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Does Darwin have anything to say about Beowulf and Madame Bovary?
DARWINIAN LITERARY CRITICISM: such an evocative phrase! But what does it mean? Could it refer to the eviscerations of authors that take place regularly in the back pages of The New Republic-critics culling weak novelists from the herd? Or perhaps it's an allusion to the scramble for jobs at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, in which only the intellectually fit (or fashionable) survive.
In fact, the proponents of Darwinian literary criticism hail it as the Next Big Thing in literary studies. For a decade or more, they've argued that evolutionary psychology can be a useful tool in illuminating works of fiction, seeing it as a more rational, scientific replacement for such other lit-crit modes as Marxism, poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis. Exit the self-subverting sign; enter the selfish gene.
And now the movement has a manifesto: ''The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative'' (Northwestern), edited by Daniel Sloan Wilson, a biologist and anthropologist at Binghamton University, and Jonathan Gottschall, until recently an adjunct instructor of English at St. Lawrence University in New York. Its dozen essays explore how art might have arisen in our evolutionary past and demonstrate how to deploy Darwinian ideas when reading specific texts.
Gottschall sought Wilson out as a co-adviser on his doctoral thesis after the Binghamton English department blanched at his belief that Darwin might be a useful prism through which to view Homer's bloody ''Iliad.'' Once Gottschall discovered evolutionary theory in grad school, he could never go back. Suddenly, he writes, he ''experienced the 'Iliad' as a drama of naked apes-strutting, preening, fighting, tattooing their chests, and bellowing their power.''
But genetic explanations of behavior face resistance from humanities scholars, as the book's publishing history may attest. With contributors like uber-sociobiologist E.O. Wilson and literary critic Frederick Crews (each of whom writes a forward to the book), the novelist Ian McEwan (who, in a previously published lecture, speaks of the universality of certain emotions, which he attributes to natural selection), and the Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd (who summarizes theories about the origins of art), the editors were sure university presses would be clamoring for the book. But at least 15 turned it down.
At each press, ''The science editor would usually give it a fair shake,'' Gottschall says. ''Then they would say, 'Let me run it by the literary guy.' That's when it would get the ax.''
Anti-gene biases aside, one problem with the new approach is the chasm between macro theories and micro readings, which few scholars seem able to bridge adroitly. The theories of the origins of art summarized by the biographer Boyd, who teaches at the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, are certainly meaty and serious. Steven Pinker's ''cheesecake for the mind'' theory, for instance, proposes that art is a byproduct of intelligence and abilities that evolved for utilitarian reasons. But the readings often get stuck at the level of: Madame Bovary cheated because she lusted for an alpha male.
That was one contention in the recent ''Madame Bovary's Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature,'' by David P. Barash, a psychologist at the University of Washington, and his daughter Nanelle R. Barash. In the new book, Robin Fox, a professor of social theory at Rutgers, points to-but doesn't do much with-examples of male bonding in ''Gilgamesh,'' ''Beowulf,'' and the ''Iliad,'' arguing bonding evolved to help during hunts. End of insight.
Other contributors say literary Darwinism should inspire critics to approach books more like scientists. Gottschall himself had students ''code'' the character traits of heroes and heroines of 1,440 folk tales. Unsurprisingly, he found that male protagonists were more active and aggressive than heroines, but points out that the pattern extends across cultures. And a trio of contributors, Daniel J. Kruger, Maryanne Fisher, and Ian Jobling, uses the survey method to show that female readers would rather marry the ''proper heroes'' in Romantic-era novels-but have a quickie with the ''dark heroes.'' In art as in life, ''dads'' and ''cads'' pursue alternative mating strategies, each effective in its own way.
Frederick Crews once mocked Darwinian criticism, among other trendy approaches, in his satire ''Postmodern Pooh,'' but here he praises the authors ''because they always write as open-minded empiricists.'' Still, in an e-mail he confessed, ''My hunch is that the vein of evolutionary ore to be mined in literary study will prove to be rather thin.''
Other signs of this field's future are mixed, too. Cambridge University Press has tentatively agreed to publish Gottschall's dissertation, on the ''Iliad,'' but his adjunct position at St. Lawrence has ended, and he's yet to find a new job. The market is tough for everyone, but by turning himself into ''half an evolutionary theorist, half a classicist,'' he worries he's ahead of his time. ''I've made a sort of freak of myself.''
Christopher Shea's Critical Faculties column appears in Ideas biweekly. E-mail critical.faculties@....
