Darwin and Dickens

A new breed of literary crtitics is using evolution to explain literature--and to challenge intellectual orthodoxy.

Nick Gillespie from the November 1998 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

Carroll's reading of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights proceeds from such assumptions: He notes that the story of the tempestuous relationship between the foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Linton (née Earnshaw), who are raised as brother and sister, is usually discussed as a "conflict between unregulated, demonic sexual passion and tamely civilized behavior." Critics typically explicate Wuthering Heights in terms of Heathcliff and Catherine's struggle with their quasi-incestuous desires. Such a Freudian focus, argues Carroll, "erroneously" imports incest into a text where it is not a central issue (he cites Hamlet as a similar instance of critical malfeasance). Instead, Carroll argues that something else is at work.

Drawing on current ethological research, Carroll documents that boys and girls who are raised as siblings, even if they are not related, are "genetically programmed" to find sexual relations distasteful. Given that, he writes, "we can conjecture that Heathcliff and Catherine...raised as brother and sister, are not engaged in a primarily sexual liaison as adults, that the relationship is essentially regressive, motivated by an appeal to childhood....The violent and histrionic displays in which both Heathcliff and Cathy engage would be seen not as Byronic sexual displays but rather as infantile tantrums pathologically (and lethally) affiliated with adult power." Drawing on biographical detail, Carroll concludes that Wuthering Heights is a "projective representation of Emily Brontë's overly enmeshed (but not incestuous) relationship with her alcoholic brother Branwell."

Carroll's approach is basically traditionalist in terms of subject matter (a classic novel) and method (a thematic reading, authorial biography). That approach hardly exhausts the possibilities of evolutionary criticism, either in topic or temperament. In Mimesis and the Human Animal, for instance, Storey draws on all manner of literary texts --old and new, high and low, lasting and ephemeral. He discusses the characters Volpone, Sgt. Bilko, and Lex Luthor in a single sentence; references to the Spanish Golden Age drama Celestina rub up against mentions of the sitcom Cheers. While Carroll's introduction to Evolutionary and Literary Theory is a decorous (though full-scale) assault on poststructural thought, Storey comes out swinging in a "Pugnacious Preface" that features the Brechtian epigraph, "Why should we still want to be so clever when at long last we have a chance of being a little less stupid?"

Where Does Comedy Come From?

Storey explicates the biological underpinnings of the tragic and comic genres. Discussing the latter, Storey "approach[es] laughter and smiling--universal reactions of human beings to specifiable classes of stimuli--as evolved responses of an apparently adaptive kind." This is where the crab-eating monkey and relaxed open-mouth displays come into play: Laughter and smiling and their flip sides, anger and crying, turn out to have common roots in the mammalian fight-or-flight response to ambiguous circumstances. Any sudden, startling, or incongruous situation, Storey explains, may lead to laughter and smiling, or if it's deemed dangerous, to avoidance, anger, and tears.

What's common to "laugh-inducing situations" across cultures, he writes, is the presence of a "masterable discrepancy." If you can resolve a difficult or foreboding situation, you're likely to laugh, smile, or feel relief. Such is the evolutionary basis, argues Storey, for the comic genre. Make the situation unmasterable, and one moves into the realm of tragedy, with all its fear, trembling, and pathos. He further notes that the common biological basis for both genres helps explain why it is often difficult to draw a bright line between the two.

Where Carroll and Storey spend much of their time explicating specific works of literature, Alexander Argyros suggests a third way of doing evolutionary criticism. His A Blessed Rage for Order scarcely mentions literary works per se, save for the title's allusion to a Wallace Stevens poem. Instead, Argyros is more interested in the sort of theoretical and philosophical expositions about writing that characterize much poststructuralist criticism and contemporary literary "theory." While all the evolutionary critics engage poststructuralism at length, Argyros seems more sympathetic to it than most; he spends the first third of the book in an affectionate, if relentless, critique of the thought of Jacques Derrida, the Big Kahuna of deconstruction.

Argyros also moves beyond biological evolution to discuss wider-ranging and far more speculative matters: "Recent developments in a congeries of different disciplines, ranging from high-energy physics to biogenetic anthropology, suggest the contours of a stunningly beautiful model of cosmic evolution," he writes, drawing heavily on chaos theory. "Rather than a flat web of traces, the universe appears to be a marvelously complex, and frequently tangled, dynamical hierarchical system." The interest in different forms of evolution leads him ultimately to suggest that art is "simply the result of [an] incongruity between a rapidly evolving cultural world and our evolutionary heritage."

From such a point, Argyros develops a theory about the function of storytelling, its larger social purpose, and its apparent universal appeal. The creation and interpretation of literature, he argues, participate in creating a "gene-culture coevolution, a positive feedback system" in which genes generate basic rules for culture and "cultural practice creates selective pressure for the survival of certain genes." Since "literature is a model through which factual and counterfactual possibilities may be staged," he says, it gives "human societies...the capacity to identify and rank possibilities." The imagined worlds created through all forms of storytelling, then, are means through which individuals and societies envision and move toward their futures.

From Science to Subversion

To appreciate fully how different evolutionary approaches to literatures are, one needs to understand a few things about contemporary literary studies, particularly poststructuralist assumptions about science. As Frederick Crews has accurately put it, poststructuralism, a set of related ideas associated with figures such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes, "has been all but officially recognized as the new academic establishment." Its assumptions writes Crews, are often "treated as self-evidently valid." If poststructuralism does not quite constitute an express "flight from science and reason" (as the title of a recent anti-poststructuralist collection would have it), it certainly travels in that general direction.

As its name suggests, poststructuralism was born out of "structuralism," a school of thought identified with French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss that achieved prominence in the humanities and social sciences in the 1950s and '60s. Structuralism was based on the search for deep, underlying similarities in cultural phenomena, including myth, art, and literature. After identifying analogous "structural" relationships (or "isomorphisms"), the structuralist could then compare apparently different objects of study and tease out larger, deeper meanings.

Lévi-Strauss used such a method to read different versions of the Oedipus myth (including Freud's) and Zuni Indian creation myths, concluding that they all dealt with a culture's inability to move from a primitive conception of human beings as "of the earth" to "the knowledge that [they] are actually born of man and woman." In keeping with his comparative approach, Lévi-Strauss stressed cognitive and cultural relativism. He dismissed "prevalent attempts to explain alleged differences between the so-called primitive mind and scientific thought," arguing instead "that the kind of logic in mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science."

Structuralism aspired to the status of a "science" --indeed, its proponents considered it the ultimate "science of man." Poststructuralism effectively turned structuralism against itself by insisting that structuralist readings only make sense within constantly changing and ultimately subjective contexts: What Lévi-Strauss's readings really exposed was the structure of his thought; other readers would have other responses. As the French critic (and onetime champion of structuralism) Roland Barthes put it, "Everything signifies ceaselessly and several times, but without being delegated to a great final ensemble, to an ultimate structure." There is, in the end, no final, ultimate meaning--only ongoing interpretation.

The turn to poststructural literary analysis in the early 1970s, write Nancy Easterlin and Barbara Riebling in After Poststructuralism (1993), "initially generated excitement because it seemed to tear the field of literary studies wide open, subjecting texts to radically subversive readings....Through an endless play of signifiers, the tyrannical world of finite textual meaning was replaced by a free realm of infinite ambiguity....Liberated from fixed systems of meaning, [the critic] ruled a vast empire of play and pleasure."