In 2007, Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan described the human self as an ‘[i]ntegration of microbial communities and human technological extensions’Footnote ¹. Margulis had been the first biologist to propose that endosymbiosis – the presence of symbionts living within their hosts – plays a key role in evolution because it results in symbiogenesis, where new entities evolve from the embedding of different life forms within each other. As Margulis theorised in 1967, one single-celled organism absorbing another led to the energy-producing mitochondria that are vital to human cells. Although her idea was initially rejected by various scientific journals, by 2007 it had become the leading scientific theory of the origin of eukaryotic cells. In Dazzle Gradually, a blend of popular science and philosophy, Margulis and Sagan conclude that all ‘organisms of greater morphological complexity than bacteria’ have ‘selves of multiple origins’, and compare them to the Chimera of Greek mythology.Footnote ² Part lion, part goat, and part serpent, the Chimera was slain by Bellerophon with the help of another hybrid, Pegasus. But for Margulis and Sagan, symbiogenesis adds a new twist to the myth:

Through this rhetorical sleight of hand, Margulis and Sagan employ the Chimera metaphorically but dismantle the heroic plot structure associated with the figure. Thanks to symbiogenesis, the monsters that humanity sets out to slay are always, already, present within the human self.

Like Margulis and Sagan’s essays, the novels I examine in this chapter reimagine the self as a collective, where the very notion of individuality is questioned and displaced towards multi-scalar assemblages. Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio (1999) and David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014) explore how the awareness of endosymbiosis might destabilise the human subject. In Darwin’s Radio, a retrovirus hidden in the human genome produces a pandemic that changes the DNA of humanity, triggering a new step in the species’ evolution. In Mitchell’s blend of dystopian realism and fantasy, atemporal beings living within human bodies connect the lives of human protagonists to longer, century-spanning lifetimes, and through them to the planetary change wrought by the Anthropocene. In both novels, endosymbiosis embeds different scales of existence and temporality within each other, and the symbiotic self becomes a site of political reflection.

The first two sections of this chapter read Darwin’s Radio and The Bone Clocks as thought experiments in symbiopolitics. I begin by situating Bear’s novel in regard to science fiction’s previous portrayals of symbiogenesis so as to highlight the originality of this novel’s multi-scalar plot, which imagines retroviruses as mutualist collaborators across the long timescale of human evolution. This choice is all the more striking for the fact that Darwin’s Radio was written at the height of the AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) pandemic. The Bone Clocks bears witness to a different kind of planetary threat: Mitchell wrote this novel in the aftermath of the failed 2009 climate summit, and published it two months before the 2014 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report confirmed human activity to be the dominant cause of global warming. Where Bear’s symbiopolitics respond to pandemic anxiety, Mitchell’s are strongly inflected by ecological anxiety and Anthropocene awareness. Together, these novels suggest that the symbiotic body can become a narrative site of resistance to the immunological conceptions of self and society that are stimulated by such global anxieties. I read them as narrative experiments that resist a particular twenty-first-century nexus of politics and biopolitics, where the molecularisation of life breaks down the body into biocapital, and immunity divides self from non-self. Because it questions such separations, endosymbiosis destabilises defensive immunological politics – a brand of politics whose fantasies of biological and social immunity, as Roberto Esposito and Frédéric Neyrat have theorised, are built on protective boundaries. In each novel, I examine first how the plot resists such immunological politics, and then how the endosymbiotic body as political trope undermines ideologies of the autonomous subject.

In the final section, I interpret the metanarrative and metaleptic dynamic of these novels as a form of multi-scalar biological awareness, where the self is not only written by its endosymbionts but forced to position its narrative within that of the species. Both Bear and Mitchell present the self as a fundamentally textual construct, genetically written and rewritten in Darwin’s Radio, and narrated by competing authorial figures in The Bone Clocks. This metaleptic trend is partly inherited from the genetic narratives of twentieth-century popular science and speculative fiction, but strange loops also tend to characterise postgenomic reflections on the symbiotic human. Margulis and Sagan’s Dazzle Gradually contains several such loops, including the Chimera story quoted earlier, and the ‘Uncut Self’, an essay which begins mid-sentence with the end of its final sentence in order to describe the endosymbiotic self as a Möbius strip. I suggest that Darwin’s Radio anticipates this metaleptic microbiological imaginary and explores some of its political implications, while The Bone Clocks revises it in the light of Anthropocene awareness. Like Margulis and Sagan, Bear and Mitchell use strange loops to create awareness of other scales, but their novels pull metalepsis in an ethical direction, drawing attention to the response-ability that might arise from symbiotic relations across scales.

5.1 Viral Symbiopolitics against Dis-embedded Vitality in Darwin’s Radio

Endosymbiosis raises many questions about what, precisely, constitutes a biological individual. As philosopher Thomas Pradeu remarks, the ‘fact that virtually every living thing is home to “foreign passengers” – some of which play important functional roles in the host – raises important issues regarding biological boundaries’.Footnote ⁴ The exact nature of holobionts – those entities constituted by a host body and its passengers – is the topic of much philosophical debate. Among philosophers of biology, the holobiont is diversely defined as a community, an evolutionary unit, or a series of ‘nested individuals, with sometimes distinct, non-overlapping life cycles’.Footnote ⁵ Biomedical research shows that the health of the holobiont is a collaborative affair, so that the essential role of microorganisms in the development, metabolism, and immunity of their hosts makes binary oppositions between self and non-self increasingly problematic. ‘[T]oday’s immunology’, Pradeu notes, ‘tells us that a living thing can be seen as an immunologically integrated chimera’.Footnote ⁶ Like Margulis and Sagan, Pradeu uses the word ‘chimera’ to convey a shift in paradigm, but his use of the term as a common noun denotes the biological meaning, that is, the coexistence of genetically distinct parts in an organism. Across different domains, symbiosis thus poses epistemological difficulties in the form of lexical puzzles: is an individual always a community? And what is the self protected by immunity, if it must include the non-self?

Published in 1999, before the Human Genome Project was completed and before the term holobiont became widely discussed in the life sciences, Darwin’s Radio anticipates many of these philosophical questions. The novel’s acknowledgements testify to Bear’s sustained exchanges with biologists throughout the writing, and its fictional scientific conversations convey a shared excitement at the rapid pace of genomic research at the turn of the twenty-first century. The plot follows three American scientists who understand, faster than the society around them, the significance of a spreading infection by an unknown retrovirus – a type of virus that inserts its DNA into the genome of its host cells. While the American government seeks to develop a cure for the epidemic, nicknamed ‘Herod’s flu’ because it causes miscarriages in infected women (60), microbiologist Kaye Lang discovers that the infection triggers a second pregnancy, whose foetus carries a modified human genome. She is aided in this discovery by Christopher Dicken, a ‘virus hunter’ (60) working for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and Mitch Rafelson, an archaeologist who stumbles across the remains of an outbreak among Neandertals. Together, they come to understand that the virus, which has been dormant in human DNA for thousands of years, is activated by a collective response to environmental pressure: in this case, the accumulated violence of the twentieth century. The realisation that the same retrovirus enabled the appearance of homo sapiens sapiens thousands of years earlier convinces Kaye that infection will bring about a major leap in human evolution. Although she initially joins the pharmaceutical company developing a vaccine, Kaye soon abandons her scientific stardom and chooses, with her new-found partner Mitch, to accept the genome-modifying infection and carry a pregnancy to term.

When viewed against the historical background of science fiction’s love affair with symbiosis, Darwin’s Radio is particularly original in two ways. Stableford and Langford note that science fiction started portraying parasites in a positive light after the Second World War: with this ‘dramatic change of emphasis’, relations that appeared to be parasitic tended to be revealed as mutualistic, that is, beneficial to both partners.Footnote ⁷ However, in a review of the narrower strand of science fiction inspired by symbiogenesis, Laurel Bollinger shows that many novels that reacted to this new concept depicted it as an aggressive take-over from within, where microscopic symbionts cause the destruction or near destruction of the human race.Footnote ⁸ Examples include Greg Bear’s Blood Music (Reference Bear1985), Hideaki Sena’s Parasite Eve (Reference Sena1995), and Peter Watts’s Rifters series (2000–2004). Blood Music, for instance, portrays humans failing to resist the takeover and dissolution of humanity by microscopic organisms that rewrite them from within. Octavia Butler’s work is a notable exception to this negative portrayal of symbiogenesis: in Clay’s Ark (Reference Butler1984), the scenario of alien microbial infection and genetic modification makes some human hosts, particularly women, grow stronger. This positive vein continues in Butler’s Xenogenesis series (1987–1989) where alien and human genes are combined, but the series is more concerned with symbiosis in general than symbiogenesis per se. Bear’s Darwin’s Radio, because it presents the virus within as a saviour, thus defends a view of symbiogenesis that is much more optimistic than many of the novel’s predecessors, and closer to Butler’s novels than to Bear’s own earlier Blood Music.

The most striking originality of Darwin’s Radio is that the novel does not attribute species transformation to an alien intervention or infection, as is the case in many science-fiction classics such as Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (Reference Clarke1953) or Doris Lessing’s Shikasta (Reference Lessing1979). Even within the narrower range of fiction inspired by symbiogenesis, microbial infection tends to come from outer space – via alien species in Clay’s Ark or Joan Slonczewski’s Brain Plague (Reference Slonczewski2000) – or from spaces so distant as to be almost alien, like the deep ocean in Watts’s Rifters series. Bear’s novel, however, gives symbiogenetic agency to a retrovirus that has been dormant inside humanity’s genome for millennia. Leaving unanswered the question of where the original infection came from, Bear presents the virus as an Other that is integral to the DNA of the human species, and essential to its evolution. Bear’s biological knowledge here is remarkable, because Darwin’s Radio was written before the published results of the Human Genome Project estimated that endogenous retroviruses make up between 5 and 8 per cent of the human genome.Footnote ⁹ Bear’s retrovirus, like Watts’s, Sena’s, and Butler’s microbes, tells us that the human is a multi-scalar assemblage, but, instead of turning the human into an collective, it simply reveals that it always was one. In effect, Darwin’s Radio replaces the strangeness of distant places with the strangeness of distant times: the virus connects the human not to the vast scale of outer space but to the equally vast scale of deep time. The virus permits anisochrony because its awakening suddenly accelerates the evolutionary process into the duration of a single pregnancy.Footnote ¹⁰ As a plot device, Bear’s use of symbiogenesis thus renders the human self multi-scalar in more ways than one, superposing the microscopic with the mesoscopic, and the deep time of evolution with the lifespan of individual characters.

Darwin’s Radio foregrounds the biopolitical potential of viral agency. The plot pits Kaye and Mitch against the American government, which gradually enforces registration, quarantine, and military containment measures. Effectively this polarised plot contrasts a symbiopolitical acceptance of endosymbiosis with bioeconomic and biopolitical strategies aimed at immunising and containing life. Kaye’s trajectory first plunges the reader into the universe of genomic research and big pharma biotechnology. Much of the novel’s plot follows the ups and downs of vaccine and biotech research: the rivalries, collaborations, and economics that drive it, including the giant pharmaceutical company Americol being briefly thwarted when the viral genes are patented by a rival laboratory. Bear’s detailed accounts dramatise the power struggles of biocapital at the turn of the century, within the economics that Nikolas Rose describes as a ‘dis-embedding’ of vitality, where life becomes ‘a series of distinct and discrete objects’.Footnote ¹¹ In particular, Darwin’s Radio highlights the dis-embedding carried out by the engineering, patenting, and marketing of microbiological agents. The very process on which the vaccine relies is one of molecular decomposition: as Kaye explains, the vaccine ‘attaches to part of the SHEVA code and splits it. Breaks its back. The virus can’t replicate’ (225). These anthropomorphic images resonate with the novel’s evocations of everyday violence in the biotech industry, including laboratories haunted by the screaming of simians and the CDC director’s casual reference to ‘our little rape of Mother Nature’ (68). Kaye’s actions, which lead her from the control of genetic engineering to the vulnerability of infected pregnancy, reject this dis-embedding of life, to reinscribe the subject in relations of interdependent vulnerability. That ethical-epistemological shift is thematised in a central chapter, where Mitch, Kaye, and Christopher discuss their theories in the margins of a conference entitled ‘Controlling the En-Viron-Ment: New Techniques Toward the Conquest of Viral Illness’ (230). Held in the San Diego zoo, the conference’s setting epitomises the dis-embedding of life into categories and cages. The contrasting image that emerges from the three researchers’ discussions is that of the genome as ‘a network, with emergent thoughtlike properties’ (242). This dispersal of agency lends itself well to posthumanist readings: Alaimo, for instance, describes Darwin’s Radio’s enfolded agencies as ‘a kind of in-habitation, in which what is supposed to be outside the delineation of the human is always already inside’, so that the ‘stuff’ of human corporality eviscerates the notion of ‘human’.Footnote ¹²

While I agree that the novel questions the boundaries of the human, I read this opened-up human subject as a political site that specifically questions immunological conceptions of self and nation. I refer here to Esposito’s conceptualisation of the politics of immunity. Esposito theorises that immunity and community are engaged in a reciprocal definition: there is no community without an immunitary apparatus. The key role of the metaphor of the body politic in modern political theory makes the philosophy of immunity a locus of political thought: ‘the immune system’, he argues, ‘is revealed as the nerve center through which the political governance of life runs’.Footnote ¹³ For Esposito, the hypertrophy of security apparatuses in contemporary society is the political result of a nineteenth-century view of immunology, where self and other are opposed in an excluding, destructive relation. This view of the immune system, as Haraway explains, functions as ‘an elaborate icon for principal systems of symbolic and material “difference” in late capitalism’ and ‘a map drawn to guide recognition and misrecognition of self and other in the dialectics of Western biopolitics’.Footnote ¹⁴ Contemporary medical theories of immunology, however, are potential catalysers of political transformation since they understand the body as ‘a functioning construct that is open to continuous exchange with its surrounding environment’, where the immune system becomes ‘an internal resonance chamber, like the diaphragm through which difference, as such, engages and traverses us’.Footnote ¹⁵ Esposito draws in particular from Alfred Tauber’s philosophical investigation The Immune Self, which presents the body as a social community and tolerance as a key aspect of immunology. From this perspective, immunity is redefined as ‘a process that always involves an open system of self-definition that constantly produces self and other’.Footnote ¹⁶ This processual view entails a questioning of our grammatical foundations: the self is no longer ‘a subject or an object, but rather, a principle of action’, or, as Tauber put it, ‘a verb without a subject’.Footnote ¹⁷

The plot of Darwin’s Radio, where Kaye turns away from vaccine research to embrace infection and pregnancy, enacts the shift theorised by Esposito, from a defensive conception of the immune self to an acceptance of the self as processual, collective agency. But this shift is also performed by the novel’s multi-scalar tropes, which represent the human body as a space of cohabitation. Esposito, as Catherine Bernard argues, continues Foucault’s biopolitical project by viewing illness as a state that turns the body into a ‘political vector’, a vector which is traversed by biopolitics and shapes the body political in return.Footnote ¹⁸ Like Esposito, Bear represents the body-as-host as a figure that resists conservative immunological conceptions of both self and state. In the ‘Short Biological Primer’ included at the end of the novel, he employs the classic popular science trope of the body as microcosm when he suggests that ‘we may simply be spaceships for bacteria’ (528), echoing Margulis and Sagan’s quip that ‘communities of the microcosm have alighted – if briefly – on the moon’.Footnote ¹⁹ The opening chapters of the novel also play with this microcosmic imagery when Kaye, after examining the bodies of men and women executed because they were carrying SHEVA, falls asleep and dreams:

This passage is reminiscent of Microcosmos, where Margulis and Sagan write that the notion of the individual is ‘something abstract, a category, a conception’ because ‘organisms are like cities […] composed of immigrants from all over the globe, of neighborhoods, of criminals, philanthropists, alley cats, and pigeons’.Footnote ²⁰ Similarly, in Bear’s paragraph, bacterial life is anthropomorphised and human life imagined as the offspring of bacteria: the paradoxical energy of the passage is created by juxtaposing these physical scales, as well as superimposing the timescale of evolution on that of daily life. As a result, the speaker of the concluding sentence is unclear. Who welcomes whom? The enunciator of the previous sentence appeared to be a dreaming Kaye speaking for her species, so that the human might be welcoming the bacteria home, but the bacteria might equally be welcoming the humans. The syntactical ambiguity conveys the strange loop of the endosymbiotic self: grammatical subject and object are indistinguishable since the observed bacteria are already present within the human subject.

Bear’s depictions of the human body as bacterial microcosm perform the type of double zoom that I identified in Chapter 1 as a recurrent tool of popular microbiology. Zooming in to invisible microbial processes is also a way of zooming out to species-scale evolution. This double focus, where the microscopic perspective enables and contains the macroscopic view, continues a synecdochic tendency present in Bear’s earlier novels. Len Hatfield has shown that Bear’s fiction from the late 1970s and the 1980s ‘places inner and outer spaces in a tropic relationship’, particularly in the trope of the ‘galaxy within’:Footnote ²¹ striking examples in those earlier works include a Cosmic Egg in Hegira (1979) and an Earth compressed to a sub-microscopic scale in Eternity (1988). These synecdochic poetics exploit science fiction’s classical questioning of boundaries between inner and outer space, and destabilise the dichotomy between the one and the many.Footnote ²² In Blood Music, Bear’s first novel-length foray into microbiology, the concept of the ‘individual’ is pluralised by the microscopic ‘noocytes’ who take over the human race from within. When the infected biologist Michael Bernard enters into a dialogue with the noocytes inhabiting him, they tell him that there are now ‘many Bernard’ in his blood.Footnote ²³ A comparable blurring of plural and singular is performed in the final chapter of Darwin’s Radio, where Kaye’s daughter Stella encounters another ‘virus child’ possessing enhanced communication faculties. When questioned by her parents about the encounter, Stella explains: ‘[h]e was one of me’ (523). The subject is pluralised in both cases, but the political implication is different: where the earlier novel disintegrated the human subject and body, Darwin’s Radio connects separate bodies into a network. Neither the humans nor the genes can act alone: there is, as Kaye discovers, more than one genetic location coding for SHEVA, and therefore ‘[m]ore than one station on Darwin’s radio’ (312).

This emphasis on community and collective agency is particularly important because it resists the individualistic paradigm of what was still, when Bear wrote Darwin’s Radio, the most famous description of genetic agency in popular biology: Richard Dawkins’s metaphor of the selfish gene. In 1976, Dawkins described the human body as a vehicle for invisible agents: ‘Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside giant lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. […] They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.’Footnote ²⁴ In 1986, Margulis and Sagan’s Microcosmos gives a remarkably similar portrayal of humans as ‘walking communities of bacteria’ (191), but their emphasis is precisely not on selfish behaviour: instead, they emphasise community and cooperation. Bear’s novel weaves together these various imaginaries of secret agency, but opts to work with the symbiopolitics of collective agency against the ‘selfish’, genocentric paradigm popularised by Dawkins. Not only does SHEVA’s viral DNA appear to answer a need for human evolution but the retrovirus is in itself a distributed collective.

The body as microcosm is thus a synecdoche that functions as a locus of political experimentation, where collaborative politics can emerge. Bear’s multi-scalar poetics exploit what Catherine Bernard calls the ‘hermeneutic short-cut’ of pandemic life, where the individual and the political body are superimposed because ‘the body is shown from the start to be collective and, symmetrically, the body politic experienced as always already individual in its corporeity’.Footnote ²⁵ But, as Darwin’s Radio progresses, the novel’s synecdochic imaginary becomes focused specifically on pregnancy – a state which Julia Kristeva famously problematised as a ‘splitting of the subject’.Footnote ²⁶ For Esposito, the pregnant body participates in the figure of the implant, which can be ‘an artificial prosthesis or a natural implant like fertilized eggs in the mother’s womb’: as such, pregnancy is a key philosophical tool that illustrates the dialectics of immune tolerance.Footnote ²⁷ Because of the complex mechanisms through which the immune system of the pregnant woman does not reject the foetus, pregnancy is a privileged figure of the dialectic immunitary process, where the immune dynamic functions as ‘a sounding board for the presence of the world within the self’.Footnote ²⁸ Esposito’s figurative choices resonate with Bear’s: for the former, the pregnant body is the resonance chamber and the sounding board of immunity; for the latter it contains Darwin’s radio, where the self receives messages from other species as well as from its own species. When the physician monitoring Kaye’s pregnancy expresses her astonishment at the healthy foetus, she wonders at the absence of rejection: ‘[w]hy aren’t you rejecting her as foreign tissue – she’s completely different from you! You might as well be carrying a gorilla’ (447). The foreigner in question is both the self-as-another-species (the viral part of humanity figured here by an animal) and the scalar paradox of the self-as-species (the embryo as humanity taking an evolutionary leap). As the pregnancy progresses, Kaye and Mitch turn into outlaws: unable to get married because they refuse to test for SHEVA, they also cannot get medical help without registering their pregnancy and address with the authorities. Kaye finally gives birth while hiding in a Native American reservation, another space of legal containment. The defensive immunology embodied by the CDC in the novel thus finds its political equivalent in the biopolitics of control and containment, which Bear explores further in the novel’s sequel Darwin’s Children.Footnote ²⁹ The law is revealed as society’s way of immunising itself against the other, and can be viewed, as Esposito suggests, as ‘a function of the immune system’.Footnote ³⁰ Pregnancy itself becomes an act of resistance where the tolerance of a politicised body resists the intolerance of the body politic.

In addition to politicising the pregnant body, Darwin’s Radio creates a particularly original ethical thought experiment by blurring the boundaries between the miscarrying subject and the pregnant subject. The novel’s scientists are horrified when the first miscarriages produce deformed embryos, whose ‘eye sockets are open at the side, like a kitten’s’, and whose ‘skull looks more like a lemur’s’ (118). These chimeras are revealed to be only the first stage of a second pregnancy, for which their ovaries provide the egg, so that the miscarrying subject is in fact already pregnant again with the mutated virus-child. By situating the symbiotic self in a simultaneously pregnant and miscarrying body, Darwin’s Radio uses pregnancy as an ambivalent figure that raises ethical questions. As Jennifer Scuro has theorised, miscarriage is an event that speaks to the ethical ‘emptying out’ of the self that is experienced in pregnancy.Footnote ³¹ Following Derridean and Levinasian ethics, Scuro presents miscarriage as a time when the self is undone by the other, and which reveals the transformation that occurs in any pregnancy. Pregnancy becomes a state where the self is taken hostage by the other within. Bear’s conflation of miscarriage and pregnancy brings this hostage state into sharp focus: it is in the absolute hospitality of pregnancy that the human species may welcome – by becoming their hostage – its symbiotic others and itself as species.

The infected pregnant body is thus a multi-scalar figure that connects the microbial to the human, the body to the state, and the individual to the species. As a synecdoche for the species, it opens up the human to multi-species interdependence. As a synecdoche for the body politic, it resists defensive immunological politics as well as individualistic ideologies of the autonomous subject. As such, it is a critical trope which highlights, to use Judith Butler’s terms again, a particular ‘tear in the fabric of our epistemological web’.Footnote ³² This tear is the mismatch, pointed out by Esposito and Haraway, between, on the one hand, contemporary biomedicine’s understanding of endosymbiosis and immunity and, on the other, an imaginary of self and society which is still based on a defensive, nineteenth-century view of immunology, and which rejects any process of othering as a threat.

5.2 Postgenomic Symbiopolitics against Extractive Parasitism in The Bone Clocks

In an interview given a month after The Bone Clocks was published, David Mitchell explained his view of the human self through the notion of endosymbiosis:

In The Bone Clocks, this plural self takes the form of invisible, quasi-immortal guests, sheltered by human bodies. When Holly Sikes, whose life constitutes the novel’s main narrative thread, accepts to carry two of these guests, she inadvertently makes her body a participant in an ongoing war. Hidden to most, and only slowly revealed to the reader, the Horologists live discreetly within human hosts, and protect mankind from a rival, predatory group of Atemporals, the Anchorites, who feed off human souls. These relations effectively include the three different forms of symbiosis identified by biology: while the soul-eating Anchorites depend on a parasitic relation, detrimental to human life,Footnote ³⁴ the Horologists’ relations with their human bodies are entirely peaceful, wavering between commensalism when they do no harm and mutualism when they benefit their hosts. At times, The Bone Clocks reads like a vampire story or, as one critic summarises, a mix of ‘young adult romance, vampire narrative, social realistic novel, supernatural thriller, spiritual memoir, literary lampoon and science fiction’.Footnote ³⁵ However, the ecological concerns thematised in the novel’s final, dystopian chapter lend these symbiotic relations a particular political significance. At stake in the war between the different Atemporals is a war between two different conceptions of organic life: the Anchorites’ biocapitalist politics against the Horologists’ symbiopolitics.

As I read it, the novel’s plot contrasts a biocapitalistic view of life reliant on extractive parasitism with a postgenomic ecosystemic view that values embedded, mutualistic relations. The word parasite appears at several key moments in The Bone Clocks, and the variety of meanings it carries in different chapters reflects the ambivalence of the concept as both a political and a biological term. In classical comedy, the parasite is a comic type, a cunning guest who somehow works his way into the house and invites himself to the table. In the nineteenth century, the word was used metaphorically in the natural sciences to describe a type of symbiotic relation in which one being feeds off another’s resources. This is the meaning of the term for the Horologist Marinus who, when thinking back to previous bodies they have inhabited, view themselves as ‘an epiphyte, not a parasite’ (465). Marinus is a harmless and even helpful guest, comparable to epiphyte plants who grow on trees without weakening them. By contrast, the future Anchorite Hugo Lamb, who entertains a circle of wealthy friends at Cambridge University so that he may slowly build his fortune through shady card games and other forms of fleecing, is called an ‘intestinal parasite’ by one of his rich hosts (166). As he is staying at the time in that friend’s chalet, he is also a parasite in the classical sense of the trickster guest, who cunningly benefits from his host’s wealth.

Lamb wields the critical power of the parasite as it was first invented by Latin and Greek comedy: a figure of free speech and satirical opinion, whose position outside productive cycles enables them to reveal the weaknesses of the system they disturb.Footnote ³⁶ A thoroughly cynical narrator, he conveys a pithy portrait of England’s wealthy classes, which he observes from his position as a guest at their tables. In the Latin typology of parasites, he would belong to the derisores, those whose talent for mockery and well-informed conversation makes them welcome guests. Despite his moral flaws, Lamb’s satirical role is comparable to that of the other male narrators who, like him, fall in love with Holly at different times of her life: war journalist Ed Brubeck, who reports on the Irak war despite being ‘spat on as a parasite’ (261), and novelist Crispin Hershey, whose chapter is a relentless satire of the publishing industry. Holly, meanwhile, builds her life around caring for the homeless – those members of society who are still designated as parasites by early twenty-first-century political discourse, where the term is frequently used in condemnations of welfare dependency and anti-immigration rhetoric.Footnote ³⁷ In the first chapter, sixteen-year-old Holly, running away from home, is an uncomprehending participant in the war between Atemporals, and survives the encounter by accepting to give ‘asylum’ (24) to a Horologist in her body. She then works for a homeless shelter in London, helping runaways and addicts, and eventually settles in Ireland, where the final chapter finds her protecting her granddaughter and a Moroccan refugee from the violence and bigotry of the ‘Endarkenment’ (550). Throughout the novel, Holly is a provider of shelter and asylum. By repeatedly welcoming the other, into both the home of self and the house of the nation, her actions undermine the political rhetoric that frames vulnerability as parasitism.

Holly’s acts of hospitality are contrasted with the Anchorites’ biologically parasitic dependence on the life of children, whom they invite into their chapel so that their souls can be decanted into Black Wine, a source of eternal youth. As Peter Childs points out, the theme of predation is present throughout Mitchell’s novels. For Childs, this theme ‘reiterates the trope of brutal cultural appropriation into an apocalyptic future’,Footnote ³⁸ whereas for Treasa De Loughry the vampirish Anchorites are allegories for transnational capital and ‘finance capital’s exhaustion of millennial youths’.Footnote ³⁹ The Anchorites can thus function allegorically for many forms of parasitic relations, but I am particularly interested here in the fact that their practice is essentially a form of biocapitalist extraction. The Anchorites, led by a Mr Pfenninger whose name suggests the German Pfennig or penny, are an all-white sect financed by a nineteenth-century colonial fortune. Their extractivism is emphasised by the expression ‘Black Wine’, which evokes oil (449), and by the fact that their soul-drinking activities continue those of a Buddhist order which, in Mitchell’s earlier novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, drinks a life-giving ‘Oil of Souls’ distilled from the bodies of children.Footnote ⁴⁰ The ecological disasters depicted in the final chapter of The Bone Clocks lend a retrospective significance to the extraction of Black Wine, paralleling its consumption to humanity’s exhaustion of oil supplies. As Marinus summarizes in the penultimate chapter, set in 2025, ‘[o]il’s running out, […] Earth’s population is eight billion, mass extinctions of flora and fauna are commonplace, climate change is foreclosing the Holocene Era’ (491). The fact that the Black Wine comes from young children and rejuvenates the Anchorites’ bodies turns the biological body into a key ecopolitical trope.

The novel’s polarised plot is supported by equally polarised perceptions of the human body: as biocapital for the Anchorites and as latent commons for the Horologists. The decanting of wine from the bodies of children is a striking image of the dis-embedding of life analysed by Rose in contemporary bioeconomics, where parts of the body are isolated and considered as ‘manipulable and transferable elements or units’ open to commodification.Footnote ⁴¹ Like Mitchell’s earlier novel Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks includes biomedical industries in its satire of twenty-first-century capitalism: as he walks through the Hay Literary Festival in Wales, Crispin notes ironically that the smoking tent is ‘sponsored by Win2Win: Europe’s premier facilitator of ethically sourced organs for medical transplant’ (295). For Rose, the decomposing of vitality into discrete objects is a development of biocapitalism that is ‘given particular salience in a regime of the self that accords bodily health great ethical value’.Footnote ⁴² Rose draws attention to the moral shift that occurs when the optimisation of health, rather than the healing of disease, becomes a force driving bioeconomics: the good life becomes equated with the healthy life. The dis-embedding of live as biovalue, he notes, can only be accelerated by ‘an age of choice and self-maximization in which the body and its capacities have become central to technologies of selfhood’.Footnote ⁴³ The Anchorites, I suggest, embody a radical form of this optimisation and transformation of the body into biocapital, which supports a neoliberal, entrepreneurial conception of the self.Footnote ⁴⁴

The Bone Clocks resists this biocapitalist impoverishing of ethics by construing the human body as a site of multi-scalar symbiopolitics. The novel expands the poetics of embedded temporalities that inspired the Russian doll form of Cloud Atlas, and locates this multi-scalar temporality within the human body.Footnote ⁴⁵ Holly shares her body with several Horologists who have lived for centuries, as well as other occasional visitors, including the haunting voices of Aboriginal people on the site of a former Australian prison. These acts of hospitality embed multi-scalar temporalities into Holly’s sense of self: her own temporal awareness, which is suited to the scale of her life expectancy, exists alongside that of her invisible guest Esther Little, a Horologist who has lived for several thousand years. As in Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas, the juxtaposition of timescales enables ecological awareness. The Horologists’ perspective, which Mitchell himself has connected to ‘Anthropocene memory’, allows them to perceive the gradual acceleration of environmental destruction hinted at throughout the novel, whose slow violence is not perceived by the humans until the final chapter.Footnote ⁴⁶ Their presence activates the complex temporalities of symbiotic relations where, as Deborah Bird Rose theorises, ‘[e]ach individual is both itself in the present, and the history of its forebears and mutualists’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Holly, who narrates the opening and closing chapter, is a focaliser whose awareness gradually stretches across different scales of existence. By the end of the novel in 2043, pandemics of microbial rat flu, ebola, and rabies are part of everyday existence, decimating entire cities and narrowing the remaining humans’ possibility of survival. Yet Holly still finds time to see the minute cohabitants of her landscape: ‘[s]andhoppers’, she notes as she walks along a beach, ‘ping off my exposed shin, and oyster-catchers pick their way between stones and bladderwrack, stabbing the mud for lug-worms’ (598).

The novel resists the biocapitalist reduction of identity to self-sameness and self-optimisation by founding identity in relations of hospitality and responsibility. I read this polarisation through the terms proposed by Paul Ricœur, whose hermeneutics of the self distinguish between idem identity and ipse identity. In Oneself as Another (Reference Ricœur1990), Ricœur argues that narrative identity is always constructed by a balance between two poles: on the one hand idem identity, the perpetuation of the same, or what one might call character; on the other ipse identity, the pole of responsibility and ethical response to others.Footnote ⁴⁸ Identity, Ricœur explains, is not generally one or the other, but always situated on a continuum between the two. At one extreme, the self is identifiable through the perpetuation of sameness, which makes it a fixed conception of itself. At the other, the self is reliable through the continuity of response to others, what we can refer to (although Ricœur does not use this term) as its response-ability. Both poles are sources of temporal stability, so that narrative identity is a dialectic relation between ipseity and sameness. Literature, however, is an experimental space where extremes can be explored: these extremes, for Ricœur, are thought experiments which push concepts of identity to their limits. I view the war between Anchorites and Horologists as one such thought experiment, which places the poles of ipse and idem identity in stark opposition.

Through devoured souls and implanted others within the self, Mitchell, like Esposito, politicises the figure of the implant.Footnote ⁴⁹ The soul-consumption of the Anchorites is likened to a medical transplant by the Horologist Arkady: ‘[l]ike an organ donation, where only one in a thousand is a compatible match’ (449). Here, selective commodification perpetuates the idem identity of self-sameness, since host and donor must match, and ensures temporal permanence for an identifiable character. The names of the first Anchorites Holly encounters, Miss Constantin and Joseph Rhîmes, highlight this constancy and self-similarity. By contrast, Horologists may change ethnicity and sex with every new host but have no choice in the matter, so that their self is othered in each new body. ‘In stark contrast to his last East Asian self, Arkady’s soul’, Marinus notes, ‘now occupies a big-boned gangly, blond, acne-prone, Hungarian male body’ (411). Horologists, in other words, enact Esposito’s view of the implant as a locus of tolerance, since they literally experience the self as another. This othering is epitomised by Marinus’s final appearance, in the sixth chapter, as a young man with ‘African lips, sort of East Asian eyes, Caucasian-ish skin, and sleek black hair, like a Native American in an old film’ (602). What makes Marinus Marinus, in this incarnation, is their reliability, their choice to return to help Holly’s family. The ordinary humans of The Bone Clocks must thus side with one of two extremes: where the amoral Lamb chooses the perpetuation of idem identity, Holly’s repeated acts of hospitality place her in the ethical camp that favours ipse over idem.

Reading the novel through Ricœur’s concepts, and in the light of Esposito’s theory of immunopolitics, helps me to highlight the ethical implications of a postgenomic conception of the body as multi-scalar commons. Holly’s actions tend to favour the ipse pole of identity and resist the defensive mentalities growing around her, particularly in the final chapter, where her adoption of a refugee and her discussion with roaming thieves are sharply contrasted with her brother’s attempt to seclude himself in an English gated community called Tintagel. But it is Holly’s body, as a willing host, that stretches this ipseity across temporal scales, through her symbionts that connect her to past and future human generations. By opposing insular identity to a symbiotic paradigm, the novel enacts contemporary medicine’s shift from an internalist view ‘which sees the individual as insular, autonomous and endogenously built’ to an interactionist view ‘which sees an organism as an ecosystem that is constantly interacting with its environment’.Footnote ⁵⁰ As Esposito argues, and as the dystopian ending of The Bone Clocks suggests, this shift does not sufficiently inform twenty-first-century conceptions of the body politic.

The novel’s dystopian drift confirms Frédéric Neyrat’s analysis of the twenty-first-century globalised self as a paradoxical construct, connected to the whole planet yet intent on immunisation ‘against otherness and against anything that could alter this Self’.Footnote ⁵¹ For Neyrat, the drive to remain untouched is a fundamental dynamic comparable to the death-drive and the life-affirming drives identified by Freud. It is a reaction to a world of tangled global connections and contagion, where viruses, information, and radioactivity all seem capable of spreading instantly. The flip side of these forms of contagion is what Neyrat, after Alain Brossat, calls ‘immunitary democracies’,Footnote ⁵² which offer ‘the guarantee of not being touched’:

Such a split is made possible by a generalised state of moral anaesthesia, where the intangible occupies the position of a ‘bystander insensitive to the disasters of the world’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Neyrat emphasises the irony of this desired intangibility in a world where there are no longer any untouched places, but only relative degrees of exposure. If we read The Bone Clocks along the lines of Brossat’s and Neyrat’s political theory, the Anchorites’ desire to immunise themselves against the ageing of the ordinary mortals they call ‘bone clock[s]’ (59) makes them intangibles. Holly’s perspective as a runaway and later a vulnerable old woman in a collapsing society places her at the other extreme of the spectrum, in a position of constant exposure. The mutual assistance that Holly and the Horologists give each other at key points in the narrative engages in a form of symbiopolitics that resists what Neyrat calls ‘the epidemio-immunologic production of the world’.Footnote ⁵⁵

The connection between micro- and macro-scales in Mitchell’s fiction has been theorised through a number of productive concepts, including the meronym, the hyperlink, and the fractal,Footnote ⁵⁶ but the concept of symbiosis allows me to read Mitchell’s multi-scalar poetics from a biological and ecosystemic perspective which frames vulnerability and dependence as ethical necessities. From these positions anchored in ipse identity, the novel suggests, response-ability can develop towards other generations as well as towards nonhumans. Like Kaye’s pregnant-miscarrying body in Darwin’s Radio, Holly’s symbiotic body is a critical political trope which resists immunitary politics and their promise of intangibility. In this light, the defeat of the Anchorites in the penultimate chapter is the victory of mutualistic cooperation against extractive exploitation. Through Holly’s victory, it seems that the symbiotic self has vanquished the politics of immunisation and intangibility. But this victory is short-lived and scale-bound. In the dystopian final chapter, it becomes clear that, on a planetary scale, extractive capitalism and immunological politics have only accelerated. The novel’s ending, in other words, questions the scalability of its own allegory of resistance.

5.3 Symbiosis as Metalepsis, or the Self as a Strange Loop

By portraying the self as a space of cohabitation, Darwin’s Radio and The Bone Clocks draw attention to symbiopolitical relations that traverse scales. The main plot twist in Darwin’s Radio, which turns a killer virus novel into a saviour virus novel, highlights the biopolitical dangers of an immunological worldview, where metaphors of immunity are intertwined with the imaginary of self, society, and nation. Engaging with symbiosis on a more figurative level, The Bone Clocks plays with the overlap between biology and politics inherent in the concept of the parasite, so that the theme of soul parasitism allows a myse en abyme of a whole ecopolitical system. When Kaye gives birth to her extraordinary daughter, or Holly wins the battle against the soul-devourers, the reader may expect that a decisive blow has been struck: surely these individual victories are allegorical models for a future where humanity will embrace its symbiotic self? Both novelists, however, take pains to contradict any such optimism. The sequel Darwin’s Children portrays a bleak future of containment and surveillance for the new humans born at the end of Darwin’s Radio, while the final chapter of The Bone Clocks leaves little hope for Holly’s survival, or indeed for most of humanity.

One way of reading those bleak futures is to view them as allegories of failure. Treasa De Loughry, for instance, criticises the environmental pessimism of The Bone Clocks as an expression of ‘capitalist realism’: ‘the belief, drawing on Jameson’s infamous statement, that there is no alternative to capitalism other than the destruction of life on earth’.Footnote ⁵⁷ For De Loughry, Mitchell’s fiction universalises a capitalist imaginary where ecological crisis is produced by a competitive society based on predation and consumption. I propose, however, to examine these novels’ ethical work from a different, formal angle: rather than reading them as allegories of failure, I suggest that they reveal some of the limitations of allegorical form for trans-scalar ethics. As I have argued with regards to The Overstory and The Swan Book, the scales of ecological and Anthropocene awareness render allegorical narratives particularly problematic, since ecosystemic or species-scale concern – such as the fear of pandemics or climate breakdown – often distances the individual human from the behaviour of the human species. Allegory, which David Herman theorises as a privileged tool for macro-scale modelling and ‘storytelling at species scale’,Footnote ⁵⁸ is weakened by this experience of dissonance between the individual and the species. Here I continue to develop the argument presented in Chapter 4, which views metaleptic dynamics as an alternative and complementary form through which trans-scalar ethics might play themselves out.

The metalepses at work in Darwin’s Radio and The Bone Clocks create the strange loops or tangled hierarchies that Brian McHale and Michelle Ryan associate with ontological metalepsis. Both Ryan and McHale refer to Hofstadter’s descriptions, in Gödel, Escher, Bach, of the strange loop as a phenomenon that ‘occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started’, and the tangled hierarchy as what occurs ‘when what you presume are clean hierarchical levels take you by surprise and fold back into a hierarchy-violating way’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Ryan’s and McHale’s use of the term ‘ontological’, which I follow here, differs from Alice Bell and Jan Alber’s use of the term in their work on ‘unnatural narratology’ and possible worlds theory.Footnote ⁶⁰ Whereas Bell and Alber define ontological metalepsis as the transgression of boundaries between story-worlds, I am interested here in metalepses that occur between different levels of one story. Darwin’s Radio and The Bone Clocks, I suggest, figure different scales of life as different narrative levels, and relations of reciprocal authorship across scales as metaleptic loops. The sense of a species-wide crisis brings relations between scales into sharp focus in both novels. Bear and Mitchell construe these relations through a symbiotic and postgenomic imaginary where inner and outer environments are engaged in relations of mutual authorship and recursive transformation. Those loops are most obvious in Darwin’s Radio, whose characters are intensely aware that they are written from within by the script of species-wide DNA, modified by a virus reacting to humanity’s twentieth-century crimes, and whose viral scripts they in turn attempt to read, narrate, or modify. Although genetics are not thematised in this way in The Bone Clocks, I suggest that Mitchell’s symbiotic imaginary is also fundamentally postgenomic in the way it embeds different timescales within the human body, and in its portrayal of invisible, inner agents as interpreters and modifiers of the ‘Script’ of humanity’s future (393).

As Jamie Milton Freestone has demonstrated, metalepsis is a structural feature of popular evolutionary genetics, where the personification of genes in accounts such as Dawkins’s Selfish Gene induces a recursive situation. The gene or genome is the author of the human writing the narrative about the evolution of the genome. Freestone points out that the nineteenth-century metaphor of the Book of Life was a source of metatextuality well before the birth of genetics, and that ontological metalepsis was inherent to evolutionary discourse from the onset, because the narrator of evolution is also the product of evolution. Twentieth-century metaphors of the genome as text and author of the human, combined with the twenty-first century’s development of genetic technology, have added to this looping structure:

In these genomic loops, movement across narrative levels is also movement across physical scales. In Darwin’s Radio, those metaleptic dynamics are amplified and complexified by viral agency. Both the genome and the virus are personified as authors within: Kaye describes the genome as a ‘Wizard’ which includes a ‘genetic editor’; the head of the vaccine project declares that the virus has a long-term ‘strategy’ (215); and a Native American who becomes Mitch and Kaye’s ally explains that ‘[t]his DNA must be a spirit in us, the words our ancestors pass on, word of the Creator’ (468). When the main protagonists decide to submit to this rewriting from within, and Kaye falls pregnant, she and Mitch start writing books about their evolutionary theories, adding a fresh metaleptic loop to their genomic textuality. Kaye’s title, The Queen’s Library, attempts to picture the genome,

In this vision of symbiopolitics, authorial figures multiply: Dawkins’s selfish gene metaphor is reworked into a political game with a central authority and multiple allies and opponents, mutualists and parasites. The double role of DNA fragments – as both passive, ‘movable elements’ and active, ‘selfish’ actors – reflects an ambiguity typical of genomic discourse, where genes are often simultaneously presented as capable of activating, being activated, or being acted upon.Footnote ⁶² Rather than clarify these relations, the metaleptic image of the potentially rebellious library only further entangles the hierarchy of agencies.

Horizontal metaleptic connections between Mitchell’s novels, whose recurrent characters appear to weave together a single, shared story-world, have been discussed elsewhere.Footnote ⁶³ Mitchell himself has described his fiction as a ‘sprawling macronovel’, where ‘the parts fit into the whole’.Footnote ⁶⁴ But I want to draw attention to the vertical metaleptic dynamics that connect different narrative levels in The Bone Clocks. Many of the novel’s characters refer to a hidden metanarrative that determines their lives: Hugo Lamb is convinced that certain events in his life are ‘scripted’ (172, 175), while the Horologists refer to both a ‘Script’ and a ‘Counterscript’ (406) that they follow or resist in their ‘metalife’ (453), their term for the existence they lead beyond the timescale of an individual human life. Glimpses of this Script are occasionally read by some of the human characters, including Holly, her great aunt Eilish, and Soleil Moore, a poet who tries to alert the world to the Anchorites’ crimes. Moore reveals to Crispin that his works of fiction have unwittingly accurately imagined the Anchorites’ methods, and thereby written him ‘into the Script’ (393), just as Holly has unwittingly transcribed elements of the ‘Script’ in her bestseller autobiography The Radio People. All these textual images position the characters of The Bone Clocks as intermittent readers, and occasional co-authors, of a metanarrative which unfolds on the scale of the human species.

In his reading of Cloud Atlas, Jay Clayton has argued that Mitchell’s interest in reincarnation responds to ‘changes in our relation to time wrought by twenty-first-century genomics’.Footnote ⁶⁵ He reads the earlier novel as an exploration of ‘genome time’, a temporality which ‘fuses the personal timescale of everyday life with the immense impersonal timescale of the species’.Footnote ⁶⁶ For Clayton, the cyclical temporality of reincarnation in Cloud Atlas thus echoes twenty-first-century evolutionary theory’s foregrounding of life cycles over individuals: as Barry Barnes and John Dupré theorised in 2008, evolutionary biology suggests that we can consider organisms as simply ‘recurrent patterns in a continuing cycle of changes, and what part of the cycle will count as “the organism” should be considered no more than an arbitrary decision’.Footnote ⁶⁷ This awareness of genome time, I suggest, is equally present in The Bone Clocks, but the theme of scripting and counter-scripting in the later novel signals a new inflection of this biological awareness which responds to the concept of symbiogenesis and the accelerating expansion of postgenomic biocapitalism. In The Bone Clocks, the self is not only construed as a reader and possible rewriter of the species’ genome but also as a host to foreign passengers who may equally rewrite it. The Anchorites, who try to bring about a Counterscript, pursue the ideology of a self-enhancing subject rewriting and optimising the body as biocapital. The Horologists, by contrast, enact the fading of the individual organism noted by Barnes and Dupré: the differences between the organism they inhabit, their skin colour or gender, are less important than the recurrent pattern of their symbiotic relations with their hosts.

The looping relations that connect scales in both Darwin’s Radio and The Bone Clocks foreground what McHale calls ‘the ontological dimension of recursive embedding’Footnote ⁶⁸. But, unlike the postmodernist texts analysed by McHale, they do not express the recursion of a fundamentally linguistic subject. Rather, these loops express a biological self-awareness that responds to genomic and postgenomic science. My reading of these novels confirms Marco Caracciolo’s observation that materiality provides a new cause for ontological instability in twenty-first-century fiction:

Caracciolo points out the resulting contrast between the subject of postmodernist writing, collapsing ‘under its own linguistic weight’,Footnote ⁷⁰ and the posthuman subject, questioned by its entanglement with nonhuman materialities. This contrast is relevant to my study of Bear and Mitchell because what I have referred to as the symbiotic self in this chapter is, like Rosi Braidotti’s definition of the posthuman subject, ‘a transversal entity, fully immersed in and immanent to a network of non-human (animal, vegetable, viral) relations’.Footnote ⁷¹ In the dichotomy outlined by Caracciolo, Bear’s and Mitchell’s novels would thus fall squarely on the side of the posthuman since they entangle the human subject with nonhuman life, testing the ethical web that binds individuals with their own and other species. Because their turning-inwards is also a turning-outwards, towards the environmental crisis and the future of the human species, Darwin’s Radio and The Bone Clocks can be read as experiments in what Braidotti calls ‘becoming-posthuman’, a political project which expresses ‘multiple ecologies of belonging’ and acknowledges ‘the collective nature and outward-bound direction of what we still call the self’.Footnote ⁷²

Nevertheless, the metaleptic dynamics that disrupt the self in these two novels remain indebted to postmodernism’s textual subjectivity because the realisation of entanglement comes in a highly textual form, when the subject realises that they are written from within. This realisation is a profound disruption to which these genomic and postgenomic subjects react by making their own metaleptic moves. I borrow this expression from Debra N. Malina’s analysis of twentieth-century texts by Samuel Beckett, Christine Brooke-Rose, and Angela Carter, where she argues that metalepsis is essential to the construction of the postmodern subject, ‘in ever-changing relation to narrative structures’,Footnote ⁷³ because the shock of metalepsis modelises the violence of this construction. In Beckett’s writing, for instance, Malina shows that subject construction takes the form of metaleptic moves through which the subject is reconstructed by ‘powers-that-be’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Beckett’s speakers resist through their own metaleptic moves, collapsing levels of narrative to prevent higher-level narrators from effecting such narrative reconstruction. I find Malina’s argument useful beyond the category of the postmodern because it brings out the violence inherent in the subject’s awareness of being written or rewritten by invisible powers, and the political potential of metaleptic moves that ‘write back’. These invisible powers, in Bear’s and Mitchell’s fiction, take the form of viral DNA and of scripts followed by the others hidden within the self, but these inner texts inscribe the subject in a biopolitical field shaped by biocapitalist interests and immunological politics. In other words, the ‘powers-that-be’ that are highlighted by these novels’ metaleptic dynamics are never purely biological.

In Darwin’s Radio and The Bone Clocks, metalepsis therefore gives form to an ontological complexity specific to the twenty-first-century biological subject, which is shaped by symbiotic relations and genomic awareness. The strange loops of this symbiotic self convey a destabilising, multi-scalar conception of life, figured as a recursive text written by multiple, embedded authors. Against the neoliberal model of the entrepreneurial self, writing the script of her own life, these novels write the self as shared authorship and relational ontology. By reading them as experiments in symbiopolitics, I have suggested that they direct a genomic and postgenomic imaginary towards a critique of defensive immunological conceptions of self and society, and of the biocapitalist dis-embedding of life. In this context, the use of metalepsis is a formal choice that highlights embedded ontologies and foregrounds the need for response-ability towards other scales, whether these be the scale of species or the microscopic and macroscopic scales of ecosystems.

Let me return finally to Ricœur’s hermeneutics of the self. Both novels rely on a strong polarisation between idem identity and ipse identity: just as Anchorites clash with Horologists in The Bone Clocks, the government science of defensive immunity is contrasted, in Darwin’s Radio, with infected pregnancy as an experience of absolute hospitality towards the other within the self. Ricœur’s terminology thus helps us to perceive the tension between, on the one hand, a defensive conception of the self as capable of immune response to invaders and, on the other hand, a relational conception of the self as multi-scalar ecological subject. These narrative opposites should not, however, lead us to overstate the evils of stable character or the virtues of pure ipseity. Ricœur is careful to note that narrative identity is constructed somewhere between the two: it is, in fact, one of the functions of narrative to balance both poles together, to connect the two extremities, allowing the self to derive identity both from a sense of stability and from ethical response-ability.Footnote ⁷⁵ The ‘metaleptic moves’ made by the main protagonists of these novels perform precisely this type of narrative act: by writing about the authors hidden within, they respond to the other and construct a sense of self as narrating subject. In this strange loop, the symbiotic subject writes itself into accepting that it is being written.