Why Can’t Biologists Read Poetry? Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love

Abstract

Since reinvention of social Darwinism as sociobiology in 1970s, and particularly since reinvention of sociobiology as evolutionary psychology in 1990s, deployment of Darwinian ideas and models has been steadily on rise in a wide variety of academic fields--Brian Boyd offers a list that includes ethology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, neurophysiology, anthropology, analytic philosophy, and psychology (2). (1) Yet literary study has been curiously reticent in engaging this intellectual trend. A recent review of prominent journal of theory Critical Inquiry reveals that while Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud vie for position with Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault among journal's most frequently footnoted thinkers, Darwin is, apparently, nowhere to be found (Stevens and Williams 217). To be sure, a small and determined group of scholars has attempted to ground study of literature in evolutionary psychology, and others have investigated Darwin's impact on, and debts to, literature and culture of his own era. (2) But literary criticism--in part because of its investments in historicizing and relativizing cultural norms, in part because of a healthy suspicion of ways in which Darwin's has been used to justify reactionary views on race, class, and gender--remains wary of neo-Darwinian vogue, with its axiom, taken from entomologist Edward O. Wilson, that the genes hold culture on a leash (167). Barbara Herrnstein Smith's recent discussions of human-animal relations, for example, are so trenchant in their attacks on neo-Darwinist linguist Steven Pinker--for his reckless application of metaphors from human realm to animal, for his apparent disdain for literature and arts--that her reader might fail to notice that she is, in fact, arguing for recognition of neo-Darwinian insights about permeability of human-animal divide. Similarly, although Marjorie Garber challenges neo-Darwinists, most notably her Harvard colleague Wilson, for their reduction of human nature to the level of gene (21), she does not dispute Wilson's arguments so much as simply dislike them. Rebuking Wilson for his relegation of literary to a purely ornamental or decorative function, she points out that he quotes endorsement of good name as evidence for evolutionary hazards of sexual infidelity but utterly neglects Iago's position as most arrant hypocrite in all of Shakespeare, [and] his own contempt for 'good name' as compared to more material and vengeful rewards (28). It may be accidental that a question of sexual jealousy underlies example over which Wilson and Garber skirmish, but Garber's response to Wilson, and Smith's to Pinker, partake, I suggest, of a slightly different sort of jealousy, a possessiveness about realm of literary. Thus in asking why biologists can't read poetry, I want to address both senses of question--I want to ask not only why masterly scientists like Wilson prove to be clumsy and undergraduate-sounding when they talk about Shakespeare but also why literary critics like Garber and Smith (and myself) want them to be bad readers. Why can't biologists read poetry? At same time, however, I pose converse question: Why can't poets (or literary critics, or humanists) read science? What cultural strictures or habits of thought make us regard invocation of Darwin's name--especially when it comes to explanations of culture--with suspicion? In answering these questions I do not propose to stake out a position on exactly how far Darwinian thinking can usefully be extended to social sciences and humanities. My inquiry into both new Darwinism and resistance to it will remain largely within my own disciplinary territory--literary criticism. In short, I aim to offer less a Darwinian reading of culture than a cultural reading of Darwinism. This reading will proceed through a detailed analysis of Ian McEwan's novel Enduring Love--a novel that engages contemporary debates about neo-Darwinism by representing a series of interrelated conflicts between scientific, literary, and religious worldviews. …