The Evolution of Literary Theory and the Literary Mind

Instead of thinking of our ideas as our own creations, and as working for us, we have to think of them as autonomous selfish memes, working only to get themselves copied.

—susan blackmore, the meme machine

Although admirable in many ways, Mark Turner’s audacious The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language was astonishing for its reluctance to take seriously almost the entire history of literary theory.¹ In his eagerness to embrace insights from the newly emerging field of cognitive studies in order to probe the mysteries of how the human mind works, Turner seemed blind to the possibility that models of the mind in question were already nascent in the work of many literary theorists. Some academics, such as Max Eastman, had explicitly begun to unearth “the literary mind” decades earlier,² and before Turner, well-known literary theorists such as Wolfgang Iser, though not actually using the term, had frequently worked at the confluence of literature and mind and had shed some light on the nature of such a mind. Here, I try to trace the evolution of the literary mind, especially in relation to developments in literary theory, adopting evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’s idea that irrespective of national or other boundaries, all forms of culture (including works of literature) are suffused with “memes.”

The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary’s definitions of evolution include “a process of change in a certain direction: unfolding” and “a process of continuous change from a lower, simpler, or worse to a higher, more complex, or better state.” Most dictionaries echo this latter definition and suggest movement only in the direction of greater complexity, sophistication, and refinement; they take for granted the idea that evolution inevitably means progress. Eliding the notion of change for better or worse, the vagueness of the definition “change in a certain direction” however, should not be forgotten. Together, these two definitions may be taken as pointers toward evolution’s warmly contested nature.

In his conclusion to On the Origin of Species Charles Darwin’s assertion that “as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection” suggests that evolution is unequivocally associated with progress.³ Although this hard-line view of evolution has been enthusiastically embraced by Dawkins and many others (including the philosopher Daniel Dennett), the self-proclaimed “Darwinian pluralist” Stephen Jay Gould has boldly announced that “there is no progress in evolution.”⁴ While not denying that natural selection ensures progress, Gould refuses to characterize all of evolution in this way because he insists that evolution is not exclusively the preserve of natural selection; and on June 12, 1997, in a controversial piece in the New York Review of Books he garners support for this thesis from Darwin himself, who declared in the 1872 edition of Origin of Species, “I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification.”⁵

Thus, Gould argues that in the natural world there are certain structures that are there by accident and that offer resistance to the view that every pattern in nature can be explained in terms of natural selection. Observing the representations of the four evangelists and the four biblical rivers within the triangular spaces between walls and apex left over by the arches that support the structure of the dome of San Marco in Venice, Gould argues not only that these splendidly adorned spaces are a side consequence of the dome’s primary function but also that the same phenomenon exists in nature because parts of the natural world encapsulate functions that seem secondary to their essential nature.⁶ A bird’s feathers, for instance, may exist at a primary level to provide warmth and have only secondarily the function of enabling the bird to fly, although a clearer example may be the shell of certain snails, where the main purpose is almost certainly the protection of the creature inside but the secondary one, the spin-off, the fringe benefit, for some female snails at least...