• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.243-260
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• 2007

This article explores how Richard Powers' The Gold Bug Variations, an interdisciplinary novel through the new concepts of biocriticism and bioliterature is connected with literature/art and science/technology. Powers uses Edgar Allen Poe's "The Gold Bug" and Johann Sebastian Bach's "The Goldberg Variations" for decoding DNA in order to analogize a genomic metaphor. He imagines literature as "the book of life" genome, written by DNA code due to the complexity and multiplicity of the genome. His novel, as 'genomic narrative,' shows the articulation of the genomic reading, and expression in the life language through the discourses of the information technology and the rhetorical tropes in biology. New biological ideas are continually required to articulate these processes. In the present tendency of the Human Genome Project, such advanced devices as biocybernetics offer the potential to open up new possibilities to researching the complexity of the genome. This can only happen if the following two ideas are followed: One is to comply with advanced technologies for processing the rapidly increasing data of the genome sequence; The other is to admit the necessary paradigm shift in biology. As shown above, the complexity and multiplicity of the genomic reality is not so simple. We must go beyond determinism, even if representation of a biological reality reveals the possibility of expressing its constituent elements by the advanced biotechnology. Consequently, in the unstoppable advances of the art of decoding the genome, The Gold Bug Variations interrelates to the interdisciplinary approaches through the rhetorical tropes that unfold the complex discursive world of the genome. Powers shows that the complex mechanisms of the genome in the microworld of every cell as the plot of "the book of life" can be designed and written using DNA language. At the same time, his genomic reading and writing demonstrate the historical processes of the shifting center of new genomic development and polysemous interpretation.