d’Arte Board

This is knid of related to the yarn theory post yesterday in that it involves scientists trying to study art, but I wonder if this isn’t the counterpoint to the benefits seen in there. Newscientist reports on a study that sought to evaluate Victorian Literature from an evolutionary standpoint. Their conclusion is that literature is used to strengthen society and reinforce its communal values in a way which supports the evolution of humans and society.

As someone who has studied literature, allow me to be the first to respond: Gee, Doctor, you think so?

As opposed to art and science being used to further each other, as in the yarn examples, I think this is a case where the researchers could have saved themselves a lot of trouble by getting to know the field of literary criticism just a little. As it is, this strikes me as one of the most pointless experiments since someone decided to spend money to determine if
beer goggles exist.

It is fundamental to the study of literature (as well as most narrative art forms) that everything is a form of rhetoric. In some way or form an author can’t escape expressing their values, as well as the society they belong to. Some works may not be straigtforward social critiques, but they still all relate the social values and perception of the author.

Every time Shakespeare or Greek playwrights wrote about a king, you could read into that character’s story-arc a prescription for what makes a good or bad Monarch. Richard III? Bad King. Henry V? Good King. The entire definition of a tragedy is that a character has a fatal flaw that leads to their downfall. Its an intrinsically rhetorical device- avoid this flaw because it’s bad and leads to tragedy. Pretty straightforward, right?

Even in non-tragedies like Victorian Social Dramas, the didactic messages aren’t exactly hidden. In fact they are often explicit- much of the “action” in Jane Austen’s novels involves people talking about what is proper in society. Shockingly, most of those values don’t involve undermining society (“Oh, that rogue, Darcy was quite rude yesterday pestering me about my plans to explode the parliament this summer…”)

If every book didn’t have this facet to it, poor English majors would have a hell of a time coming up with anything to write about. The point of each piece, and how it is achieved is the primary analysis point for most stories. The most famous literary works may be those where a clear cut moral statement is ambiguous or difficult to define (Hamlet, for example, or Huck Finn), but these often express the lack of resolution their societies may have had towards certain issues (In Hamlet, if it’s never okay to kill a monarch, what if the monarch is someone who killed a monarch? In Finn, Twain uses much of the book seemingly leading to a confrontation with the issue of slavery only to ultimately give up in the face of such a daunting issue).

If the point of the University of Glasgow study is not generally that novels tend to express the values of society, but to specifically express values that are considered evolutionarily advantageous, I still don’t see it. How can Victorian Literature, of all things, stand in as a generic representation of human literature? Why did they only concern themselves with the novel? Did they know the specific history of this form and how that would inform it’s content in the 19th century (I could write an essay on that alone, but will spare you)? Given that the novel is just a sub-subgenre of human narrative, it seems more worthwhile to examine a broader scope.

I understand the value of comparing like subjects to each other when quizzing a number of people for a study, but the conclusions are weakened if they can only state that the Victorian Novel contains evolutionary values. Because these documents are specific to the society they arose in, you can’t extrapolate that to human narrative forms in general. And if its not generic human narrative they are studying, then it shouldn’t be taken as an expression of humanity-wide evolution, right?

If they wanted to get an basic overview of the similarities of human narratives, I can save them the trouble: Go read Joseph Campbell. He already spent a lifetime covering this whole subject from myth to novels and even movies accross the entire face of the globe.

To wrap this up before I hit 1000 words, this is a silly study. It uses questionable methodologies to establish things that were already known to come to a conclusion that doesn’t offer any particular insight. If they are trying to prove that novels are a cultural evolutionary mutation, they can’t even say that. Novels and other narrative forms intrinsically express the values of their authors. The values the authors possess are ingrained by society. Societies are obviously going to express values that strengthen themselves, or else they wouldn’t exist. So the most you can say about the novel from this study is that it is a social expression. To which I reply, “Duh.”

The more interesting questions I’d rather see addressed (to the extent it is possible) is how intertwined to human evolution is the evolution of society. How intertwined are these concepts to human communication and the evolution of narrative itself. Did communication and narrative arise in response to increased mental capacity, or did our cognitive abilities arise out of the use of new forms of communication? Or were they conjoined as a happy accident?

So in closing- come on, Science, you’re better than this.

-JD

This entry was posted on January 14, 2009 at 3:58 pm and is filed under Art, Links, literature, Miscellaneous . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.