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."

Postcards from the Edge - Tocqueville’s Letters Home

From NYT:

"Ostensibly, Tocqueville and his friend and traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, were here to study the American prison system for the French government, and on their return they dutifully filed a lengthy report — a book so forbidding that, though he owns a copy, Mr. Brown has so far avoided reading it.

But almost from the start of his trip Tocqueville, at least, seems to have imagined another kind of book, a study of Americans themselves, and he turned every encounter with them into a reporting mission. “No one is better set up for the study of the American people than we are,” he wrote to Edouard. “Our mission and our letters open all doors; we rub shoulders with all classes.”"

Having read the selections that the article mentions, I can confirm they are indeed delightful. (His first letter, like that of any good son, was to his mother.) Tocqueville himself was a delight, at least as far as I remember him from reading Democracy in America in college, even at his most prosaic. I would have loved to have a glass of wine with him, especially given that, with his pedigree, he probably had an amazing cellar. The kind of wine you should drink like water.

Interview with Madeleine Peyroux

From The Telegraph:

"Bare Bones finds Peyroux exploring ways of processing her grief over her father's death and embracing a life in the moment. 'It deals with loss, transition, discovery,' she says. And it opens with a jaunty gipsy jazz number on the bright theme of 'Instead of feeling low/Get high on everything you love'.

'I looked for ideas in literature,' she says, 'I checked out a few writers that I hadn't been able to grasp: Lorca, Neruda. I even tried Dante's Inferno because I wanted to look at the Christian idea of salvation in another poetic light outside the Bible.'"

I like Peyroux and her idiosyncratic, boho biography. I don't even mind the Billie Holliday comparisons, technically warranted, perhaps, but not at all accurate, as Billie was contingent on so much that was extra-vocal, and not merely biography. Such is the fate of icons from iconic times. There really will never be another Billie. To return to Peyroux: I haven't listened to this album too much, but her others—when I was going into contemporary jazz singers in a major way—I am more familiar with, and I recall being particularly impressed with her rendition of Piaf's signature song, "La Vie En Rose" (the recent biopic made an especially deft touch in speculating Piaf liked Holiday's music; they would have had much to talk about, I think) and that song belongs to her almost as much as "Strange Fruit" belongs to Billie, so the achievement is no mean one.

What made me bookmark this interview, at least in part, though, was the idea of looking for consolation in poetry, and those poets in particular. And, later in the article, the real graf:

The album ends with Somethin' Grand written in support of Barack Obama. "I recorded vocals on election day," she says, "without any planning ahead, and came back to the house to see that he had landed in a landslide. That night, I watched his speech in tears, as we all did."

Peyroux dedicated another song, I Must Be Saved to the singer Odetta, who died last year. The artist and civil rights activist "changed everything" for Peyroux.

"I was lucky enough to meet her while I was recording a Bessie Smith song in 2004. I looked up and she was conducting me from the vocal booth, not just with her hands but with every emotion running across her face.

"Without being less humble than I should be, I felt I had an understanding with her. I felt we recognised that the blues are a part of our heritage, too. That women are not only doing and experiencing the same things as men, but also that we can see what men are going through."

The Odetta anecdote is worth the entire interview, but in light of the Obama song, it acquires an added force, for Odetta was supposed to sing at the inauguration but died days before. Aretha did a creditable job, to be sure, but Odetta! I will never forget what Rosa Parks replied when asked about what music she liked best: "All the songs Odetta sings."

Byatt on Forster

From The Times of London:

A. S. Byatt, novelist, on Howard’s End

When I was a student, I regarded Howard’s End as the moral epitome of goodness. One used to think: 'This is wonderful, here is a novelist who says we must connect the businessman with the world of the arts,' then you slowly realise that E. M. Forster actually can’t do it. His businessman is not an adequate businessman to carry the weight Forster wants him to carry, he’s simply unpleasant. Forster is too parochial and he holds inside himself the snobberies that he thinks he is castigating. The Schlegel sisters [in the novel] feel they’re very superior, but Forster also sort of feels they’re superior. I particularly dislike his treatment of Leonard Bast — Forster is really mocking him. Just think what D. H. Lawrence would have done with it.'

And Forster cannot do sex between a man and a woman. When Helen Schlegel and Leonard Bast make love, it is simply Forster the author saying: 'My plot requires these two people to make love to each other.' He cannot really imagine it happening. He can’t really imagine the world he is trying to call into being.'

Though tending toward overstatement, many of these have a point, several of which I am in sympathy with, but it is the anti-Forster selection from Byatt—whose work I actually admire, unlike James Wood (see his eviscerating takedown from the LRB here, complete with spirited riposte from Isobel Armstrong; I much preferred his takedown of Paul Auster in the New Yorker here)—that has given me the most pause. For I admire Howard's End, too, and Forster more generally, but she's right about Bast and I suspect there's a germ of truth in the rest of it. That said, I wonder how much I am being swayed by this recent piece in the New Criterion on Forster (by way of Kermode lectures under consideration), faulting him for the same snobberies but praising him in the main.