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

Byatt’s substantial contribution to the novel’s investigation of the twentieth-century molecular understanding of life unfolds across her quartet of novels, The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002). In this chapter, I reveal Byatt’s 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 quartet’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 essays. This approach elucidates the central role of the snail in the quartet’s historicisation of the metaphor of DNA as the language of life. Introducing a new concept, I argue that the snail functions in the text as an “aesthetic model organism”. I identify correspondences and differences between Byatt’s text and both George Eliot’s and Jacques Derrida’s conceptions of organic forms and organic linguistic structures. I suggest that through its exploration of genetic metaphors of life, Byatt’s quartet elaborates a sophisticated concept of self-conscious organic form.