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Self-Organization and Selection in Richard Powers's The Gold Bug Variations

n encyclopedic “Continuing Education Project” that evolves into a survival lesson on complexity and ecological wisdom, Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1991) strives to be nothing less than “the universe’s User’s Manual”: “Not a how-to, but another kind of self-help manual all together” (Gold Bug 124, 88; Galatea 241). The Gold Bug Variations engages the complex order of the natural kingdom and warns us about the fragility of our niche in the ecosystem. Interconnections between people and the living environment they inhabit catalyze both the subject matter and the narrative methods of Powers’s massive novel. As living systems interacting with other living systems, readers are urged to display a humble attitude toward humanity’s part in life’s “ongoing experiment” (636). More consistently than any other contemporary American novelist, Powers’s writing foregrounds a passionate interest in the life sciences, in particular, the dynamics of complex adaptive systems. A central concept of complexity theory states that emergent phenomena can arise from a system of simple local rules tuned to “the edge of chaos.” The structure of The Gold Bug Variations maps the attention of complexity studies to global patterns onto a more or less realistic pair of twinned love stories and simultaneously illustrates how this global order springs from the simplest elements of life. Throughout the novel, Powers introduces and amplifies a striking analogy between Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations1 and the genetic code that is central to the emergent order of the