Acephalous

"And there still would have been the Holocaust..."

Few write on the history of evolutionary theory as compellingly as John Wilkins. (Had his Species: the History of an Idea and Defining Species: a Sourcebook from Antiquity to Today been available in 2002, I could've avoided years of thankless legwork and finished my dissertation with normative time to spare. Not that I'm bitter.) So I can think of no better way to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin than to listen to Wilkins speculate about what would have happened had it never existed. My only qualm is with this paragraph:

Lamarckism, by which I mean the progressivist view of evolution, not the “acquired inheritance” version that has little to do directly with Lamarck and anyway is set up as a contrast with Weismann not Darwin, would have played an even greater role in people’s thinking than it did. It may still be with us now—we would be trying to figure out how progress occurs out of necessity, rather than it being the rather odd view of people like Conway Morris.

I think scholars who focus more on the scientific literature underestimate the popular appeal of what amounts to quasi-Lamarckian thought both then and now ... but then again, as I'm the person who wrote my dissertation, I would.

On the style of Octavia Butler's Patternist novels

People routinely slam the prose styling of Octavia Butler (as I would demonstrate with citations and quotations were the new TypePad editor not so averse to material copied from OpenOffice documents), but reading the Patternist novels according to the chronology internal to them has me appreciating the gentle relentlessness of her prose.  However, sometimes I think the critics have a point:

"What does the white animal follow?" asked Anyanwu's grandson loudly enough for Doro to hear.  "What has he to do with us now?"

"My master must pay him for you," said Anyanwu's grandson loudly enough for Doro to hear.  "What has he to do with us now?"

"My master must pay him for you," said Anyanwu.  (Wild Seed 41)

That just scans something awful.  In all seriousness, though, rarely is the reason behind an editorial error so obvious or so indicative of an author's stylistic tics.  In Wild Seed, Butler wed her characters to her prose, such that the latter's stolidity became evidence of the former's hard-fought restraint.  (It is, after all, a novel about two people who spend their unnaturally long lives finding excuses not to murder each other.)  She did so deliberately because, at this point in her career, she could.  The novels were published in this order: Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), Clay's Ark (1984); but they move through narrative time in this one: Wild Seed (1980), Mind of My Mind (1977), Clay's Ark (1984), Survivor (1978), Patternmaster (1976).

I'll discuss how her interest in evolution is, fundamentally, a narrative one (and in so doing, discuss how this interest's inherent in all evolutionarily-inflected narratives, including Darwin's) at some point in the near future.  For the moment, what fascinates me is how the elder Butler crafts the prose of the later novels in such a way that it "develops" into the style of the earliest one (Patternmaster).  Were she actually a Dickian hack ("sophisticated ideas communicated in pedestrian prose," as Consensus Q. Amalgam would have it), such a feat would be beyond her; but comparing the occasionally dense and ornate prose in Wild Seed (which shares formal concerns and historical content with 1979's Kindred) to the more direct, straightforward prose of Clay's Ark—written nearly half a decade later—it is difficult to imagine that the latter's resemblance to Patternmaster is anything other than intentional.  When she was young, she couldn't help but write of the future in spare and quotidian manner; but by 1984, she could adopt a transitional voice, something that approximates in complexity the difference between 1977's Mind of My Mind and 1976's Patternmaster. 

While it may seem odd to call attention to the refinement of her narrative voice, it is essential to understanding the refinement of the thought processes it develops alongside: the series is unusual in that, as Butler said, she invented a society that was conceptually fascinating, but instead of going on to invent another, she became interested in how that one could possibly have come to be.  The fact that eugenics and alien invasion were, for her, the answer is troubling, but I'll leave the how and why of that for a later post. 

The dissertation you were destined to write.

For some reason, I kept on hearing the name "Lambert" repeated recently.  Every time I did, the theme from my favorite childhood cartoon took up residence in my head for hours on end:

Watching "Lambert the Sheepish Lion" as an adult made me realize that the reason I always remembered Winnie the Pooh narrating it was because Winnie the Pooh narrated it; more importantly, I learned that my fascination with nature vs. nurture debate started early.  I can graft so many elements of that cartoon onto arguments in my dissertation that it makes more sense to say that those arguments were rooted in it.  

"Lambert" tackles the notion that we essentially are what we are, but can choose to be otherwise.  So too does my dissertation.  It addresses the fact that superiority is dependent upon environment, and that environment encompasses both the social (the lambs) and natural (the wolf) worlds.  So too does my dissertation. 

I would go on, but I can barely see for all the irony: a cartoon I loved as a child in which the premises of deterministic thought were challenged likely determined the topic of the dissertation I would write as an adult.

You People Suck

Remember a few (months longer than I remembered them being) back when I asked whether I'd knocked your socks off? 

Remember how I played up the interdisciplinary awesomeness of all things blogs?  Then how I did it again a few months later with some folks up at Davis?

I take it all back. 

The punchline to the Wharton introduction was supposed to be that the famous metaphysical philosopher's true talent lay in the biological sciences.  He'd discovered the importance of amphioxus notochords long before anyone else thought to look at them ... but because my head's jammed full of junk, I missed the significance of Wharton's reference. 

The amphioxus was not just some fish—it was an important fish-type-thing.  Possibly the most important fish-type-thing of the late 19th Century. 

Why? 

Because the amphioxus had long been considered one of those all-important missing links.  To quote the I-can't-emphasize-his-importance-enough-type-person Ernst Haeckel—referenced by Wharton in the very paragraph I cite—the amphioxus is important "because it fills the deep gulf between the Invertebrates and the Vertebrates" (76).*

The amphioxus is—quite literally—a liminal figure in the history of science.  Given that my argument in this chapter concerns Wharton's reluctance to wed any particular evolutionary theory because of the excess of liminal figures and ambiguous conclusions, I find your silence on the issue quite alarming.

You're supposed to be helping me.  (In case the subtext of the earlier posts/presentations/roundtables was unclear.)  Yet here I am stuck doing all this work myself. 

I can't say I'm not disappointed. 

Because I am.

That's where I've been the past week: in the archives, reading about these almost-fishes and the many debates they engendered.  This didn't have to happen.  I could've been reading the 3,000 odd posts in my RSS reader.  But you people had to let me down.  Don't think I'll forget this.

Because I won't.

(Unless something more important comes up.  There's only so much trivia a mind can contain ... and petty grudges concerning non-issues are typically the first overboard.)

---

*Eddie Izzard is a bad influence.

This Is How Very Important He Was

Whenever I tell people I'm working on Herbert Spencer, they tilt their head and ask:

"What does The Faerie Queen have to do with American literature?"

"Absolutely nothing," I reply.  "I'm working on Herbert Spencer, not Edmund."

"Who was Herbert Spencer?" 

"Only the single most important intellectual force of the Nineteenth Century."

"If you say so."

And I do.  Because he was.  Only I can't prove it fast enough to prevent their attention from drifting to more significant matters.  (Like their work.)  Now I can.  Here, reprinted in its entirety, is an article from the front page of The New York Times (6 December 1903):

He was the Britney Spears of his time!  Except instead of being a useless pop singer, he was an Intellectual Titan!  Two days earlier—and also on the front page—the Times had reported:

The question, of course, is "For whom is Spencer's condition causing 'grave anxiety'?"  The answer is, well, everyone.* 

Point being, HERBERT SPENCER WAS SO IMPORTANT THE TIMES PUBLISHED A FRONT PAGE ARTICLE SAYING HE HAD HAD A BAD DAY SO STOP LOOKING AT ME FUNNY AND TALKING ABOUT THE FAERIE QUEEN ALRIGHT?

What is the Regnant Theory of Naturalism, Anyway?

As there's confusion over basic procedural issues like how long a dissertation abstract should be (one single-spaced page, two single-spaced pages, five single-spaced pages), I figure there's no harm in asking a basic intellectual question:

What do you consider the dominant theory of naturalism?

If I'm to be redefining it, I ought to know what the majority of scholars think it is.  I'm tempted to follow Lisa Long, who, in her review of three recent attempts at defining naturalism, threw up her hands in defeat:

In the end, naturalism turns back on itself, becomes the uncategorizable category, precisely because the taxonomic and evolutionary tendency of literary history is naturalist in and of itself—concerned in its own way with determining what nineteenth-century critic Hippolyte Taine theorized as the ubiquitous "race, moment, and milieu" that have produced literary naturalism and other generic categories. American literary genres emerge as living, breathing, and ever-changing entities in these texts and in critical history as a whole; much collective scholarly energy has been spent, like that of biological taxonomists, looking for similarities between genres/"species" of literature, and hierarchicalizing those groups based on evolutionary relationships.

She identifies the current attempt to define naturalism as one more lost battle in a long, unwinnable war ... which means the best I can accomplish in my introduction is another pointed setback in an unending campaign of failure.  Of course, I could really surrender and claim, as one critic recently did, that naturalism is "less a movement than a jumble of proffered peculiarities."  The mind rails against the brutal honesty of that definition, but I admire its bravado.

So which naturalism should I be redefining?  The most current consensus?  The most powerful? 

Get Out Your Red Pencils: a Dissertation Abstract Awaits

For those curious as to what literary historicists do (Anthony) and those convinced I do absolutely nothing at all (Emerson), I present my dissertation abstract. 

Behold! 

Everything I've slaved over lo these many years, condensed into five paragraphs ... thereby ensuring that what I've written makes absolutely no sense.  See, I've been over this thing so many times—made so many piddling changes, emphasizing so many stakes here, dropping so many arguments there—I can no longer read the words before me. 

I don't know what they mean.  So invested am I in the history of its revisions—the agonizing decision to delete this, the writhing that accompanied the diminishment of that—I'm unable to judge whether it even makes any sense.  Are the stakes of my argument apparent?  Can you tell how necessary my corrective is to the health of the discipline? 

Does it even make any sense?

(Note: The final version of my dissertation contains a chapter on Twain which is, at the present moment, too excreable to include in the abstract.  Also, my fifty-five page intellectual history of evolutionary theory at the turn of the last century will likely become my first chapter, thus necessitating the writing of an introduction which resembles my abstract and, you know, talks about literature.)

Thought-in-Process: Wharton's "The Descent of Man," Part I

Indicative of my current juvenile acuity: while reading a discussion of male homosexuality in Victorian culture I laughed aloud when I encountered the name of the person whose work had been cited: Dr. Harry Cocks. I initially thought it a prank of some sort, but as you can see from the link, that's the man's name.  His work seems high quality, but when I read his name, I snorted like a seventh grader.  (For which I apologize.)  Needless to say, I'm not in an intellectual place today.  So, I'm borrowing a page from my friend Wally's book and begin this post by saying:

No idea where this is going. 

Pennies from Heaven, Fall into My Lap

When I set my new chapter-per-month schedule, I knew I'd socialize less, sleep less, watch less television—but I also knew I'd be unable to produce quality work without some dumb luck.  No researching for months and months before finding the best quotation in the history of everything; I'd need critical evidence self-glomerating into compelling arguments at breakneck speed.  You can understand, then, why I'm demoralized by my discovery of the isolation of New York "society" from American society at large.*  You can also understand why I'm elated that Edith Wharton underlined the following passage in Haeckel's The History of Creation:

Individuals can transmit, not only those qualities which they themselves have inherited from their ancestors, but also the peculiar, individual qualities which they have acquired in their own life.

Now, underscoring is no more of an endorsement than, say, linking, but it means establishing her familiarity with the neo-Lamarckian strain of evolutionary thought will be a cinch.  All I need do now is determine where she stands on these issues, and I'll be set.  I'll have this thing done in no time flat.  Already half-finished, it will be, sometime soon, I hope.

*The upper reaches barely even considered themselves American.  Wharton wrote of her friends, "we are none of us Americans, we don't think or feel as the Americans do, we are the wretched exotics produced in a European glass house."  The emphasis on "we" and use of the phrase "the Americans" point to future difficulties in establishing her take on social evolution, but as that milk's yet to be spilled, I'll save my tears for now.