Transatlantic Studies in British and North American Culture 11
Charles Darwin’s Looking Glass
The Theory of Evolution and the Life of its Author in Contemporary British Fiction and Non-Fiction
Bearbeitet von
Dominika Oramus
1. Auflage 2015. Buch. 150 S. Hardcover
ISBN 978 3 631 65870 3
Format (B x L): 14,8 x 21 cm
Gewicht: 300 g
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Introduction: Charles Darwin’s Looking Glass
This book undertakes to introduce a new and important context of Darwinisminspired popular science, a context which has been rather neglected by literary
studies to date. I believe that my tackling of this issue allows literary scholars to
gain new perspective in describing contemporary civilization, which turns out
to be the product of post-Darwinian ideology, as in popular understanding Darwinism is now the single most important theory explaining the workings of the
universe and humanity’s place in it. It is ‘the Theory’, with a capital T, the epitome
of science. Thus Darwin is now the mass-culture icon of the ingenious scientist
and the founder of modernity in science, an honor which until quite recently had
belonged to Albert Einstein. Consequently, Darwin’s life has become a mythic
story repeated in his biographies (in the form of both books and films), although
the biographical novels and fictive novels on him use historical and biographical detail with varying degrees of fidelity. And indeed, just as with other myths,
Darwin’s life has features of a canonical story whose every variant must contain certain well-known anecdote-like moments (among them the Alfred Wallace controversy; the journey of the HMS Beagle; the Galapagos discoveries; and
doubts on whether to publish a heretical theory).
Darwin’s life is everybody’s property: writers and filmmakers freely translate
it into stories which form a part of contemporary mythology in the meaning
defined by Roland Barthes in his seminal Mythologies. One of the essays in my
book, “The Voyages of Charles Darwin in Recent Fiction and Non-Fiction”, attempts to describe the process of ‘mythologizing’ Darwin as seen in three books
written in the last forty years and devoted to the young Darwin’s voyage around
the world. From Alan Moorehead’s Darwin and the Beagle (1969) to Irving
Stone’s The Origin (1980) and Roger McDonald’s Mr. Darwin’s Shooter (1999),
these works describing the voyage of the Beagle differ as far as their genre goes,
but each of the writers adds more and more fictive details to the established facts,
thus blending fiction and non-fiction. Analysis of these three books allows me
to demonstrate the myth-making mechanism writers employ when they fantasize about Darwin’s life. The naturalist’s biography is reduced to a number of
‘nodes’, well-known moments, events or facts, such as his poor health, his quarrels with Robert FitzRoy, and his interest in finches. Such ‘nodes’ define Darwin
as we know him, a figure of the 20th century’s collective imagination. Each writer
chooses from these nodes and narrates his own semi-imagined story, thereby
producing diverse myth-like accounts of ostensibly one and the same ‘Darwin’,
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precisely in the way heroes and demi-gods in ancient mythologies feature differently in manifold myths. The name Darwin today denotes both a historical
personage and a fictive character, and his biographies and biographical novels
are ‘faction’ – combining fact and fiction.
This observation is further developed in two more essays: the first of which is
concerned with Darwin’s stay in the colonies – and the second with the contemporary biographies of his wife, Emma Darwin. The essay “History and Simulation
in Thorvald Steen’s Don Carlos and Giovanni and Roger McDonald’s Mr. Darwin’s Shooter” is concerned with presenting colonial history in these two novels.
Referring to Jean Baudrillard’s notion of history as simulation, as described in his
famous Simulacra and Simulations, the essay discusses the books by Steen and
McDonald in the context of postmodern poetics. These ‘Darwinian fantasies’ are
told by unreliable narrators who refer to numerous classics as well as to other
literary Darwiniana. The narrators mostly talk about books they read, the ones
Darwin reads (and writes), and they presume that we readers have read them
all. In reading these narratives we are closed up within a vicious circle of texts
corresponding with one another, but having no relation to any extra-textual reality, past or present. History itself is a myth, a laboriously yet vainly re-produced
‘faction’ about our past. “Depictions of Emma Darwin in Recent British NonFiction” offers an analysis of the literary lives of Emma Darwin as myths. Referencing Roland Barthes, Mircea Eliade, and Edward Caudill, this essay looks
at Mrs. Darwin’s recent biographies from the angle of media studies, popular
culture studies, and anthropology. Keeping in mind that ‘myth’ in the popular
understanding denotes a tale which lacks literal truth and yet is a vehicle for a
greater truth transcending the factual details, the numerous avatars of Emma
Darwin we see in non-fiction written at the turn of the millennium serve to
argue diverse ideological points. For some she is an embodiment of nineteenthcentury wifely virtues who teaches us what true femininity is; for others she is a
disappointed reader of Jane Austen’s books whose life fails to resemble fiction;
for yet others she is a fundamentalist Unitarian focused on her religion and blind
to other people’s ideas. Moreover, although the books analyzed in this essay are
non-fiction, they make free use of the novelistic stock figures one encounters in
Victorian literature: the happy wife, the dutiful mother, the skillful housewife,
the shrewdly intelligent girl from the landed gentry who mocks her suitors mercilessly, and the devoted Christian widow. All in all, fact and fiction blur in the
biographies of Emma Darwin, just as it is in the case of those devoted to her
husband.
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One cannot overestimate the impact of Darwin’s theories on British literature
of the 19th and the 20th centuries, particularly as regards science fiction. On the
Origin of Species and the polemics the publication of the book provoked, made
notions such as evolution, devolution, and anthropogenesis enter the popular
imagination and find their way to ‘penny-dreadful’ novels. The very idea of evolution seemed uncanny at that time: if humanity has evolved from lower animals
the line dividing what is human from what is not must be very tenuous indeed.
The beast is hidden in each one of us, and can be easily awoken. The half-human
hybrids we read about in ancient mythologies are therefore not just fantasies, but
may become horridly real. The Gothic novels by Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar
Wilde, Bram Stoker, and most of all H.G. Wells, the author of the many-times
filmed The Island of Dr. Moreau, fed on such fear and simultaneously prompted
the emergence of a new literary genre: science fiction. Its authors speculated on
the possibilities of devolution. They stipulated that if we have evolved over the
eons, we may also devolve, as well – which, as falling is to climbing, will in fact
be all the easier. Thus Dr. Jekyll may one day be horrified to find Mr. Hyde actually hidden within his own self. Dorian Gray may live through a similar trauma
seeing his own bestiality exteriorized in his wicked image. By the same token,
Wells’ narrator – who, marooned on Moreau’s island, encounters human-bestial
hybrids – first thinks that Moreau’s horrid experiment involves the reversal of
evolution, and that the scientist, by subjecting people to some cruel vivisection,
exposes the pre-human beast we all carry within. However, Moreau in fact is
attempting the opposite and trying to humanize the animals. The doubt concerning what the terms ‘human’ and ‘bestial’ mean adds to the uncanny appeal
of this work.
When in the 1920s Hugo Gernsbeck created the first American pulps devoted
to science fiction, he started by re-printing Wells and Verne. The pessimistic lateVictorian fantasies about mad scientists and the bestial nature of people served
as models for even more pessimistic tales from the times of the Cold War and
nuclear tests involving A and H bombs. Today, over one hundred years after
Wells, Darwin’s theory continues to have an enormous impact on culture. Since
the creation in the 1940s and 1950s of the ‘Modern Synthesis’, the blend of evolutionism and modern genetics, Neo-Darwinism has been considered the latchkey
to all natural history. British intellectuals from Richard Dawkins to David Attenborough stridently claim we are very near to understanding how nature works
and contemporary writers feel obliged to comment on this supposition.
The most vivid contemporary attempt at describing devolution is to be
found in J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World. Similarly to his other early novels
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(The Crystal World and The Drought) The Drowned World is a catastrophic novel
in which Ballard depicts a dying civilization and a passive, defeated human race.
The end of the world as we know it is a good moment to study sundry human reactions to trauma and to describe a noble but resigned protagonist whose aim is
to die in the way he is destined to die. Ballard enters intertextual dialogues with
Freud, Darwin, and the surrealists, and his reader is expected to decipher and
interpret allusions and be brave enough to draw the most pessimistic conclusions. In this book the catastrophe is due to the hyperactivity of the Sun, which
has resulted in mutants resembling primordial organisms from archaic epochs.
Gradually, as Earth’s climate and geography go back to their state from millions
of years ago, biological evolution is also reversed. Ferns and reptiles dominate
the Earth, mammals cease to multiply, and the remnants of the human race
(forced to move to the poles) are witnesses of the end of civilization. The waters
of the melted ice-caps flood most of the Earth and the heat is unbearable. The
new coast-lines resemble those from the very distant past; the remains of human
cities are deluged and looted by all kinds of pirates and savages. According to
Ballard, despite our human nature and mammalian anatomy all of us retain on
the cellular level memories of previous stages of evolution. We ‘remember’ our
ancestors who evolved into humans. One of the characters postulates our innate
propensity for backward movement; he believes that deep in our souls are traces
of the passage from the most primitive protozoa to Homo sapiens. Memories
from the turn of the Paleozoic and the Triassic era are encoded somewhere in
the hind-brain. These long-latent genetic recollections of our ancestors, the first
air-breathing amphibians, are now awoken by external stimuli resembling those
from millions of years ago.
Thus the theory of evolution still inspires diverse genres of fantasy, ones which
this book also attempts to explore. In the essay entitled “Recent Fiction about
Charles Darwin: Peter Nichols, Harry Thompson, and John Darnton”, I closely
read three recent novels: Peter Nichols’ Evolution’s Captain, Harry Thompson’s
This Thing of Darkness, and John Darnton’s The Darwin Conspiracy in order to
describe the relationship between the theory of evolution, fantasy, history, and
science. The apocryphal biographies of Darwin’s associates and the Neo-Victorian fantasies about the truth behind the official version of Darwin’s story prove
how prolific his biography still is, breeding, as it does, new stories and prompting subsequent generations of writers to generate their own Darwinian fantasies.
Similarly, my essay “References to the Theory of Evolution in the Novels of
John Fowles, A.S. Byatt, and Hilary Mantel” is concerned with Darwinism and
literature. Challenging the cliché that Darwinism is atheism, the essay juxtaposes
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three aspects of Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Byatt’s Morpho Eugenia,
and Mantel’s A Change of Climate – namely: the way nineteenth-century naturalists are depicted in the contemporary novel; what do these writers understand by
‘science’?; and is there really an inescapable conflict between the theory of evolution and Christianity? Are we dealing with a simple replacement of God with
natural history? Why are the mid-nineteenth-century Darwinian naturalists still
stock figures in Neo-Victorian novels? Why are the intellectual debates provoked
by their discoveries still a very important subject for British novelists today?
My next article “Echoes of the Mid-19th-century spiritual crisis in selected
contemporary texts referencing Charles Darwin”, which is based on the critical
writings of Michael Ruse, Asa Gray, and Edward Caudill, discusses three contemporary books of fiction and semi-fiction – namely, by Randal Keynes, Jenny
Diski, and Graham Swift. They all are about the search for Victorian forebears
by twentieth-century narrators who have just experienced some trauma. Their
acute feelings of nostalgia and suicidal depression are linked to the theme of the
loss of Christian faith their Victorian great-grandfathers suffered after having
read (or, in one case, having written) On the Origin of Species. Each of the three
books recreates the past by reading the retrieved nineteenth-century documents
that stimulate the narrators’ imagination, making them spin their own gloomy
yarns and indulge in self-destructive fantasies – thus demonstrating that the
theme of ‘Darwinism and the Victorians’ truly does imply crisis in the spiritual
history of Britain.
The idea of “The Theory of Evolution and the Life of its Author”, from the
title of my book, breeds stories of both fiction and faction. One further essay,
“Darwin’s Problem with Human Ancestry as Reflected in Recent Fiction”, deals
with how popular culture reworks the implications of Darwinism, which at first
glance are politically incorrect. The issue in question is that humans, especially human babies and savages, display features and behaviors also to be seen in
young primates. Describing non-Europeans as ape-like and infants as little monkeys is provocative in times of racial equality and the pop-cultural sentimentalization of babies. My reading of William Irvine’s Apes, Angels, and the Victorians,
Randal Keynes’ Annie’s Box, and its film adaptation by Jon Amiel, Creation, lets
me demonstrate how Darwinian controversies are ‘tamed’ by mass culture. Popular texts reinforce the vision of both Darwin the loving father and Darwin the
proto-conservationist, thereby rendering his orangutans-babies-savages chain of
associations harmless. Darwin the genius is pictured as a reluctant rebel against
the Biblical paradigm of Creation who struggles with the implication of his own
discoveries.
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As the full title of this book, Charles Darwin’s Looking Glass. The Theory of
Evolution and the Life of its Author in Contemporary British Fiction and NonFiction suggests, the essays in this volume deal with a number of subjects: Darwinian fictions; Darwinian non-fictions; the theory of evolution as reflected in
both of them; and Darwin’s life as reflected in both of them. I trust I have suitably
addressed the above four issues in my essays, but one last aspect of my project
still needs to be explained – namely, the titular ‘looking glass’. Why and how does
today’s culture gaze upon the myth of Darwin, his theory, and his life in order to
find its own reflection? What image does it find there? – what kind of narcissistic
pleasure does it get? – are our times the era of Charles Darwin? – if so, then why?
The essays in this book were written in the strong belief that comparative
analysis of diverse Darwinism-inspired discourses (post-modern novels, science
fiction, nature films) can enrich literary studies. Such an analysis introduces new
contexts to the standard ways of reading contemporary literature and, thanks to
the interdisciplinary approach, texts written by scholars and journalists specializing in natural studies are discussed alongside works of fiction. The interdisciplinary approach allows me to demonstrate how deeply the diverse spheres of
today’s culture influence one another: Darwinian scholars use epic conventions
to make their popular science papers interesting, and novelists who have read
popular books by Dawkins or Wilson make their fictional characters behave in
accordance with Darwinian theories. Moreover, the essays here show how the
very notion of ‘science’ changed in meaning throughout the 20th century, and
prove that for both novelists and filmmakers Darwin is now the mass-culture
icon of the ingenious scientist and the founder of modernity in science. Thus,
Darwinism in this respect has replaced the theories of relativity and quantum
physics that were “fashionable” among literary scholars in the 20th century.
Darwinian paradigms (entities evolve in time via natural selection, survival of
the fittest, and the spread of successful adaptations) are referenced in literature,
popular science, show business, and education (e.g., the Discovery Channel’s nature films) – which fact points to the homogeneous character of global culture.
By comparing diverse uses of evolutionary discourse in current literature and
films, my essays demonstrate how natural science influences the contemporary
humanities and, conversely, how literary conventions are used in order to make
scientific and popular science texts intelligible and attractive. Charles Darwin’s
Looking Glass. The Theory of Evolution and the Life of its Author in Contemporary
British Fiction and Non-Fiction attempts to discover the common denominator
of generically diverse Darwinism-inspired discourses and, additionally, to show
how deeply fashionable scientific theses have infiltrated postmodern literature
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and popular culture. In the essay “Darwinism and the Humanities” I discuss
the mid-1990s crisis of literary and social studies and demonstrate that by references to evolutionary biology scholars are re-introducing to their texts the human universals which in the heyday of postmodernism were deemed false and
a product of a hegemonic ideology. With concepts such as a universal, cultureindependent human nature re-entering the humanist debate by the Darwinian
back-door, new and interesting approaches emerge. I prove this point by referencing Edward O. Wilson and his Sociobiology. Wilson’s notion of ‘consilience’,
the intellectual bridge between the sciences and the humanities, helps to understand recent critical attitudes in the fields of anthropology and literary and film
studies, as pursued by Neo-Darwinism inclined scholars.
The essay “The Motif of Human Evolution in Selected Fiction and Non-Fiction” is an attempt to use the Darwinian vantage point in the analyses of novels
and popular science films. I discuss on the same plane fictive accounts of early
human societies by H.G. Wells and William Golding, and the educational TV
films by Jacques Malaterre. My references include Charles Darwin, Geoffrey
Miller, and Roger Lewin. The last essay in this volume, “Annie Dillard and Kurt
Vonnegut on the Galapagos Archipelago as the Archetypal Darwinian Setting”,
compares the way Dillard and Vonnegut (who are both well-read in Darwinian
criticism) use references to the naturalist’s works and Darwinian paradigms in
science to prove their very diverse points. Their Galapagos-set narratives deal
with human nature, religion, the creation of the universe, the future of the human race, along with other grand issues. The ideological standpoints of both
writers are very different and yet both find vehicles in the theory of evolution for
their metaphors, which proves that ours truly is a Darwinian culture in which
Darwinian paradigms serve all purposes. The life and oeuvre of Charles Darwin,
as all my essays maintain, are a looking glass in which we enjoy gazing at the image we see: the image of ourselves as creatures who have evolved pleases us and
gives comfort.
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