The Literature Gene?

"Darwin and Dickens" by Nick Gillespie, in Reason (Nov. 1998), 3415 Sepulveda Blvd., Ste. 400, Los Angeles, Calif. 90034–6064.

The post-structuralist literary critic—who is quite sure that all texts have no fixed meaning, that between the signifier and the signified always falls the shadow—has been much in evidence in English departments in recent decades. But a new rival has been sighted: the evolutionary critic, who approaches literature and literary theory with Darwin’s Origin of Species in hand.

One such critic is Joseph Carroll, an English professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. In Evolution and Literary Theory (1995), he applies the principles of evolutionary psychology—which holds that much human behavior is governed by the imperative of passing on one’s genes— to classic literary works. Take Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s classic tale about the stormy relationship between the foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Linton (née Earnshaw). Raised as brother and sister, they struggle, according to the conventional interpretation, with quasi-incestuous desires. But current ethological research, Carroll points out, shows that unrelated boys and girls raised as siblings are "genetically programmed" to find sexual relations distasteful. There’s no smoldering sexual tension between Heathcliff and Catherine, Carroll insists. They are merely guilty of "infantile tantrums."

Carroll’s approach is "basically traditionalist" in subject matter and method, observes Gillespie, a Reason senior editor. Other evolutionary critics are more trendy, bringing Darwinian insight to literary theory. For instance, Alexander Argyros, author of A Blessed Rage for Order (1992), looks upon art as "simply the result of [an] incongruity between a rapidly evolving cultural world and our evolutionary heritage." The creation and interpretation of literature, he maintains, are part of a "gene-culture coevolution, a positive feedback system," in which genes set the basic rules for culture while "cultural practice creates selective pressure for the survival of certain genes." In the imagined realm of literature, it seems, humans can test out various possible survival strategies.

Handicapped by its narrow focus and required technical background, evolutionary criticism is unlikely to become a full-fledged academic "movement," Gillespie thinks. But the evolutionary critics may at least do some good by championing some things that are currently out of vogue in the academic literary world, such as "the scientific method, rational analysis, and the idea that there is something approaching an objective, knowable reality."