Embryologies of Modernism

In October 1926, critic C. H. Rickword observed that “character is, to borrow biological jargon, an emergent quality of the novel. It emerges from the story, which is itself structurally a product of language. . . .” ¹In a review of Elizabeth Drew’s study, The Modern Novel,Rickword called character an “organizing principle” (“NF,” 156), and defined “the quality that is common to all great works of literature, in no matter what genre” (“NF,” 157): “it is primarily a sequence of events developing in accordance with an inner necessity” (“NF,” 157). In its interest in a sequence of developmental events, the notion of an inner necessity, the concept of an organizing principle, and its opposition between an “emergent quality” and the structural surround from which it emerges, as in its overt admission that it is borrowing from biology, this manifesto from the realm of literature challenges the two-culture divide. Rickword is writing about literature using terms current in modern embryology.

I want to explore the possibility that developments in the scientific field of embryology—concerned as it is with the principle of individual development against a backdrop of species change over time—have a relationship to developments within the art of fiction, with the latter’s emphasis on character creation against a backdrop of narrative and language, in the modern period. ²In short, I will ask: What connections may exist between the embryological “take” on the developing individual, and the literary approach to character construction in the first three decades of the twentieth century?

Since its origins in the observations of Hippocrates and Aristotle, embryology focused on “the most obstinate biological problem of all—that of how the egg develops into a complex organism.” ³While in the nineteenth century it was primarily a descriptive science, concerned with morphology, with form, by the dawn of the twentieth century, embryology had emerged as an experimental science as embryologists engaged in a heated series of debates. ⁴Vitalists, favoring the notion of a life-force fueling development, were vanquished by mechanists, who held that embryonic development could be explained “on a mechanical cause-and-effect basis” (SL,263). ⁵Preformationists, who held that the entire adult organism existed preformed in the egg, were decisively overruled by epigenesists, who held that the organism developed through successive processes of differentiation, from a previously undifferentiated entity (SL,31). These movements in modern embryology had their parallels in modern culture at large, in its increasing mechanization, breakdown of communal certainties, and threat to conventional ideas of causality and predictability. ⁶So just as the seventeenth century saw the development of a “fetal subject” suiting the new requirements of the liberal civil state, early-twentieth-century embryology charted the development of a new embryo suited to its period. ⁷This was an embryo neither preformed nor infused with an ineffable life force, but instead machine-like and developing into a greater differentiation subject to the reign of chance.

Three new experimental techniques developed in the first two decades of the twentieth century enabled embryologists to investigate the nature of the relationship between individual and species (phenotype and genotype) or, to put it more broadly, between the problems of embryonic development and hereditary transmission of differences. They were tissue culture, grafting, and artificial parthenogenesis. ⁸These techniques are particularly interesting, because they address issues in embryology that echo specific problems of character creation in modern literature: the temporal and spatial boundaries of the individual, the malleability of sex/gender, and the organizing principles of development.

The technique of tissue culture, perfected in 1907, enabled embryologists to excise living tissue and keep it alive, bathed in a nutrient solution, in petri dishes or test tubes. American scientist Ross Harrison first carried out this technique successfully in his anatomy lab at The Johns Hopkins University, when he induced fragments of nervous tissue from frog embryos to stay alive, and to produce outgrowths, when cultured outside the body. The same technique was later practiced with great cultural prominence by Alexis Carrel, who brought it to London—and mass cultural celebrity—in 1924. ⁹The technique of grafting was perfected by...