[Paleopsych] Denis Dutton on Literary Darwinism
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Denis Dutton on Literary Darwinism
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The Pleasures of Fiction
Philosophy and Literature 28 (2004): 453-66.
by Denis Dutton
Human beings expend staggering amounts of time and resources on
creating and experiencing art and entertainment music, dancing, and
static visual arts. Of all of the arts, however, it is the category
of fictional story-telling that across the globe today is the most
intense focus of what amounts to a virtual human addiction. A
recent government study in Britain showed that if you add together
annual attendances in plays and cinema with hours watching
television drama, the average Briton spends roughly 6% of all
waking life watching dramatic performances. And that figure does
not even include books and magazines: further vast numbers of hours
spent reading short stories, bodice-rippers, mysteries, and
thrillers, as well as so-called serious fictions, old and new. The
origins of this obsession with comic and dramatic fictions are lost
in remote prehistory, as lost as the origins of language itself.
But like language, we know the obsession with fiction is universal:
stories told, read, and dramatically or poetically performed are
independently invented in all known cultures, literate or not,
having advanced technologies or not. Wherever printing arrives, it
is used to reproduce fictions. Whenever television appears in the
world, soap operas soon show up on the schedule. Both the forms
that fiction takes and the ideas, types of characters, and kinds of
conflict that make up its content can be shown to be strikingly
similar across cultures. It has specialist practitioners rhapsodes,
novelists, playwrights, actors and is governed both informally with
stylistic conventions and sometimes formally for example, by
censorship laws. A love of fiction is as universal as governance,
marriage, jokes, religion, and the incest taboo.
The question for any general aesthetics is: Why? Joseph Carroll is
a literary theorist who has applied his probing mind over the last
decade to the origins, nature, and functions of literary
experience. His new collection of essays and reviews, Literary
Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (Routledge,
$85.00 boards, $23.95 paper) looks at literature and literary
theory through the lens of evolutionary psychology. At the same
time, Carroll's eye is that of an extremely perceptive literary
critic. In fact, I would judge him to be one of the most acute and
knowledgeable readers of fiction I've ever encountered. It should
not come as a surprise, therefore, that he is sometimes dubious, or
even scathing, about evolutionary explanations of literature that
have been offered up by writers whose grasp of psychology exceeds,
in his opinion, their command of high literature. His complaints,
however, are not about the fundamental notion that evolution by
natural and sexual selection have made human beings into the
story-loving animals they have become: his adjustments are intended
to increase the accuracy and usefulness of Darwin's revolution.
However critical he is of evolutionary psychologists, Carroll
remains a Darwinian through and through.
Carroll holds that the only way to attain a general theory of
literature is through an account of human nature that builds from
the ground up, from the most basic conditions for the evolution of
the human species. A Darwinian literary theory first needs a
Darwinian psychology. Once we have a basic Darwinian psychology in
place, we can see that the narrative proclivities of human beings,
far from being an incidental by-product of the evolved mind, are
central to some of its most human functions. The structures of
basic motives and dispositions are what would be appropriate for a
species, as Carroll describes it, that "is highly social and mildly
polygynous, that displays concealed ovulation, continuous female
receptivity, and postmenopausal life expectancy corresponding to a
uniquely extended period of childhood development, that has
extraordinary aptitudes for technology, that has developed language
and the capacity for peering into the minds of its conspecifics,
and that displays a unique disposition for fabricating and
consuming aesthetic and imaginative artifacts." Such a list alone,
he contends, would make it impossible to imagine a blank-slate view
of the mind, in which the mind evolves in a vacuum, goes onto
produce culture, which then gives back to the mind all content and
structure.
Some of the mental processes that grow from this ground are
universally predictable for individuals, for example such
capacities as the acquisition of language and color vocabularies.
Other processes, Carroll says, are characterized by a
"combinatorial fluidity" of a sort that we prefer to call
"creative" or "inventive." But in all cases, cultural artifacts,
"no matter how complex or seemingly arbitrary, are constrained by
the limitations of physical nature and are both prompted and
constrained by an evolved human psychology." The best way to
understand these prompts and constraints for Carroll is in terms of
a hierarchical structure of what he terms "behavioral systems,"
which he explicates with a diagram that goes back to the concept of
inclusive fitness as a first mover for all adaptations.
The achievement of inclusive fitness requires that human life be
organized along lines which Carroll specifies in terms of seven
behavioral systems. These systems are saturated by basic human
emotions that form the general framework for motivations. These
coexisting systems realms of affect, interest, and constraint make
up the fabric of human life from the Pleistocene to the present.
They are the basis for human reproductive success and survival as a
social species. Listed along with a few examples of their
prehistoric manifestations, the behavior systems are:
(1) Survival: avoid predators, obtain food, seek shelter, defeat
enemies.
(2) Technology: shape cutters and pounders, use levers, attach
objects, use fire.
(3) Mating: Assess and attract sexual partners, overcome
competitors, avoid incest.
(4) Parenting: nurse, protect, provide, nurture, teach.
(5) Kin: distinguish kin, favor kin, maintain a kin network.
(6) Social: build coalitions, achieve status, monitor reciprocity.
(7) Cognition: tell stories, paint pictures, form beliefs, acquire
knowledge.
This schema locates imaginative artifact manufacture and
story-telling alongside other normal human pursuits. This is surely
a valid move, given the sheer quantity of attention human beings
devote to fictions and other aesthetically imaginative activities.
These cognitive pursuits are not a special, rarified useless realm,
but are in different ways mutually implicated with the other
specified behavioral systems in particular, we might imagine,
technology, mating, parenting, and general social life.
The seven behavioral systems are the foundation for most of what
might be regarded as the social constructions of human life:
national politics, specific languages, law, local customs and
belief structures. But the seven systems are not themselves social
constructions: their existence is not arbitrary and contingent but
present today in all human cultures because of the operation of
Darwinian mechanisms: ancestors who favored these propensities and
strategies survived; their survival over times made such
propensities innate. The systems are intrinsically regulated by
emotions of pleasure and aversion: Carroll relies on Paul Eckman's
basic psychological typology: fear, joy, sadness, anger, disgust,
contempt, and surprise. (These emotions of course subdivide
indefinitely into the likes of shame, chagrin, embarrassment,
affection, regret, and so forth, depending on local emphasis and
traditions: but once again, basic emotions such as joy and sadness
are not themselves social constructions, they are the universal
conditions for having an emotional life at all.) These emotions
saturate behavioral systems, constituting the motivational
mainsprings for their relevant attitudes and behavior.
Carroll's behavioral systems form discriminable contexts for the
operation of cognitive modules, the individual blades and pop-up
tools of the Swiss Army knife metaphor of mind: "For instance, the
cognitive module of vision edge and motion detection, color, depth,
etc. would be activated within the technological behavioral system
and survival system. . . . `Face recognition' modules would be
activated within all interpersonal behavioral systems (mating,
parenting, kin, social interaction)." He also thinks it likely that
the brain has specific modules "geared to the construction of
narratives and the recognition of aesthetically pleasing verbal
patterns," and that these modules would be intrinsic to the
cognitive behavioral system. In addition to this active mental
apparatus, Carroll believes that experience, certainly including
the experience of fictional narratives, is conditioned by
life-history categories: our life is divided into phases of birth,
growth, mating, parenting, and death. Evolutionary psychology has
typically over-emphasized mating (and courtship) as the focus of
attention, and indeed fictional narrative universally deals with
the trials of love. But Carroll thinks that all these life-period
patterns must be kept in mind when discussing fiction. He does not
accept that maximizing human reproductive potential is so vastly
important in the scheme of human history. Sultans who sire hundreds
of children, he remarks, are not typical of the human race. Much of
what has taken human attention in evolutionary history is directed
at bodily survival and at social maintenance: keeping yourself and
your family well-fed and healthy, defending family and tribe, and
making the tribe a stronger, more fit social unit. Inclusive
fitness toward successful reproduction is the ultimate goal, but
the lived fabric of daily human life brings many other purposes and
ideas into play. Issues of social dissonance and cohesion, death
and its meaning, as well as the challenges and adventures of youth
that do not involve courtship, can also be expected to figure into
the cognitive content of stories and art. I imagine most
evolutionary aestheticians would welcome Carroll's outline of a
Darwinian psychology. However, this account so far leaves open the
question of how fiction functions as an adaptation. Fictional
narrative supplies us with pleasure, but what does it do for us
adaptively? Steven Pinker, writing from the standpoint of empirical
psychology, supplies one answer to this question. Joseph Carroll,
literary connoisseur and theorist, thinks on the other hand that
Pinker's answer shows he does not know what literature is in the
first place. It's instructive to trace out the implications of
their dispute.
The universal fascination with fictions is a curious thing. If
human beings were attracted only to true narratives, factual
reports that describe the real world, the attraction could be
attributed to utility. We might imagine that just as early homo
sapiens needed to hew sharp adzes and know the ways of game
animals, so they needed to employ language accurately to describe
themselves and their environment and to communicate truths to each
other. Were that the case, there would be no "problem of fiction,"
because there would be no fiction: the only alternatives to
desirable truth would be unintentional mistakes or intentional
lies. Such Pleistocene Gradgrinds would be about as eager to waste
linguistic effort creating fables and fictions as they would be to
waste their manual skills laboring to produce dull adzes. We can
speculate even that the enjoyment of fictions might have put them
at an adaptive disadvantage against more Gradgrindish neighboring
tribes: homo sapiens would in such a circumstance have evolved to
react to untrue, made-up stories much as it reacts to the smell of
rotting meat. Now as it happens, this speculation does not accord
with facts: the human reaction to fictions, at least when they are
properly understood to be fictions, is not aversion, but runs
anywhere from boredom to amusement to intense pleasure.
At this point we reach a fork in theory's road. There are two
issues to be distinguished. First, there is the adaptive usefulness
of fiction, its functional benefits, from Pleistocene campfire
stories to modern novels and movies. Second, there is the pleasure
and perhaps related felt satisfactions that are not well described
as immediate pleasure which the experience of fiction evokes. On
the first topic, the functional uses of fiction, Carroll, Pinker,
and other evolutionary aestheticians agree. There is an enormous
potential survival value for a species in being able to hypothesize
non-obtaining states of affairs imagining, contrary to known facts,
what it would be for the neighboring tribe to attack the camp when
the men are out hunting, or what it would be to travel in an area
where water is scarce. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides talk about the
advantages of "decoupled" imaginative acts, Michelle Sugiyama
writes of fictions as a kind of imaginative preparation for dealing
with real-world problems, and Pinker himself uses a games analogy
in How the Mind Works (1997): "Life is like chess, and plots [in
fiction] are like those books of famous chess games that serious
players study so they will be prepared if they ever find themselves
in similar straits." In life as in chess, "there are too many
possible sequences of moves and countermoves for all of them to be
played out in one's mind." Familiarity with fictional plots
obviates the need always in to learn things in first-hand life
experience; it can aid in the development of mental flexibility and
adaptability to new social problems and expanded physical
environments.
On the other, Pinker and Carroll starkly diverge on how to regard
the pleasure produced by fiction. Pinker treats the intense
pleasures of art, including fiction, essentially as by-products.
The arts are a means by which we identify "pleasure-giving
patterns" in the brain. For him, the arts "purify" these patterns,
"concentrate them," allowing the brain to "stimulate itself without
the messiness of electrodes or drugs . . . [to] give itself intense
artificial doses of the sights and sounds and smells that
ordinarily are given off by healthful environments." Pinker
explains this process with a culinary analogy: "We enjoy strawberry
cheesecake, but not because we evolved a taste for it. We evolved
circuits that gave us trickles of enjoyment from the sweet taste of
ripe fruit, the creamy mouth feel of fats and oils from nuts and
meat, and the coolness of fresh water. Cheesecake packs a sensual
wallop unlike anything in the natural world because it is a brew of
megadoses of agreeable stimuli which we concocted for the express
purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons. Pornography is another
pleasure technology." For Pinker, the arts are yet another. On this
account, the arts seek out and find the pleasure centers associated
with meeting adaptive challenges ones which increased fitness in
the Pleistocene and stimulate those centers without going through
the risks and toil of actually undertaking the challenging
activities. In the creation and experience of art, our minds rise
to "a biologically pointless challenge: figuring out how to get at
the pleasure circuits of the brain and deliver little jolts of
enjoyment without the inconvenience of wringing bona fide fitness
increments from the harsh world." The arts are pleasure short-cuts,
variously likened by Pinker to puzzles and games, alcohol and
drugs, and sweet, rich desserts things that also give us little
jolts of enjoyment.
Pinker's view of pleasure in the experience of music, literature,
and art brings to my mind one of the most enduring arguments in
aesthetics. It was first raised not in connection with literature,
but as a move in the musical aesthetics formulated in the
nineteenth century by Eduard Hanslick (1825-1904). Even though
Hanslick only applied his argument to music, it has application to
other arts, including fiction, where I think it can be used to
resist Pinker's position. Hanslick was the champion of Brahms
against Wagner, for which Wagner pilloried him as Beckmesser in Die
Meistersinger. In his 1854 tract, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the
Musically Beautiful), he attacked the idea that the purpose of
music was to excite emotions a common opinion then as now. While he
granted that sometimes incidental emotions can be produced by music
(parades, church music, dance music, nostalgic music, perhaps),
there was no reliable connection between the emotions in music and
those putatively produced in listeners "no invariable and
inevitable nexus between musical works and certain states of mind,"
as he put it. The beauties of music are peculiar to it, and can be
perceived in music even when perhaps little or no emotion is felt
by a sensitive and perceptive listener. (A fine discussion of
Hanslick is found in Geoffrey Payzant's 2002 monograph, Hanslick on
the Musically Beautiful).
Hanslick's essential meaning can be captured with a thought
experiment: suppose you are listening with pleasure to a particular
piece of music, say, the achingly melancholy first movement of the
Brahms 4th Symphony. You have a strong sense of its emotions, a
sense of its atmosphere. Is the transaction between the music and
you properly described as those emotions being produced in you?
That is the model Pinker describes art produces, causes, emotions
in us, pushes our pleasure buttons. "Music appears to be a pure
pleasure technology," he says, "a cocktail of recreational drugs
that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure
circuits at once."
Now let us imagine that some clever neurophysiologist invents a
drug or technology that can give you the emotion of the Brahms
movement directly, without having to sit through the music itself.
This might involve taking a pill, or attaching little wired pads to
your temples. The Hanslickian claim is that such a procedure is
unintelligible. It makes no sense because the intense emotional
tone of the Brahms 4th is not something in your brain externally
caused by the music, and therefore extrinsic to the music. The
emotion is known only in experiencing that very piece of music, in
the minutes that you experience it. The emotion is both individual
and intrinsic to the experience of that individual musical work
itself. Hanslick called such moments the experience of The
Musically Beautiful, and his rather Kantian point is that we have
them only in contemplating music. For Hanslick, as for a Kantian,
music is not an aesthetic form that has an emotional content which
might be delivered by some alternative, non-musical means.
In the Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, Hanslick contrasts two aspects of
music that resonate with the dispute between Pinker and Carroll on
the nature of aesthetic pleasure. Few people respond adequately to
beauty in music, Hanslick says. They do not listen actively,
intellectually, but as passive recipients of emotion. Hanslick
likens this to eating, getting drunk, or taking opium. It's
important to realize that Hanslick is not denying that music has
what he calls this pathological aspect. He only wants to argue that
as a high and lasting art, music must be listened to in a manner of
active, informed contemplation. This is a kind of listening that
requires cultivation; it addresses the mind and not just the
emotions. The effects of such listening on the mind are not
evanescent, Hanslick furthermore argues, but permanent. In this
respect, we can only imagine Hanslick's response to a remark Pinker
makes about music: "Compared with language, vision, social
reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our
species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged"
(How the Mind Works, p. 528).
Carroll, for his part, regards Pinker's outlook as fundamentally
misguided. He writes, "Despite the concession to the utility of
fiction as a model for moves in the game of life, Pinker's wider
exposition makes it apparent that like Freud he regards literary
representation as largely a matter of pleasurable fantasy. It is
different from pornography only in that the pleasure buttons it
presses are not those literally and concretely of sexual activity."
So what does art and literature give us? Carroll does not deny that
literature gives us simulations that can act for models of
behavior, game plans in Pinker's sense. But art goes further: "It
helps us to regulate our complex psychological organization, and it
helps us cultivate our socially adaptive capacity for entering
mentally into the experience of other people." This is not quite
the same thing as imaginatively encountering a dangerous elephant
in a story. It is rather a matter of entering empathically into the
minds of our fellows. It may come to us as entertainment, but
fiction has profound effects on making us what we are.
Carroll elaborates this claim by referring to Dickens's persistent
attention to the role fiction plays in the lives of abused and
neglected children. There are many such in Dickens: the Smallweed
children in Bleak House little Judy, who "never owned a doll, never
heard of Cinderella, never played any game," as the family had
"discarded all amusements, discountenanced all story-books, fairy
tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever."
The Smallweed children are grotesques. Little Tom and Louisa
Gradgrind in Hard Times are more tragic figures. Deprived of art
and literature by their father, a utilitarian ideologue, they grow
up emotionally and morally impaired. Esther Summerson, the
protagonist of Bleak House, grows up in a world, as Carroll says,
"devoid of affection." She survives by creating a imaginative world
of her own, a private, imaginary place where she talks with her
doll and engages normal human affection, keeping her emotional
nature alive, till the plot turns in her favor and she moves to a
better environment: "The conversations she has with her doll are
not fantasies of pleasure; they are desperate and effective
measures of personal salvation." Carroll also mentions the abused
David Copperfield, who discovered next to his bedroom dusty,
forgotten books that had belonged to his dead father: Tom Jones,
Humphrey Clinker, Don Quixote, and Robinson Crusoe. Carroll argues
his case thus:
What David gets from these books is not just a bit of mental
cheesecake, a chance for a transient fantasy in which all his own
wishes are fulfilled. What he gets is lively and powerful images of
human life suffused with the feeling and understanding of the
astonishingly capable and complete human beings who wrote them. It
is through this kind of contact with a sense of human possibility
that he is enabled to escape from the degrading limitations of his
own local environment. He is not escaping from reality; he is
escaping from an impoverished reality into the larger world of
healthy human possibility. By nurturing and cultivating his own
individual identity through his literary imagination, he enables
himself to adapt successfully to this world. He directly enhances
his own fitness as a human being, and in doing so he demonstrates
the kind of adaptive advantage that can be conferred by literature.
This account is some distance from pleasure buttons. It is intended
by Carroll to support his central contention that literature is an
"important means by which we cultivate and regulate the complex
cognitive machinery on which our more highly developed functions
depend." Carroll accuses Pinker of failing to grasp the importance
of such cultivation, as evidenced by his claim that the human race
could do away with music and be basically unchanged, and that music
can be analogized to recreational drugs. "Drugs," Carroll says,
"are disorienting and demoralizing. If young people use them
habitually, they become incapable of adapting to the demands of a
complex environment. Music has no such deleterious effect. More
importantly, it seems very likely that people raised with no
exposure to music, art, or literature would be psychologically and
emotionally stunted, that they would be only marginally capable of
developing in normal ways." The notion of a recreational-drug
shortcut to achieve a Darwinian fitness reward is a delusion. Nor,
it would seem, is the pleasure value of art an end to which the art
itself is a mere shortcut. Working through and understanding in
experience a work of art is an achievement, and an intrinsic value.
Carroll argues that literature is a means by which people learn to
understand their own emotions and the feelings of others. Fiction
provides us with templates for a normal emotional life. "For these
mental maps or models to be effective in providing behavioral
directives," he says, they must be "emotionally saturated,
imaginatively vivid. Art and cultural artifacts like religion and
ideology meet this demand." They help us "make sense of human needs
and motives," simulating life experience, allowing us to grasp
"social relations, evoke sexual and social interactions, depict the
intimate relations of kin, and locate the whole complex and
interactive array of human behavioral systems within models of the
total world order. Humans have a universal and irrepressible need
to fabricate this sort of order, and satisfying that need provides
a distinct form of pleasure and fulfillment."
The mention of David Copperfield's discovery of his dead father's
books also suggests another idea central to understanding
literature. The meaning of a literary work, Carroll says, is not in
the events it recounts. It is how events are interpreted that makes
meaning. Interpretation, in turn, involves necessary reference to a
point of view. This is defined as "the locus of consciousness or
experience within which any meaning takes place." Following M.H.
Abrams, Carroll argues that an interpretive point of view is
constituted by three elements: the author, the represented
character, and the audience. These elements come together, in the
experience of the reader, as situated in the mind of the author.
That is why part of the significance for David Copperfield in
discovering the books is that he is being introduced, as Carroll
says, to "the astonishingly capable and complete human beings who
wrote them." The importance of fiction depends on a sense of a
communicative transaction between reader and author understood as a
real, not an implied or postulated author. Authors are actual
persons who negotiate between the various points of view of
fictional persons (the characters), the author's own point of view,
and the point of view of the audience. Carroll insists that these
three elements are present in every literary experience and that
they exhaust the list of operative elements: "There are always
three components. There are only three components."
This isn't to deny that the components overlap, that audiences
change (hence our interest in recovering the meanings and values of
the original audiences of historic works), and that authors
contrive even to hide themselves. Nevertheless, the author is
trying to control the show the interpretation of characters, their
actions and the events that befall them. Authors attempt this by
persuading, manipulating, wheedling, and so forth: whatever will
appeal to the reader and create a convincing interpretation,
including ambiguous interpretations of polysemic events.
This then is how Carroll's evolutionary substructure underpins a
general theory of literature. "Authors are people talking to people
about people." Behind the talk lies an evolved structure of
behavioral systems, a Darwinian psychology, and the emotions that
characterize it. Literary forms are analyzed and understood in
terms the complex relations between authors, characters, and
audiences. As I understand Carroll's view, this makes the
experience of a work of literature inescapably social, and not just
about an imaginary social life. The author is always a palpable
presence, which would explain why intentionalism has never died in
criticism or literary theory.
Literary Darwinism contains many passages analyzing literature to
good effect. His discussion of Pride and Prejudice is especially
useful to illustrate the kind of analysis for which his literary
theory calls. For example, he cites the episode in which Mr.
Collins introduces himself to the Bennet household in a letter that
is read by the family. This letter is, as Carroll nicely describes
it, "an absolute marvel of fatuity and of pompous self-importance,"
and much is revealed in how mother, father, and the Bennet sisters
react to it. The excessively sweet-tempered older sister, Jane, is
puzzled by it, though she credits Mr. Collins with good intentions.
The dull middle sister, Mary, says she rather likes Mr. Collins's
style. The mother, in her typical manner, only reacts to it
opportunistically, in terms of a potential advantage in the
situation. It is up to Elizabeth and her father to see clearly what
a clownish performance the letter represents: their understanding
marks an affinity of temperament and a quality perceptiveness the
others lack. But what Carroll's analysis makes clear is that there
are two more people not fictional characters, but actual human
beings who are in on the agreement between Mr. Bennet and his
second daughter. These two further individuals are also members of
their "circle of wit and judgment." First, there is Jane Austen,
the author of Pride and Prejudice. And second, there is you, the
reader of Pride and Prejudice. The creation and experience of the
novel brings about a uniting of points of view, a sense of shared
sensibility not open to everyone, and a broadening of perspectives.
It is no small enjoyment for the reader to be included in this
exclusive group.
Which brings us back to pleasure and its place in literary theory.
Carroll claims in the spirit of scientific neutrality that
Darwinian literary theory ought to be applicable to any literary
specimen, just as DNA analysis should apply equally to human beings
or to flatworms. This may be so, but it seems to me that Carroll's
approach is most congenial to classic fictions of the sort we read
from Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dickens, George Eliot, or Jane Austen.
If we set Carroll against Pinker, we find, as so often in the
history of aesthetics, that the two theoretical outlooks look
better or worse depending on the choice of examples adduced to back
them up. Does everything Carroll says in applying his evolutionary
theory of fiction work as well with a Harlequin Romance as it does
with Daniel Defoe? I think not. Carroll dislikes Pinker's
characterization of literature in terms of fantasy, escapism, and
ephemeral entertainment values, and provides powerful arguments for
seeing fiction in a different, more cultivated and informed way.
But he has not so much refuted Pinker as shown that literature can
do more than Pinker seems to suppose.
Hanslick distinguishes the "ideal" aspect of music from its
"elemental" aspect: attention to the former is the smart way to
understand music. Those who know only the latter aspect possess
only a passive, dumbed-down way to listen. Hanslick does, however,
allow that music itself does, whether we like it or not, have both
of these aspects: there are Sousa marches and there are Bartok
quartets. We ought to make ourselves, he thought, into informed,
cultivated listeners in order to appreciate all music has to offer.
If we listen to it as shallow entertainment, so much the worse for
us. Literature offers a parallel distinction. There is no doubt, we
might similarly argue, that just as Robinson Crusoe helped make a
man of the fictional David Copperfield, so George Eliot's and
Charles Dickens's fictions have helped real readers develop and
mature. But evolutionary aesthetics has also to account for the
fact that Eliot and Dickens were not the most popular novelists of
Victorian England. That honor belonged to the nearly forgotten
Maria Corelli, Queen Victoria's favorite novelist, whose
metaphysical twaddle may more clearly accord with Pinker's than
Carroll's characterization of literary experience. In any event,
the drugs, porn, and cheesecake analogues certainly seem more
plausibly applied to aspects of contemporary popular fiction and
movies than to Middlemarch. And even if we grant the important ways
serious literature can provide audiences today with Carroll's
templates, his cognitive maps and models, why should we not allow
that Mills and Boon readers today are also provided with cognitive
maps and templates by their literature? By Carroll's own admission
such templates might include religious ideologies and mythologies,
as well as fictions from Gilgamesh to V.S. Naipaul. So why not
movies, which, a cynic might insist, provide relatively
unsophisticated life-advice for relatively unsophisticated people?
If there is adaptive survival value in ancient, Stone-Age
storytelling, it ought to extend to our own time and explain
somehow the pleasure we get from fictions. It strikes me that
Carroll and Pinker are both correct to some extent about all
fiction, with each more correct than the other about different
subclasses. Pinker is most right about popular, effects-driven
blockbuster movies, TV, and cheap thrillers. Carroll is most right
about high art, the classics whose values endure across
generations, the "best that is known and thought in the world."
This is not a surprise: Joseph Carroll brings to his Darwinian
position a sensitive aesthetic and critical sense. He writes
beautifully about deep, rich works of art. This gives a wholly
earned air of importance to the essays in Literary Darwinism. For
the last decade, I've heard it said that evolutionary aesthetics is
a field of great potential. Read his extended analysis of Pride and
Prejudice and you can see how Carroll goes beyond the promises into
the payoff. He is able to demonstrate how a knowledge of Darwinian
mechanisms shines light on some of the most cherished aesthetic
emotions and experiences we are capable of feeling and he does it
without impoverished reductionisms, without making the endlessly
complex seem stupidly simple. His Literary Darwinism is a book to
reckon with.
University of Canterbury, New Zealand
[5]denis.dutton at canterbury.ac.nz
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