Literary Darwinism

There's an interesting article on literary Darwinism in this Sunday's Times Magazine. I'm sure those of you who know my general fascination with evolutionary psychology and consilience would assume that I'm a literary Darwinist as well, but the truth is I have some doubts about the project, which I've been following on and off for the past few years. I wrote a little about this in the introduction to Mind Wide Open, but my general concern is that, almost by definition, the Darwinian insights that literary critics can use are the least interesting thing about evolutionary thinking. Because ev psych is concerned with human universals, most of the behavior it describes is the stuff of cliché: women are attracted to high-status men, people tend to value the lives of their near-relatives over the lives of strangers, and so on. What's fascinating in ev psych is not usually the behavior it documents, but rather the way it explains the evolutionary roots of that behavior. (I know many of you out there think those explanations are merely just-so stories, but whether you buy them or not, they're the intellectually meaty part of the model.) And it seems to me that literature doesn't really bring anything new to that part of the story. It's true that you can find plenty of examples of status-seeking and kin preference and incest taboo in the canon, but you can also find plenty of examples of characters dutifully obeying the laws of gravity as well -- and that's not going to tell you anything interesting about physics, right?

The Literary Darwinists that I've read tend to talk about the way great works of literature shine light on the human universals described by the ev pysch canon. But I think the more interesting application would be to shine the light in the other direction: if we know something about human universals from the sciences, then we can use that knowledge to gain a better appreciation of the achievements of culture. We can point to the historical places, or the elements of our own society, where we've ventured the furthest from our biological inclinations. And what better place to look for those wanderings than in the canon of world literature?

That said, this review by the excellent Denis Dutton makes me wonder if there's more to it than I've perceived so far.

Comments

[Steven Shaviro]

I find the "Literary Darwinism" highlighted in the New York Times rather lame and uninteresting, for the same reasons you state. (I am not convinced by Dutton's review, either).

The most interesting use of Darwinism to read literature, to my mind, is the work of the late Morse Peckham, who wrote mostly in the 1950s and 1960s (i.e. before Edward O. Wilsion and "sociobiology"), and now seems to be mostly forgotten. Peckham wrote books like "Man's Rage for Chaos" and (his masterpiece) "Explanation and Power."

Peckham proposes some interesting Darwinian explanations for how and why we have literature and art, and what adaptive purposes they might serve. But the most interesting part of Peckham's project is his speculation on how mutation, adaptation, and natural selection function within art and culture, both on the level of individual creativity and on that of large-scale cultural evolution. Which means that, rather than using Darwin to explain how all literature supposedly reflects the same "human universals," Peckham uses Darwin to explain how cultures can in fact be radically different from one another, and how literature and art involve continual change and innovation. From Peckham's perspective, the problem with ev psych is that it isn't Darwinian enough, since for it evolution stops with the emergence of the human species, while for Peckham the whole point of culture is that it allows for evolutionary processes to continue on a larger scale, and with a far more rapid pace, than they do in the biological realm.

[Steven Johnson]

Steve, great point. I agree completely with what you say -- in fact, I was almost going to add a few lines in my original post about the way in which Darwinian models can be used to describe the overarching system of literary culture, and not individual works; but that's a bit more of a metaphor than a strict application of the theory, right?

I got started on this whole project years ago, working with my old mentor Franco Moretti at Columbia, who wrote an essay called "On Literary Evolution" that kind of changed my life in a weird way. Have you ever read that one? It's very short and speculative, but also a great read...

[David Bengtsson]

Literary Darwinism seems to combine the least interesting things about evolutionary psychology with the least interesting things to be said about literature, about individual works as well as of literature as such.
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The David and Nanelle Barash book "madame Bovary's ovaries" (As one might guess, the title is one of its few endearing feature) is a case in point.