Subversive Seduction: Darwin, Sexual Selection, and the Spanish Novel

7. A Romance with Darwin in the Evolutionary Noche of Alejandro Sawa

181 c h a p t e r se v e n A Romance with Darwin in the Evolutionary Noche of Alejandro Sawa Building on the theoretical, scientific-feminist, and historical foundations of part 1, the three chapters of part 2 engaged discrete components of Darwinian sexual selection—the players, the mechanics, and the outcomes—so as to read them anew through literature. In each case, close attention to Darwin’s own voice from The Descent gave rise to original inquiries into the relationship between his theory and its praxis in the sexual politics of Spain during the late nineteenth century. The realist novels of Picón, Clarín, and Galdós captured this seldom recognized but ever-present aspect of evolutionism through their representation of courtship and, in particular, concerns over the patriarchal power dynamics governing women’s choice. Specific instantiations brought to light unanticipated facets of Darwin’s thought, and together they illuminated the reach of the indeterminism bound up in his science. Thus, with each telling it became ever more evident that this indeterminism cannot be separated from questions of community. No doubt, this side of the “extremely complex affair” (The Descent, 1:296) has to do with Darwin’s inconsistencies and uncertainties, but as we have seen, there are other complicating factors. Constants in the Darwinian model like conscience, language, and the imagination imbue humankind and evolutionary portrayals of it with an unfinished character, an “indefinite amount of fluctuating variability” (The Descent, 1:114) as it were, and therefore the novelistic analogues up to this point correspond to historical circumstance only insofar as Speciations 182 both the science and the fiction exhibit like plasticity. In other words, to get back to the theoretical frame I establish in chapter 1, the very notion of “real” reciprocity between literature and science is about how we read the realist movement, which was an aesthetic approach to reality held together by “pure possibility” and “historical contingencies ” as outlined in my earlier chapters. It is a way of reading centered on the dynamism of the coupling and is ethical to the extent that the search, premised on questions of social justice like women’s rights, involves history in the making. This is the kind of scholarship Edward Said has in mind when calling for interdisciplinary studies that move literature beyond its “isolated paddock” toward a greater awareness of the “stake in historical and political effectiveness” novels and other texts, like The Descent, can be seen to have had once appreciated in tandem.1 In the introduction, I mentioned that Bert Bender explains his study of Darwinian sexual selection and American fiction as one concerned with the influence of the former on the latter. What I left out is that the book as a whole bypasses the feminist dimension of the problem as he poses it. By contrast, I cannot see the relationship between the theory and realist representation in any other light, given the sociopolitical stakes of courtship at the time. Sexual selection among men and women has always been about much more than reproductive success; it involves power. Never fixed, the social conditions (historical context ) and aesthetic responses (adaptations) remain open-ended. Constant change need not equate to progress as improvement, but it very well might. It requires, instead, that knowledge occur in the questioning through an interdisciplinary optic that brings different forms of cultural production into contact in a setting that makes intelligible the material consequence of their union. Understanding an indeterminate Darwin through literature, therefore, is about understanding both better. But for the union to be meaningful, the second step, naturally , is to make the intersection mean something. The chapters of “Adaptations” have begun this process, fashioning a less predictable Darwin, but this is not enough. The space created up to this point, as it happens, allows sexual selection to spill over into issues assumed to lie even further outside its purview. With a writer like Alejandro Sawa (1862–1909), the bleak fatalism of his novels makes reading for the same sort of openness much more difficult. At the level of content, there is no similar space to maneuver . Sawa’s obsession with the evil that lurks behind every corner of A Romance with Darwin 183 society, especially in his novel Noche (1888), communicates in its closure a very clear message about all that is wrong with the world. He might therefore be a more limited...