Lifeboats and Binaries
In a novel of epic proportions such as Middlesex, images play a very important role. The narrator spends much time dwelling on the significance of certain images, whether comparing the burning city of Smyrna to his own childhood memories of a fireside charring of scrapped wrapping paper, or speeding time in explaining the functioning of the assembly line, the gambling addiction of his grandfather, or the fertilization of an egg (I use the masculine pronoun as at the close of chapter two, the narrator’s adult identity is male, at least if forced into a binary). An image from early in the story of Lefty and Desdemona’s reinvention of each other as lovers, not siblings, seems especially prescient to the chaos the narrator portends: the sex scenes in the ship’s lifeboat. That the consummation of their marital union would occur in a device meant to save those in peril of imminent drowning and destruction is as strong an indication of danger ahead as a metaphor can come. And certainly, that is the feeling that overrides the first two parts of the novel–of something fully and totally wrong ahead, something that just should not be, but will happen no matter–a fated doom which wends its way into nearly every scene.
Middlesex effectively provides a sense of imminent doom while, counterintuitively, laying out from the very first page nearly exactly what that fated event will be. This is accomplished through a narrative in which the distant past is constantly informed by the less distant past, while also occasionally visited by the present. And though the narrative is certainly convoluted (though not as much as the family tree the narrator lays out which explains the twice-relational nature of each of his relations), it is undergirded by a purpose throughout: to bring the reader to the present, to the “most famous hermaphrodite in history,” to someone once called Caliope, now called Cal, and how all of this came to pass. That Jimmy Zizmo once crashed into an iced-over Lake St Claire, only to reappear as the founder of the Nation of Islam, may seem totally out of context, yet in this narrative, it is not, as each family relation explained leads us one chromosome closer to Cal, and to a mystery whose essential nature the novel has already revealed, on the surface, but not much deeper.
The first half of the novel focused primarily on the family narrative, and established a strong beginning point for Cal’s story. In telling the story of someone who fits outside of the sexual binary, a meandering yet fully engrossing account of sexual deviance on the part of those who seem to fit comfortably in their assigned and accepted sex is quite an interesting way of questioning just how in control of our bodies, emotions, and urges we are, and how able we are to fit them into categories and places that society would say they should be. The character of Dr Philobosian, who warns of hemophilia and other defects of the child born of incest, is a strong reminder of the scientia sexualis culture operating, in which some behaviors fit, while others are sick and harmful. That the story of Cal’s creation begins with sex in a lifeboat is altogether appropriate, as his existence itself points to a place that is just above drowning and destruction for a society which upholds a normative binary, declaring male and female, healthy and unhealthy, dead and alive, and so on.
One final, slightly unrelated note–another binary, that of dead and alive, is rejected by the novel, in its portrayal of Zizmo’s funeral. Although he is dead, his spirit still dwells on earth for 40 days, able to cause mischief and minor harmful deeds. Only after those 40 days expire is he fully dead, and totally out of the realm of the living, unable to affect them and confined to some great beyond.
