In my next blog entry, I plan to review and critique Jonathan Kramnick's "Against Literary Darwinism," and perhaps some of his other writings. As I study Kramnick's critique of literary Darwinism, or LD, it occurs to me that my own approach (ELC) is in important respects different from the school of Joseph Carroll and colleagues (LD), the school which is the focus of Kramnick's inquiry.
Kramnick argues that the roots of LD go back to E. O. Wilson and his concept of consilience. Wilson argues that, because human societies obey the laws of physics and the laws of biology, you should be able to construct a causal chain upwards from the physical sciences to explain in detail human cultures and the humanities. He supposes a logical chain of postulates that takes you from quantum mechanics through biological evolution to Finnegans Wake (or at least Jane Austen). I do not subscribe to that view, which one might call hard consilience, and in that way, I do not belong to the literary Darwinism school.
An alternative framework might be called soft consilience. This position can hold that human societies do not violate the laws of nature, such that the fabric of the observable world is not interrupted by supernatural rips and tears. However, this position can still maintain that the more fundamental scientific laws do not entail a particular result in the more derived phenomena. It denies that a chain of strict entailment exists. We cannot violate the laws of physics, but they do not prescribe the details of culture.
To support this alternative, one can point to the behavior of non-linear systems in which an approximate solution at a lower level does not predict macro-behavior at a higher level. In meteorology, one can invoke Lorenz's butterfly to explain why weather prediction can only have a short time-horizon. Thinkers have argued that different levels of phenomena produce emergent behaviors that are not readily predicted by the behavior of their components. Within this alternative view, you cannot write a sequence of postulates that entail one another starting from biological evolution and get to the oeuvre of Shakespeare. I find myself in this latter camp.
Still, within this alternative framework, the more fundamental laws of nature do operate, and one might expect to see general patterns of behavior at the more derived level. The incalculability of meteorology does not mean that climatology cannot exist. It might not rain two weeks from Thursday at 4 pm in a given location, but we can generally predict what the average temperature will be for this time of year for this geographical area.
In the realm of psychology, because all living humans are part of a very long chain of organisms each of which was the product of sexual reproduction, it should come as no surprise that sexual behavior occupies a strong influence on the human mind. It should also come as no surprise that cis-norm heterosexual behavior (necessary for reproduction) will dominate the range of human sexual behavior. (There are, after all, only three living Shakers, and they converted.)
The LD framework, when pushed to its logical endpoint—its entelechy I like to say—claims that it can eliminate all other forms of literary criticism as the misguided musings of thinkers who are in error about human nature. It not only wants to examine literary works from an evolutionary perspective; it also wants to dispel and refute other readings. People who do not like, say, Critical Theory, which derives from Marxism, might like this assertive aspect of LD.
I am reminded of the book The Platonism of Shelley by Notopoulos (1952), in which the author gives three reasons why Platonism should be the framework for examining Shelley's writings. Reason number three was: because Platonism is true. You would have thought that he would have made that reason number one. His belief that Platonism is true in an absolute sense suggests that his reading of Shelley should be the privileged reading, and perhaps that all other readings are false.
In my own attempts to create evolutionary readings of literary works, I find that the evolutionary reading does not negate other readings. It is one reading among many that might offer some insight into the literary work in question. For me, literary works are valuable because they speak to aspects of the human sense of life's meaning, if you will. A given interpretation of a literary work should offer the reader a perspective on the work that adds to its complex network of possible meanings. Many literary theorists have encouraged and celebrated plural-meaning criticism, such as Hyman in his book The Armed Vision (407).
Because we are animals that have evolved from other species, aspects of our understanding of the world come from that legacy. Aspects of literary works that tap into that aspect of human nature can, and perhaps should, resonate deeply with the human consciousness. Themes in literary works that connect with aspects of the human experience which derive from our evolved nature should attract the attention of readers. Like Notopoulos, I argue that my preferred themes should attract the attention of audiences because biological evolution is true. I do not join with literary Darwinists in claiming that other interpretations are therefore false.
Interpreting literary works from an evolutionary perspective is much older than the current field of literary Darwinism. For example, Lionel Stevenson published the book Darwin among the Poets in 1932. I myself am not an expert on the history, but I am aware of it.
A recent example of this sort of evolutionary interpretation can be found in Judith Saunders' volume of essays: American Classics: Evolutionary Perspectives (2018). When I read that book, I noted that Saunders did not have a chapter on theory to anchor her observations in a general approach. Perhaps she did so to avoid having to commit to one version of the theory, such as the aggressive version put forward by the literary Darwinists.
One of the prominent writers associated with the literary Darwinist movement is Jonathan Gottschall. In general, I like his ideas. He writes about "story" broadly, including historical writings, religion, philosophy, and other cultural productions. When push comes to shove, though, he seems to fall in line with the more rigid paradigm set out by Joseph Carroll, which insists on a mental module for traditional literature in the sense of fictional accounts aspiring to aesthetic ideals. Gottschall's writings about "story" more broadly seem to contradict his theoretical adherence to strict literary Darwinism.
The literary Darwinism of Carroll and company attracted press attention because it made the sweeping claim that most of the humanities could be tossed into the trash bin. By comparison, the evolutionary literary criticism that I have advocated is small beer. But ELC cannot be debunked the way LD can. The ELC critic might simply focus on authors who expressedly discussed evolutionary ideas in their work, whether George Eliot or Joseph Conrad or Edith Wharton. An evolutionary perspective is undoubtedly relevant to work written by authors who were conscious of evolutionary ideas.
My migration to cultural evolutionary literary criticism takes a step further away from hardline literary Darwinism. Cultural evolution argues that culture itself has been a force shaping the human genome. Human beings are generalists. Collective knowledge through culture helps us fit tightly into a wide variety of ecological niches.
Literary works are artifacts valued and preserved by cultural groups. Different schools of literary criticism represent those diverse cultural traditions that may compete or cooperate with one another. In particular, aspects of literature that tap into genetically evolved qualities of the mind compete with aspects that support culturally specific qualities of the mind.
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