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Title	:	The Gold Bug Variations
Author	:	Richard Powers
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 640 pages
Published	:	1991 by Harper Perennial
Categories	:	Fiction. Literature. Music. Novels. Contemporary

The Gold Bug Variations

Richard Powers

Paperback | Pages: 640 pages

Rating: 4.13 | 1615 Users | 163 Reviews

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A Source of Meditative Awe As soon as I finished reading this novel, I wanted to respond the only way I could that would do justice to my feelings for the book: and that was to admit that I was in a state of wonder and to say that, in Richard Powers’ own words, the novel was "a source of meditative awe". Although, at 639 pages, the novel was long, it was enough, neither too little nor too much. Still I didn’t want it to end, not so much when it did, but at all. Recognition of the Variations To the extent that the novel may be considered a work of post-modernism, it’s more profound than anything else I’ve read since, perhaps, "The Recognitions". It shares the knowledge of Thomas Pynchon’s "Gravity’s Rainbow", if not necessarily its playfulness. But then most of what passes for playful in other works of post-modernism is merely puerile, which is the last accusation that could be made about "The Gold Bug Variations". This novel is deadly serious, infinitely curious, intimate and romantic. So much so that you will learn more about women and men within its pages than you would from anything written by Joseph McElroy. Titular Playfulness Powers does play in this novel, but he plays with the building blocks of life. They are both the form and the subject matter of the novel. He spins his narrative around the double helix of DNA. There are two main stories: one set in 1957/58 and the other in 1983. Ironically, though perhaps not, each time is just a few years after the recording of one of Glenn Gould’s recordings of Bach’s "The Goldberg Variations" (1955 and 1981), which are alluded to in the title of the novel and consistently throughout the text itself. The two stories don’t so much alternate as intertwine. Powers and his characters play music for us, instead of post-modern silly buggers. The title also alludes to Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, "The Gold-Bug", which concerns the decipherment of a coded message about the location of the deceased Captain Kidd’s pirate treasure. As Poe’s narrator says:

"Circumstances and a certain bias of mind have led me to take interest in such riddles, and it may well be doubted whether human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve."

The Seam Between Formula and Mystery In the 1958 story, a number of scientists (including Drs. Stuart Ressler and Jeanette Koss) are trying to decode the message contained in the spiral DNA staircase. In the 1983 story, a young research librarian named Jan O’Deigh starts investigating Dr Ressler’s background at the request of her future boyfriend, art historian Frank Todd (who has just started working at a commercial data processing centre where Dr Ressler now works, and is eager to find out why Dr Ressler might have abandoned research that could have won him a Nobel Prize). Soon after the novel starts (in 1983), both Jan and Frank learn that Dr Ressler has died of cancer. Thus, there are limited opportunities to learn the truth from Ressler himself. Jan’s field notebook contains the detail of the 1983 narrative. She's the source of most of the scientific information about DNA and the research project (as she tries to educate herself - and us). The coded message is the central metaphor of the novel. Yet the background isn’t just your customary post-modern name-dropping or info-dumping. We accumulate data, knowledge and understanding at the same pace as Jan does in her effort to investigate Ressler’s background. The 1958 story is narrated in the third person, though we learn plenty about what Ressler is involved in, both professionally and personally. Indeed, it's revealed early in the novel that Ressler and Jeanette had a love affair. At the beginning of their relationship, Jeanette gave Ressler a vinyl copy of Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of "The Goldberg Variations". Ressler plays it constantly, until eventually it becomes a metaphor for both their relationship and the message contained in DNA. A Pinnacle of Potency The Goldberg Variations consist of 30 variations bookended by an aria at the beginning and end. Equally, Powers’ novel consists of thirty chapters bookended by two literary "arias" (literarias). Each chapter averages about 21 pages long, and is divided into four to six sub-chapters (like strands of DNA that propel the novel towards its conclusion). In the liner notes to his recording, Glenn Gould wrote of Bach’s music:

"It is, in short, music which observes neither end nor beginning, music with neither real climax nor real resolution, music which, like Baudelaire's lovers, 'rests lightly on the wings of the unchecked wind.' It has, then, unity through intuitive perception, unity born of craft and scrutiny, mellowed by mastery achieved, and revealed to us here, as so rarely in art, in the vision of subconscious design exulting upon a pinnacle of potency."

It’s no overstatement to make the same comments about Powers’ novel. It has a double helical unity derived from intuitive perception that is born of both superlative craft and close scrutiny, mellowed by a non-pyrotechnic mastery of language that is subtly achieved. On the other hand, the vision and design are quite conscious and deliberate, nevertheless achieving a pinnacle of potency. Playing with Messages One of the scientists mentioned in the novel says of the double helix:

"I am the riddle of life. Know me and you will know yourself."

Powers refers to their research into the riddle as "the old detective story, the sober mystification of the bug." (p 238) The novel proceeds on the basis that there is both a secret message contained in the code and a message with respect to the creation of life sent out by the code, the latter its primary task. Jan responds:

"I spend the afternoon playing with messages, and on no proof but my pleasure, feel as if I’m closing in on my discovery, me." (p 220)

The Complexities of Intimacy Jan soon realises that it’s not just pleasure at the heart of the code, but, like aspects of painting (and music), desire:

"Shape and form began to seem dialects of desire."

She dresses herself up, makes herself a "visual lure" (p 223):

"I didn’t try to explain that I was after one thing: what it felt like to be alive." (p 315)

Desire seems to be part of the survival mechanism built into the "sinuous ribbons" of the helix. DNA is self-motivated to perpetuate itself by procreation (i.e., multiplication). Citing Herman Melville, Powers has Jan say, "Survival might force one into bedfellowship with a Queequeg or two":

"Truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold." (p 229) "At length, he [Todd] relaxed into my arms and kissed me where the collarbone turns to sternum." (p 232)

Play Me My Variations Ressler initially tries to ignore his own attraction to and longing for Jeanette:

"Dr. Koss walks across the lab to the dissection table, her legs inscribing a counterrhythm, the high arc of her collarbone floating in contrary motion. He is hypnotised by her approach, his pinch of chromatic pain enhanced to ecstasy at just being able to see her, look at her, taste without touching. How can he remain impassive, give this woman no clue that she throws out his method, corrupts his buffer rates, soaks his equilibrium with a wash of chemical maydays." (p 236)

Desire doesn’t just perpetuate the species, but it also seems to frustrate and confuse the normal operation of the individual biological system. Broadcast desire creates a "walking trance, the sleeping spell of mind." (p 237) The system can read it as an error, "a complex carbohydrate tease, cybernetic systems feeding back into each other, an infinite Do-loop, a sentence grammatical but out of syntactical control, whom looping around to subject subject who." (p 238) Ressler resolves to dedicate his research to Jeanette: "He will bring her an incalculable prize...Now he will prove to her that he, of everyone she has ever met, most merits the selection of love...He has sought the code in order to seduce her." (pp 258, 281) Some Other Hypothetical Life Just as the codes of DNA determine life, they are variable, and never result in the same outcome twice. There are approximations, errors and flaws in the code that account for both variation (variety) and evolution. Every code or "language makes it impossible to receive the exact message sent." All language is mere metaphor. It’s not (and can’t be) an exact replica of life. The Code as a Figure, a Metaphor Ressler hypothesises that "The code is...a figure. A metaphor. The code exists only as the coded organism. There is no lexicon or look-up book. Not in the molecules, nor the cell, nor anywhere else but in that place - unnameable except by comparison - that houses all translation, all motivation, all that self-propagating structure that only by rough analogy and always in archaic diction (but not yet in his own words) can only inescapably be called desire." (p 271) The construct of metaphor is central to the novel:

"The poignancy of a pattern lifted beyond identity, beyond the thing it was mimicking, past metaphor, into the first mystery: the bliss beyond the fiddle, but not, for a night, beyond fiddling." (p 574)

This is how Jan explains the metaphorical relationship between "The Goldberg Variations" and DNA code:

"Dr Ressler - already fighting gnostic tendencies - must have loved discovering in Bach two paired strands, four phrase-building blocks, a sixty-four-codon catalogue. Bach had a habit of imbedding mystic numbers in his compositions; these ones happen to correspond to the number-game nature embeds in its own. But this coincidence was the least of the qualities that made this music Ressler’s best metaphor for the living gene." (p 579)

The Unmappable Location of Love Jan pursues the connection further into the very nature of language, its imprecision and its inability to capture reality:

"I would tell him [Todd] how the helix is not a description at all, but just the infolded germ of a scaffolding organism whose function is to promote and preserve the art treasure that erects it. How the four-base language is both more and less than plan. How it comprises secret writing in the fullest sense, possessing all the infinite, extendable, constructing possibilities lying hidden in the parts of speech. How there is always a go-between, a sign between signature and nature...Even Todd would see how breathtaking it must have been to be the first to connect metaphor to chemistry, to find the genes, those letter-crosses nesting like flocks in family trees...How language makes it impossible to receive the exact message sent...I would make metaphors for you until I became almost clear. Words are fairy tale, not a court transcript...The closest he [Ressler] would ever get is simile, literature in translation, the thing by another name, and never what the tag stood for. The dream that base-pair sequences might talk about themselves in high-level grammar vanished in the synthesised organism. Science remains at best a marvellous mine, not a replacement for the shattered Tower [of Babel]." (p 517)

Still, "for a brief moment, he [Ressler] achieved a synthesis between a scientist’s certainty in underlying particulars and the cleric’s awe at the unmappable whole." (p 399) The Thing Plays Itself Like the code, the Variations play themselves, which also describes the mutual desire between Ressler and Jeanette:

"All the two of them need to do is hit the right notes at the right time, and the thing plays itself." (p 501)

Shortly afterwards, Jan describes her notebook entries in a way that could be equally applied to the novel itself:

"A little lay chemistry, evolution in outline, amateur linguistics padded out with kiss-and-tell." (p 556)

While this description is literally true, it doesn’t quite do justice to the novel’s status as a profoundly satisfying metaphysical and romantic masterpiece. I highly recommend this novel to serious readers who are comfortable with the subject matter of both philosophy and science (not that you require any prior knowledge of either - you can leave that to Jan!). VARIATIONS ON LOVE: The Double Helix of Desire [Ode to Stuart Ressler] Did you think you could find The secret code of life With another man’s wife, Two lovers’ legs entwined? Play Me My Variations [In the Words of Richard Powers] Two copies twist about each Other with helical precision, At ever-increasing steps, coding For their own continuation. Challenge the Patient [After Richard Powers] Apply your Latinate reason To any vollumannous tome Spruiked by a pomo coterie: Dotards love their own dotery. Weed it and reap out of season, In case it transmits their syndrome. CLA REM ONT [Lyric by Robyn Hitchcock] "And you wanna know what is And also what is not Don't you, girl? It's an independent life And you want to see your eyes Reflected in the world." SOUNDTRACK: [Quodlibet] (view spoiler)[ Lejaren Hiller - "Illiac Suite for String Quartet" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fojKZ1y... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illia... Glenn Gould - "The Goldberg Variations" (J. S. Bach), BMV 998 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cwas_7H... Glenn Gould - "The Goldberg Variations" (J. S. Bach), BMV 998 (Zenph Re-Performance) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah392... The Beatles - "Penny Lane" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-rB0... The Beatles - "Strawberry Fields Forever" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzYBf... The Beatles - "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=121MW... Robyn Hitchcock & The Venus Three - "A Man's Gotta Know His Limitations, Briggs" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP7Ns... Robyn Hitchcock - "Intricate Thing" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gx8F... Robyn Hitchcock - "Belltown Ramble" (Live at Belcourt Theatre, Nashville) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aPHF... Robyn Hitchcock - "I'm Falling" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHP4V... Nick Cave - "Are You The One That I've Been Waiting For?" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NXcuX01... k d lang - "Still Thrives This Love" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uSZdypI... (hide spoiler)]

Specify Books Concering The Gold Bug Variations

Original Title:	The Gold Bug Variations
ISBN:	0060975008 (ISBN13: 9780060975005)
Edition Language:	English URL http://www.richardpowers.net/the-gold-bug-variations/
Characters:	Stuart Ressler, Jeanette Koss
Setting:	Brooklyn, New York City, New York(United States) Chicago, Illinois(United States)
Literary Awards:	National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for Fiction (1991)

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Ratings: 4.13 From 1615 Users | 163 Reviews

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I had not heard of Richard Power before I picked up a copy of The Goldbug Variations, so I didn't have much of a preconceived idea of what to expect. First thing I did was open up the book randomly to a few pages and read some sentences to get the authors general style. First I noticed the density of the style. I'm ok with that. I tend to like dense and even write that way some times. But then I noticed that as far as I could tell the sentences didn't really mean anything. Well they would

How many ways are there of being alive?This was my second time though The Gold Bug Variations. For brevitys sake (I could write a lot, so be thankful), Ive left my original review below as most of it still holds. Here are just a few further thoughts.There are faults in this book. It is over-written (Powers has turned every possible dial up to 11), it could be 200 pages shorter, it contains technical, scientific passages that will baffle all but the expert. But I still give it 5 stars for one

A mid-50's scientist was on the verge of real discovery in the realms of DNA research, and nothing happened. Decades later a librarian wants to know why. Where'd he go? What happened?If you liked Gravity's Rainbow you might want to give The Gold Bug Variations a look. It has perhaps not quite a Pynchonian level of technical discussion and detail, but a lot nonetheless; Power's voice is hard work, but after awhile I found it growing on me. Rich characterization, imagery, and arcane references

If you loved Powers' "Galatea 2.2" but wished it was twice as long and 10X as wonderful, here you go.Suggested prerequisites:- read Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold Bug"- acquire Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of Bach's "Goldberg Variations"

This book is not for the faint of heart. It is extremely challenging for its complex subject matter: DNA, classical music patterns, and computer programming. As a former software developer and infrequent pianist who took a genetics course in college, I have to say that only the computer stuff made sense, although it was a little farfetched. I tried to understand the genetic research issues and their relationship to Bachs Goldberg Variations, but I found myself mostly reading these passages

I wanted to like this, I really did. I read every page of it, which is an achievement in itself. I just found it very very overwrought for my taste, lost in its own screed of meandering, endless science metaphors and detailed descriptions of Bach piano pieces and DNA protein strings. When you get down to it, I just found it really hard to care about anything that was happening in the book.