People often ask me what I intended in calling my recent novel The Origin of Species, wondering, I suppose, at the shamelessness of associating my meager offering with one of the seminal works of humankind. Shamelessness, sadly, comes easily to novelists, and I admit I chose the title on a bit of whim, when I was plodding through a tedious early draft and hoped some whimsy might speed me along.
By the time the novel was finished, however, I felt I’d come by my associations honestly. I had also come probably as close as I ever had to a conversion experience, and discovered that a literary theory I’d invented as a spoof actually had a real-life counterpart, one that was probably already on its way to being the Next Big Thing in the madcap world of lit crit.
I first encountered Darwin’s version of The Origin of Species in a social-science course that asked fresh-from-the-farm liberal-arts majors like myself to consider whether Darwin and a handful of other paradigm-shifters of his day—notably Freud, Marx, and Adam Smith—hadn’t inadvertently ushered in the horror show that was the 20th century by kicking the foundations out from under all the old categories of good and evil. For my part, I was wholly in favor back then of kicking out foundations, particularly those that had been pile-driven into my brain by the Roman Catholic Church.
But around Darwin, I felt wary. Maybe it was the C-minus I had got in high-school biology, or the feeling that Darwin was colder comfort than the other rogues he’d been lumped with. Marx offered communist utopia, Freud psychic wholeness; even Adam Smith offered a full belly and money in the bank. What did Darwin offer? Randomness. No plan. I might have left the church by then, but the church hadn’t left me: I still needed a worldview that offered an endpoint, a moral structure. In a kind of serial cosmonogamy, I spent my undergrad years bed-hopping among the various prospects, going from Freud to Jung to Northrop Frye, from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Then I entered graduate school, and was asked to check all my worldviews at the door. The Big Narratives were history, we were told—not only the hoary ones like Christianity and Beowulf, but also socialism, the Enlightenment, the self-help movement—and worse, everything we had imagined we knew about the world was a stinking lie, trapped in a binary logic that kept whatever it was that was really out there at some unfathomable remove. Or at least I think that was what we were told—much of it was put to us in a language that purported to be English but didn’t resemble any form I’d ever seen before.
Oddly, my initial reaction to these revelations was to take solace. I was pushing 30 without having settled on a worldview I could commit to, and now the postmodernists had let me off the hook. If I eventually began to take issue with them, it was mainly out of a need to generate paper topics. The more issue I took, however, the more suspicious I grew. It was curious, for instance, that even while these folks were crowing over the death of the big narratives, they were busy inventing their own, usually ones that started with Plato—as the chief architect of the dreaded binaries—and ended with the binary logic of computers.
It was also curious how quickly the new theories had come to sound like the old ones, merely substituting trendy French terms like mise-en-abîme for good old-fashioned ones like “ambiguity.” Indeed, given the publish-or-perish imperatives of academe, it started to seem that the main purpose of these new theories, just like my opposition to them, was to generate paper topics. Five minutes out of graduate school, I saw how completely unavailable any of these theories were as actual life mates, and so found myself once more on the metaphysical prowl.
I had not forgotten Darwin in this time, though the only progress I’d made in my understanding of him had been through the man known as Darwin’s Rottweiler, Richard Dawkins, whose book The Selfish Gene had threatened to strip away whatever illusions I still had about human goodness. As much as I hated facing those kinds of hard truths in my personal life, I found they were usually exactly the ones I shoved my characters’ faces into in the fiction I was writing by then.
It was probably out of the perverse pleasure I took in placing my characters behind that cosmic eight ball that my own Origin of Species was born. In this case, there was the added hope of revenge, since my protagonist—haunted by a chilling experience on the islands that had proved so life-changing to Darwin himself, the Galápagos—was a budding academic, hell-bent on the hare-brained scheme of developing an evolutionary theory of narrative.
I had intended this premise as a promiscuous swipe at theorists of every sort. In invoking Darwin, however, I had serendipitously pitted my protagonist against one of the central tenets of all those postmodernists who had tormented me in grad school, that of social construction, the idea that there is no reality “out there” we can meaningfully get at; there are only our socially constructed versions of it. The differences between the sexes, in that view, aren’t immutable facts but mere conventions, as are the laws of physics, best-seller lists, solar eclipses, or pretty much any phenomenon or field of knowledge you’d care to mention. To a Darwinist, that kind of talk is pure finch-poo, like counting nature out entirely in the old nature/nurture debate. Never mind all that genetic material that nature brings to the table, encoded with countless Wikipedias’ worth of information, built up over billions of years, from the time when the first prokaryote walked the earth.
That I had chanced upon such a perfect storm of clashing worldviews made me think I might actually be onto something. I started reading up on the sociobiologists, who for years had been busy applying Darwinist insights to fields like sociology and psychology that were only a stone’s throw from the humanities, and suddenly an evolutionary theory of narrative didn’t seem so far-fetched. Already I was anticipating the speaking tours, the Ivy League sinecures, the school of thought that would be founded in my name. Keeping my cards close to my chest—Darwin, working out his theory in secret for many years, had shown similar caution—I sounded out a literature professor I knew.
“Sounds like you’ve been reading the evolutionary theorists,” he said at once. “Pretty wacky stuff.”
Sure enough, I’d been scooped. A few hours’ research turned up Darwinist musings on literature that ranged from Madame Bovary’s Ovaries to Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation. I felt like Darwin must have when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him some thoughts he had whipped together during a bout of malarial fever that almost exactly anticipated the theory Darwin had been working out for two decades. But while my own hopes for glory were shot, my protagonist, Alex, was in the clear: His story was set in the 1980s, when he would still have been safely at the leading edge of Darwinist lit crit. By now I felt he had earned that edge, and indeed I was waiting anxiously to see what final shape his own contribution would take.
There is always a stage in the writing of a novel when its world seems more real than anything outside it. When I hit that stage with The Origin of Species, I was fully on board not only with Alex’s theory of narrative but with the whole evolutionary project. So stunningly applicable and true did the insights of Darwinism seem across a vast range of phenomena—from child-rearing and spousal relations to department meetings and tenure review—that, like Darwin’s contemporary Thomas Huxley, I could only clap my hand to my forehead and say, “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!”
Of course, I had to get over my attachment to outmoded notions like “meaning” and “purpose,” which, like the chemical cocktail called love, turned out to be just handy bromides our genes feed us to keep us procreating. What the world lost in nuance, however, it gained in symmetry and order. My new bible was the book Consilience, by Edward O. Wilson, the granddaddy of sociobiology. It showed me how the blueprint provided by evolutionary biology should make it possible to harmonize all human knowledge, so that one day opera, macramé, and plate tectonics could all be understood in the same language and on the same terms.
It wasn’t long, however, before the transcendent total knowledge that Consilience was arguing for began to seem a lot like all the squishy, superstitious concepts—heaven, nirvana, tantric orgasm—it was meant to overthrow, more a matter of faith than of fact. Rather than trying to turn Darwinism into a religion, I realized, I ought to have taken a cue from Darwin himself, who was famously tightlipped on these questions, arguing that if his theory of evolution was even moderately correct, then future generations would find his own musings on matters metaphysical about as relevant as he would find those of an ape.
When the fog of writing had cleared, I found myself more or less where I had started, still out in the metaphysical cold. Mind you, the view out there is amazing. It goes on forever.