The phylogeny of literature
I'll begin by excerpting an exchange between authors Jim Lewis and Jeffery Eugenides found on Slate.com here.
The first quote I'm interested comes from Jim Lewis: "Perhaps the problem is this: We were taught, all too readily, to think of literature as progressing within the context of historical forces. Joyce leads to Beckett, Borges leads to Barth, Pynchon begets DeLillo, and so on. But of course, things don't work like that. You can tell the story that way, and it'll make some sense, but not for long. (Curiously, it makes more sense when the story is about the visual arts in the 20th century—but that's another conversation.) It's an over-optimistic and simplified view of the way literature works and changes, a view built, I suppose, on the model of progression in the natural sciences. But it holds sway in the academy, at least it did when we were there, and even for those who know it's untrue, its force lingers." (italics mine)
Not only does Lewis hit on an interesting point about literature here, but also about science and the abstractions we rely upon to understand our world. It turns out that this evolutionary ladder model is seriously flawed (probably for any discipline it tries to explain) but it especially impedes our understanding of evolutionary relationships and the framework of our biological, ecological world. The late Stephen Jay Gould wrote about this in his book Full House as well as in various essays. He points out the curious depiction of the evolution of life forms on earth as following a flawed model of "progression," which makes it easy to assume that evolution seeks models of greater complexity as a kind of perfecting tendency. Indeed, many murals or paintings show first a kind of primordial life, leading to fishes, but then in the next panel, where we see lizards and dinosaurs, we no longer see the ameobas or fishes. And so on till mammals, primates and finally, humans. But of course this is a serious problem, since not only do we not inhabit a world filled solely with humans, but that there is nothing necessarily final about our current evolutionary form. Also, we all know full well that we share the earth with cats and cockroaches, giraffes and germs. For a really in depth explanation of how this evolution is not indeed directed, but instead seems so due to naturally imposed limits, read Full House--it's brilliant.
What I'm more interested in exploring is the abstraction of this linear, progressive evolution as applied to literature. As a writer, (and a relatively young, not-as-well-read-as-I'd-like one), I often try to place myself in the context of all the writers who have come before. Since we experience the passing of time as linear (a Western abstraction, since some cultures experience time as circular), we tend to constrain our thoughts to the orderly succession of one entity after another. Of course, once we think about it, we rationally understand that there is a simultaneity to the occurrence of events and the existence of entities.
As in science, then, it is thus much more productive to think of the evolution of things as a great, shrubby, branch-y affair. Just as the radiation of creatures led to a great profusion of diversity, some branches continuing on, some dying out, but many coexisting at the same time, so it is the case with literature at any given moment. We have difficulty with this, I think, because of our tendency to want to categorize neatly, and also our relatively weak ability to hold opposing and contrasting thoughts in our minds at the same time. We enjoy the discrete, the singular. The effusive and fecund we may enjoy on an aesthetic or emotional level, but once we try to apply reason or logic to them, they intimidate, confuse and escape us. Thus, our resistance to the non-linear shrub.
However, it is just this model of the shrub that we should attempt to incorporate into our understanding of literary evolution. If we accept and use this model (which is a sort of abstraction in and of itself), we can acknowledge the direct influence of others, while also understanding the complexity of any particular artistic moment. What this means for me, as a writer, is that rather than saying, "I am post-Joyce, post-Proust," etc., I can say, "I am *of* Joyce, *of* Proust," and so on. This distinction changes the focus from a historical time-based relationship, (not always that relevant, even in the biological sciences, since sometimes creatures lose traits that they've gained, and sometimes, more rarely, gain them back,) to indicate a phylogenetic relationship, i.e., one based on what we might call "morphological" similarities. If, for example, I read David Foster Wallace, and adopt his footnotes (which I will never do, but let's go with it for now), I am now of his "kind." It is important to stress that this is a more of a convergent evolution situation. Instead of having to inevitably adopt footnotes, as is likely with a direct descendent, I find them to serve my literary survival in a particular way that is not the same as Foster Wallace's usage, and so I adopt them. Because of the structural similarities, however, I will be associated with Foster Wallace if I continue the footnote trope, just as birds and bats are associated as "flying creatures," though their wings are not exactly similar, but confer a certain structural ability that wingless animals do not have. It makes talking about literature more complicated, since we can, as artists, have evolved out of a certain innovation without having realized it, as 20th century novelists did, not having to begin with the conventions of the very first novels. They started in an entirely different place, as a human begins a human at birth, not having to re-evolve, because of its genome.
Literary genomes are just as tangled and complex, which makes it difficult to know where I'm starting, how I got here, and what I'm capable of developing. Still, while the metaphor has some very obvious holes (conscious choice not being possible in the biological model of heredity), I think it is helpful for a working writer to place herself not in a historical time slot, but rather to accept her time and her talents as a piece of the phylogenetic shrub that is literature. In this way, we do not feel as though we must expend so much energy just to chop down the tree, focusing our efforts, instead, of helping the organism to thrive by being as vigorous and productive as we are able.
The first quote I'm interested comes from Jim Lewis: "Perhaps the problem is this: We were taught, all too readily, to think of literature as progressing within the context of historical forces. Joyce leads to Beckett, Borges leads to Barth, Pynchon begets DeLillo, and so on. But of course, things don't work like that. You can tell the story that way, and it'll make some sense, but not for long. (Curiously, it makes more sense when the story is about the visual arts in the 20th century—but that's another conversation.) It's an over-optimistic and simplified view of the way literature works and changes, a view built, I suppose, on the model of progression in the natural sciences. But it holds sway in the academy, at least it did when we were there, and even for those who know it's untrue, its force lingers." (italics mine)
Not only does Lewis hit on an interesting point about literature here, but also about science and the abstractions we rely upon to understand our world. It turns out that this evolutionary ladder model is seriously flawed (probably for any discipline it tries to explain) but it especially impedes our understanding of evolutionary relationships and the framework of our biological, ecological world. The late Stephen Jay Gould wrote about this in his book Full House as well as in various essays. He points out the curious depiction of the evolution of life forms on earth as following a flawed model of "progression," which makes it easy to assume that evolution seeks models of greater complexity as a kind of perfecting tendency. Indeed, many murals or paintings show first a kind of primordial life, leading to fishes, but then in the next panel, where we see lizards and dinosaurs, we no longer see the ameobas or fishes. And so on till mammals, primates and finally, humans. But of course this is a serious problem, since not only do we not inhabit a world filled solely with humans, but that there is nothing necessarily final about our current evolutionary form. Also, we all know full well that we share the earth with cats and cockroaches, giraffes and germs. For a really in depth explanation of how this evolution is not indeed directed, but instead seems so due to naturally imposed limits, read Full House--it's brilliant.
What I'm more interested in exploring is the abstraction of this linear, progressive evolution as applied to literature. As a writer, (and a relatively young, not-as-well-read-as-I'd-like one), I often try to place myself in the context of all the writers who have come before. Since we experience the passing of time as linear (a Western abstraction, since some cultures experience time as circular), we tend to constrain our thoughts to the orderly succession of one entity after another. Of course, once we think about it, we rationally understand that there is a simultaneity to the occurrence of events and the existence of entities.
As in science, then, it is thus much more productive to think of the evolution of things as a great, shrubby, branch-y affair. Just as the radiation of creatures led to a great profusion of diversity, some branches continuing on, some dying out, but many coexisting at the same time, so it is the case with literature at any given moment. We have difficulty with this, I think, because of our tendency to want to categorize neatly, and also our relatively weak ability to hold opposing and contrasting thoughts in our minds at the same time. We enjoy the discrete, the singular. The effusive and fecund we may enjoy on an aesthetic or emotional level, but once we try to apply reason or logic to them, they intimidate, confuse and escape us. Thus, our resistance to the non-linear shrub.
However, it is just this model of the shrub that we should attempt to incorporate into our understanding of literary evolution. If we accept and use this model (which is a sort of abstraction in and of itself), we can acknowledge the direct influence of others, while also understanding the complexity of any particular artistic moment. What this means for me, as a writer, is that rather than saying, "I am post-Joyce, post-Proust," etc., I can say, "I am *of* Joyce, *of* Proust," and so on. This distinction changes the focus from a historical time-based relationship, (not always that relevant, even in the biological sciences, since sometimes creatures lose traits that they've gained, and sometimes, more rarely, gain them back,) to indicate a phylogenetic relationship, i.e., one based on what we might call "morphological" similarities. If, for example, I read David Foster Wallace, and adopt his footnotes (which I will never do, but let's go with it for now), I am now of his "kind." It is important to stress that this is a more of a convergent evolution situation. Instead of having to inevitably adopt footnotes, as is likely with a direct descendent, I find them to serve my literary survival in a particular way that is not the same as Foster Wallace's usage, and so I adopt them. Because of the structural similarities, however, I will be associated with Foster Wallace if I continue the footnote trope, just as birds and bats are associated as "flying creatures," though their wings are not exactly similar, but confer a certain structural ability that wingless animals do not have. It makes talking about literature more complicated, since we can, as artists, have evolved out of a certain innovation without having realized it, as 20th century novelists did, not having to begin with the conventions of the very first novels. They started in an entirely different place, as a human begins a human at birth, not having to re-evolve, because of its genome.
Literary genomes are just as tangled and complex, which makes it difficult to know where I'm starting, how I got here, and what I'm capable of developing. Still, while the metaphor has some very obvious holes (conscious choice not being possible in the biological model of heredity), I think it is helpful for a working writer to place herself not in a historical time slot, but rather to accept her time and her talents as a piece of the phylogenetic shrub that is literature. In this way, we do not feel as though we must expend so much energy just to chop down the tree, focusing our efforts, instead, of helping the organism to thrive by being as vigorous and productive as we are able.
posted by Tiffany Hamburger at
2:42 PM
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