Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (review)

Darwinian literary critics have been claiming over the last decade to have developed not merely the newest but the truest approach to literature. Armed with the insights of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, they argue that we finally have the tools for a scientific, empirically grounded understanding of authors, characters, readers, and literature itself. That view has even begun to seep into the broader culture, as evidenced by an article in the New York Times Magazine in late 2005. Joseph Carroll, a Victorianist whose Evolution and Literary Theory appeared in 1995, is a leader in this movement, and his latest book seeks to develop and refine it.

Darwinian literary critics of Carroll's "adaptationist" school regard the human mind as having evolved "through an adaptive process of natural selection" (xii), and they believe that literature, as a product of that mind, is best understood with reference to it. Rooted in various lines of inquiry in sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, this Darwinian approach, Carroll emphasizes, does not amount to the naïve and rather sterile exercise of examining the characters in literary texts to assess how well or poorly their behavior and motivations compare to those described and postulated by evolutionary psychologists for human beings generally. Rather, the "central challenge" for literary Darwinism is to connect "the highest levels in the organization of human nature with the most detailed and subtle aspects of literary meaning" (189). The "research program" of literary Darwinism (and Carroll's choice of this social scientific term, like his invocation of the Kuhnian "paradigm" and even his use of the author-date system of reference in preference to MLA style, is not casual, but in keeping with the explicit claim that his Darwinian approach can finally make literary criticism a social science) thus also includes accounts of a literary work's formal properties (from diction to plot), theme, tone, point of view (of author, characters, and implied audience), and "what literature is, what its functions are, and how it works" (vii). Carroll argues that a Darwinian approach is superior both to traditional criticism, which is sensitive but subjective, and to more modern critical schools, which wrongly deny or omit the importance of biological constraints in human culture.

The book is a collection of previously published essays, reviews, and lectures, with only three of the sixteen chapters appearing for the first time. A separate introduction provides a helpful overview, but a considerable amount of repetition inevitably ensues, and the inclusion of reviews and the tendency to discuss multiple texts in a limited space at times give the work a cursory feel. The book's first two sections explain the features of literary Darwinism, argue for its superiority to other approaches and schools, and provide examples. The first section is weighted toward theoretical considerations, the second toward practical criticism, primarily of nineteenth-century novels. The third and shortest part offers a critique of recent Darwin biographies and of Stephen Jay Gould's evolutionism.

Carroll explains and differentiates very cogently the various strands of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, and Darwinian literary criticism. He is particularly at pains to offer a more elevated account of literature's adaptive function than that proposed by Steven Pinker, who sees literature primarily as a source of pleasure comparable to cheesecake and recreational drugs. His dilemma rather like J. S. Mill's when confronting Jeremy Bentham's equation of poetry with push-pin, Carroll builds instead on the work of E. O. Wilson, who has argued that literature and the arts allowed early humans to express and control feelings related to important, complex forces in their lives. Wilson is both Carroll's most important source for sociobiological ideas and his intellectual inspiration; he praises even the "expression of kindly intelligence and genial humor" (71) he finds in photographs of Wilson, although he is also able to critique the limitations of Wilson's simplistic view of the arts. Literature's true adaptive value, Carroll contends, lies in the sense of...