SOURCE: “Sex, Language, and Narrative: Continuity and Discontinuity in Italo Calvino's ‘Meiosis,’” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 27, No. 2, Spring, 1990, pp. 203–09.

“Meiosis” is the centrepiece of a trilogy of short stories, also including “Mitosis” and “Death,” in which Italo Calvino speculates about the similarity between texts and biological organisms with respect to notions of continuity and discontinuity. In these stories, Calvino exploits the fact that he can construct analogies between language and texts on the one hand and DNA and biological organisms on the other, based on their similarities as systems. As Calvino's story demonstrates, both linguistic and organic systems are complex, flexible within limits (by virtue of the ability to rear-range components), polysemic, potentially self-referential, and theoretically inexhaustible: our species will probably be extinct before all possible English narratives and all possible human DNA combinations have been actualised.

Calvino's story “Mitosis” takes its name from the process of cell division that occurs in asexually reproducing organisms and in all the cells, except those that produce the egg and sperm, of sexually reproducing species. In mitosis a cell divides to produce two daughter cells, which are genetically identical to the original. This represents the ultimate in genetic continuity. It is true that there is some discontinuity, in that the original cell no longer exists as an undivided entity. But, in a very real sense, it is its two daughter cells. One of the quotations with which Calvino prefaces his trilogy is taken from Georges Bataille's L'Erotisme. This quotation points out that, in mitotic division,

from a single entity, two result. … The first has disappeared. Essentially, it is dead, since only the two entities it has produced survive. … it ceases to be. … in the sense that it is discontinuous. But … there was continuity. … The first dies, but in its death appears a fundamental instant of continuity.

(t zero 55–56)

The conservation of DNA in mitotic division, the fact that the offspring are genetically identical to the maternal cell, constitutes genetic immortality. This leads Calvino to refer to asexually reproducing species as “a discontinuous and perpetual life, always identical to itself” (“Death,” t zero 88).

In “Death,” Calvino meditates on one of the most significant evolutionary events in the history of our planet—the appearance of sexual reproduction. Sex is a wildly successful adaptation, as evidenced by its popularity. It is believed that sexual reproduction was adopted by so many species because it greatly increases the genetic diversity of a species and speeds up the rate of evolution. Calvino sees another advantage: that sex, and its inevitable corollary, death, make possible the existence of the unique individual. Calvino suggests that sex and death entered the world at the same moment because the offspring of sexually reproducing species are not genetically identical to either parent. Therefore, when the parents are destroyed, their particular combinations of genes cease to exist. This, says Calvino, is death. That is, sex introduces a radical discontinuity that makes genetic immortality impossible. Calvino has thus inverted the normal view of sexual reproduction as the individual's chance for a kind of immortality.

Sexual reproduction involves continuity of a sort, in that the DNA of both parents is partially conserved in their offspring, but only half of the full DNA complement of each parent is given to the child, and, as we shall see, the parental genes are “shuffled” and recombined before fertilisation. Since there are thousands of human genes, the possible number of permutations resulting from this recombination greatly exceeds the total number of people who have ever existed. And it is the specific combination of genes which gives each person his or her identity, which makes every individual unique. So, in sexual reproduction, although the parental DNA is (partially) conserved in the offspring, the unique identity of the parent is lost when he or she dies. For this reason, Calvino calls all exually reproducing species “the discontinuous” (“Death,” t zero 91).

The notion that identity resides in the particular combination of genes one possesses is a very important one. Since the average gene changes by mutation only once in every 200,000 years, it is the recombination of genes in every generation of a sexually reproducing species that is principally responsible for human individuality. This is obviously analogous to language, which does not create new narratives primarily by generating new words, but by rearranging existing words. Calvino defines language as “signs, articulated sounds, ideograms, morphemes, numbers, punched cards, magnetic tapes, tattoos … social relations, kinship institutions, merchandise, advertising posters,” all of which serve as “connective tissue” to bridge the discontinuities between individuals. “The circuit of vital information that runs from nucleic acid to writing” is, therefore, a continuity which threatens the discontinuity which is the basis of individual identity (“Death,” t zero 91–92). That is, language revives the dangerous possibility of immortality, “the risk … [of] living forever,” of unchanging continuity which makes all members of a species identical. Therefore, says Calvino, we must find ways to break language's “perpetual self-repetition” (87, 92). Language must be constantly ruptured, just as sex, and its corollary death, must rupture the continuity of a single self-perpetuating combination of genes. Death and discontinuity are liberating because they permit change, the generation of new identities and new narratives.

One can extend Calvino's analogy to include not only individuals but whole species. The process of evolution comes about by the breaking up of a species' old DNA language and its reorganisation into new combinations. Similarly, one can depict the evolution of a literary genre as an irruption of the new which introduces a tension of continuity and discontinuity, resembling that seen in the evolution of a species. Advocates of discontinuous models of species and genre formation would argue that a single individual, simply by existing, can alter the characteristics of a species, or that the appearance of an innovative new text can change the parameters of an existing genre. That is, it is possible to draw analogies between biological species and literary genres, and between personal identity and texts. In “Meiosis,” Calvino plays with the notion of the textuality of personal identity.

Calvino's depiction, in “Meiosis,” of the individual is post-structuralist, in that the definitive, essential self disappears before his narrator's speculations as utterly as the definitive, essential text evaporates under post-structuralist criticism. The self simply becomes a space within which events interact. Calvino's narrator, a meditative camel, begins by discussing the problems of origin:

Narrating things as they are means narrating them from the beginning, and even if I start the story at a point where the characters are multicellular organisms, for example the story of my relationship with Priscilla, I have first to define clearly what I mean when I say me and what I mean when I say Priscilla.

(75)

This is always a problem with biography, for one must decide when personal identity begins. David Copperfield begins on the night of the protagonist's birth. Tristam Shandy tries to begin at the moment of conception. Calvino's narrator tries to begin with the meiotic events that led to the formation of the sperm and egg by which he was conceived. He is defeated by the elusiveness of both definitive self-hood and definitive texts.

In “Meiosis,” Calvino exploits the fact that the “Central Dogma” of molecular biology is based on the concept of DNA as a language and that standard textbooks of biology use linguistic models to explain DNA function to students. The DNA “alphabet” consists of only four “letters”: the bases guanine, cytosine, adenine, and thymine, which are always abbreviated as G, C, A, and T. All “words” in DNA language are three letters long, but each gene or “sentence” contains hundreds of these “words.” A punctuation of sorts exists, in that there are sequences of bases that sign for the beginnings and ends of gene “sentences.” The gene “sentences” are packaged together on chromosome “chapters” and the entire gene complement of a cell can be thought of as a text.¹

However, rather as one might expect in a Calvino story, each of these “chapters” or chromosomes exists in two slightly different versions. Calvino's narrator inherits twenty-three chromosome “chapters” from his father, representing slightly different versions of the same twenty-three chromosomes inherited from his mother. Therefore, his total genetic complement, or genotype, can be thought of as a text comprised of twenty-three pairs of closely matched but non-identical chapters. Calvino makes great use of the fact that not all the genes one possesses are manifested or expressed. Therefore, the narrator's total genetic makeup (genotype) has a high degree of latent polysemeity: there are elements in any genotype which are not allowed to emerge. The genes which are expressed constitute his phenotype.

For example, suppose the narrator inherited one chromosome from his father which carries genes for brown hair and blue eyes, and a matching chromosome from his mother with genes for blonde hair and brown eyes. The father's brown hair and the mother's brown eye genes will be expressed, while the blonde hair and blue eye genes will not. That is, a phenotype represents a “definitive” reading of the genetic text, in which polysemeity is suppressed. But what looks like a blending of the parents' qualities—“He has his father's hair and his mother's eyes”—is in reality nothing of the kind. As Calvino points out, this apparent harmony masks hidden disagreement: “we know what we claim to be in our exterior form counts for little compared to the secret program we carry printed in each cell, where the contradictory orders of father and mother continue arguing” (“Meiosis,” t zero 82).

The problem which perturbs Calvino's narrator is the question of whether his “real” personal identity resides in the genes which are expressed or in the ones condemned to silence:

So at times I'm seized with uncertainty as to whether I am really the dominant characteristics of the past … or whether instead my true essence isn't rather what descends from the succession of defeated characteristics, the total … of everything that … has remained excluded, stifled, interrupted.

(82)

This, of course, is an echo of the post-structuralist depiction of the struggle for dominance, the aim of which is to render the opposition silent. Calvino takes advantage of the fact that the biological term for the situation in which one gene is expressed and its partner is silenced is dominance.

Therefore, says Calvino, what appears to be genetic unity is in reality struggle and rupture, and an individual is not a unified text, but rather the arena for a constant struggle of two narratives. Ironically, although the narrator appears to be the union of his parents' qualities, he is really the battleground within which their competing narratives struggle for expression and dominance. Each chapter remains forever divided into two competing versions, and every cell of his body bears witness to his parents' separation: “the offspring cells [perpetuate] not so much the union as the unbridgeable distance that separates in each couple the two companions, the failure, the void that remains in the midst of even the most successful couple” (81). But there is one moment, during meiosis, at which separation is transcended.

During meiosis, the special type of cell division which occurs only during sexual reproduction, the maternal and paternal chromosomes seek each other out for a moment of meeting known as conjugation, which one translator of “Meiosis” has rendered as “copulation” (83). This is the time at which “crossing over” occurs, when maternal and paternal chromosomes exchange DNA. It is therefore possible for the narrator's cell, which contained the paternal brown hair and blue eye chromosome and the maternal blonde hair and brown eye chromosome, to produce sperm in which these characters have been recombined so that blue eyes and blonde hair appear on the same chromosome. At this point there has been genuine union, and the competing narratives have been conflated.

Calvino's narrator realises that, at this point, for the first time since the moment of his own conception, the chromosomes of his body do not represent two conflicting inherited narratives, but a new and unique story made by rupturing and recombining the original narratives. However, this true union of the parents does not take place in the cells of the narrator's own body, but only in the cells which give rise to his sperm:

So finally the encounter of the pasts which can never take place in the present of those who believe they are meeting does take place in the form of the past of him who comes afterward and who cannot live that encounter in his own present. We believe we're going toward our marriage, but it is still the marriage of the fathers and the mothers which is celebrated through our expectation and our desire. What seems to us our happiness is perhaps only the happiness of the others' story which ends just where we thought ours began.

(84)

… finally the words written in the nuclei are no longer the same as before but are no longer parts of us either, they're a message beyond us, which already belongs to us no more.

(82–83)

Furthermore, this moment of reconciliation and synthesis is immediately disrupted because the chromosome which represents a genuine conflation of his parents' narratives is in the narrator's sperm. At fertilisation it becomes one term in the dialectic of the narrator's child.

Therefore, Calvino depicts personal genetic identity as a story which demonstrates an extreme resistance to closure: it involves a dialectic in which the moment of reconciliation and synthesis is ephemeral and illusory. Calvino's narrator realises that, at the moment at which his DNA text no longer consists of two inherited conflicting narratives, but becomes, by a breaking down and reorganisation of components, a unified and unique story, it is no longer his. The love story of his parents achieves full closure only for a moment and then becomes part of a new battle for dominance within his child.

According to Calvino, “Void, separation and waiting, that's what we are” (82). We are void because we are the empty space within which our parents' genes conflict. Our separation is the unbridgeable gulf between our parents' genes within our cells, and between our own and our lover's genes within our child. Only our phenotypes interact: our genotypes meet those of our lovers for a brief moment of chromosomal conjugation, in the cells by means of which our children beget our grandchildren. And we are forever waiting for our unique identity, which never occurs in our present but only in our future. Our identity never belongs to us.

Even worse, Calvino's narrator in “Meiosis” points out, one could say that he is merely a device for the perpetuation of a DNA text whose contents do not prescribe his own identity, or that of his parents, or even that of the human species, but simply that of DNA itself. The DNA “super-text” is totally self-referential, in that DNA “signs” for a vehicle (the individual) by which DNA can make more recombinations of DNA: “we proceed blindly … carrying out an established program … always the same. We don't tend toward any future, there's nothing awaiting us, we're shut up within the system of a memory which foresees no task but remembering itself” (80–81). To this way of thinking, human freedom is an illusion.

Calvino's narrator notes that there is one moment at which chance, in the form of random gene recombination during meiosis, appears to offer him an escape from the determinism of his genetic heritage. However, this moment occurs, not in his own body, but in the sperm he gives to his child. He and Priscilla

were only the preparation, the envelope, for the encounter of pasts which happens through us but which is already part of another story, the story of the afterward: the encounters always take place before and after us, and in them the elements of the new, forbidden to us, are active: chance, risk, improbability. … This is how we live, not free, surrounded by freedom.

(84)

This moment of freedom, like the moment of meeting during chromosomal conjugation, is ephemeral and illusory. The randomness of gene recombination does not offer an escape from determinism, since the “narrative” arising by chance is a genetic command inherited by the next generation. The dangerous continuity of DNA language binds each generation to the past: the narrator's child is the inevitable result of chance events that preceded its conception.

Despite its determinism, the DNA super-text constantly frustrates the promise of closure. There are endings, in that individuals die and species become extinct, but there is no closure because DNA goes on forever, its story blindly unfolding toward no telos: “nothing is made on purpose … nobody has invented anything … the way I am and Priscilla is really doesn't matter. … all a genetic heritage has to do is to transmit what is transmitted to it for transmitting” (77). This, as Calvino is quick to point out, has a bearing on evolution, which many people attempt to render as a narrative whose point of closure is the emergence of the human species. Those who impose a teleology on evolution see it as some kind of obstacle race with a big brain, culture, and above all, language, as a prize for being the most successful. But the pattern of evolution is generated by random mutation and by the chance recombination of genes during meiotic cell division. Natural selection is an unconscious editor, retaining within the DNA super-text those narratives which have survived the contingent vicissitudes of their environment: “What each of us really is and has is the past; all we are and have is a catalogue of the possibilities that didn't fail, of the experiences that are ready to be repeated” (80). Therefore the pattern one sees in evolution exists, not as a latent meaning unfolding itself in time, but simply as a result of chance and non-purposive determinism.

Thus, Calvino's characters live in a paradox of continuity and discontinuity. Priscilla and her lover exist in lonely discontinuity because they are incapable of real contact. Yet, they are enslaved to continuity in that they are chained to the past except for a brief moment of freedom which “belongs” to nobody. Human language and the language of DNA alike burden them with the past, tie them to continuity, and threaten their individuality, without which there can be no separation and, therefore, no possibility of meeting. Calvino's narrator concludes that his love story is not only “impossible to narrate but first of all impossible to live” (80). How can he construct a narrative about two individuals, when he cannot focus on a moment at which anyone possesses his or her own identity? How can he describe these people's relationship, when genuine union is so fleeting? How can he construct a narrative in which his characters make a meaningful choice to love one another, when their freedom is always in a future which never arrives?

I am left with a question. Calvino argues that we must disrupt language because freedom and personal identity, however limited our experience of these might be, are worth the price of separation. If sex is what ruptures DNA language and brings in freedom (however ephemeral and illusory), gives us unique identities (however ungraspable), and permits real meeting (however fleeting), what does this for human language? Does Calvino imply that the creation of new stories is the saving disrupter? Is that why his narrator continues, although he knows it is “impossible,” to tell stories?

Note

1. The process by which the DNA “sentence” is passed on to another kind of nucleic acid (RNA) with a slightly different alphabet (all T's are replaced by U's, the base uracil) is called transcription. The process by which this RNA “sentence” is converted into protein “language” is called translation.