The Selfish Genre: Agency, Metalepsis, and Narratives of Evolution

Nonfiction popular science books tend to utilize stock narrative forms. Works about cosmology or neuroscience, for instance, frequently employ the detective story of uncovering scientific truths via the discovery of clues, or the "Galileo myth" of the scientific hero standing up to dogmatic convention. A well-known example is Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, which the author frames as narrating a "quest" that has been going on since "the dawn of civilization" (1988: 14). It even includes brief biographical sketches of some of the heroes—Newton, Einstein, and Galileo—to whom Hawking compares himself (122). In the popular science subgenre of works on evolutionary biology, these conventional narratives are likewise common. But there are other features of texts about evolution that are of special importance to the study of narrative. First, there is a pervasive textual metaphor not only at the heart of explanatory strategies in popular works but also integral to the more official technical language of textbooks and professionals. This metaphor figures the genome as a text to be read and copied, and nowadays to be edited through gene manipulation technologies. Meanwhile, the genome is also presented as the author of organisms'—including humans'—behavior. This prompts a metafictional reading, whereby the reader is thrown into an unusual relation to the "fictive" text of the genome, a text by which the reader is in some sense authored—her genes greatly influence who she is—but which she may in the future "rewrite" with elective gene therapies. I argue that this is a unique type of metalepsis with no equivalent in fictional narratives.

The personification of genes is, as we will see, a more contested metaphorical device. Like the textual metaphor, it is also standardly employed in popular accounts of evolution, but it is not as pervasive in the technical literature. It is especially prominent in books that take the gene's-eye perspective, the nonpareil example of which is Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene. The first edition, published in 1976 (recently released in a fortieth-anniversary edition), launched his career as probably the best-known contemporary popularizer of evolutionary theory. The central conceit of the book is that one should adopt the point of view of the gene, rather than that of the organism or species, in thinking about how evolution by natural selection works. In doing so Dawkins personifies the gene, including in the title, even though he offers frequent disclaimers about not attributing agency or conscious purpose to unthinking entities. He is only partly successful in this, and indeed, critiques of his work over the last forty years have often focused on this point (see Journet 2010). In various paratextual elements—prefaces, endnotes, and an epilogue—to subsequent editions of The Selfish Gene and also in other of his books, Dawkins has sought to clarify the usefulness of personification while also weighing in on arguments over the nature of language and metaphor.

The difficulty, I think, is in the fact that genes are used to explain evolution, which is a process that itself is meant to explain the gradual emergence of real agency from non-agential or quasi-agential things, namely, genes. No grammatical case exists for designating the kind of quasi- or proto-agent that the gene represents for Dawkins and other writers in the subgenre. For the reader, the categories of subject and object are mingled and the very basis of narrativity—agents causing events—is undercut by the narrative of the evolution of complex life and hence agency itself. This is also metaleptic. Any narrative of evolutionary history that culminates in the unique attributes of Homo sapiens— which The Selfish Gene does—is also perforce a narrative of the reader's and the narrator's origins.

Together, the textual metaphor and the use of personification disclose the peculiarities of narrativizing evolution. I argue that they also disclose the centrality of evolution to questions in narratology. It may be that the effect generated by the mingling of levels in a fictional metalepsis is essentially the same as that which draws criticism...