Where does one even begin? Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations (1991) is a masterpiece on so many levels. But it eludes the literary critic, the musicologist, and the scientist alike. And that's kind of the point. It is the one-culture text of one-culture texts. Who reads it then? Who translates? (That's kind of the point.)
The literary scholar reads:
"The point of every translation -- the years spent in science, away from art history, wrapped in the library, trapped in this paragraph -- is suddenly one and the same.
Translation, hunger for porting over, is not about bringing Shakespeare into Bantu. It is about bringing Bantu into Shakespeare. To show what else, other than homegrown sentences, a language might be able to say. The aim is not to extend the source but to widen the target, to embrace more than was possible before. After a successful decoding, after hitting upon the right solution -- however temporary, tentative, replaceable, and local -- the two extended, enhanced languages (Shakespeare changes forever too, analogies adapting to the African plains) form a triangulating sextant pointing back to the height of the ruined tower, steering limited idiom toward a place where knowledge goes without saying" (491).
The musicologist reads:
"Sound, he pronounced, always means more than it says. The parts only start to explain the thing waiting to spring out of them. So it is in every organized hive. Because we live on the seam between formula and mystery, because I can recognize in the harmonic vicissitudes the hummable tune is put through some similar, metaphorical bend, music marks out the way all messages go. Its contours deliver themselves, bent from the chance of experience. They live for a minute in ephemeral pattern, then collapse back to a uniform void that says nothing, carries no knowledge, far less information. The silence they fall back into, the nothing that they contrast with, is what notes make, for a measure, audible. [...]
But notes passed through a transforming key: nothing is what it is except in where, when, and how it goes about unfolding" (571).
The scientist reads:
"The inert shape of this enzyme has a binding site that fits substance A. The active shape has a site matching B as well as materials C and D that it transforms into product E. If A grabs the molecule first, it locks it into inert shape, eliminating those sites that accept the catalyzable materials. The enzyme is switched off, C and D can't bind, and the manufacture of E stops. But if B first binds to the enzyme in active form, it locks the molecule into shape with C and D's sites intact. The faucet is held open; the enzyme joins C and D into E so long as supplies of C and D exist.
Ressler's magic of Boolean circuitry begins to emerge. The presence of A inhibits the manufacture of E; B promotes it. None of the compounds reacts with the enzyme itself; the machine remains unchanged except for switching on and off, always capable of switching back if the splint-substances detach. Even wilder: the inhibitors, promoters, and inputs, binding to independent sites, need have nothing to do with one another. A, B, C, D, and E can be anything at all. In theory, any chemical can be made to inhibit or promote the degradation of any other. The effect can even be nonlinear; multiple binding sites on an enzyme could cause the small amounts of compound to have enormous effects on the synthesis of others" (395).
As a literary scholar, I am compelled to start reading a textbook on Molecular Biology. And I've been listening to J.S. Bach's "Goldberg Variations" all day.
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And, it's a love story.
Powers, Richard. The Gold Bug Variations. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.
