IAN DUNCAN George Eliot’s Science Fiction I ‘‘ W HEN THE VIEWS ENTERTAINED IN this volume on the origin of species, or when analogous views are generally admitted,’’ Charles Darwin writes in the conclusion to On the Origin of Species, ‘‘we can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history.’’ It will be, in the first place, a rhetorical and semiotic revolution: We shall have to treat species in the same manner as those naturalists treat genera, who admit that genera are merely artificial combinations made for convenience. This may not be a cheering prospect; but we shall at least be freed from the vain search for the undiscovered and undiscoverable essence of the term species. The other and more general departments of natural history will rise greatly in interest. The terms used by naturalists of affinity, relationship, community of type, paternity, morphology, adaptive characters, rudimentary and aborted organs, &c., will cease to be metaphorical, and will have a plain signification. 1 Darwin invokes the literal register of scientific language that has been a desideratum of natural philosophy since the founding of the Royal Soci- ety. At the same time, he demotes ‘‘the term species’’ to the condition of a figure, an ‘‘artificial [combination] made for convenience.’’ For now, plain signification lies in the future, and Darwin must keep wrangling with the metaphoric substance of his argument. 2 He opens The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication (1868) with an apology: The term ‘‘natural selection’’ is in some respects a bad one, as it seems to imply conscious choice; but this will be disregarded after a little familiarity. No one objects to chemists speaking of ‘‘elective affinity.’’ ... For brevity’s sake I sometimes speak of natural selection as an intelligent power;—in the same way as astronomers speak of the attraction of gravity as ruling the movements of the planets, or as agriculturists speak of man making domestic races by his power of selection. ... I have, also, often personified the word Nature; for I have found it difficult to avoid this ambiguity; but abstract George Eliot’s recourse to comparative mythology and biology in Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda engages a conjectural history of symbolic language shared by the Victorian human and natural sciences. Troubling the formation of scientific knowledge as a progression from figural to literal usage, Eliot’s novels activate an oscillation between registers, in which linguistic events of metaphor become narrative events of organic metamorphosis. Representations 125. Winter 2014  The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 15–39. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/rep.2014.125.2.15. 15 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/representations/article-pdf/125/1/15/327792/rep_2014_125_1_15.pdf by guest on 17 July 2020