Writing of Life: Multiple Languages, Scientific Realities, and Cybernetic Metaphors in Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations
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This paper illustrates how Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations (1991) recreates the discourse of multiple languages, scientific reality, and cybernetic metaphors of the genome, and connects this to other fragmentary objects to create new forms of the language of life. While others have examined the novel's relationship to aesthetics, I focus on the use of information within the author's novel to explain the development of genomic research as an interdisciplinary phenomenon. In this perspective, I first explore the multiple languages of the life that this novel demonstrates interconnected with postmodernism in science, language, music, and literature to generate the discourse of polysemy through which the genome is read and articulated. Second, I explain how scientific theories and their modes of articulation have evolved so that one scientist's theory or hypothesis will be solved and decoded by the next generation. This causes a consistent movement at the center of scientific focus as each new discovery is made. Third, I also examine some of the cybernetic metaphors that have facilitated the development of the genome project and that draw upon fragments from several different disciplines. I describe how the codon is articulated, and analyze a mixture of terms from linguistic, scientific, and information theories along with cybernetic metaphors to articulate how the codon is used.
Abstract
This paper illustrates how Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations (1991) recreates the discourse of multiple languages, scientific reality, and cybernetic metaphors of the genome, and connects this to other fragmentary objects to create new forms of the language of life. While others have examined the novel's relationship to aesthetics, I focus on the use of information within the author's novel to explain the development of genomic research as an interdisciplinary phenomenon. In this perspective, I first explore the multiple languages of the life that this novel demonstrates interconnected with postmodernism in science, language, music, and literature to generate the discourse of polysemy through which the genome is read and articulated. Second, I explain how scientific theories and their modes of articulation have evolved so that one scientist's theory or hypothesis will be solved and decoded by the next generation. This causes a consistent movement at the center of scientific focus as each new discovery is made. Third, I also examine some of the cybernetic metaphors that have facilitated the development of the genome project and that draw upon fragments from several different disciplines. I describe how the codon is articulated, and analyze a mixture of terms from linguistic, scientific, and information theories along with cybernetic metaphors to articulate how the codon is used.
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