Inverts and Invertebrates: Darwin, Proust, and Nature's Queer Heterosexuality

INVERTS AND INVERTEBRATESDARWIN, PROUST, AND NATURE’S QUEER HETEROSEXUALITY

SIMON PORZAK

DIACRITICS Volume 41.4 (2013) 6–34 ©2014 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Simon Porzak, having received his PhD in Rhetoric from the University of California, Berkeley in 2014, teaches at Columbia University. His dissertation, “Anima Automata: On the Olympian Art of Song,” traces the encounter between humans and machines, voices and affects, in opera, engineering, and literature from Les contes d’Hoffmann to Kylie Minogue.

Charlus: Si [cette petite personne] change de tramway, je prends, avec peut-être les microbes de la peste, la chose incroyable appelée “correspondance.”

Jupien: Je vois que vous avez un cœur d’artichaut.

At the midpoint of a journey through that life-within-a-life that is Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, within the obscure forest of symbols that is an everyday Parisian courtyard, the reader (and the narrator, Marcel) encounter three portentous, chimerical beasts: the Duchesse de Guermantes’s spectacular orchid; the vest-maker Jupien; and the Baron de Charlus, the very specimen-type of aesthetic dandyism. Proust and Mar-cel seize upon this encounter to introduce a new narrative code into the novel, finally allowing the reader entry into the blazing hell of same-sex desire—the titular Sodom and Gomorrah—that has until now remained an indecipherable secret. The volume’s brief introductory chapter, a whimsical biological treatise on “inversion” that will determine the definition and value of what we more generally call “homosexuality” within Proust’s world and work, climaxes on the image of a lonely invert, alone on the beach after a day of unsuccessful cruising, “like a sterile jellyfish (méduse) that will perish on the sand.”1

Marcel’s memory of a washed-up jellyfish glimpsed on a seaside holiday provides one motivation for this image. But the text, obeying the Proustian law of metonymic contagion described by Gérard Genette,2 introduces another layer of comparison by con-tamination and proximity, conflating orchid and invertebrate:

Jellyfish! Orchid! When I was following only my own instinct, the jellyfish repelled me at Bal-bec; but had I known how to look at it, like Michelet, from the point of view of natural history and of aesthetics, I would have seen a delectable girandole of azure. Are they not, with the transparent velvet of their petals, like the mauve orchids of the sea?3

Historically, most readers have aped Marcel’s earlier attitude in their reaction to the text’s linkages of homosexuals, orchids, and jellyfish, displaying a repugnance which, by the principle of metonymic contagion, expands to encompass the first part of Sodom and Gomorrah; Lawrence Schehr underlines the paradox by which “in addition to being Proust’s most famous text about homosexuality, [the chapter] is also widely disliked.”4 Such readings of Sodom and Gomorrah first posit that the text does determine the Recherche’s paradigm of homosexuality on the basis of its discussion of inversion and then judge this paradigm “repellent” on various moral grounds. The naive reader would accept the narrator-naturalist’s explicit arguments that the novel’s homosexuals, like the larger class they exemplify, are doomed to sordid lives devoid of intimacy, pleasure, and integrity. The more sophisticated reader, of whom Leo Bersani provides a helpful exam-ple, would accuse the text of failing to provide a theoretical basis for a political program of gay liberation and thus secretly hewing to a “profoundly heterosexual bias.”5 Such moral repugnance, or moral repugnance about such moral repugnance, seems justified—the book in the reader’s hands is called Sodom and Gomorrah, after all.

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However, this metaphor linking beached homosexuals and man-o’-wars encrypts another scene. Even if the reader does not imagine Proust himself wandering sadly along the shore and saluting a fatally waylaid cnidarian as a fellow traveler, the structure of the analogy—in which Marcel, Proust’s amanuensis, compares inverts like Proust to jelly fish—relies on a necessary moment of recognition between the invert author hiding behind or in “Marcel” and the jellyfish, a hidden homology detected despite their appar-ent dissimilarity, a recognition that would appear to run contrary to one’s “own” instinct. Might there be something positive and productive to see in the moment of mutual regard between jelly and nelly? And why do we find the prospect of this méduse so petrifying that we refuse to look directly at it? This textual conjunction displaces, if only provisionally, the introduction’s inaugurat-ing metaphor, in which the cruising of Charlus and Jupien appears to be compared to the pollination of a flower by a bee—the metaphor that Bersani criticizes as “strikingly inexact” and even anti-Proustian.6 But we need not discard this metaphor just because it breaks down. For some readers, acknowledging the failure of the bee-flower meta-phor becomes a means of achieving a Michelet-like appreciation of Proust’s project. Schehr argues that the problematic overabundance of metaphoric meaning in Sodom and Gomor rah is precisely the point; Proust strategically refuses to thematize homo-sexuality by instead generalizing an open-ended activity of aesthetic interpretation in which the reader must also participate. Schehr locates this process, in which “the nov-elist sets language up as its own object,” as the true locus of Proustian homosexuality.7 Consequently, although the chapter seemingly relies on an appeal to nature to ground its ambivalent apology for homosexuality (as André Gide will do much more explicitly, along And Tango Makes Three lines, in his Corydon), Schehr argues that Proustian homo-sexuality is not found in nature, for that would ground homosexuality as a transhistorical ideal, but rather that nature provides one of an endless series of alibis for the perfor-mance of Proustian homosexuality, thus preserving its autocritical and protean aspect.8 Elisabeth Ladenson takes a different tack: if the bee-flower metaphor breaks down, it is because Proustian homosexuality in fact does not inhere in the male-male prac-tices of a Charlus or a Jupien. As such, Ladenson seems to agree with Bersani that male homosexuality, or at least the homosexuality localized in the male characters of the Recherche, is “essentially heterosexual,” even though the term’s imbrication with het-erosexual patterns of gender, difference, and desire led Proust to refuse the word in favor of inverti.9 But Ladenson does not for that reason conclude that the novel lacks homosexuals entirely; instead, she argues, the empty, unread or unreadable, space of Gomorrah teems with Proustian homosexuality, and only by attending to the particular lesbian content of Gomorrah can we “grasp the place of femininity, and thus of sexuality in general, in Proust’s work.”10 The narrator learns from the female bands over which he continually obsesses to “[turn] away from the doomed attempt to insert himself between women” and instead “decides to reproduce himself.”11 But difference remains in Gomorrah, “the site of sexual unpredictability in the Recherche and the exception to its stated rules.”12 The seeming epistemological paradox of this heterogeneity even within

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autoeroticism no doubt contributes to “the petrifying effect of feminization”13 exempli-fied by the méduse, whose namesake’s many snakes, as Freud argues in “Medusa’s Head,” only represent the explosive proliferation, the metonymic contagiousness, of castration.14

In both Ladenson’s and Schehr’s readings, the méduse sterile could well stand for the vertiginous depths confronting the reader alternately in the silence of Gomorrah or in the fruitlessness of Sodom’s endless, mutually interfering interpretations. So when, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s words, the metaphor of the bee and the flower “opens gaping conceptual abysses” in its suggestion of “the red herring of botanical hermaphrodism,”15 or when Ladenson discusses one early critic’s “general perception that something fishy is going on in the novel in terms of gender,”16 we should perhaps not be surprised to glimpse the marine world of red herrings and ( jelly)fish in the space left open by the very failures or lapses of inversion’s inaugurating metaphor.17 In Marcel’s exclamation “Jellyfish! Orchid!” which suggests that inverts and flowers are not like each other all by themselves, shines the light cast both by the “girandole of azure,” the “sterile jellyfish” that generates comparison even as it eludes thematization, and by the double optic of “natural history and aesthetics.” What if the jellyfish, with its obscene lack of form, its incommunicative “sterility,” is exactly what enables the text’s other slippery, venomous connections? And what kind of simultaneously scientific and aesthetic framework exists to allow us a glimpse into these murky depths? Proust isn’t the only aesthetico-nat-uralist to have his attention captured by marine invertebrates. Charles Darwin, too, was fascinated by sponges, corals, and—above all—barnacles, turning to them again and again at significant moments in his scientific works and in his work as a sci-entist. Darwin waited to publish his evolutionary theory until 1859 in part because from 1846 to 1854 he was preoccupied with writing a staggering, four-volume survey of all barnacle species, living and extinct. But this was not just wasted time: Darwin’s barnacle research gave him a spectacular glimpse of one of the most improbable and mysterious biological phenomena imaginable—the evolution of sex. In other words, no compari-son between “homosexual” and “heterosexual” desires and practices would be possible without the process Darwin observed in his barnacles, the process culminating in sexu-ally differentiated life. The bee and the flower, Charlus and Jupien, and even the plant and animal kingdoms themselves, are only analogical in that their manifold exuberance diverges and derives from a common, mysterious ancestor: the prehistoric, asexual sex life of marine invertebrates. Later, when Octave Mirbeau travesties Darwin’s voyages in his ambiguously decadent novel Torture Garden (whose narrator, a sham “embryologist,” embarks on a colonial

No comparison between “homosexual” and “heterosexual” desires and practices would be possible without the process Darwin observed in his barnacles, the process culminating in sexually differentiated life.

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mission of research and diplomacy), he provides the intertextual foundation for Marcel’s rapture at the precise point in which his narrator, too, begins to stray into the uncharted waters of sodomitical and sadistic perversion; surveying the Indian Ocean with his com-panion, the corrupt Clara, he awakens to the beauty of nature in observing the “clus-ters of jellyfish—red, green, purple, pink and mauve jellyfish” that “floated like scattered flowers on the smooth surface” of the sea.18 This metaphoric conjunction occurs at the cusp of the narrator’s initiation into the world of Clara’s strange desires (announced here by her cries of pleasure upon seeing the jellyfish), as well as into a new appreciation for “the infinite beauty of Form, which passes from man to beast, from beast to plant, from plant to mountain, from mountain to cloud, and from cloud to the pebble that contains in microcosm all of life’s splendor!”19 Mirbeau’s embryologist glimpses life and nature’s form in the bizarre homology of jellyfish and flower, plant and animal, all suddenly grasped in the iridescent emergence of the invertebrates—destabilizing his understand-ing of his place in the world along with his sexual subjectivity. In this essay, I will give the association between invert and invertebrate a prominent place in both Proust’s and Darwin’s works, strategically unseating the flower from its position as master trope for Proust’s theory of homosexuality.20 Doing so implies, first of all, taking Proust seriously as a thinker within “natural history,” which simultane-ously implies prising “natural history” away from a narrow identification with the disci-pline of natural history. As several readers, notably Gillian Beer and Peter Bowler, have argued, Darwin’s arguments, particularly those in the third version of The Origin of Spe-cies, are truly revolutionary—so revolutionary, in fact, that much of “Darwinism” is a reaction against those terrifying initial arguments.21 For the Darwin of the Origin, “natu-ral selection” is a radically non-agential, irregular force acting with no teleological aim other than a general tendency toward increasing “complexity”; but, for the evolutionary thought of the late nineteenth century, natural selection appears as constant, regular, and progressive. Bowler’s The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Re-Interpreting a Historical Myth exhaustively maps the differences between a mythological “Darwinian revolution” and the “non-Darwinian revolution” that, he demonstrates, was in fact the dominant mode of evolutionary thinking within the biological sciences in the late nineteenth century, and that remains current today in our popular understanding of evolution. If we think of Darwin’s theory as “a catalyst that helped to bring about the transition to an evolutionary viewpoint within an essentially non-Darwinian conceptual framework,”22 or even as the traumatic truth against which regularized evolutionary theory was designed to protect us, then we must ask where, if not in the natural sciences, Darwinian thought took place, in the decades following the Origin. Bowler, extending Beer’s previous work, finds a sur-prising venue for post-Darwinian Darwinism in the popular—that is, not quite properly literary—literature of H. G. Wells.23 I would add that the extremes of decadence and aes-theticism, similarly located eccentrically finwithin the terrain of fin-de-siècle literature, also provide a site for the development of those Darwinian concepts that fin-de-siècle science marginalized as troubling on disciplinary or moral grounds. Rediscovering the interdisciplinary research program of such literature allows us to encounter some of the


most interesting consequences of Darwin’s work (which appear not within science, but within literature) and to clarify the true stakes of literary projects such as Proust’s, by bringing the terms and conclusions of a text back into the meaningful context in which it performs its work. Instead of locating the orchid as the locus of aesthetico-biology within Proust’s novel, then, let us turn toward the world of the marine invertebrates, from which the méduse has emerged, flopping onto the shores of the text, filling us with a certain critical revul-sion that we might resist, if only we knew how to look at it. I begin this essay by estab-lishing the specific importance of marine invertebrates within Darwin’s work; marine invertebrates disclose the odd secrets of nature’s “laws,” destabilizing their normativity in productive ways, particularly in regard to evolution and sexuality. Then, I reread the opening pages of Sodom and Gomorrah as a strange extension of Darwin’s work, show-ing how Proust continues and develops definitions and distinctions introduced by Dar-win, as a means to intercede in the critical debate surrounding this strange chapter in the Re cherche’s history. Instead of arguing against characteristic moralizing readings of Proust’s scientific inquiry into homosexuality, I would like to suggest that we can, by recovering Proust’s Darwinism, give new and previously unnoticed meanings to their central terms: if Proust displays a “heterosexual bias,” it is only because, like Darwin, he defines nature as exuberantly, impossibly, revolutionarily, and even queerly heterosexual.

>> Billions of Blue Blistering Barnacles

Darwin waited a long time to publish his On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection. He sketched the first famous diagram of the “tree of life” in 1837 and in 1844 left a sealed envelope in his wife’s care containing an article on the topic to be published in the event of his death. Yet only in 1859 did the complete outline of his evolutionary theory appear in print. Although we have mythologized many of the putative psychologi-cal causes of this delay—the internal conflict between his potentially atheistic scientific theory and his religious beliefs, for instance24—one of his stranger reasons for forestall-ing publication remains more or less unacknowledged: he needed to observe two bar-nacles having sex. It may surprise the modern reader that as minor a matter as the intimate lives of minuscule marine invertebrates would present such a formidable challenge to science, but in fact barnacle sex (or the seeming lack thereof ) presented a major stumbling block for Darwin’s theory, appearing within the Origin as the final potential counterexample to a generalized theory of evolution. The argument goes as follows: nature must exist in a constant state of variation; if this were not so, then the pressure introduced by the struggle for existence would not produce any changes in nature’s forms, but instead sim-ply eliminate some number of them. (If the scarcity of resources is the motor turning evolution’s wheels, natural variability is the friction in the road surface allowing evolu-tion to actually go anywhere. For this reason, Darwin begins the Origin with long chap-ters on variation. Variation is a more original force than “the war of nature,” even though

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variation without competition cannot result in evolution.) Now, if variation is a natural constant, then forces must be working constantly to reproduce variation. Darwin saw “crossing,” the interbreeding of two differently sexed individuals of a species, as the only significant means of introducing variation into a population.25 (Although Darwin’s pre-Mendelian conclusions about the reasons why crossing so favored variation were incorrect, sexual reproduction is nevertheless one of the most important generators of variation.26) Therefore, if there were organisms that did not cross, Darwin’s natural selection could never be a universal quality of life. So to prove the universality of evolu-tion, Darwin must prove that, “both in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, an occasional intercross with a distinct individual is a law of nature.”27

Enter the barnacle. In Darwin’s time, barnacles were considered to be exclusively, even paradigmatically, hermaphroditic.28 What’s worse, barnacles were seen as self- fertilizing hermaphrodites—little narcissistic inverts trapped by their own doubly sexed nature in the autoerotic solipsism of their shells. Proving the necessity of occasional crosses between hermaphroditic plant species and between terrestrial hermaphroditic animals is relatively simple:29 Darwin handily demonstrates that even the most perfect hermaphrodite could never fully coincide with itself—“as in the case of flowers, I have as yet failed . . . to discover a single case of an hermaphrodite animal with the organs of

reproduction so perfectly enclosed within the body, that access from without and the occasional influence of a distinct individ-ual can be shown to be physically impos-sible.”30 And, given the infinite scope of nature, whatever is not impossible must occasionally occur. However, this strategy becomes problematic among aquatic her-maphrodites (although “currents in the

water offer an obvious means for an occasional cross”), especially barnacles: “Cirripedes long appeared to me to present a case of very great difficulty under this point of view; but I have been enabled, by a fortunate chance, elsewhere to prove that two individu-als, though both are self-fertilising hermaphrodites, do sometimes cross.”31 Since, then, there is no case in which allogamy is impossible, there is no species in which it does not take place, and “the difference between hermaphrodites and unisexual species, as far as function is concerned, becomes very small”;32 they are both subject to the same law of variation, even though their variability differs by an extreme magnitude. Certainly, Darwin’s conclusion asserts the universal heterosexuality of nature. How-ever, Darwin insists on the extreme improbability of this generalized hetero sexuality, defining it not as normal, but merely logically necessary, since not entirely impossi-ble. Darwin admits that he only glimpsed cirripedian heterosexuality “by a fortunate chance”—not only the act, but its registration, appear as miraculous. A truly improbable artifact enabled Darwin to prove that barnacles crossed: in his dissections, he unexpect-edly encountered “the singular case of an individual, in a group of Balani, in which the

Darwin insists on the extreme improbability of this generalized heterosexuality, defining it not as normal, but merely logically necessary, since not entirely impossible.


penis had been cut off, and had healed without any perforation; notwithstanding which fact, larvae were included in the ova.”33 (Darwin, Freud’s forefather, associates castration with the demonstrability or “truth” of sexual difference.) Imagine how improbable this meeting must have been: a barnacle would have to have lost its penis, recovered from this injury, been fertilized by another barnacle, been chosen out of a whole ocean’s worth of other barnacles by one of Darwin’s correspondents, and been dissected by the naturalist in such a way that observation of the ova was possible. Darwin relied solely on dissec-tion, making it even more overwhelmingly improbable that a hermaphroditic barnacle had experienced a chain of events that made its sexual history legible to the natural sci-entist’s methods.34 And yet, like everything about crossing, variation, and nature, that is exactly what did happen. If heterosexuality, then, is normative, it is certainly not because anything about it is normal; instead, Darwin discovers and defines crossing, and thus the variation that is nature, as a highly improbable, unlikely, contingent, and nevertheless sustained, aber-rance. The sublime scale of nature ensures that the vanishingly rare phenomenon of variation is in fact everywhere visible, but this does not change its fundamental near-impossibility. Barnacles not only exemplify this eccentric normality of variation in the text of the Origin, they also provided Darwin with a direct window into the emergence of hetero-sexuality itself, as a peculiarly efficient detour of the asexual means of multiplying vari-ability in nature. Darwin, traveling in the Beagle along Chile’s shores in 1836, happened across a barnacle that would turn out to be one of the first unisex specimens of Cirripedia ever discovered. Darwin’s later research revealed a wide world of reproductive strate-gies in a class of organisms that until then had been considered monolithically, hermeti-cally hermaphroditic. In particular, Darwin focused on the genera Ibla and Scalpellum. He discovered that some species of Ibla were entirely unisexual, with differentiated males and females, while in other species of Ibla he discovered tiny dwarf males (which he originally thought were minuscule parasites) living as sperm sacs within the shells or even bodies of female or hermaphroditic individuals. The various sexual strategies of barnacles in genus Ibla allowed Darwin to observe the gradual emergence and evolution of something we com-monly think of as un-evolvable: the absolute difference between the sexes. The different species of Ibla sketched a possible passage from a fully hermaphroditic species to a fully unisexual one. In Ibla, then, we “first meet with Males and Females distinct; and, within the limits of this same restricted genus, the far more wonderful fact of hermaphrodites, whose masculine efficiency is aided by one or two Complemental Males.”35 Darwin cer-tainly appears interested in this “first,” original encounter with sexual differentiation, but he passes to “the far more wonderful fact” of another species in which hermaphro-dites and unisex males (the tiny “complemental” males) live alongside each other. This cohabitation is more fascinating because it is an intermediary stage—and thus it sup-ports speculation about the historically contingent emergence of heterosexuality as a reproductive strategy.

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Significantly, the immense variation in the distributions of these creatures’ sexes and their reproductive strategies did not, to Darwin, imply that they were not related as members of one class or species, although before his writing the hermaphroditism of barnacles was taken as one of the defining traits of Cirripedes as a class.36 Darwin sees sexual exuberance not as a stumbling block but as a cause for excitement:

The simple fact of the diversity in the sexual relations, displayed within the limits of the genera Ibla and Scalpellum, appears to me eminently curious. . . . As I am summing up the singularity of the phenomena here presented, I will allude to the marvellous assemblage of beings seen by me within the sack of an Ibla quadrivalvis,—namely, an old and young male, both minute, worm-like, destitute of a capitulum, with a great mouth, and rudimentary thorax and limbs, attached to each other and to the hermaphrodite, which latter is utterly different in appearance and structure; secondly, the four or five, free, boat-shaped larvae, with their curious prehensile antennae, two great compound eyes, no mouth, and six natatory legs; and lastly, several hundreds of the larvae in their first stage of development, globular, with horn-shaped projections on their carapaces, minute single eyes, filiformed antennae, pro-bosciformed mouths, and only three pair of natatory legs; what diverse beings, with scarcely anything in common, and yet all belonging to the same species!37

The “singularity” of the “marvelous assemblages” of barnacle life—where each shell, far from being shut into the stultifying sameness of hermaphroditism, instead reveals new and ever more complex patterns of relations between individuals both uni- and bisex-ual—captivates Darwin, with its demonstration of how the most radical “diversity” of existence inhabits the very “sameness” of a species. Discussing Ibla in a letter, Darwin is moved to rapture: “Truly the schemes and wonders of nature are illimitable.”38

However, the variability of species, particularly marine invertebrates, sometimes pro-voked a mixed response in Darwin, of fascination and frustration combined. In 1833, returning from Tierra del Fuego, Darwin confessed to his cousin that “the invertebrate marine animals, are however my delight; amongst them I have examined some, almost disagreeably new; for I can find no analogy between them & any described families.”39 Strangeness could become disquieting, and the “delight” of novelty “disagreeable” when it made “analogy” elusive. Darwin further analyzes the affect inspired in him by the cir-ripedes: “I had thought the same parts, of the same species more resembled than they do anyhow in Cirripedia, objects cast in the same mould. Systematic work w[oul]d be easy were it not for this confounded variation, which, however, is pleasant to me as a specu-latist though odious to me as a systematist.”40 Darwin explains his ambiguous relation to barnacles’ extreme variability by considering the doubled nature of his own desire: they frustrate his desire for systematicity, his desire to be able to define the nature of their species positively; but by instead demonstrating that species identity is constituted not by sameness but by an ever more complex series of differential relations, they allow him to speculate, and thus to speculate about evolution. Remember, Darwinian evolutionary theory defines a species not on the basis of a presumed homological or ideal unity, but instead as a set of more or less extreme divergences from a nonexistent “type.”


To think about barnacles is necessarily to think about evolution, and to think about evolution not on the basis of the “natural” crossing of unisexual species but instead from the standpoint of the extreme improbability of cirripede conjunction. If “the unusual sexual systems of cirripedes forced [Darwin] to puzzle through the conse-quences of his transformist ideas long before 1846,”41 they also forced him to puzzle through transformism on the ground of what had, until then, been considered the entirely sterile and “unnatural” ground of reproduction without heterosexual crossing.42 Darwin does not naturalize the bizarre “schemes and wonders” he found in the barnacle world; instead, he denaturalizes the apparent obviousness and efficacy of heterosexual crossing, along with the self-evident limits that appeared to differentiate the “higher orders” and the invertebrates, the plant and animal kingdoms, and even sexual and asexual reproduction. Methodologically, this move to evolutionary speculation implies a redefinition of “analogy.” The lack of an “analogy” between the new species of barnacles he discovered in Chile and the precedent naturalistic definition of the various barnacle families frus-trated the Darwin of the 1830s, who wanted to think of species in terms of the sameness of one mold that cast multiple objects. But by the end of the Origin, analogy appears as something different: “Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype.”43 Analogy, here, is what links the most dissimilar forms of life. This brings us to two important aspects of Darwin’s invertebrate program. First is the mere fact that he chose to focus on invertebrates at all, and that he felt that such a decision was a justifiable method for research in the natural sciences.44 Darwin’s pro-fessor Robert Grant, a specialist in sea sponges, saw invertebrates as potential analytic models, as windows into the simplest forms of processes and structures of life shared by all organisms, and not as bankrupt or degenerate forms of life with no practical interest, as had Cuvier.45 Analogy, here, is not homology;46 instead, analogy focuses on the way in which two radically different organisms have something in common that is proper to neither of them, in that it represents a process of life that predated them and will con-tinue to develop beyond their individual or species existence. Organisms share the fact that they are never the teleological or necessary end of the structures that most naturally seem to define them. Second, when Darwin set off on the Beagle, he was preoccupied by a very specific invertebrate problem, one that had interested Grant: the classification of so-called zoo-phytes, organisms (in particular, coral polyps) that had not yet been conclusively classi-fied as either plant or animal. Over a third of Darwin’s entries about invertebrates in his zoology diary focused on polyps.47 Polyps were perhaps so important to Darwin because they seemed to lie so tantalizingly close to the very beginning of life; Grant had lectured on the spontaneous emergence of tiny bubbles of living matter within a fluid medium, and polyps (along with other microscopic life-forms, like infusoria or filamentous algae) seemed like likely suspects in the search for these bubbles.48 Polyps promised to offer a decision on the very nature of the boundary separating life and non-life.

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Darwin attempted to classify polyps and corals by comparing their modes of sexual reproduction to those of plants. Unsurprisingly, he discovered that the modes of sexual reproduction employed by polyps were manifold and complex—as were those of plants, making things even worse for any possible determination of the zoophytes’ kingdom alli-ance. But Darwin resolved the problem in a different way, writing in his journal that “I am inclined to think in Corallines, such as Tubularia & Flustra, the Polypier is as much a living man being as any Plant, (as a Lichen or Corallina) that it communicates with the circumambient fluid either simply as in Clytia, or in more complicated manner, as in Flustra.”49 (Amusingly, “man” emerges here sous rature in the gaping abyss of compari-son between plant and animal. But Darwin is not anthropomorphizing polyps; rather, he is redefining the life of “man” in an elemental manner, simply as existence within a rela-tional environment.) Darwin defines the polyp as alive in that it enters into a relation-ship with its environment, in that it communicates in variously complex ways. And this complexity both sustains the analogy and connects the various forms of life in question. This complexity also sustains the project of evolution, as Darwin reveals in his 1837 notes on transmutation of species: “All animals of same species are bound together just like buds of plants, which die at one time, though produced either sooner or later.—Prove animals like plants.—trace gradation between associated and nonassociated animals,—&

the story will be complete.”50 The pat-tern remains the same: death is constant, while reproduction is bound solely to the “sooner or later” of chance, ensured only by the vastness of nature. Only the statis-tical miracle of variation prevents death from being fatal, harnessing its energy instead for metamorphosis and change. In this way are animals “bound together,”

both within a species and even beyond the limits of their kingdom, since this paradoxi-cal binding unites them with plants. Life is united not in the simplicity of a shared set of traits but in the complexity of the infinite number of ways life diverges and differenti-ates, even from itself, in the “ever branching and beautiful ramifications” of the tree of life.51 Darwin solves the mystery of the zoophyte not by assigning it to the plant or ani-mal kingdom, but by using it as a prism in which the plant and animal kingdom come to resemble each other in their very difference, from each other and from themselves.52

This brings Darwin, and us, to the very origin of life—through what Proust will call “those experimental epochs when neither dioecious flowers nor unisexual animals existed, to that initial hermaphroditism of which a few rudimentary male organs in the female anatomy and female organs in the male anatomy appear to conserve the trace”53—which Darwin locates within the impossible crossing of aquatic hermaphrodites:

In animals analogy leads one to suppose that seminal fluid fluid (& not dry as in plants) there-fore, great difficulty in crossing (& this most important obstacle to my theory) without the hermaphrodites mutually couple.—(now how is it in Planaria, they couple . . .

The pattern remains the same: death is constant, while reproduction is bound solely to the “sooner or later” of chance, ensured only by the vastness of nature.


(Barnacles, aquatic yet Crustaceans, & true hermaphrodites) It may be said that true her-maphroditism is a consequence of non-locomotion—(contradicted by Plants) & as there are no fixed land animals, so there are [no] true hermaphrodites.—I suspect this rather effect of liquid semen, therefore animal life commenced in Water!54

Darwin brings us to the very “commencement” of animal life, which begins in the water with the next-to-impossible “crossing” of “true” hermaphrodites, epitomized by barna-cles. Higher animal life, then, rests on the extreme improbability of barnacle crossing, as does sex itself. Darwin continues this thought in his notes, writing: “In my theory I must allude to separation of sexes as very great difficulty, then give speculation to show that it is not overwhelming.—”55 Speculation begins in that dash; indeed, this is the very well-spring of evolution and evolutionary thought—the emergence of separate sexes as the necessary consequence of the extremely improbable, yet never impossible, phenomenon of a barnacle’s difference from itself, of which unisexual reproduction is but a conve-niently efficient variant. Following the text of Darwin’s notes, we could say that the obstacle is what is impor-tant, not as a stumbling block, but instead as the guarantor of nature’s odd normalcy. Nature is queerly normal; if we see heterosexual reproduction everywhere, it is only because heterosexual reproduction is one of the least probable modes of reproduction possible, and yet perhaps the most characteristic mode, since the crossing between two others is the wellspring of that complexity that is synonymous with variability. Further-more, heterosexual reproduction is merely one form of the separation of sexes; there are infinitely many ways for male and female to separate, from each other and from them-selves, as Darwin learned dissecting Ibla, and thus infinitely more ways for various sexes to come (improbably) together again. Darwin learns from the barnacles to phrase nature in the form of the necessary-since-next-to-impossible. This is by far the most important denaturalization achieved by Darwin’s barnacle research: the discovery of the original asexuality of sex itself. (Perhaps a better word would be transsexuality, since this origin of sex lies radically beyond the limits of the field of “sexuality” that it nevertheless inaugurates, and because transsexuality implies that conjunction across sexual “essences” is the fundamental law of desire.) By posit-ing the hermaphroditism of marine invertebrates as the fundamental background in and against which various other reproductive strategies ensuring variability would emerge, Darwin can link all life in terms of a shared deviance—precisely the originary deviance, the non-self-similarity of the barnacle that makes crossing statistically necessary despite its quasi-impossibility—from the example of the marine invertebrate. And in this logic, several distinctions necessarily collapse: plant and animal, for certain; but also “normal” and unlikely, sexual and asexual, hetero- and homosexual. All these terms are merely various expressions of the queerly heterosexual relation of the aquatic hermaphrodite to itself—of life to itself. Looking at barnacles for years on end is a rather odd thing to do. Darwin seemed to think so at the end of his life, when he writes in his autobiography that, although

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the barnacle research helped him with the problem of natural classification that would come up in the Origin, he nevertheless doubted “whether the work was worth the con-sumption of so much time.”56 But the late Darwin, himself somewhat caught up in the non-Darwinian revolution that attempted to palliate the traumatic impact of his earlier work, was neither the revolutionary Darwin of the Origin nor, as we have seen here, of the barnacle research. And “wasting time,” refusing to fit one’s work into the schema of proper productivity, societally well-ordered generation—as Proust would certainly have recognized—sometimes constitutes a most revolutionary act.

>> The Beautiful, the Inconceivable, and the Complex

In order to find time again—indeed, in order to go in search of lost time in the first place—time must be lost; so Gilles Deleuze defines the Proustian law of wasted time. We must put off our “real” work, and we must stray into worlds devoid of the “right” meaning.57 Only then can we build the analogical bridge, across the unbridgeable gap separating the moi social of lost time and the moi interne of time regained, which founds the aesthetic relation to truth and the world. Of course, the situation I am focusing on here may seem, superficially, to be signifi-cantly more complicated—since we here observe Darwin’s wasted time being found again by Marcel/Proust. But in fact the same principle applies: the self of wasting time and the self of finding time again are just as foreign to each other as are Darwin and Proust, and any possible crossing between both sets of partners just as improbable.58 The opening of Sodom and Gomorrah (“Sodome et Gomorrhe I”), the brief introduc-tory anecdote that begins the eponymous fourth volume of the Recherche, builds its way toward an explicit encounter with Darwin. Marcel has positioned himself overlooking the courtyard where the Duchesse de Guermantes has positioned her rare orchid “with that insistence with which the marriageable young are thrust forward,” wondering “whether, by some providential chance, the improbable insect would come to visit the tendered and forlorn pistil.”59 But instead of witnessing this highly improbable event, he observes another, as Charlus and Jupien meet and begin a mirror-game pose-off, “in perfect symmetry” and “in accordance with the laws of some secret art.”60 Marcel senses something mysterious in the highly constructed, bizarre, and affected nature of this scene, which is “imbued with a strangeness, or if you like a naturalness (d’un naturel), the beauty of which continued to grow.”61 Charlus and Jupien withdraw; Marcel pursues and watches their sexual encounter through the famous vasistas (transom). The narrative then pauses to puzzle through the ramifications of their encounter, and of Marcel’s first encounter with homosexual encounters. We find that Charlus is a woman and that he thus “belonged to that race of beings, less contradictory than they appear to be,” the race des tantes or men-women, female souls trapped in male bodies.62 The text dilates on the quite complicated vicissitudes of this essential double gender-ing of the invert, concluding that, since the tante desires masculinity but is essentially feminine, no homosexual relation is ever possible, since no homosexual can satisfy the


desire of another homosexual. One maxim runs as follows: “[The Sodomists] would go to Sodom only on days of supreme necessity, when their own town would be empty, at those times when hunger brings the wolf out from the woods, that is to say that every-thing would proceed in sum as in London, Berlin, Rome, Petrograd, or Paris.”63 This conclusion strands the invert on the beach, alone, with only the jellyfish meta-phor we encountered at the beginning of this essay to keep him company. And from there the text loops back around to the orchids shared by Darwin and the Duchesse de Guermantes:

I found the mimicry of Jupien and M. de Charlus, incomprehensible to me at the outset, as curious as those gestures of enticement addressed to insects, according to Darwin, by the flowers known as composites, which raise the florets of their capitula so as to be seen from farther away, like a certain heterostyled flower that turns its stamens over and arches them in order to clear a path for insects, or which offers them an ablution, or, quite simply, like the fragrance of the nectar, the brilliance of its corollas, which were at that very moment attract-ing insects into the courtyard.64

The opening chapter ends with Marcel back in the courtyard, not yet having pursued his reflection on inversion to the degree of sophistication he has attained since his first encounter, regretting the time he wasted in the wrong kind of naturalist observation: “I was distressed at having, by attending to the Jupien-Charlus conjunction, perhaps missed the fertilization of the flower by the bumblebee.”65

Many commentators have remarked on the strange temporality of this scene: the nar-rator both announces its absence from the text of The Guermantes Way while delaying it until it can be treated properly and at length and also intercedes retroactively in the text by including theoretical reflections on the nature of the race to which Charlus and Jupien belong that Marcel would only make years after doing his empirical research at the vasistas. Interestingly, these narrative contortions allow Sodom and Gomorrah to follow almost precisely in Darwin’s footsteps, by combining delayed understanding and retrospective intercession. Furthermore, the move from the initially promising meta-phor of the bee and flower to the seemingly sterile plague of invertebrates, motivated by the narrator’s interjected interpretation of Marcel’s interpretations, mirrors Darwin’s own use of the example of the bee and the flower. In the Origin, Darwin begins to inves-tigate the coupling of bee and flower, presenting it as a paradigmatic case for the pos-sibility of a most improbable evolution, since such an evolution would depend on the sustained, mutually beneficial, and completely unconscious entanglement of two vastly different organisms (from two different kingdoms, even):

Yet if a little pollen were carried, at first occasionally and then habitually, by the pollen-devouring insects from flower to flower, and a cross thus effected, although nine-tenths of the pollen were destroyed, it might still be a great gain to the plant; and those individuals which produced more and more pollen, and had larger and larger anthers, would be selected. . . .

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Thus I can understand how a flower and a bee might slowly become, either simultaneously or one after the other, modified and adapted in the most perfect manner to each other, by the continued preservation of individuals presenting mutual and slightly favourable deviations of structure.66

Since we know now what to look for, we observe that Darwin already has located the bee-flower relationship within a framework characteristic of the barnacle research: the coadaptation of bee and flower is perfectly efficient and universalized only as the accu-mulation of tiny, occasional, accidental, improbable, and non-intentional or non-agential deviations. But immediately after this celebration of bravura evolution, Darwin intro-duces the possibly fatal counterexample of self-fertilizing hermaphrodites, and then the “fortunate chance” that allows him to establish that cirripede hermaphroditism is never total, thus introducing evolution as the transformation of death into the power of trans-formation, eliding the finality of death in the radically atelic “ramifications” of life. We have seen how necessary and time-intensive this seemingly throwaway moment of detour through the world of marine invertebrates is in Darwin’s work, and how its eccentric position masks its supreme rhetorical and methodological importance. With-out the barnacle, the bee and the flower could never be compared, to each other or to other forms of life. Cirripedes introduce sexual differentiation precisely because their hermaphroditism does not epitomize the mythical complementarity of Aristophanes’s myth in the Symposium, but instead an idealized form of any one sex’s non-correspon-dence with itself. Proust picks up the argument here: hermaphroditism appears as an almost impossible ideal form of heterosexuality, of the very possibility of sexuality across difference. Inverts and women don’t couple sexually for the very Darwinian-cirripedian reason that “the invert approximates too closely to a woman to be able to have useful relations with her”; self-fertilization is “sterile.”67 Inverts are “like the snail”—another slippery invertebrate68—in that snails “cannot be fertilized by themselves, but can be so by other hermaphrodites.”69 So homosexual sex is explicitly the sex of hermaphroditic invertebrates—and, just as explicitly, the sex between radically, improbably other her-maphrodites, the irreducible difference within any hermaphroditism. Indeed, Darwin’s bee and flower example insists on the extreme difference at the heart of evolutionary sexuality, one which links individuals not only of different sexes (the male and female flowers) but of entirely different species and entirely different divisions and recombinations of sexes (the bee and the flower, the bizarrely unisexual, female-dominated colonies of bees, and the exuberantly multiple sexings of the plant kingdom). The relation between bee and flower even opens and solicits other kinds of cross-species transferences, as when Darwin explains the mechanics of pollination met-aphorically, writing that “bees will act like a camel-hair pencil”70—bee and flower turn out to resemble complex tools made by humans out of one of the most paradigmatically unexpected of mammals. Not coincidentally, the processes of nature resemble the tools of art (watercolor painting, here): all evolution is coevolution (since by definition het-erosexual), and thus all evolution proceeds through a mutual, aesthetic representation of


the other that transforms that other by never entirely succeeding in capturing the other’s essence. Darwin rhapsodizes on such aesthetic evolutions: “We see these beautiful co-adaptations most plainly in the woodpecker and misseltoe; and only a little less plainly in the humblest parasite which clings to the hairs of a quadruped or feathers of a bird; in the structure of the beetle which dives through the water; in the plumed seed which is wafted by the gentlest breeze; in short, we see beautiful adaptations everywhere and in every part of the organic world.”71 This action by definition characterizes organic life—or “life” itself—but it also links the organic world to the inorganic world of water and wind, to that which seems absolutely antithetical to life.72 (Proust exemplifies absolutely unpredictable coadaptation with the gerontophilic Jupien, one of “the subvariety of inverts destined to ensure the pleasures of love to the invert who is growing old”;73 and if patterns of interrelation and mutuality change over the course of life, there can be no “one” organism, since the entire conditions of species existence change over the life of the individual.) Darwin’s aesthetics, like Proust’s, centers on the chiastic moment in metonymy where two radically different forms turn out to have exchanged their most deeply characteristic qualities, as in Elstir’s painting of the sea-shore in which the land is aqueous and the ocean terrestrial or of Odette as “Miss Sac-ripant” in which the genders themselves exchange their originary attributes. Aes-thetically, metonymy ensures that nothing can ever be alone, since the necessity of contiguity (nothing can be absolutely close to anything else, but conversely nothing can ever be far from anything else) means that any one form will, sooner or later, be reflected in, and reflect, an adjacent form. To the natural law of crossings of different forms corresponds the aesthetic law by which forms represent each other, constantly reinventing the alterity of the other in their mimicry.74

So nature is indeed fundamentally heterosexual, but here “heterosexuality” has noth-ing to do with the putatively complementary relation between males and females of the same species. And this “heterosexuality” is also an aesthetic relationship. If the works of nature eclipse the works of art in scope,75 it is only because Darwin “can see no limit to [nature’s] power, in slowly and beautifully adapting each form to the most complex rela-tions of life.”76 “Complex,” one of Darwin’s favorite words, encapsulates his aesthetic the-ory of natural science: the interfolded existence of the most diverse organisms (and their inorganic environment) demonstrates the “ever branching and beautiful ramifications” of the tree of life. Darwin’s final celebration of nature’s beauty—“whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved”77—clarifies once more his notion of a law, of science or art. The “fixed” laws of nature nevertheless,

Darwin’s aesthetics, like Proust’s, centers on the chiastic moment in metonymy where two radically different forms turn out to have exchanged their most deeply characteristic qualities.

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unexpectedly, bizarrely, wonderfully, produce endless revolution. The barnacle’s sexual-ity is ideal because it subverts its seeming closure and self-sufficiency just as the greatest laws of nature do. From this viewpoint, the heterosexual character of “the Jupien-Charlus conjunction” comes differently into focus. First, their mirror-dance is “harmonious” not because they adequate their bodies to each other, but instead because their individual bodies express similar gestures differently; mirroring gestures make the fundamental difference of their bodies clear from the start, and this, far from putting a damper on their homosexual cou-pling, triggers its evolving eroticism. What the text calls the “perfect symmetry” of their poses cannot be the narcissistic self-love posited as the cause of male homosexuality, precisely since the poses are struck “with the coquettishness that the orchid might have had for the providential advent of the bumblebee”78—with the absolute asymmetry of the coadaptation of the bee and flower. The comedy of Charlus and Jupien’s postcoital dia-logue, in which the two of them talk entirely at cross-purposes but nevertheless manage to carry on an exchange within what appears to be a developing conversation, prolongs this game of relation across and through difference.79

Bersani’s central critiques of Sodom and Gomorrah also appear in a different light, given the complex encounter between Darwin and Proust. Bersani locates the text’s key argument in its identification of Charlus as a woman in a man’s body; this implies that there are, elsewhere, men in men’s bodies and that Charlus will never find a complemen-tary lover whom he would desire and who would desire him. First, Bersani points out that Proust seems to present “la race des tantes” as monsters caused by “a biological mis-take in sexual identity”;80 although this biological “mistake” certainly leads to important cultural consequences (since it opens up the possibility to endlessly confuse “essences”),

it nevertheless consigns the invert to an existence as a accidental degeneration. But Bersani misconstrues nature’s law: as the barnacle shows, sexual aberrance is biologically primary and the “correct”

sexes, genders, or modes of sexual expression are only accidental consequences of the bizarre origin of sex itself. Sexual “identity” is always—not fatally, but transformatively—flawed, and the heterosexuality of our culture an uncanny offshoot of the more radical heterosexuality of the barnacle. Evolution is the mis-taking of sexuality, its fundamental capacity to “take” otherwise. But what about the loneliness of the invert, the inevitability of which produces pity in the imaginary “average reader” and frustration in the queer theorist? Bersani ana-lyzes the law of negative identification by which Charlus, whose ideal is masculine, must himself be feminine; desire is thus desire for what one can never be, and thus for what one can never have. Bersani calls this heterosexual law—for the sake of which “Marcel Proust the homosexual had to submit to the torture of being heterosexual”—the law of the “tragedies of inconceivable desire.”81 Bersani here makes two assumptions that run counter to the conception of nature explored by Darwin and Proust: first, that Marcel

Evolution is the mis-taking of sexuality, its fundamental capacity to “take” otherwise.


Proust is “homosexual” by nature; and second, that for something to be inconceivable makes it impossible, when instead, due to the vastness of nature, everything that is merely inconceivable will turn out to be quite common. Look again at that statement about the impossibility of (re)settling Sodom: the text declares such an ideal society of inverts impossible (this utopian ideal can only conceive of “invert society” as elsewhere, as an independent model pitched against “normal” society). Nevertheless, much more unsettlingly, the text asserts that inverts meet each other, as an everyday exception to the rule, in every city on earth. Homosexual society already features in all societies; homosexual desire is almost comically conceivable since we can collect evidence of it everywhere. Heteronormativity notwithstanding, normatively heterosexual society is physically impossible. Bersani thus faults Proust’s concept of homosexuality for being non-normative—for being, in other words, too queer—since it grounds homosexual rela-tions, and heterosexual relations, in the realm not of the necessary but instead of the necessary exception. Finally, adding up these reconsiderations, we arrive, somewhat hilariously, at an Occam’s razor explanation for Marcel’s heterosexuality: no tragedy here—instead, Proust, in the Recherche, identifies himself as heterosexual because, as we might say today, he himself identifies as heterosexual. As we saw with the barnacle, the seemingly solipsistic sterility of the barnacle merely sets the stage for the miracle, the everyday next-to-impossibility, of relationality itself. Certainly, we do occasionally manage to form bonds with other beings who are more or less, but never entirely, like us (sometimes they’re almost unrecognizable); this some-times distracts us from the fact that any conjunction, any crossing, with any other is so statistically unlikely as to be almost inconceivable. Sedgwick, significantly, insists on the Recherche’s double game: the text presents Charlus and Jupien’s coupling as entirely counter to its normal laws of desire while simultaneously, and silently, “the love relation-ship entered into on this occasion between Charlus and Jupien is demonstrated—though it is never stated—to be the single exception to every Proustian law of desire, jealousy, triangulation, and radical epistemological instability.”82 The Darwin of the barnacle research would know more than anyone that this exceptional character of Charlus and Jupien’s partnership, as a form of “knowledge of a fellow-creature who is neither his opposite nor his simulacrum,”83 proves their relationship to be the most natural thing in the world. Proust knows this as well, tipping his hand in Marcel’s exclamation about “the strangeness, or if you like a naturalness, the beauty of which continued to grow” of the scene which, “by a fortunate chance,” he is privileged to observe. When the invert and the invertebrate confront each other on the shores of the text, only our critical prejudices, our internalized, perhaps willed, non-knowledge about the ways of nature, lead us to count the characters on the beach as one lonely homosexual and not as two organisms (or more—human, jellyfish, orchid, bee, camel . . .), all relating to each other in the paradoxical similarity of their difference. A relation between homo-sexuality and the hermaphroditism of the barnacle is not impossible, but it becomes inconceivable once we insist that the kind of sexuality we will find therein have the ideological consistency our culture imputes to “heterosexuality.” Darwin and Proust

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discover, in these various hermaphroditisms, that no sexuality, no sex, and indeed no organizing paradigm for sexes or sexualities, can ever have the form of identitary con-sistency characteristic of the contemporary institution of heterosexuality, at least as it demands to be perceived. Bersani states the natural law of Sodom and Gomorrah thus: “Nothing, Proust sug-gests, is more unnatural than for sexual inverts to come together.”84 Bersani implicitly defines “uncommon” as “unnatural,” and simultaneously decides that the next-to- impossible is functionally identical to the physically impossible. Only from those surpris-ingly banal assumptions can we pronounce this law as fatal to homosexuals. We might place Bersani’s specific observation within a more general theory offered by Proust and Darwin: Nothing is more improbable than any coming-together at all, since nothing is more improbable than any originary differentiation; however, given the immensity of nature, these rare, wondrous, and beautiful crossings happen everywhere. Deleuze, unlike Bersani, did not reject the Proustian link between the strangely natu-ral homosexuality of Charlus and Jupien and the world of hermaphroditism—which, in his case, would entail some critical exchange with hermaphrodite life revelatory of the foreignness within himself. He writes: “objectively, heterosexual loves are less profound than homosexual ones; they find their truth in homosexuality. . . . At the infinity of our loves, there is the original Hermaphrodite. But the Hermaphrodite is not a being capable of reproducing itself (capable de se féconder lui-même). Far from uniting the sexes, it separates them, it is the source from which there continually proceed the two divergent homosexual series.”85 This highly suggestive reading valorizes the hermaphrodite not as the imagined unification of the sexes, but instead as the moment of fracture, within the apparent closure of hermaphroditism, that opens up a world of different distributions of bodies and crossings. But by separating “the” sexes (as if there can be only two of them, as if once they were two they were not legion), originary hermaphroditism enables organisms of different sexes and sexualities, even the most self-evidently incompatible sexualities, to find each other again, in the miraculous accident of relational intersub-jectivity, an event no less miraculous (and, perhaps, no less perverse) for its everyday character. The writing of the Recherche begins in Combray with the divergence of the Guer-mantes’s way from Swann’s way, just as its consideration of homosexuality begins with the “gaping conceptual abysses” that yawn between the two inconceivable metaphoric conjunctions of Sodom and Gomorrah. But this writing would be truly impossible, and not just spectacularly improbable, if any original divergence did not take place in the hermaphroditic moment when the same transforms itself into the different. If it turns out that the apparently multiple paths actually form one single loop, the shape of a DNA plasmid, this formal unity does not change their fundamental capacity for divergence. Proust’s writing bases itself in the moment of a vanishingly rare correspondence—say, between two flagstones countries and decades apart; and this discovery only becomes an aesthetic miracle if no two flagstones are alike, if flagstones are all alike only in that they all diverge from the ideal flagstone in unexpected and unique ways. Just as divergence,


detour, deferral, and divagation enable lost time to be pursued and regained (as improb-able as that might be), sexual difference, the difference of any sex from itself, creates the natural world of endlessly complex, endlessly wonderful, endlessly exuberant couplings.

>>

As a postscript to this consideration of an impossible (or is it merely improbable?) en counter between Darwin and Proust, I would like to reflect on its implications for another impossible encounter, the scholarly encounter of an “interdiscipline” between the sciences and the humanities. First, humanities scholars must be highly skeptical of arguments that rely on an appeal to the findings of a disinterested and monolithic “science” to judge the truth-value of aesthetic arguments. For starters, many such projects, such as the recent work of “literary Darwinists” such as Joseph Carroll, Brian Boyd, and Jonathan Gottschall, attempt to prove the validity of certain cultural modes, including the interpretation of cultural products, via a comparison with the findings of natural science, but in so doing (to paraphrase William Cronon) tend to “get back to the wrong nature.” The “nature” that they find, which immediately confirms what they already believe, has, to my eye, nothing to do with the scientific impulse to discover in nature complexities beyond the expected.86 Carroll, for example, founds his claims through a link to a “total system of evolutionary knowledge”87 sometimes named “the Darwinian conception” and which he elsewhere suggests “is basically true, or closer to the truth than other conception we now have.”88 Even if we accept that Darwinism presents the best framework in which to understand the emergence of life and its vicissitudes (a viewpoint that I in fact per-formatively endorse in this article), I am not convinced that the “truth” of Darwinism lies in its totalized, systematic aspect. Instead, as the Darwin of the barnacle research suggests, sometimes the truest element of a totality emerges at the very point at which that totality revises or escapes from itself. Science could instead be thought on the basis of science’s revolutionary impulse—its massively auto-critical and transformative move-ment, in which it best exemplifies the nature it purports to describe—and not as the sub-sequent and sometimes reactionary work of codification and stabilization that certainly constitutes the bulk of the disciplinary business of science. For corresponding reasons but with different consequences, literary readers of Proust have looked toward the floral field and not toward the jellyfish as the metaphoric core of Sodom and Gomorrah precisely because orchids appear as appropriate and expected objects for Proust’s aestheticism. It’s amusingly bizarre that in a work whose symbol is a floral-scented lemon cookie baked in a scallop-shell mold that the importance of marine invertebrates should remain hidden in plain sight behind our stereotyped and prede-termined concept of “proper aestheticist practice.” In other words, we must allow aes-thetics to be just as self-subverting as science attempts to be. Conversely, I do not think that literary scholars should reject literary discourses on nature as mere representations of scientific discourse, bracketed by fictionality, quarantined from any possibility of

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providing insight about the natural world, and only deployed within literature for stra-tegically literary purposes. Schehr, for instance, expresses a concern that arguments that aim to justify certain sexual practices by pointing out their transhistorical existence within nature can just as easily be used to marginalize or exterminate those sexual prac-tices; for that reason, he chooses to read Sodom and Gomorrah not as a description of certain natural processes but instead as “an argument with deontological or hermeneu-tic consequences.”89 Although I would certainly agree that we can, and should, draw out these deontological and hermeneutic consequences from Proust’s text, I would also add that they follow from an investigation of the natural world that does in itself also partici-pate in natural science, and that by uncovering a strangely slippery, elusively transforma-tive force at the heart of “nature” Proust obviates any appeal to progressivism or degen-eration theory—consequentially rendering questions of deontology or hermeneutics all the more important. Perhaps we should instead practice the interdisciplinarity of aesthetics and science as the sustained exploration of their original entanglement. Proust, in daring to suggest that phenomena can be observed and judged “from the point of view of natural history and of aesthetics,” reveals that Darwin already occupied such a viewpoint. We could read the Origin not as a work of natural history with potential consequences for or detours into aesthetics, but instead as a work written within the improbable crossing of natural history and aesthetics, as Darwin’s conflation of “beauty” and “complexity” (two names for the atelic telos of evolution) demonstrates. The coupling of Proust and Darwin, occasioned by the very strange correspondence of two marine invertebrates, demonstrates the potential of an interdisciplinary method that critically approaches the stability of the very disciplines it attempts to cross—and that thus locates its conditions of possibility in the indisciplinary or transdisciplinary origins of the disciplines. I certainly do not want to claim that I have invented these terms, or even that I assert any definite allegiance to either one in this essay; I am obvi-ously borrowing them, as I am borrowing terms like “nature” and “heterosexuality,” from myriad impassioned scholars that I would not like to reduce here to a list of three or four famous names. Instead, I hope that my explorations have suggested some new meanings or orientations for signifiers whose function and scope certainly remain, as yet, undecided (again, as is my hope with those signifiers like “nature” and “heterosex-uality”). For instance, when we arrive at “transdisciplinarity” through the figure of a crossing over and even beyond the gulf separating various genders or sexes, the idea of a transdisciplinary project or space may take on different valences. In particular, we have seen how a detour through a scientific project that has hardly ever been seen as “proper” science shows us how to rethink our most fundamental ideas about the consistency of nature, the object through which natural science is defined. If we define nature not as consistent but instead as consistently aberrant, then the power of a queer reading of nature, as Proust demonstrates, lies not in articulating a modality of queerness that would be as consistent as nature—like the “natural” coupling of man and woman (or man and man, or woman and woman, or . . .)—is ideologically considered


to be, but instead in generalizing the original queerness of nature, perhaps by producing radically new “heterosexual” orientations or identities. In so doing, we meet new, strange companions on our journey through life: Proust gazes into an inert blob of purple jelly and sees himself; Darwin dedicates a decade of youth to reflecting on the almost invisible lives of barnacles. Various kinds of disgust (revulsion at the man-o’-war’s unappealing form, at the prospect of so much wasted time) condition us against such relationships, but perhaps the stunningly inappropriate or improper character of these couplings signals their revolutionary potential. It’s said that politics makes strange bedfellows; perhaps we could invert the maxim and say that acknowledging and inhabiting the natural strangeness that enables any kind of sexual fellowship, in or out of bed, could constitute a radical form of political action. When we hear homosexuality being denounced as “unnatural,” an attack that pre-sumes the firm foundation of a “natural” heterosexuality, it does not follow that our only response is to decry the cultural constructedness of these definitions. As Deleuze famously states, “when power becomes bio-power, resistance becomes the power of life”;90 when ideology colonizes and consolidates forms of life, an articulation of the vital complexity of life becomes a form of political resistance. Rereading the very naturalness of any sexuality allows us not only to demonstrate the contingency and bizarreness of our contemporary forms of heterosexuality, but also to discover the universal, improbable, and altogether queer forms of heterosexuality that are all of nature’s inconceivably com-plex interrelations, and to play a part in furthering their revolutionary entanglements.

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1 Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, 30.

2 See Genette, “Métonymie chez Proust,” 56.


4 Schehr, The Shock of Men, 53.

5 Bersani, Homos, 139.

6 Ibid., 146.


8 For Schehr’s explicit discussion of stabilizing “naturalizations” of homosexuality, see the introduc-tion to The Shock of Men: “From Gide to Foucault.”

9 Ladenson, Proust’s Lesbianism, 41.

10 Ibid., 6.

11 Ibid., 130.

12 Ibid., 108.

13 Ibid., 88.

14 Freud, “Medusa’s Head,” 273.

15 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 220.

16 Ladenson, Proust’s Lesbianism, 13.

17 Ladenson also introduces several “red herrings” into her discussion of Proustian sexuality; see her discussion of Albertine throwing “red herrings” at the narrator (ibid., 42) and her argument that the world of Gomorrah is presented on the surface level of the Recherche as a “textual red herring,” in that it con-stantly provokes the hermeneutic impulses of Marcel and the reader while seemingly offering no decodable content (ibid., 60). Of course, Ladenson argues that the true red herring of the text is the way Gomorrah is coded as “red herring” in the first place; its apparent solicitation of a depth hermeneutics itself distracts Marcel and the reader from a possible other strategy for encountering, desiring, and reading persons and texts.

18 Mirbeau, Torture Garden, 86.

19 Ibid., 73–74.

20 The same fixation on the orchid-bee complex as the source of the chapter’s metaphoric value preoccupies even those critics who have taken care to pay attention to the specificity of Proust’s Darwinian intertext. For instance, Emily Eells, who devotes much time to reading Sodom and Gomorrah in Proust’s Cup of Tea, nevertheless identifies a “dominant floral motif” and considers only Darwin’s post-Origin work on sex in orchids. Although Darwin’s orchid research is certainly important to the study of the Recherche, it is not the only Darwinian intertext relevant to Proust, nor to the entire complex of “French Aesthetico-Decadent literature” (Proust’s Cup of Tea, 94).

21 See Beer, Darwin’s Plots; and Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution.

22 Bowler, The Non-Darwinian Revolution, 8.

23 Ibid., 185–86.

24 Reevaluations of Darwin’s career have demonstrated that this so-called delay is a recent invention; see John van Wyhe, “Mind the Gap: Did Darwin Avoid Publishing His Theory for Many Years?” However, acknowledging the relatively contemporary manufacture of the narrative in which Darwin struggles with his faith in private before suddenly and publicly endorsing evolutionism does not mean that we have to conclude, as van Wyhe does, that Darwin’s only rea-son for starting work on the Origin so late was that he simply wanted to get his other, unrelated concerns out of the way first. As I argue here, the period of barnacle research can itself be seen as not a convenient distrac-tion from or a peripheral concern to evolutionary research, but instead as a necessary detour by which Darwin was able to tackle the issues that lay nearest to the heart of his evolutionary thinking.

Notes


25 In the second paragraph of the Origin, Darwin discounts Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s theory of “mon-strosity” as deformation induced during embryonic development, writing instead that “the most frequent cause of variability may be attributed to the male and female reproductive elements having been affected prior to the act of conception” (The Origin of Species, 72). The separation of sexes, as necessary precursor to any crossing between different sexes, thus becomes the guarantor of variability within nature. Darwin read Geoffroy’s theory of embryonic mutation in 1844, two years before commencing his barnacle research in earnest; see Darwin, The Annotated “Origin,” 8.

26 Furthermore, the other two mechanisms favoring variation—mutation within an individual and genetic exchange across populations of species, called “gene flow”—are at least metaphorically implicit in Darwin’s notion of “crossing,” since, as we will see, he includes self-fertilizing hermaphrodites and cross-species interchange within his model of crossing.

27 Darwin, The Origin of Species, 147.

28 See Newman, “Darwin and Cirripedology,” 377.

29 Darwin’s later works on orchid reproduction were explicitly written in response to an argument discounting his evolutionary theory on the ground that certain hermaphroditic orchids were entirely self-fertilizing. Clearly, both Darwin and his fellow sci-entists (evolutionists and anti-evolutionists alike) saw that the self-fertilization of hermaphrodites presented a major challenge to any evolutionary theory.


31 Ibid., 146–47.

32 Ibid., 147.

33 Darwin, A Monograph on the Sub-Class Cirripedia, 61.

34 Aquaria were practical and available by the mid-1850s, and Darwin was an early adopter; his fam-ily participated in his 1855 experiment to demonstrate that the seeds of terrestrial plants could be conveyed through saltwater. However, his barnacle research exclusively relied on dissection. For an extended dis-cussion of Darwin’s use of aquaria, see Stott, Darwin and the Barnacle, 248–52.

35 Darwin, A Monograph on the Sub-Class Cirripedia, 182.

36 Ibid., 198.

37 Ibid., 292–93.

38 Darwin to Charles Lyell, September 2, 1849. Darwin Correspondence Project, http://www.darwin-project.ac.uk/entry-1252.

39 Darwin to W. D. Fox, May 23, 1833. Darwin Cor-respondence Project, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-207. Darwin goes on to specify that the marine invertebrates that have so fascinated him come from amongst “the most minute Crustaceae.”

40 Darwin to J. D. Hooker, June 13, 1850. Darwin Correspondence Project, http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/entry-1339.

41 Love, “Darwin and Cirripedia Prior to 1846,” 281.

42 For an excellent discussion of prevailing atti-tudes toward hermaphroditism and asexual repro-duction in the 1830s and ’40s, see Sloan, “Darwin’s Invertebrate Program, 1826–1836,” 101.


44 Invertebrates, in fact, get something like the last word in Darwin. For instance, they are the last animal mentioned in the Origin, concluding the description of “an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth” (ibid., 459). For a

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compelling reading of the importance of worms in Darwin’s thought, and in particular the modes of social and political relationality they imply, see Donald Ulin, “A Clerisy of Worms in Darwin’s Inverted World.”

45 Sloan, “Darwin’s Invertebrate Program, 1826–1836,” 76–77.

46 Darwin’s research on barnacles did provide him with many opportunities to study homology, in various extreme forms. For instance, he was able to demonstrate the homology between the full-sized Ibla and the diminutive bodies of the complemental males, even though at first glance they appeared as absolutely different organisms. More generally, he was everywhere confronted with the need to draw homological links across the extremely different forms one individual barnacle would take on over the course of its life. Barnacles begin life as a one-eyed larva, gradually becoming more complex cyprid larvae; in this form, they search out a surface to settle on or into, and, upon finding a suitable place, permanently attach themselves head-first onto it and metamorphose into juvenile barnacles. (Inside their shells, barnacles basi-cally resemble upside-down shrimp.) Darwin was one of the first to recognize that barnacle larvae were, in fact, barnacles; his dissections gave him an oppor-tunity to see how one part of the barnacle’s body played different roles across the span of its life. But now “homology” focuses on the difference between expressions of the same structure, and not on its unity across bodies or stages.

47 Sloan, “Darwin’s Invertebrate Program, 1826–1836,” 90.

48 Ibid., 84.

49 This extract from Darwin’s manuscripts (referred to as DAR 5:98–99 in the characteristic classification system) is unavailable in a standard transcription. The transcription provided here is taken from the editor’s introduction to Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Zoology Notes & Specimen Links from H. M. S. Beagle, xvi.

50 Darwin, Notebook B: Transmutation of Species, 73.


52 Contemplating the complemental males of Scalpellum, Darwin writes: “Can the males retain their spermatozoa, till told by some instinct, that the ova in the sack of the often fecundated hermaphrodite are ready for impregnation; or are the spermatozoa sometimes wasted, as must annually happen with such incalculable quantities of the pollen of many dioecious plants?” (Darwin, A Monograph on the Sub-Class Cir-ripedia, 242). What sustains this analogy between bar-nacle and plant is not the success of their reproductive strategies, but instead the degree to which both forms of dissemination fail to hit their target. Again we see Darwin interesting himself not in the positively shared forms of various organisms, but instead in the similar contexts of generalized improbability or negativity which make success possible, as a miraculous moment of good luck.

53 Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, 30–31.

54 Darwin, Notebook E: Transmutation of Species, 70, 71.

55 Darwin, Notebook D: Transmutation of Species, 159e.

56 Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882, 118.

57 Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 14.

58 Scholars seem, on the whole, satisfied with the statement that Proust never read Darwin (it seems he learned everything he knew about Darwin from the introductory lecture included in the 1878 French translation of On the Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects). It is certainly not my contention—nor would I find such a contention necessary—that Proust actually did read Darwin, including the various letters, journal entries, and specialist volumes on cirripediology I


have been investigating here. Instead, as part of my general strategy of troubling the complete identifica-tion of scientific work and the scientific disciplines, I would argue that only because Darwin originally, and radically, constructed his work at the impossible interdisciplinary junction of biology and aesthetics can Proust later inherit and extend that work as an aesthetico-naturalist.


60 Ibid., 6. Proust’s description of this scene seems, to me, to imitate and extend Stéphane Mallarmé’s description of the pas de deux that introduces the ballet Les deux pigeons in his Crayonné au théâtre. Charlus himself discusses La Fontaine’s fable “Les deux pigeons” when he first encounters Marcel and his grandmother in Balbec. (Ladenson discusses this literary disquisition in terms of Charlus’s ambiguous sexual orientation; see Ladenson, Proust’s Lesbian-ism, 120–21.) Given that an odd crop of amateurs called “pigeon fanciers” occupy several pages in the first chapter of the Origin and prove vital to Darwin’s demonstration of the mechanism of artificial selection, I suspect that pigeons could be the site of another encounter between Darwin and Proust.


62 Ibid., 16.

63 Ibid., 33.

64 Ibid., 31.

65 Ibid., 33.

66 Darwin, The Origin of Species, 140, 142.


68 In “Combray” (the opening chapter of Swann’s Way), Marcel’s semen is likened to a snail’s trail of slime, linking the snail to autoeroticism. But here, the snail is precisely what cannot fertilize or desire itself, or that, in taking itself as its object, radicalizes

its difference from itself. Correspondingly, we might speculate that, for Proust, like Sade before him, masturbation is only possible as a relation to one’s own alterity; masturbatory fantasy might not be narcis-sistic but transformative. This reading of masturbation also echoes Ladenson’s closing suggestion that the lesbianism of Proust’s women motivates the narrator’s autobiographical turn, and thus that Proustian self-narration is a form of female homosexuality.



71 Ibid., 114–15.

72 Love extrapolates on Sloan’s work to com-ment on the close ties between Darwin’s research on geology—often seen as of immense foundational importance—and his research into marine inverte-brates and cirripedes in particular; the two branches of research emerge from the consideration of the place of fossilized shells in the geological record. See Love, “Darwin and Cirripedia Prior to 1846,” 283.


74 My understanding of this chiastic relation-ship between science and aesthetics is influenced by Whitney Davis’s compelling reading of orchids in Darwin and Joris-Karl Huysmans (“Decadence and the Organic Metaphor”). My argument here diverges from Davis’s in a few important ways: I find that he overemphasizes the apparent thematic differences between Darwin and Huysmans in order to present each as the stark inverse of the other (perhaps this is because he approaches Huysmans from the British aestheticist legacy of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, in which Huysmans is famous for turning “against nature”); and that he is perhaps mistaken in choos-ing to present Darwin essentially as a degeneration theorist preoccupied with preserving the stability of the higher forms of life against a potentially “atavistic” return to more primitive forms. These methodological

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choices make Darwin an anti-Darwinist (since a pro-gressive evolutionist), and draw too stark a distinction between science and aesthetics, to the point where they can only meet as polar opposites.


76 Ibid., 443.

77 Ibid., 460.


79 Ibid., 11–15.


81 Ibid., 143.

82 Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 220.

83 Ibid.


85 Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 7–8.

86 Literary Darwinism has been the subject of much debate, critique, and defense, in the pages of this journal as well as in a series of articles in Critical Inquiry, beginning with Jonathan Kramnick’s provocatively titled “Against Literary Darwinism” (Critical Inquiry 37, no. 2 [2011]). I do not claim to make an exhaustive contribution to that debate here. Obviously, this essay does not directly address the discussion of the evolution of thought central to liter-ary Darwinism (unless desire or sexual behavior should be read as categories of “thought”); neither do I assess the reproductive or adaptive utility of texts such as Proust’s or Darwin’s. Furthermore, by centering on a restricted temporal context for archaeological reasons, I leave out the whole of twentieth-century evolution-ary theory necessary to the development of the literary Darwinist argument. Rather, it simply strikes me that many of the problems that are both resolved and enriched by the dialogue between Proust and Darwin that emerges around the figure of marine

invertebrates also arise in the formulation and consoli-dation of a “Darwinian” school of literary criticism.

87 Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory, 25.

88 Carroll, Literary Darwinism, 3.


90 Deleuze, Foucault, 92.


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Bersani, Leo. Homos. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Bowler, Peter J. The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988.

Carroll, Joseph. Evolution and Literary Theory. Colum-bia: University of Missouri Press, 1994.

———. Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Darwin, Charles. The Annotated “Origin”: A Facsimile of the First Edition of “On the Origin of Species.” Edited by James T. Costa. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009.

———. The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882. Edited by Nora Barlow. London: Collins, 1958.

———. Charles Darwin’s Zoology Notes & Specimen Links from H. M. S. Beagle. Edited by Richard Keynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

———. A Monograph on the Sub-Class Cirripedia: The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes. London: The Ray Society, 1851.

———. Notebook B: Transmutation of Species (CUL-DAR121). Transcribed by Kees Rookmaaker. Darwin Online, http://darwin-online.org.uk/.

———. Notebook D: Transmutation of Species (CUL-DAR 123). Transcribed by Kees Rookmaaker. Darwin Online, http://darwin-online.org.uk/.

———. Notebook E: Transmutation of Species (CUL-DAR124). Transcribed by Kees Rookmaaker. Darwin Online, http://darwin-online.org.uk/.

———. The Origin of Species. New York: Gramercy, 1979.

Davis, Whitney. “Decadence and the Organic Meta-phor.” Representations 89, no. 1 (2005): 131–49.

Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Translated by Séan Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

———. Proust and Signs. Translated by Richard Howard. London: Continuum, 2008.

Eells, Emily. Proust’s Cup of Tea: Homoeroticism and Victorian Culture. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002.

Freud, Sigmund. “Medusa’s Head.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey, 18:273–74. London: Vintage, 2001.

Genette, Gérard. “Métonymie chez Proust.” In Figures III, 41–63. Paris: Seuil, 1972.

Ladenson, Elisabeth. Proust’s Lesbianism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

Love, Alan C. “Darwin and Cirripedia Prior to 1846: Exploring the Origins of the Barnacle Research.” Journal of the History of Biology 35, no. 2 (2002): 251–89.

Mirbeau, Octave. Torture Garden. Translated by Michael Richardson. Sawtry: Dedalus, 2003.

Newman, William A. “Darwin and Cirripedology.” In History of Carcinology, edited by Frank Truesdale, 349–434. Rotterdam: A. A. Balkema, 1993.

Proust, Marcel. Sodom and Gomorrah. Translated by John Sturrock. New York: Viking, 2004.

Works Cited

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Schehr, Lawrence R. The Shock of Men: Homosexual Hermeneutics in French Writing. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.

Sloan, Phillip R. “Darwin’s Invertebrate Program, 1826–1836: Preconditions for Transformism.” In The Darwinian Heritage, edited by David Kohn, 71–120. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Stott, Rebecca. Darwin and the Barnacle. New York: Norton, 2003.

Ulin, Donald. “A Clerisy of Worms in Darwin’s Inverted World.” Victorian Studies 35, no. 3 (1992): 294–308.

van Wyhe, John. “Mind the Gap: Did Darwin Avoid Publishing His Theory for Many Years?” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 61, no. 2 (2007): 177–205.

IMAGE: Rebecca Campbell, MOM 16, 2014 Oil on board, 36 x 24 in. Photo: L.A. Louver

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Inverts and Invertebrates: Darwin, Proust, and Nature's Queer Heterosexuality