A source of metaphors for, and literally the grounds of, human nature: The Gene

In the essay "On Writing Stories" placed towards the beginning of his new book of essays, Philip Pullman says,

"So: where are you going to start, and what are you going to say?
There's an image here from science which I find useful when I think about this. Coleridge, apparently, used to go to scientific lectures to renew his sock of metaphors, and while I would never dream of saying that the main function of science is the production of metaphors for subsequent development in the arts, science is damned useful to steal from" (25).

Then towards the end of The Gene: An Intimate History, Siddhartha Mukherjee takes up the same idea, only from the opposite end, as it were:

"You cannot read The Plague except as a thinly disguised allegory of human nature. The genome is also a testing ground for our fallibilities and desires, although reading it does not require understanding allegories or metaphors. What we read and write into our genome is our fallibilities, desires, and ambitions. It is human nature" (479).

Throughout the book, Mukherjee, evidently a tremendous reader as well as a brilliant writer, keeps drawing on poetry for chapter monographs, and dropping in lines of it here and there in the middle of paragraphs as a sort of trail of evocative bread crumbs.

I might take issue with the read of Camus' book, or rather the dogmatic statement shutting down other possible readings, but this is some other person's view he heard once, Mukherjee explains; and of course the quote is taken out of context from a 500-page, magisterial work of science and history, and idiomatically the phrase "you cannot read...except as..." depends a lot on tone of voice for how hard you want to push that opinion, how far you intend it merely as polemical, provocative. As for "thinly disguised allegory," well, that's simply a cliche. Particularly in the light of the Tolkien-Olsen strictures for definition and application of allegory, it's not so easy to pin down as the demotic use might suggest.

To say something is something else is to make a metaphor. To do so in light of a rich cultural system of meanings is to write an allegory (I still need to try to read The Fairy Queene and Macrobius and more Chaucer and make up my own mind about this stuff). I don't think anyone fully understands this process. The poetic making of metaphor or allegory rivals the scientific analysis and theorizing of genetics or evolution in complexity. In Mukherjee's account, proposing the metaphor of the gene as abhed, indivisible, as the biological counterpart of an atom of matter or a byte (bit?) of data, taking the philological as well as personal ("intimate") viewpoint as an inspiration for the story of the gene and aligning it with these two similar and crucial concepts which have unfolded in such astonishing technological developments and ideological ramifications--well, it all makes for quite a good book. And, as Pullman reminds us, we're free to read it how we will, and take from it what we will.