John Glendening. The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels: An Entangled
Bank.
Glendening
has a good topic—the influence of evolutionary ideas on a few major novels in
the late nineteenth century. He gives extended readings of Wells’s
The Island of Dr. Moreau, Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Stoker’s Dracula, and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. He also gives shorter
accounts of Wells’s The Time Machine, some of Conrad’s early fiction, W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions, A. S. Byatt’s Possession,
Huxley’s “Evolution and Ethics,” and a few passages from Darwin’s writings. He
acknowledges that evolutionary themes in the fictional works have already been
much discussed. His rationale for discussing them again is that these novels “rarely
if ever have been considered together as explorations or enactments . . . of
the uncertainty and confused interrelationships that, fostered by
nineteenth-century evolutionism, subvert ideas of order—tangling the web of
Darwinian theory” (15). Now, over the past thirty years or so, most critics commenting
on these novels have followed the general trends in poststructuralist theory. Accordingly,
they have argued that in some fashion these novels, like all other novels, “subvert
ideas of order.” Moreover, Glendening explicitly
locates his work in the lineage established by Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots (1983) and George
Levine’s Darwin and the Novelists (1988).
That is, he locates himself in the lineage that envisions
Originality in topic
and critical approach are not decisive criteria of value for a scholarly study.
Thoroughness in research, lucidity of critical vision, incisiveness and cogency
of argument—all those criteria are still in play. Good execution can make even
an often played composition exciting and memorable. In his readings of
evolutionary themes in his chosen texts, Glendening
is industrious and methodical. He is less thorough in delving into the history
of evolutionary theory, but still he makes a reasonable showing. He mentions Lyell
and gives some attention to Lamarck and to Chambers’ Vestiges of Creation. On the history of evolutionary theory in the
nineteenth century, he references Bowler, Richards, Mayr, and Sulloway. In his theoretical formulations, Glendening works at the level of academic commonplace. Though
affirming basic poststructuralist themes, he does not cite Derrida, Foucault,
or other primary poststructuralist theorists. He takes his central theoretical
terms at second and third hand. He invokes “chaos” as his own ultimate
epistemic term but makes only vague and general reference to chaos theory. Like
many poststructuralist critics, he mistakenly supposes that chaos theory, as a specialized
field in mathematics, underwrites deconstructive notions of indeterminacy. He indicates
that he has had some slight recent exposure to evolutionary psychology and has
responded favorably to it. He is aware that adaptationist views of human nature
conflict with poststructuralist ideas, and this conflict evidently makes him
uneasy, but he leaves the issue in suspense, broached but undeveloped.
Since Glendening offers
no original historical research and no original theoretical formulations, his
claim on the reader’s attention depends chiefly on the merit of his extended
readings. Here his success is partial. He often has sensible and even
perceptive things to say about the texts. Long stretches, though, consist only
in analytic summary and paraphrase, not very interesting in themselves, and
reaching a point, a conceptual climax, only by invoking deconstructive formulas
that are not always integral with the bulk of his exposition. The summaries
depend for the most part on the analytic utility of ten terms derived from five
supposedly binary oppositions: human/animal; modern/primitive;
masculinity/femininity; progress/degeneration; and nature/culture. The
conceptual climaxes depend on affirming that the paired terms are in some
fashion both mutually exclusive and interdependent.
Glendening’s central thematic formula consists in a
tension between “order” and “chaos.” He argues that the mind “tends by its very
nature toward the creation of an order that promises personal and social
integrity” (31). That seems to be his own actual sense of things, and it
accords well with his late and incomplete assimilation of an adaptationist view
of cognition. He suggests, for instance, that language evolved to enable humans
“to act jointly
in accordance with generally accurate assessments about demanding and often
dangerous environments” (192). Despite this and a few other such salutary
observations, Glendening’s
commitment to
poststructuralist theory leads him to invest ultimate conceptual value
in terms
such as “relativism,” “indeterminacy,”
“contingency,” “randomness,” and
“confusion”—terms
that for him seem to function more or less as synonyms. In his reading,
all the
novels produce sensations of “confusion, uncertainty, and
entrapment” (194). Dracula, in particular, seems
“wonderfully confused” (121).
To be interesting as performance,
interpretive criticism must posit some imaginative conception of a literary
work and bring all its observations to bear on supporting and illuminating that
conception. Glendening sometimes offers critical
comments on the imaginative and aesthetic qualities of the works he discusses,
but he does not formulate imaginative conceptions as central organizing
principles for his critiques. Instead, he just works conscientiously at routine
analytic summary, letting his historical and thematic arguments, such as they
are, provide the rationale for his analysis. Consequently, though his readings
are sometimes astute, they still fall flat as imaginative performance. In my
view, he is at his best in his reading of Tess
of the d’Urbervilles. Through most of that critique, he ignores his
theoretical commitment to confusion and follows an intuitive conviction that “Hardy’s
vision is artistically whole” (73). For that sort of old-fashioned humanist insight,
his theoretical training provides no support, but in this case his instincts
are sounder than his training.
Joseph Carroll
Curators’ Professor