Bioluminescence: Materiality, Metaphor and Trace in Sixty Lights

Abstract

Bioluminescence, the phosphorous cold light that emanates from living organisms, is a central figure of Gail Jones’s second novel Sixty Lights (2004). The novel announces itself as a venture in light writing by its title, the names of its characters (Lucy and Isaac Newton), its sixty-section album structure, narrative events and, ironically, its challenge to Enlightenment teleology and coherence. Within these collected illuminations, the figure of bioluminescence complicates the many structural and figural binaries in play in the text to show their interimplication: light and shadow, image and word, presence and absence, subject and object, mind and body, organism and machine, masculine and feminine, life and death