Beginning Again: Darwin’s Caterpillar from George Eliot to Beckett

Abstract

The chapter examines one particularly evident case of literature borrowing from biology: the case of what Samuel Beckett calls “Darwin’s caterpillar.” This caterpillar, described in The Origin of Species, exemplifies a kind of repetition compulsion which prevents it from completing the stages of its metamorphosis into a moth. I trace the increasingly innovative ways in which novelists incorporated the repetitions of Darwin’s caterpillar into their novels. I briefly chart the caterpillar’s role in the narrative dynamics of fiction by George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, Samuel Butler, and Henry Green, before devoting the bulk of the chapter to its function in Molloy, Malone, The Unnamable, and How It Is, where it evidences the continuing relevance of development in Beckett’s fiction.