The analogy between metathesis and metastasis

The analogy between metathesis and metastasis is Diotallevi’s attempt to understand his terminal cancer through the textual operations at the heart of the Plan. By linking the transposition of letters to the spread and transformation of cells, he makes the group’s playful search for hidden meanings answerable to the body—and turns an intellectual method into an intimate explanation of death.

The Body Repeats the Plan

Diotallevi recalls that for months he and his companions had uttered combinations of the letters of the Book—GCC, CGC, GCG, CGG—as though they were devout rabbis. He imagines that what their lips pronounced, their cells learned. His body, in this account, has devised a different Plan of its own: its cells proceed independently, creating a private history through transformations that may produce something new, meaningless, or contrary to the right meaning.

The metaphor is not simply that illness resembles textual change. Diotallevi describes his cells as carrying out the same operations the group applied to texts: inverting, transposing, alternating, and transforming. The analogy gives physical force to the Plan’s combinatorial habits, but it also reverses their apparent playfulness. The cells do not interpret at a safe distance; they enact transformation within the body, where the difference between a right meaning and a wrong one becomes a matter of survival.

From Metathesis to Metastasis

While he could still read, Diotallevi says, he studied dictionaries and the histories of words to understand what was happening in his body. He places the linguistic term metathesis beside the oncological term metastasis, emphasizing their resemblance and shared sense of movement or change. His examples of metathesis are small alterations in speech: “clasp” becomes “claps,” and “beloved” becomes “be-voled.” He associates this transposition with temurah, then argues that dictionaries separate terms whose roots and meanings, to him, disclose a deeper kinship.

His reasoning turns on the linked ideas of shifting, transferring, substituting, and changing meaning. Metathesis and metastasis become more than a verbal resemblance: they provide a single interpretive pattern through which Diotallevi reads both language and bodily disease. His conclusion is that the group’s search for meanings beyond the letter made its members, in a figurative sense, lose their senses—and that his cells have followed the same procedure “obediently, dutifully.”

Imagination and Its Cost

Diotallevi rejects the idea that he speaks this way merely because he is ill. He says he has studied his body day after day and understands what is happening, but cannot intervene: the cells no longer obey. He attributes his dying, in part, to having convinced himself that there was no order and that any text could be made to yield to unrestricted interpretation. He imagines that his own brain transmitted this message to his cells, and that they have proved no wiser than the mind that taught them.

This is Diotallevi’s explanation, not an established medical account of cancer. Its force lies in the way it converts the Plan’s interpretive freedom into a source of responsibility and dread. The group treated transformations as a joke; Diotallevi now understands that joke as an image of a body making changes without regard for their consequences. His final formulation—“we were imaginative beyond bounds”—binds the intellectual excess of the Plan to the helplessness of illness. The analogy thus makes the body seem to have learned the group’s method, while exposing the peril of mistaking limitless interpretation for harmless play.