Literary Study and Evolutionary
Psychology: The Once and Future Discipline
Introduction: Three Scenarios
Thirty years ago, the idea of creating a specifically
evolutionary theory of literature would scarcely have seemed imaginable and
would certainly not have seemed within the range of practical possibility. Nonetheless,
over the past fifteen years, “literary Darwinists” have been making rapid
progress in integrating literary study with the evolutionary human sciences. What
is the likely future trajectory of this movement? We can probe this question by
comparing three alternative scenarios: one in which literary Darwinism remains
outside the mainstream of literary study; one in which literary Darwinism is incorporated
as just another of many different “approaches” to literature; and a third in
which the evolutionary human sciences transform and subsume all literary study.
Most of the people working in literary study at the present time would probably
suppose the first or second alternative futures most likely. I think the third
most likely.
For the first two scenarios, we can easily enough extrapolate
from past and current beliefs and practices, but we also have to factor in the
continuing development of the evolutionary human sciences outside of literary study.
That would have an impact on the way life would be lived within the isolated
enclave of literary study. It is one thing to be a small village in a world
consisting only of small villages. It is another thing to be a small village
surrounded by a world empire in confident possession of the practices and
beliefs through which it has achieved unification and mastery. For the third
scenario, we have to envision how literary study would develop within an
evolutionary perspective that encompasses all the human sciences.
Where Are We, and How Did We Get Here?
Before considering the three
scenarios, I shall quickly describe the trajectory that brought us to our
current state. The historical facts are familiar but assume different forms
under different interpretive perspectives. My own narrative account will help
establish the point of view that governs my assessment of future prospects.
Through the first two thirds of the twentieth century, most
literary study operated under a shared set of beliefs and values extending back
to the Victorian cultural theorists, particularly Matthew Arnold. Giving up on
religion, the Victorians looked for existential “meaning” in two main areas:
utopian social futures, and the arts, especially poetry. They thought the arts
condensed the best wisdom of our collective humanity and also gained access to
whatever amorphous spirituality was left over after deducting the historical
validity of the Bible, the divinity of Christ, and the immortality of the soul.
One of the things left over in amorphous spirituality was the idea of a
divinely ordered progression of history leading to some ultimate condition of
social harmony and intellectual fulfillment. The arts, and especially poetry,
would be the chief medium for recognizing and participating imaginatively in
that blessed dispensation. However quaint such beliefs might now appear, until
about 1980 they provided an overarching rationale for the two main kinds of
study that occupied literary scholars: (1) hard-core scholarship—establishing
texts, producing editions, collecting letters, writing biographies and literary
histories; and (2) detailed interpretive analysis of individual texts and
descriptive histories of literary traditions. Some of this work was animated by
explicit invocations of Marxist, Freudian, Christian, or Jungian ideas, but
most of it was eclectic, oriented to the common language and the common
understanding. This whole phase can be designated the traditional humanistic
paradigm.[1]
By the late seventies, signs of overproduction had become
unmistakable. Most of the major projects in hard-core scholarship had been
adequately completed. Critics interpreting single works were forced into ever
more tenuous and improbable speculations. To publish interpretive commentary,
one has to say something new, and most of what could reasonably be said at the
level of common observation had already been said. The solution, of course, was
to turn to European speculative philosophy, first structuralism, and then,
almost immediately, “post-structuralism.” Deconstruction swept through departments
of literature like flag-waving cadres of the French Revolution, galvanizing all
the inhabitants, striking terror in some, provoking others into obstinate
resistance, but in most exciting rapturous enthusiasm. The inferiority complex
that had long dogged literature professors vis à vis the scientists, who
actually got things done, suddenly gave way to an extraordinary hubris in which
literature professors believed they had unique access to the ultimate nature of
things. The world at large, exemplified, say, by Time magazine,
was skeptical but intimidated, uncertain at first, but willing to acknowledge
any new form of glamor that could command attention. For three or four years,
the deconstructors played word games, discovered their inner verbal child,
fashioned exquisitely ambiguous titles for theoretical articles, and, in their
more sober moments, adopted postures of cosmic nihilism. To a watching world,
all this ultimately seemed rather silly, but the main force at work undermining
the deconstructive regime was internal. People go into literature not just to
play games with words. Literature gives access to the most intimate and
powerful aspects of experience. Deconstruction offered a general stance of radical
subversion to all existing values, but it offered very little in the way of
positive human content.
Foucault provided the content. He absorbed deconstructive
irrationalism and gladly assented to the transcendental status with which the
deconstructionists had invested “Discourse,” but he also had real bones to pick
with the Western cultural tradition. He did not just adopt radical subversion
the way a teen-ager adopts insolence, as a style. He went after the meat of the
matter, systematically critiquing ideas of sanity, criminality, and sexuality,
disdaining all social norms as arbitrary manifestations of “Power.” This was a
creed by which literary scholars could live, for three decades anyway, right up
to the present time. It gave them a program and a stance: to re-read all texts
as insidious machinations of political power. Theorists and critics who have adopted
this stance have a mission in life: to serve as the conscience of their race.
Their constituencies are the victims of oppression in traditional power
structures: especially women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, and colonial
peoples.
Three decades into the new postmodern hegemony, we are now
also at least a decade into “the crisis in the humanities.” The subversive
metaphysical and political fervor that fuelled the poststructuralist revolution
has long since subsided into tired routine. The question that generated the
revolution, “What next?” is being asked again, and with increasing desperation.
In a recent essay on the parlous state of the humanities, Louis Menand
professes himself willing to consider almost any possible option, only just not
one particular option: “consilience,” that is, integrating literary study with
the evolutionary human sciences. That option, he declares, would be “a bargain
with the devil.”[2]
Scenario 1: And Never the Twain Shall Meet
In the first scenario—a continuation of the status quo—a
large majority of literary scholars continue to share Menand’s aversion to any
connection with the evolutionary human sciences. The literary Darwinists stand
wholly separate from the mainstream literary establishment, massively ignored,
unable even to get panels accepted at the annual conferences of the Modern
Language Association, assiduously though silently expunged from citation lists
and from surveys of critical theory, not merely neglected but actively and
aggressively shunned. In this scheme of things, the literary Darwinists write
essays critical of mainstream practices but have no productive interaction with
the mainstream.
If literary scholars reject literary Darwinism, what other
kinds of work can they produce? The same kinds they have been producing for
three decades: arcane theoretical systems of a purely verbal, speculative
character, diverse in superficial terminology, but alike in their commitment to
“cultural constructivism.”[3]
Along with the generation of more verbal systems, we would also have to have
more readings of standard texts in terms of identity politics. This kind of
thing might not seem susceptible to endless repetition. Hence the need for the
constant proliferation of superficial variations in the verbal systems used for
interpretation.
The poststructuralist revolution was based on no actual
discoveries and no ideas more substantial than willful paradox and sophistical
quibble.[4]
That kind of intellectual foundation could vanish overnight, leaving nothing
even for archeologists to sift through. Would it be possible then for literary
study to cycle back through a traditional humanist phase? Possible, but not
very likely. Traditional humanists are committed to literature itself as the
deepest source of insight and wisdom. They are thus committed to the common
idiom, and that idiom has already pretty much exhausted itself as a source of
commentary on the standard texts. In contrast, the fundamental
poststructuralist axiom is that meaning is “constructed.” If that is the case,
the supposedly determinate structure of meanings in a finite body of canonical
texts would exercise no constraint on the proliferation of interpretive terms.
Hence the greater likelihood that poststructuralism will have achieved, in a
steady state world, a permanent hegemony in literary study. It offers the hope
of something always new to do, even if that novelty consists only in variations
in analytic terminology.
If literary study continues indefinitely in the poststructuralist
vein, it will do so under two forms of degenerative pressure: the inner
inanition that is already so frequent a source of complaint among its own
practitioners, and the ever-growing prestige and power of the scientific
understanding of human nature. Under that external pressure, “Theory” will have
to become ever more elusive, avoiding all direct formulation of propositions
that obviously conflict with established results of scientific research. The
strategy for eluding science need consist only in refinements of a procedure
already widely practiced: formulating all propositions simultaneously in two
separate versions: the radical and the truistic. The radical version gives the
appearance of a substantive proposition startling in its novelty, and the
truistic version gives the appearance of logical invulnerability. The blending
of the two versions give the delusory appearance of propositions that are both new
and true—the holy grail of all research. For instance, “There is no outside the
text.” Radical version: “Nothing exists outside of verbal constructs; only
verbal constructs exist.” Truistic version: “Everything we can talk about we
can talk about only by using words; all our verbally mediated experience is
verbally mediated.” The radical version gives a fallacious appearance of
profound novelty, suggesting a fundamental alteration in folk epistemology—that
is, common sense. The truistic version, mingling indistinguishably with the
radical version, invests the radical version with the self-evidence of
tautology. When critics make damaging arguments against the radical version,
the deconstructor can smoothly retreat into truism. “All I really meant to say
was . . . “ or, preemptively, “This is not to say. . . . “ Anyone willing to
participate vicariously in the conceptual blur produced by the mingling of the
two versions can enjoy the characteristic deconstructive frisson, the little shiver of
cognitive pleasure at the manifestation of the Uncanny. To give substance to
this frisson, one need only transpose
the logic of equivocation into a slightly more concrete proposition: “All
identity is socially constructed.” Radical version: “The only constituents of
identity are arbitrary social conventions; even something as basic as
biological sex is purely and exclusively a construct of arbitrary social
conventions.” Truistic version: “Humans are social animals; all human
experience is influenced in some way by participation in social life.” In the
blur between these two versions, most criticism has persisted now for decades,
and could persist into the indefinite future.
We can fancy, in this scenario, that poststructuralism never
dies, but we cannot fancy that it does not age. Time passes. Gollum dwindles
and shrivels, becoming less human, but retaining physical vigor. Tithonus
shrivels into a cricket but chirps perpetually. The Struldbrugs, in the third
book of Gulliver’s Travels, grow ever
older, becoming more ill-tempered, narrow-minded, and senile, but happy, they
and those who live with them, in the assurance that they will never die.
While Gollum dwindles, Tithonus chirps, and the Struldbrugs
drool, what of the literary Darwinists? The first monograph in literary
Darwinism, Evolution and Literary Theory,
appeared in 1995. The number of books and articles published
since 2007 and now in press—a three-year span—far exceeds the number published
altogether in the twelve years from 1995 through 2006. In a steady-state
scenario, this exponential growth could not continue. Otherwise, within just a
few years, literary Darwinism would have come to dominate literary study,
violating the premise of the scenario. So, we have to assume that the rate of
growth in literary Darwinism not only levels off but actually declines—and all
this while poststructuralist literary study is losing heart, on the one side,
and the evolutionary human sciences are making giant strides on the other.
Unlikely, but so goes the scenario. Within this scenario, we need say only that
the literary Darwinists would continue to do the kind of work they have been
doing all along.
What the Darwinists have been doing all along is using
evolutionary psychology to examine the motivations of characters in novels,
plays, and (less frequently) poems, concentrating chiefly on the sexual aspects
of reproductive success but taking in also family dynamics, social dynamics,
and survival issues such as acquiring resources and avoiding predators. [5]
Several studies have located individual works or literary traditions in
relation to an evolutionary analysis of specific ecological and cultural
environments.[6]
Cognitive science has been used to assess form[7],
and basic emotions have been combined with basic motives to analyze tone and
genre.[8]
Personality psychology has been used to assess individual differences in characters
and authors.[9]
A few studies have analyzed authorial intent and the emotional responses of
readers, considering not just characters and plots but also relations among the
differing perspectives of authors, characters, and readers.[10]
Most studies so far, though, have been “thematic.” That is, they have focused
on the motives of characters and the organization of characters into plots.
Reproductive themes include differences between males and females in the
criteria for selecting mates, competing male and female reproductive interests,
the neurobiology of romantic infatuation and monogamous bonding, sexual
jealousy, conflicts between investments in mating and parenting, paternal
uncertainty, maternal bonding, attachment theory, the emotional and cognitive
development of children, parent-offspring conflict, and dispositions for
favoring kin. Basic social dynamics include the tension between dominance and
affiliation in the organization of social groups, the interplay between
intra-group cohesion and inter-group conflict, reciprocal altruism and the
morality of contractual obligation, the evolution of egalitarian behavior,
tribal instincts, group-selection, tit for tat, cheater detection, the adaptive
function of religion, and gene-culture co-evolution. Ego-psychology and
interpersonal relations include Theory of Mind, manipulative deceit,
self-delusion, and costly display.[11]
In most literary studies drawing on evolutionary ideas, human universals play a
large part, since species-typical characteristics imply genetically mediated
dispositions constraining cultural formations (hence the inherent conflict with
cultural constructivism).
The most important institutional blockage limiting further
growth in literary Darwinism is that only one or two graduate programs, so far,
allow students to pursue this line of work. In the steady-state scenario, then,
we have to assume that older scholars continue to prohibit their students from
taking up this line of investigation. Consequently, the work published in
literary Darwinism would continue to be produced mostly by scholars who had
already gained tenure on the strength of more conventional kinds of research.
Scenario 2: Joining the Party
In this second scenario, we can slot
in the description of mainstream literary study from the previous scenario,
assuming it would remain much as it now is or will be. The only thing that
would change in this second scenario is that literary Darwinism would not be
shunned. Nor would it become a dominant, commanding perspective, altering the
whole paradigm of literary study. It would simply be recognized as yet one more
“approach” to literary study. Two institutional markers would signal the
realization of this scenario: evolutionists would have panels accepted at the
annual conference of the Modern Language Association and its regional
affiliates; and interpretive essays in literary Darwinism would regularly be
included in casebooks of canonical literary texts. Most such casebooks now
include essays exemplifying Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis, deconstruction,
feminism, and New Historicism (that is, Foucauldian cultural critique). We
shall know that the second projected future has become a present reality when
the casebook on Hamlet also contains an essay
giving a Darwinian reading of the play. (Several such essays have been
published but none included in casebooks.)[12]
Among some of my colleagues with an
evolutionist bent, this second scenario seems the most likely of the three. It
takes account of the rapidly increasing visibility and prestige of literary
Darwinism outside the academic literary establishment—for instance, the notices
that have appeared in journals and newspapers around the world, from Science and Nature through The New York Times, The Guardian, TLS, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Since the Darwinists have
vindicated their claim that evolutionary ideas can be used for literary
interpretation, and since they form a rapidly growing minority of literary
scholars, is there any reason that this second scenario might not almost
inevitably take place sometime within the next few years? I think there is.
Marxism, Freudianism, and deconstruction are all totalizing in their own ways,
but they can also all be converted into forms that make them parts of the
standard postmodern blend. Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis are
essentially compatible with Foucauldian discourse theory. And indeed,
“poststructuralism” as a school can be most concisely defined as the
subordination of Marxist social theory and Freudian psychoanalytic theory to
deconstructive semiotics. That is the message in Foucault’s definition of
“discursive practices.”[13]
Can Darwinism be subordinated in this way to the transcendent power of the
sign? Efforts along this line have not been wanting. In Darwin’s Plots, Gillian Beer takes Darwinian themes as
precursors for Derridean indeterminacy. George Levine takes a similar line in Darwin and the Novelists. Ellen
Spolsky adopts the idea of “cognitive domains” from evolutionary psychology and
uses this idea as evidence for the Derridean claim that cognition is
necessarily incoherent.[14]
Still, no specifically Darwinist form of poststructuralist interpretation has
emerged from these efforts. Poststructuralism yields causal primacy to
language. To think in evolutionary terms, in contrast, is almost automatically
to adopt a perspective of deep time, a perspective in which “life,”
self-replicating DNA, precedes thought, to say nothing of language. One can
speak of DNA itself as a form of “language,” but this is just a metaphor, and
it does not take one very far into the formation of personal and social
identity. “Constructivist” and biological notions of personal and social
identity seem inherently incompatible. Biology is too deep, broad, and basic to
be easily or convincingly depicted as just another semiotic gambit.
The powerful disciplinary motives behind literary academics’
resistance to biology form a natural bond with ideological motives. If human
nature were “socially constructed,” it could easily be changed to fit more
neatly into whatever moral and political forms one might favor.[15]
Causal force would reside primarily not in underlying biological realities but
rather in the formulation of social ideals. One would need merely think an
ideal, using it to guide one’s commentary on literature and life, in order to
bring about desirable social change. This idealist approach is a particular
manifestation of a pervasive and perhaps universal human cognitive disposition:
the disposition for wishful thinking. Wishful thinking offers the solace of
comforting illusion and could possibly even have adaptive, therapeutic value,
easing stress and making it easier to endure insoluble problems. Nonetheless,
pleasurable fantasy necessarily operates in tension with adaptive dispositions
for finding out how things actually work. Literary academics at the present
time are perhaps particularly susceptible to wishing away real social problems,
rather than understanding them, because they have painted themselves into a
disciplinary corner. Having abjured the prospect of gaining real knowledge, they
have inevitably placed a heavy emphasis on moral and political judgment as the
chief justification for what they do. If they cannot offer objective knowledge
about their subject, the rationale for their professional existence must be that
they occupy a superior ideological perspective. This professional raison d’être is a politicized,
poststructuralist version of the humanist idea that a literary education makes
one a better person. Poststructuralist ideologues envision a world in which
conflicting interests and differential distributions of power no longer exist.
Accordingly, they look with disapproval on all actual forms of social and
political organization. They thus guarantee for themselves a perpetual stance
of ideological superiority. Darwinism is by no means incompatible with an
informed and humane moral creed,[16]
but it is most definitely incompatible with the utopian ideal of a world order
in which conflicting interests and differential distributions of power do not
exist.[17]
Despite the inherent incompatibility between Darwinism and Foucauldian
cultural critique, for the purposes of the scenario, let us imagine that the
Darwinists are brought into the casebooks. Would they consider themselves just
one more approach among many? Some no doubt would. “Pluralism” is a chronic
symptom of theoretical confusion in the humanities. The idea is that the world
is divided into two main parts: a physical part that can be understood by
science—reduced to components, quantified, and unified—and an imaginative,
cultural, spiritual, or personal part—qualitative, consisting of unique
irreducible moments of experience and unique irreducible effects, aesthetic and
imaginative. By its very nature, this second world could never be reduced to a
unified set of underlying regularities. It could only be described and evoked.
Its essence is not reductive law but phenomenal particularity. The best way to
deal with it is to bring as many perspectives as possible to bear on a subject
and thus to illuminate as many diverse aspects of the subject as possible. The
diversity of aspects would never add up to a single, unified phenomenon, and explanations
of those aspects would never add up to a single, unified explanation. Though denied
the ultimate satisfaction of unified causal explanation, adherents of this
world view can look forward to an endless succession of incomplete and
incompatible interpretive responses to the same finite body of novels, poems,
and plays. This, more or less, is the pluralist metaphysic. However diverse
their overt professions of theoretical allegiance, this metaphysic defines the
deepest convictions in most practitioners in the humanities today.
What, then, would a Darwinist
contribution to a casebook look like? To qualify as Darwinist, a reading would
have to bring all its particular observations into line with basic evolutionary
principles: survival, reproduction, kinship (inclusive fitness), basic social
dynamics, and the reproductive cycle that gives shape to human life and
organizes the most intimate relations of family. While retaining a sense of the
constraining force of underlying biological realities, literary Darwinism would
also have to emulate the chief merit of Foucauldian cultural critique—its
understanding that the forms of cultural representation are highly variable,
that these variations subserve social and political interests, and that every
variation has its own specific imaginative quality. As it is currently
practiced, cultural critique usually arrives at its conclusions in a
theoretically illegitimate way, by assuming the causal primacy of representation.
This is what it means to say that reality and social identity are
“constructed.” Despite the obvious fallacies in this idea, Foucauldian critique
often has rich descriptive power. The Foucauldians have achieved dominance in
literary study partly because they recognize that the chief purpose of literary
study is to examine the forms of cultural imagination. To compete for space in
casebooks, then, the Darwinists would almost necessarily have to eschew their
own tendencies toward literalist representationalism—the idea that literary
texts merely depict a pre-existing reality in a true and faithful way.
Vulgarity accompanies theoretical movements the way camp
followers—hawkers, prostitutes, and idlers—accompany an army in the field. Just
as there is a “vulgar Marxism,” there is also a “vulgar Darwinism.” Yet
further, there is a vulgar form of literary Darwinism. In its most naïve form,
literary Darwinism consists in merely pointing to the existence of Darwinian
themes in various works of literature. Madame Bovary wants a mate with more
status than her husband. Anna Karenina is bored with her respectable husband
and gets charmed into an illicit relation with a Byronic type better suited for
short-term mating. No wonder she ends up throwing herself beneath a train. Tom
Jones just can’t resist a roll in the hay with Molly Seagram, and that gets him
into hot water with Sophia Western, but he is only doing what comes naturally
to males, so she forgives him in the end. Had Sophia herself been found
dallying with Molly’s brother, the outcome could not have been so favorable.
The sexual double-standard is just part of human nature.
In its short history, vulgar literary Darwinism has already
become established as a convenient target for critics eager to dismiss the
possibility of evolutionary criticism in its more sophisticated forms.[18]
Practitioners of the more sophisticated forms recognize that literature does
not simply represent typical or average human behavior. Human nature is a set
of basic building blocks that combine in different ways in different cultures
to produce different kinds of social organization, different belief systems,
and different qualities of experience.[19]
Moreover, every individual human being (and every artist) constitutes another
level of “emergent” complexity, a level at which universal or elemental
features of human nature interact with cultural norms and with the conditions of
life that vary in some degree for every individual. Individual artists
negotiate with cultural traditions, drawing off of them but also working in
tension with them. The tension derives from differences in individual identity,
the pull of universal forms of human nature, and the capacity for creative
innovation in the artist. Individual works of art give voice to universal human
experience, to the shared experience of a given cultural community, and to the
particular needs of an individual human personality. Literary meaning consists
not just in what is represented—characters, setting, and plot—but in how that
represented subject is organized and envisioned by the individual human artist.
Moreover, literary meaning is a social transaction. Literary meaning is only
latent until it is actualized in the minds of readers, who bring their own
perspectives to bear on the author’s vision of life. A thorough interpretive
effort would subsume represented subjects and formal organization into an
overarching concept of literary meaning, and it would expand the concept of
meaning to include its transmission and interpretation. Still further, instead
of looking only at intentional meanings and the responses of readers, a
thorough evolutionary critique would look at the kinds of psychological and
cultural work specific literary texts actually accomplish—the functions they
fulfill—and it would locate those functions in relation to broader ideas of
adaptive function, thus bringing the interpretation of individual works to bear
as evidence on the larger, still controverted question of adaptive function.[20]
The more any Darwinian critique succeeded in achieving this
kind of total reading, the less compatible it would be with the pluralism
implicit in casebooks. If Darwinism becomes just another approach included in
casebooks, it will probably do so by carving out its own distinctive niche in a
way parallel to that of the deconstructionists, Freudians, Marxists, and
feminists. Like their fellow practitioners in other schools, Darwinists would
need to make their interpretive essays distinctive by making them crude and
sensationalistic. Casebook essays typically earn their keep by riding hobby
horses into the ground. They sacrifice justice and sensitivity in favor of
programmatically rehearsing terms that distort the actual structure of meaning
in a literary text. If the Darwinists wish badly enough to be included in
casebooks, they should be able to meet these requirements with no more
difficulty than that encountered by practitioners of the other critical
schools.
Scenario 3: Back to the Future
If literary Darwinism were to be
dominated by its vulgar form, the evolutionists would have some chance of
getting into the casebooks but no chance of ultimately transforming literary
studies. Transformation involves renovation from the ground up, eliminating the
endemic confusion of “pluralism” and carrying through on the implications of a
Darwinian vision. It is not the case that there is nothing outside the text. It
is not even the case that there is nothing outside of life. Before life
evolved, there was a physical universe in which it could evolve. It is the case, though, that there
is nothing in life outside of evolution. That means both less and more than it
might seem to mean. It does not mean that the forms of literary
development—genres and traditions—exactly parallel the macro-structures of
evolutionary development. It does not mean that all human experience is driven
in a simple and direct way by the Biblical injunction go forth and multiply. It
does not mean that all literary characters exemplify average or species-typical
forms of behavior. It certainly does not mean that all authors, even ancient,
medieval, Renaissance, and neo-classical authors, are crypto-Darwinists. What
it does mean is that all humans past and present have evolved under the
massively constraining force of adaptation by means of natural selection. It
thus means that the species as a whole has a characteristic structure of “life
history.”[21]
That life history entails a species-typical set of motive dispositions and
emotional responses, and along with them a species-typical range of personality
characteristics. Individuals can and often do vary from the species-typical,
but the species typical provides a common frame of reference. Individual
differences, in specific cultures and specific individual persons, vary from
that base line in ways that have systemic effects on the motivational and
emotional characteristics of the whole system. Individuals can mate with members
of their own families, prefer sexual partners of their own sex, murder their
parents or children, live celibate lives in religious orders, consign
themselves to perpetual hermitage in deserts, starve themselves to death, throw
themselves on hand grenades, blow themselves up in crowded market squares,
devote their lives to charitable purposes, sacrifice worldly ambition for the
sake of art, or write books declaring that reality is purely a social
construct. All of these forms of behavior can be traced to the only possible
source of all behavior: the interaction between genetically transmitted
dispositions and specific environmental conditions. Consequently, none of these
behaviors is “unnatural,” and indeed, there is no such thing as an unnatural
form of behavior. Every form of behavior consists in some discernible
combination of the elements of human nature interacting with specific
environmental conditions. Every form of behavior has its own distinct set of
affects; everything comes with a cost; every form of satisfaction sacrifices
some other possible form of satisfaction; every fulfilled impulse works in
tension with some other impulse left unfulfilled; and every act shapes the
total organization of feeling and perception in the whole organism and in the larger
social groups in which virtually all individual humans are embedded. The
motives and passions that have derived from an adaptive evolutionary process
constitute what we call “human nature.” Intuitive perceptions of these motives
and passions are products of “folk psychology”—the common, shared, basis for
the understanding of intentional meaning in other human beings.[22]
Folk psychology is the lingua franca
of social life and of literature.
The Darwinian literary study that,
in this scenario, will ultimately absorb and supplant every other form of
literary study will assimilate all the existing concepts in literary
study—traditional concepts of style, genre, tone, point of view, and formal
organization, substantive concepts of depth psychology, social conflict, gender
roles, family organization, and interaction with the natural world. It will not
just take those concepts ready made and tack them together like a shack made of
flattened cans and scraps of cardboard on the edge of a third-world city. It will
use them as heuristic guides to the emergent structures that are most relevant
to literary study as a subject matter with its own peculiar features and
concerns, but it will rebuild each of those concepts de novo—reshaping, breaking down, consolidating, and
adding—by direct and explicit reference to the rapidly expanding research in
all the contiguous disciplines of the human sciences.
Most of the literary Darwinists now
at work have been trained in the old schools and have been teaching themselves
new concepts and methods, striving and sometimes struggling to gain an assured
perspective on disciplines in which they have no specialist
expertise—evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, anthropology,
linguistics, personality theory, and cognitive and affective neuroscience. At
the same time, they have been integrating these concepts with traditional
concepts in literary study, building theoretical principles that could explain
and direct their efforts, and seeking to vindicate these theoretical constructs
through Darwinian readings of specific texts.[23]
All this is necessary, but it is not enough.
There are no real ontological or epistemological barriers
separating the humanities and the evolutionary human sciences. We do not occupy
parallel universes, stepping comfortably out of one when we drive a car or
visit the dentist and into another when we read a novel, look at a painting, or
listen to a piece of music. It is all the same world, intelligible by the same
instruments.[24]
The barriers separating these two worlds are the barriers merely of convention
based on ignorance. “Pluralism” elevates those conventions to the dignity of a
theoretical position, and that position provides a rationalization for
maintaining the habitual limitations in the scope of our subjects and the
methods by which we investigate those subjects. In this third scenario, the
pace of production in Darwinist publication will continue or increase; the
institutional resistance of the postmodern establishment will crumble from
within, almost silently, softly metamorphosing into dust, like the Soviet
empire, as a result of intellectual dry rot. A few hammer blows no doubt will
be needed to knock down actual obstructions, like the
In this third scenario, high-school
students will all take introductory courses in statistics, which are, after
all, less demanding mathematically than the more advanced forms of math in the
standard high-school curriculum. Undergraduates, as part of their general
education, will take more advanced courses in statistics and will also take
courses in empirical methodology. This will not be so much an added burden as
it might seem, since the whole undergraduate curriculum will be much more
unified than it now is. Courses in the “social sciences” will themselves all be
integrated from an evolutionary perspective—the same kind of perspective that
prevails now, for instance, in journals such as Behavioral
and Brain Sciences. The evolutionary human sciences will be closely
integrated with required courses in evolutionary biology, molecular biology,
and the sciences of the brain. Students in the humanities will develop basic
proficiency in these disciplines in the same way virtually all European
students, in all disciplines, now develop a good working knowledge of the
English language.
When undergraduate English majors write papers on
Shakespeare or Virginia Woolf, Chaucer or Charlotte Brontë, they will in some
ways do what they have always done—talk about characterization, personal and
social identity in the characters and in the author, style, point of view,
tone, the organization of narrative, and cultural contexts and literary
traditions. But in other ways, all this will be different. In writing of
personal and social identity, they will not have recourse to obsolete and
misleading ideas from Freud, Marx, and their degenerate progeny. They will have
recourse instead to empirically grounded findings in the evolutionary human
sciences. In speaking of tone and point of view, they will make use of
cognitive and affective neuroscience. They will consider local affects in
relation to the actual brain structures and neurochemical circuits that
regulate emotions, to “mirror neurons,” Theory of Mind, and “perspective
taking.” In assessing style and the formal organization of narrative or verse,
they will take account of underlying cognitive structures that derive from folk
physics, folk biology, and folk psychology. They will still bring all their intuitive
sensitivity to bear, registering the affective qualities that distinguish one
work from another, communing in spirit with the author, or holding off
skeptically from authors with whom intimacy for them is repugnant. They will
not regard their own subjective responses as wholly arbitrary nor as somehow
incommensurate with the brain structures that regulate behavior, thought, and
feeling in ordinary life. When they locate literary works in relation to
cultural context, they will have recourse to new forms of history, both forms
that use brain science to create an ecological and psychopharmacological
profile of a given era,[25]
and also forms that delineate large-scale laws of social organization deriving
from elementary processes of inter-group conflict and intra-group organization.[26]
They will draw on knowledge both of the actual social and political situation
and of the deep evolutionary background for that situation. We already see
works of literary scholarship that answer to this description.[27]
When they come to graduate study, aspiring literary scholars
will have open before them a wide spectrum of methodological choices, ranging
from the purely discursive, essayistic forms of commentary that now dominate
the humanities to the rigorously quantitative, empirical methods that now
prevail in the sciences.[28]
Some no doubt will tend more in one direction than in another, but none will
think that quantitative and discursive forms of study occupy separate and
incommensurate universes. They will not cast about desperately for novelty, taking
recourse in superficial verbal variations ensconced in sophistical theoretical
ambiguities. They will, rather, wake up like kids at Christmas, delighted with
the endless opportunities for real, legitimate discovery that are open to them.
Conclusion: Belief in Things Unseen
In one way, the third scenario is
the hardest about which to make concrete predictions. To predict a continuation
of the status quo, one need only extrapolate from what one can actually see and
factor in the consequences of degenerative pressure, internal and external. The
process at work is something like that in which profilers for police agencies
take a photograph of a person missing for years, apply known principles for the
way people’s faces change over time, and come up with a reasonable
approximation to what the missing person would look like now. So also, with the
second scenario, one holds the mainstream practices steady while adding to them
the current practices of literary Darwinism. To make literary Darwinism fit
comfortably into the culture of casebooks, one need only standardize its
current tendencies toward vulgarity. The third scenario allows us to stipulate
the conditions for rebuilding literary knowledge from the ground up, but by its
very nature as a progressive, empirical discipline, it exceeds prediction. It
promises discovery, things not yet dreamed of, lying latent in the bosom of
reality, at levels of causal structure we have not yet penetrated, and at
levels of complexity we do not yet, perhaps, have the skills even to envision.
If one were able to travel back in time, visit some far-seeing investigator in
the Renaissance, an astronomer, say, or an anatomist, take him by the elbow and
give him a tour of the modern world, would it not all seem to him truly alien,
strange, wonderful beyond all imagining? And yet, all these wonders were lying
latent in the world, and he would himself have been taking the first steps
toward their discovery.
Acknowledgments
For
judicious help in editing this article, grateful thanks to Harold Fromm, Gwendolyn
Carroll, Jessica McKee, Gad Saad, and especially Alice Andrews, who went with
me through multiple drafts.
Notes
[1]
Northrop Frye, The Critical Path: An
Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism
[2] Louis Menand, “Dangers Within and
Without,” Profession 2005, ed.
Rosemary G. Feal (
[3] Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and
Constructivism (
[4] M. H. Abrams, “How To Do Things with
Texts,” Partisan Review 46 (1979):
566-88; John R. Searle, “The Word Turned Upside Down,” New York Review of Books 30, no. 16 (27 October 1983): 74-79;
William E. Cain, The Crisis in Criticism:
Theory, Literature, and Reform in English Studies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1984), ch. 2; John R. Searle, “Literary Theory and Its
Discontents,,” New Literary History 25
(1994): 637-67; Joseph Carroll, Evolution
and Literary Theory (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995), 56-68.
[5]
Joseph Carroll, “Adaptationist Literary Study: An Emerging Research Program,” Style 36 (2002): 596-617; Harold Fromm, “The New Darwinism in the
Humanities: From Plato to Pinker,”
Joseph Carroll, “Literature and Evolutionary Psychology,” in Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, ed. David Buss (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005), 931-52; Joseph Carroll, “Adaptationist Literary Study: An Introductory Guide,” Ometeca 10 (2006) 18-31; Joseph Carroll, “Evolutionary Approaches to Literature and Drama,” in The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, ed. Robin Dunbar and Louise Barrett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 637-48; Joseph Carroll, “An Evolutionary Paradigm for Literary Study,” Style 42 (2008) 103-35.
[6] Brian Boyd, “The Origin of Stories: Horton Hears a Who,” Philosophy and Literature 25 (2001): 197-214; Brett Cooke, Human Nature in Utopia: Zamyatin’s “We” (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002); Joseph Carroll, “Aestheticism, Homoeroticism, and Christian Guilt in The Picture of Dorian Gray: A Darwinian Critique,” Philosophy and Literature 29 (2005): 286-304; Judith P. Saunders, “Evolutionary Biological Issues in Edith Wharton’s The Children,” College Literature 32 (2005): 83-102; Marcus Nordlund, Shakespeare and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, Evolution (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007); Jonathan Gottschall, The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
[7]
Brian Boyd, “Art and Evolution: Spiegelman in The Narrative Corpse,” Philosophy
and Literature 32 (2008): 31-57; Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (
[8] Joseph Carroll, “The Cuckoo’s
History: Human Nature in Wuthering Heights,” Philosophy and
Literature 32 (2008):
241-57; John A. Johnson, Joseph Carroll, Jonathan Gottschall, and Daniel J.
Kruger, “Hierarchy in the Library: Egalitarian Dynamics in Victorian Novels,” Evolutionary Psychology 6 (2008):
715-38; Joseph Carroll, Jonathan Gottschall, John A. Johnson, and Daniel J.
Kruger, “Human Nature in Nineteenth-Century British novels: Doing the Math,: Philosophy and Literature 33 (2009):
50-72.
[9] Johnson, Carroll, Gottschall, and
Kruger, “Hierarchy”; Carroll, Johnson, Gottschall, and Kruger, “Human Nature.”
[10] Carroll, “Aestheticism”; “The Cuckoo’s History”; Johnson, Carroll, Gottschall, and Kruger,
“Hierarchy”; Carroll, Gottschall, Johnson, and Kruger, “Human Nature”;
Robert Storey, Mimesis and the
Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996); Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, “On the Origins of Narrative:
Storyteller Bias as a Fitness-Enhancing Strategy,” Human Nature 7 (1996): 403-425; Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, Cultural
relativism in the bush: Toward a theory of narrative universals, Human Nature 14 (2003) 383-396.
[11]
Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction:
Theory of Mind and the Novel (
[12] Storey, Mimesis, 131-35; Scalise Sugiyama, “Cultural Relativism”; Daniel
Nettle, “What Happens in Hamlet?
Exploring the Psychological Foundations of Drama,” in The Literary Animal: Evolution and the
Nature of Narrative, edited by Jonathan
Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson (
[13] Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).
[14] Gillian Beer,
[15] Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in
American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Steven
Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern
Denial of Human Nature (
[16] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, ed. J. T.
Bonner and R. M. May, 2 vols. in 1, 1871 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1981); Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics
of Human Nature (Albany:
SUNY Press, 1998); Peter Singer, A
Darwinian Left (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2000); L. D. Katz, ed., Evolutionary Origins of Morality:
Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives (Bowling Green, OH: Imprint Academic,
2000).
[17] Carroll, “An Evolutionary Paradigm.”
[18] Eugene Goodheart, Darwinian Misadventures in the Humanities
(
[19] Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (
[20] Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1977); Carroll, Literary Darwinism, 63-68; Steven Pinker, “Toward a Consilient
Study of Literature,” Philosophy and
Literature 31 (2007): 162-78; Carroll, “An Evolutionary Paradigm”; Joseph
Carroll, “Rejoinder,” Style 42 (2008): 309-412; Denis Dutton, The
Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution (New York: Bloomsbury,
2009); Boyd, On the Origin.
[21] Bobbi S. Low, Why Sex Matters: A Darwinian Look at Human
Behavior (Princeton:
[22] David C. Geary, The Origin of Mind: Evolution of Brain, Cognition, and General
Intelligence,
[23] Jonathan Gottschall, David Sloan
Wilson, eds., The Literary Animal:
Evolution and the Nature of Narrative (
[24] Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New
York: Knopf, 1998).
[25] Smail, On Deep History.
[26] Peter Turchin, War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires (
[27] Cooke, Human Nature; Gottschall, The
Rape of
[28] Jonathan Gottschall, Literature, Science, and a New Humanities
(