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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Did you feel in writing "Middlesex" that you were pushing against that tendency that people have now to think that everything is genetically predetermined?
Yes. Because I grew up in the unisex 1970s, when everyone was sure that gender role was just environmentally conditioned and that we could give little girls guns and they'd happily go shooting up each other. That's where I started, and now I see it completely reversed, where I'll go to the playground with my daughter and sit with a mother who has a son, she'll say, "Look at my son, beating on that rock while your daughter is playing so nicely next to that rock." And it's true that kids do seem to exhibit these innate differences, but people have decided that all of our behaviors are genetically determined and we're getting a lot of very simplistic explanations of our behavior on the basis of what hunter-gatherer societies did 20,000 years ago. I'm supposed to exhibit a lot of Neanderthal attributes and you are supposed to be out picking berries.
I'm supposed to like shopping, which I hate.
Right. That kind of thing. I find it ridiculous actually, overly reductive. And "Middlesex," while admitting a certain amount of genetic determinism, tries to open up a space for free will again in human nature. And one that I think genetics accords with. They tried to find our genes. They thought they'd find 200,000, but they found 20,000. We have as many genes as a mouse, Cal points out at one point, so why are we not mice? Something else is at work besides just genes. The old ironclad idea of Greek fate is like the idea of genetic fate we're living through now.
How important is classical Greek culture to your writing? It's ironic, given our talk about genetics, that modern Greeks are thought not to be the direct descendants of ancient Greeks, but the cultural identification is still very strong, even if it doesn't come down through the blood.
Being a modern Greek is immediately a comic situation because it's mock epic. You still believe that you've come from the ancient Greeks. There are all these arguments that the ancient Greeks were actually blond, that they were some Northern race that were inhabiting Greece. I know a little bit about things like that. Nevertheless, if you are born Greek-American, you do think that your heritage is Pericles and things like that. I remember being 8 years old and looking in the World Book and finding Alexander the Great and I said, "Dad, where's Macedonia?" and he said, "That's part of Greece." And I said, "We have him! We have Alexander the Great!"
I didn't actually start out thinking I was going to write a Greek-American novel, but because I was dealing with hermaphroditism, it brought up classicism, and classicism brought up Hellenism, and Hellenism brought up my Uncle Pete, basically. If I was going to write about Tiresius, I could write about Greek-Americans as well.
Were you raised with a lot of ethnic self-identification, or was your family assimilationist?
My immediate family was completely assimilationist. My father never went back to Greece. He didn't care very much about Greece, but there were certain times when it would bubble up in him. But in general, he was part of a generation that wanted to become American, and he did. He was a very patriotic American. He didn't marry a Greek woman or go to a Greek church. In the book, when the character of Milton sides with America over Greece during the Cyprus invasion, that was something that my father would have done. And we didn't talk about classical Greece in my household growing up at all.
Is including Greek myth in your novels a particular preoccupation of yours? "The Virgin Suicides" had some of the feeling of mythos to it.
It's not something I was conscious of at all with "The Virgin Suicides." I'm more aware of it with this book because it deals with classical themes. I think this comes less from being Greek-American than from studying Latin so much. The first books that I really read closely were "The Aeneid" and "The Metamorphoses." An epic story, and stories where people can go into the underworld and strange things like that happened, were the first stories that seized my imagination when I was young, and I'm starting to think of what a great influence those writers were on me when I look at my novels now. But I'm not conscious of trying to do that. Actually, I think that because my name is Greek, I got a lot more people saying "Eugenides has a Greek chorus" than other people would have gotten using the same narrative voice.
Did that bother you, people saying that about the first-person plural narrator of "The Virgin Suicides"?
No. It was a perfectly nice way to describe this choral narrator. But I never thought of it as a Greek chorus at all. I just thought of it as a group of boys.
