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Encoding an Infinite Message: Richard Powers's Gold Bug Variations

1995; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/con.1995.0004

1080-6520

Jay A. Labinger,

Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Biomedical Research

Encoding an Infinite Message: Richard Powers’s Gold Bug Variations Jay A. Labinger (bio) Jacob Bronowski has defined science as “nothing else than the search to discover unity in the wild variety of nature.” 1 This is perhaps the culmination of a belief whose origin G. S. Rousseau locates in the seventeenth century: “Nature herself was finite. . . . not an infinite body of knowledge that man could never hope to understand. . . . rather codified in a vast but nevertheless finite set of laws and relationships that would gradually be revealed to man if he persisted.” 2 According to this view, the diversity and complexity of the world are to be mastered, confined, and simplified—certainly not emphasized or celebrated. The central message of Richard Powers’s third novel, The Gold Bug Variations, is that this conception looks from exactly the wrong direction. The wondrous thing about the world is not that “the wild variety of nature” may be encompassed by a finite set of laws, but rather that such a limited basis set can generate infinite variety. The message is eventually understood by Stuart Ressler, a young biological researcher caught up in the race to break the genetic code in the 1950s, and is misread, in various ways, by most of the other characters; these comprise the main themes of the text’s narrative. More strikingly, though, the message is not only presented by the text but [End Page 79] structurally embedded within it, as Powers has constructed out of his limited basis set an echo of systems that can generate infinite possibility. The crucial structural element in this construction, as foreshadowed by the title, is code. 3 In order to see how a message portraying infinity may be encoded, it is essential to distinguish two different functions of code. The more familiar is the simpler: substitution. This function is well represented in Poe’s story “The Gold Bug,” where a cipher has the sole function of concealing a set of instructions, which are usable only after reconversion to clear text. A good description of this aspect of code is provided by Douglas Hofstadter: “decoding mechanisms . . . do not add any meaning to the signs or objects which they take as input; they merely reveal the intrinsic meaning of those signs or objects.” 4 Code in this sense has no productive power: there is a one-to-one correspondence between the coded message and its deciphered meaning. A second and more important function of code may be seen in three of the novel’s major motifs. Two of these are the genetic code, the set of rules whereby genetic information stored in DNA is translated into protein synthesis in the cell; and computer programming, where code refers to the set of instructions that the programmer actually writes. In programming, the aspect of substitution is still present in some sense: the code, in whatever programming language used, must be converted into machine language. However, the main function of this code is not substitution but rather generation: it is a set of instructions that brings about actions. It does not merely produce another version of itself; rather, it produces the intended output of the computer program. The distinction is even more obvious with respect to the genetic code. One can distinguish between the set of rules of correspondence between a specific triplet of bases and a specific amino acid (translation), and the synthesis of an enzyme from information encoded in a sequence of DNA (expression). 5 In the substitutional sense, the coded message—a list of the nucleotide bases that make up a gene—yields upon decoding just another list, [End Page 80] that of amino acids that make up a protein. In the generative sense, though, the result of decoding the genetic message is the living organism! There is thus a multiplicative aspect of code and decoding that takes us far beyond any one-to-one correspondence: the near-infinite complexity and infinite variability of life are generated from the relatively simple set of molecules and rules that comprise the genetic code. The third coding motif is Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Although the connection with code is not at first obvious, Powers presents it...