Human Evolution and Fantastic Victorian Fiction

Anna Neill’s Human Evolution and Fantastic Victorian Fiction is bound to have different effects depending on who opens it. If the reader is an average literary scholar with an interest in science, the book will produce the warm fuzziness of familiar ideas unfolding familiarly. If the reader is an average historian of science, some puzzlement may occur about the presumed central role of literature, but the book’s pattern will be unsurprising. If the reader is a biologist or an evolutionary social scientist, the experience may resemble Neill’s citation of Samuel Butler’s hypothetical “grain of corn in the hen’s stomach,” which “finds itself in an environment so unfamiliar to the world its forefathers have taught it to navigate, that it ceases to remember it is grain” (97). If the reader is a literary scholar who believes in the epistemological validity of science, there might be neither surprise nor fuzziness. The present reader responded with mild fatigue when Butler, sentient grains and all, was placed next to Darwin and described as a “genius” (95).Neill’s book fits safely within literary study’s current program for interpreting evolutionary theory in nineteenth-century literature. I have characterized that program at length elsewhere, identifying its core tenets and tracing its roots to the early 1980s (Jonsson, “Old Tune” and Early Evolutionary Imagination 74–87). I argued that Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots (first published in 1983) established parameters that largely remain in place for present scholars: a tendency to treat evolutionary theory as semi-fictional, a tendency to suggest that evolutionary theory owes more to literary inspiration than to scientific methodology, and a tendency to view any epistemological validity in evolutionary theory as a confirmation of literary theories popularized around the 1980s—deconstructive indeterminacy of meaning; the cultural construction of (human) nature; and the consequent vilification of hierarchies, definitions, and noncultural explanations. In line with the idea that meaning is indeterminate, Beer employed techniques of argumentation that simultaneously advance and withdraw claims (evolution both is and is not fictional), avoiding accusations of anti-scientific rhetoric (Jonsson, Early Evolutionary Imagination 74–87). The resulting program opens up a world of possibilities for reading and rereading novels with different degrees of emphasis on indeterminacy and hierarchies. It also prevents interdisciplinary understanding, feeds academic territorialism, encourages ideological distortion, and leads scholars in circles of repetition toward sheer stagnation. In my view, this program has stymied the study of a deeply fascinating subject for forty years.Neill indicates that no change is in sight. If anything, the slimness of her book and the meekness of its argument suggest some petering out of the program. Fantastic Victorian Fiction spends its conclusion—traditionally a place for extending and rhetorically elevating one’s claims—on a brief gesture to the more fashionable genre of twenty-first-century “indigenous futurisms” (148). Neill herself seems genuinely interested in her nineteenth-century subject. She delves into the biographical and historical context of each author and displays some imaginative immersion in each literary text. This is particularly remarkable given the abstract and didactic nature of some of her texts, like Flatland and The Water-Babies. Nevertheless, she seems unable to explain the interest of her subject, or even to articulate it, beyond tired formulas about Victorian racism, classism, and sexism. Those formulas lead her in the iron circles of a carousel, from foregone conclusion to illusory revelation. The details of her significantly different literary texts all reduce to the claim that they use wild and unpredictable ideas of evolution to challenge a racist, classist, and sexist idea of evolution. That challenge is implicitly what makes the literary texts interesting or worthy of explanation.Fantastic Victorian Fiction does not convincingly explain its literary selection, though it advertises it in the title. A naïve scholar setting out to study evolution in fantastic literature might choose texts that are straightforwardly influenced by evolutionary theory and classified as fantastic. Someone familiar with this forty-year program will know that the focus is numinous cultural effects rather than demonstrable influence—indeed, that demonstrable influence was somewhat scorned by its pioneers (Jonsson, Early Evolutionary Imagination 77–78). With due numinousness, Neill moves from Charles Kingsley and Lewis Carroll to Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, Samuel Butler, Edwin Abbott Abbott, Edward Bellamy, and William Morris. Only three of these eight authors (Kingsley, Butler, and Wells) were directly concerned with evolution. One is American rather than Victorian. All of them can be described as “fantastic” in the sense that they depict counterintuitive realities and tend more or less toward symbolism and allegory, but so could any number of other Victorian authors—George MacDonald, Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Machen, or Sheridan Le Fanu. One might think that a general interest in science determines the selection, but that is not born out by Bellamy or Morris—and would have been true of the excluded Stoker. Kipling is a stretch in that respect too, though the case could have been made more robust by his handful of speculative fiction stories. Instead, he is included for his Just So Stories, which imitate oral storytelling in a manner that supposedly elevates the “savage” practices deplored by the version of evolutionary history that Neill opposes: “an often pernicious evolutionary conception of the human” (2). Carroll is similarly included because his interest in and supposedly sympathetic depictions of mental illness elevates the mentally ill. Abbott’s Flatland is mainly concerned with mathematics, but he was interested in pedagogy and can thus be said to comment on human development. Three of the texts (by Wells, Bellamy, and Morris) are included because they are socialist utopias, though only one of the authors was influenced by evolution.One needs a vast net to catch these texts together. As Neill puts it, they are “on the face of it, a motley collection” (7). Through this admission, she acknowledges—perhaps semi-consciously—that her scholarly program does not offer adequate guidance or justification for a literary selection. Her texts are united only by her claim that they oppose an evil version of evolution—but that claim, too, is heavily qualified. According to Neill, her literary texts remain “embroiled” to different degrees in precisely the pernicious version of evolution that she opposes, so that she cannot “ignore those surface depictions” that apparently contradict her argument about the authors’ ideological affiliations (10). One is left wondering whether it was necessary to involve evolution. The real thesis formula seems to be the one that literary scholars imbibe from their undergraduate years: “Is this text sexist, racist, or otherwise discriminatory?” with the illuminating (and invariable) answer “Yes and no.”Literary scholars who write about evolutionary theory still tend, like Beer, to obscure their claims with dense terminology that is juggled in precise movements of distraction. Neill is less guilty of this than other recent contributors to the field (see Duncan; Griffiths), but she nevertheless operates within a field that is built on equivocation. It is simply more convincing to say that Samuel Butler is an important evolutionary thinker if you say it obscurely. Similarly, it is more convincing to say that “these texts all in different ways wrench human development out of deep, gradual time” than to say that a set of literary works liberate humans from their evolutionary past (10). If Neill were challenged with the plain version of this claim, she might explain that she meant that these literary works free us from a particular interpretation of the evolutionary past—a narrative about evolutionary history that stresses “deep, gradual time.” But, you might say, is it not unavoidable to stress deep time and gradualism when discussing evolutionary history? In response, Neill could specify (as she does elsewhere) that she meant a gradualist narrative about deep time that is teleological, anthropocentric, and insistent on discriminatory hierarchies. These ideas are not implied by the word gradualism. Before you can accuse Neill of redefining that word, however, she qualifies conscientiously: “not to suggest that the (gradualist) theory of evolution . . . was inherently racist” (3, italics in original). If pressed very hard, she might even admit that she was only talking about what the literary texts depict or suggest imaginatively, not what they change in the real world. None of these specifics or qualifications are there to disturb the thrilling suggestion that our species can be freed (“wrenched away”) from deep time and gradualism by reading The Island of Dr. Moreau. Even as an afficionado of Wells, I would object to that estimation of his bio-transformative powers.Rhetoric of the nature just described can be confusing to readers who are unfamiliar with it. It can be confusing, in a different way, to readers who are so familiar with it that it has become second nature. To clarify my point, here is a translation into plain language of the forty-year program within which Neill operates—a narrative of evolutionary history, as it were, with literature in a leading role:This interpretive pattern can be altered to make Darwin more or less of a villain and to further emphasize the importance of literature. For instance, Devin Griffiths argued that Darwin’s theory was highly inspired by the historical fiction of Walter Scott (Jonsson, “Old Tune”). Neill adds very little to the pattern. She portrays her authors as torn between evil hierarchies and liberating chaos. She focuses on “fantastic fiction,” but her argument about the genre precisely resembles arguments about other genres aligned with liberating chaos (from novels to “weird realism” to historical fiction) (Levine; Duncan; Griffiths). She is particularly concerned with the perniciousness of “gradualism” and “Malthusianism,” but that perniciousness was noted by literary scholars in the 1980s who preferred to focus on Aristotelian essentialism or literary realism—all of which translate more or less directly into evil, in alliance with categorization and human nature, and thus supposedly with sexism and racism (Beer; Levine).Neill herself is rather modest in her invocation of this mythic clash between good and evil, but she pays full respects to the less modest luminaries of the field, from Gillian Beer and George Levine to Deleuze, Guattari, and Derrida (1–2, 42, 89, 90, 96, 101). She is unwaveringly loyal to the program, despite her plentiful qualifications. Most overtly, she joins Deleuze and Guattari in celebrating Samuel Butler as a prescient thinker who would “surely have been gratified” that “many of his claims now resonate with posthumanist challenges” (96). This account of Butler’s “combination of Lamarckian evolution and associationist psychology” is maintained against the historical derision of evolutionary biologists (99). More amusingly, it is maintained against Butler’s own local admission that his ideas do not make “the smallest pretension to scientific value,” instead intending to “entertain and instruct the numerous class of people who . . . enjoy speculating and reflecting (not too deeply) on the phenomena around them” (99). In Neill’s view, this is Butler’s way of stressing the vital importance of literature: “he seemed to say that science must become more like popular fiction if it is to open minds to truly new ideas” (99). Moments like this could make anyone feel like a grain of corn in a hen’s stomach. One minute we are reflecting on the imaginative effects of the greatest paradigm shift in biology, the next we are soberly bid to consider Derrida’s thoughts as he stood naked before his cat (90). Apparently, in this world of avian digestion, “Darwin is often seen as a precursor to Deleuze and Guattari” (92). In such a world, we might as well be asked to believe that literature is crucial to science on the word of a literary scholar interpreting a novelist.I don’t pretend to know how earnestly Neill believes in the program that structures her book or the formulas that shape her literary interpretations. She often seems to forget about both program and formulas as she produces competent historical exposition or lively plot summary. Her description of Abbott’s ideal of liberal education, for instance, is delightful (113–117). She is charmingly responsive to the craftsmanship of William Morris and the Tristram Shandy-like material humor of Abbott (whose perfectly square book and sloppy geometrical drawings are depicted in illustrations). At other times, she seems almost embarrassed by her chosen literary texts. In the brief conclusion, after discussing the importance of recent works by indigenous authors Louise Erdrich and Cherie Dimaline, Neill all but apologizes for her choice: “My Victorian texts are quite different, of course. They are all written by professional, middle-class (and with one exception) British men during the height of empire” (149). One might question whether these are the most significant differences between, say, the novels of Erdrich and those of Wells. More to the point, one might question the implicit evaluation of the past through the degree to which it resembles the present. While it is admirable to champion the downtrodden and connect historical novels to modern concerns, it is a very Victorian fallacy (that Neill claims to oppose) to consider one’s own moral values the culmination of history. My hope is that she is more earnest in her imaginative immersion than in her apologies.It seems doubtful that Neill’s book represents the last gasps of literary study’s program for nineteenth-century depictions of evolution. High-profile monographs by Duncan and Griffiths are just a few years old, and more are likely to appear. However, Neill’s enactment of a waning moon is cause for reflection. Her book is essentially a slim collection of thematic summaries, written in a lively voice and replete with historical detail, but run through a filter of weak formulas and preconceptions that place every bit of information in doubt. What would it mean to lose such books? I cannot say whether it is better to convey literary history in distorted morsels than to leave it to oblivion. But I also don’t think those are the two alternatives. Neill’s subject has inherent interest, and so do (at least some of) the texts she treats. This piece of literary history will most likely keep being pursued by inquisitive minds. It would only be a good thing for a stagnant, distorting program to make room for more vigorous alternatives—alternatives that could perhaps aim to advance knowledge about nineteenth-century literature instead of measuring it with ideological formulas. A new program might use a current understanding of evolutionary biology to frame Victorian ideas, acknowledging the reality of both the struggle for life and human social adaptations; it might use information about basic human motives, cognitive biases, and the adaptive function of the imagination to explain why evolutionary theory tends to be reshaped into certain types of myths; and it might add personality psychology to biographical research in order to tease out how and why individual authors turned evolution into particular stories (Jonsson, Early Evolutionary Imagination). Perhaps Neill, too, would benefit from such change.