It is strange that Darwin considers novels “works of the imagination, though not of a very high order.” Unfortunately, he does not clarify for the reader what exactly he means by this so we are forced to make assumptions about his intention. I think Darwin liked novels because of the escapism they provided. Novels allow the reader a break from reality and an escape to fantasy. It is far less likely, for me at least, that I will be so engrossed in a poem that I am whisked away to and absorbed in the world it describes. Darwin’s theory of “literary natural selection” so to speak denigrates novels to a lower and more vulgar place in culture, yet he appreciates novelists and the works they produce. It seems to me that for Darwin novels serve the same purpose that television and websites about cats with bad grammar serve for us today; they are mindless entertainment. He mentions that he has had many novels read to him and I imagine Darwin laying on a couch with his eyes closed imagining all of the things that are happening in the novel. For Darwin novels are passive entertainment they work their qualities on him while he passively consumes.
His theory does not entirely hold up however if we apply it to “The Time Machine” by H.G. Wells. Darwin’s theory holds that in order for a novel to be moderately good must end happily. In order for it to “come into the first class” it must have a character that one can “thoroughly love.” “The Time Machine” has neither of these qualities nor, in the case of the latter, a pretty woman. The novel presents a future world in which the descendants of man have divergently evolved into two distinct races. The two live in a sort of corrupted utopia in which the weaker and prettier eloi exist to feed the subterranean morlocks. The book also contains a visit to the end of the world in which man has been destroyed and the world is overrun with giant crustaceans and squid-creatures. The book hardly ends on a positive note as we are returned to the present and left to march slowly on towards the apocalypse. It is worth pondering whether or not there is anything that one can do to prevent the eventual split in man and the society of 802,701. The paradox of time travel leaves the reader with no clear answer.
This book makes me wonder where Darwin would classify it in his hierarchy of literature. There are no characters to which I felt, or I could imagine Darwin might have felt, an affinity for. Perhaps the narrator of the book is a relatable of the character but he serves little other purpose than to frame the novel. The eloi certainly are “attractive” but they are simpletons and virtually indistinguishable from each other. The morlocks are grotesque and feed on the eloi and so I hardly see them as relatable characters. Although I think that in many ways the morlocks are the most “human” of the creatures the time traveler encounters. I certainly don’t think that the controlling and cocky time traveler is a character to be loved. He has an incredible amount of hubris to think that he can go to the future and consider himself the superior being. He seems to somehow forget that the people he encounters are the descendants of him. Given our propensity for thinking that evolution just further and distills and clarifies the better attributes of creatures it can be assumed that they should be superior to us. But they aren’t. They devolved into simpler and baser creatures. They have lost touch with the art and the beauty they once enjoyed and now live in the dilapidated ruins of their golden age. As Darwin says the parts of their brain that appreciate higher aesthetic taste have atrophied. They exist in a world full of beauty but devoid of appreciation for it. The passage from Darwin’s autobiography ends with him saying that “The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” The eloi with their disregard for their own lives and the lives of others, and the morlocks with their diet of eloi embody this problem beautifully.
It is odd then that H.G. Wells’ book does not fit the criteria of Darwin’s first class novels, yet the characters in it exemplify the dangers in losing the higher arts.
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Something was screwy with the clock on my computer so this was scheduled to publish at ten o'clock tonight. I think I fixed it though. Maybe. I don't know.
ReplyDeleteYes indeed! Darwin, insofar as the evidence you were given for this post, never definitively defines what he means by “imagination.” However, be careful that the speculation with which you follow up this lack of definition does not over-generalize to the point of effacing the evidence you *do* have from the autobiography. It is certainly possible that Darwin enjoyed the ‘escapism’ of novels, at least with regard to the “happy endings” and “pretty ladies” they could present; but does this necessarily preclude poetry from such escapism? In contrast to this speculation, your statement—“Darwin’s theory of ‘literary natural selection’ so to speak denigrates novels to a lower and more vulgar place in culture, yet he appreciates novelists and the works they produce”—does an excellent job of describing the problematic that drives Darwin’s thoughts here: novels are at once indicative of an atrophied aesthetic sense and appreciated for their effect. With this in mind, I enjoyed your discussion of Wells’ _The Time Machine_ as an exception to the degenerate novel. However, I also question why Darwin’s theory doesn’t necessarily hold, given that Wells’ text does not (as you discuss) contain the qualities for *Darwin* to enjoy the text. Does this not prove his point: that he cannot enjoy such a text precisely b/c it lacks the possibly escapist vein? In fact, is it not too real? Too much a performance of the very theoretical work that caused the atrophy of his aesthetic sense in the first place? It seems to me that you are disagreeing with the fact that Darwin would relegate _The Time Machine_ to a lower class of literature (and not that Darwin can or cannot uphold his own theory). We have to remember, as you mention at the top of the post, that the excerpt in question is from Darwin’s autobiography; it is, in effect, an opinion piece. So to agree or disagree w/ its premise demands, for example, that you take into account the state of atrophy in which Darwin claims to be writing. Might this then be the quality that would allow you to dismantle his theory, by using Wells’ novel as a kind of decoder ring?
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