| Contents > Mis-Perception: Metaphor as a metaphor for the reception of fictional narratives by Russ Swinnerton |
Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5  |
Literary Darwinism and the moral dimension
Consideration of the symbolic nature of language and its evolutionary origins leads us to an evolutionary approach to literature itself. Joseph Carroll is perhaps the best-known proponent of Darwinian analysis in literature, approaching texts as he does out of a “naturalist conviction that literature reflects and articulates the vital motives and interests of human beings as living organisms.” (Carroll, 2004, pp. 152-3) Carroll is suggesting why moral issues (among several other vital interests) should be so central in literature. Starting from other premises, Carroll arrives at a conclusion similar to Deacon’s, that one of the great advantages of symbolic representation is its utility in exploring the difficulties of forming social contracts, considerations at the heart of ethics:
-
Human beings living in a real physical world and interacting both with their physical environment and with other human beings form the central topic of all literary representation. Cognitive rhetoric emphasizes metaphorical relationships, but this elementary configuration presents us with a primary, literal order of representations. Metaphors are diverse, but they have meaning and force only in the degree to which they reflect the elementary structure of human motives and concerns.
In literature, the most frequent and important themes are those that concern individual identity, sexual romance, and the family. (Carroll, 2004, pp. 108-9)
But our symbolising nature makes us susceptible to metaphor even when the distance between the narrative and our subjective experience is vast.
-
Literature is satisfying – moving or disturbing – not in the degree to which it fulfils fantasy expectations – though it can do this – but in the degree to which it provides a sense of psychological order. … Through literature and its oral antecedents, we recognise the elemental structures of human concerns in our own lives and in those of others. We filter out the trivial and the tangential aspects of experience and see into the deep structure of our nature. And we not only ‘see’ – not only understand objectively… – we realize our deeper nature in vividly subjective ways. (Carroll, 2004, pp. 115-6)
Nancy Easterlin, however, warns us of the complexity of the whole undertaking of looking for evolutionary origins of this or any other dimension of literature:
-
Knowing, then, that we share an evolved psychic architecture whose patient excavation, so to speak, will result in a progressively better defined concept of human nature, and knowing too that the behaviour of human beings as writers as well as other kinds of agents varies under divergent environmental conditions, Darwinian criticism should be sensitive to the complex relationship between individual adaptations, the total array of adaptations, subjective cognitive processes, and environmental circumstances that give literary works enduring significance. (Easterlin, 2001, p. 252)
Implications
If metaphor – or symbolic representation – can indeed be thought of as a product of the uniquely human co-evolution of language and the brain, of culture and biology, what then are the implications for literature, and for the production and reception of narrative?
For the reader or critic, an evolutionary-psychological approach is probably most useful in considerations of authorial intent: l’auteur, il n’est pas mort? My own work on Ford Madox Ford, and the moral trajectory of his characters, from Dowell and his ‘good soldier’ Ashburnham to Tietjens in Parade’s End, is illuminated by consideration of a psychological perspective:
-
The identity between narrator and author is an invitation to a biographical reading of the novel [The Good Soldier]. Thomas Moser’s recent interpretation reveals the sources of the novel in the life. Florence and Leonora not only correspond to Violet Hunt and his first wife Elsie Hueffer, respectively, the curious and distorted ways they are seen by Dowell correspond to Ford’s self-serving views of Violet and Elsie. But reduction of the novel to biography threatens the integrity of the novel. The distinction of The Good Soldier is in its objectification of the quandaries of character and sexuality that Ford as well as many of his contemporaries found themselves in during the crucial period before World War I. For all the appreciative criticism of The Good Soldier, readers have not, in my view, sufficiently appreciated Ford’s contribution to the deauthorizing tendency in modern fiction. Ford exercises his extraordinary technical skill in The Good Soldier not so much in the interest of form as in the interest of making us see with maximum vividness and uncertainty our sexual and moral lives. (Goodheart, 1986, p. 378)
And for the writer? If nothing else, knowing that the ‘burden of proof’ is a pleasingly light one in provoking the suspension of disbelief, only confirms what writers have always known, that successful stories (alas, for bears to dance to…) are constructed with engaging characters and a plot. There are plenty of examples in the literary canon that invite imitation or provoke reaction – the meat and potatoes of writing courses – without the necessity for a unifying theory of literature from an anthropological, evolutionary, or cognitive viewpoint. The exploration of those viewpoints, hovever, stimulates ideas, and new ways of thinking about our collective condition – and that is at the heart of the creation of the characters and the plot.
| Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
| Contents > Mis-Perception: Metaphor as a metaphor for the reception of fictional narratives by Russ Swinnerton |