The Evolution of Literature: Legacies of Darwin in European Cultures ed. by Nicholas Saul and Simon J. James (review)

The Evolution of Literature, edited by Nicholas Saul and Simon J. James, explores the interaction between literature and Darwinian theory, both historically and contemporarily. This interaction can be situated at several levels. A first level concerns the traces evolutionary thinking has left in literature from the nineteenth century until today. At a second level, evolutionary theory can be used (and historically has been used) to inform us about literature, its origins, function, and possible “adaptive” purpose. Finally, literary critics and writers have developed ideas about how the evolutionary process itself might be understood as aesthetic. The nineteen articles of Saul and James’s book deal with all of these levels—be it that they explore some questions in more depth than others.

Most of the articles in the volume concern evolutionary themes and tropes in German, French, and English literature. One can read, for example, about the evolutionary inspired poetics in the work of Alfred Tennyson and Robert Chambers (Anna Barton), the echoes of the evolutionary conceptions of Trofim Lysenko and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in French postwar novels (Louise Lyle), the “new Darwinism” in Friedrich Nietzsche (John A. McCarthy), and the evolutionary psychology in Michel Houllebecq (Douglas Morrey).

Other essays explore how evolutionary theory has been used to understand the phenomenon of literature itself. In those articles, cultural history is used to throw new light on current debates. In his instructive piece, John Holmes indicates how certain errors of Victorian evolutionary criticism, as exemplified by—among others—Herbert Spencer and Hippolyte Taine, return in the present-day schools of “literary Darwinism” and “biopolitics.” Similarly Nicholas Saul, who studies the evolutionary aesthetics of Wilhelm Jensen, believes that the contemporary debate “recapitulates” to a large extent nineteenth-century discussions (242). This claim is substantiated by Jon Adams, who explores how current Darwinian literary critics use evolutionary theory to make evaluative claims. He quotes, among others, the work of literary scholar Joseph Carroll, in which—according to Adams—the quality of writings is judged by looking into the character and biological “normality” of their authors. This is illustrated by the passages in which Carroll debunks the work of Michel Foucault by referring to his “malignant” temper and “bathhouse promiscuity” (166–67). Such digressions indeed bring passages in Max Nordau’s Entartung (1892) to mind, in which the pathological “egomania” of Charles Baudelaire and the “sexual psychopathy” of Émile Zola are discussed.

Carroll is only one of the present-day theorists who receive a critical reading in The Evolution of Literature. In the book, several contributors judge severely contemporary attempts to integrate evolutionary psychology into literary studies. Yet, depending on the author, this criticism leads to different conclusions. Some contributors, such as Saul, conclude by stressing the autonomy of culture and emphasize that the evolutionary approach has little (if anything) to teach us about texts. Katja Mellmann still sees a role for evolutionary psychology, be it as an “ancillary science.” She argues that Darwinism might be unhelpful for understanding texts in themselves but does offer insights into the “relationship between the structure of literary texts and their perceived effects” (307). Wendy Wheeler, finally, believes the life sciences might enlighten literary studies, but she stresses we should replace old-style mechanistic and reductionistic Darwinism with more holistically oriented biosemiotics and systems biology. Inspired by these disciplines, she argues that “the ways in which literary language resonates for a reader . . . [are] merely a more complexly articulated . . . form of the resonances felt by organisms” (176–77). Also, one might discern a recapitulation here. Wheeler’s ideas about a “creative force” in nature bring to mind the early-twentieth-century discourse of Henri Bergson.

The Evolution of Literature touches upon a myriad of interesting topics, but it is not always clear how these topics interconnect, let alone how they build up to an overarching argument. The book has found...