Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution, by Ian Duncan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution by Ian Duncan Philipp Erchinger (bio) Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution, by Ian Duncan; pp. xiii + 290. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019, $35.00, £30.00. Anthropology, as Ian Duncan's impressive Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution confirms, has returned to literary scholarship. But it has discarded the guise of the universalist science of man that was one of the unfinished projects of Enlightenment thought. Instead, studies of the human now often work from the premise that their subject is not only infinitely diverse, but also deeply involved with a world of nonhuman life and matter that forms an integral part of its existence, sustaining and surpassing that existence at the same time. As Duncan outlines in his introduction, this modern approach to anthropology took shape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when a materialist and evolutionist "natural history of man" began to complicate the older notion that human life is divided between a physical body and an "immortal soul." As a result, the figure of man came to inhabit a confusing borderland crisscrossed by multiple fault lines: between "nature and history, individual and species, human life and biological life, or life as such" (2). As various emergent disciplines laid claim to the exploration of that borderland, Duncan argues, the nature of human being became an urgent problem, unsettling the very sciences that increasingly sought to use it as their secular ground. Duncan's key argument is that the realist novel, which evolved alongside the natural history of man, is itself a form of anthropology: rather than simply staging or exhibiting [End Page 290] the questionable figure of the human, it actively participated in its investigation. Duncan pursues this claim through five chapters that range widely across the "classical era of European realism, circa 1750–1880," covering philosophical, scientific, and fictional prose from Germany, Britain, and France (1). The first two chapters establish an analogy between the loose, open, variable form of the novel and the indeterminate nature of human life, which was perceived as equally capable of assuming "all forms and functions" (9). Thus viewed, the very formlessness of novel writing enabled it to compose the "universal discourse" that the philosophy of human nature was unable to supply (2). Indeed, the study of human life, like its subject, was fractured from its inception, as Duncan explains. One broadly empiricist school, represented by a line that stretches from Johann Gottfried Herder to Charles Darwin, described human history as inseparably caught up in the evolution of organic life. By contrast, a rival tradition ranging from Jean-Jacques Rousseau through Immanuel Kant to Friedrich Nietzsche argued that humans develop through works and arts that separate them from their natural state. In both cases, the underlying question was how natural philosophers were supposed to conceive of the relation between the organic life that humans involuntarily undergo and the historical life that they consciously lead. In the Romantic Bildungsroman, as we learn in chapter 2, this relation between organic and historical development reoccurs in the form of an unresolved conflict between the growth of a human individual and the life of the species of which it partakes. Concentrating mainly on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795–96) and Germaine de Staël's Corinne, or Italy (1807), Duncan shows how these novels try to mediate the "formation of species being" through narratives of personal progress (57). In doing so, Duncan argues, they repeatedly draw attention to the difference, or even open a rift, between individual and human history. In Corinne, the ruinous disintegration of these two dimensions of human life is specifically meant to expose the "exclusion of women" from the universal category of Enlightenment "man" (57). One of the greatest merits of Duncan's study is that it vividly and thoughtfully illustrates how the nature of the human increasingly was overtaken and transformed by the very life in which nineteenth-century science, from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire to Charles Lyell and Darwin, found it to be embedded. For example, in Walter Scott's Count...