Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice

2. An Evolutionary Apologia pro Vita Mea

In an interview for his online forum Neuronarrative, David DiSalvo asked, “What is your favorite work of literature?” The following essay is my answer. , I’m going to fudge on this question, expanding it to take in more than one genre and more than one phase of my own imaginative life—not a single “favorite,” but some few favorites. The most intense and vivid imaginative experience I ever had was in reading the major poems of Wallace Stevens’ culminating visionary phase, especially “The Owl in the Sarcophagus.” I’ve also had some fine high moments with Keats, sensually rich and meditatively pure. Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles gave me my richest, warmest, most lyrical and emotionally absorbed experience in reading a novel. When I first read George Eliot’s Middlemarch, I had the kind of epiphanic experience—expanding my own imagination to its limits—that I had also with the late visionary poetry of Wallace Stevens, though the mode, of course, was different. I have to confess that when I first read Stevens, I was a half-witting participant in the late Romantic effort to preserve some imaginative realm for “spiritual” experience. As I was writing my book on Stevens, that belief faded and failed, and I had to finish the book in grim scholarly determination just to tell the truth about Stevens, a truth few other critics had even glimpsed—the simple observation that he is essentially a religious poet. Something similar chapter 2 , An Evolutionary Apologia pro Vita Mea 55 56 Reading Human Nature happened in my history with Middlemarch, which has a divided worldview. One view is shrewdly realistic and ironic (a perspective embodied in the character Mary Garth). The other is idealistic, spiritual, moralistic, a perspective embodied in Dorothea Brooke. In the moralistic vein, Dorothea does what Stevens did in the visionary, lyrical vein—offers a secular imaginative approximation to a religious worldview. I bought into that, thus giving evidence that at that time, in my early twenties, I was still only gradually withdrawing from a religious worldview. That “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” has been a chief trajectory of the modern imagination. My own trajectory recapitulated it in brief and in small. Nowadays, Dorothea’s ardent spiritual yearnings just get on my nerves. Stevens doesn’t, though. I wrote an article for a Cambridge Companion to Stevens a few years ago and revisited all his work and my own writing on it. It was like reliving the most intense love affair of one’s youth. As in a museum, perfectly preserved, untarnished, lovely in memory, but no longer part of the actual world. I lost all literal religious belief—became a confirmed atheist—when I was sixteen, but it took another fourteen years or so to drain out the last of the late Romantic imaginative spiritualism . In this gradual fading, my own experience is something like that of Darwin, who never underwent any convulsive loss of religious faith (unlike many of his contemporaries). The final paragraph of On the Origin of Species invokes “the Creator.” After that, as Darwin explains in his autobiography, his sense of things faded into the light of common day. That kind of perspectival change radically alters one’s whole repertory of imaginative response. Reading On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man were transformative experiences for me. When I was sixteen, I had read in a biology textbook that all features of all organisms were the product of interactions between genetically transmitted dispositions and environmental conditions. That observation had instant, axiomatic conviction for me, and it was the first step in completely altering my metaphysical perspective—leading to the loss of religious faith. (If all behavior is ultimately determined in this way, “free will” in any ultimate sense is illusory, and the idea of divine punishment and reward is outrageous.) Then a few years later I read H. G. Wells’ Outline of History, a big twovolume work that started with the history of the earth and went An Evolutionary Apologia pro Vita Mea 57 on through the evolution of hominids before settling into the standard rise and fall of civilizations. Wells was T. H. Huxley’s student and had an excellent grasp of the logic of adaptation by means of natural selection—hence his classic science fiction works The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Time Machine. I absorbed Darwin’s theory through Wells. So...