IV

Chapter five of Part Two: What Do We Make of It All?

The Value of Systematic Reduction

Agonistic structure in these novels displays a systematic contrast between desirable and undesirable traits in characters. Protagonists exemplify traits that evoke admiration and liking in readers, and antagonists exemplify traits that evoke anger, fear, contempt, and disgust. Antagonists virtually personify Social Dominance—the self-interested pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. In these novels, those ambitions are sharply segregated from prosocial and culturally acquisitive dispositions. Antagonists are not only selfish and unfriendly but also undisciplined, emotionally unstable, and intellectually dull. Protagonists, in contrast, display motive dispositions and personality traits that exemplify strong personal development and healthy social adjustment. Protagonists are agreeable, conscientious, emotionally stable, and open to experience. Protagonists clearly represent the apex of the positive values implicit in agonistic structure. Both male and female protagonists score high on the motive factor Constructive Effort, a factor that combines prosocial and culturally acquisitive dispositions. Their introversion, in this context, seems part of their mildness. The extraversion of antagonists, in contrast, seen in the context of their other scores, seems to indicate aggressive self-assertion.

Taken singly, as separate propositions, some of these findings might seem little more than empirical confirmations of observations so obvious that no one would bother to dispute them. It might not, for example, seem terribly surprising that readers dislike antagonists or that protagonists are more agreeable, on average, than antagonists. Actually, all such findings could in fact be disputed. If the work of “Theory” has taught is nothing else, it has surely taught us that nothing in literary studies can be taken for granted. In his preface to an overview of poststructuralism, the eminent theorist Jonathan Culler observes that much of the “interest and force” of poststructuralist theory derives from “its broad challenge to common sense.” Given this broad challenge, simply providing systematic empirical support for common sense would serve a useful purpose. But the challenge of “obviousness” can be answered on still stronger grounds. We have not ourselves taken our findings singly, as separate propositions. We have taken them collectively, as parts of theoretically rationalized categories about human nature and fictional narratives. Strictly on epistemological grounds, observation at the level of discrete and fragmentary impression is less valuable, as knowledge, than observation lodged within theoretically rationalized categories. Moreover, organizing separate observations into larger patterns makes it possible to formulate hypotheses about the psychological and social functions of agonistic structure, and those hypotheses have an important bearing on a still deeper question: the evolutionary origin and adaptive functions of literature and its oral antecedents.

The word “dislike” is a common language term, but in our usage, it is also the product of a statistical analysis of ten emotional responses derived from the systematic empirical study of basic human emotions. Similar considerations apply to the other categories used to delineate character sets. The personality factor “Agreeableness” is a common language term, but it is also part of a model, derived from the statistical analysis of thousands of lexical items, that organizes personality into five superordinate factors. The motives and criteria of mate selection used in the questionnaire are couched in the common language, but they are also part of an integrated set of principles lodged within the explanatory context of evolutionary social science. Dislike correlates negatively with Agreeableness, positively with Social Dominance, and negatively with a preference for Intrinsic Qualities in a mate. Such correlations provide evidence for the existence of agonistic structure; the clear patterns of agonistic structure testify to the robust quality of the categories; and evolutionary social science provides a larger explanatory context both for the categories and for agonistic structure.

If one presupposes the existence of agonistic structure, this or that finding in this study, taken singly, might not seem surprising, but for many readers in the humanities, we anticipate that the central premise of this study will be not only surprising but deeply disturbing. Our central premise is that both human nature and literary meaning can be circumscribed, reduced to finite elements, and quantified. Acting on that premise, we reduced human nature to a set of categories and used the categories to trace out quantitative relationships in responses to a large body of literary texts. This procedure tacitly negates the idea—nebulous and pervasive, Protean in its varieties—that literature and the experience of literature occupy a phenomenological realm that is separate and qualitatively distinct from the realm that can be understood by science.[1]

Demonstrating that large tracts of literary meaning can effectively be reduced to concepts lodged in a systematic body of empirical knowledge offers an alternative both to the poststructuralist repudiation of common sense and to the dualist metaphysics undergirding old-fashioned humanism. Analyzing agonistic structure enables us to link objectively discernible features of characters with the evaluative stance of writers and the emotional responses of readers, infer the normative cultural ethos of the novels, correlate that cultural ethos with the elemental dispositions of human nature, and situate those dispositions within the explanatory context of human social evolution. In our view, this sort of unified causal explanation is intrinsically satisfying. “Consilience”—linking one’s own domain of knowledge with adjacent domains, and envisioning all domains as interlocking parts of a unitary natural order—offers the highest level of unified causal explanation.

Our research design employs several working hypotheses of wide scope. We adopt an evolutionary view of human life history, regard the attributes of characters in the questionnaire as a reasonable approximation of the basic components of human nature, postulate that agonistic structure exists and can be effectively reduced to Valence and Salience, and assume that in responding to novels readers simulate the experience of emotionally responsive social interaction. Our respondents need not have concurred with any of these working hypotheses. The questions we asked, like the novels themselves, were couched in the common language. Respondents need only have responded on the level of common understanding. Our aim has thus been to preserve the common understanding of the novels while situating them within a consilient view of human nature.

Sex, Status, and Community in the Novels

In the world of these novels, males hold positions of political, institutional, and sometimes of economic power denied to females, but females hold a kind of psychological and moral power that is exemplified in their status as paradigmatic protagonists. The most important distinguishing features of antagonists, both male and female, are high scores on the motive factor Social Dominance (the desire for wealth, power, and prestige), low scores on the personality factor Agreeableness, and low scores on a preference for Intrinsic Qualities (intelligence, kindness, and reliability) in a mate. Female protagonists score lowest of any character set on Dominance and highest on Agreeableness and on preferring Intrinsic Qualities in mates. They also score highest in the typically protagonistic personality factors Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Openness. Female protagonists clearly hold a central position within the normative value structure of the novels. The ethos of the novels is in this sense gynocentric—female centered. The communitarian ethos forms the core of the values implicit in agonistic structure. In motives, the criteria for selecting mates, and the features of personality, female protagonists evidently have more affinity for that ethos than male protagonists. (For a scholarly account of the gynocentric ethos in this period, see Houghton 341-93.)

In the past thirty years or so, more criticism on the novel has been devoted to the issue of gender identity than to any other topic. The data in our study indicate that gender can be invested with a significance out of proportion to its true place in the structure of interpersonal relations in the novels and that it can be conceived in agonistically polarized ways out of keeping with the forms of social affiliation depicted in the novels. In this data set, differences between males and females are less prominent than differences between protagonists and antagonists. If polarized emotional responses were absent from the novels, or if those polarized responses co-varied with differences between males and females, the differences between male and female characters could be conceived agonistically, as a conflict (as it is, for instance, in Gilbert and Gubar). The differences between male and female characters in motives and personality could be conceived as competing value structures. From a Marxist perspective, that competition would be interpreted as essentially political and economic in character (as it is, for instance, in Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction). From the deeper Darwinian perspective, it would ultimately be attributed to competing reproductive interests. The predominance of Valence in the organization of characters suggests, in contrast, that in these novels conflict between the sexes is subordinated to their shared and complementary interests. In the agonistic structure of plot and theme, male and female protagonists are allies. They cooperate in resisting the predatory threats of antagonists, and they join together to exemplify the values that elicit the readers’ admiration and sympathy. Both male and female antagonists are massively preoccupied with material gain and social rank. That preoccupation stands in stark contrast to the more balanced and developed world of the protagonists—a world that includes sexual interest, romance, the care of family, friends, and the life of the mind. By isolating and stigmatizing dominance behavior, the novels affirm the shared values that bind its members into a community.

In the chapter on motives, we observe that dominance and affiliation can be linked with contrasting tendencies toward bias in self-perception. Egoistic bias exaggerates one’s power and status, and moralistic bias exaggerates one’s selflessness and altruism (Paulhus and John). On the average, agonistic structure in these novels displays a distinct moralistic bias. That bias could possibly reflect a cultural ethos particular to the period in which the novels were written. To reach empirical conclusions on this question would require comparisons with empirical studies of agonistic structure in literature from other periods. So far, of course, we have no other such studies and thus no data to compare. Pending further research, we venture to speculate that the moralistic bias displayed in these novels is not particular to the period. The degree to which aggressive violence characterizes the behavior of protagonistic males most certainly varies according to the cultural ecology of a given period, but the broad disposition for a moralistic bias seems to reflect fundamental political dispositions characteristic of the human species.

In Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, Christopher Boehm offers a cogent explanation for the way interacting impulses of dominance and affiliation have shaped the evolution of human political behavior. In an earlier phase of evolutionary social science, sociobiological theorists had repudiated the idea of “altruistic” behavior and had restricted prosocial dispositions to nepotism and to the exchange of reciprocal benefits. In contrast, Boehm argues that at some point in their evolutionary history—at the latest 100,000 years ago—humans developed a special capacity, dependent on their symbolic and cultural capabilities, for enforcing altruistic or group-oriented norms. By enforcing these norms, humans succeed in controlling “free riders” or “cheaters,” and they thus make it possible for genuinely altruistic genes to survive within a social group. Such altruistic dispositions, enforced by punishing defectors, would enable social groups to compete more successfully against other groups and would thus make “group selection” or “multi-level selection” an effective force in subsequent human evolution. The selection for altruistic dispositions—and dispositions for enforcing altruistic cultural norms—would involve a process of gene-culture co-evolution that would snowball in its effect of altering human nature itself.[2]

Agonistic Structure and the Adaptive Function of Literature

Is it feasible to reason backwards from our findings to formulate hypotheses about functions fictional narratives might have fulfilled in ancestral environments? By identifying one of the ways novels actually work for us now, can we produce evidence relevant to hypotheses about the evolutionary origin and adaptive function of the arts? Yes. Agonistic structure is a central principle in the organization of characters in the novels. Taking into account not just the representation of characters but the emotional responses of readers, we can identify agonistic structure as a simulated experience of emotionally responsive social interaction. That experience has a clearly defined moral dimension. Agonistic structure precisely mirrors the kind of egalitarian social dynamic documented by Boehm in hunter-gatherers—our closest contemporary proxy to ancestral humans. As Boehm and others have argued, the dispositions that produce an egalitarian social dynamic are deeply embedded in the evolved and adapted character of human nature. Humans have an innate desire for power and an innate dislike of being dominated. Egalitarianism as a political strategy arises as a compromise between the desire to dominate and the dislike of being dominated. By pooling their power so as to exercise collective social coercion, individuals in groups can repress dominance behavior in other individuals. The result is autonomy for individuals. No one gets all the power he or she would like, but then, no one has to accept submission to other dominant individuals. Boehm describes in detail the pervasive collective tactics for repressing dominance within social groups organized at the levels of bands and tribes (and see Salter 63-70).[3]

An egalitarian social dynamic is the most important basic structural feature that distinguishes human social organization from the social organization of chimpanzees. In chimpanzee society, social organization is regulated exclusively by dominance, that is, power. In human society, social organization is regulated by interactions between impulses of dominance and impulses for suppressing dominance. State societies with elaborate systems of hierarchy emerged only very recently in the evolutionary past, about ten thousand years ago, after the agricultural revolution made possible concentrations of resources and therefore power. Before the advent of despotism, the egalitarian disposition for suppressing dominance had, at a minimum, a hundred thousand years in which to become entrenched in human nature—more than sufficient time for significant adaptive change to take place (Wade). In highly stratified societies, dominance assumes a new ascendancy, but no human society dispenses with the need for communitarian association. It seems likely, then, that agonistic structure in fictional narratives emerged in tandem with specifically human adaptations for cooperation and specifically human adaptations for creating imaginative constructs that embody the ethos of the tribe.

Agonistic structure in these novels seems to serve as a medium for readers to participate vicariously in an egalitarian social ethos. If that is the case, the novels can be described as prosthetic extensions of social interactions that in non-literate cultures require face-to-face interaction. If that face-to-face interaction fulfils an adaptive function, and if agonistic structure is a cultural technology that fulfils the same adaptive function, one could reasonably conclude that agonistic structure fulfils an adaptive function. We hope to see further empirical research that opens up new ways of probing this important issue.

Our largest conclusion is that agonistic structure provides a medium of shared imaginative experience through which authors and readers affirm and reinforce egalitarian dispositions on a large cultural scale. At least one possible challenge to this conclusion could readily be anticipated. Could it not plausibly be argued that the novels merely depict social dynamics as they actually occur in the real world? If that were the case, one would have no reason to suppose that that the novels mediate psychological processes in the community of readers. The novels might merely serve readers’ need to gain realistic information about the larger patterns of social life. To assess the cogency of this challenge, consider the large-scale patterns revealed in our data and ask whether those patterns plausibly reflect social reality:

The world is in reality divided into two main kinds of people. One kind is motivated exclusively by the desire for wealth, power, and prestige. These people have no affiliative dispositions whatsoever. Moreover, they are emotionally unstable, undisciplined, and narrow minded. The second kind of people, in contrast, have almost no desire for wealth, power, and prestige. They are animated by the purest and most self-forgetful dispositions for nurturing kin and helping non-kin. Moreover, they are young, attractive, emotionally stable, conscientious, and open-minded. Life consists in a series of clear-cut confrontations between these two kinds of people. Fortunately, the second set almost always wins, and lives happily ever after. This is reality, and novels do nothing except depict this reality in a true and faithful way.

In our view, this alternative hypothesis fails of conviction. The novels contain a vast fund of realistic social depiction and profound psychological analysis. In their larger imaginative structures, though, the novels evidently do not just represent human nature; they embody the impulses of human nature. Those impulses include a need to derogate dominance in others and to affirm one’s identity as a member of a social group. Our evidence strongly suggests that those needs provide the emotional and imaginative force that shapes agonistic structure in the novels.

The Politics of the Novels

In modern social environments, egalitarianism sometimes eventuates in a revolutionary hostility to the differential distribution of power and privilege. Is the ethos of the novels therefore implicitly revolutionary? No, only reformist. The novelists typically express hostility toward assertions of dominance based on wealth, power, and prestige, but they do not typically repudiate all existing structures of social power. Dickens and Eliot are among the most aggressively political novelists in the study. Dickens is suspicious of public institutions, passionately sympathetic to the sufferings of the poor, and uncompromisingly hostile to aristocratic arrogance. Nonetheless, most of his protagonists are solidly middle-class, well-educated and professionally trained. They display no anarchic impulses, and they have no tolerance for revolutionary violence. Madame Defarge, the virulent revolutionist in A Tale of Two Cities, is an antagonist, and she is defeated and killed finally by an ideologically conservative servant of the English bourgeoisie, an elderly woman. Eliot’s political sympathies are liberal, not revolutionary. Felix Holt, one of her protagonists, becomes involved in a political riot, but only in order to contain its violence. He pretends to assume leadership of a mob in order to divert it from its most destructive aims. After he is released from prison, he settles comfortably into the domestic life of a proletarian intellectual. His “Address to Working Men,” an essay Eliot appended to the novel, concentrates on reform within the working class. He urges working men to gain more education so as to deploy more responsibly the political power he hopes them someday to gain. Real political “radicals” have always sniffed dismissively at the description Eliot gives to her hero in the title of the book—Felix Holt, the Radical.

Taking Dickens and Eliot as characteristic of the more radical novelists in this study, we can conclude that there is nothing very seriously subversive about the political ethos of the novels. The “industrial” novels of Disraeli (Sybil, or the Two Nations) and Gaskell (Mary Barton, North and South) adopt political stances very similar to those of Eliot—compassionate about the sufferings of the poor, implicitly advocating institutional reform, but offering no encouragement to impulses of revolt. Gissing’s novels about the urban underclass (for instance, The Nether World) could scarcely be said to have a political dimension. They are naturalistic horror stories oriented to the tragedy of fine-grained people trapped in coarse and brutal environments. Similar sympathies animate Henry James’s only political novel, The Princess Casamassima. James’s characters include irresponsible aristocrats, but the most sinister characters are the proletarian subversives who sacrifice James’s delicate inter-class protagonist, Hyacinth Robinson, to gratify their own class animosities. In The Secret Agent, Conrad explores the underworld of political subversives from an unequivocally hostile perspective. His anarchists are uniformly a seedy, shady lot, distinguished chiefly by weaknesses of mind or character.

As we argue in part four, Austen’s politics are essentially conservative. She tacitly affirms the legitimacy of the larger social order. The same can be said of Trollope. The Palliser series, Trollope’s novels about political life, do not deal with politics in the broader social sense. They deal only with the politics internal to a career in public office, just as his novels about religious life, the Chronicles of Barsetshire, deal only with the politics of ecclesiastical ambition, not with religion itself. Like Austen’s characters, Trollope’s characters are mostly from the upper classes. In Trollope and Austen both, agonistic conflict plays out from within those classes. Other authors register conflict among social classes, but few or none adopt a purely class-based system for the distribution of protagonists and antagonists. Some characters from the upper classes are depicted as arrogant and domineering, thus antagonistic, and some are depicted as kind and generous, thus protagonistic. In Dickens, some members of the proletariat, for instance Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times, are almost allegorical embodiments of kindness and decency in working class guise. Others, though, such as Orlic in Great Expectations, are vicious and brutal. Across the whole field of the novels, dominance and affiliation correlate with class identity in no systematic way.

Taken collectively, the novels in this study affirm egalitarian values. They thus nurture impulses that tend toward social reform—toward diminishing differences of wealth and rank, recognizing our common humanity, and thus improving conditions of life for the most vulnerable members of society. Even at their most political, though, the novels work at a level of motive and emotion deeper and more universal than any specific form of social organization. They affirm the qualities that make community possible.

The Division between Cultural and Prosocial Dispositions in the Ethos of the Novels

In the ethos implicit in the agonistic structure of these novels, communitarian social dispositions are closely linked with an active mental and imaginative life—with curiosity, intelligence, imagination, and aesthetic responsiveness. The most distinctively protagonistic motive factor, Constructive Effort, consists in both pro-social and culturally acquisitive motives. Constructive Effort correlates positively both with the personality factor Agreeableness (a socially oriented factor) and the personality factor Openness to Experience (a culturally oriented factor).

These two sets of dispositions, the cultural and the prosocial, are both parts of human nature, but the ethos integrating them is only an ideal of civilization. Neither set is functionally dependent on the other. Either can function perfectly well in the absence of the other. In the minds of most of the protagonists in this study, communitarian and culturally acquisitive dispositions interact harmoniously—hence the average scores that distinguish protagonists as a group. In characters such as Sara Crewe, Dorothea Brooke, Isabel Archer, and Jane Eyre, the culturally acquisitive and prosocial motives converge. Such characters occupy the center of the cultural ethos embodied in agonistic structure. In a small minority of cases, the two sets of dispositions diverge. When that happens, as in Great Expectations, Vanity Fair and The Picture of Dorian Gray, the total ethos of the novel is likely to be sharply divided against itself.

A division in the ethos of a novel has distinct effects in a novel’s tone and in the emotional responses of readers. Emotional disturbance in tone makes itself felt, for instance, in the self-alienation in Pip’s first-person narrative persona, in the ironic reverberations in Thackeray’s narrative voice, and in the psychodramatic horror in which Wilde’s narrative culminates. In our research design, disturbances in readers’ responses can be directly measured. Protagonists who display a fully integrated suite of normative dispositions typically elicit strongly positive, sympathetic emotional responses. Conversely, antagonists who conform to agonistic type—Count Dracula, for instance, or Austen’s Aunt Norris—typically elicit emphatically negative responses. Agonistically ambiguous characters such as Becky Sharp and Catherine Earnshaw elicit emotionally ambivalent responses. Such characters satisfy impulses of rebellion, evoke compassion, or prompt the reader to identify with Machiavellian impulses. They thus expose the fault line in a cultural ethos compounded of two ingredients—the prosocial and the cultural—that are both intrinsically attractive but that are not functionally interdependent. In charming but sociopathic protagonists like Becky Sharp, and in good-natured but dim-witted minor characters like those who typically gather around Dickens’ protagonists, the ethos divides into its separate parts.

Machiavellian characters are sometimes attractive—charismatic, erotically fascinating, refreshingly free of social constraints. From the safe distance of their libraries, readers often find such characters highly diverting. In their actual social lives, few readers would wish to have much to do with people motivated chiefly by predatory impulses of social dominance. One might as soon wish to have a wolf or tiger for a house mate. Most protagonists can be counted among the beautiful people, but their personal charm is not the main reason that the novels form a viable virtual community. A “community” of egoists, however charming, would be a contradiction in terms. Community requires cooperation—subordinating individual interests, at least in part, to the common good. Agonistic structure produces a viable virtual community because it promotes that common good.