Darwinian Nature and Artistic Texts: Essays on Making / Unmaking by Allan Conrad Christensen (review)

In Darwinian Nature and Artistic Texts, Allan Conrad Christensen approaches the relationship between the natural and literary worlds from an evolutionary perspective, arguing that nature and literature are linked by their similar reliance on "the symbiosis of making and unmaking" (38). That is, creativity and newness in both are dependent upon the destruction–or at least revision–of what has come before. Drawing upon psychology, economics, literary theory and science writing, Christiensen explains how artists self-consciously created this phenomenon in literature and music produced between 1819 and 1969. Readers of this journal may be most interested in four chapters that concern the works of Dickens (Great Expectations, Bleak House, and Barnaby Rudge), though each essay in the book builds on, and to some extent, revises the thesis of those that came before, thus affirming the overarching argument.

Christensen begins by examining Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle alongside American writer Richard Henry Dana, Jr.'s Two Years Before the Mast. Both works originated, Christensen points out, in the writers' similar rebellions: against the careers laid out for them; against the conventional path for nineteenth-century travelers of means, the Grand Tour; and against what they saw as an oppressive European cultural indoctrination (40–41). Darwin noted that Europeans transmit disease to indigenous cultures, and Christensen suggests that both biologically and metaphorically, European culture runs counter to the "survival of the fittest" natural principle (43). Their rebellions against this culture by turning to the natural world they encountered in South America allowed Darwin and Dana to invent cultural forms–"a new type of scientific writing [… and] a new type of travel writing" (44), that survived when reproduced in future texts by other authors (82). Christensen next turns to the elegiac poems of Tennyson and Hopkins, whose In Memoriam and The Wreck of the Deutschland, respectively, use the metaphor of the ship's journey to represent the writing of poetry itself (90). Christensen argues that a new form of writing is born of this venture, too. As they strive "in this marine element to remember, resuscitate, and resurrect their heroes–amidst the wreckage of many unsuccessful poetic ventures–our poets are more importantly refashioning themselves and their art" (121).

The chapters that follow focus on the relationship between what Christensen calls "the book-life" and authentic living in the natural world. In Edward Bulwer-Lytton's The Caxtons, the hero, Pisistratus Caxton, must learn from his scholar-father's example, that the "book-life" is stifling until infused with natural experience. Pisistratus gains this experience, like Darwin and Dana, by hearing what Christensen calls "the call of the wild" and by turning from European culture. He travels to Australia, where he recovers his creativity, and engages in writing that unmakes and revises what has gone before: he turns from writing autobiography to writing a novel. Christensen also considers Dickens's Great Expectations and Bulwer's A Strange Story in this chapter on the dangers of the "book-life," but in these novels, the books in question are metaphorical: they are the written lives of the protagonists. Pip and Fenwick, in their respective texts, "find themselves threatened by would-be authors who aspire to take charge of their stories and imprison them in plots that are not of their own making" (131). The ensuing struggle for authority over the writing of the characters' life-stories "parodie[s] … the struggle underway in Nature" (154) and threatens to unmake each protagonist's life.

The next chapter explores a related textual problem. Christensen notes that beyond the perils of the "book-life," there is the constant possibility of misreading the texts with which we are confronted. He concerns himself with the epistolary proposals in Bleak House and Middlemarch, the misreadings of which negatively affect human relationships in the novels. In Bleak House, Christensen suggests, Esther misreads Jarndyce's written offer of marriage, imposing her own...