In response to Vic Perry:
On to important things - Boyd's attack on
theory is robust, although
narrowly focused --- is "theory" really all just about difference?
No,
"Theory" isn't all about difference, and in fact most of my article was
about anti-foundationalism, which was the other great gift, according
to Louis Menand, whom I was replying to, of the "greatest generation"
of Theorists. I was challenging HIS sense of Theory—of its having
ceased to enrich literary studies but only after having undoubtedly
done so forever, in his view, when it introduced (as he sees it)
antifoundationalism and “difference.”
And I'll believe biology will tell us something
about literature, art or
music that we hadn't already figured out a LONG time ago when I
actually
see it. Which is to say, go for it, by the way.
I have gone for
it, with Homer (Odyssey) and Dr Seuss (Horton
Hears a Who!) as detailed examples, in the book I
have just finished, On the Origin of Stories. And I hope to do the same with Shakespeare, Austen, Joyce
and Spiegelman in the sequel, which I am about to begin.
As
for that guy Nabokov, to meet [Steve]'s reasonable criterion for
posting
this: Slavist and occasional Nabokovian Brett Cooke has been working in
the area of biopoetics (as he terms it) for much longer than me. He
invited me to speak on Nabokov from an evolutionary point of view at
the AAASS conference in Washington in November, so I did.
My
short paper was mostly about how hard it is for me to bring Nabokov and
evolutionary perspective together, or to do so in a way that answers as
economically or as precisely the questions that I most urgently want to
ask about particular Nabokov books (I took Lolita
as my example). But it also makes me ask new questions that I hadn't
thought to pose at all, and see new patterns I hadn’t thought to search
for.
And
while I would like to say I can go into this now, I can't: you'll just
have to wait and see. The long perspective of evolution isn't a pinhole
vision from a fixed standpoint but allows many different views. I can’t
know in advance what difference it would make to, say, my reading of Lolita,
when I ever get to the point of really understanding that book, and if
I could know in advance, if an evolutionary perspective offered some
sort of template, it wouldn’t be worth having.
One
of many, many ways in which an evolutionary perspective on things human
can be relevant to literature is by considering Theory of Mind, or folk
psychology, our natural (evolved) intuitions about other minds, which
has been the focus of thousands of articles in psychology (clinical,
comparative, developmental and evolutionary) over the last twenty years
or so. Lisa Zunshine, known to many Nabokovians for her VN work, has
written a book Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Ohio State UP, 2006), where she takes Lolita
as a major example. I think Lisa does not know enough of the
psychology, and misapplies it to the fiction, yet it helps her find
things in Lolita that hadn’t been seen so
clearly before, although at the same time she also mishandles the
passages she focuses on. I have written a review-essay on her book in Philosophy and Literature 30:2
(2006), 571-581, which should be accessible electronically through any
reasonable university library. She has written a reply, and I a reply
to her reply, for the next issue. But as I say, attention to Theory of
Mind, even when done extremely well, is just one of a very large number
of ways an evolutionary perspective can enrich our reading of fiction.
But I will save the detailed arguments and the examples for my books.
Brian Boyd