darwin and literary studies

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Introduction: Darwin and Literary Studies


Jonathan Greenberg

Roughly a decade ago, it could be said that Charles Darwins thoughtwas notably absent rom the discipline o literary studies. Although Dar-win had long been seen as an important infuence on specic writers ormovementsConrad and Hardy in England, or example, or Americannaturalismthis infuence seemed to amount to little more than a atal-ist recognition o the cruel logic o a godless cosmos. A major thinker othe nineteenth century, Darwin appeared to have almost no place in thevarious discourses that inormed twentieth-century literary analysis, rom

Russian ormalism and New Criticism through cultural materialism andqueer theory. It is true that a ew important works had been written inthe 1980s that explicitly brought the insights and methods o contempo-rary theory to bear on Darwin and his cultural and intellectual legacies:here Gillian Beers Darwins Plots, Margot Norriss Beasts of the ModernImagination, and George Levines Darwin and the Novelists still stand out asvibrant works o scholarship. Yet while these books are cited and praisedeven today, they never launched entire research programs in the manner

o contemporaneous works such as Stephen Greenblatts Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Eve Kososky Sedgwicks Between Men, or Slavoj ieks TheSublime Object of Ideology.

This relative absence o Darwin rom literary discussion was under-standable, i regrettable. Ater all, applications o Darwins thought to thesocial, the political, and the cultural have a notorious track record, having

justied both eugenicists interventions into human reproductive rightsand Social Darwinists justications o social and economic inequalities.Humanists could be excused or expecting that renewed eorts at Dar-

winian cultural analysis would only reach intellectually predictable orpolitically repugnant conclusions. But wariness o such reductive ideas or


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reactionary agendas seemed to have quietly given way to outright avoid-

ance o Darwin and even biology itsel. An epistemological skepticism or

methodological rigor regarding specifc lines o argument had calcifed

into an unchallenged assumption that any gesture toward the biological

would inevitably revive the kind o alse universalisms that literary studies

had spent much o the 1980s and 90s unmasking.

At the same time, outside o literary studies, just the opposite trend

seemed to be happening: Darwin was assuming an ever-greater promi-

nence in scholarly and other public discourses. During the 1990s several

disciplines beyond the hard sciences, such as philosophy, anthropology,

and psychology, were taking up Darwinian theory, while journalists and

popularizers pumped out one best seller ater another claiming to explainall manner o phenomena in terms o evolution by natural selection. In

the public sphere, the most visible o these disciplines was the feld o

evolutionary psychology. Building on the sociobiology worked out in

the 1970s by E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, Robert Trivers, and others,

evolutionary psychology explicitly sought, under the banner o Wilsons

consilience,1 to apply theoretical models rom evolutionary biology to

human behavior. And while its claims remain highly controversial, the

discipline itsel, as Dana Carluccio points out in her contribution to thisissue, has become astonishingly popular over the last twenty-fve years,

both as a research program and as a pop culture phenomenon (510).

Carluccio observes:

Its prolierating publishing venues, academic societies, and text-

books are echoed by journalism, novels, and movies that have

trumpeted the felds hypotheses, making them as ubiquitous in

US culture today as psychoanalytic notions, such as Freudian

slips. Someone who has never heard o evolutionary psychologyis nonetheless likely to believe that men fnd physical cues o

emale ertility (like youth) attractive because it helps them pass

on their genes. (51011)O course, i evolutionary psychological reasoning has passed over into

pop culture or common senseor, maybe more precisely, into what John

Guillory has called spontaneous philosophy2 (Sokal 476) it might

be suspected that this transition has been eortless or the simple reason

that the gap was so narrow to begin with. Quasi-Darwinian pop-cultureactoids concerning the infdelity o men or the industriousness o the


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wealthy may resonate strongly with conventional wisdom simply because

it is in conventional wisdom that they originate.

But whether or not the success o a Darwin-favored spontaneous

philosophy can be attributed (or reduced) to the ideological work that

it does in a ree-trading, globalizing world, it was surely predictable that

Darwinism in one orm or another would at last make an impact on

literary studies. One way in which this impact has been elt is through

the rise o a literary Darwinism. Trumpeted as the next big thing in

The New York Times,3 this minischool proceeds rom premises laid out

by evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, and is oten, though by

no means always, hostile to the last our decades o literary theory.4 The

basic premise o literary Darwinism is that because the human brain is aproduct o evolutionary adaptation, and because literature is a product o

the human brain, then principles o evolutionary biology can be protably

extended to literaturerst to literature as a general cultural entity (why

it came about), then to broad literary categories and structures such as

narrative, genre, and meter, and nally to the analysis or interpretation o

particular works.5 O course, the sorts o claims that this vein o research

generates, along with the objections to them, will be amiliar to many

readers, and those conversant with the history o sociobiology and evo-lutionary psychology will readily discern the contours o the old debates

that Andrew Brown has dubbed the Darwin wars: those in-house battles

amongevolutionists where Gould, Lewontin, and Eldredge clashed with

Wilson, Dawkins, and Dennett about spandrels, punctuated equilibrium,

and the value o regarding the gene as the unit o natural selection.

Although my own skepticism about the stronger claims o evolution-

ary psychology is no doubt evident by now, it is not the aim o this issue

either to adjudicate those claims or to apply them to literary studies. (Twoother journals, Philosophy and Literature and Poetics Today, have already

oered special issues more strictly devoted to literary Darwinism, and

collections o essays are now appearing alongside individually authored

volumes.6) On the other hand, since this is a journal o literary criticism,

it should at least be noted that debates about evolutionparticularly

about eorts to extend it into the cultural, political, social, and ethical

domainsare consistently marked by illustrative uses o the literary. Ste-

phen Jay Gould, or example, amously borrows a term rom Kipling in

objecting that sociobiology peddles just-so stories, narratives about theevolution o a given physical or behavioral trait that construct speculative,


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ctional, and sel-justiying accounts o its origin that are oten unsup-

ported, or even unsupportable, by experimental evidence (Sociobiology

258). Just-so stories, Gould argues, mislead us by confating unction and

origin, conusing meaning and cause.7 For this same reason Michael

Brub complains that sociocultural applications o Darwinism all too

oten conclude that Nature hersel speaks the language o Ayn Rand

(70)that evolutionary psychology, like ree-market economics, tends to

arm the existing social order as natural and the natural as desirable.8 To

be sure, such status quo-ism is by no means universal among neo-Dar-

winists, but its subtle persistence as a philosophical premise sprouts up un-

expectedly even when it is expressly disavowed, causing logical stumbles

or those who, however unwittingly, take it as a point o departure.9 Thusin a broadside against contemporary theory, Joseph Carroll invokes the

theodicy o Alexander Popes Essay on Man, in which Popes balanced

denitions and neat antitheses quietly but orceully bring multiple alls

together into one:

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;

All chance, direction, which thou canst not see,

All discord, harmony not understood,

All partial evil, universal good:

And, spite o pride, in erring reasons spite,

One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.10 (5253)

Indeed, the tendency o evolutionary psychology to devolve into an

atheist theodicy prompts Goulds other amous literary reerence: his

characterization o sociobiologists as ollowers o Voltaires Dr. Pangloss.

He quotes Voltaires amous optimist in order to show the allaciousness

o excessive or naive adaptationism: Everything is made or the bestpurpose. Our noses were made to carry spectacles, so we have spectacles.

Legs were clearly intended or breeches, and we wear them (Gould and

Lewontin 581)

Now, whether literary gures like Kipling, Pope, and Voltaire (not

to mention the quasi-literary Ayn Rand) are actually needed in a debate

like this may be doubted; the prousion o such allusions may indicate

little more than the act that in poems, plays, and novels, ideas are oten

ormulated in particularly incisive ways. Scientists do tend to use literature

as mere ornament rather than as a ully legitimate investigation o ques-tions o human nature (Garber 28). Still, such allusions also remind us


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that the literary has always been a sphere where the most undamental

and ar-reaching o existential questions have been explored. Matthew

Arnold amously argued that it is precisely in the wake o Darwins dis-

coveries, as well as o disenchanting scientifc discoveries more generally,

that people have turn[ed] to poetry to interpret lie or us, to console

us, to sustain us. Indeed, he goes so ar as to argue that Without poetry,

our science will appear incomplete (300). It is such an Arnoldian unc-

tion or literature that Deirdre Coleman discerns in her contribution to

this issue when she notes that, when aced with moral and emotional

crisis, J. M. Coetzees David Luriea literature proessor relegated to

teaching Communications (Coetzee 3) to a postliterate (32) student

bodydraws on his literary education to interrogate what it means tobe human (Coleman 613).

The juxtaposition o Darwin and literary study, then, by exploring the

oten-contested intersection o scientifc and humanistic discourses, at the

very least holds out the promise o addressing major questions o interest

to both othe so-called two cultures. Yet it is precisely the ailure to ulfllthis promise that prompts another critique o literary Darwinism: that it

oers only the old wine o tried-and-true interpretations in the beguiling

new bottles o scientifc terminology.11

Literary Darwinists open them-selves up to criticism, i not outright parody, when they simply redescribe

Jane Austen plots in terms o mate selection and kin assistance.12The most

compelling objection to literary Darwinism, then, may not be that it is

speculative (any ambitious criticism must have the reedom to speculate),

or that it leads to a conservative politics (a scholarly inquiry shouldnt be

avoided because one ears its results), but simply that it ails toaddress themost important questions that defne the discipline o literary study. In the

Phaedo,when Socrates, awaiting death, reutes Anaxagoras, he comparesthe older philosopher to a person who,

when he endeavored to explain the causes o my several actions

in detail, went on to show that I sit here because my body is

made up o bones and muscles; and my bones, as he would say,

are hard and have joints which divide them, and as the bones

are lited at their joints by the contraction or relaxation o the

muscles, I am able to bend my limbs, and this is why I am sit-

ting here in a curved posturethat is what he would say, and hewould have a similar explanation o my talking to you, which


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he would attribute to sound, and air, and hearing, and he would

assign ten thousand other causes o the same sort, orgetting

to mention the true cause, which is, that the Athenians have

thought t to condemn me. (136)

The scientic materialist explanations o muscles and bones, o sound and

air (to which Socratess leisurely elaboration satirically lends an aura o

complexity), may be perectly valid in their own domains, but they leave

untouched the questions o justice raised by the stark act o Socratess

imminent death.

Darwin, despite his sel-eacing rhetoric, did o course engage those big

questions that have always occupied the poets, and he recognized that

his scientic discoveries inevitably bore on human aairs. Thereore, to

understand the scope o Darwins legacy or literary studies, it is rst o

all essential to regard the literary not merely as belletristic ornament, nor

merely as ready sociological data or investigations o patterns o human

behavior,13 but as complex engagements with the questionsexistential,

ethical, sociopolitical, psychological, representationalthat arise in the

atermath o revolutionary scientic discoveries. And it is precisely here

that we need to discern the basic kinship o Darwins thought with the

literary theory that sel-described literary Darwinists tend to reject. To

some, such a recognition may appear counterintuitive: because Darwin

was infuenced by an English empiricist tradition running rom Hobbes

through Malthus and Smith to Ricardo, he is generally not linked to the

body o literary theory descending rom Continental thinkers like Kant

and Hegel. Yet his impact on orerunners o contemporary thought suchas Nietzsche, James, and Freud cannot be ignored. Keith Leslie Johnson,

in his contribution to this issue, goes so ar as to call Darwin the ourth

hermeneut o suspicion (575), placing him alongside Paul Ricoeurs a-

mous triumvirate o Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as a ounder o modern

interpretive practices. Gillian Beer, who was probably the rst, at least

among modern critics, to notice Darwins extraordinary hermeneutic

potential (8), calls attention to his legacy as a philosopher o fux rather

than the advocate o stability constructed by the literary Darwinists, whoaim to eradicate interpretive play by establishing hard-and-ast natural


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categories. Or as Johnson puts it, taking a slightly dierent tack, i literary

applications o Darwins scientic theories in recent years . . . have been

slow to gather supporters, that ailure

may be because, even while acknowledging the intrigue o em-

pirical approaches, humanities types tend to share a basic intu-

ition: that understanding Darwins thought (now more than ever,

as the clich goes) is perhaps more important in its ethical and,

ultimately, biopolitical dimension than in its scientic or meth-

odological one.14 (572)

Such a claim is implicitly endorsed by Laura Otis as well, when she argues

that representations o the gure o the scientist in works by H. G. Wellsand George Bernard Shaw suggest both writers concern with the ethics

o experimentation at a time when scientic knowledge was increasing

aster than awareness o its social implications (49293).

As it turns out, numerous scholarsapparently working indepen-

dently o one anotherhave begun to trace the anities o Darwins

thought with certain lines o contemporary literary theory. The eminist

thinker Elizabeth Grosz notes that questions o origin and identity make

up one o the most complex and underdiscussed elements o Darwinism,the point where Darwins own account uncannily anticipates Derridean

diffrence [sic] (21). Finding meaning only in dierences, in interstices,

Darwin seems to produce a quite peculiar, and thoroughly postmodern,

account o origin (23). Grosz uses her close reading o Darwin to trace

a line o descent running through Nietzsche and Bergson to Deleuze

and Irigaray. Meanwhile, the literary historian Louis Menand, beginning

with many o the very same passages in Darwins Origin, works out an

intellectual lineage that positions Darwin as a precursor o the philosophi-cal pragmatism o Peirce, Dewey, and Jamesa channel o thought that

eventually fows into the mainstream o American literary theory. Like

Grosz, Menand notes that or Darwin the idea o the species is a contin-

gent one. He goes on to make the pragmatist point that such contingency

does not nulliy the value o the concept o a species, although it does

radically change it: Darwin did not conclude that species do not exist. He

only concluded that species are what they appear to be: ideas, which are

provisionally useul or naming groups o interacting individuals (123).

Related insights have come rom the critics Ellen Spolsky and ColinMilburn, who have in the last decade independently articulated paral-


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lels between Darwins thought and Derridas, with Spolsky specifcally

aiming to deang the threat that poststructuralist theory seems to pose

or a cognitive-studies-oriented audience. Lastly, the Italian philosopher

Giorgio Agamben, whose Homo Sacerand The Open have become oun-

dational texts or discourse about the animal and the creaturely, shows that

the old evolutionary pseudoproblem o the missing link between ape and

human is nothing but a (Derridean) aporia, a zone o indeterminacy

(37) created by defnitional tension: Like every space o exception, this

zone is, in truth, perectly empty, and the truly human being who should

exist there is only the place o a ceaselessly updated decision (38).

Just as Darwin can be conceived o as a proto-postmodernist, so so-

ciobiology can be shown to rest on some highly Derridean premises. Thearch neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins defnes the gene in structuralist,

even deconstructive terms. He argues that the gene is best understood

not as a single protein sequence (or cistron) at a single locus on a chro-

mosome, responsible or the synthesis o a single protein chain, but as a

retroactively identifed cause o any given phenotypic eect:

The eect o any would-be cause can be given meaning only

in terms o a comparison, even i only an implied comparison,

with at least one alternative cause. It is strictly incomplete to

speak o blue eyes as the eect o a given gene G1. I we say

such a thing, we really imply the potential existence o at least

one alternative allele, call it G2, and at least one alternative phe-

notype, P2, in this case, say, brown eyes.15 (Extended195)

Biologists say a gene is or something only when a signifcant com-

parison can be made between two possible genetic variations and two

possible phenotypic eects. Unless eye color varies within a popula-tion, biologists have no reason to identiy a gene or eye color at all.

For Dawkins, phenotypic eects can always be thought o as relative

to alternative phenotypic eects (196; Dawkinss italics). This idea, he

claims, is a undamental truism, o logic more than o genetics (38). It

is simply meaningless, he argues, to speak o an absolute, context-ree,

phenotypic eect o a given gene.16 As with Saussures signifers, there

are in Dawkinss concept o the gene no positive terms, only meaningul

dierences within a system. Thus a genetic cause produces a phenotypic

eect only by what Dawkinswith no apologies to Derrida and hisamous chains o signiferscalls chains o biological and chemical


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processes: chemical chain[s] o embryonic causes (Selsh 66), long and

devious chains (Extended197), long, ramied and indirect causal chains

(198). In act, what the word genenames as the cause o a phenotypic e-

ect is not a single cistron at a single locus on a chromosome but rather

the complex interaction o many cistrons: the use o single-locus models

is just a conceptual convenience (21). A gene is really a combination o

cistrons working in concert (or confict), and the particular combination

that one identies as a gene depends on the phenotypic eect that one

chooses to isolate. For Dawkins, geneticists . . . always deal with differences.

A gene is the sum o its eects.17

Such overlooked homologies between sociobiology and literary

theory may indicate the centrality o Darwins thought to both. The greatevolutionary theorist and historian o science Ernst Mayr maintains that

Darwin dispelled not only the notion o divine creation but in act ve

major philosophical tenets, principles that undergirded not only religion

but nineteenth-century science as well: creationism, anthropocentrism,

essentialism, physicalism, and teleology (318); and in various ways the

demise o each principle reverberates through contemporary thinking.

The rejection o creationism still appears, in American political discourse

today, as the most menacing o Darwins insights, and thanks to the aggres-siveness o the undamentalist Christian political agenda, anticreationism

is probably the Darwinism most visible in the US news media. But

or the Victorians this was not necessarily Darwins most radical insight,

and certainly not his only one; his other revolutions have proved at least

as durable. Antiessentialist or antitypological thinking, or example, has

been central not only to the political agendas o contemporary liter-

ary and cultural studies but, much more broadly, to the mainstream o

twentieth-century political liberalism; Mayr, himsel a signatory to theamous 1950 UNESCO statement on racism, points to antiessentialist

thinking as grounds or debunking any (pseudo)scientic racism (320).

Meanwhile, Darwins antiphysicalism contributes to a shit rom the

clockwork model o the Newtonian universe to a view o science based

on a probabilism that recognizes temporal change, emergence, and

stochastic processes (a newly available understanding o nature as open

and dynamic that inorms Omri Mosess interpretation, in this issue, o

habit in Gertrude Steins work). Next, by overturning anthropocentrism,

Darwin strikes an irreversible blow to what Freud later calls mans narcis-sistic notion o himsel as holding a privileged place in the universe. This


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critique o anthropocentrism, unimaginable in its current orm without

Darwin, has given rise to the burgeoning area o animal studies (Wole

564), an interdisciplinary zone where political advocacy, cultural studies,

Continental philosophy, ecocriticism, and biology intersect to discuss

nonhuman animals and their use, representation, and theorization by hu-

man ones. Finally, Darwins antiteleological view o evolutionhis view

o the world as a continually changing work in progresshas, as George

Levine argues, undamentally reshaped the expectations that readers bring

to plots and radically problematized the way that novels achieve or ail to

achieve narrative resolution:

The growing nineteenth-century dissatisactions with closurethe most marked and inevitable eature o plottingare

urther refections o this Darwinian movement away rom te-

leology and . . . toward a new kind o emphasis on continuing

change. (19)

Mayrs ramework, then, sketchy as it may be, oers touchstones or

understanding how Darwins thought ramies through twentieth-century

literature, and thus why a journal taking that literature as its area o study

should devote an issue to his conjunction with modern literature. Forwhile Grosz and Menand help us to see Darwins impact on particular

modernist-era thinkers, we can go still urther and claim that Darwin

makes possible modernism itsel. Though it may be true that in a nar-

row sense the decades o modernism beore the synthesis o Darwin and

Mendel are marked by what has been called an eclipse o Darwinism

(Bowler)the prevalence o soter or more Lamarckian models o in-

heritancein a broader sense the ar-ranging questions opened by Dar-

win play out ully in various directions throughout modernist texts, andbeyond them in the second hal o the century. Teaching a course on the

modern British novel, I cannot ail to note, or example, Cesare Lombro-

sos Darwinian criminology in Conrads The Secret Agent, sociobiological

explanations o womanly beauty in JoycesA Portrait of the Artist as a Young

Man, repeated reerence to Darwin in the psychotic visions o Septimus

Smith in Wool s Mrs. Dalloway, invocations o Charles Lyells geological

deep time in ForstersA Passage to India, and the burning o a copy oThe

Descent of Man in the opening pages o Ivy Compton-BurnettsA House

and its Head. These multiple, various textual appearances o Darwin orDarwinian ideas suggest, perhaps, what Ive argued elsewhere: that rather


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than a Darwinian understanding o culture, what is needed is a cultural

understanding o Darwin, that is, o the contradictory, dynamic, and orce-

ul signifcations that his name and work have assumed over the twentieth

century.

The essays collected in this issue ollow no single methodology, nor do

they subordinate the feld o literary criticism to experimental psychology.

The works they analyze cover the chronological range o the twentieth

century (and then some) rom fn-de-sicle essays by W. E. B. Du Bois

and T. H. Huxley to a novel o J. M. Coetzee published at the centurysclose. They consider literature that is lyric and satiric, realist and antastic,

argumentative and parabolic. They address issues o race, class, gender, and

sexuality; and also o language, character, genre, ethics, and politics. And

yetalong with the fve book reviews that treat recent work on this and

related topicsthey coalesce into a tight cluster o common themes and

ideas.

For example, almost all the essays partake o a theoretical eort to

think past the timeworn nature/nurture debate. Omri Mosess discussiono Gertrude Stein emphasizes a dynamic, processual, and developmental

model o evolution and situates Stein in a vitalist tradition that descends

rom Darwin and includes Bergson and James. This tradition discerns a

startling continuum between biology and culture and proves particularly

useul to contemporary thinking because it contests both concepts o

biological essentialism and social constructivism (447). A key term or

Moses here is habit, which in Steins viewand in her practiceis a

constructive orce. Against orthodox neoromantic or modernist under-standings o habit as deadening (akin to outworn social and aesthetic

conventions), Steins habit is a gradualist and incremental but unpredict-

able and livelypattern o repetition with dierence, a pattern that is not

inevitable or uniorm (448). Developing at the boundary o nature and

culture, the internal and external, the voluntary and the involuntary, it

structures Steins literary innovations on the level o sentence, character,

narrative, and genre. Part o a nondeterministic and nonphysicalist uni-

verse, habit is a dynamic orce rather than an archive (464). Ultimately,

or Moses, Stein proves a stronger advocate or habit than even Bergsonand James; she resembles more closely their teacher, Darwin himsel,


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who apprehends a balance between creative and conservative unctions

o habit. Like Darwin, Stein concentrates attention on microevents that

reveal emergent changes rom an earlier precedent (446). Moses thus

challenges accounts o evolution that rely on understanding heredity as a

mere blueprint, accounts o modernism that undervalue the repetitions

o habit, and accounts o Stein that condemn her attention to characters

as immutable types.

The mutual implication o culture and biology likewise emerges

in Laura Otiss essay, which discerns strong parallels between George

Bernard Shaws Pygmalion, a social comedy o class mobility, and H. G.

Wellss The Island of Dr. Moreau, a science ction adventure about tra-

versing the species barrier. Otis points out that Wells (a student o T. H.Huxley) saw much greater promise in science than did the ever-skeptical

(and stubbornly Lamarckian) Shaw. Still, she demonstrates how in both

these tales o metamorphosis, the authors indict the scientist gure or

an ethical indierence to the pain caused by his will-to-knowledge,

and how both narratives show experimental transormations entailing

complexities beyond the scientists anticipation or control. These paral-

lels allow Otis to urther demonstrate how, in the wake o Darwin, the

discourses o class and species are o necessity interlaced: Eliza Doolittlesclass transormation is represented through animal metaphors, while the

rebellion o Moreaus beast people against their dictatorial ruler has

clear sociopolitical overtones. Thus while Shaws work is oten held to

be more optimistic about the possibility o social change, Otis breaks

with received opinion by viewing Pygmalion as closer to Moreau in that

both works attack the credibility o missionary narratives o individual

rescues in which Christian charity, along with cleanliness and sobriety, are

sucient to alter human (or beastly) behavior. Although neither writerendorses laissez-aire Social Darwinism, both radically test the plasticity

o social structuresindeed o the social as such. In Otiss reading, they

ultimately suggest that transormation must be systemic i it is to be last-

ing, and that the scientist or social engineer ignores this conclusion at his

peril.

Taking a slightly dierent angle o approach, Dana Carluccio seeks

to historicize the confict between social constructionism and biologi-

cal essentialism in her examination o race in American modernism. She

argues that our understanding o both modernist accounts o race andcurrent-day debates over evolutionary psychology are incomplete i we


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ail to acknowledge the prominence o Darwinian thinking in the works

o writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and George Schuyler. For Du Bois,

evolutionary thinking is not a biological reductionism but rather a

middle term (513) between the biological and the cultural that mediates

by shiting attention rom essences to unctions. Instead o a set o geneti-

cally controlled and fxed traits, race becomes an inevitable cognitive

propensity to act as ifsuch traits existed. In short, Du Bois views race as

a cognitive fctionan evolved technology (515) that serves (or has

served) an adaptive unction. Because it directs attention to what race does

rather than what it is, a cognitive fction can persist independently o

[its] correlation to anything outside [itsel] (517).18 Carluccio mobilizes

this idea o race as a cognitive fction in a sedulously careul reading oSchuylers wild satire Black No More. Whereas Du Bois uses the notion

o (seeing) race as an evolved cognitive capacity to deend racial plural-

ism, the pessimistic Schuyler intimates that our evolutionary inheritance

has poorly equipped our minds or a modern world vastly dierent rom

the environment to which we adapted. I race is a cognitive adaptation,

Schuylers novel seems to imply, it is one that seems now to serve only

violent or exploitive ends.

Susan McCabes essay on Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishopfnds in Darwinwhose work both poets knew deeplypossibilities

rather than limitations, and in her reading he becomes a thinker ar more

intriguing than we see in the reductions o his ideas given to us by con-

temporary pop culture. Darwin proves valuable or Moore and Bishop

in multiple ways: his naturalists eye or the distinguishing detail oers a

model o poetic observation; his intellectual honesty provides an under-

standing o the natural world that is unsentimental, even depersonalized

yet flled with attractive anomalies and originals (548); his imaginationo slow, gradual change provides an analogy or the creative process; his

empiricists gathering o samples mirrors a modernist process o poetic

composition that entails the collecting and culling o literary specimens.

Most o all, his scrupulous attention to variations, dierences, and oddities

allows Darwin to emerge as an early queer theorist who adumbrates mod-

els o mothering and sexuality that escape the dominant Freudian oedipal

paradigm. Thus even though Darwins own writing avoids representation

o motherhood, he still can oermost strikingly in his discussions o

artifcial selection and the breeding o pigeonsunorthodox scenarioso domestication that contrast with the traditional ones that are gener-


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ally associated with mothering and the rearing o the young (555). The

queer fgures o the male mother, the dandyish ancier, the obsessive

taxonomist (554),the student o extinct and orgotten species, and thecollector o natures odd variations all allow or a breakrom teleologicalsexuality and point the way toward thinking beyond rigid attachment

to fxed or immutable orms o embodiment (569).

Reconnecting Darwins insights with those o recent theory, fnally,

can inorm the understandings o a concept increasingly visible in liter-

ary studies, the animal. The two essays that close out this volume engage

the animalor, to use the term that Eric Santner has avored, the crea-

turely19in both the midcentury moment o the new atomic age and

the postCold War moment o the centurys close, when the all o theSoviet Union and the end o apartheid awakened new political hopes

but also new uncertainties. Keith Leslie Johnsons essay on T. H. Huxley

and his grandson Aldous examines the younger writers 1948 novelApe

and Essencewithin the problematic o post-Darwinian ethics (584), a

problematic Johnson reads with the help o Agambens writings on the

human-animal binary. Johnsons essay begins with T. H. Huxleys struggle

to relate the two terms in the title o his 1893 lecture, Evolution and

Ethics, showing how his best eorts to decouple the natural world oevolutionary change rom the human realm o ethics deconstructs itsel,

as concepts like sympathy and justice prove too slippery to unction as

criteria o distinction. This philosophical struggle then serves to clariy the

ethical stakes in Aldous Huxleys post-Holocaust novel, whichrom its

opening invocation o Gandhis murder to its presentation o a screenplay

describing a antasy o warring mutant eugenicist primatesthematizes

the abject body as a site where sovereign power is both exercised and

resisted. Ultimately, the distinctions between human, animal, and monstermatter less to Aldous than the act o the subjection o all lie to power.

A Darwinian understanding o lie, viewed through Agamben, helps us

to discern the logic o those alienating zones o the nonhuman within

the human, zones which become visible in apartheid, in genocide, in

anti-Semitism, racism, and so orth (589). Through a ludicrous (and

oten aesthetically reviled) science fction scenario, Huxleys antastical

screenplay-novel illumines the very real biopolitical allout o twentieth-

century social Darwinisms.

Deirdre Colemans essay engages a similar problematic at a laterhistorical moment and in a radically dierent genre by turning to a


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contemporary novelist central to theoretical investigations o the animal,

J. M. Coetzee. Coetzee has long been concerned with human beings in

the condition o abjection, and his 199798 Tanner Lectures at Princeton,

collected as The Lives of Animals, have become canonical texts or suggest-

ing how literature might challenge an anthropocentric worldview. In her

reading o Coetzees novel Disgrace, Coleman recognizes that Darwin is a

necessary fgure or contemporary theorizations o the creaturely. Work-

ing through multiple allusions in Disgraceto romantic writers, she fnds in

that earlier historical momentby no accident, a moment just prior to

Darwins own writinga romantic dialectic . . . between a Malthusian

population principle and a Godwinian drive o the species to perect

itsel (604). She argues that David Lurie, the novels protagonist, under-stands postapartheid South Arica through an implicit interpretation o

Darwin and Malthus (a Social Darwinism) that views political, personal,

and sexual relations through a brutal calculus o biological competition

among races to survive and reproducea competition in which women

are relegated to the status o material resources. But Luries ear o racial

swamping (601), tied to his individual anxiety about evolutionary and

reproductive ailure (607), gives way to an alternative reading o Darwin

that recognizes continuity not only between races but between species.Luries avored romantic authors turn out, in this view, to be early theo-

reticians o the creaturely, with archetypal outcasts like Frankensteins

creature or Byrons Lara calling upon the reader or understanding and

sympathy.

As Colemans reading outlines a dichotomy o political possibilities

or Darwinism, so the essays in this issue together indicate a richness and

a mutliariousness o implication to Darwins thought that go ar beyond

the caricatures and slogans oered to us by todays journalism. Ernst Mayr,in the article Ive quoted, notes that Darwins ideas were liberating even

as they placed a new burden on modern man (323), and he goes so ar

as to claim that the end o Panglossian teleology means that I we want

to have a better world it is up to us to take the necessary steps (324).

The stakes o interpreting Darwin, on this view, are high indeed. And

while none o the essays collected here presumes to claim the last word

on either Darwins place in literary study or the ways in which he might

point us to a better world, taken together they all surely demonstrate

that over the entire span o the twentieth century, writers have ully rec-ognized and grappled with the reedoms and burdens that Mayr discerns.


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Jonathan Greenberg

Working to open interpretive possibilities rather than to oreclose them,

these essays together demonstrate that just as literature has taken up the

complex challenges posed by Darwin, so too has literary criticism.

Notes1. A program to resolve disciplinary dierences by reinterpreting all knowledge

via the methods and discourses o the natural sciences.

2. Guillory takes the term rom Louis Althusser. It designates a set o philo-

sophical positions that generates and justifes research but has become so wide-

ly accepted and reproduced that it has ceased to be philosophically questioned

within a given discourse community. For Guillory, Spontaneous philosophy

is something more than common sense, i also something less than adequate

philosophy (Sokal 476). Elsewhere Guillory describes it as the discourse

o sel-description and legitimation produced alongside practice (Critical

Response 528) and remarks that sel-congratulation is the worst eature o

spontaneous philosophy (530).

3. Literary Darwinism, along with the related feld o cognitive literary study,

was recently championed in The New York Times with this very clich (Cohen).So-called cognitive approaches to literature do not necessarily assume a neo-

Darwinist view, and many oundational cognitive scientists (Noam Chomsky,

Jerry Fodor) strongly reject some o the premises o the Dawkins-Dennett

school; still, evolutionary psychology conceives o itsel as using sociobiology

and cognitive science, and in literary studies there is much overlap between the

subschools.

4. See or example Joseph Carrolls claim that a very large proportion o the

work in critical theory that has been done in the last twenty years . . . is es-

sentially a wrong turn, a dead end, a misconceived enterprise, a repository o

delusions and wasted eorts (25). Brian Boyd, slightly less strident, writes:

The prevailing mode o literary theory in academe oten calls itsel

simply Theory, as i theories like those o gravity, evolution, and

relativity were nugatory. . . . Capital-T theory . . . has isolated literary

criticism rom the rest o modern thought and alienated literary studies

even rom literature itsel. (384)

5. For works o literary Darwinism see Carroll, Boyd, Storey, Dutton, Dis-

sanayake, Barash and Barash, and Gottschall. William Fleschs Comeuppanceis

reviewed in this issue.


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6. See Easterlin, Richardson and Steen, Gottschall and Wilson, Boyd, Carroll,

and Gottschall.

7. This argument is central to Goulds critique o the neo-Darwinists andtends to be grudgingly conceded. Gould notes Nietzsches arguments or the

nonequivalence o current utility and causes o origin and cites the anal-

ogy made in The Genealogy of Morals between the sociocultural evolution o

punishment and the biological evolution o organs such as the hand or the eye

(Structure1214). One nds, interestingly, the exact same point made by Michel

Foucault: The eye was not always intended or contemplation, and punish-

ment has had other purposes than setting an example (83).

8. Except, o course, when the existing order is so plainly undesirable that it

cannot be justiedin which case it is human intererence with nature that is

blamed.

9. For an especially vivid illustration o inadvertent status quo-ism conficting

with the authors proessed liberalism, see Steven Pinker.

10. Carroll claims:

The basic poststructuralist position, inverting that o Alexander Pope, is

that whatever is, is wrong. I would not agree with Pope that whatever

is, is right, but I would agree even less with people who are undamen-tally opposed to the very principle o normative order. (26)

Note Carrolls polemical raming o his opponents position as radical and his

own as moderate.

11. See or example Tony Jackson, who nds much to endorse in the program

o reconciling literary criticism with empirically oriented cognitive disciplines,

but opines: Too oten it seems that the vocabulary o cognitive rhetoric is

simply being plugged into the interpretation (173). See also William Benzons

book review in this issue:

I nd [Fleschs] explication [o spite and vindictiveness] interesting, but

thats not the point. Is that explication useul and illuminating, does

it do more than ground those notions in biology? Im not sure that

it does. . . . Thus its not clear to me how ar his literary analysis goes

beyond the complex redescription o actions in biological terms.

(63233)12. Thus it may be that the ot-perceived antitheory bent o literary Darwin-

ism is less a simple anti-intellectualism than an antimodernism. I, as FredricJameson argues, modernism made the canon in its own image (179), so that


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Jonathan Greenberg

great works o the past (Pounds troubadours, Eliots metaphysicals) were iden-

tifed as those that achieved a kind o difculty, complexity, or aective sophis-

tication at odds with reigning bourgeois protocols, then modernism would

aim to renounce those very aspects o reading, art, or literature that literary

Darwinism seeks to explain. For it is o course the popular bourgeois orms

o artor indeed the earlier collective and oral orms o song and storytell-

ingwhose evolution literary Darwinism must address i it would approach

anything like the explanation o a species-wide universal. Thus modernism and

the poststructuralist theory that in many ways derives rom it would alike ap-

pear largely irrelevant i not downright perverse to literary Darwinism because

they cultivate a specialized, sophisticated, highly trained readership. In this,

then, literary Darwinists fnd company in that branch o let-leaning cultural

studies that views high modernism as an elitist mystifcation o art and urges

instead critical attention to popular orms.

13. For Gottschalls idea o literature as social science data, see D. T. Max.

14. Biopoliticalis a coinage o Foucaults, used to reer to the subjection o lie,

bodies, populations, reproduction, and sexuality to political power; it is a major

theme o Agambens thought as well. Santner defnes it as the threshold where

lie becomes a matter o politics and politics comes to inorm the very matter

and materiality o lie (12).

15. An allele is an alternative orm o the gene potentially occupying the same

place on the chromosome.

16. As Dawkins writes in his earlier and even more amous book, The Selsh

Gene:

No one actor, genetic or environmental, can be considered as the

single cause o any part o a baby. All parts o a baby have a near

infnite number o antecedent causes. But a differencebetween one baby

and another, or example, a dierence in length o leg, might easily betraced to one or a ew antecedent dierences, either in environment

or in genes. It is differences which matter in the competitive struggle to

survive. (37; Dawkinss italics).

17. One could trace a similar poststructuralist tendency in Daniel Dennetts

deconstruction o the sel, which he acknowledged to overlap with French

poststructuralist descriptions. Dennett indeed gives a fne, i inadvertent, sketch

o the Foucauldian theory o power when he attempts to illustrate his own

view o the sel. He claims that philosophers o mind tend

to treat the mind (that is to say, the brain) as the bodys boss, the pilot

th hi F lli i ith thi t d d thi ki i


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important alternative: viewing the brain (and hence the mind) as one

organ among many, a relatively recent usurper o control, whose unc-

tions cannot properly be understood until we see it not as the boss,

but as just one more somewhat ractious servant, working to urther

the interests o the body that shelters and uels it, and gives its activi-

ties meaning. This historical or evolutionary perspective reminds me o

the change that has come over Oxord in the thirty years since I was

a student there. It used to be that the dons were in charge, while the

bursars and other bureaucrats, right up to the Vice Chancellor, acted

under their guidance and at their behest. Nowadays the dons, like their

counterparts on American university aculties, are more clearly in the

role o employees hired by a central Administration, but rom where,

fnally, does the University get its meaning? In evolutionary history, a

similar change has crept over the administration o our bodies. Where

resides the I who is in charge o my body? (3)

18. C. Boyd, who, ollowing David Sloan Wilson, reminds us that Evolu-

tion . . . places no premium on truth (205). In dierent contexts, both

perceiving and misperceiving truth can be advantageous.

19. Santner distinguishes his psychoanalytically inormed approach rom those

whose primary aim is to break down the boundaries between the human and

the nonhuman. Rather than stressing human similarity to or solidarity with

the nonhuman animal, he emphasizes instead creaturely lie as a distinctly hu-

man dimension (18).

I would like to thank Lee Zimmerman, Naomi Liebler, and David Greenberg

or their comments on this essay. I would also like to thank Proessor Andrew

Weiner o Spaightwood Galleries in Upton, MA, or his help in securing per-

mission or the image on the cover o this issue.

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