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 4 of 4)

So what's next in literary studies? In virtually any discussion related to evolution, the question of what the future holds is always lurking around the edges--even as one recognizes that evolution is much better at explaining the past than predicting any particular future. There seems to be a growing sense that poststructuralism and its various "constructivist" cognates may be headed, if not for extinction, then to a serious decline in population. This may ultimately have less to do with poststructuralism's validity and more to do with scholarly appetites for innovation and novelty. The plain truth is that every critical school becomes unfashionable over time. Having enjoyed a dominant position for about 25 years, poststructuralism is simply approaching that limit.

To be sure, poststructuralism's imminent death has been reported with great regularity. For over a decade, reports have been trickling in that Derrida is no longer in fashion in Paris, implying that, as with the lag between haute couture appearing on the runways in the City of Light and its ready-to-wear counterpart showing up at the Mall of America, his days--and those of his poststructuralist frères--are numbered.

Why might it actually be true this time? Partly due to poststructuralist "discoursing" on science, of all things. Consider the most public--and embarrassing--example of this: In 1996, Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University, published an article called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" in the Spring/Summer edition of Social Text, a highly influential poststructuralist academic journal. In barely readable prose, Sokal purported to unmask the politically and philosophically reactionary Enlightenment "dogma" that "there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in `eternal' physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the `objective' procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method." He further argued that "recent developments in quantum gravity... the emerging branch of physics in which Heisenberg's quantum mechanics and Einstein's general relativity are at once synthesized and superseded," were consistent with various progressive political ideas. In other words, he wrote a quintessentially poststructuralist critique of science.

At the moment the issue came out, however, Sokal announced in the pages of another publication, Lingua Franca, that his Social Text piece was a fake, a mixture of "solecisms...citations of authority, plays on words, strained analogies, and bald assertions." Sokal explained that he perpetrated the hoax because he was troubled by what he saw as a decline in academic rigor in "certain precincts" of the humanities. "Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies ...publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions? The answer, unfortunately, is yes," wrote Sokal. "I intentionally wrote the article so that any competent physicist or mathematician (or undergraduate physics or math major) would realize it is a spoof. Evidently, the editors of Social Text felt comfortable publishing an article on quantum physics without bothering to consult anyone knowledgeable in the subject." That Sokal shares Social Text's hard-left political leanings--indeed, he claims he was angered by the "progressive" left's turn toward "epistemic relativism" --only made the joke that much crueler.

Being had in such a forum is both humiliating and dispiriting, to say the least. In a response printed in Lingua Franca, the co-editors of Social Text passive-aggressively admitted that they "obviously...regret having published Sokal's article," let on that they considered Sokal's original manuscript "a little hokey," but said that they were willing to let "readers judge for themselves whether [they] were right or wrong" to publish the article. They also chided Sokal for fomenting left-wing infighting: "There is nothing we regret more than watching the Left eat the Left."

More interestingly, though, they attacked him for perpetuating the "caricature" of poststructuralists as "otherwordly fanatics who deny the existence of facts, objective realities, and gravitational forces. We are sure Sokal knows that no such persons exist." Stanley Fish, the executive editor at Duke University Press, which publishes Social Text, made a similar point in a New York Times op-ed piece on the matter.

Which means that poststructural thought, in the words of some of its better-known practitioners and in full public view, has been stripped of its very claim to difference. If it is merely suggesting that we should remain attentive to the limits of human knowledge and especially how they affect science, then poststructuralism is doing the same thing as its most insistent critics, but in a manifestly less informed way. Few critical movements can long survive such moments.

Evolving Future

This is not to suggest that poststructuralism or its assumptions will vanish overnight. Just as some Neanderthals walked among Cro-Magnon man, so too do dying schools of literary criticism long overlap with ascendant ones. Indeed, contrary to poststructuralist notions of swift and complete "paradigm shifts," changes in literary criticism happen in a jerk-and-stutter fashion. The assumptions and methods of older schools are typically incorporated, in part or whole, consciously or not, into what comes next. Variations on the "New Critics"--who employed a critical method stressing close reading and formal elements of texts and who ruled the literary roost for much of the postwar period--still walk the halls of English departments.

While poststructuralism's fortunes may be on the wane, evolutionary criticism's appear on the rise. The study of literature has always been an interdisciplinary activity, drawing on anthropology, history, philology, psychology, and sociology. The evolutionary critics' ability to synthesize new and ongoing research and to adapt it to their own field provides a model of how such interdisciplinary study can work. Evolutionary criticism is also likely to benefit from a broader intellectual interest in, as the title of Steven Pinker's recent book puts it, How the Mind Works. The profusion of books dealing with that and related topics--The Symbolic Species, by Terrence Deacon; The Mind's Past, by Michael Gazzaniga; Language and Human Behavior, by Derek Bickerton; The Origin and Evolution of Intelligence, edited by Arnold Scheibel and J.W. Schopf; and Making Sense of Sex: How Genes and Gender Influence Our Relationships, by David Barash and Judith Lipton, to name but a few--suggests that criticism informed by research that transcends the nature-nurture debate will likely find a significant readership.

At the same time, evolutionary criticism likely has too narrow a focus and too technical a background for it to ever become much more than "something like a movement." Critical schools that achieve widespread institutional power are typically much more general in method and application. Whatever cachet it gains is much more likely to stem from its direct engagement with and thoroughgoing critique of poststructuralism, not from creating an army of critics who go into the classroom with Darwin in one hand and Dickens in the other. But there may well be a time in the not-too-distant future--Carroll suggests it's a matter of several decades, as the social sciences and humanities become more comfortable with the evolutionary paradigm--when undergraduates talk late into the night about monkeys, Milton, and the "obvious" connections between the two.