Coding the Ethnic
Content
D(NA) Coding the Ethnic: Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex
Author(s): PATRICIA E. CHU
Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 42, No. 2, Theories of the Novel Now, Part I (SUMMER
2009), pp. 278-283
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27764316
Accessed: 30-05-2015 08:59 UTC
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Coding theEthnic:
Jeffrey
Eugenides's Middlesex
D(NA)
PATRICIA E. CHU
My essay is drawn from a longer project on the biopolitics of the ethnic novel.
In writing about the twenty-first century as the century of the Human Genome
critics such as Ian Hacking, Paul
Project, biotechnology, and genetic manipulation,
Rabinow, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Nikolas Rose describe molecular genetics as hav
and the practices of biopolitics. The
ing transformed the conception of personhood
differences these critics point to usually have to do with the difference between
genetics and genomics.
The twentieth century was, as Keller has famously put it, "the century of the
gene," inwhich the "gene for" paradigm persisted into latermetaphors of "infor
mation coding." The individual was understood
(with varying degrees of deter
to
have
the
number
and
of
chromosomes
minism)
proper to its spe
configuration
these
chromosomes
determined
cies; genes strung along
development and during
on
to
But
characteristics
when
actual sequencing of
reproduction passed
offspring.
the human genome began at the very end of this century of the gene, the number
of genes was too small to function in a "gene for" paradigm,
inwhich each gene
coded forno more than a few functions. Noncoding
(sometimes popu
sequences
that themetaphor
larly termed junk) in both DNA and RNA further emphasized
of "the code," inwhich a set of genes was like "digital instructions" formaking an
organism, could not account for an organism's development and function. As we
learned in high school science, the old model was that DNA codes RNA, which
then codes the proteins. Instead, it turned out that one coding sequence might be
involved in the synthesis of several different proteins and thatmaking one protein
can entail interactions of several distinct coding sequences from different regions
of the gene; that sometimes RNA codes forDNA; that there are pathways from the
tissues toDNA sequences during development and in the course of normal cellular
and that there are heritable characteristics, some acquired over the life
metabolism;
of the organism, that do not originate in theDNA but attach themselves to it some
how. These discoveries add up to a move away from genetic determinism. Rather
than fate, genes offer now probability and possibility as well as multiple sites for
intervention. As Rose puts it,molecular genomic biology "is probabilistic not deter
ministic, open, not closed, not identifying an essential racial truth that determines
individuals to different fates but opening up the possibilities of intervention and
transformation" (161). Even in the absence of actual intervention at themolecular
level, the revelations about the complexity of genomic expression beyond the gene
suggested that the presence or absence of any particular gene could express in
any number ofways, ways thatwere susceptible to an individual's knowledge and
behavior. Rabinow writes that "the new genetics will prove to be a greater force for
reshaping society and life than was the revolution in physics" (98).
Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42:2
DOI
10.1215/00295132-2009-015
? 2009 by Novel,
Inc.
This content downloaded from 196.21.233.64 on Sat, 30 May 2015 08:59:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
CHU
EUGENIDES'S
MIDDLESEX
279
I am interested in how the transformative "new genomics"
might affect ethnic
it seems tome that such a switch in our
apprehension of biologi
resonate significantly in that area. The
early "race" novel, some
of
which
would
be
ethnic
borrowed
the
novel, iswhat Rose has called
principles
by
a
that
it
its
links
is,
"biological
citizenship project,"
"conceptions of citizens to
beliefs about the biological existence of human beings, as individuals, as men and
and races, and
women, as families and lineages, as communities, as populations
as species" (132). In 1900, at the
of
the
now-defunct
century of the gene,
beginning
African American writer Pauline Hopkins
could envision the novel as a political
act, a way ofmaking black people human through something the novel genre is
famous for: its ability to produce resonant accounts of the individual and his or her
social order. In her preface to Contending Forces she writes: "No one will do this for
us; we must ourselves develop themen and women who will faithfully portray the
inmost thoughts and feelings of theNegro with all the fire and romance which lie
dormant in our history" (14). The point was not to disavow the biological, forwith
out it there was no group to have "our" history and, more importantly, no basis
on which tomake ethical demands
(Rose 133). Instead the race novel attempted
to imbue the potentially deterministic biological existence it accepted with some
thing nonbiological.
I just gave a rather boring definition of the novel: that its specialty is to give an
account of the relation between the individual and the social order. More interest
ingly, this is precisely the kind of account that biological narratives of the life
to give of the rela
later genetics, still later genomics?attempt
sciences?eugenics,
In the earliest eugenic narratives, a
tion between
individuals and populations.
"unified clinical body [is] located within a social body made up of extracorporeal
...
in terms of large-scale flows?of air, water, sewage,
conceptualized
systems
germs, contagion, familial influences, moral climates and the like" (Rose 44). The
(and arguably of the next one hundred years of
biopolitics of Hopkins's moment
novels written by authors who shared her goal) was that of the heritable and sim
literature because
cal identity would
ple gene.
Ian Hacking has recently remarked that the ideology of choice and performance
of ethnic identity in Philip Roth's The Human Stain dates it as pre-genetic. Iwould
like to offer a brief "postgenomic" reading of JeffreyEugenides's 2003 novel Middle
sex, suggesting itas an exemplary moment for the ethnic novel in thewake of,most
on themolecular
level
famously, theHuman Genome Project and of genetic work
takes up the old tropes of the ethnic novel's construction of
generally. Middlesex
modern American personhood and narrates them, literally, from amolecular genet
ics viewpoint (thenarrator imagines family history as his own genetic production).
Eugenides's Greek American protagonist Callie, later to become Cal, inherits the
and the secret of its transmission: his grandparents
gene for hermaphroditism
Desdemona
and Lefty were also brother and sister. Callie "becomes" Cal after an
accident necessitates a trip to the hospital and a doctor discovers what her half
blind pediatrician has never noticed. Sent to a specialist whose research goal is to
prove that "nurture" trumps "nature," Callie gives all the "correct" answers to the
tests (partly by design), and the doctor recommends surgery tomake her
runs away from home, cut
physically the female she, in his view, already is. Callie
doctor's
This content downloaded from 196.21.233.64 on Sat, 30 May 2015 08:59:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
280
NOVEL I SUMMER 2009
ting her hair and buying male clothes from a Salvation Army store along theway.
Cal narrates the novel as a forty-something embassy employee in Berlin.
What I find fascinating about this novel is its breathtaking revival of thewhite
immigrant narrative from its largely inert state. So my first interest is the narrative
that seem to have emerged from the scientific reconstruction of the
possibilities
Human Genome Project, elements ofwhich appear in Eugenides's
the
after
subject
work. Second, I find an array of biopolitical
implications that result from how
new
of
takes
the
ideals
the
like
up
genomics. In what follows, Iwould
Eugenides
to open up for discussion what that science and narration in this novel might
reveal about each other.
formation the source of narrative plenitude
Eugenides makes Cal's biological
when described from the perspective of the new genomics. This is hard to describe
in the space of a short essay, but having two genders, being seemingly limited by
an explosion of narrative voice.
biology, becomes rather
Like Tiresias, I was first one thing and then the other. I've been ridiculed by class
March
mates, guinea-pigged by doctors, palpated by specialists, and researched by the
not
in
with
love
A
Grosse
Pointe
red-headed
Dimes.
me,
knowing
fell
girl from
of
what I was. (Her brother likedme, too.)An army tank ledme into urban battle once;
a swimming pool turnedme intomyth; I've leftmy body in order to occupy others?
and ail thishappened before I turned sixteen. (3)
and lift in this passage contrast sharply to Callie's discovery that
The momentum
the term monster is listed as a synonym in the dictionary when she researches her
condition through themore circumscribed narratives of dictionary and medical
to the poignancy of
practice. Here, in the space available tome, I cannot do justice
nor
first
to
from
the
switch
how
that passage
person to third person in
(430-32),
It is as much the
the effects of older genetic discourses.
themidst of itunderscores
flatnarrative and defensive self-humanization generated by absolute eugenics that
she/he flees as it is surgical intervention.
parodie use of the conventions
Many reviewers have catalogued Eugenides's
of Greek tragedy in the novel, usually suggesting its connection to the Greekness
of the novel's protagonist and as a strategy for humor and irony. But while this
cultural reference might add, so to speak, "ethnicity" to the narrative, this is itself
are eventually revealed not to have read
parodie. Milton and Tessie, Cal's parents,
the Greek plays as they struggle to improve themselves with a set of theworld's
is
classics. To treat narrative tradition as embodied by classic tragedy parodically
to reference precisely the difference between old and new narrative gambits and
world notion of fate, is akin to
assumptions. The "Ancient Greek notion," the old
the racial determinism of the nineteenth century. The new genomic biology allows
for excessive narrative and for freewill:
In the twentieth century, genetics brought theAncient Greek notion offate into
our very cells. This new century we've just begun has found something different.
our being iswoefully inadequate.
Contrary to all expectations, the code underlying
a
we
have
Instead of the expected 200,000 genes,
only 30,000. Not many more than
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CHU
EUGENIDES'S
MIDDLESEX
281
mouse. And so a strange new possibility is arising. Compromised, indefinite,sketchy,
but not entirely obliterated:free will ismaking a comeback. Biology gives you a brain.
a
Life turns it into mind. (Eugenides 479)
Rabinow
writes of the new century's genomics
thatwe now have a fate that
will carry with itno depth. It makes absolutely no sense to seek out themeaning of
the lack of a guanine base because it has no meaning. One's relation to one's father
.
see a
or mother is not shrouded in the depths of discourse here. . . We
might even
return to tragedy in post-modernist form, although we will likely not simply rail
overcome our fates throughmore techno
against thegods, but rather be driven to
science. (102-03)
fate. Cal narrates from
In refusing surgery, Cal rejects the old depth-ridden
a position somewhere as a gamete, knowing transparently and without agonis
tic searching his relationship to his family as expressed through his genome; he
describes genes lining up, proteins sequencing and the like. The parodie tragic
rather than representative of agonized
chorus renders incest merely humorous
in the
relation to history that is itself?to repeat Rabinow's apt phrase?"shrouded
novels derive their claustrophobic density
Faulkner's
Where
discourse."
of
depths
from obscured family and historical relations, for the postgenomic
generations,
such things are transparent. This convention allows for a narrative that makes
Cal's condition emblematic of freedom.
I said earlier that this story, inmolecular narrative, of a hermaphroditic protago
nist without identity agony breathtakingly revives a tired genre: thewhite ethnic
in addition to recognizing the new and libera
immigrant narrative. I think that
term Cal uses for
tory narrative here, we need also to consider that the primary
were
born inAmerica.
himself is immigrant,despite the fact that he and his parents
over his parents and reaching back to the potential-filled myth of the
Skipping
can say he is anything he can be convincing about, Cal chooses a
immigrant who
different kind of birth:
a war. Now, some fifty-two years
My grandparents had fled their home because of
as definitely. I was
was
later, I was fleeing myself. I felt that I
saving myself just
the
alias
under
and
ofmy new gender. A
fleeing without much money inmy pocket
a
cars
a
across
me
series
the ocean; instead,
conveyed me across
of
ship didn't carry
I
and
a
new
and
like
was
Desdemona,
continent. I
person, too, just
Lefty
becoming
come.
new
I'd
me
to
which
to
world
in
this
would
didn't know what
(443)
happen
Like his grandparents, who become husband and wife in a country where virtu
one knows them, Cal's new self is a sexual one. "Desire made me cross over
ally no
to the other side, desire and the facticity ofmy body" (479). And like his grand
father,Cal fears someone may see through his new identity. Girls, he worries, may
was like an immigrant, putting on airs, who runs into someone from
spot him: "I
the old country. I didn't want to be found out" (471).
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282
NOVEL I SUMMER 2009
Is the "alias of his new gender" also an alias for
Eugenides, a way to revive the
dream
of
The
house
fromwhich the book takes its
(white) self-making?
immigrant
title,Middlesex, an ultramodern antibourgeois house that symbolizes the plenitu
dinous lifeCal will claim, stands in a richer,whiter
than the one he
neighborhood
was born in.Milton fails to
out
of
Detroit's
and
get
decaying
darkening neighbor
hood until no one will buy his business there. But after the fires from the Detroit
riots burn the place down, he takes the insurance money and
pays cash down
when the realtor doesn't want to sell to Greeks, then enrolls Callie in a
private
school for girls. Coming back forhis father's funeral, back to the
city as a man for
the first time, Cal says brightly to his brother that he likes Detroit,
replacing what
have
been
with
how
it
much
is
with
the experience
might
disappointment
decayed
of seeing his old city as a new person, now a man. He
one
moment of
experiences
limitation when he confronts a black man as a white man for the first time:
When I was little,street corner dudes like thatwould sometimes lower their shades
towink, keen on getting a rise out of thewhite girl. . . .But now the dude gave me
. . .That was when I realized a
a
different look altogether.
shocking thing. I couldn't
become a man without becoming TheMan. Even ifI didn't want to. (518)
Race is impervious to the new molecular dispensation. Cal mourns not its imper
viousness
forAfrican Americans
but his own loss of potential, locked into being
"The Man." During the funeral itself,Cal fullymobilizes his ethnic
to
masculinity
block the free-flowing space ofMiddlesex.
And so itwas I who, upholding an old Greek custom no one remembered anymore,
stayed behind onMiddlesex, blocking thedoor, so thatMilton's spiritwouldn't reen
ter thehouse. Itwas always a man who did this,and now I
[The house]
qualified....
was still the beacon itwas intended to be, a
with
interior
divested
walls,
place
few
of theformalities of bourgeois life,a place designed for a new type of human being,
who would inhabit a new world. I couldn't helpfeeling, of course, that theperson was
The wind swept over the crusted snow intomy
me, me and all the others likeme....
Byzantine face, which was theface ofmy grandfather and of theAmerican girl I had
once been. (529)
Here Cal contains in his own body the most symbolically fruitful characters of
the immigrant saga?the
immigrant grandfather and the "American girl." And
both are white. To be honest, I'm not really sure how Iwant to continue reading
this novel into the current American
racial context or how skeptical Iwant to be
about the paradigm
shift of molecular
genomics. The revival of white ethnicity
here might very well index white ethnic freedom from racial determinism while
some
enjoying the "depth" of authenticity. The mourning over being "The Man"
times strikes me as akin tomourning by conservative literary intellectuals over
how American
literature and literary criticism has been "taken over" by narra
tives of race and ethnicity, and popular culture equivalents
that accompany this.
And I can't help observing that another novel notable for its revival of this genre
isMichael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union?but
the ethnicity here is. Jew
This content downloaded from 196.21.233.64 on Sat, 30 May 2015 08:59:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
CHU
EUGENIDES'S
283
MIDDLESEX
ish and thus more
racially circumscribed. Ethnicity has to take to science fiction
in
the form of alternative history. IfHopkins were writing now,
(loosely defined)
would she be able to produce a race novel likeMiddlesex or would she, in order to
imagine such a fatewithout depth, turn to science fiction?
Works
Eugenides,
Jeffrey. Middlesex.
New
York:
Cited
Farrar,
Straus
and Giroux,
2002.
Hacking, Ian. "Genetics, Biosocial Groups, and the Future of Identity."Daedalus 135.4 (Fall
2006): 81-95.
Hopkins, Pauline. Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative ofNegro LifeNorth and South.
1900.Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988.
Keller, Evelyn Fox. The Century of theGene. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002.
Rabinow,
Paul.
Essays
on the
Anthropology
of Reason.
Princeton:
Princeton
UP,
1996.
Rose, Nikolas. The Politics ofLife Itself:Biomedicine,Power, and Subjectivity in theTwenty-First
Century.
Princeton:
Princeton
UP,
2007.
This content downloaded from 196.21.233.64 on Sat, 30 May 2015 08:59:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Author(s): PATRICIA E. CHU
Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 42, No. 2, Theories of the Novel Now, Part I (SUMMER
2009), pp. 278-283
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27764316
Accessed: 30-05-2015 08:59 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/27764316?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 196.21.233.64 on Sat, 30 May 2015 08:59:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Coding theEthnic:
Jeffrey
Eugenides's Middlesex
D(NA)
PATRICIA E. CHU
My essay is drawn from a longer project on the biopolitics of the ethnic novel.
In writing about the twenty-first century as the century of the Human Genome
critics such as Ian Hacking, Paul
Project, biotechnology, and genetic manipulation,
Rabinow, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Nikolas Rose describe molecular genetics as hav
and the practices of biopolitics. The
ing transformed the conception of personhood
differences these critics point to usually have to do with the difference between
genetics and genomics.
The twentieth century was, as Keller has famously put it, "the century of the
gene," inwhich the "gene for" paradigm persisted into latermetaphors of "infor
mation coding." The individual was understood
(with varying degrees of deter
to
have
the
number
and
of
chromosomes
minism)
proper to its spe
configuration
these
chromosomes
determined
cies; genes strung along
development and during
on
to
But
characteristics
when
actual sequencing of
reproduction passed
offspring.
the human genome began at the very end of this century of the gene, the number
of genes was too small to function in a "gene for" paradigm,
inwhich each gene
coded forno more than a few functions. Noncoding
(sometimes popu
sequences
that themetaphor
larly termed junk) in both DNA and RNA further emphasized
of "the code," inwhich a set of genes was like "digital instructions" formaking an
organism, could not account for an organism's development and function. As we
learned in high school science, the old model was that DNA codes RNA, which
then codes the proteins. Instead, it turned out that one coding sequence might be
involved in the synthesis of several different proteins and thatmaking one protein
can entail interactions of several distinct coding sequences from different regions
of the gene; that sometimes RNA codes forDNA; that there are pathways from the
tissues toDNA sequences during development and in the course of normal cellular
and that there are heritable characteristics, some acquired over the life
metabolism;
of the organism, that do not originate in theDNA but attach themselves to it some
how. These discoveries add up to a move away from genetic determinism. Rather
than fate, genes offer now probability and possibility as well as multiple sites for
intervention. As Rose puts it,molecular genomic biology "is probabilistic not deter
ministic, open, not closed, not identifying an essential racial truth that determines
individuals to different fates but opening up the possibilities of intervention and
transformation" (161). Even in the absence of actual intervention at themolecular
level, the revelations about the complexity of genomic expression beyond the gene
suggested that the presence or absence of any particular gene could express in
any number ofways, ways thatwere susceptible to an individual's knowledge and
behavior. Rabinow writes that "the new genetics will prove to be a greater force for
reshaping society and life than was the revolution in physics" (98).
Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42:2
DOI
10.1215/00295132-2009-015
? 2009 by Novel,
Inc.
This content downloaded from 196.21.233.64 on Sat, 30 May 2015 08:59:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
CHU
EUGENIDES'S
MIDDLESEX
279
I am interested in how the transformative "new genomics"
might affect ethnic
it seems tome that such a switch in our
apprehension of biologi
resonate significantly in that area. The
early "race" novel, some
of
which
would
be
ethnic
borrowed
the
novel, iswhat Rose has called
principles
by
a
that
it
its
links
is,
"biological
citizenship project,"
"conceptions of citizens to
beliefs about the biological existence of human beings, as individuals, as men and
and races, and
women, as families and lineages, as communities, as populations
as species" (132). In 1900, at the
of
the
now-defunct
century of the gene,
beginning
African American writer Pauline Hopkins
could envision the novel as a political
act, a way ofmaking black people human through something the novel genre is
famous for: its ability to produce resonant accounts of the individual and his or her
social order. In her preface to Contending Forces she writes: "No one will do this for
us; we must ourselves develop themen and women who will faithfully portray the
inmost thoughts and feelings of theNegro with all the fire and romance which lie
dormant in our history" (14). The point was not to disavow the biological, forwith
out it there was no group to have "our" history and, more importantly, no basis
on which tomake ethical demands
(Rose 133). Instead the race novel attempted
to imbue the potentially deterministic biological existence it accepted with some
thing nonbiological.
I just gave a rather boring definition of the novel: that its specialty is to give an
account of the relation between the individual and the social order. More interest
ingly, this is precisely the kind of account that biological narratives of the life
to give of the rela
later genetics, still later genomics?attempt
sciences?eugenics,
In the earliest eugenic narratives, a
tion between
individuals and populations.
"unified clinical body [is] located within a social body made up of extracorporeal
...
in terms of large-scale flows?of air, water, sewage,
conceptualized
systems
germs, contagion, familial influences, moral climates and the like" (Rose 44). The
(and arguably of the next one hundred years of
biopolitics of Hopkins's moment
novels written by authors who shared her goal) was that of the heritable and sim
literature because
cal identity would
ple gene.
Ian Hacking has recently remarked that the ideology of choice and performance
of ethnic identity in Philip Roth's The Human Stain dates it as pre-genetic. Iwould
like to offer a brief "postgenomic" reading of JeffreyEugenides's 2003 novel Middle
sex, suggesting itas an exemplary moment for the ethnic novel in thewake of,most
on themolecular
level
famously, theHuman Genome Project and of genetic work
takes up the old tropes of the ethnic novel's construction of
generally. Middlesex
modern American personhood and narrates them, literally, from amolecular genet
ics viewpoint (thenarrator imagines family history as his own genetic production).
Eugenides's Greek American protagonist Callie, later to become Cal, inherits the
and the secret of its transmission: his grandparents
gene for hermaphroditism
Desdemona
and Lefty were also brother and sister. Callie "becomes" Cal after an
accident necessitates a trip to the hospital and a doctor discovers what her half
blind pediatrician has never noticed. Sent to a specialist whose research goal is to
prove that "nurture" trumps "nature," Callie gives all the "correct" answers to the
tests (partly by design), and the doctor recommends surgery tomake her
runs away from home, cut
physically the female she, in his view, already is. Callie
doctor's
This content downloaded from 196.21.233.64 on Sat, 30 May 2015 08:59:33 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
280
NOVEL I SUMMER 2009
ting her hair and buying male clothes from a Salvation Army store along theway.
Cal narrates the novel as a forty-something embassy employee in Berlin.
What I find fascinating about this novel is its breathtaking revival of thewhite
immigrant narrative from its largely inert state. So my first interest is the narrative
that seem to have emerged from the scientific reconstruction of the
possibilities
Human Genome Project, elements ofwhich appear in Eugenides's
the
after
subject
work. Second, I find an array of biopolitical
implications that result from how
new
of
takes
the
ideals
the
like
up
genomics. In what follows, Iwould
Eugenides
to open up for discussion what that science and narration in this novel might
reveal about each other.
formation the source of narrative plenitude
Eugenides makes Cal's biological
when described from the perspective of the new genomics. This is hard to describe
in the space of a short essay, but having two genders, being seemingly limited by
an explosion of narrative voice.
biology, becomes rather
Like Tiresias, I was first one thing and then the other. I've been ridiculed by class
March
mates, guinea-pigged by doctors, palpated by specialists, and researched by the
not
in
with
love
A
Grosse
Pointe
red-headed
Dimes.
me,
knowing
fell
girl from
of
what I was. (Her brother likedme, too.)An army tank ledme into urban battle once;
a swimming pool turnedme intomyth; I've leftmy body in order to occupy others?
and ail thishappened before I turned sixteen. (3)
and lift in this passage contrast sharply to Callie's discovery that
The momentum
the term monster is listed as a synonym in the dictionary when she researches her
condition through themore circumscribed narratives of dictionary and medical
to the poignancy of
practice. Here, in the space available tome, I cannot do justice
nor
first
to
from
the
switch
how
that passage
person to third person in
(430-32),
It is as much the
the effects of older genetic discourses.
themidst of itunderscores
flatnarrative and defensive self-humanization generated by absolute eugenics that
she/he flees as it is surgical intervention.
parodie use of the conventions
Many reviewers have catalogued Eugenides's
of Greek tragedy in the novel, usually suggesting its connection to the Greekness
of the novel's protagonist and as a strategy for humor and irony. But while this
cultural reference might add, so to speak, "ethnicity" to the narrative, this is itself
are eventually revealed not to have read
parodie. Milton and Tessie, Cal's parents,
the Greek plays as they struggle to improve themselves with a set of theworld's
is
classics. To treat narrative tradition as embodied by classic tragedy parodically
to reference precisely the difference between old and new narrative gambits and
world notion of fate, is akin to
assumptions. The "Ancient Greek notion," the old
the racial determinism of the nineteenth century. The new genomic biology allows
for excessive narrative and for freewill:
In the twentieth century, genetics brought theAncient Greek notion offate into
our very cells. This new century we've just begun has found something different.
our being iswoefully inadequate.
Contrary to all expectations, the code underlying
a
we
have
Instead of the expected 200,000 genes,
only 30,000. Not many more than
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CHU
EUGENIDES'S
MIDDLESEX
281
mouse. And so a strange new possibility is arising. Compromised, indefinite,sketchy,
but not entirely obliterated:free will ismaking a comeback. Biology gives you a brain.
a
Life turns it into mind. (Eugenides 479)
Rabinow
writes of the new century's genomics
thatwe now have a fate that
will carry with itno depth. It makes absolutely no sense to seek out themeaning of
the lack of a guanine base because it has no meaning. One's relation to one's father
.
see a
or mother is not shrouded in the depths of discourse here. . . We
might even
return to tragedy in post-modernist form, although we will likely not simply rail
overcome our fates throughmore techno
against thegods, but rather be driven to
science. (102-03)
fate. Cal narrates from
In refusing surgery, Cal rejects the old depth-ridden
a position somewhere as a gamete, knowing transparently and without agonis
tic searching his relationship to his family as expressed through his genome; he
describes genes lining up, proteins sequencing and the like. The parodie tragic
rather than representative of agonized
chorus renders incest merely humorous
in the
relation to history that is itself?to repeat Rabinow's apt phrase?"shrouded
novels derive their claustrophobic density
Faulkner's
Where
discourse."
of
depths
from obscured family and historical relations, for the postgenomic
generations,
such things are transparent. This convention allows for a narrative that makes
Cal's condition emblematic of freedom.
I said earlier that this story, inmolecular narrative, of a hermaphroditic protago
nist without identity agony breathtakingly revives a tired genre: thewhite ethnic
in addition to recognizing the new and libera
immigrant narrative. I think that
term Cal uses for
tory narrative here, we need also to consider that the primary
were
born inAmerica.
himself is immigrant,despite the fact that he and his parents
over his parents and reaching back to the potential-filled myth of the
Skipping
can say he is anything he can be convincing about, Cal chooses a
immigrant who
different kind of birth:
a war. Now, some fifty-two years
My grandparents had fled their home because of
as definitely. I was
was
later, I was fleeing myself. I felt that I
saving myself just
the
alias
under
and
ofmy new gender. A
fleeing without much money inmy pocket
a
cars
a
across
me
series
the ocean; instead,
conveyed me across
of
ship didn't carry
I
and
a
new
and
like
was
Desdemona,
continent. I
person, too, just
Lefty
becoming
come.
new
I'd
me
to
which
to
world
in
this
would
didn't know what
(443)
happen
Like his grandparents, who become husband and wife in a country where virtu
one knows them, Cal's new self is a sexual one. "Desire made me cross over
ally no
to the other side, desire and the facticity ofmy body" (479). And like his grand
father,Cal fears someone may see through his new identity. Girls, he worries, may
was like an immigrant, putting on airs, who runs into someone from
spot him: "I
the old country. I didn't want to be found out" (471).
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282
NOVEL I SUMMER 2009
Is the "alias of his new gender" also an alias for
Eugenides, a way to revive the
dream
of
The
house
fromwhich the book takes its
(white) self-making?
immigrant
title,Middlesex, an ultramodern antibourgeois house that symbolizes the plenitu
dinous lifeCal will claim, stands in a richer,whiter
than the one he
neighborhood
was born in.Milton fails to
out
of
Detroit's
and
get
decaying
darkening neighbor
hood until no one will buy his business there. But after the fires from the Detroit
riots burn the place down, he takes the insurance money and
pays cash down
when the realtor doesn't want to sell to Greeks, then enrolls Callie in a
private
school for girls. Coming back forhis father's funeral, back to the
city as a man for
the first time, Cal says brightly to his brother that he likes Detroit,
replacing what
have
been
with
how
it
much
is
with
the experience
might
disappointment
decayed
of seeing his old city as a new person, now a man. He
one
moment of
experiences
limitation when he confronts a black man as a white man for the first time:
When I was little,street corner dudes like thatwould sometimes lower their shades
towink, keen on getting a rise out of thewhite girl. . . .But now the dude gave me
. . .That was when I realized a
a
different look altogether.
shocking thing. I couldn't
become a man without becoming TheMan. Even ifI didn't want to. (518)
Race is impervious to the new molecular dispensation. Cal mourns not its imper
viousness
forAfrican Americans
but his own loss of potential, locked into being
"The Man." During the funeral itself,Cal fullymobilizes his ethnic
to
masculinity
block the free-flowing space ofMiddlesex.
And so itwas I who, upholding an old Greek custom no one remembered anymore,
stayed behind onMiddlesex, blocking thedoor, so thatMilton's spiritwouldn't reen
ter thehouse. Itwas always a man who did this,and now I
[The house]
qualified....
was still the beacon itwas intended to be, a
with
interior
divested
walls,
place
few
of theformalities of bourgeois life,a place designed for a new type of human being,
who would inhabit a new world. I couldn't helpfeeling, of course, that theperson was
The wind swept over the crusted snow intomy
me, me and all the others likeme....
Byzantine face, which was theface ofmy grandfather and of theAmerican girl I had
once been. (529)
Here Cal contains in his own body the most symbolically fruitful characters of
the immigrant saga?the
immigrant grandfather and the "American girl." And
both are white. To be honest, I'm not really sure how Iwant to continue reading
this novel into the current American
racial context or how skeptical Iwant to be
about the paradigm
shift of molecular
genomics. The revival of white ethnicity
here might very well index white ethnic freedom from racial determinism while
some
enjoying the "depth" of authenticity. The mourning over being "The Man"
times strikes me as akin tomourning by conservative literary intellectuals over
how American
literature and literary criticism has been "taken over" by narra
tives of race and ethnicity, and popular culture equivalents
that accompany this.
And I can't help observing that another novel notable for its revival of this genre
isMichael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union?but
the ethnicity here is. Jew
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CHU
EUGENIDES'S
283
MIDDLESEX
ish and thus more
racially circumscribed. Ethnicity has to take to science fiction
in
the form of alternative history. IfHopkins were writing now,
(loosely defined)
would she be able to produce a race novel likeMiddlesex or would she, in order to
imagine such a fatewithout depth, turn to science fiction?
Works
Eugenides,
Jeffrey. Middlesex.
New
York:
Cited
Farrar,
Straus
and Giroux,
2002.
Hacking, Ian. "Genetics, Biosocial Groups, and the Future of Identity."Daedalus 135.4 (Fall
2006): 81-95.
Hopkins, Pauline. Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative ofNegro LifeNorth and South.
1900.Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988.
Keller, Evelyn Fox. The Century of theGene. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002.
Rabinow,
Paul.
Essays
on the
Anthropology
of Reason.
Princeton:
Princeton
UP,
1996.
Rose, Nikolas. The Politics ofLife Itself:Biomedicine,Power, and Subjectivity in theTwenty-First
Century.
Princeton:
Princeton
UP,
2007.
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All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
