I always think that novels have to have a hermaphroditic imagination because the job is to go into the minds of women and men.
Click play to listen. Recorded on November 3, 2002.
Jeffrey Eugenides reads from his novel Middlesex, an account of how one family’s Greek heritage, including the rare genetic trait for hermaphrodism, asserts itself through generations. The motif of transition permeates everything, as protagonist Calliope Helen Stephanides is reborn Cal, a Greek immigrant family in Detroit decorates their modern Prairie School décor with colonial furnishings, and the writers of the Great Books gradually evolve from the Socrateses to the Hemingways of the world. Kristina A. Valaitis, Executive Director of the Illinois Humanities Council, interviews Eugenides.
Above: Detail from Tiresias Appears to Ulysses during the Sacrificing by Johann Heinrich Füssli (1741-1825). Cal, the protagonist of Eugenides’s novel Middlesex, compares himself to Tiresias, the prophet who switched genders in classical mythology.
