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commonly petroleum and electricity. In biology, the terms hybrid
and hybridity are considerably more complex, where the former has
five distinct meanings and is subject to as many different types of
classification within each of them. Without attempting to use bio-
logical hybridity as a model, there is nevertheless good reason to
investigate the ways in which different genres mingle, and espe-
cially in those cases (like the hybrid vehicle) where the various types
are visible rather than hidden. For example, the mule is a case of
interspecific hybridity, where a cross between a female horse and
male donkey produces a strong work animal but one that is sterile.
The sterility is ensured by the genes or rather by their number, the
horse having 64 and the donkey 62. By analogy, some literary hy-
brids appear to be highly productive. Satire and romance have tra-
ditionally worked rather well together, conscious of each other’s
excesses and attuned to checking them. Other hybrids, such as the
epistolary novel (loosely speaking, a combination of biography and
letter writing), have enjoyed some popularity and then fallen out of
fashion. A third group, including Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy
and James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, has left no direct-line descend-
ents, even though various of their innovations and other features
have been utilised. Once again, I do not wish to make any exact
correlations. Instead, I am suggesting that the vocabulary of science
and particularly of biology is highly suggestive and worthy of fur-
ther exploration.
5. Conclusion
Although Dawkins’ memetics has been partially discredited and
Hutcheon’s revisions of a biological model remain as yet untested
by full length studies, the borrowing originally went in the other
direction. In his Origin of Species, Charles Darwin, who, incidentally,
knew nothing about genes or genetics and did not even understand
Mendelian inheritance, makes constant reference and comparison to
cultural evolution. In Darwin’s model, however, competition
between variants is essential and that might be difficult to prove in
the case of adaptations of Greek tragedy. At the same time, the
MARTIN S. REGAL