Literature and Evolution

Author(s): Paul Hernadi

Source: SubStance, Vol. 30, No. 1/2, Issue 94/95: Special Issue: On the Origin of Fictions:
Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2001), pp. 55-71
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3685504
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Literature and Evolution

Paul Hernadi

Introduction

Each word in my apparently simple title calls for clarification. As for

literature, I take a longer and broader view than many fine scholars who see
it tied to written or printed texts.' As for evolution, I am intrigued by the
possibility that some version of its fundamental principle-"differential
survival of replicating entities"-operates not only in the history of life but
perhaps also in the history of ideas.2 Even so (as regards the "and" linking
the two terms), I don't aim here at finding a role for evolution in literature.3
Rather, I propose to explore the role of literature in evolution or, more
precisely, some of the roles probably played by written literature's oral
antecedents in the co-evolution of human nature and cultures.4

Given the multiplicity of ways in which literature has been intended,

produced, transmitted, stored, and mentally processed, it is hardly surprising
that no definition of it commands wide-spread acceptance.5 One thing seems
to me very clear, however: Despite the etymological derivation of "literature"
from littera, the Latin word for "letter," it is short-sighted to restrict the study
of literature to texts. After all, writing has been with us for a relatively short
period of human history, and even today many people around the globe get
their literature through oral and gestural performance or through postliterate
channels like radio, film, and television.6 More to the point is the older
tradition linking words like poem and concepts like poetic imagination to poesis,
the ancient Greek word for making.
But what is it, precisely, that poets and other producers of literature
make? Even if you answer with a contemporary phrase and say that they
produce virtual realities, you have remained on pretty traditional ground.
Almost 2,400 years ago, Aristotle insisted that the poet is more a maker "of
his plots than of his meters" (17 at 1451b), and more than 400 years ago Sir
Philip Sidney declared that the inventive poet "doth grow in effect another
nature" (14). Needless to say, literature's "other nature" emerges from the
ordinary nature surrounding us only if its plots and characters come alive
in our minds as manifestly virtual rather than hallucinatory. In other words,

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56 Paul Hernadi

we need to engage
(2:6) if we are to
unresponsive to,
The requisite cog
reading of novels,
of his or her me
(39-40). Far from
collaborative act
"decoupled" men
thinking (see Bic
experience, we m
may be continuall
TV screen, or som
watch or read abo
170-71), we need t
of those "star-cr
The notion of co-
viewed not so muc
leading to consu
imagination. Why
all cultures today
here is to propos
literary seduction
once and perhaps
by distinguishing
signification as f
the pleasurable co-
reasons for some
52:sections 65-67
argue that (1) lit
textual or electron
vital capacities
signification and t
early humans cou
less imaginative
ancestors of later
literature contrib
selfish human org

SubStan

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Literature and Evolution 57

Literary Expression, Commun

Representation, and Signific

In thinking about literary exper

mental processing of evoked world
if people who are invited and expe
so. For example, outraged spec
reported to have punished or eve
TV stations are said to receive cond
screen relatives of deceased
disconnections between "literar
reveal with spectacular clarity th
not enforce, literary consummatio
This state of affairs is not surpri
humans goes beyond simple sem
hermeneutic inferences as to the
sharing information. As we study t
impersonal notions of "uploadin
by personalistic concepts of expres
After all, the oral sharing of
grammatical force field of "first,"
speaking, spoken to, and spoken ab
source and second-person target
implied, as is often the case in w
for example, studiously avoid t
without concealing the fact that t
Now, at least one of the three gr
in literary experience. In the fir
and playwrights carry their role-p
the public presentation of onese
impartial judge. For a certain str
acts, and each author of a dialogue
of a distinctly different other. Spe
regard such role-playing as nondec
hear or read the words, "I will wat
(Hamlet I. ii. 242-43), their proper r
to seek an encounter with a ghost
to the playwright who wrote the w
or screen. Such dramatic imperso

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 58 Paul Hernadi

subdivision of ei
as the chief sour
For another, the
especially in so-
need not be any
histories or aut
historical accurac
audience as nond
reminiscent of w
or "cops and ro
A likewise pl
communication
its "second pers
"Please close the
if she tells him,
But if John list
hears a woman
unlikely to feel f
rings. Elizabeth
the first line, w
Portuguese," bu
husband, Rober
eloquent declarat
or acted upon, b
Poems addresse
stream of consciousness in the even more indirect communicative situation

of a "soliloquy" that is "overheard," to invoke John Stuart Mill's

characterization of poetry in general (1: 71). But whose silent soliloquy other
than your own can you really "overhear"? Take a typical text of this kind,
Wordsworth's brief "Lucy" poem, "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" (149). To
be sure, the first-person pronouns in the first two lines ("A slumber did my
spirit seal;/ I had no human fears") point to a speaker different from the
reader. Yet many responsive readers will "eavesdrop" on the poem's last
four lines as if the poet's unspoken meditation on a young girl's death were
coming to them in their own soundless voice:

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

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Literature and Evolution 59

So far we have considered how

poet's explicit or implied "you" can
of speaking, writing, listening, or
it is mainly third-person pronou
lose much of their ordinary referen
toward a virtual world comes abou
other words they stand for) are in
in a mind thanks to imagination r
from clear-cut, of course. It is p
imagined and remembered peopl
More important still, memory and
both actual and virtual events: we
George Washington's life without
first president of the United Sta
plots and characters of even the m
and people we remember. Even so,
a marked difference between refe
to Don Quixote. This is why young
tree serves as a memorable exam
fight against windmills exemplifie
such as we readily associate with p
ourselves. In more general terms,
about "them," but a great deal of
being experienced as being about
Much more could be said about t
the first-person source, second-pers
of information transfer among hum
constituent of such transfers, and
of verbal signification. Words
transparent medium of represen
utterance or read an inscription
their (actual or virtual) referents. W
the semiotic conventions of t
transparency of verbal significatio
the familiar kinds of contexts and
conventional meanings have bee
inscriptions are typically harder t
the sentence "They can fish there"
with reference to a creek or a foo
of the ambiguity and try to fit the
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60 Paul Hernadi

contexts, you ca
ambiguity and d
from words to ap
to language as a t
Likewise, when t
is perceived as "an
seems to send a
convention-bound
devices of versifi
(e.g., "mama," "
counterpoint to c
In an importan
said to highlight
sea" and "lands
dictionary defini
the metaphoric s
successfully emp
leaps across the
c
figurative discou
it appear to speak
and nonliterary s
occur outside lite
act of speech (e.g
can easily acquire
intertwined liter
Since the vario
rebuffed by an u
conjunction with
Before turning t
expression, indire
signification, le
interaction in "T
intriguing and
stretching challen
discussing the
supplication to a
ancestors in her
misplaced my cop
has acquired one y

SubStan

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 Literature and Evolution 61

(with musical score, phonetic tran

on my web page as soon as possible
Eight common monosyllabic word

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

But the signification of the line is ambiguous in part because a multiple set
of expressive, communicative, and representational uncertainties are
associated with it: we can't be sure (1) whose curiosity is expressed by th
question; (2) whether it is to the tiger or, indirectly, to a human listener or
reader that the question communicates an urgent appeal for reply; and
what kind of analogy is being invoked between the human world and th
evoked animal world of tigers and lambs.
Those questions can't be answered unequivocally for several reasons
To begin with, the entire poem consists of queries ostensibly addressed to a
tiger. Yet, as the many published explications of this text and of the
accompanying picture from Blake's Songs of Experience indicate, huma
readers feel called upon to respond in terms of their own very diverse frame
of reference.'1 To complicate matters further, the questions asked in the poem
cannot be directly attributed to William Blake, the once flesh-and-blood poe
and visual artist residing in London, because any questioner of a virtua
beast must be considered an imagined presence in a virtual world. Bu
Blake, the actual "maker" of the verbally evoked and pictorially represented
animal, doesn't identify the virtual questioner of the tiger as explicitly as h
identifies the virtual source of the question "Little Lamb, who made thee?"
as "a child" (see 115: lines 1 and 17 of "The Lamb" in Blake's earlier Songs of
Innocence).
Needless to add, the representational status of a situation in which
questions can be put to a tiger is fictional or mythical rather than historical.
No wonder, therefore, that the poem has prompted a great deal of interpretive
effort to identify the analogical significance, for actual humans, of the
relationship between the virtual tiger and virtual lamb referred to in it. By
my informal count, critics finding that the fearfully symmetrical beast stands
for the "holiness of tigerness" (Hirsch 248) outnumber those perceiving it as
an almost diabolic embodiment of "competitive, predacious selfhood" (Raine
43). A similar majority appears to be building toward the assumption that
Blake's tiger and lamb (and whatever each represents analogically) are
complementary manifestations of the same multifaceted creative force rather

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 62 Paul Hernadi

than disparate pr
battling each othe

The Co-evolution of Virtual and Actual Worlds

Questions like those being asked of Blake's tiger and lamb prompted
many generations of early humans to produce and circulate creation myths.
Such myths and accompanying rituals and oracles obviously relied more on
poetic imagination than on historical memory. But I see no reason for
postulating a rigid separation between nonliterary and literary experience
in the stone-age mind. Even today, literary experience is not triggered in a
cognitive or emotive vacuum: modern readers, listeners, and spectators
mentally process the virtual comings and goings of imagined characters as
if they were analogous to remembered actual events. Indeed, the cognitive
skills enabling the prehistoric emergence of oral literature must have been
byproducts of primate adaptations initially serving nonliterary functions.
For example, our capacity for literary impersonation surely stems from the
use of inauthentic expression in "Machiavellian" dissembling of the kind
recently discovered among apes and even monkeys, and our capacity to
comprehend literary communication without acting upon it is anticipated
by our primate ancestors' increasing ability to recognize the deceptive
intentions of liars and cheaters (see Byrne and Whiten). Likewise, the
production of fictive stories and the reception of such stories with "willing
suspension of disbelief" could build on the preliterary capacity of
protohumans to plan actions after comparing counterfactual mental
representations of possible alternative futures. Even the metaphorical or
otherwise translucent use of language is likely to have first emerged in the
nonliterary context of workaday speaking and listening.12
But evolution has a habit of turning byproducts into material for further
differential selection. For example, rudimentary forms of feathered wings
had probably evolved as means of temperature regulation long before the
serendipitous shape and size of some protowings began to make a difference
in the survival chances and reproductive fitness of individual protobirds
attempting to fly. In a much later co-evolutionary context, the following
sequence seems probable: literature (along with other cultural formations)
first grew out of nature but then, so to speak, grew some of its branches back
into nature's trunk, thanks to the improved survival chances of individuals
with talent for participating in the imaginative flights of protoliterary

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 Literature and Evolution 63

experience. And such an assumpt

an unscientific literary scholar's im
has recently observed:

We move through a virtual world of o

can be said to survive in deserts and f
survive in the company of other gen
said to survive in the virtual, even
(Unweaving the Rainbow 284-85)

Dawkins doesn't tell us specifical

enter the co-evolutionary scene o
and cultures. I see them do so via
fabulation. The protodramatic, pro
of literature enabled our early anc
and storytelling as socially sanction
oblique communication, and counte
of literature's adaptive functions c
functions still is) to sharpen our sk
kinds of pretense, irrelevance, an
well.

Needless to say, literary experi

certain mental muscles needed to turn humans into smarter cheaters and

liars or into shrewder cheater- and liar-detectors. At least as important,

trafficking in literature's virtual realities can open new horizons for human
expression, communication, and representation. In other words, literature
allows us to explore more fully than we could without it, just what can be
publicly expressed, communicated, and represented--as well as privately
felt, willed, and believed. Beyond doubt, all this applies not only to Blake's
readers in the eighteenth or twenty-first century, but also to those distant
people listening to his ancestor's awe-inspired address to a totemic tiger (or
was it a bison?) long before the beginning of recorded history. Indeed,
protoliterary realizations of human potential probably affected the
sensibilities of prehistoric humans much more profoundly than ingenious
literary productions or interpretations can affect the overcharged hermeneutic
circuitry of our postmodern mindset.
To be sure, it is possible to regard literature and other arts as evolutionary
byproducts rather than as life-supportive adaptations. To justify his doing
so, the cognitive theorist Steven Pinker even likened the attractiveness of
esthetic experience to our craving, often harmful today, for once-scarce

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 64 Paul Hernadi

nutrients like fat a

analogy only explai
arteries today whe
dozens of cable channels. As for the environments in which our hunter-
gatherer ancestors struggled to survive, Pinker's analogy suggests that
especially well-adapted early humans were pursuing scarce mind-
sharpening opportunities for protoliterary experience with almost as much
gusto as they pursued meals rich in fats and sugars.
In the sphere of fictive representation, Sidney defended imaginative
world-making-literature's capacity to grow "another nature" (14)-with
the sensible argument that the poet "nothing affirms, and therefore never
lieth" (57). A similar "apology for poetry" can be mounted for the expressive
and communicative dimensions of literature. Just as literature's imaginative
storytelling doesn't result in a bunch of lies, its playful impersonation doesn't
entail manipulative pretense, and its typical lack of immediate relevance
doesn't result in frivolous waste of time either. On the contrary, true
authenticity and deep urgency will sometimes be found behind literature's
fatade of false identities and false promises or alarms. For example, some of
Hamlet's virtual capacity for soul-searching has grown into the actual mental
make-up of many actors and spectators, while Barrett Browning's and
Wordsworth's readers have been given the seeds for planting new ways of
loving and mourning in their own lives. Since preliterate instances of role-
divided rituals, love songs, and funeral dirges must have had analogous
effects on their performers and audiences, protoliterature's "other natures"
yielded new sets of brain-made virtual environments in which some actual
human genes (like Marianne Moore's "real toads" in poetry's "imaginary
gardens" 41) could survive better than others.

School for Budding Altruists?

The precise functions of literary experience differ vastly in different

ages, societies, and persons. But some common features do exist, and their
widespread occurrence strongly suggests (although certainly doesn't prove)
that they co-evolved with gradual changes in the human brain and nervous
system as cultural adaptations to the natural and cultural environments of
our hunter-gatherer ancestors.'3 These common features include the four
discussed here: dramatic impersonation, indirect communication, fictive
storytelling, and the so-called poetic use of language. Three others, which I
have discussed elsewhere (Hernadi, forthcoming), are respectively aligned
with human cognition, emotion, and volition or motivation: (a) the
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Literature and Evolution 65

verbalizing of semantic and e

participatory orientation through
modes of discourse; (b) the polariz
and gratifying types inclining au
and (c) the motivating impact of
characters on the will of actual p
Let me conclude by briefly elabor
the last-mentioned cross-cultural
nonliterary behavior.
Certain myths, legends, folk ta
more recent literature have
transcending commitments. They
heroes and satirizing selfish vil
To be sure, heroic and villainous t
biased manner so that selfless s
up being promoted at the expen
Furthermore, not all fictive plots
rewarding the virtuous and
evocations of virtual villainy and
deter actual villainy and violence.
and Samuel Johnson (e.g., 3:19-25
Aristotle (e.g., 11 at 1449b) and Fr
through the catharsis of passiona
embarrassing fantasies.
I would say that, on balance, l
effective in curbing our ego
freeloading. Having been told the
be like her evil stepmother, and h
to emulate Orwell's pigs. Just a
have often been reinforced by re
of poetic justice, whose verdicts, b
self-defeating altruistic acts retr
point of view. In many--perhap
and religious traditions have thus
self-sacrifice well beyond the gen
for altruistic behavior toward o
The Selfish Gene 88-108 on "kin s
It is unclear to what extent cult
particular group might enhance t
behavior among future descendan
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66 Paul Hernadi

popular idea of grou

by many leading t
Williams's influenti
reawakening cross
and Wilson), but m
culturally promoted
poetic justice can be
After all, human po
fairly close relatives
a mere few thous
predisposed to be at
of their largely k
without regard to d
on reciprocal altrui
immediate change
long run, of course
could also receive si
toaccord better th
orphaned children
In any case, some
for the evolution
difficult pedagogica
behavior patterns f
precious little help
genes apparently
convincingly argu
offspring because so
descendents, whose
the particular set of
benefit directly f
close.Thus it stand
toward altruism sh
Genes that make a
less parental attent
perish before they
risk-taking of adult
after a sufficient n
To be sure, nature
parents even witho

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 Literature and Evolution 67

such motivation, humans would

blood donations, or to endanger
strangers from drowning or burni
make human life, on the whole,
lives of our uncivilized ancestors
70 [p. 62 in the "Head" edition]).
doubt goes beyond aesthetic suga
instruction. But the importance of
sugar-coating should not be und
programmed differences in age-re
and disciplined cooperation. Horace
aspiring poets some 2,000 years
"useful" (utile) if you want your w
folks prefer lighthearted fare to th
(39: lines 341-46). Knowing that
becoming ever more altruistic, I
the enduring coexistence of predil
behavior in each of us.

In this article and in its forthcoming companion piece I have suggested

that the pleasure taken today worldwide in oral, written, or electronically
recorded literature legitimates speculation about why our distant ancestors'
chances for survival might have been promoted by protoliterary transactions.
Lest I be perceived as overly optimistic about the long-term future of literature
as we know it, I hasten to point out that the past success of biological and
cultural adaptations has little predictive value concerning their future impact
on evolutionary history. The friends of literature can thus not take its
continued existence for granted, no matter how firmly they may personally
believe in its salutary significance. To facilitate the survival of literature and
perhaps even the continued existence of a species that has so far been thriving
with it, we and our descendants must try to sustain cultural conditions that
are hospitable to the co-creative play of imaginative world-making. And we
should especially promote the proliferation of diverse enough virtual worlds
so that at least some of them may prove life-enhancing in unforeseen phases
of the co-evolution of human nature and cultures. 14

University of California, Santa Barbara

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 68 Paul Hernadi

Notes

1. An interesting example is Alvin Keman who calls literature a "text-centered institution"

even though, in the same sentence, he cites The Iliad and Hamlet-two works designed
for performance-as "masterpieces of literary art" (15). Going further in what I think is
the wrong direction, Keman even says that literature "was a cultural development of a
machine, the printing press" (20). This kind of view is often associated with the notion
that both the theory and perhaps the very practice of literature as art originated shortly
before or around 1800 (see, for instance, Eagleton 18). The massive evidence against
such proposals is slightly obscured by a historical shift in terminology. While "the modem
system of the arts" including literature may well have emerged in the eighteenth century
(see Kristeller), numerous earlier discussions of poesis and its cognates by Aristotle,
Sidney, and others are significant forerunners of explicitly formulated theories of literature
as a verbal art.
2. The quoted phrase comes from Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene 192. It occurs in Chapter
11 where the prominent British biologist recommends "throwing out the gene as the
sole basis of our ideas on evolution" (191). Dawkins suggests that human culture has
given rise to entities of a new kind, capable of self-replication, and that these are subject
to evolutionary selection according to how well each can spread its replicas. Dawkins
calls such a "unit of cultural transmission or unit of imitation" a "meme"---abbreviated
from mimeme, in turn derived from the Greek word mimesis (192). The concept of a self-
replicating cultural unit has given rise to wide-ranging crossdisciplinary discussion (see
Blackmore).
3.The attempts by Brunetiere and others to establish evolutionary analogies between
biological species and literary genres were cogently criticized by Wellek (41-46) but
cautiously revived by Fishelov (19-52).
4. The term and concept of "co-evolution" has been applied by a number of authors to the
reciprocal impact of nature and culture (e.g., Lumsden and Wilson; Durham; Deacon).
I speak of "cultures" in the plural to indicate the diversity of life forms compatible with
human nature which, I assume, is flexible and evolving but singular. Without such an
assumption, which I share with other scholars exploring possible connections between
literature and evolution (e.g., Frederick Turner, Joseph Carroll, and Robert Storey), no
political theory or legal practice could be securely based on the rather counter-intuitive
principle that "all men [and women] are created equal."
5. See Hernadi, ed., What is Literature? Separately or in conjunction, fictive representation
and patently metaphorical or otherwise "opaque" signification that calls attention to
itself are perhaps the most often invoked criteria of literariness (see, for instance,
Jakobson; Beardsley; Genette). I prefer the term "translucent" to "opaque," propose to
add two further criteria (role-playing expression and indirect communication), and
consider all four as only potential triggers of any actual literary experience.
6. I don't mean to imply that motion pictures are nothing but recorded literature or canned
theater. Cinematography uses recorded images and sounds for much more than the
quasi-literary purpose of evoking the interaction and mental life of virtual people, with
emphasis on plot, dialogue, and character. But many movies (like those based on the
writings of Shakespeare and Jane Austen) can be properly regarded as recorded
performances of literary works. The shift from stage or text to screen need not be more
radical than the shift (in the case of the Odyssey, for instance) from oral presentation by
a lyre-strumming, flute-accompanied "singer of tales" impersonating various characters
to hand-written or printed texts. (For more on this subject, see Hernadi Cultural
Transactions 39-49 and "Reconceiving.")
7. Rare counterexamples to this generalization may, of course, exist. But anthropologists,
usually eager to stress differences, don't seem to have encountered any culture that

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 Literature and Evolution 69

lacks role-playing, fabulation, or some

Donald E. Brown's survey of human un
and joking (131), storytelling and figu
types of the "conjunction of music and
8. Throughout this article, the phrase "ear
By contrast, archeologists tend to distin
"anatomically modem," from such "ear
and the archaic homo sapiens.
9. A very recent example of the theatrica
off-off Broadway production of Charlie
voice recorder). This riveting "play
conversations that took place shortly
Excerpts, as telecast by PBS on June
newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june0
The New York Times (January 30, 2000
at http: / /www.weird.org/Calendar/s
10. Well over a hundred pertinent items
by Bruce Borowsky (January 1996) at
42/42bib.html, also accessible through t
A Literary Web Study of The Tygerby Ra
tyger/index.html.
11. Such quandaries of literary interpreta
of some hermeneutic supreme court. F
reader," new avenues of interpretation
this article. Consider, for example, th
are not told whether the tiger is male o
same gender as "he who made the
implications of Blake's contrast betw
pastures and the fierce tiger, chiefly ro
post-colonial age, I may not be the fir
important, however, than the identity o
whether it will expand literature's herm
in the "meme pool" of future reading
Blackmore).
12. Today's global ease in mentally processing literary experience suggests that the cognitive
skills required for the oral transmission of protoliterary utterances was present long
before the earliest extant proverbs, stories, and songlike poems were written down in
Sumer, India, China, Egypt, and Greece. Even so, I cannot completely agree with those
astute eighteenth-century students of both "literary antiquities" and surviving oral
traditions who considered the figurative language and imaginative myth-making of
ancient poetry chronologically prior to literal workaday discourse (see Auerbach on
Vico, Herder, and some of their disciples). Granted, certain cognitive tools routinely
applied today to nonliterary tasks have long been sharpened by their employment in
literary transactions (see Hernadi, forthcoming). Yet the earliest literary skills had to be
built, I believe, on such preexisting cognitive skills as had already been available for
nonliterary expression, communication, representation, and signification.
13. In some respects, literature's co-evolutionary role fits into a more fundamental interplay
between human anatomy and cultural innovation, namely, the "co-evolution of language
and the brain" (see Deacon, subtitle). The latter kind of reciprocal impact can be briefly
described as follows: The emergence and efficient use of language required large and
complex brains, and such brains in turn were consistently selected for among members
of a species in which language skills conferred great adaptive advantages.

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 70 Paul Hernadi

14.The last three sent

its forthcoming com
on Imaginative Wor
identical formulations
to Porter Abbott, Ch
Alan Richardson, Ber
and John Tooby for
co-directing the "Ev
Office of Research at

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