Struggling since 1859
Barbara Burns talks to Niall Sreenan, whose book Rethinking the Human in the Darwinian Novel: Zola, Hardy, and Utopian Fiction has just been published in Legenda’s Studies in Comparative Literature series.
BB. Take us back, if you will, to Victorian Britain, following the publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. What was it about Darwin’s evolutionary theories that rocked the nineteenth-century world, making an impact far beyond the field of science?
NS. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was certainly not the first piece of work to propose a form of evolutionary change in the natural world. You can trace evolutionary thinking right back to pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, and I mention in the book, for example, that nineteenth-century natural historians like Jean Baptiste Lamarck, in France, and Robert Chambers, in Britain, had advanced theories of evolutionary progress before Darwin.
However, what was really important about Darwin’s work, and what differentiated it from Lamarck and others, was that it offered a model of evolutionary change that was ‘non-teleological’, meaning that evolution was not ‘progressive’, and that it was driven by a competition for survival, the so-called ‘struggle for life’. So, instead of an idea of evolution that leads towards human progress or the unfolding of a divine plan, Darwin’s theory was characterized by directionlessness and violent struggle.
This of course had all sorts of implications beyond biological science – for religious thought, for political thought and economics, and in art and literature. For the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, Darwin’s great impact was to knock the human off its self-appointed perch as the pre-eminent species, revealing the animal nature that Freud believed was buried in the depths of our psyche. This book looks at the way novelists, from the nineteenth century and beyond, responded to this attack on the specialness of the human.
BB. The first two chapters of your book, focusing in turn on the nineteenth-century realist writers Emile Zola and Thomas Hardy, are followed by a third chapter on three more recent novelists – Samuel Butler, Aldous Huxley, and Michel Houellebecq –, whose work offers a utopian response to Darwin’s ideas. What were your reasons for choosing these writers in particular?
NS. The book is organized around the idea of ‘reception’, which just means that I have chosen authors that we know read or were aware of Darwin’s ideas, and whose response to those ideas we can trace in their literary writing. Sometimes that response is explicit, as in Émile Zola’s Germinal, when two striking coalminers argue about Darwinism’s compatibility with revolutionary socialism. And sometimes it’s more subtle. Darwinian evolution isn’t name-checked in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, for example, but its narrative is still deeply engaged with evolutionary ideas, particularly Darwin’s thoughts on courtship and sexuality from The Descent of Man (1871).
For the third chapter, I chose three authors of utopian fictions – Samuel Butler, Aldous Huxley, and Michel Houellebecq – again because we can trace Darwin’s influence on their writing, but this time in a genre that looks quite different from nineteenth-century realism. The works I focus on span three centuries: Butler’s Erewhon (1872), Huxley’s Island (1962), and Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island (2005). Together, they show us how the literary impact of Darwinian thought goes beyond the representation of ‘reality’ but also how it has influenced speculative and utopian fictions from the Victorian period right up to the present. Above all, however, I was drawn to these literary works because I thought they offered particularly compelling aesthetic and/or philosophical responses to Darwin’s thought.
BB. Can you introduce us to a memorable scene from one of these writers that illustrates this theme?
NS. One of the key scenes I quote from in the book is in Zola’s Germinal where, as I mentioned, we have two revolutionaries arguing about the relevance of Darwinism to socialism. It depicts a disagreement between Étienne Lantier, a follower of a kind of social-Darwinian conception of socialist progress, and Souvarine, an anarchist, for whom Darwinism was just a way of justifying existing inequalities.
Il se faisait une idée révolutionnaire du combat pour l’existence, les maigres mangeant les gras, le peuple fort dévorant la blême bourgeoisie. Mais Souvarine s’emporta, se répandit sur la bêtise des socialistes qui acceptent Darwin, cet apôtre de l’inégalité scientifique, dont la fameuse sélection n’était bonne que pour des philosophes aristocrates. (Germinal: 508)
[He formed a revolutionary idea of the fight for existence, the lean swallowing the fat, the strong people devouring the sickly bourgeoisie. But Souvarine got angry and held forth about the stupidity of the socialists who accepted Darwin, that apostle of scientific inequality, whose famous natural selection was only fit for aristocratic philosophers.] (Germinal: 450)
Souvarine, in fact, goes further and argues that if Darwin’s theory of ‘eternal misery’ was correct, it would be just as well to exterminate humanity as a whole. To me this is such a rich scene and offers a kind of key to the whole book. It shows us that Zola was in fact aware of Darwinism and its wider social implications and dramatizes precisely the kind of interpretation and contestation that characterized the reception of Darwin at the time. It also underlines the theoretical and political stakes at play in this interpretation – emancipation versus extermination – which is a tension that I try to confront across all three of the book’s chapters.
BB. To what extent would the broader population at the time have been aware of Darwin’s theories? Were readers of Zola and Hardy shocked by the subject matter that confronted them in these novels, or might these texts have served an educational purpose?
NS. Darwin’s work did find a wide readership in the nineteenth century, not just in Britain. The first print-run of On the Origin of Species was a ‘sell-out’ and it went through five further editions and was widely translated, including in French, in Darwin’s lifetime. The Marxist critic Raymond Williams argued that Darwin’s work was received so well because the theory of natural selection already matched the brutal social and economic reality of daily life for many in the Victorian period.
However, not everybody who knew about Darwin’s theories read his works. People encountered Darwinian ideas through a variety of different and sometimes less-than-accurate sources, whether through the periodical press or through other evolutionary thinkers – somebody like Herbert Spencer, who coined the term ‘the survival of the fittest’ and whose work wasn’t even strictly Darwinian. In France, even if you did read the first translation of On the Origin of Species, by left-wing radical and advocate of women’s rights, Clémence Royer, you would have read a quite questionable and partisan Preface that re-frames natural selection as a scientific proof of the progressive nature of human development.
What I try to show in the book is that Zola and Hardy can be productively re-interpreted against this quite complex intellectual context. It seems likely, for example, that Zola had not read Darwin’s work in detail and that his writing shows signs of the same kind of politically motivated understanding of evolution that we find in Royer. Yet, precisely because of this ‘misreading’, his novels do engage with fundamental questions around human autonomy from biological fate, which in turn, perhaps, might offer us new ways of grappling with the challenges posed by Darwinian thought.
BB. The legacy of Darwin can have negative associations, not least in respect of the struggle for existence, the elimination of the weak, and the challenge to previous conceptions of humanity’s place in the universe. Do the texts you’ve studied offer any counterbalance to the apparent bleakness of this theme, in terms of hopeful prospects for a repositioning of humanity? Or is the lack of transcendence in these texts the very challenge we’re invited creatively to address?
NS. One of the ambitions of this project was to trace that very bleak picture of humanity across a range of different authors, to explore how the novel responds, or can be made to respond, to it. It is undeniable that in nineteenth-century fiction realist representation seems synonymous with pain, suffering, and the delusion of human agency. However, what I ended up exploring too was the way in which the Darwinian novel is just as concerned with articulating (or attempting to articulate) more positive images of human existence.
The chapter on utopian fiction shows how authors have used Darwinian ideas to envision models of human perfection and liberation. The chapter on Hardy focuses on his work’s preoccupation with love and courtship, taking up Darwinian conceptions of sexual selection that challenge the overriding determinism of natural selection. I even argue that Zola’s work, for all its violence and pessimism, could be read (via the famously counter-intuitive philosopher, Gilles Deleuze) as an optimistic take on human impermanence and revolutionary possibility. I argue, ultimately, that all of these efforts to re-think the human after Darwin can be called a ‘reparative’ way of reading and relating to Darwinian bleakness.
BB. How did you become interested in the topic of the Darwinian novel?
NS. Some years ago, I began reading popular evolutionary scientific works, like Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976), and became interested in new forms of literary theory that tried to employ contemporary evolutionary psychology and cognitive science to unearth the deep biological roots of story-telling and literary creation. From there, I started to see Darwinian themes in everything that I read, particularly in nineteenth-century realism!
However, it was Gillian Beer’s magisterial work, Darwin’s Plots (1983), that helped shape my approach. It is a pathbreaking book in so many ways, but for me it offered a historically and narratively alert way of reading literature and science together that doesn’t default to pseudo-scientific accounts of evolutionary ‘human nature’. Beer’s work opened my eyes instead to the historical and narrative interrelation of literary art and Darwin’s writing and thought. My fascination with the utopian novel probably comes, in part, out of the political and intellectual climate of popular British post-Marxist thought around the 2010s. Reading polemics like Capitalist Realism (2009) and Inventing the Future (2015) convinced me that fictional and theoretical attempts to envisage alternative societies and futures could act as a rupture with the prevailing notion that inequality, struggle, war, and so on, are all ‘natural’ parts of human life.
BB. How did you cope with the challenge of determining what, precisely, counts as ‘Darwinian’ in literary and theoretical texts?
NS. Many of the writers I discuss engage with evolution, natural selection, heredity, or – later, in the utopian works – with genomic thought, but not always in ways that draw directly or faithfully on Darwin’s own writings. For example, while we can quite confidently say that Thomas Hardy was aware of and did read Darwin, he also read many other ‘evolutionist’ thinkers, so there is a danger that we ascribe too great a role to Darwin in influencing Hardy’s fiction. So, the difficulty, as I saw it, was to try to avoid collapsing everything into a single category of ‘Darwinism’ by attending to translation, reception, and various routes of cultural transmission, without becoming obsessive about strict lines of influence. The way I approached this problem was to read these novels’ relations to Darwin’s work ‘backwards’ – that is to say, to show how the shock of Darwin’s assault on the human can be re-addressed and further explored through the lens of the works of literature that came after it.
BB. How would you sum up the ways in which these literary responses to Darwin help us to think in fresh ways about what it means to be human?
NS. It seems to me that contemporary conceptions of what it means to be ‘human’ are at an impasse. For many, still, it means to be in possession of a unique intelligence or agency that separates us from the natural world. We can glimpse this both in our societies’ heedless acceleration into climate crisis as well as in our faith in the kind of techno-utopian solutionism that implicitly casts us in the role of demi-gods. On the other hand, it seems risky to dissolve entirely the category of the human (a trend present in naïve new-age ecological thinking as much as post-human concepts of technological ‘singularity’), as this might lose sight of our species’ actual and potential capacities for imagination, solidarity, or political action – however contingent or limited they might be.
The novels in this study confront this tension in the aftermath of the Darwinian assault on human exceptionalism. Yet, neither Zola’s works, Hardy’s, nor the three utopian fictions I look at in the book offer simple answers. Rather, as I try to demonstrate, they offer a more complex, sometimes contradictory vision of the human that may help us understand our position as a species in a more nuanced way.
full news feed • subscribe via RSS