Narrating Conversion in an Age of Darwinian Gradualism

We have been reading Darwin's book on the "Origin of Species" just now. . . . [I]t will have a great effect in the scientific world, causing a thorough and open discussion of a question about which people have hitherto felt timid. So the world gets on step by step towards brave clearness and honesty! But to me the Development theory and all other explanations of processes by which things come to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the processes.

—George Eliot, letter to Mme Eugene Bodichyon, December 5, 1859

In this essay I focus on two quite different post-Darwinian models of human change in English literature, with a special emphasis on representations of the "conversion experience." The differences between them are both historically significant and relevant to the study of narrative and cognition, bearing as they do on at least two controversial issues: the role of narrative in human understanding and the nature of narrative events.

To frame this essay I start with two textual moments in 1900 that encapsulate these two models of change. The first is from an essay titled "The Concept of Change" by Arthur Ernest Davies in which he declares that the progress of human change over time is "a gradual self-unfolding in which the self becomes progressively more conscious" (511). There is much late nineteenth-century orthodoxy packed into these few words, as I discuss below. The second moment is actually a matter of nanoseconds when Jim jumps from the Patna in Lord Jim.

"I knew nothing about it till I looked up," he explained hastily. And that's possible, too. . . . It had happened somehow. It would never happen again. He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a thwart. He . . . saw vaguely the ship he had deserted uprising above him, with the red side-light glowing large in the rain like a fire on the brow of a hill seen through a mist. "She seemed higher than a wall; she loomed like a cliff over the boat. . . . I wish I could die," he cried. "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well—into an everlasting deep hole."

(Conrad 1900/1968: 68)

Conrad's calculated stress is on an event so sudden that you cannot even see it happen. As Jim puts it, "I had jumped . . . it seems" (68). The reader is not given any rendering of the jump itself. One moment Jim is on the ship, the next he is in the boat. One moment Jim is one kind of a person, the next he is another kind of a person, with no way of scaling the cliff back to the person he was. These two textual moments by Davies and Conrad represent the poles of discourse on human change that I am ad-dressing: the one, a late nineteenth-century bromide; the other, an atavistic modernist topos. I argue that both models reflect not only the impact of the Darwinian model of change but also the effort to accommodate its deep resistance to modes of narrative representation. Their formal differences, however, reflect significantly different views of causality.

The Gradualist Model

When Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, he not only gave the world a powerful explanatory mechanism for evolution—natural selection—but in the process he made the case that biological change comes about "only by the preservation and accumulation of infinitesimally small inherited modifications" (Darwin 1859/177: 74). In making his case he drew heavily on gradualist models already developed in geology, which, like Darwin's theory, depended on vast stretches of time. First published by James Hutton in 1785, the geological template of this narrative model was a "transformationist" riposte to the prevailing "catastrophic" or "saltationist" models of change, which were necessitated both by biblical chronology and, more fundamentally, by the default limits of the human understanding of time. Hutton's model was revised and popularized by Sir Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology (1830, 1833), and in 1831 Darwin took Lyell's first...