Literary Darwinism

Page 13 September–October 2009 Philosophy & Fiction Literary Darwinism William Flesch The last decade or so has seen the rise of an insurgent school of literary critics and theorists, loosely allied around the still inchoate idea of literary Darwinism. Brian Boyd (who doesn’t like this term, which comes from Joseph Carroll, preferring the unlovely coinage “evocriticism”) is a leading member of this group. Like most of its members, he is a polemicist. (Full disclosure: he has two mildly skeptical footnotes about me in the book.) He thinks that by explaining the evolutionary origins of fiction, one can determine and so delimit what it can mean. Literary analysis that interprets any story (from fairy tales to Ulysses [1922]) in ways incompatible with the presumed adaptive function of narrative, as established by science, would therefore be proved false. Our minds are constrained by our evolutionary origins, so a literary Darwinist can (as they believe) show the actual impossibility of any interpretation that runs counter to those constraints. In particular, literary Darwinism has been a brief against subtlety, more or less on the grounds that subtlety couldn’t possibly thrive in the coarse rough and tumble competition to survive and reproduce imposed on our genes by the real world. Efficiency is all. For some literary Darwinists, this means that fiction, because it is memorable, is a pretty good, but not necessarily unique, means to an end like conveying information, both specific (don’t eat white berries) and general (enemies may be tricking you). Boyd rightly takes a stronger line, and sees fiction as an irreducible experience—for him because it is an adaptation for which there are no work-arounds. While Boyd unfortunately still sees fiction as an adaptation, the claim that there are no substitutes for fiction makes him a much better literary critic than the average literary Darwinist, as can be seen in his accounts of Homer’s Odyssey and Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! (1954). These chapters offer sensitive observations, interesting background data, and helpful connections. Since the proof of any theory has to be in the insights it makes possible, this might seem to support his thinking about Darwinian theory. But really more or less every other sentence of this part of the book is expendable. The sentences about literature are worthwhile, the ones about animal behavior irrelevant. His bad sentences (and a lot of the evolutionary arguments) are bad because he is uncritically and tendentiously enthusiastic about gee-whiz scientific hypotheses that are highly controversial to say the least (as when he accepts speculative and controversial claims for the existence and function of mirror neurons in human beings), and of fairly minor moment anyhow, compared to the genuinely beautiful ideas that evolutionary theory can offer anyone interested in the nature of literature. Those ideas could lead to genuine critical insights in the hands of a subtler thinker—the kind who might learn from rather than whackily condescend to Aristotle and Erich Auerbach, Bernard Williams and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as Boyd does in the service of an unconvincing and shallow adaptationist program. Boyd wants to show that fiction is 1) an adaptation, because that would mean that 2) it must be adapted for something, so that 3) determining what it’s adapted for shows what it can and cannot mean. Fiction (he thinks) is an adaptation because something so complex and yet universal couldn’t survive evolutionary demands for efficiency of behavior and cerebral computation unless it was doing something important. We know the important things that humans need to do to survive, which include learning and practicing and exploring the varieties of social interaction in a wide variety of circumstances, and fiction allows us to simulate these interactions in a pretend setting. So it is designed (selected for) to create beneficial overtraining in social interactions and their possible consequences, good and bad. Any interpretations that cannot be mapped onto this function would be false or empty. The concatenation of these three claims is supposed to explain both the artistry and the emotional power of fiction: pattern and passion are incentives offered by nature so that we will engage in the social training that fiction offers. The...