foregrounds the quartet’s contemplation of relations between, and respective affordances of, biological and cultural forms of expression and representation. Frederica’s own writing project, her “Laminations”, elaborates on the relations between organic and inorganic forms of art and understanding, because here representation and epistemology are again intricately fused (BT 464, emphasis original). Frederica’s project of laminations extends beyond an artistic practice and encapsulates her approach to life. She first conceives of the project, in The Virgin in the Garden, after her first unsuccessful sexual encounter with a stranger. Her laminations project appears imbued from the beginning with a tension between the worlds of intellect and physical experience that constitutes a central motif in her life—and the quartet—a movement “from sex and back to the intellect” (290). The principal idea behind the project is to resist this tension by keeping things separate, because then, “in many ways you saw them more truly” (273). Her desire for intellectual and physical compartmentalisation is described as a distinctly inorganic endeavour: “One could let all these facts and things lie alongside each other like laminations, not like growing cells” (274). The exact constitution of these laminations remains ambiguous because, as in this passage, Frederica frequently conceives of the project as placing ideas, and later texts, next to rather than on top of each other, as the layers implied in the term laminations would actually suggest. The emphasis of the project seems rather to lie on the separation of impressions and texts rather than on any specific practice. Following this desire to consider things separately after her ambivalent sexual adventure, she rejects her “organic image” of a church spire as phallic, “since the earlier organic and sexual linking by analogy was undoubtedly selfish” and thus not perceived as intellectually objective (273–274). Her vision of a rigorous separation of her intellectual and physical life,

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particularly as a woman in the patriarchal power structures of the 1950s and 1960s (SL 154, 223, 254), provides her early on with “both a model of conduct and an aesthetic that might suit herself and prove fruitful” (275). And the principle of lamination does indeed come to shape her intellectual and physical development. At least this is the case up until the point when she marries the wealthy Nigel in an attempt to embrace E. M. Forster’s alternative dictum from Howard’s End—“Only connect”. Nigel proves intellectually incompatible but with him she connects through novel experiences of physical pleasure (SL 358, 391, BT 310; see also Campbell 2004, p. 243). Unsurprisingly, Frederica rejects Forster’s dictum after her marriage violently ends, and yet she creatively incorporates the divorce documents into her Burroughs-like laminations project of textual cut-ups and collage. Frederica’s laminations are intended as an alternative to organic analogy. They entail an epistemological approach that reproduces the process of simultaneously unearthing similarity and difference, a dynamic familiar from the quartet’s conception of metaphor and Byatt’s own notion of “seeing the likeness in the difference” (Byatt 1993a, p.  20). Frederica perceives an “art form” in the acceptance of “fragments” and “layers”: “Things juxtaposed but divided, not yearning for fusion” (BT 312). Rather than negating metaphoric connections, however, the laminations’ emphasis on separation heightens the self-referential attention to difference enshrined in metaphor. Frederica does not regard the connections forged in metaphors as an inseparable “fusion” of ideas. Instead, as she explains to her extra-mural class, she believes metaphors and other images to take their “power from all our imaginings and their sameness and their difference” (BT 213, emphasis original). Her laminations’ similar epistemological affordance of showing things “juxtaposed but divided” is exemplified in her inclusion of two documents about DNA, namely a biologist’s lecture on genetics, given to an audience high on LSD, and an article about the DNA of snails, which figure here in yet another incarnation of the aesthetic model organism. These juxtaposed documents, while relying on similarity, effect the identification of difference between the two contexts and meanings of DNA: Frederica’s thoughts run uneasily on genetic similarities and differences, machine-men and seed-flower species, stones, paper and scissors. She thinks that the DNA which is the fetish of the turned-on [in the LSD lecture] has probably very little, though not nothing, to do with the DNA of Helix hor-

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tensis, in the food processor, on the slides, under the microscope, of Luk Lysgaard-Peacock. (BT 466)

Her laminations recreate in another aesthetic mode some of the epistemological insights produced by the aesthetics of the snail, which metaphorically interlinks various contexts of genetic meaning in the novels. The reason why Frederica fashions her laminations as a decidedly anti-organic form is that she perceives it in contrast to “organic cells boiling to join and divide and join in a seething Oneness” that extinguishes all individuality, especially her hard-won individuality as a woman (BT 312). On closer examination, Frederica’s perspective appears less strictly opposed to organicism than she professes. Stella Butter, for instance, argues that Frederica’s postmodern plural identity, represented in the form of the laminations, resonates with the text’s emphasis on the infinite variability of a universal language of genes (Butter 2004, p. 371; see also Alfer and Edwards 2010, p. 69). In the novel, Luk suggests a similar analogy between human language and DNA by citing Francis Bacon who compared the variability of human language with the variability of human forms (BT 357–358). And indeed, Frederica’s citation of Burroughs that words “have not to be new, they have to be only re-arrangements” brings to mind the translational processes of recombinant DNA (BT 384, emphasis original). Ultimately, the novels seem to suggest that Frederica’s rejection of organic forms is politically rather than aesthetically motivated. Tellingly, at the end of the quartet, when she is in a partnership with Luk, whom she can relate to both physically and intellectually, the “laminations were slipping” and she can say about her life at that moment, suggestively organically, “all this was one” (WW 411, 421). The quartet’s interrogation of organicism develops as an important context for the text’s exploration of continuities between genetic life and artistic forms. Two diverging forms of representing the organic emerge through Frederica’s engagement with organicism. One equates the organic with an all-consuming, undifferentiated “Oneness”, while the other thrives on “organic” analogies which highlight difference besides similarity. The latter serves as the basis for the quartet’s sustained exploration of organic artistic forms against the background of genetics’ propositions about the textuality of living processes. For this exploration, Byatt’s engagement with George Eliot’s “Notes on Form in Art” is revealing. As we have already seen, Alfer has established a structural affinity between Byatt and Eliot’s poetological and epistemological concept of “distinction

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and combination” (Alfer 2001, p. 52), but this affinity between Byatt and Eliot can be taken further. Firstly, Byatt’s connections with Eliot, especially regarding the latter’s essay on organic forms, go beyond mere structural resemblances. In her 2004 essay “Soul Searching”, as previously mentioned, Byatt voices her career-long interest in the conflicted relations between body and mind, and, more broadly, culture and biology. In the essay, she retraces the authors whose treatment of the subject proved important for her own development as a writer; and George Eliot features prominently on this list. Firmly situating Eliot in her historical time and its epistemological landscape, Byatt outlines Eliot’s attempts to reconcile the feeling material body with the thinking and imagining mind through new scientific propositions about evolution and the nervous system. Byatt’s stated nostalgia for Eliot’s combination of the physical and the intellectual powerfully frames Byatt’s quartet as her own personal attempt at reconciling these poles, now through the new discourses of genetics and neuroscience. Eliot’s prime position in the essay also underlines her general importance for Byatt’s literary project and poetics. Secondly, Byatt’s specific knowledge of Eliot’s essay on organicism in art can be attested by the fact that she edited a collection of Eliot’s essays and other writings that includes “Notes on Form in Art”. The edition was published in 1990, just a few years before the publication of Babel Tower, the novel in which the aesthetic principle of “distinction and combination” receives its most extensive treatment. In Byatt’s introduction to the edited volume, she discusses several areas in Eliot’s writing that also manifest as chief concerns in the quartet: from the reconciliation of sensuality, feeling and the mind, through possible governing principles of life, to the relation between real and ideal forms. Commenting explicitly on “Notes on Form in Art”, Byatt identifies in the essay a “desire” for a language that is expressive of the kind of “informing principle of life” suggested by science and the “particular individual forms” such principles give rise to in the complex fabric of social and physiological life (1990, p. xxxii). These comments on the essay link up directly with Byatt’s interest in the quartet in the governing principles and individual forms suggested by genetic science. Moreover, a closer analysis of Eliot’s essay alongside the quartet uncovers Byatt’s own poetics of genetic metaphors of life to follow the particular mixture of aesthetics and epistemological enquiry that characterises the “self-conscious web of metaphor” Byatt identifies in Eliot’s work (ibid., p. xxxii). Reading the quartet through Byatt’s interaction

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with Eliot’s essay allows a more refined understanding of Byatt’s own aesthetic philosophy of the relation between biology and culture. Byatt, like Eliot, contemplates the concept of “distinction and combination” as emerging from an organic understanding of natural and artistic forms. Eliot begins by outlining an epistemological paradigm of form: And as knowledge continues to grow by its alternating processes of distinction and combination, seeing smaller and smaller unlikeness and grouping or associating these under a common likeness, it arrives at the conception of wholes composed of parts more and more multiplied and highly differenced, yet more and more absolutely bound together by various conditions of common likeness or mutual dependence. And the fullest example of such a whole is the highest example of Form. (Eliot 1990, p. 232, my emphasis)

Here, knowledge crucially depends on ever-more precise differentiation within an overarching system or “whole” that combines the differentiated parts, all of which constitute an interrelated web of forms, because, as Eliot puts it, “every difference is Form” (ibid., p. 232). Eliot infers this conception of form from biology: The highest Form, then, is the highest organism, that is to say, the most varied group of relations bound together in a wholeness which again has the most varied relations with all other phenomena. It is only in this fundamental sense that the word ‘Form’ can be applied to Art in general. (Ibid., pp. 232–233)

Eliot’s conception of form in art expressly takes its shape from biology, more precisely from the internal structuration of living organisms. This poetological position illuminates the aesthetic debate in Byatt’s novels. Eliot’s analogy between biology and art, for example, undermines Frederica’s contrast between facts or things that “lie alongside each other like laminations” in art and “growing cells” (V 274)—Eliot does not see a difference here, to the contrary, she takes the internal differentiation of the organism—or cell—as her fundamental model for artistic and linguistic differentiation. Eliot elaborates her analogy between art and living forms further with recourse to organic shells—evoking Byatt’s snails: Poetic Form was not begotten by thinking it out or framing it as a shell which should hold emotional expression, any more than the shell of an ani-

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mal arises before the living creature; but emotion, by its tendency to repetition, i.e. rhythmic persistence in proportion as diversifying thought is absent, creates a form by the recurrence of its elements in adjustment with certain given conditions of sound, language, action, or environment. Just as the beautiful expanding curves of a bivalve shell are not first made for the reception of the unstable inhabitant, but grow and are limited by the simple rhythmic conditions of its growing life. (Eliot 1990, p. 235)

Eliot’s analogy between the biological forms of “growing life” and poetic form suggests a corresponding life of forms in poetry and art. This analogical conception of the life of poetic form is rendered cautiously ontological when Eliot conflates ontology and analogy by referring to the rhythms of organismic growth and when she pronounces poetic form as the direct expression and extension of human emotions. Byatt’s tetralogy critically engages—and even partially adopts—this concept of the life of forms. The novels outline theological and genetic ontologies of “information”, which are criticised, respectively, as either metaphysical or “dangerously” unaware of their conflation of analogy and ontology. However, lingering metaphysical connotations of genetic discourses can also be identified, just as ontological conceptions of genetic writing and DNA as text are shown to have been culturally adopted. And Frederica’s laminations project, instead of eschewing organicism, actually differentiates between a sense of organic unity, which it rejects, and organic literary forms, which it employs. Frederica’s organic forms, just as Eliot expounds, thrive on differentiation as a formal paradigm. On the level of the quartet as a whole, this notion of organic differentiation in literary forms is further explored, both implicitly through the text’s dialogue with Eliot, and explicitly, especially with regard to the metaphor of DNA as text. As we have already seen in the many references to genetic writing and genetic text in the quartet, the notion of a genetic book of life is frequently suggested without ever being stated as such. What we do see, however, is the narrator explicitly engaging with D. H. Lawrence’s concept of the novel as the “bright book of life” (SL 73). Lawrence is repeatedly mentioned in the tetralogy and provides a particularly significant if indirect cultural background in Babel Tower, where the actual obscenity trial around Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover serves as the historical referent for the Babbletower trial in Byatt’s novel. On the level of character, Frederica’s opposition to organic imagery makes her suspicious of Lawrence’s organicism (SL 221). Frederica criticises that he “wants to talk

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about everything, all life, not books” (BT 215). She identifies in Lawrence the kind of organicism in art which she opposes because it eliminates difference: “In the one bright book of life you have to have it all, the Word made flesh, the rainbow, the stars, the One” (BT 311). She further rejects in Lawrence the resonances of the original book of life, the Bible. On the level of aesthetics, Byatt, in turn, addresses a more precise array of organic forms than Lawrence by incorporating biological metaphors of life. Most importantly, however, Byatt’s negotiation of organic forms contrasts the vitalistic unity embraced in Lawrence’s writing with a scientific emphasis on the formal and epistemological differentiation of living organisms. Confronting a more abstract organicism with a concrete genetic conception of organic structure like this is a common element in the quartet. In The Virgin in the Garden, Frederica’s rejection of the “organic image”, which suggests likeness where she envisions difference, contrasts with her sister Stephanie’s analogies of poetic and biological forms. Teaching Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, Stephanie contemplates the poem and is described as “looking into inner emptiness, waiting for the thing to rise into form and saw nothing, nothing and then involuntarily flying specks and airy clumps of froth or foam on a strongly running sea” (99). The association with foam conjures up for her the “foam-born” Venus and her connotations of sex and reproduction. “Not a bad image”, she finds, “if you wanted one, of the coming to form from shapelessness” (100). This organic image of reproduction is powerfully paired with Jacqueline’s later distinctly genetic vision of her foetus “forming busily out of formlessness” (WW 180). Stephanie’s analogy between biological and poetic “coming to form from shapelessness” unfolds an understanding of form resonating with Eliot’s emphasis on formation as a process of differentiation.8 Both poetic meaning and foetus emerge from an undifferentiated, and thus unknowable, formlessness. Set up in direct correspondence with Stephanie’s earlier remarks, Jacqueline’s later biological vision emulates Eliot’s process of formal differentiation but suggestively replaces the unknown, undifferentiated origin of both organic and poetic forms with a single genetic point of origin. 8  Stephanie is again the locus of a conflation of biology and culture when the concept of growth comes to metaphorically connect her gardening, her new pregnancy as well as her son’s physical and linguistic development (SL 275; see also Cambiaghi 2003, pp. 282-83). And again, when Stephanie draws on the rhythm of a poem by Wordsworth to cope with the rhythm of her contractions (Walezak 2018, p. 108).

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This intimation of a possible organic link between genetic reproduction and artistic and linguistic creation exceeds Eliot’s organic structural analogy. The most explicit expression in the quartet of such a direct organic continuity is the idea of a textual link between biological and cultural life, based on the paradigm of genetic textuality. Hodgkiss’s warning about the dangers of analogy, however, hovers over all the novels’ intimations of an ontological foundation for the metaphor of DNA as textual information. His warning echoes, for instance, in a school girl’s comment to the committee on language learning; her comment is ambiguously poised between separating and conflating the levels of ontology and analogy: “essentially […] grammar is like the names of chemicals or parts of the body” (BT 178, my emphasis). In her characteristic epistemological emphasis on “distinction and combination”, Byatt demonstrates two different but related positions. She elucidates how the metaphor of a genetic language of life could be argued to never quite capture the concrete reality of biological life, but also, crucially, explores the ways in which the metaphor can reasonably be conceived to denote life itself in its uncompromising materiality. Byatt shares her profound investment in the structures of molecular biology with Jacques Derrida whose work on the textuality of the living offers an insightful comparison with Byatt’s genetic metaphors of life. For both Derrida and Byatt, the 1970s marked a period of intense engagement with the implications and conceptions of the new discourse on life produced by genetics. Byatt’s The Virgin in the Garden was published in 1978 and Derrida’s thinking on the textual dimension of the new life sciences came to a head in La Dissémination (1972), Glas (1974), and most strikingly in the seminar La vie la mort, held in 1976. The seminar has only just been translated into English, published in 2020 as Life Death, and is currently causing a substantive revision of received notions about Derrida’s views on the fundamental textual nature of living processes. Comparing Derrida and Byatt necessitates to recapitulate distinct stages in the philosopher’s thinking about DNA as well as in the concomitant critical analysis of his work on the subject. Writing at the same time about the connections opened up by genetics between biological and cultural life, Byatt and Derrida nevertheless arrive at different conclusions, which proves enlightening for understanding both their positions. Derrida’s heretofore unpublished seminar Life Death has sparked a recalibration of previous interpretations of the extent to which Derrida postulates an ontological link between life and text. Before, on the basis of such works as La Dissémination (1972) and Glas (1974), Derrida’s

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biological metaphors of writing were held to denote a predominantly analogical relationship between the systems of biology and writing. Derrida’s thinking as it emerges in Life Death, however, posits a significantly more concrete ontological continuity between biological and cultural life. Derrida’s strong position on the textuality of the living in the 1976 seminar importantly reframes his earlier work on the subject as leading up to this later emphasis on the textual process of life. Derrida’s earlier, seemingly more analogical thinking about the relation between biology and textuality, when brought to bear on Byatt’s text, underlines such analogies in the quartet. In La Dissémination and Glas, quoted here in their English translations, the notion of genetic textuality is often only implicit in other, related metaphors like “insemination” or the concept of the “germ” or “seed” (Derrida 1981, p. 304, 1986, p. 27). In both works, though, these more generally biological metaphors are explicitly linked with an underlying genetic understanding of life and reproduction. In the preface to La Dissémination, for instance, Derrida refers to the “genetic production” of written history and compares the function of the “textual preface” to a “genetic pro-gram” (1981, p. 37, 38).9 In Glas, Derrida’s reference to “the genetic text” similarly seems to conceptually encapsulate the work’s numerous allusions to germs and seeds as forms of writing (1986, p.  124).10 Despite the prominence of biological metaphors in general, and genetic metaphors in particular, both in La Dissémination and Glas, Christopher Johnson contends that Derrida does not actually believe “there to be a direct filiation between the genetic and the linguistic” and that “Derrida’s use of biological metaphors is not in any way biologistic or organicist in orientation” (1993, pp. 168, 170). The two works’ marked linguistic playfulness—and Glas’s collage style— indeed appear to suggest that Derrida merely compares symbolic writing to biological forms of reproduction and heredity. He identifies a shared functional structure between organic life and text, and it is only in that sense, as Johnson holds, that for Derrida the “metaphor [of DNA as script] is more than a metaphor”, “that the similarity of form (isomorphism) of 9  Derrida here playfully inserts his notion of the “gram”, or différance, which he had outlined in his foundational De la grammatologie (1967), into the notion of the genetic programme, reproducing on a textual level the convergence of genetic and textual writing he envisions conceptually. 10  The “genetic” in Glas also punningly, if only implicitly, reverberates with the text’s discussion of the work of Jean Genet, especially through capitalised references—“Genetically” (1986, p. 231).

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writing and genetic code is indicative of their identity” (Johnson 1993, p. 172, emphasis original). This isomorphic pairing of biological and linguistic form is reminiscent of George Eliot’s structural analogy between the internal formal differentiation of both living organism and art. Eliot’s conception of form correspondingly appears organic only by analogy, and then, by implication, so does Byatt’s formal-epistemological reliance on Eliot’s mode of “distinction and combination”. Johnson concedes, however, that Derrida does conceive of a direct “genetic or genealogical continuity” between genetic code and symbolic writing from an evolutionary perspective (1993, p. 172). This materialist approach to language and writing is part of Derrida’s larger critique of idealist philosophy and “the logocentric tradition” of structuralism and phenomenology, which tended to treat the human capacity for language as decoupled from evolution and expressive of human exceptionalism (ibid., p.  172). In contrast, Derrida traces a direct developmental link between the genetic code that is the basis for all of life and human language. This argument resonates with the quartet’s suggestion of the realistic possibility of an evolved, genetic basis for language, active at the level of the individual human organism. And just as Derrida posits his evolutionary-­materialist perspective against a “logocentric tradition”, so the novels counter Wijnnobel’s belief in a genetic predisposition for linguistic structures with characters who, like Frederica in the beginning, rigorously separate language and thought from materiality, biology and the body. A similar dynamic governs the quartet’s negotiation of the conflict between body and mind, exemplified both in Frederica’s laminations project as well as in the debate about the materiality of consciousness at the body-and-mind conference at the end of A Whistling Woman. Throughout the tetralogy, be it in the form of the female characters’ resistant experiences of their own bodies, especially during pregnancy, or in the form of “things” stubbornly inviting but eluding linguistic representation, physical reality is depicted as disrupting any purely self-referential—or “logocentric”—system of thought and language. The quartet’s interrogation of a genetic foundation of language amplifies this desire to connect language with the bodily, material thingness of life, which in the text receives its most forceful expression in metaphors like the snail that simultaneously elucidate similarity and difference. In La Dissémination and Glas, Derrida similarly appears to pursue a structural link between genetic code and linguistic form, between life and writing, even joining them developmentally,

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while insisting on their analogical rather than ontological relation. In light of Life Death, this reading of Derrida’s genetic metaphors changes. Derrida’s argument in Life Death remains informed by an evolutionary understanding of language but his sense of a continuity between genetic and symbolic writing now gains an ontological status that reinforces and goes beyond his evolutionary genealogy of writing as a cultural practice. In Biodeconstruction, his important analysis of Life Death and his subsequent re-reading of Derrida’s oeuvre, Francesco Vitale argues that Derrida develops his very notion of writing—of différance—in dialogue with what he identified as the fundamentally textual nature of biological structures (Vitale 2018). Already in De la grammatologie, Derrida’s conception of différance, and its reliance on “protention and retention” of meaning, had resembled the evolutionary category of “variation”, which similarly relies on introducing innovation while reproducing established structures (Derrida qtd. in Vitale 2014, p. 101; see also Naas 2019). In Life Death, evolutionary genetic writing becomes not just analogical to symbolic textuality but is identified as the actual primal writing system of différance. The conception of différance is thus inextricably linked with what Derrida describes as the genetic “textualization” of the life sciences (Derrida 2020, p. 78). As Derrida explains, textuality is now the underlying condition not only of linguistic representation but also of biological reality: What could have appeared, more or less naively, to be the limited condition of philology, of literary criticism, of the science of documents and archives, etc., namely, having as its ultimate referent something that we used to call text and that we believed we understood under this name, this condition is now shared by genetics or the science of the living in general. (Derrida 2020, p. 78)

Crucially, this identification of a textual foundation to life engenders a conflation of analogy and ontology in Derrida’s concept of life as genetic writing. Byatt’s text does not make any such final claims about the status of its metaphoric interconnections between biological and other forms of writing and text. However, the quartet’s negotiation of a possible organicism in artistic forms could be read as a proposition not dissimilar from Derrida’s vision of genetic textuality not only as the governing structure of the living but also as the origin of différance and pluralistic linguistic meaning.

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However, Derrida’s philosophy goes beyond throwing Byatt’s organic literary forms into relief; their comparison also reveals a significant blind spot in Derrida’s engagement with the metaphor of DNA as text. The central biological intertext in the Life Death seminar is geneticist and Nobel laureate François Jacob’s The Logic of the Living (published in 1970 as La logique du vivant. Une histoire de l’hérédité). Derrida undertakes an extended critique of Jacob’s analogical description of the textual logic of genetic transcription as the governing principle for the reproduction, stability and variability of living organisms. For Derrida, Jacob’s textual analogy of treating DNA like text is flawed because it still inscribes a metaphysical essence into the process of reproduction: “Jacob cannot himself refrain from making reference to the essence of the living” (2020, p. 84).11 As a result, Derrida argues, Jacob does not go far enough in recognising the actual textuality of the living—as well as the additional variability and indeterminacy that genetic reproduction as a form of intertextuality, as a “logic of integration of prior structures” implies (ibid., p. 86). For Derrida, this fundamental textuality of the living transcends the confines of an explanatory scientific model and is instead constitutive of living processes: the “concept of textuality” is now “coextensive with the living” (ibid., p. 119, see also pp. 78–81). Genetic science has literally revealed life as text. The finality of this statement highlights a striking difference to Byatt’s cautious treatment and continuous historicisation of genetic metaphors of life in the quartet. Derrida is not ignorant of the historicity of the textual paradigm in biology. Quite to the contrary, his awareness of historical epistemology in the context of genetic knowledge is repeatedly emphasised, for example, when he discusses Jacob’s explicit comment that before genetics “Life has forever accomplished without writing” (Derrida 2020, p. 23); or when he critiques George Canguilhem’s work on the historically variable meanings of models and metaphors in biological science (ibid., p. 68; see also Rheinberger 2018). Despite his own admission that there is nothing about the concept of the textuality of the living “that is not linked to and motivated by a certain historico-theoretical situation” (2020, pp. 119–120), Derrida presents textuality as an ahistorical truth about the processes of life. The recognition of the genetic textual paradigm is so 11  Both Jacob and Derrida prefer “the living” to “life” in order to circumvent the remnant metaphysical connotations of the latter concept. However, Derrida holds that Jacob does not achieve this despite his declarations to the contrary (see also Derrida 2020, p. 3).

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momentous that it collapses the opposites of teleological and historicising accounts of epistemology, which become “indissociable” in the historical revelation of the textuality of the living (ibid., p. 76). Derrida’s textual outlook posits cultural practices of writing and thinking as continuous with fundamental biological processes. The resulting structures of culture closely resemble Eliot’s organically grown forms in nature and art. Derrida’s collapse of the merely analogical in genetic textuality further recalls instances in the quartet in which DNA is treated as ontologically textual, for instance when Jacqueline refers to the genetic “messages” that, in the growing foetus, “sped from cell to cell”. The novels ultimately do not subscribe to a Derridean vision of the life of the text, however, and never lose sight of the historicity of the genetic discourse of life. By comparison, Byatt’s extensive historicisation of genetic science and its historically specific conditions of knowledge is more mindful of the historical situatedness of the molecular metaphors of life. This is despite Byatt’s underlying desire to explore every possibility of connecting body and mind, or language and nature, or art and biology, through the new concept of life provided by the discourses of genetics. As a result, the quartet’s organic forms only ever achieve a precariously temporary ontological status. The text’s self-conscious metaphors of genetic textuality are perennially confronted with the perils of their originary analogies as well as their historicity.

Conclusion: Byatt’s Metaphors of Life and Self-­Conscious Organic Forms Byatt’s essay in Nature announces itself as “Fiction informed by science”. Her quartet, to paraphrase Byatt, is extensively informed, that is, shaped from within, by science in general, and by genetic science in particular. The quartet hence clearly demonstrates a significant dialogue between genetic and cultural dimensions of life. What is more, the quartet also comes to inform the scientific discourse it interrogates. Byatt’s tetralogy of novels performs a highly complex and sophisticated exploration of multiple molecular metaphors of life. Firstly, the figure of the snail embodies the central genetic metaphor of DNA as text. The snail as genetic metaphor functions as both scientific and aesthetic model organism in the quartet. As scientific model organism in two historically specific genetic contexts, the snail effects a historicisation of genetic epistemology and evokes such

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culturally salient topics as genetic heredity and kinship, genetic determinism and genetic human-animal relatedness. As aesthetic model organism, the snail provides a metaphoric vehicle through which to study the panoply of epistemological, aesthetic and ethical as well as additional cultural implications of a molecular view of life. The snail as multifaceted metaphor, in which the multitude of analogical connections it establishes converge, may be read to function according to the underlying epistemological poetics of metaphor the tetralogy develops: adopting George Eliot’s concept of “distinction and combination”, the text employs metaphors self-­ reflexively to investigate the relations of similarity and difference they establish between their constitutive parts. Secondly, and importantly, this self-reflexive use of metaphors effects a metalinguistic investigation of the genetic metaphors’ referentiality embedded in the quartet’s larger concern with representation. Drawing on both George Eliot’s conception of organic forms and Jacques Derrida’s notes on genetic writing as the original model for all writing, I have outlined Byatt’s aesthetic of self-conscious organic forms. The latter encapsulates the quartet’s desire for linguistic and artistic referentiality. At the same time, Byatt maintains a self-reflexive awareness of the structural impossibility of relating language unprecariously to the life of the organism at its most fundamental levels. The perils inherent in analogy and metaphor, however, which the quartet makes explicit, serve as both epistemological and aesthetic impulse for Byatt’s multi-volume novel project. Genetic metaphors of life thus emerge as socio-culturally consequential and historically specific epistemological constructions, which nonetheless grapple with the external reality of biological materiality, and as fertile literary progenitors of new forms and meanings in the novel’s exploration of life. Byatt’s expansive genetic vision of life explicitly includes human and nonhuman life forms and it is the language of DNA which informs this inter-species relatedness. In the following chapter on Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, I turn to the aesthetic challenges and affordances such a genetically related vision of all life holds for the novel. Atwood, just like Byatt herself, evidences Byatt’s claim that continuing advances in genetic science “give rise to changes in the forms, as well as the subjects, of fiction”. Already the quartet’s promiscuous metaphors of life are sure to continue to evolve with every re-reading.

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References Alfer, Alexa. 2001. Realism and Its Discontents: The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life. In Essays on the Fiction of A. S. Byatt: Imagining the Real, ed. A. Alfer and M. J. Noble, 47–59. Greenwood: Greenwood. Alfer, Alexa and Edwards, Amy J. de Campos. 2010. A.  S. Byatt: Critical Storytelling. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Beer, Gillian. 1985. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. London: Ark. Brown, Alistair. 2007. Uniting the Two Cultures of Body and Mind in A.S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman. Journal of Literature and Science 1: 55–72. Butter, Stella. 2004. ‘Babbling Voices’: Einheit und Differenz, fremde und eigene Stimme(n) in A. S. Byatts Babel Tower. In Beyond Extremes: Repräsentation und Reflexion von Modernisierungsprozessen im zeitgenössischen britischen Roman, ed. Stefan Glomb and Stefan Horlacher, 351–375. Tübingen: Narr. Byatt, A. S. 2005. Fiction Informed by Science. Nature 434: 294–297. ———. 2004. Soul Searching. The Guardian, February 14. ———. 2003 [2002]. A Whistling Woman. London: Vintage. ———. 2000. Ancestors. In On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays, 65–90. London: Chatto & Windus. ———. 1997 [1996]. Babel Tower. London: Vintage. ———. 1995 [1985]. Still Life. 1985. London: Vintage. ———. 1994 [1978]. The Virgin in the Garden. 1978. London: Vintage. ———. 1993a [1991]. Still Life / Nature morte. In Passions of the Mind, 9–20. London: Vintage. ———. 1993b [1991]. People in Paper Houses: Attitudes to ‘Realism’ and ‘Experiment’ in English Post-war Fiction. In Passions of the Mind, 165–188. London: Vintage. ———. 1990. Introduction. In George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, ed. A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren, ix–xxxiv. London: Penguin. Cambiaghi, Mara. 2003. The Power of Fiction in A.  S. Byatt’s Babel Tower. Symbolism 3: 279–304. Campbell, Jane. 2004. A.  S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Cuddon, J.  A. 1999. Symbol and Symbolism. Dictionary of Literary Terms, 884–888. London: Penguin. Davey, Gail. 1998. Still Life and the Rounding of Consciousness. The Lancet 352: 1544–1547. Derrida, Jacques. 2020 [1976–77]. Life Death. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1986 [1974]. Glas. Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr, and Richard Rand. Omaha: University of Nebraska Press.

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———. 1981 [1972]. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. London: Continuum. Dusinberre, Juliet. 1982. Forms of Reality in A.  S. Byatt’s The Virgin in the Garden. Critique 24: 55–62. Eliot, George. 1990. [1868]. Notes on Form in Art. Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, ed. A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren, 231–236. London: Penguin. Hamann-Rose, Paul. 2019. Genealogies of Genetics: Historicising Contemporary Science in Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf and A.S.  Byatt’s A Whistling Woman. In Representations of Science in Twenty-First-Century Fiction: Human and Temporal Connectivities, ed. Nina Engelhardt and Julia Hoydis, 113–131. London: Palgrave. Hanson, Clare. 2020. Genetics and the Literary Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hansson, Heidi. 1999. The Double Voice of Metaphor: A.  S. Byatt’s ‘Morpho Eugenia.’ Twentieth-Century Literature 45: 452–466. Harris, Daniel. 2016. Politics for the Polyps: The Compound Organism as a ‘Peculiar Form of Communism’ in Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke and The Water Babies. Nineteenth-Century Literature 71: 64–88. Johnson, Christopher. 1993. System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, Jennifer A. 2010. Sooth-Saying Song Thrushes and Life-Giving Snails: Motifs in A. S. Byatt’s Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman. Journal of English Studies 8: 57–71. Josipovici, Gabriel. 1979. Modern Literature and the Experience of Time. In The Modern English Novel, ed. G. Josipovici, 257–72. London: Open Books. Kay, Lily E. 2000. Who Wrote the Book of Life: A History of the Genetic Code. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Keller, Evelyn Fox. 2000. The Century of the Gene. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ———. 1995. Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology. New York: Columbia University Press. Millstein, Roberta. 2008. Distinguishing Drift and Selection Empirically: ‘The Great Snail Debate’ of the 1950s. Journal of the History of Biology 41: 339–367. Naas, Michael. 2019. Learning to Read ‘Life Death’ Finally: Francesco Vitale’s Epigenetic Criticism. CR: The New Centennial Review 19: 13–33. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 2018. Review of Biodeconstruction: Jacques Derrida and the Life Sciences, by Francesco Vitale. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 16 July 2018, https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/biodeconstruction-­jacques-­derrida-­and-­ the-­life-­sciences/. Accessed 3 March 2020. ———. 2010. On Historicizing Epistemology: An Essay. Trans. David Fernbach. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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Ecologies of Life: Genetics in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy

In October 2018, a successor venture to the Human Genome Project (HGP) was announced: the Earth BioGenome Project. The sub-title of the research article outlining the project, published by an international team of scientists around evolution and ecology specialist Harris A. Lewin, already indicated that a genetic conception of life would again be the driving force behind a major scientific endeavour: “Earth BioGenome Project: Sequencing life for the future of life” (Lewin et al. 2018, p. 4325). While the HGP was limited to sequencing “only” the human genome—a momentous undertaking by any measure—the task Lewin et al. set themselves is even more ambitious: they plan on “sequencing all life on Earth” (ibid., p. 4327). More precisely, they aim to sequence “the genomes of all of Earth’s eukaryotic biodiversity”, that is, basically, of all living organisms composed of cells with a clearly delineated cell nucleus, a vastly inclusive body of species that only excludes bacteria and archaea. Eukaryotic organisms also include plants whose genomes will now be sequenced alongside their human and nonhuman animal partners in the totality of life in the biosphere. For the HGP, life itself still had essentially meant human life. Now, in the ecological, agricultural and pharmacological agendas of the Earth BioGenome Project, life has acquired a scope that includes all plant and animal species on the planet, significantly subsuming the human

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 P. Hamann-Rose, Genetics and the Novel, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53100-2_5

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animal under the latter category.1 The BioGenome’s emphasis on a genetic extension of the concept of life itself, beyond the human, shares conceptual ties—albeit likely unbeknownst to its authors—with Margaret Atwood’s earlier aesthetics of life in the MaddAddam trilogy (2003–2013) whose first volume was published as the HGP came to completion. In this chapter, I discuss Atwood’s three novels in the trilogy in the context of a larger rethinking of life driven by the threat posed by anthropogenic climate change to all life on earth. Atwood’s inter-species genetic aesthetic manifests both a new stage in the novel’s exploration of life and a specific response to the challenge of addressing in fiction the ecological crisis of the twenty-first century. The BioGenome’s focus on a genetic collective of life on the planet, embedded in diverse epistemic and commercial contexts, corresponds to central concerns in Atwood’s trilogy. Yet the BioGenome Project does not simply provide a topical introduction and background to the Canadian author’s three novels because of their shared discourses. The differences between their rhetoric and philosophical outlooks are also revealing. Just as the mega-science project, Atwood’s trilogy, so I will argue, engages a vision of life not only articulated through but fundamentally shaped by genetic discourses and technologies. For Lewis and his colleagues, the brush with which to paint the portrait of all (eukaryotic) life on the planet is genome sequencing. Both trilogy and the BioGenome Project approach life through a species-level focus. For Atwood, concepts and techniques from genetic science serve as the aesthetic and interdiscursive material from which the novels forge a genetic imaginary and understanding of life. The trilogy then imaginatively transcends the epistemic boundaries set by contemporary genetic knowledge so that notions of species belonging and species distinction become increasingly unstable, questioning the validity of taxonomic othering in the era of genetic engineering. Further, both aesthetic and scientific projects display heightened ecological alarm at the dire consequences of climate change in general and such particular developments as “the sixth great extinction event of life on the planet” (Lewin et al. 2018, p. 4326). In the face of raging climate disasters, the

1  Life in biology has of course always meant nonhuman life too but neither have nonhuman life forms ever been given the same kind of significance as human biology—see Coccia on biology’s neglect of plants (2019, p. 3)—nor had a genetic totality of life ever been granted such a publically visible and well-funded forum as in the BioGenome Project.

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theme of human survival and the future of life runs through both texts, however with different political and philosophical underpinnings. On the surface, both texts employ a similar rhetoric. In Oryx and Crake, the scientist Crake asserts that overpopulation, mass extinction of species and loss of arable land have brought humanity to the brink of collapse: “As a species we’re in deep trouble, worse than anyone’s saying” (347).2 Equally connecting the fate of the human to biodiversity, Lewin et  al. state: “Humanity faces the question of how […] massive losses of species diversity will affect the complex ecosystems that sustain life on Earth” (2018, p. 4326). Crucially, for Lewin’s team, the primary goal is to understand how human life on Earth can be sustained. While species protection and ecological responsibility feature prominently in the article’s vocabulary, the project is ultimately driven by a “global imperative for human survival and prosperity” (ibid., p.  4326). Their aims comprise, in that order, the “understanding, utilizing, and conserving [of] biodiversity” (ibid.). By foregrounding the potential commercial and industrial applications to be enabled by the project, the article moreover betrays an economic and political anthropocentrism that stands in contrast to its scientific conception of life that includes human and nonhuman organisms. The inclusivity of the goal to “[b]etter understand [the] evolutionary relationships among all known species” (ibid., p. 4327) clashes rhetorically with the objective to enhance the range of “ecosystem services” (ibid., p. 4328) offered by the planet, an umbrella term for human benefits from the biosphere. And evoking the notion of human control over life that Lily Kay and others have identified in the metaphor of the genome as a “book” or a “language” (see chapter “Introduction: Books of Life in the Long Century of the Gene”), the BioGenome’s aim is to compile “a complete Digital Library of Life” (ibid., p. 4333). In this chapter, I argue that in Atwood’s trilogy the anthropocentric concern with biodiversity, as exemplified by the nonfictional BioGenome Project, is ultimately replaced by a vision of life that uses genetic discourses to represent a totality of life and life forms that does not relapse into human-nonhuman dichotomies. This vision of life functions as a unifying concept that relies on a similar genetic and evolutionary understanding of 2  For descriptions of increasingly dramatic consequences of anthropogenic climate change in the novel, see pages 27 and 71–72. All references to the individual titles in Atwood’s trilogy, if not discernible from the context, will be marked as follows: OC (Oryx and Crake), YF (The Year of the Flood), MA (MaddAddam) plus page.

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life as the BioGenome’s taxonomic framework. But the trilogy explores the framework’s potential political implications and aesthetic possibilities neglected by the anthropocentric constraints imposed by the BioGenome’s dependence on funding and profitability. Atwood’s text also takes to task the coupling of science, technology and capitalism, so intimately inscribed into the BioGenome Project, and which in the MaddAddam novels emerges as the root cause of the planet’s ecological collapse. In this diagnosis, the trilogy evokes E. O. Wilson’s similar judgement in The Future of Life: “Science and technology led us into this bottleneck. Now science and technology must help us find our way through and out” (Wilson 2002, p. xxiii). One of the foremost public writers on ecology, Wilson is claimed by both Atwood and the BioGenome Project.3 Wilson might be more optimistic about the role of technology in shaping the future than the trilogy suggests but Wilson’s notes on the biosphere can be directly linked to the trilogy’s representation of life: “The totality of life, known as the biosphere to scientists and creation to theologians, is a membrane of organisms wrapped around Earth so thin it cannot be seen edgewise from a space shuttle, yet so internally complex that most species composing it remain undiscovered” (ibid., p. 3). Differentiating the totality of different species, a concept known as biodiversity, Wilson distinguishes between ecosystem, species and genes as ecological levels but contends that the “ecologist sees the whole as a network of energy and material continuity flowing into the community from the surrounding physical environment, and back out, and then on round to create the perpetual ecosystem cycles on which our own existence depends” (ibid., p. 11). In Atwood’s trilogy, all three levels of ecological enquiry are delineated but genetics serves as their connecting tissue. Atwood had already previously, in her novel Life Before Man (1979), articulated a warning of ecological damage and events that “menace life on earth” (Arias 2011, p. 383; see also Garrard 2010, p. 232). In the MaddAddam trilogy, however, this concern with life and ecology is reframed through a genetic lens that investigates and aesthetically configures meaningful interrelations between human/nonhuman life and the physical environment.

3  See Lewin et al. (2018, p. 4333n1) and Shannon Hengen and Sabine Schönfellner on Atwood’s reliance on Wilson’s The Future of Life in the trilogy (Hengen 2010, p.  72; Schönfellner 2018, p. 135).

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Ecologies of Life: Genetics at the Intersection of Ecocriticism and Posthumanism The genetic vision of life constructed by the three novels in the MaddAddam trilogy proves an aesthetic and epistemic constellation that invites an interpretation through a combination of posthumanist and ecocritical thinking. The trilogy’s genetic conception of life, I argue, functions in a way that materialises key objectives of recent writing in both traditions but also extends them in significant ways, not least because Atwood’s focus on genetics illuminates novel connections between the two fields. Ecocriticism and posthumanism share a substantial overlap in their objects and methods of enquiry, especially considering their mutual investment in animal studies. The main literary and critical concerns of a particularly prominent branch of posthumanism, which Tamar Sharon calls “radical posthumanism”, involve a revaluation of the human in relations of human and nonhuman being. This branch is also referred to as “critical posthumanism” (Callus et al. 2014, p. 105). Even though there is significant conceptual and rhetorical overlap—and contradiction—between this and other strands of posthumanist philosophy (Sharon 2014, p.  5), two additional modes of thinking the posthuman are frequently distinguished. The one, which Sharon refers to as the tradition of “bioconservatism”, includes thinkers like Jürgen Habermas or Francis Fukuyama who see in biotechnological innovations a threat to the very fabric of human nature (ibid., p. 1). The other is transhumanism, a tradition of thought upholding the superiority of the human over other species, while seeking to augment it beyond what one might call its natural limits (Wolfe 2010, pp. xiii–xiv). While bioconservatism and transhumanism clash in their attitudes towards the modification of the human, “they are both grounded in the humanist narrative of the human as an autonomous, unique and fixed entity, that is separate from its environment in a distinct way” (Sharon 2014, p. 3). In radical posthumanist thinking, by contrast, notions of human exceptionalism and of a universal “human nature” become highly problematic because they neglect the environmental networks in which the human is inevitably implicated. Ecocriticism is similarly invested in subverting perceived hierarchies of human and nonhuman being in order to rethink the place of the human in the world’s ecosystems. The figure of the human deconstructed in such ecocritical thinking is the same that underpins transhumanist and

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bioconservatist thought. As Sharon highlights, in the two latter traditions, the human is envisioned as “separate from its environment in a distinct way” (2014, p. 3). In other words, the human is understood to transcend and to wield the power to govern its environment. Sharon’s posthumanist emphasis on the environment here seamlessly invokes ecocritical work and its focus on human relations to the nonhuman world. The decentring of the human is a shared agenda in both ecocritical and critical posthumanist thinking. Eminent ecocritic Timothy Clark remarks accordingly: “Environmental issues are always inherently ‘posthuman’ in that they stress the degree to which human life and thought are determined by multiple material conditions and relationships” (Clark 2019, p. 14).4 For Clark, the figure of the human and changing notions of the environment are intricately connected. As nature, especially Nature with a capital N, is increasingly considered a problematic conception of a holistic unit, untouched by human intervention, the nature-culture binary breaks down, and with it, the implied nature-human dualism also. “In sum, the distinction between nature as the correlative of culture and nature in the more fundamental sense of physical systems and their laws, object of natural science, comes to a breakdown in the Anthropocene” (Clark 2013, p. 87). This has consequences for thinking the human as Clark elaborates: “In the past, nature may have seemed to offer a stable frame to give basic structure to human life […]. A sense of entrapment, unpredictability, and fragility becomes dominant now” (ibid., p. 84). Clark’s argument that the notion of nature crumbles in the face of a new plurality of differently mediated environments evokes Timothy Morton’s similar though more provocative call for the dismissal of the concept of nature once and for all in his Ecology Without Nature (Morton 2009). Clark’s reference to the mediation of scientific knowledge is indicative of a new trend in ecocritical thinking which brings it again closer to posthumanist concerns. Lawrence Buell, one of the pioneers of environmental criticism, identifies this development when he remarks on “environmental criticism’s increasingly close engagement, following the lead of N. Katherine Hayles, with science studies, with the work of Latour and Donna Haraway in particular” (Buell 2011, p. xiv). This turn to science studies in ecocriticism, as Garrard comments, is combined with an emergent ecocritical interest in biopower (2010, p. 9). Buell concludes: “the 4  Clark’s posthumanism here is also close to the “methodological” posthumanism of Latour and Pickering (Sharon 2014, p. 5).

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path to environmental criticism’s future would seem to lie not in allying itself with any sort of environmental restorationist ethico-politics but rather through recognition of humanity’s posthuman condition, whatever its risks, whatever the as-yet-unforeseen, mutagenic transformations of natureculture, be they happenstance or engineered” (Buell 2011, p. xiv).5 Buell’s invocation of an engineered posthuman environment brings us closer to the role of genetics in both ecocriticism and posthumanism. The vision of a genetically engineered future is a staple in the posthuman imaginary. In posthumanism, to the extent that such a generalisation is permissible, genetic engineering functions as a favourite site to exemplify the blending of technology with living organisms. Such blending can be seen, as in transhumanism, as enabling an accelerating intervention into the evolution of the human being. In a more critical posthumanist framework, such moments of technological-organic commingling question the preconceived natural boundaries that are supposedly transgressed by technological interventions into an individual’s genetic make-up. Besides posthumanism’s concern for human-technology interactions, human-animal relations are the discipline’s other great focus. In animal studies too we can find a prominent genetics-informed investigation, this time of the relation between humans and animals. Donna Haraway came to prominence in posthumanist theory through her concept of the cyborg, another instance of technological-human interaction. More recently, she has suggested the concept of “companion species” to denote the shared space inhabited by human and nonhuman animals.6 Reconfigured non-­ hierarchically on the level of species, humans and animals are envisioned as genetically related participants in the larger community of animal life on the planet. Genes figure in Haraway’s theorisation of companion species as markers of connection beyond the culturally imposed difference of biopolitical human superiority. First of all, her argument is evolutionary: she invites us to “understand companion species in both storied deep time, which is chemically etched in the DNA of every cell, and in recent doings, which leave more odoriferous traces” (Haraway 2003, p.  8). Haraway relies on a narrative of genetic relatedness among species to introduce her  “Natureculture” is a term used by both Haraway and Latour.  Stephanie LeMenager et  al. note a continuity between both of Haraway’s theoretical concepts: “Her companion species, which applies to dogs and their owners, to genetically engineered lab animals like OncoMouseTM, and to all life as defined through coevolution, places the cyborg on a continuum with the household pet and the avian flu, opening the door to further considerations of transgenic influence and play” (2011, p. 4). 5 6

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cross-species conversation about human-nonhuman relations. Albeit sometimes using genetic imagery more metaphorically—as when she imagines patting her dog will leave “some molecular record of our touch in the codes of living” (ibid., p. 2)—Haraway frequently draws on more literal understandings of biological and particularly genetic science to trace kinship networks among species: “Instructed by evolutionary population biologists and bioanthropologists, I know that multidirectional gene flow […] is and has always been the name of the game of life on earth” (ibid., p. 9). Haraway’s emphasis on multidirectional gene flow  draws on Lynn Margulis’s work on symbiogenesis. Haraway’s reliance on Margulis’s work proves particularly pertinent for a discussion of Atwood’s trilogy because Margulis’s concern for organism-environment relations lends itself equally well to posthumanist and ecocritical investigations. A truly controversial figure, Margulis proposed in 1967 a “symbiotic view of eukaryotic cell evolution” (Gray 2017, p.  1285). While it took decades for her work to be accepted—and not all her hypotheses have been found compelling—Margulis’s renewal of interest in symbiogenesis—or endosymbiosis—has profoundly influenced concepts of evolution. Most prominently, her work contributed to a critical reappraisal of the core biological idea of the tree of life. In The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, David Quammen recounts: “Margulis argued that the cells constituting every creature in the more complex divisions of life—every human, every animal, every plant, every fungus—are chimerical things, assembled with captured bacteria inside nonbacterial receptacles. […] This seemed crazy when Margulis proposed it in 1967” (2018, p. xiv). That an organism could incorporate foreign cellular material not through generational reproduction alone but also through absorbing elements of its environment on a molecular level clashed with central biological dogma. Margulis’s reference to chimeras here prefigures Atwood’s aesthetics of chimeras as a central, similarly subversive trope in her investigation of life in the trilogy (see also Casid 2011 on the subversive potential of the chimera, p. 63). Together with figures like Carl Woese, Margulis’s work paved the way for the conception of horizontal gene transfer, a mechanism that not only, in Ford Doolittle’s phrasing, “uproots the tree of life” because it questions the dogma of the  linear transmission of genes (Doolittle in Quammen 2018, p. xv; see also Sharon 2014, p. 127). But horizontal gene transfer also gives a genetic substance to Margulis’s idea of a network of symbiotic

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relations, which Haraway appropriates to underpin her conception of companion species. As Quammen explicates: “The recognition of horizontal gene transfer […] as a widespread phenomenon has overturned the traditional certitude that genes flow only vertically, from parents to offspring, and can’t be traded sideways across species boundaries” (Quammen 2018, pp. x–xi). In biology, this coincides with a growing effort to promote the genetic study of ecology known as “community genetics” (Neuhauser et al. 2003, p. 545). It should be noted that Haraway takes the insights of horizontal gene transfer further than the biologists would. While the new vision of evolution opens up the theoretical possibility of general “co-habitation, co-­ evolution, and embodied cross-species sociality” that Haraway speaks of (2003, p. 4), Haraway’s use of Margulis’s symbiogenesis becomes metaphorical in the broad scale of its application as a method for conceiving of cross-species kinship and the ethical ramifications this includes. Haraway derives from this genetic kinship among companion species a human ethics of care and responsibility. She proposes the concept of “significant otherness” (ibid., p. 3) to recognise fundamental ties between species at the same time as accepting that political power relations among them remain asymmetrical. By drawing on this significant otherness to denote the biopolitical differences that continue to exist in networks of genetic kinship, I also aim to pre-empt the radical loss of difference a flatter ontology is sometimes said to entail (see also Cole 2013). In Atwood, as we shall see, Haraway’s conception of genetic kinship is given a material representation in the genetic ties the trilogy establishes among a panoply of species. Margulis and the genetic vocabulary associated with her work have also been claimed by ecocritics in order to explore the larger environmental relations between organisms. The role of genetic discourses in environmental criticism is significantly more opaque than in posthumanism. At the turn of the millennium, when environmental criticism was just beginning to come into its own, Glen A. Love began to call for ecocriticism to increase its engagement of science, including genetics. Bringing to mind Haraway’s emphasis on nature-culture, Love states: “The research findings of a century of studies of human and nonhuman animal behavior and genetics have rewritten our conception of much of human nature and the old nature-nurture debate” (Love 1999, p. 573). Highlighting genetics as a mode through which to apprehend human-environmental relations like species interactions and behaviour as well as agriculture, Love champions genetic science as an ecocritical concern and methodology. The implied

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temporality of Love’s conception of genetics is, akin to most ecocritical uses of genetics, the linearity of classical evolution. In contrast, the genetic discourses of Margulis’ symbiogenesis offer a much more fractured set of genetic narratives and temporalities. Timothy Morton is one of the few ecocritical scholars to engage this nonlinear type of genetic discourse. Morton states: “At any given moment, boundaries between and within life forms are disturbingly arbitrary, at least from their genomes’ point of view: ‘Organisms and genomes may … be regarded as compartments of the biosphere through which genes in general circulate’ such that ‘the whole of the gene pool of the biosphere is available to all organisms’” (Morton 2014, p. 295). Morton here expounds a view of genetic species kinship that mirrors Haraway’s notion of “multidirectional gene flow” and companion species. Yet, Morton extends Haraway’s species focus in a way that is important for my own argument regarding Atwood’s trilogy. Emphasising the concept of the biosphere, the totality of life on the planet, Morton broadens the scope of the genetic analysis performed by the model of endosymbiosis. Morton refers to this model, somewhat overeagerly, as “the scientific fact of coexistence, which includes symbiosis (and endosymbiosis).” And continuing Clark’s ecocritical investigation of human nature, Morton concludes: “The human as such is already nonhuman, insofar as our bodies are colonies of symbionts down to the DNA level (DNA as such is a symbiotic community of code insertions, pieces of viral code, and so on)” (Morton 2014, p.  301). Morton locates the kinship network that connects the biosphere at the level of genes. Morton is at pains, however, to reject the sense of totality his “symbiotic community of code insertions” elicits. He champions the plural relationality of ecology to conceive of the environments in which we find ourselves. In contrast, Clark describes “an incalculable connection between bodies, human and nonhuman, across and within the biosphere […], with a sense of both holism and, increasingly, entrapment” (Clark 2013, pp.  80–81). Conceding the claustrophobia of an encompassing, all-­ pervasive ecology, Clark nevertheless identifies in the ecological vision of the biosphere a holistic image of nature. For my purposes, I will side with Clark and retain a sense of totality of the environment for my analysis. Firstly, because the concept of ‘life itself’ claims a totality. Secondly, because Atwood’s genetic ecologies of life derive much of their political

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power from its encompassing character that establishes connections among all domains of living beings.7 Atwood’s inclusion of plants as one of the specific ecologies of life explored in the novels is particularly noteworthy because it opens a dialogue between the novels and the “plant turn” in recent philosophical thinking about life and the environment (Coccia 2019, p. 123n1). In his recent The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture, Emanuele Coccia explores plant life as “life as complete exposure, in absolute continuity and total communion with the environment” (2019, p.  5). Like Morton, Coccia’s metaphysics of plant life asserts a loss of exteriority as plant life enables and blends with the world. But for Coccia, unlike Morton, this is a productive reason to keep engaging with the notion of world and to see world and nature, as produced through plants, as one (ibid., pp. 10–11). By including plant life in its genetic vision of life, Atwood’s trilogy reflects this renewed interest in plants Coccia identifies. And whereas ecocritical and posthumanist thought with its focus on human and nonhuman animals has neglected the life of plants, its inclusion in the trilogy offers a chance to extend the genetic community of species through the model of endosymbiosis the two critical traditions have theorised. In other words, Coccia and Atwood may remind us that humans are not only 98% chimpanzee but also 35% daffodil (Marks 2002, p. 29).

Epistemologies of Intervention: Life in Oryx and Crake The genetic science in Atwood’s trilogy’s, while taken to imaginative new heights, can be clearly traced back to scientific advances from around the time when the three novels were published, such as the development of GM foods (Arias 2011, p. 389) and transgenic pigs (Botta 2010, p. 245).8 Beyond these obvious links to actual scientific projects, Atwood imagines future advances in these fields. One striking example is the fully mastered technique of creating genetic chimeras. The geneticists’ ability in the trilogy to combine DNA from different species, most exuberantly in Crake’s 7  Yet, to signal that I am not blind to the problematic nature of any holistic image of the environment, as Clark is neither, I specifically refer to the plurality of ecologies of life Atwood constructs in the trilogy. 8  Bouson suggests a rather precise dating for the novel’s future by arguing that Jimmy was born around 1999 (2004, p. 140).

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humanoid Crakers, wildly surpassed anything possible in the first decades of the third millennium. While the discovery of CRISPR-Cas9, post-publication of MaddAddam, provides an inkling as to how this feat might actually be accomplished, Atwood devises an ingenious sleight of hand to account for the jump ahead in splicing technology. This imaginative trick, to my knowledge, has hitherto escaped critical notice except for Ferreira’s general remark on its function in the trilogy to signal a scientific advance (Ferreira 2011, p. 408). In Oryx and Crake, Crake explains to Jimmy that genetic engineering was propelled to new levels once “the proteonome had been fully analyzed and interspecies gene and part-gene splicing were thoroughly underway” (356). The proteome, or “proteonome” in Atwood’s usage,9 delineates the totality of variants of proteins in the ecology of life, just like the genome accounts for the sum of genes in a given organism (Mukherjee 2016, p. 487). Since genes are essential for the replication of the body’s protein chains, full access to this additional level of physiological complexity suggests a drastically increased control over the genetically engineered organism.10 Atwood’s vision of the successful sequencing of the proteome here functions as an imaginative extrapolation of the hope that the full knowledge of proteomics would finally provide the knowledge necessary to fulfil the genetic engineering prospects originally associated with the sequencing of the human genome. This form of scientific extrapolation from existing to potential scenarios is characteristic of both science fiction at large and technologically minded dystopian fiction in particular. The tremendous recombinatory abilities arising from the scientific breakthrough imagined by the trilogy, however, enable the disastrous uses to which genetics in the novels is put and in that regard stress the novels’ dystopian character. The critical opinion is in disagreement about the precise target of the dystopian monitory message in the MaddAddam trilogy. Some argue that Atwood attacks genetic science as such and that she posits the very idea of biotechnological engineering as dangerous (Griffiths 2004, p. 192; Dinello 2005, p. 260; Bouson 2004, p. 140). The majority of critics, however, agree that the trilogy is not in fact anti-science but that it rather targets the abuses of science as unregulated experimentation by an unchecked and unscrupulous capitalist  Susan Squier interprets Atwood’s spelling as a neologism (Squier 2003, p. 1154).  The growing knowledge about the complex multilevel networks in the organisation of cells also support a very different conclusion, namely a radical scepticism against the kind of genetic (or protein) reductionism that usually underpins notions of genetic engineering (Rabinow and Caduff 2006, p. 330). 9

10

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system. These capitalist abuses in turn lie at the heart of the environmental and social collapse the trilogy outlines and that define its pre-apocalyptic world (Stein 1999, pp.  145–146; Botta 2010, p.  244; Adami 2012, p. 260; Korte 2008, p. 160; Bosco 2010, p. 156; Hamner 2017, p. 156). Atwood herself has commented that in her estimation the trilogy’s warning is not about “our inventions—all human inventions are merely tools— but what might be done with them” (Atwood 2005, p. 323). The trilogy’s post-apocalyptic setting represents the catastrophic outcome of the dystopian pre-apocalyptic society. In the first novel, Oryx and Crake, the narrative present is the time of the post-apocalypse, focalised through Jimmy who now refers to himself as Snowman. The second volume, The Year of the Flood, inhabits the same narrative present as Oryx and Crake. The reader follows the alternating accounts of two women, Toby and Ren, about their lives before the “waterless flood” as the pandemic becomes known among the members of an eco-religious group, the God’s Gardeners, and to whom both Toby and Ren at some stage belonged. Interspersed between their accounts, the novel reproduces sermons and hymns used by the group. In the final volume, MaddAddam, multiple focalisers shape the narration of the surviving humans’ struggle in the post-apocalyptic world as well as of further flashbacks into the pre-­ pandemic past. In all novels, the narrative present is narrated in the present tense while the retrospective narration mostly adopts the past tense, which further anchors the narrative present in the trilogy’s post-apocalyptic temporality. I contend that dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction contain particular formal advantages for investigations of genetic visions of life. The first reason is their scale. Dystopian fiction usually portrays a dire future the world over. In Brave New World (1932), one of the major historical intertexts of the MaddAddam trilogy, it is literally the “World State” that has taken over human reproduction and is responsible for the creation of human life. In another intertext, John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), the whole planet—with the possible exception of the impenetrable U.S.S.R.—is known to be affected by a plague of plants. Post-­ apocalyptic texts by definition revolve around an incisive major catastrophe that usually occurs on a global scale, like the mutation of the triffids from garden plants into marauding killers in Wyndham’s novel or, indeed, the global pandemic caused by the “BlyssPluss Pill” (OC 346) in the MaddAddam trilogy. Their totalising scale occasions their peculiar

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affordance to represent and engage the totalising conception of life—as zoe as well as the totality of bios.11 Identifying the “imponderable scale” of the Anthropocene as one of the major challenges to its literary representation, Clark suggests science fiction as a genre particularly suited to the task (2013, p. 81).12 Clark does not associate the scale affordance of science fiction with representations of life, yet this generic feature allows Atwood to replace the human-­ environment dualism with a differentiated but continuous conception of an ecological totality of life forms. This ecological affordance of science fiction’s scale of representation can be observed, for instance, in The Day of the Triffids in the image of London reclaimed by various species of plant life: “The gardens of the Parks and Squares were wildernesses creeping out across the bordering streets. Growing things seemed to, indeed, to press out everywhere, rooting in the crevices between the paving stones, springing from cracks in concrete, finding lodgements even in the seats of the abandoned cars” (Wyndham 2014, p. 197). We find here prefigured the repossessing of human habitation by plant and animal life that abounds in the post-apocalyptic spaces of the MaddAddam trilogy. In both their scale and history of articulating conceptions of life, the genres of dystopian and post-apocalyptic science fiction exhibit a particular affinity to representations of life unfamiliar to the generic pre-­ dispositions of the realist novels of Byatt, Mawer or McEwan. However, while Atwood makes full use of the particular generic forms offered by her choice of genres for her investigation of life, she complicates the dystopia’s pessimism and the precarity of the post-apocalypse. For, as the following discussion of the trilogy’s first volume, Oryx and Crake, demonstrates, life after the apocalypse is robustly bouncing back. The novel’s epistemic perspectives on life are historically specific. By virtue of their incisive, world-toppling nature, apocalypses are by definition deeply historicising phenomena. Apocalypses reveal the conditions of any given or imagined world to have been valid only for a historical period of time and not, as those inhabiting the pre-apocalyptic time might have believed, ever-lasting (Canavan 2012, p.  139). Such historicising of 11  For a detailed discussion of both concepts, see chapter “Introduction: Books of Life in the Long Century of the Gene”. 12  See also Chakrabarty’s argument that the phenomenon of climate change itself is productive of a discourse that suggests collectivity: “‘climate change poses for us [the] question of a human collectability, an us, pointing to a figure of the universal that … arises from a shared sense of catastrophe’” (Chakrabarty qtd. in Ciobanu 2014, p. 154).

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knowledge and practices suffuses the entirety of Atwood’s trilogy. This is nowhere more apparent than in the text’s investigation of a geneticised vision of life, which by the end of the novels, in the post-apocalyptic world of lost epistemes, is itself shown to disappear. This historicity introduces particular and paradoxical temporalities of reading and interpretation. As readers follow Jimmy’s focalisation into pre-disaster societies and knowledge, and subsequently, with Jimmy, project those epistemes onto the post-disaster world, their thinking has in fact become anachronistic. They are thinking the world in terms that in that world are almost already forgotten. Scientific knowledge is likely to vanish as the last surviving scientists of the human band of survivors pass away. In Oryx and Crake, Jimmy’s struggle with remembering the time before the pandemic, evinced by the “blank spaces in his memory” (4), is indicative of the disappearance of whole institutions and traditions of thought, including, especially, the sciences. Jimmy is after all a “words person” and not a “numbers person” according to his father’s nomenclature of Compound sociality and talents (28). Jimmy’s, and the critic’s, interpretations of the post-apocalyptic world through discourses from before the catastrophic intervention emerge as products of the historically specific conditions of knowledge that governed Compound reality—and by the complex epistemic extension characterising the genre, govern the readers’ own structures of knowledge. A number of critics have commented on the underlying genetic understanding of life in the trilogy, however without connecting this to the post-apocalyptic vigour of life in the text (Howells 2006, p. 163; Cooke 2006, p.  119; Botta 2010, pp.  244, 250; Sanderson 2013, p.  224; Narkunas 2015, p. 2). Linking the trilogy’s negotiation of geneticised life with the text’s depiction of living processes before and after the pandemic is a foremost concern of this chapter. In the first volume, Oryx and Crake, readers are introduced to a geneticised view of zoe, or life itself, that increasingly shapes the biopolitics of life as bios. While the novel, right from the beginning, shows life to thrive in the post-apocalyptic setting, the pre-pandemic society’s genetic understanding of living organisms takes shape only gradually as Jimmy’s narrative flashbacks accumulate. As readers learn more about the creation of the genetically spliced animals that roam the forests and ruinous cityscapes, as well as about the geneticisation of life that made them possible, the earlier pre-pandemic epistemes increasingly inform the readers’ understanding of the post-apocalyptic present in the novel.

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Before the pandemic, the genetic splicing of organisms, including the integration of human tissue in pigs, already subverts species boundaries and breaks down human-nonhuman dualisms. However, these experiments and their critical posthuman potential are still contained in the controlled environments of the Compounds and only escape containment by occasional acts of bioterrorism. Significantly, life is shown to thrive freely only after the apocalyptic pandemic, at least in Oryx and Crake. As a consequence, the full political and aesthetic potential of thinking life as a genetic web of interrelations, though prefigured in the pre-pandemic scientific discourses and ideas, here only comes to the fore after the transgenic animals have been released into the wild and are shown to integrate successfully into the earth’s post-human ecosystem.13 In Oryx and Crake, the non-dualistic re-framing of human-nonhuman relations is highlighted only when Crake massively intervenes in the planet’s biosphere. In the beginning of Oryx and Crake, the nature of this intervention is still unknown. As Jimmy wakes in his improvised bed in the trees lining a beach somewhere along the East coast of North America, the catastrophe is only implied by the references to human rubble, abandoned spaces and, of course, his bed in the trees. Remarking the opening’s ambivalence between strange beauty and disaster, as encapsulated for instance in the “rosy, deadly glow” (3) of the sunrise, Lee Rozelle interprets the space and time of the beach as a liminal moment between the old world—and its world order—that was lost and the new one that is emerging (Rozelle 2010, p. 61). In this liminal surrounding, Jimmy notes the offshore towers rising “improbably out of the pink and pale blue of the lagoon” (OC 3). His attention turns to the sounds of life around him: “The shrieks of the birds that nest out there and the distant ocean grinding against the ersatz reefs of rusted car parts and jumbled bricks and assorted rubble sound almost like holiday traffic” (3). The human loss evoked by the analogy at the end of the sentence is countered by the nonhuman presence of birds and the waves. These environmental agents literally reclaim human-­ made objects and spaces. At the same time, the protagonist-narrator introduces a human presence right from the beginning. He describes the surrounding sound as “wave after wave sloshing over the various barricades, wish-wash, wish-wash, the rhythm of heartbeat” (3). The metaphoric link between a beating human heart and the perpetually recurring 13  I use the hyphenated version of “post-human” to demarcate my temporal use of the term.

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waves points both to the resilience of the environment and to a connection between nature and the human body that foreshadows the genetic connections between species the novel will explore. The theme of living nature as an agential force reclaiming manmade structures is revisited repeatedly in the novel. The following passage comments on what happens to the cities once the humans have left: The buildings that didn’t burn or explode are still standing, though the botany is thrusting itself through every crack. Given time it will fissure the asphalt, topple the walls, push aside the roofs. Some kind of vine is growing everywhere, draping the windowsills, climbing in through the broken windows and up the bars and grillwork. Soon this district will be a tangle of vegetation. […] It won’t be long before all visible traces of human habitation will be gone. (260)

The passage evokes similar descriptions in post-apocalyptic and post-­ human writing from Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids to Alan Weisman’s 2008 non-fiction imagination of The World Without Us. Especially noteworthy is the vitality of the vegetative life in the passage, its sprawling presence in the post-disaster environment of the novel. The vines, as is revealed in MaddAddam, are a kudzu variety which features in Crake’s planning for the Crakers’ survival. The Crakers’ reliance on the vines and its abundance illustrates one of the many moments in the trilogy where genetic splices are shown to find their niche in the ecosystem. While the vine itself is not stated to have been augmented through genetic engineering, one could speculate that its “growing everywhere” is possibly a product of Crake’s genetic tinkering. It is not just the vegetative dimension of the biosphere that thrives in the post-human landscape of the novel. It brims with animal life too. At the beginning, Jimmy finds himself repeatedly engulfed by his environment: “All around him are noises: the slurping of the waves, insect chirpings and whirrings, bird whistles, amphibious croaks, the rustling of leaves” (122). Besides the birds, the insects and the frogs, he hears an owl hooting (131), flicks away spiders and ants, urinates on grasshoppers and struggles to “keep […] rats and mice” out of his food storage (4). Often, like the spider or the ants running up his arms, or the flies circling around his face (430), not to mention the more dangerous splices, animals encroach on him. It is clear that, as Pusch states, a reversal of human’s previous role as dominating environmental agent has occurred (2015,

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p. 58). The animals’ presence—however annoying for Jimmy—is also an expression of nature’s recalcitrance as well as of the abundance of life after humanity has ceased to control it. Post-apocalyptic life in the trilogy appears not as an artificial product of genetic engineering but rather as a potent mixture of chimerical and non-­ engineered species whose vigour gives grounds for optimism. In an important essay on Oryx and Crake, Lee Rozelle was the first to remark upon the strength of the biosphere after the human catastrophe, countering overly pessimistic interpretations of the novel. In reaction to Bouson in particular, he shows that “Bouson’s alternatives—‘game over forever’ or human survival—finally dismiss the complex viability of remaining flora and fauna that still thrive in the novel” (Rozelle 2010, p.  62; see also Pusch 2015, p. 57). The successful mixture indicates that what could be deemed “unnatural” in the genetic splices is in fact relatively easily assimilated into the “natural” life of the environment, questioning the validity of nature as a normative concept. Life in a variety of life forms thrives in the aftermath of the pandemic, not despite the destruction of human life and habitation but because of it and because of an influx of genetically engineered life forms. The genetic understanding of life that enables both the engineering of the genetic hybrids and the recognition of genetic kinship among different species is explored in multiple contexts in the trilogy. The digital realm in the trilogy, for instance, works to establish a molecular conception of the organism. Computer games like “Spandrel” (MA 197) are based on assumptions about the programmability of living beings. In the game, players can create new features for existing “bioforms” and simulate their evolutionary chances for success (MA 197). The game resonates with the novel’s portrayal of the early days of genetic splicing when “create-an-­ animal was so much fun, […] it made you feel like God” (OC 57). The process of creating chimeras is suggested as a kind of game that relies on the possibility to newly arrange living matter. This conflation of the digital with the organic evokes contemporary notions of “biohacking” (Tocchetti 2014, p.  17) and underlines the historical development of reframing genetic material as information. Genetic knowledge in the novel is also shown to explain all kinds of phenomena completely unconnected to genetic chimeras. For instance, Jimmy subscribes to a genetic explanation of inherited traits and talents when he complains that “the Compound schools were awash in brilliant genes, none of which he’d inherited from his geeky, kak-hearted parents”

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(OC 204). Zeb, in MaddAddam, construes kinship relations in his family through genetic discourses. He muses that “he’d been adopted, since he couldn’t possibly have come from two such pristine sources of DNA” as his parents. He finds a genetic explanation: “Once he figured out genetics, he decided that Trudy must’ve secretly had it off with some fix-it guy with a wrench” (MA 110). The conception of the organism as a molecular being comes fullest to the fore when Crake explains to Jimmy the nature of his genetic engineering work. Having previously begun a career in “Transgenics” (OC 233), in the final segment of the story before the pandemic, Crake is employed by the “RejoovenEsense Compound” (266) and engaged in a classified genetic splicing experiment. Seemingly, he is at work perfecting human genetic enhancement technologies, a highly profitable project—“They’d be able to create totally chosen babies” (357). Equipped with limitless funds and an untoward level of autonomy in his research, he is able to hide from his financiers that he is in fact busy creating both the virus designed to exterminate humanity and the humanoid Craker species. This virus is also presented as a genetic chimera: a “supervirulent splice” (OC 398); so that even the virus assumes a part in the genetic community of life in the novel. As the replacement of the human species, the Crakers are designed to live harmoniously within the recovering earth’s ecosystem after anthropogenic climate change has been stopped. Hiring Jimmy to do the ad campaign for the official end of the project, Crake gives him a tour of the research facility, the “Paradice” dome (350). When first confronted with the Crakers, Jimmy is unaware of Crake’s ulterior plans and is led to believe in the Crakers’ commercial purpose. Crake even refers to them as his “floor models” (355). Crake then explains, via the concept of the sequencing of the “proteonome”, how the Crakers had been created: they are the result of “interspecies gene and part-gene splicing” and as such “programmed” (356). Their genetic make-up contains, among others, genetic material from humans, jellyfish, baboons, octopi and citrus fruits (117, 194). As chimeras, the Crakers are truly representative of all domains of eukaryotic life. The Crakers not only embody a sense of genetic community among species; they were also designed to have no conceptions of racism or exploitation, neither among themselves nor with regard to other species. In the novel’s explicit discussion of genetics and racism, Crake locates both the developmental origins of alleged markers of race, such as skin colour, and the human trait to discriminate on the basis of race at the level

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of genes. The novel’s emphasis on genetic connection among humans and other species, however, conceptually undermines the very concept of race. More pragmatically, once Crake has supposedly identified the genetic basis of racism, he eliminates it in the Crakers as part of his encompassing plan to remove the “destructive features” from the “ancient primate brain” of the human species: “For instance, racism—or, as they referred to it in Paradice, pseudospeciation—had been eliminated in the model group, merely by switching the bonding mechanism: the Paradice people simply did not register skin colour. Hierarchy could not exist among them, because they lacked the neural complexes that would have created it” (358). In the novel’s imagined genetic “Paradice Regained”, inter- and intra-species racism is banished. The Crakers do indeed appear to live without discrimination and their example sets in relief the systematic exploitation of non-white people, especially of non-white women like Oryx, in the trilogy’s corporate pre-pandemic society. Not all of Crake’s designs for the Crakers work as planned—their eventual reversion to religion most strikingly undermines his belief in the complete programmability of not only appearance but also personality. Yet Crake’s ability to incorporate an array of multi-species DNA into one organism is both testament of the advanced genetic engineering technologies in the novel and the conception of the organism as a genetically organised being that underlies Crake’s biotechnologies. Even without full knowledge of Crake’s ulterior plans, Jimmy feels ambivalent about the Crakers, as he also did about earlier splices. Because the novel is focalised through Jimmy, the reader is invited to share his reservations about the Crakers. By now, Jimmy is so accustomed to genetic chimeras that he displays more cynical humour than horror towards the splicing of organisms: before being shown the Crakers, he expects to see a “gruesome new food substance […]. A liver tree, a sausage vine” (355). While he does not openly oppose the Crakers, his fascination is tinged with mocking scepticism: “Didn’t you get a bit carried away?” he asks Crake when he learns about their regularised mating cycles and their recycling of their own excrements (359); these features are all later revealed to afford the Crakers their perfect ecological integration. Earlier in the novel, Jimmy appeared more explicitly critical of engineered beings, for example when the two discuss the engineered butterflies on the campus of the “Watson-Crick Institute” (203): Jimmy feels that “some line has been crossed, some boundary transgressed” (242). The trilogy’s critique of engineered life forms is however more complex than this exchange

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between Crake as scientist and Jimmy as moral instance suggests. Jimmy’s mother, herself a scientist, functions as another voice critical of the Compound philosophy behind creating transgenic organisms. She attacks her husband, arguing: “You’re interfering with the building blocks of life. It’s immoral. It’s sacrilegious” (64). Narkunas summarises the argument, stating: “Jimmy’s mother evokes the sacred as the limit-event of life” while “his father’s perspective […] represents a generalised idea of how life itself is a game or puzzle to be mastered by human will” (2015, p. 8). Some critics, like Bouson, read the novel as an outright indictment of the horrors of genetic engineering, arguing that it shows “the grave dangers posed by the ‘gene rush’ currently underway and the ‘reductionist mind-set’ of biotechnology as it heedlessly intervenes in natural processes” (Bouson 2004, p. 140). Bouson, tellingly, cites Fukuyama (ibid., p. 140) who, as a bioconservatist thinker, underlines Bouson’s own normative use of nature. While an emphasis on the value of human dignity and the regulation of genetic experimentation is, I suggest, upheld by the trilogy, I contend that a normative interpretation of the novels precludes one from registering its critique of humanism as well as its subversive nonhuman ethics. Also, there are very different kinds of chimeras displayed in the text, eliciting very different responses. Confronted with the headless chickens grown for meat production, marketed as ChickieNobs, Jimmy is indeed appalled (238). Although in the end he does eat them too, suggesting a normalisation of even such previously outrageous creations (see also Balsmeier 2019, p. 99), the ChickieNobs exemplify the ethical dilemma of how to deal with what Susan McHugh has investigated as “semi-living beings” (McHugh 2010, p. 191). In contrast, Jimmy immediately adopts the spliced pet rakunk, a combination of raccoon and skunk, as an intimate friend when he is a child (OC 59). Other chimeras like the pigoons complicate matters further. Bred for xenotransplantation, the pigoons incorporate human tissue and because this makes Jimmy sense a connection to them, he is horrified at the prospect that some of their human-pig meat may have been served in the cafeteria (27). How chimeras are perceived in the text thus depends on the chimera and their purpose. Rather than merely satirising genetic science—as a “‘surreal zoo’ of transgenic species” (Bouson 2004, p. 140)—the chimeras are further implicated in the trilogy’s deconstruction of species boundaries and revaluations of the concept of the human.

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The main thrust of the novel’s criticism is geared not against the genetic chimeras as such but at the economic and political systems that produce them (see also DiMarco 2005; Cooke 2006; Arias 2011; Dunlap 2013; Vials 2015). Life becomes a commodity in numerous ways in the trilogy. Besides the obvious example of the biotechnological interventions into life through the creation of chimeras, countless aspects of social life in the Compounds and pleeblands have become subject to the Compounds’ biopolitical control.14 Jimmy learns from Crake, for instance, that the pharmacological branch of his Compound has been introducing diseases into the population in order to then market their antidotes to those diseases (246–248). In the process, the pleeblands have become, so Crake, a “giant Petri dish” (338). The world of Oryx and Crake is suffused by the biopower of the corporations that abuse scientific knowledge to further capital gain. Crake, as the Compound financiers’ favourite, acts as the apotheosis of this coupling of capitalism and science. Crake’s embeddedness in the economic and ideological structures of his society make him less of a “mad scientist” as some critics would have him be (Bouson 2004, p.  145; Ingersoll 2004, p. 164; Mohr 2007, p. 17; Davis 2008, p. 238; Snyder 2011, p.  471; Hamner 2017, p.  153). Kroon argues convincingly that Crake’s perceived “madness” is only a symptom of the hyper-capitalist society of his upbringing (Kroon 2015, p. 18). Even though Crake eventually destroys the capitalist system surrounding him, along with humanity that came up with it, in order to act responsibly towards the planet, he is able to do so only by exploiting the resources and global networks capitalism has created. Crake is as much product of the Compound system as a rebel against it. Further, his plan of an ecological utopia is thoroughly informed by the knowledge economy of the Compounds. His reasons for regarding humanity as doomed directly result from his scientific-­ reductionist logic that regards human nature as genetically determined and hence inevitable; and to which the ideologies of the Compounds offer no alternatives. As the example of Jimmy shows when he attends the 14  The figure of Oryx functions, among other things, as another symbol for corporate, Western exploitation of life, and especially of non-Western female bodies, through sex trade and human trafficking; “Oryx’s experience is the ultimate expression of a world in which, as she puts is, ‘everything has a price’ (139)” (Hicks 2016, p. 43). See also Stein: “Through this industrialization of sex, female bodies become fodder for profit much the same way that plants and animals become merely genetic materials for corporate biogenetics” (Stein 2013, p. 190).

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dilapidated Martha Graham Academy, humanities studies are no longer valued in the market economy of the novel. The logic behind Crake’s plan to reshape life on earth is prefigured in the video games Jimmy and he play as children. In general, the games effect a “normalization of life itself as a game during Crake and Jimmy’s adolescence” (Narkunas 2015, p. 10). The game “Extinctathon” (OC 92) in particular foreshadows the near extinction of the human species in the novel. The game is basically a guessing game about extinct species. Because many of these have gone extinct due to human intervention in habitats and anthropogenic climate change (92), the game demarcates a possible starting point for Crake’s consciousness about what today is referred to as the sixth mass extinction of species (Lewin et  al. 2018, p.  4326). As is revealed later, the game also functions as a secret online platform where a group of bioterrorists called “MaddAddam” (252) convene and plot their acts of sabotage against the Compounds. Crake’s team at the Paradice dome consists mainly of scientists from the MaddAddam group he pressured into working for him. When Crake later in the novel describes the human species in its taxonomic classification—“Phylum Chordata, Class Vertebrata, Order Mammalia, Family Primates, Genus Homo, Species sapiens sapiens” (OC 214)—he evokes the classification of extinct species from the game Extinctathon. While the novel in this way intimates that the human species might join the game’s list of bygones, the game also underlines the idea of life as a game that can be manipulated and in which reality and fake, nature and artifice are no longer meaningful. This theme of comparing “fake” and “original” is recurrent in the text. From the “reproduction” furniture in Jimmy’s childhood home (30) and the “fake palm trees” in the Paradice dome (356) to the “tropical splices” in the Paradice garden (350) and the chimerical butterflies at the “Watson-­ Crick Institute” (203), Oryx and Crake is filled with apparent “fakes”. Only when the pandemic news coverage strikes Jimmy “like a movie” (399), the reality behind the artifice comes back to haunt him. Struck by the appearance of the butterflies, Jimmy explicitly asks Crake if they are “real or fake” (235). Crake replies: “After it happens, that’s what they look like in real time. The process is no longer important” (235). For Crake, the question of originality no longer matters. “I don’t believe in Nature […]”, said Crake. “Or at least not with a capital N” (242). Crake rejects nature as a privileged process of creation that indicts aberrations as “unnatural”. In his genetics-informed empiricism, this is sound. On a genetic basis alone, there is no fundamental  difference between the

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engineered butterfly and its non-spliced companions. While his rejection of nature in this instance could be seen as motivated by a capitalist objective, his later creation of the Crakers suggests that he truly believes this. To introduce an arguably foreign element into the world’s ecosystem in order to save it does not present a contradiction to Crake. The loss of a normative natural framework is hence presented as ambivalent in the novel. On the one hand, it enables the excesses of the corporate capitalism in the story, not to mention Crake’s vision of a new ecology that includes his Crakers and requires the annihilation of humankind. On the other hand, the trilogy uses the splices to explore the connections between species that had previously been obscured by a normative concept of Nature with a capital N. To rethink Nature ecocritically as nature or ecology is here entwined with rethinking Man through a posthumanist lens. Both ecocritical and posthumanist projects aim at uncovering connections and networks of agency between species and their environment that, to think with Latour, notions of modernity have glossed over. The concept of life, in its human and biopolitical iteration a deeply modern concept according to Foucault, becomes nevertheless a Latourian quasi-object (Latour 1993, p. 53) once it grows to encompass nonhuman life forms and begins to question the boundaries that demarcate the liberal humanist subject. In Oryx and Crake, Crake’s Paradice project first appears to reflect transhumanist objectives of changing human nature for the better. Crake explains his designs to be about “benefits for the future human race” (OC 358). Equally, the BlyssPluss pill is designed as a negative eugenic measure that is aimed at pharmacologically improving the conditions of human life (see also Narkunas 2015, p.  13). One of his fridge magnets supports Crake’s transhumanism, saying: “To stay human is to break a limitation” (OC 354). Although Oryx and Crake “concentrates on the possible effects of the interface of transgenics […] and tissue engineering to overcome any limits in the perfectibility of human or animal life” (Narkunas 2015, p. 1), this transhumanist vision is criticised in the text as part and parcel of the ecologically destructive nature of the Compounds. The reader learns that Crake’s transhumanism is mostly an act for his superiors, to lull them into a sense of security while he radically rewrites human superiority by embedding the new humans in harmonious ecologies of life. The Crakers’ lack of complex thought, together with their more ludicrous characteristics, arguably even turns them into a transhumanist parody.

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Suggesting a radically egalitarian conception of humanity in the Crakers, Crake assumes the role of posthumanist critic instead. Oryx and Crake introduces a pronounced posthumanist investigation of the relation between human and nonhuman life that continues throughout the trilogy, finding a kind of apotheosis in the final battle and union of species in MaddAddam. As previous critics have noted, it is especially the genetic splices in the novel that occasion posthumanist revaluations of what it means to be human and what it might mean to be posthuman. Allison Dunlap, for instance, argues: “In their daily practices, then, the scientists of Oryx and Crake diminish animal/human distinctions and the possibility of human exceptionalism” (Dunlap 2013, p. 6; see also Pusch 2015; McHugh 2010; Balsmeier 2019). When Jimmy encounters the pigoons for the first time, his encounter is described as a meeting of companion species. When rumours circulate that pigoon meat has been served in the cafeteria, Jimmy remarks that he “didn’t want to eat pigoons, because he thought of the pigoons as creatures much like himself” (OC 27). The creaturely bond between pigoons and Jimmy is emphasised by the fact that the scientists, among them his father, “now have genuine human neocortex tissue growing in a pigoon” (63). Created from a variety of animal, human and plant DNA, the Crakers in turn represent a multi-­ species form of being that undermines any hegemonic transhumanist interpretation of their life form. From when they appear as strangely human but not-human creatures Jimmy engages with on the beach, to when readers increasingly learn about their coming-into-being and their genetic make-up, the Crakers function as the trilogy’s most persistent critique of human exceptionalism. To Jimmy, the Crakers appear too perfect: “each one is admirably proportioned. Each is sound of tooth, smooth of skin. No ripple of fat around their waists” (115). On the outside, they appear as transhuman superhumans. However, their docile nature and limited—though growing—cognitive capacity to think in abstractions immediately undermines any traditionally humanist ideals of power and reason. Their language teaching has been restricted by Crake so that “no name could be chosen for which a physical equivalent […] could not be demonstrated” (8). Humanist ideals are further dismantled by the Crakers’ effortless ecological integration, as indeed Crake had intended. They live as vegans, do not build firm habitations, do not need clothes and do not aspire to either knowledge, power or dominion over others. Their names—ranging from scientists like “Madame [Marie] Curie” to political-military leaders like

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“Abraham as in Lincoln” (OC 116)—appear as ironic and satirical quips about the lofty ideals of the old world, which nevertheless in the end managed to almost destroy all life on the planet. In contrast, the Crakers do indeed seem to embody an ideal of what Morton calls “coexistence” and their superhuman beauty seems to underline their advantage over the human in this regard. In comparison with the Crakers, Jimmy is the aberration. What Ku and Davis refer to as his “monstrosity” (Davis 2008, p. 237; Ku 2006, p. 112) encapsulates this notion that the Crakers pull the rug out not only from under humanism’s self-destructive delusions of species superiority but also from under the human as the measure of all things. Jimmy himself highlights his abnormality in the face of the Crakers by renaming himself as “Snowman” (8), an allusion to the “Abominable Snowman” (8) whose uncanny mixture of man and monster reflects Jimmy’s outsider role in the ecology of the post-apocalypse. The human integration into the totality of life is a major source of the novel’s more optimistic moments after the pandemic. This non-­ anthropocentric optimism in the trilogy as a whole is frequently missed. As Calina Ciobanu notes: “As Atwood figures it, however, the end of the Anthropocene is hardly the end of the world—it is simply the end of our world” (2014, p.  153). But even for the human survivors in the story, there is moderate grounds for hope (Bosco 2010, p. 171). At the end of Oryx and Crake, Jimmy stumbles across a band of fellow human beings, after thinking he was the only human survivor for most of the novel. While the trilogy’s first volume ends at this moment of possibility, the end of MaddAddam more explicitly envisions a future for humankind, though in conjunction with the Crakers and through mutual reproduction. This species union at the end of the trilogy is prepared by the interconnectedness of life forms envisioned in Oryx and Crake. It is striking that in light of the trilogy’s emphasis on such genetic inter-­ species communities, the immeasurable loss of human life depicted in the trilogy seems to fade into the background. By foregrounding the surviving animal species and obscuring the decimation of the human population, the novels appear to reverse the dynamic otherwise characterising public awareness of the mass extinction of animals species. In addition to the trilogy’s genetic imaginary of life beyond the human, this critical reversal of viewpoints expands the text’s investigation of non-anthropocentric perspectives on life.

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The trilogy’s imagination of inter-species kinship through genetic chimeras is complemented by a plethora of symbolic splices. Jimmy imagines Oryx “floating towards him through the air, as if on soft feathery wings” (OC 131), recalling mythic chimeras such as mermaids or creatures “with the heads and breasts of women and the talons of eagles” (12). In addition, the text includes the “snake women”, the erotic dancers in sequined animal costumes in the “Scales and Tails” nightclub, featured in The Year of the Flood (74, 307) and obliquely alluded to in Oryx and Crake (4). They extend the trilogy’s cultural and linguistic imagining of inter-species connections and seamless inter-species flux. Like Oryx, the snake women also introduce a perspective on female exploitation by the biopolitical structures of the corporate system governing the pre-pandemic society in the text. In MaddAddam, the character Zeb literally slips into the skin of a bear to save himself from the cold—terrifying two cyclists in his outfit (82). Zeb calls himself “Bigfoot” (MA 83), which evokes Jimmy’s equally human-animal post-apocalyptic moniker of the “Abominable Snowman”. On a variety of levels, the novels play with different forms of thinking and representing human-animal interconnections. The trilogy does not simply subscribe to an ideal vision of ecological equality among species, however. Atwood in that way evades the charge sometimes levelled against a new materialist flat ontology. Whereas before the pandemic, biopolitical hierarchies are evident throughout all levels of social bios, after the catastrophe differences between species are no longer based simply on human exceptionalism and power but take shape against the background of a shared genetic continuity. This new quality of difference in similarity can be considered as realising the other species’ “significant otherness” (Haraway 2003, p. 3), which here also includes plants as significant others. Rather than figuring just as places of shelter and sustenance, they, too, become valuable companion species. The end of Oryx and Crake highlights both difference and connection between Jimmy and the living environment around him. The text’s ending mirrors its beginning, almost word for word (429). Davis interprets the slight differences between the passages as signalling a change in the relations between human and nature that the novel has outlined, specifically undermining humanity’s dominion over the environment and replacing it with Jimmy’s precarious existence (Davis 2008, p. 252). At the same time, the end again invokes the beauty of the diversity of life after the apocalypse: “After everything that’s happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is. From the offshore towers came the avian shrieks

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and cries that sound like nothing human” (OC 429). While Osborne identifies the “notable deletion of the reference to ‘various barricades’” in the two passages as implying that the “barriers Snowman had established between the Crakers and himself seem to be breaking down” (Osborne 2008, p. 35), the emphasis on the inhuman avian cries at the same time still signal that Jimmy feels as an other to the environment around him. Atwood’s text is not blind to the challenge of thinking the human through a posthumanist framework of ecological interconnection and is keen to uphold that the ecological community at the end of the novel is still maintaining difference as a significant concept. The human at the end of Oryx and Crake has become an antiquated idea, beset with the dust of anthropocentrism and environmental collapse. Even so, Jimmy, and the novel as a whole, nostalgically cling to that conception of the human that evokes the other humanist ideals of art, narrative and language which the protagonist had come to represent in the scientific pre-pandemic society and which he struggles to keep from falling into oblivion in the post-­ apocalypse. For Jimmy, his ecological and genetic entanglement with the life around him is still a hard thing to grasp. In contrast, the eco-political group of the God’s Gardeners’ in The Year of the Flood have made their vision of environmental interconnection, which includes the human as one species among a continuum of many, into the bedrock of their religion.

Saint Crick and Life with a Capital L: New Genetic Dogma in The Year of the Flood In the second volume of Atwood’s trilogy, The Year of the Flood, a genetic conception of life underlies the religious dogmas of the God’s Gardeners. This appropriation of genetic science will be revealed to be intricately bound up with the group’s politics, daily routines and writing practices, as well as with the novel’s aesthetic representation of their central liturgical texts. Already in Oryx and Crake, a religious subtext can be identified: “With its frequent allusions to God, Adam and Eve, paradise, angels, and other biblical figures and images, Oryx and Crake displays the influence of various scriptures, including Genesis, Exodus, Thessalonians and the Gospels” (Hicks 2016, p.  31). In The Year of the Flood, however, these religious motifs are re-interpreted through the framework of genetics and inform the God’s Gardeners’ central precepts. Fittingly, pioneering geneticist Francis Crick is elevated to the status of a saint in their belief system— “Saint Crick” (61).

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According to traditional Christian dogma, life is always defined with recourse to God. In both Old and New Testaments, life exists through relation, not in a biological-ecological sense as relation among species, but in relation to God (Hübner 2004, pp. 56–57). Human life in this context is both granted by and partakes in the eternal life of the divine; in contrast to animals and things, which are subject to a finite existence. The belief system of the God’s Gardeners, while reproducing numerous elements from the Bible, rewrites Judeo-Christian dogma through science and environmental philosophy (see also Bouson 2011, p. 18; Adami 2012, p. 252; Hoogheem 2012, p. 61; Stein 2013, p. 196). In their ecological religion and in direct opposition to Christian orthodoxy, human life is as valuable and as recyclable as animal and other nonhuman being. As Northover points out, “they also revise God’s covenant with His creation to include not just humans but all other animals too” (2016, p.  88; see also Hoogheem 2012, p. 61). The group articulates their conception of this ecological interconnectedness, which they also take to imply an ethics of care for other species, largely in genetic terms. Their genetic dogma hence adds a new voice to the trilogy’s overall engagement with a politicised imagination of the biosphere including and beyond the human. Adam One, the group’s leader, explicitly reinterprets classical Christian dogma through science. In his admittedly selective reading of the Bible: “The Human Words of God speak of the Creation in terms that could be understood by the men of old. There is no talk of galaxies or genes, for such terms would have confused them greatly” (11). As Hamner points out, “scripture operates for Adam’s brethren as both holy and fully human, inspired but unfinished. One major effect is relatively little perceived conflict between religion and science” (Hamner 2017, p. 165). The Christian narrative of creation does not invalidate science and vice versa. Adam re-­ envisions, for instance, the biblical dust from which God made Man “as atoms and molecules” (YF 52). He does betray that this union of science and religion is patchy: he says their correspondence is “close enough” (12). He relies on science to elaborate his religious vision of an ecological community. However, he does make a point of not confusing scientific fact with God, implying that science alone is not capable of providing the kind of spiritual guidance required to exist meaningfully in the world. Adam One’s emphasis on “kinship” (13) among human and nonhuman species features recurrently in his sermons. This kinship is framed as genetic: “We thank Thee, oh God, for having made us in such a way as to remind us, not only of our less than Angelic being, but also of the knots

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of DNA and RNA that tie us to our many fellow Creatures” (53). God is cast as the origin of all life’s genetic being. What is more, it is suggested that it was an intentional act of God to specifically use genetic material to forge this inter-species bond. This vision of a genetic community of beings is foundational to their ecological philosophy. For them, all organisms play a vital role in the continuance of life itself: “Without the Earthworms and Nematodes and Ants, and their endless tilling of the soil, […] it would harden into a cement-like mass, extinguishing all Life” (160). The Gardeners’ ecological awareness exhibits all of Wilson’s three levels of ecology: the ecosystem of the soil, the species of animals involved and their genetic interrelation. Wilson is particularly pertinent in the context of this novel since the Gardeners, in their peculiar new line-up of environmentally conscious or ecocritically significant saints, have also included Wilson as one of their saints (246). Adam One extends the Gardeners’ concept of pan-species life into the evolutionary past. He foregrounds humanity’s animal origins: “On the Feast of Adam and All Primates, we affirm our Primate ancestry” (51). This tenet is repeated in one of the hymns: oh let me not be proud, dear Lord,/ Nor rank myself above/ The other Primates, through whose genes/ We grew into your Love.// A million million years, Your Days,/ Your methods past discerning,/ Yet through Your blend of DNAs/ Came passion, mind, and learning. (54)15

Humanity’s origin in an evolutionary past produces not only a sense of human animality but gives rise to an ethical need to not “rank” the human above other species. Atwood’s choice of the form of the hymn to reveal the Gardeners’ central beliefs has a significant impact on the novel’s representation of their genetic understanding of life. Already in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Atwood included hymns among the panoply of forms she deployed in the novel’s complex engagement with scripture (Larson 1989, p. 35). There, the oral form of the hymn is not only gendered (handmaidens are not supposed to read and write in Gilead), but linked with a contemplation of environmental ruin (Hooker 2006, pp. 277, 280). Both the typical orality 15  Later in the novel, a similar image of the human body as containing an imprint of its deep historical evolution occurs when the body is said to be “builded firm of genes and cells,/ And neurons without number;/ My Ark enfolds the million years/ That Adam spent in slumber” (93).

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of the form and its association with ecological catastrophe connect the hymns in The Handmaid’s Tale and in the MaddAddam trilogy. In fact, in their emphasis on environmental issues, both novels appropriate a focus on nature in the hymn that has shaped the form since Homer and Hesiod (Hooker 2006, p. 276). In The Year of the Flood, the hymn’s concern with nature is re-framed through a genetic perspective, which radically transforms the hymn into a vehicle of contemporary ecocriticism. The form’s historical and intertextual resonances with earlier representations of nature and the environment emphasise the novelty of genetic depictions of ecology as well as their particular outlook on human-environment interactions. The form’s prominence in the text is apparent since the hymn “The Garden”, from “The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook”, is presented to the reader even before the main narrative begins (xi). Invoking the form’s central theme of nature as well as Atwood’s earlier environmentalist emphasis, “The Garden” describes a process of ecological degradation. Initially, “’Twas once the finest Garden/ That ever has been seen”. Now, “By waves of sand are buried/ Both leaf and branch and root”. However, the hymn then introduces the motif which defines the Gardeners’ work ethics throughout the text: “Until the Gardeners arise,/ And you to Life restore” (xi). From the beginning, the hymn is tied up with notions of life and the environment in the novel. As the text progresses and the group’s dogma is expounded, their conception of life is then revealed as thoroughly informed by genetic science. The literary form of the hymn carries additional implications for the Gardeners’ dogma of genetic life. The form is classically characterised as a kind of song in praise of God but in its English tradition since the eighteenth century the hymn has increasingly also addressed more mundane topics (Parker 1975, pp. 398–399). A hymn is usually composed of plain words and retains its association with oral performance, despite the fact that it is now also a distinctly written form (ibid., p. 400), which accounts for its easy assimilation into the inherently versatile and inclusive form of the novel. The hymns in The Year of the Flood represent both the form’s simple style and its liturgical function. The hymns are usually sung by all the Gardeners, perpetuating the form’s purpose of instilling a sense of group cohesion. This community spirit hence takes shape through their performance of the genetically informed communitarian philosophy enshrined in the Gardeners’ dogma. In the novel, the hymn also retains its characteristic emotive appeal; often, however, with a marked sense of self-reflexive irony. As Hamner

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comments: “Atwood’s adaptations of classic English hymns are simultaneously touching and hilarious in their sentimentality […], especially with Zeb playing a (partially) reformed Miltonic Satan in the background, the amusingly devious character who smirks at all forms of excessive piety” (Hamner 2017, p. 161). The text’s intertextual reference to Milton underlines the rich literary history evoked by Atwood’s use of the form. The hymn’s connotation of both oral and written traditions also proves enlightening in the context of the novel. On the surface, it seems that the Gardeners simply follow tradition by performing their hymns together. However, it emerges that they do not keep a written record of any of their foundational texts—hence the “Oral Hymnbook”. Further, the Gardeners even explicitly reject writing anything down, as a precaution against the pervasive surveillance system in place in the pre-pandemic society: “your enemies could trace you through it” (YF 6). The Gardeners’ oral culture is an expression both of their emphasis on community and of the precarity of their political position. Their ecological thinking opposes corporate power and, as a result, the very act of writing becomes subject to the intense power politics in the novel. Even within the group, power hierarchies are not as flat as Adam One’s egalitarian conception of life and community suggests. While the group is set up according to democratic principles, Adam One functions as the de-­ facto leader of the God’s Gardeners. Not only does he have access to a computer—and thus engages in illicit writing practices, according to Gardener doctrine. He also appears to believe that some form of guiding power is necessary for human society to function, which does not absolutely contradict but substantially qualifies his dogmatic emphasis on an encompassing, non-hierarchical community. Adam’s belief in the necessity of leadership appears at least partly motivated by his evolutionary outlook. He goes beyond simply stating a genetic and evolutionary link between human and nonhuman animals that recalls Margulis’s theory of symbiogenesis, or posthumanism’s and ecocriticism’s uses of it. Evoking the sociobiology of McEwan’s protagonist in Enduring Love, and recalling Crake’s remarks to the same effect, Adam One draws on evolutionary biology to explain present human behaviour—the “blend of DNAs” that produce “passion, mind, and learning”, in the words of his own hymn. Further, he exclaims in one of this orations: “Our appetites, our desires, our more uncontrollable emotions—all are Primate!” (52) Adam One also contends that humans have an evolutionary propensity for religion: “We’ve evolved to believe in gods” (241). And the trilogy

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suggests that if religion is understood as a form of community held together by a shared sense of belonging, then this might indeed be true. The Crakers elicit this interpretation as they come to develop, guided by Jimmy as their reluctant prophet, a belief system of their own. Ingersoll argues convincingly that the community-building of the God’s Gardeners around their religion does indeed prove an evolutionary advantage over their fellow humans who perish in the pandemic (Ingersoll 2004). At the same time, Adam admits that such community-building requires a punishing moral instance like God to inhibit humanity’s destructive tendencies (241). His leadership indicates that humanity’s genetically determined “uncontrollable emotions” even require guidance beyond that which a belief in a deity can provide. This scepticism of humankind’s ability to moral restraint, in fact, recalls Crake’s pessimism about the human species. The novel’s mocking representation of some of the Gardeners’ more idiosyncratic conventions and dogmas suggests that the group does not present a serious proposition of a utopian ecological society (see also Northover 2016, p. 88). The trilogy’s satirical treatment of religion comes to a head in the scathing depiction in MaddAddam of the singularly hypocritical Church of “PetrOleum”, run by Zeb’s father (see also Bouson 2015, p. 345); Zeb is another member of the Gardeners (MA 111). The “Lion Isaiahists” in turn seem simply hopelessly forlorn in their belief in the coming of a “Peaceable Kingdom” (YF 94). In comparison, the Gardeners’ faith appears the most convincing and earnest. Despite their more ridiculous aspects, the group indeed “represent the trilogy’s most successful resistance to corporate abuses” (Hamner 2017, p.  153). The success of the group is also not hindered by the fact that several members, like Toby or Ren, never truly believe in the kind of deity proposed by Adam One. In private, their leader himself confesses to a rather pragmatic foundation of his beliefs (241). It appears darkly ironic that Adam One welcomes the apocalypse he is convinced is coming, a conviction that drives his group’s efforts to prepare for what they call the “Waterless Flood” (YF 6). It is not entirely clear if Adam One knew of Crake’s exact plans but since Crake is revealed to be in covert contact with the Gardeners, it can be surmised that Adam One’s prophetic knowledge is in fact founded on inside information about what is going to happen. In any case, Adam’s secret contact with Crake again emphasises his privileged position among the Gardeners. Adam One is even directly implicated in Crake’s plans by providing him with the raw form of the virus that eventually decimates the human population (Hamner

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2017, pp. 159–160). His embrace of the necessity to annihilate most of humankind is ironic to the point of cynicism because it entails a large-scale destruction of innocent lives, an act that runs counter to his core tenets. As Ren recalls: “The Gardeners were strict about not killing Life” (59). But Adam One justifies this annihilation as a necessary purge: “It is not this Earth that is to be demolished: it is the Human Species. Perhaps God will create another, more compassionate race to take our place” (424; see also Hamner 2017, p. 164). Adam One’s willingness to sacrifice human life is yet another way in which the novel invites scepticism towards his beliefs, even though, in MaddAddam, Gardener lore is ultimately shown to survive first in Toby’s diary and then in the Craker boy Blackbeard’s book. In the Gardeners’ religion, sacrifice features prominently and is connected to a deified conception of Life with a capital L. Adam One conceives of Life as a divine instance similar to Christian dogma when he demands: “Should your life be required of you, rest assured it is required by Life” (347). However, he reinterprets Christian eternity in God as a cyclical returning to the biosphere: “Shall we not repay the gift of Life by regifting ourselves to Life when the time comes?” (161) And in contrast to Christian dogma, the Gardeners’ concept of Life is non-hierarchical: “We pray that we may not fall into the error of pride by considering ourselves as exceptional, alone in all Creation in having Souls; and that we will not vainly imagine that we are set above all other Life, and may destroy it at our pleasure, and with impunity” (53). The reference to souls cautions not to equate Life in Adam’s doctrine too easily with the biosphere as the totality of life. Life with a capital L contains a similar mysticism as Nature with a capital N.  Their shared intimation of transcendence invokes Morton’s third sense of nature as an idealised object of fantasy where “Nature wavers in between the divine and the material” (Morton 2009, p. 14). Both fulfil a similar function by presenting an ideal that is supposed to inspire an ethical response. With regard to Nature, Morton warns against the obfuscating distance such an idealised version of the environment places between humans and the ecosystem that surrounds and suffuses them. Life in the mystical sense of the God’s Gardeners could be considered subject to a similar danger. However, as part of Adam One’s teachings, Life is constantly embedded in scientifically informed invocations of ecological systems which arguably amounts to the effect Morton has in mind by suggesting to replace Nature by ecology. Just as Morton’s theoretical work on the environment is informed by a sense of urgency for effecting change in the face of an accelerating climate

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change, the Gardeners’ doctrines reflect a political agenda. The Gardeners have retreated to their tellingly named “Edencliff Garden” (5) on a rooftop above the pleeblands where they pursue an alternative lifestyle to the consumerist society that surrounds them, and enact various forms of “resistances to the instrumentalization of life” (Narkunas 2015, p. 2; see also Canavan 2012, p.  154). The Gardeners’ response to this political contest is a tactical retreat while they prepare for the waterless flood. In doing so, they re-appropriate the capitalist genetic imaginary for their own ends to envision an ecological coexistence between genetically related species. The Gardeners’ ecological appropriation of genetic discourses from their capitalist applications is not without contradictions. On the one hand, Adam One scornfully condemns scientists in the Compounds as “ruining the world” (146) by creating genetic chimeras (see also 277). On the other hand, in the Gardeners’ own garden, spliced plant and animal species are depicted as contributing to the garden’s fecund splendour: “the chickenpeas have begun to pod, the beananas are in flower” (16). And the genetically engineered “kudzu-moth caterpillars”, with their absurd “baby face at the front end, with big eyes and a happy smile”, product of “those jokey moves so common in the first years of gene-­ splicing”, seem humorous rather than menacingly “unnatural” (16). Thus, Adam One’s initially normative conception of nature is being undermined by the reality of life around him. This interpretation is heightened once we read, with Northover, the rooftop garden as prefiguring life after the apocalypse (2016, p. 88), which teems with chimerical life forms. The novel suggests that while Adam One seems to be undecided about the status of chimeras, “Life” is already beginning to incorporate the splices into the biosphere.

MaddAddam: Literature, Ecology and the Future of Life In the final volume of Atwood’s trilogy, MaddAddam, a key question is the role that cultural writing practices will have alongside genetic and epigenetic forms of transmission in determining the future of the newly formed inter-species communities. MaddAddam continues both previous novels’ storylines together as one. The trilogy’s conceptions of life itself, human life and of human-environment interrelations come prominently

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to the fore in the novel’s discussion of how an unlikely community of humans, Crakers, pigoons and other animals and plants, both engineered and not, tries to survive after the apocalyptic events recounted in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. The final novel consists of the homodiegetic stories Toby tells the Crakers, having inherited the job of prophet and guide from Jimmy who has fallen sick; and a present tense heterodiegetic narration that adopts the past tense when Zeb recounts his previous life story to Toby. The novel significantly ends with the written, autodiegetic narration by one of the Craker boys, Blackbeard, whom Toby has taught to read and write. A central figure in the final narrative is Zeb, already known as the leather-jacket wearing, street-smart counterpart of Adam One at the leadership level of the God’s Gardeners from The Year of the Flood. In MaddAddam, Zeb is revealed to be Adam One’s brother, a sought-after hacker who had forged connections to Crake and other Compound scientists before joining the Gardeners. While in hiding from the Compound’s security forces, the CorpSeCorps, he accepts a job at “Bearlift” (58), an environmental protection outfit that flies food to starving bears out in the Canadian wilderness as the aggravating consequences of climate change make it harder for them to survive. The project is described, through Zeb’s focalisation, as “a scam” (59) catering to a rich clientele who satisfy their conscience by doing something for the preservation of Nature: “It lived off the good intentions of city types with disposable emotions who liked to think they were saving something—some rag from their primordial authentic ancestral past” (59). The futility of this scheme—as well as the schism between the donors’ idea of Nature and the ecological reality—is revealed through the unsustainable nature of the enterprise. The bears become totally dependent on human intervention, a fact that undermines the idealised protectionist vision the endeavour displays to the public. The concept of Nature underlying Bearlift has already been shown in the two previous novels to deflect from the ecological totality of life that constitutes the natural environment, especially after the pandemic when human structures are reclaimed by plant growth and animals. This different ecological concept of nature is more akin to Clark’s second sense of nature as the “biosphere” (Clark 2013, p. 75). The novel itself offers a humorous yet profound gloss on this resurgence of life as nature unbounded in the form of an overwhelming number of slugs and snails that encroach upon Toby’s attempts at cultivating salad (96).

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The negotiation of life in the novel centres on two clusters of concerns. First, the text investigates further the interrelations between human and nonhuman life forms through a genetic matrix. In the final volume, the nonhuman life forms are foregrounded as the environment that envelops and penetrates human life. Here the concept of life essentially takes the place of the concept of environment, prioritising the animate over the inanimate. Second, the novel’s brief but significant discussion of epigenetics reflects a renewed interest in life as gene-environment interrelations. I will begin by considering the novel’s depiction of the biosphere as a genetic community of companion species. MaddAddam differs from the two prior volumes by intensifying its representation of ecological interconnection in an almost grotesquely harmonious union of species in battle. The novel’s setting also grants a wider scope to a posthumanist interrogation of the ‘human’ as Crakers and human survivors come to live more closely together. This posthumanist investigation of the species connections not only between Crakers and remaining Homo sapiens but also among all surviving species and splices, especially the pigoons, serves to question humanity’s role and ontology in the ecological make-up of life in the trilogy’s post-apocalyptic world—and by implication, in our own. In this critical impetus of the novel, the trilogy’s resonances with both posthumanist and ecocritical concerns come strongest to the fore. On the Crakers’ arrival at the “cobb-house” (MA 95), the makeshift shelter of the human survivors, they are greeted with scepticism and referred to as “‘Crake’s Frankenpeople’” (MA 19). Many of the remaining humans are ex-scientists from the Paradice project and are familiar with the Crakers as well as the process of their creation by genetic recombination. One describes this process as “a meat-computer set of problems to be solved” (MA 43), thereby both objectifying and othering the Crakers as decidedly sub-human. The particular formulation here alludes of course to similar notions about Frankenstein’s monster whose perceived otherness to his human creator marks the central conflict of Mary Shelley’s novel. Recalling the bond between the creature and Frankenstein, the continuous comparison of the Crakers to humans upholds the kinship that seems to exists between the two species in spite of expressions to the opposite. Othering the Crakers indicates a motivation in the human survivors to protect their identity-constituting conception of the “human”. At the same time, three developments in MaddAddam complicate this view that the Crakers are a nonhuman other. One, the story’s final battle

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presents a moment of inter-species connection that undermines any absolute species boundaries. This also renders the category of the human so fluid as to encapsulate the Crakers’ provocative and uncanny humanity. Two, the birth of inter-species babies, born from Crakers and humans, emphasises their compatibility as species. Three, the ending’s stress on the role and fate of narrative as a human form of representation and knowledge poses the question whether by adopting narrative, the Crakers demonstrate their humanity, or whether in doing so they in fact transform the nature of narrative to include a non-anthropocentric perspective. The final battle in MaddAddam witnesses the union of humans, Crakers and pigoons against a common enemy: the two “Painballers” (27) who pose the primary threat to the other survivors’ safety after the apocalypse. The Painballers are called after their forced participation in the “Painball” arena, a twenty-first-century incarnation of the Roman Games in which participants battle each other to the death. Whoever makes it out alive has become a sociopathic killer and Painballers are nefarious troublemakers in the pleeblands. Earlier in MaddAddam, a trial held against the captured Painballers by the human survivors enacted a debate about whether their complete lack of empathy and morality does in fact strip them of their humanity, adding a new and more humanist angle to the trilogy’s enquiry into definitions of the human. However, the Painballers escape and threaten the humans and the Crakers congregated in the cobb-house as well as the pigoons, which they hunt for food. Together, an unlikely inter-­ species army tracks down the Painballers, in an elegant narrative circle, back to the Paradice dome. In the ensuing battle, both Painballers, Adam One, one of the pigoons and Jimmy die. After the battle, the winning parties agree on a treaty laying down a mutual respect for each other’s lives. Ciobanu underlines how thus at the end of the trilogy “a species-based anthropocentrism gives way to a form of community-belonging that is reformulated from biological to ethico-social terms” (Ciobanu 2014, p. 160). The terms of this battle and the inter-species concord that follows it oscillate between satire and utopia. The pathos of the image of two pigoons carrying Jimmy back to camp to some extent undermines the more subtle inroads the trilogy suggests into the revaluation of the biosphere as a space for the companionship of species in Haraway’s conception. However, I find it more plausible to read the final battle as a culmination of the gradual convergence between species into a functional, ecological unit that emerges from the trilogy’s proposal of an ethics of care between

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species. Notably, all individual species still assume different roles in the battle—the pigoons track, the humans charge—preventing a simplistic collapse of difference between them. Instead, at the end of the trilogy, the three species of humans, Crakers and pigoons seem to accept an understanding of significant otherness. Tellingly, and anthropocentrically so, the genetic relatedness between these three species is the most pronounced. Connected through shared DNA, their symbiogenetic community echoes their ethical communion in a hopeful glimpse of utopia at the end of the world. Given that both Crakers and pigoons as splices also contain together a multiplicity of genes from other species, and given that the human organism at this point has been thoroughly geneticised and genetically extended into the species history of all life, their genetic community firmly establishes a continuity between their species. What is more, the meaning of the human effectively ceases to matter in this vision of an ecology of life in which all participants have a part to play, even if these parts are differently distributed. Genetic kinship is expressly politicised in that it is shown to entail an ecological responsibility, which the trilogy here foregrounds as an ethical ideal also for the reader. With the God’s Gardeners, the trilogy has already demonstrated however that ecological ideals are never entirely realistic. Faced with an onslaught of slugs, Toby does not hesitate to bend Gardener dogma to allow for the killing of some Life (YF 96). Toby’s actions illustrate how belief systems may not only be interpreted dogmatically but also pragmatically, recalling Adam One’s use of Gardener theology to manipulate his community of followers. The final battle’s utopian vision of an inter-species concord then seems to function equally as an ethical polemic rather than as unalterable dogma. An inter-species ethics of care is linked to the different distribution of power in the novel. Humans do not automatically dominate such a power hierarchy, the text suggests. The Craker boy Blackbeard displayed a uniquely non-anthropocentric source of power during the final battle by translating between the different species. As Pusch notes: “These skills of the Crakers to communicate with humans, nonhumans, and the natural world alike ascribe power to the hybrid nonhuman agents and turns them into the ultimate decision-makers” (2015, p.  65). Canavan also sees a promise of potential change in the Crakers, arguing that “the Crakers allegorize the radical transformation of both society and subjectivity that will be necessary in order to save the planet” (2012, p.  152). Yet, for Canavan, their subjectivity remains alien (ibid., p.  154). Rather than

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postulating an ontological abyss between human and nonhuman perceptions, I hold that the trilogy offers a chance at least to imagine such a posthuman union of subjectivities and the kind of agency this would afford. The narration of the final battle—as well as, significantly, the written record—is taken over by Blackbeard, which highlights the novel’s discussion of writing as a purely human practice (MA 358). In an act that foreshadows Blackbeard’s inheritance of the role of group orator and chronicler from Toby, he takes over the report of the battle to the Crakers as Toby is too distraught by the death of her friends. Schönfellner has argued that the Crakers’ adoption of narrative suggests that they display a genetic predisposition for storytelling in order to make sense of complex events (Schönfellner 2015, p. 288). This argument seems convincing in light of the fact that they also, in spite of Crake’s explicit designs to the contrary, develop a proto-religious belief system based on the stories Jimmy tells them of their origins in Paradice and of their creators Oryx, who made the animals, and Crake, who made the Crakers. Their desire for origin stories suggests an innate propensity for narrative. The question of how much of the Crakers’ behaviour is down to genetic predisposition rather than cultural and environmental influences is explicitly addressed in a discussion on epigenetics among the surviving scientists in the group—they all still use their names from the Extinctathon game where Crake recruited them: Ivory Bill, Manatee, Tamaraw, and Zunzuncito have cleared their plates and are deep into a discussion of epigenetics. How much of Craker behaviour is inherited, how much is cultural? Do they even have what you could call a culture, separate from the expression of their genes? Or are they more like ants? (139)

This is the trilogy’s only explicit engagement with epigenetics, that branch of genetic science concerned with environmental influences on gene expression and transmission. In the larger cultural discourse on epigenetics, its scientific foundation has frequently been appropriated into a broader investigation of the interplay of biology and environment in an individual’s development. Here, the group seems to discuss such a broader sense of epigenetics where anything not directly determined by genes qualifies as an epigenetic factor. This is how “culture” is made to feature as an epigenetic factor. In the only other critical commentary on Atwood’s trilogy and epigenetics, Cooke similarly treats language as an epigenetic

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factor, proposing that human nature in Oryx and Crake—in Cooke’s humanist sense—is the product of “the epigenetic […] function of language and technics” (Cooke 2006, p. 122). The group agrees that some aspects of the Crakers’ behaviour is clearly pre-determined: “The mating cycle is genetic, obviously, say Zunzuncito, as are the changes in female abdominal and genital pigmentation that accompany estrus” (139). Their singing in contrast is described as another instance of something like the resurgence of religion that could not be edited out without turning them completely apathetic (139). Some aspects of their behaviour, it seems, lie beyond the reach of genetic engineering whose continuous presence can only be accounted for by a lingering humanism that is simultaneously biological and beyond biological intervention. There is no simple interpretation of the trilogy’s stance on genetic determinism. Crake’s failure in subjecting his creations completely to his intended designs undermines any absolute belief in the pre-determining qualities of genes (Narkunas 2015, pp. 15–16). On the other hand, some of their behavioural trends do seem genetically heritable like a propensity for storytelling—from which religion is suggested to arise.16 The trilogy’s genetic imaginary of life is thus not clear about the extent to which the genetic ties between species are indicative of concomitant predestination. The general sense of possibility connected to genetic life in the trilogy suggests that biological determinism has its limits, leaving room for mutation as in the case of the first hybrid human-Craker babies. Though not a spontaneous mutation but result of species interbreeding, these babies nevertheless signify the openness of life to new permutations. Tellingly, the imminent arrival of these hybrid children prompted the debate on epigenetics (MA 380), and hence on the notion of genetic indeterminacy, in the first place. Although the ubiquity of genetic discourse and imagery in 16  Another moment in the final novel upholds its ambiguity towards determinism in the form of a particularly complex thought experiment. When one of the human survivors, Amanda, is devastated that because one of the Painballers has raped her she is now pregnant with his child, “Toby tries to think of something to say—something upbeat and soothing. Genes aren’t a total destiny? Nature versus nurture, good can come of evil? There are the epigenetic switches to be considered” but states that neither to her “seems very convincing” (MA 216–217). Toby’s thinking on epigenetics is complicated further by the trilogy’s suggestion that the Painballers’ abhorrent behaviour is a result of their socialisation in the Painball arena. While Amanda’s worry about the child’s character—“a child with such warped genes would be a monster” (369)—begs the question if the Painballer’s behaviour is heritable, it remains uncertain if, should it be passed on, this behaviour was the result of a prior genetic disposition or indeed proof of the heritability of acquired characteristics.

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the novels might be taken to betray a rather more serious investment in the predictive qualities of genes, the text’s use of genetics to picture inter-­ species relations, I argue, suggests a less prescriptive connotation of genetic being. The trilogy’s marginal discussion of epigenetics I hold to be a sign of its historical origin at a moment when epigenetics as a discipline was only just beginning to emerge. The arrival of the human-Craker babies, furthermore, comments on the text’s central topic of the fate of the human. One of the scientists holds: “If they can crossbreed with us, then case made, same species” (206). In this logic the successful birth of healthy, inter-species babies at the end of the novel suggests that the Crakers are in fact of the same species as the human survivors (379), which would constitute a considerable extension of the category of the human, especially if we keep in mind the earlier casting of the Crakers as the human other. The birth of the child also foreshadows the eventual dilution of any ‘pure’ human genome in the hybridisation of genetic ancestries that accompanies human-Craker reproduction (Schönfellner 2018, p.  154). As it seems harder and harder to identify a sense of human singularity in the novel, it seems prudent to recall Morton’s advice that “[i]nstead of trying to figure out who or what is more or less [human], let’s begin with the scientific fact of coexistence, which includes symbiosis (and endosymbiosis)” (Morton 2014, p. 301). In defending the concept of the human, it seems, the human does protest too much. Finally, however, the question of the Crakers’ humanity is entangled with how to read the trilogy’s ending. Critics are divided on whether the end of the three novels, which by themselves  as novels symbolise the ongoing generation of stories, signals the beginning of a cyclical movement that will see humanity, now including the Crakers, relapse into old destructive patterns or whether there is a note of hope at the close that points in a new direction. Mohr exemplifies the former interpretation, arguing that at the end “the posthumans evolve into humans” (Mohr 2007, p.  22). Osborne more cautiously admits to the possibility of this scenario: “If the Crakers continue developing as they have, creating hierarchies and sign systems contrary to Crake’s design, or if the humans are able to reproduce, then there is a chance that the whole cycle of civilization destroying itself could be repeated” (Osborne 2008, p. 41). For these critics, stressing the Crakers’ humanity corresponds to an emphasis on their inheritance of the human propensity for conflict and exploitation. By contrast, the Crakers’ significant difference to the humans can also be

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interpreted as opening up the possibility for a nonhuman political and ecological perspective not destined to repeat the mistakes of their human ancestors (Schönfellner 2018, pp. 192–193; Pusch 2015, p. 65). Narrative and language are presented as deeply connected with an image of the human individual that Jimmy comes to epitomise. Even if with his record of treating women badly and his tendency for substance abuse he represents a troubled version of humanism. But it is he who upholds language as a source of wonder, attends a dilapidated humanities college, defends—rather unsuccessfully—the value of art (OC 196–198) and rescues narrative as a form of knowledge after the apocalypse by telling the Crakers stories about the past. And as long as he is cast as the sole human survivor, at least in Oryx and Crake, human language still persists, even though it seems certain to disappear with him. He imagines a linguistic record of his fate to be pointless in the absence of “a future reader” (45). In Jimmy’s solitude, but also, implicitly for others, like Toby, language itself slowly loses its grasp on reality: “Language itself had lost its solidity, it had become thin, contingent, slippery, a viscid film on which he was sliding around like an eyeball on a plate” (305–306). As humanity fades away, the novel suggests, so does a particular way of perceiving and knowing the world, which is why, for Toby, her record of the Gardeners’ hymns and rituals is a way to cope with the loss of human society. Significantly, this is the first time that there is a written record of the Gardeners’ songs and sermons, indicating both that they need no longer be kept secret and that she, contrary to Jimmy, believes in a “future reader”. In this context, the Crakers’ contrasting emphasis on oral storytelling suggests a difference between the species. However, this contrast gives way to new forms of interaction between both the species and their particular modes of narration. Taking up the baton of storyteller from Toby, Blackbeard seems to adopt of a truly human form of experience, despite the negative consequences this might entail. Even Toby wonders after having taught Blackbeard to read and write what “can of worms” she has opened (MA 204). Yet, Atwood does something more complex than pessimistically imagining a cyclical return of the destructive aspects associated in the text with the human, and, by extension, with humanism. There is certainly an element to the trilogy that caters to a nostalgia towards humanist ideals first in an era of consumerism and scientific reductionism and then in a post-apocalyptic future in which language seems as doomed as the rest of humanity’s achievements. In that light, the ending’s emphasis on storytelling, marking the end of a novel no less, the epitome of

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modern narrative art, does not let go entirely of anthropocentric forms of knowledge and perspective. However, Blackbeard also imports his Craker heritage to human narrative. In Northover’s phrase: “the Crakers preserve (and extend) the word” (Northover 2016, p. 94). The Crakers adapt to rituals of storytelling at the same time as they effect in Jimmy a greater “respect for all life and for the natural environment” through his exposure to their beliefs: “As the Crakers, in their desire for stories and their emerging use of symbolic systems, seem to be moving more toward human characteristics, Snowman is beginning to adopt some of their customs” (Osborne 2008, pp. 40, 41). Schönfellner goes further and elucidates that the Crakers, in their sense of narrative as a group ritual, actively shape the conventions of Toby’s narration: “Even though only Toby’s words are given in the text, the reader is made to understand that the Crakers see storytelling as a group process, since Toby’s reactions to the Crakers’ interruptions are given in the text” (Schönfellner 2015, p. 291). The end of the novel emphasises a future for storytelling, albeit possibly from a non-anthropocentric perspective. It is Blackbeard, the Craker boy, who narrates the ending and who, as is revealed, becomes the keeper of the very book we read. In contrast to Jimmy and Toby, he can also communicate with at least one animal species, the pigoons, if not with more (MA 264). A biosemiotic interpretation of this would stress that Blackbeard’s ability for cross-species communication only illustrates the semiotic web of communication that already exists between all of life: “A biosemiotic theory of reading suggests our rich connectedness not only to the life of human representations but also to the Book of Nature itself” (Wheeler 2013, p.  129). For Wheeler, “Human ways of modeling the world depend, of course, upon human semiotic capacities—language and its discursive forms in myth, religion, art, mathematics, and science—but these, in turn, depend on forms of semiosis, and semiotic patterns and earthly habit formations, which belong in some form to other kinds of life too” (Wheeler 2013, p.  128). In a biosemiotic framework, Blackbeard could be seen to expand “human ways of modelling the world” by including nonhuman forms of semiosis and meaning-making. In this manner, the trilogy moves beyond an extensive critique of the boundaries between human and environment, with the Crakers as principal vehicles of that critique. With Blackbeard a new narrative voice arises that is representative of a larger spectrum of experience than a humanist conception of narrative allows. On the level of representation, Blackbeard’s

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non-anthropocentric perspective is practically indistinguishable from Toby’s previous narration, only stylistically his narration still appears somewhat unpractised. This and Blackbeard’s capitalising of “Book” (MA 388) are the only formal intimations of a nonhuman narrator. Rather than representing a fully nonhuman perspective, the trilogy’s seems to push the pressure points of the novel form to test its non-anthropocentric affordances. The possibility of a nonhuman narrative seems more a potential of the future that might only be realised in a new narrative form. Yet by appropriating the human science of genetics, the trilogy makes use of that discipline’s underlying assumption that, while inaccessible to other species, its knowledge is just as true for human as for nonhuman beings. Atwood’s text capitalises on this species-indifferent epistemological claim that generally informs modern science. As a consequence, I argue, the trilogy’s aesthetic of using genetics to depict webs of relation among the life forms of its storyworld, between humans, Crakers, pigoons, ants and zucchini, offers a novel way to imagine a non-­anthropocentric community of life. This multiplicity of life forms, of bios, conjointly produces an overarching conception of zoe, of life itself. In its totalising abstraction, life assumes the meaning of animate environment in a way that scientifically foregrounds collective ecological interconnection. The environment recast in the image of the biosphere renders life itself as a domain of considerable political urgency. As much as the humans at the end of the three novels form part of the ecologies of life they envision, and the novels portray nature as a recalcitrant force in its own right, political power of the kind that could prevent ecological catastrophe still resides wholly with the humans. It is not without irony that at the end of Atwood’s trilogy, which is so heavily invested in discourses of genetics, genetic science most likely disappears as an epistemic perspective on human and nonhuman life. The surviving human geneticists already lament the fact that without their technological apparatuses they can no longer test the Crakers scientifically (MA 99). A particular way of knowing living organisms is hence shown to be disappearing in the trilogy’s post-apocalyptic environment where scientific institutions stand abandoned. Genetic paradigms of life appear as the historically specific phenomena contemporary philosophy of science has shown them to be (see chapter “Introduction: Books of Life in the Long Century of the Gene”). Acutely responsive to the public prominence of genetic science around the Human Genome Project, Atwood’s trilogy engages the genetic epistemes of its day and develops on their basis an aesthetic and epistemologically self-reflexive representation of the

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biosphere that connects human and nonhuman organisms in a genetic conception of life. The genetic ties the trilogy establishes between individual species foreground a genetic perspective on inter-species relationality that evokes Margulis’s symbiogenesis theories as appropriated by both posthumanist and ecocritical scholars. As species boundaries crumble in the text in the face of inter-species kinship and cooperation, a textual ecology of life emerges in the trilogy. By interrogating the imbrication of the human in environmental networks where human and nonhuman being intersect, the trilogy combines impulses from both critical posthumanism and environmental criticism. The world-building potential of this ecology is most prominent in the representation of thriving life after the apocalyptic event of the pandemic. Embedding the human organism in an ecological multiplicity of life forms, a conception of life itself emerges from the text that— ontologically—is non-hierarchical. However, the trilogy’s investment in uttering a dystopian warning of corporate abuses of genetic science results in a focus on biopolitics that infuses the trilogy’s ecologies of life with a sense of power that is quite clearly distributed differently, even after the pandemic. The  vision of an inter-species community at the end of the three novels includes a recognition of, to recall Haraway’s useful term, the significant otherness that pervades the biosphere and the ethical responsibilities this entails. The trilogy’s final intimation of a non-anthropocentric narrative perspective underlines the text’s concern with the representability of nonhuman life in the novel. I argue that the trilogy reconfigures the form’s traditional focus on narratives of human lives characterised by events and psychological complexity, introducing into the novel a radically expanded and genetically informed cross-species community of life. Atwood’s use of genetics in this endeavour both echoes the agenda of the Earth BioGenome Project and imaginatively transcends it. Further, by connecting its aesthetic representation of an interconnected genetic totality of life with the social, political, ethical and cultural ramifications of this epistemological approach to human and nonhuman life, the MaddAddam trilogy exemplifies how the novel as a form allows to critically explore the implications of genetic knowledge for human society and ultimately for all life on the planet.

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Hengen, Shannon. 2010. Margaret Atwood and Environmentalism. In The Cambridge Introduction to Margaret Atwood, ed. by H.  D. Macpherson, 72–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hicks, Heather J. 2016. The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Modernity beyond Salvage. London: Palgrave. Hoogheem, Andrew. 2012. Secular Apocalypses: Darwinian Criticism and Atwoodian Floods. Mosaic 45: 55–71. Hooker, Deborah. 2006. (Fl)orality, Gender and the Environmental Ethos of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Twentieth-Century Literature 52: 275–305. Howells, Coral Ann. 2006. Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Visions: The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake. The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, ed. C. A. Howells, 161–175. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hübner, H. 2004. Leben: Der Lebensbegriff der Bibel. In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. J. Ritter, K. Gründer and G. Gabriel, 56–59. Basel: Schwabe. Ingersoll, Earl G. 2004. Survival in Margaret Atwood’s Novel Oryx and Crake. Extrapolation 45: 162–175. Korte, Barbara. 2008. Fundamentalism and the End: A Reading of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake in the Context of Last Man Fiction. In Literary Encounters of Fundamentalism: A Case Book, ed. K. Stierstorfer and A. Kern-­ Stähler, 151–163. Heidelberg: Winter. Kroon, Ariel. 2015. Reasonably Insane: Affect and Crake in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. Canadian Literature 226: 18–33. Ku, Chung-Hao. 2006. Of Monster and Man: Transgenics and Transgression in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. Concentric 32: 107–133. Larson, Janet L. 1989. Margaret Atwood and the Future of Prophesy. Religion & Literature 21: 27–61. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. LeMenager, Stephanie et al. 2011. Introduction. In Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century, ed. S. LeMenager et al., 1–15. London: Routledge. Lewin, Harris A. et al. 2018. Earth BioGenome Project: Sequencing Life for the Future of Life. PNAS 115: 4325–4333. Love, Glen A. 1999. Ecocriticism and Science: Toward Consilience? New Literary History 30: 561–576. Marks, Jonathan. 2002. What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes. Oakland: University of California Press. McHugh, Susan. 2010. Real Artificial: Tissue-cultured Meat, Genetically Modified Farm Animals, and Fictions. Configurations 18: 181–197. Mohr, Dunja M. 2007. Transgressive Utopian Dystopias: The Postmodern Reappearance of Utopia in the Disguise of Dystopia. ZAA 55: 5–24. Morton, Timothy. 2014. Deconstruction and/as Ecology. In The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, ed. Greg Garrard, 291–304. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Conclusion: Levels of Life in the Novel

This book aims to show how the novel has explored the impact of genetics on various aspects of life, from foundational conceptions to everyday experiences. In the preceding chapters, the novel has been observed to engage in multifarious ways, both creatively and critically, with specific formal, discursive and epistemological dimensions of genetic conceptions of life. In addition, I have argued that genetic discourses of life have enabled an aesthetic self-reflection of the aesthetics of life in the novel. The formal and epistemological engagement with genetics has created an opportunity for the novel to revisit fundamental assumptions about how it configures the relationship between representation, art and the material world. A. S. Byatt’s quartet of novels illustrates paradigmatically how the suggestive conception of life as genetic text in particular has given shape to a new literary self-exploration. In the quartet, the metaphor of DNA as text is revealed as analogical when it is used ontologically in scientific parlance, and, at the same time, reinforced as ontological when characters describe reproduction and the development of new life during and after pregnancy. This tension between analogy and ontology in the genetic metaphors in the text extends into what I have called Byatt’s self-conscious organic forms. On the one hand, the tetralogy suggests a possible link between biological and artistic form, linking theological, artistic and genetic

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processes of giving form through the concept of “information”. On the other, the text questions such direct continuities between art and life, positing that reality in its material specificity ultimately eludes all linguistic representation. The suggestion of an organic link between literature and reality in the text, alongside its self-reflexive denial, accords with the quartet’s overall epistemological emphasis on “seeing the likeness in the difference”, to use Byatt’s own phrase (Byatt 1993, p. 20). The quartet seems to argue that it is only by showing how language transcends reality that language’s potential continuity with reality can be articulated; and, in parallel, it is only by showing how the metaphor of DNA as text transcends biological materiality that the concrete actualities of life—as captured by the metaphor—can be brought to light. Just as the novels’ self-reflexive investigation of the nature of literary representation emerges from their appropriation of genetic metaphors, their critique of genetic epistemology is performed by their aesthetic construction. In different ways, all the novels in this study perform such aesthetic-­ epistemological negotiations of genetic conceptions of life. Their authors draw on genetic discourses to interrogate their intrinsic forms and propositions, and to explore how genetic discourses may inform and illuminate representation in the novel itself. In Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf, genetic knowledge is revealed, on one level, as historically specific and culturally situated. On another level, the novel’s particular treatment of genetic discourses highlights explicitly the affective and personal focus of literary representations of science. On yet another level, the novel’s engagement with genetic science, both conceptually and aesthetically, expands the representational scope of fictional life writing by renegotiating the genre’s conception of “life” through genetics. In Ian McEwan’s novels Enduring Love and Saturday, in turn, the sustained analogies between genetic and aesthetic structures of determinism and chance perform a critique of sociobiological and medical genetic determinisms. This critique intimately shapes the texts’ overall aesthetics, and self-reflexively explores the limits of fictional representation of randomness as a fact of the physical world. Finally, in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, genetic conceptions of life offer a discourse and aesthetic through which to reimagine human life as part of all life on the planet. This genetic imaginary is then employed to critically engage the anthropocentrism laid bare by the text’s emphasis on inter-species kinship in human forms of symbolic representation—especially in its own form as a trilogy of novels. As this study has shown, what all the novels above have in common, from Byatt

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to Atwood, is this double focus on genetic science as both an object of investigation and a vehicle for aesthetic experimentation and epistemological self-reflection. In their multifaceted formal and philosophical engagements with genetics, these authors transform genetic science according to their own aesthetic and thematic practices. Two main levels of conceptual abstraction can be distinguished in the contemporary novel’s negotiation of genetic life. (This is in addition to the various aesthetic levels on which this negotiation takes place, from metanarrative commentary and plot to character constructions and metaphors.) The first of these conceptual levels discerns at a high level of abstraction a genetic understanding of life itself. The second level encompasses all those more specialised genetic discourses that grow out of a general conception of life as genetic (such as genetic identity, genetic privacy or genetic determinism).1 Although the two levels are intricately related and mutually inform each other, their different levels of abstraction elucidate the modes in which genetic discourses are diversified in their novelistic representations. The first level denotes, for instance, the genetic re-framing of life in the fictional life writing of Mendel’s Dwarf. Biographical writing, almost by definition, brings a more abstract sense of life into focus, traditionally with a view to the events of a person’s life. The genetic perspective on life writing in Mawer’s novel, on this more abstract level, expands the genre’s conception of life from a sole focus on bios, or socio-cultural life, and into zoe, or biological life. In McEwan’s Enduring Love and Saturday, such abstract-level conceptions of life feature as the object of structural and aesthetic analysis. In Enduring Love, the initial balloon accident reveals to Joe, the protagonist, the contingency of any one life’s survival and negotiates an analogy between the role of chance in aesthetic constructions and in living organisms. This analogy between narrative and genetic structures of functional organisation is revisited in Saturday, where, additionally, the protagonist’s reductionist genetic worldview of life is encapsulated explicitly in a quotation by Darwin about life conceived at the highest level of abstraction: “There is grandeur in this view of life”. Byatt’s quartet highlights genetic metaphors of life on a similarly abstract but metalinguistic level of interrogation, considering the relations between physical genetic 1  For a discussion of cultural responses to the issue of genetic privacy in particular, see Hamann-Rose (2019) and the “Fictions of Genetic Privacy” special issue of the Journal of Literature and Science edited by Jay Clayton and Claire Sisco King (2022).

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life and its representation in genetic metaphors, both in scientific and in literary contexts. In Atwood’s trilogy, finally, it is at the abstract level of a genetic understanding of life that her poetics of inter-species kinship revaluates conceptions of human life. Radically rethinking perceived notions of species boundaries, the novels in the trilogy integrate human and nonhuman life forms discursively and figuratively into a genetic imaginary of life itself. This expanded conception of life resonates strongly with ecological perspectives on the biosphere, an alternative category of life at a similarly high level of abstraction. The trilogy envisions new interventions into the matter of life itself through genetic engineering, as yet another incarnation of the first and highly abstract level of genetic life. The second level of genetic life in the contemporary novel includes a variety of specialised discourses that have developed from a more foundational genetic understanding of life. In both Mawer’s and McEwan’s novels, notions of genetic determinism have been shown to dominate the texts’ discussions of genetic discourses. In Mendel’s Dwarf, the deterministic effects of a genetic perspective on identity and kinship are focalised and explored through the protagonist, Benedict Lambert, a geneticist whose work and genetic condition almost completely determine his sense of self. However, the novel also importantly demonstrates that the cultural dimension of his life and identity cannot, in fact, be reduced to genetics alone. In Enduring Love and Saturday, genetic determinism as an umbrella category is broken down into very specific discourses and adjoining temporalities. While Enduring Love primarily engages genetics through sociobiological perspectives, Saturday negotiates, through Baxter’s Huntington’s disease, a medical genetic discourse, as well as fashioning kinship relations and individual aptitudes in the Perowne family in genetic terms. Both novels criticise genetic determinism, but Saturday, in the end, does underline a strong sense of genetics as a kind of fate. Beyond its metalinguistic focus on genetic metaphors of life, Byatt’s tetralogy of novels, especially through the snail as scientific model organism, broaches several second-level discourses of genetic life: from kinship, genetic determinism and ecology to genetic foundations of language. In the sprawling scope of the quartet, these discourses are expansively explored with regard to their cultural meanings and social, political and ethical implications, just as McEwan’s, Mawer’s and Atwood’s novels can similarly be observed to do (Atwood’s trilogy, in particular, due to the grand scale of its science-fiction tale). These novels investigate new forms of commodified genetic engineering projects as well as genetic perspectives

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on interdependencies and kinship relations between life forms. Ultimately, these novels suggest that while genetic relations connect all life, power relations are unequally distributed. This inequality calls on the human agent—reconceived in its ecological relation to its living environment—to take responsibility for the ecologies of life in which he or she is vitally imbricated. Atwood’s trilogy illustrates particularly vividly the inextricable relation between both levels of genetic life. For example, to imagine scenarios of genetic engineering inevitably evokes the more abstract conception of life itself as genetic, a conception on which all forms of genetic engineering technologies are based. The same kind of relation applies to all second-­ level genetic discourses that are crucially informed by an underlying definition of living organisms as organised by genetic material. The individual aesthetic, discursive and epistemological relations between the two levels of abstraction of genetic life vary considerably from novel to novel and shall not be recapitulated here. Suffice it to say that while all genetic discourses evoke genetic understandings of life, these evocations may take a panoply of forms and imply different levels of emphasis. Further, these levels are not limited to the novel as a medium but can be identified in a plethora of media negotiating genetic discourses. However, it is in the novel’s dialogic form, I contend, that the most complex exploration of these two levels, and their interaction, is performed. The novels analysed in this study all investigate, in multiple ways, the meaning and literary function of an abstract genetic conception of life, while, at the same time, diversifying this more abstract conception of life on the level of specialised genetic discourses. These different levels of life also help classify the diverse formal and thematic resonances between the novels in this study and other contemporary novels that negotiate genetic discourses. Some of these other novels emphasise more specialised genetic discourses, such as the focus on genetic family genealogy in Margaret Drabble’s The Peppered Moth (2001), which links it thematically with Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf. John Irving’s A Son of the Circus (1994), also zooms in, as did Mendel’s Dwarf, on issues of genetic identity and dwarfism. Another prominent novel on genetic science is Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), which uses genetic discourses to address questions of postcolonial identity, while also featuring a satirical perspective on genetic knock-out experiments (see also Hamann-Rose 2021). Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018), in contrast, engages almost exclusively with an abstract genetic understanding of life in its depiction of

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humans and trees as genetically related forms of life. The list of novels on genetics extends far beyond this list and my selection in this study, and continues to grow. My particular selection of novels for this book intends to offer a sense of the diversity of formal and thematic concerns in representations of genetic conceptions of life in the contemporary novel. I began this study by arguing that, contrary to Fassin’s statement, genetic and cultural dimensions of life were not only not incompatible but had extensive convergence in the contemporary novel. In light of the highly complex convergences of the kind that I have identified in the novels in this study, I will now go further and argue that the novel is actually a privileged site for bringing together biological and biographical, or cultural, dimensions of life. The novel has incorporated genetic discourses both on the level of form and content, illuminating the varied cultural meanings and socio-political impacts of genetic science and practice, as well as highlighting the shortcomings of reductive genetic conceptions of life. This dimension of the novel’s dialogue with genetic science highlights its important social function as a critical medium. The novel’s multi-­ perspectival form uniquely affords complex ways to think through the actual and potential consequences of genetic knowledge and technology, on various levels of social organisation and personal affective experience— from biomedical contexts of genetic risk, therapy or reproduction to more socio-political contexts of genetic privacy, geneticised identity or genetically modified foods and organisms. Beyond this perspective of the novel, towards larger cultural debates on genetic issues, genetic discourses have, in turn, also provoked diverse and ambitious responses in literary aesthetics. Taken together, the contemporary novel’s self-reflexive and culturally critical engagements with genetic science have produced new discourses and literary forms of life, precisely by joining biological and cultural dimensions of life together. They have also revealed new ways of perceiving the interrelations that have connected them all along. Making sense of these consequential interrelations between biology and culture on all levels of life is one of the most important functions of the novel and of literary and cultural criticism today. My analysis additionally suggests that genetic science has proved particularly fruitful in encouraging aesthetic and discursive responses in the novel because the discipline’s narratives, concepts and rhetoric are already informed by literary imagery and aesthetic structure. In Enduring Love, for instance, the narrative reasoning of sociobiology’s evolutionary accounts of human behaviour finds itself appropriated and critically

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examined through the very narrative medium on which it relies in its argumentation. In both Enduring Love and Saturday, genetic structures of chance and determinism within the organisation of the organism are efficiently mirrored and examined by the novels’ aesthetic constructions of plot. In Mendel’s Dwarf, taxonomic nomenclature from the history of genetics as a discipline resonates particularly suggestively, and not without irony, with the novel’s aesthetics. Linking early genetic science with his own sense of self, the novel’s protagonist, whose genetic condition as a dwarf is the most fundamental aspect of his being, recounts that his ancestor and founder of genetics, Gregor Mendel, grew and studied so-called dwarf peas. In Byatt’s quartet, the literary exploration of textual genetic metaphors, as noted above, presents a central source of inspiration for the novels’ exploration of a new aesthetics of life. And in Atwood’s trilogy, to name but one example, extrapolations of real-world genetic chimeras produce imagined genetic hybrids. These, in turn, strongly resonate with the text’s purely metaphorical organisms, like the “snake women”, in what could be called the novels’ hybrid imaginary. In this study, such hybrid imaginaries, which conjoin discourses and practices of literature and genetic science, have been observed to thrive in the contemporary novel. The interconnections between literature and genetic science that these imaginaries make visible and construct crucially extend in both directions: literary chimeras respond to genetic chimeras—real and imagined—which themselves emerged as concepts from earlier scientific appropriations of literary-mythological imaginaries. Even at this time of high levels of specialisation, the boundaries between literary and scientific imaginations remain productively unstable. The novel is continually transformed by such dialogic incorporations of non-literary, or, rather, not-yet-literary, discourses and aesthetic forms. Beyond its interrogation of genetic science, the contemporary novel addresses numerous other discursive formations that define the current moment—from ecological and technological to political discourses. Increasingly, however, as the novels in this study forcefully expound, all of those contexts are affected in one way or another by scientific developments and advances and their ecological repercussions. Genetic discourses and technologies feature prominently, possibly supremely, in this ongoing renegotiation of cultural and socio-political life through a scientific perspective. This study makes available for the first time the complexity of the novel’s contribution to this renegotiation. The contemporary novel has been profoundly shaped by the discursive remodelling of life through

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genetics. In its turn, the novel has also critically and aesthetically articulated remarkably nuanced cultural perceptions and critiques of genetic science, thus continuing a history of literary investigations of scientific conceptions of life beginning with the Romantic debates about idealist and materialist notions of vitality. The novel’s ingrained focus on life is reconfigured through its exploration of a materialist genetic understanding of life itself. Its complex and dynamic treatment of genetic paradigms helps us rethink literature and culture, not just on the molecular, but on all levels of life.

References Byatt, A.S. 1993 [1991]. Still Life / Nature morte. In Passions of the Mind, 9–20. London: Vintage. Clayton, Jay, and Claire Sisco King. 2022. Introduction: Problem-Based Collaboration. Journal of Literature and Science—Special Issue on Fictions of Genetic Privacy 14: viii–xiv. Hamann-Rose, Paul. 2021. New Poetics of Postcolonial Relations: Global Genetic Kinship in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Amitav Ghosh’s The Calcutta Chromosome. Medical Humanities—Special issue on Global Genetic Fictions 47: 167–176. ———. 2019. Under Surveillance: Genetic Privacy in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy. Journal of Literature and Science 12: 62–79.

Index1

A Achondroplasia, 46, 48, 51–53, 59, 66 Aesthetic whole, 81, 99, 100, 103, 111 Agamben, Giorgio, 3, 19 AI, 125 Ancestry, 25 Animal studies, 183, 185 Anthropocene, 184, 192, 204 Anthropocentrism, 181, 182, 204, 206, 216, 217, 222–224, 232 Arend, Hannah, 19 Aristotle, 19, 23 Armstrong, Isobel, 8 Autobiography, 18, 28, 37, 39–42, 39n1, 44, 55, 57, 59, 65, 69, 70 B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 10 Beer, Gillian, 11n5, 17, 78, 81, 82, 142

Biodiversity, 179, 181, 182 Biography, 17, 19, 37, 38, 39n1, 40, 41, 43, 53, 59, 65, 71, 133, 134, 233, 236 Biology, philosophy and history of, 4 Biopolitics, 3, 5, 11, 30, 185, 187, 200, 202, 205 Biopower, 3, 184, 200 Bios, 19, 68, 70, 71, 192, 193, 205, 223, 233 Biosemiotics, 222 Biosociality, 64 Biosphere, 179, 181, 182, 188, 194–196, 207, 212–216, 223, 224, 234 Book of life, 12, 13, 22, 27, 38, 39, 67–69, 114, 134, 142, 143, 155, 167 Brave New World, 25, 191

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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C Capitalism, 182, 190, 191, 200, 202, 213 Carson, Rachel, 152 Causality, 75, 77, 79, 81–83, 86n5, 87–90, 93, 96, 99–101, 105, 107, 118, 120 Chimeras, 186, 196, 197, 199–201, 205, 213 Classical genetics, 148 Climate change, 7, 30, 180, 181n2, 192n12, 197, 201, 212–214 Commodification, 4, 5, 30 Companion species (Haraway), 185, 185n6, 187, 188, 203, 205, 215, 216 Concept of the gene, 15, 16 Consciousness, 102, 104, 105, 108, 119 Crick, Francis, 21, 25, 132, 206 CRISPR-Cas9, 26, 190 D Darwin, Charles, 23–25, 77, 78, 81, 82, 108, 115, 116, 131–133, 147, 233 Darwinism, 85, 103, 121 The Day of the Triffids, 191, 192, 195 Definitions of life, 12, 22 Derrida, Jacques, 29, 134, 158–175, 170n9, 173n11 Différance (Derrida), 170n9, 172 Discrimination, 47, 51, 62, 198 Double helix, 94, 147, 153, 156 Dystopia, 190–192, 224 E Earth BioGenome Project, 179–182, 180n1, 224 Ecocriticism, 30, 183–189, 202, 208–210, 215, 224

Ecology, 179–182, 187, 188, 190, 192, 198, 200, 202–217, 221, 223, 224, 234, 235, 237 Ecosystem, 181–183, 194, 195, 197, 202, 208, 212 Eliot, George, 21, 23, 29, 82, 134, 140, 158–175 Eliot, T. S., 136, 156 Embodiment, 56, 59, 69 Emplotment, 77, 80–83, 87–90, 95, 96, 99, 100, 102, 111, 118 Endosymbiosis, 186, 188, 189, 220 Epigenetics, 3, 5, 15, 22, 26, 213, 215, 218, 219, 219n16 Ethics, 39, 40, 59–63, 85, 101, 104, 114–116, 119, 120, 187, 199, 207–209, 212, 216, 217, 224 Eugenics, 24, 25, 47, 61, 62, 116, 124, 202 Eukaryotic life, 197 Evolution, 78, 81, 83, 91, 106, 108, 125, 134, 147, 148, 151, 171, 172, 181, 185, 186, 196, 208, 210, 211 Evolutionary psychology, 83–85, 93, 97–99, 101, 118, 123 Exploitation, 197, 200n14, 205, 220 Extinction, 180, 181, 201, 204 F Family history, 38, 58 Fibonacci, 157, 157n7, 159 Fictional autobiography, 42, 44, 45, 47, 70 Flat ontology, 187, 205 Formalism, 8–10, 9n3 Forster, E. M., 1, 163 Foucault, Michel, 3 Frankenstein, Victor, 215 Fukuyama, Francis, 183, 199

 INDEX 

G Galton, Francis, 24 Genealogy, 2, 25, 235 Genetic chimeras, 189, 196–198, 200, 205, 213, 237 Genetic community, 189, 197, 208, 215, 217 Genetic determinism, 232 Genetic dogma, 14, 15, 207 Genetic engineering, 59, 180, 185, 190, 190n10, 195–199, 219 Genetic enhancement, 197 Genetic essentialism, 14, 76, 77 Genetic gaze, 45, 47, 58, 65, 66 Genetic mosaic, 49, 50 Genetic privacy, 233, 233n1, 236 Genetic risk, 39, 57, 60 Genetic shame, 116 Genetic splice, 193–199, 201–203, 205, 213, 215, 217 Genetic technologies, 38, 61 Genetic test, 59, 60, 65, 77 GM foods, 189 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 21, 157 H Habermas, Jürgen, 63, 183 The Handmaid’s Tale, 208 Haraway, Donna, 184, 185 Hardy, Thomas, 149 Hayles, N. Katherine, 184 Historical epistemology, 8, 12, 148 Historicism, 7, 8 Human exceptionalism, 171, 183, 203, 205 Human Genome Project, 2, 2n1, 13–15, 26, 76, 86, 94, 95, 125, 179, 180, 223 Humanism, 5, 7, 17, 77, 82, 95–97, 183, 199, 202–204, 206, 216, 219, 221, 222

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Human nature, 183, 187, 188, 200, 202, 219 Huntington’s disease, 109, 110, 120, 122, 234 Hymn, 191, 208–210, 221 I In vitro fertilisation, 59, 62, 64, 67 J Jacob, François, 1, 173 Johnson, Samuel, 37 K Kinship, 39n1, 56–66, 71, 105, 107, 122, 123, 125, 132, 148–152, 175, 186–188, 196, 197, 205, 207, 215, 217, 224, 232, 234 L Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste de, 3 Lawrence, D. H., 27, 167 Latour, Bruno, 184, 184n4, 185n5, 202 Levine, Caroline, 10, 80, 81, 99, 120 M Margulis, Lynn, 186–188, 210, 224 Medicine, 15, 63, 76, 103, 108–110, 112–115, 232, 234 Memory, 38, 141 Mendel, Gregor, 24, 25, 42, 48, 58, 71, 107, 119, 237 Metafiction, 44, 69 Metanarrative, 44, 83, 87, 92, 118, 120, 233

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INDEX

Model organism, 133, 134, 145–148, 151, 152, 154–158, 163, 174, 234 Monod, Jacques, 75, 78 Mutation, 40, 48, 50, 51, 55–57, 61, 62, 65, 69, 78, 79, 91, 110, 112, 117, 120 N Narrative contingency, 100 Natural selection, 23 Nature and culture, 150 Nature and nurture, 53, 187 Natureculture, 185, 187 Neuroscience, 145, 165 Nonhuman life, 180n1, 182, 183, 202, 203, 207, 215, 223, 224, 234 O Oral culture, 210, 218 Organicism, 164, 165, 167, 168, 172, 231 Organic unity, 167 P Pandemic, 191, 193, 194, 196–198, 201, 204–206, 210, 211, 214, 224 Pinker, Steven, 85, 144 Plant turn, 189 Plot, 77, 80–83, 87, 88, 104, 110, 112, 113, 119, 142, 156, 233, 237 Pollution, 152 Population genetics, 147, 152, 153 Post-apocalypse, 191–193, 195, 204–206, 215, 221, 223

Postcolonial identity, 235 Post-genomics, 15 Posthuman, 63, 70 Posthumanism, 5, 22, 23, 30, 63, 64, 70, 98, 183–187, 184n4, 189, 194, 202, 203, 206, 210, 215, 218, 224 Postmodernism, 135, 135n4 Poststructuralism, 12, 29, 135, 136, 140 Powers, Richard, 27, 235 Predestination, 75, 106, 114, 115, 125, 144, 219 Predetermination, 75, 82, 90, 91, 99, 151 Predictability, 79, 81, 90 Pre-implantation-diagnostics, 59, 60, 62 Probability, 80, 88 Programmability, 196, 198 Proteome, 190 R Race, 4, 15, 26, 47, 197, 198 Randomness, 75, 77–79, 81, 83, 87, 89, 106, 110, 118, 124, 232 Rationalism, 96–98, 100, 101, 106 Reductionism, 2, 5, 13, 14, 38, 49, 51, 52, 54, 56, 62, 69, 75, 77, 86, 91, 97, 98, 100–103, 105, 106, 112–117, 119, 190n10, 221, 234, 236 Religion, 7, 68, 69, 82, 106, 119, 131, 159, 160, 198, 206, 207, 210–212, 219, 222 Replication, 16 Reproduction, 54, 62, 63, 64n5, 154, 161, 162, 168–170, 173, 216, 220, 231, 236 Ricoeur, Paul, 80, 87, 88 Romanticism, 20–23, 27, 238

 INDEX 

S Said, Edward, 1 Scale, 187, 191, 192, 212 Schrödinger, Erwin, 21 Science fiction, 25, 30, 190, 192 Science studies, 4, 8 Second law of thermodynamics, 78 Sexuality, 154, 161 Significant otherness (Haraway), 187, 205, 217, 224 The sixth great extinction event, 180 Smith, Zadie, 235 Snow, C. P., 16 Sociobiology, 83–86, 91, 93, 97–99, 107–110, 118, 120, 124, 210, 232, 234 Somatic individuality (Novas and Rose), 39, 40, 51, 52 Species, 234 Storytelling, 218, 219, 221, 222 Symbiogenesis, 186–188, 210, 224 T Taxonomy, 139–141, 147, 149, 154, 180, 182, 201, 237 Teleological design, 78 Teleology, 78–82, 92, 101, 106 Temporality, 38, 41, 58, 64, 77, 89, 92, 93, 100, 107, 108, 113, 114, 120, 188, 193, 234

Third Reich, 47, 62 Transgenics, 185n6, 189, 194, 199 Transhumanism, 183, 185, 202, 203 Tree of life, 186 Two-cultures, 16, 93, 95, 96, 104 U Uncanny, 204, 216 Unpredictability, 82, 111 Utopia, 200, 216, 217 V Victorian period, 23 Vitalism, 20, 22, 23, 168, 238 W Watson, James, 21, 25, 132 Watt, Ian, 1 Wilson, E. O., 85, 123, 182, 182n3, 208 Woolf, Virginia, 23, 119 Z Zoe, 19, 68, 70, 71, 192, 193, 223, 233

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