Adaptation: On Literary Darwinism

From the Nation

Fantastic piece on a new trend in literary criticism. The whole thing bears careful reading. I remember encountering a cri de coeur from Gotschall (I believe) in the Globe (again, not sure) several months ago enough to be intrigued and I am at least passingly familiar with Dutton's Art Instinct, having read a few reviews when it came out. I have respected the pieces I have read by Dutton—not to mention the fact I admire his indispensable resource Arts & Letters Daily—so I am a little skeptical of the criticism leveled by Deresiewicz that he is not a serious thinker, but again, I have not read the book and, judging by the links gathered on ALDaily, I like his taste. Whatever the merits of Dutton's thought more generally or the book in particular, I am inclined to agree with the merits of Literary Darwinism. I admire its ambition, to be sure, and its insistence we move away from Theory, but this isn't—or can't be—the next big thing. The graf, for me, is here:

Again and again, Darwinian criticism sets out to say something specific, only to end up telling us something general. An essay that purports to explain Shakespeare's preeminence as a playwright argues instead that drama appeals to us because it portrays the social dynamics of small human groups (as evidenced by the fact that Shakespeare's casts range from eighteen to forty-seven characters). Boyd devotes a hundred pages to the Odyssey without saying anything he couldn't have said with Anna Karenina or Middlemarch or Proust. The discussion is nothing more than an illustration of Darwinian ideas, not an explication of Homeric meanings. Indeed, it's an illustration of largely one idea, that before an artist can even worry about meanings, he needs to figure out how to hold his audience's attention. If the point sounds banal, that is squarely within the emerging disciplinary tradition. I have read any number of Darwinian essays about Pride and Prejudice (one critic calls it their "fruit fly"), but I have yet to read one that told me anything interesting. The idea that the novel is about mate selection does not count as an original contribution.

Literary Darwinism's reductive tendencies enforce an impoverished view of both literature and life. Because it deals only with fiction and drama, the narrative modes, the field ignores one of the three major branches of literature, lyric poetry, altogether. Then there is the sensitivity with which it handles the things it does address. "Genre," Carroll says, "is largely a matter of feeling--tragedy is sad, and comedy happy." First of all, genre is not largely a matter of feeling; it is largely a matter of form. Second, Carroll's scheme leaves no room for mixed cases like dark comedy or tragicomedy. Third, Oedipus Rex or King Lear may leave us feeling many things--stunned, emptied, exhilarated, exalted; Aristotle's catharsis of pity and terror will probably never be improved upon as a description of that unique state--but "sad" is not one of them. Another study cracks the conundrum of Hamlet. It turns out the play is about choosing between personal self-interest (taking over the kingdom by killing your uncle) and genetic self-interest (letting Mummy provide you with a few siblings, who would carry a share of your genes). Aside from being completely daft, and missing everything important about the play, this reading ignores the fact that, with a 30-year-old son, Gertrude is not going to be having any more babies anytime soon.

And the heart, appropriately, is at the end, the review broadening out to address the same crisis in the humanities Literary Darwinism addresses, ideological in the widest possible sense:

"There is much talk among the literary Darwinists and their allies about not wanting to go back to the days of 'old-boy humanism,' with its 'impressionistic' reading and 'belletristic' writing. (Only in English departments could good writing be considered a bad thing.) But no matter the age or gender of the practitioner, any really worthwhile criticism will share the expressive qualities of literature itself. It will be personal, because art is personal. It will not be definitive; it will not be universally valid. It will be a product of its times, though it will see beyond those times. It will not satisfy the dean's desire for accumulable knowledge, the parent's desire for a marketable skill or the Congressman's desire for a generation of technologists. All it will do is help us understand who we are, where we came from and where we're going. Until the literary academy is willing to stand up in public and defend that mission without apology, it will never find its way out of the maze."