Eugenides' Transitive Epic
'Middlesex' by Jeffrey Eugenides (Picador)
By Kristie T. La, CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Published: Friday, November 20, 2009
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2009/11/20/cal-cals-american-eugenides/ (http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2009/11/20/cal-cals-american-eugenides/)
"That's Theseus... He's got this ball of string his girlfriend gave him, see. And he's using it to find his way back out of the maze," the young Calliope is told by her father. Drawing from the Greek heritage that the two of them share, Calliope Stephanides, the hermaphrodite narrator of Jeffrey Eugenides' second novel "Middlesex" who will come to be known as Cal, follows the history of his family across two generations and one ocean in order to come to terms with the tragedy of his very existence. In tracing the thread of his own improbable lineage, Cal becomes a recursive hero; sorting, like Theseus, through a thread whose interminability confines him forever, like the Minotaur, to his prison. Mediating the scope of classical tragedy through the lens of immigration and heritage in America, Eugenides brilliantly maps the drama of antiquity onto the American landscape.
"Middlesex" is Cal's novel: a family history tracking the recessive gene mutation that accounts for his troubling condition as "a male pseudohermaphorodite—genetically male, but appearing otherwise." He starts in Turkey: siblings Desdemona and Lefty flee that country's conflict with Greece to start anew in America as husband and wife. In Detroit, cousins Milton and Tessie fall in love and become engaged amidst the turmoil of the Second World War. Calliope, their daughter—born and raised as a girl—learns of her Y chromosome after a tractor accident brings her to a hospital. In a moment of radical loss of identity, she flees her home and moves to San Francisco. Struggling to escape the vestiges of femininity and grappling with loneliness and alienation, Calliope becomes Cal and sets to the reflective task of writing "Middlesex."