Luca Mătăsaru reviews Ian Duncan’s Human Forms. The Novel in the Age of Evolution (Princeton University Press, 2019, 292 p.)
“Coming into the world without form, unbound to a special task or function, man takes on all forms and functions, fills the world and consumes it, making his own nature and making nature his own”, Ian Duncan writes in the introduction of his most recent book, Human Forms. The Novel in the Age of Evolution (9), an interdisciplinary analysis of the interaction between evolutionary theories and the development of the novel in the 19th century. The author, Professor and Florence Green Bixby Chair in English at the University of California, Berkeley, creates a simultaneously vast and detailed picture of how the debates on human nature led up to Darwin’s theory of evolution. An expert in 18th– and 19th-century British literature, Duncan draws parallels between mutations in the philosophical and biological understanding of the human and the changing forms of the novelistic genre. Although he borrows the lens of a historian of ideas, the issue of human nature and its potential metamorphoses is extremely relevant in today’s increasingly technological world, given contemporary anxieties about the rise of artificial intelligence and pressing discussions about the newly emerging relationship between the human and the non-human.
The relationship between the history of science and the evolution of the novel is much closer than we would have thought. Duncan’s main argument is that the changing conceptions regarding human nature, as a result of new discoveries and theories in the natural sciences and in natural philosophy, had a direct impact on the emergence of the 19th century novel as a genre of potentiality rather than fixed structures. However, the author argues, the novel was not only a recipient of ideas emerging in the life sciences but also developed its own images of man by employing various literary and formal techniques. This means that the problem of human nature in the 19th century transcended the scientific field to which it is generally reduced. To unfold his argument, Duncan centers his investigation on the concept of formation (Bildung in German), in both cultural as well as biological senses. In essence, his claim is that the 19th century novel contributed to the scientific debates about evolution by focusing on the development of the individual not only in relation to national history, but also to the history of the species. As he somewhat poetically formulates,
“disoriented from a daylight logic of cause and effect, flung deepest into a delirium of romantic adventure and weird science, we catch a glimpse of ourselves: neither as human countenances, nor organic bodies, but as dislocated perceptual fragments embedded in a meaning-generating apparatus—a work of literature. It is the reflection of our own vision, bloodshot with passionate amazement and with the sheer effort to see, reading in the dark.” (113)
The relationship between human nature and the form of the novel manifests itself especially in two emerging subgenres: the Bildungsroman (focused on the formation of the individual) and the historical novel (focused on national history as a link between the life of the individual and that of the species).
Duncan starts from previous analyses that identified evolutionary themes in the texts he discusses. However, he goes further than previous scholars, bringing scientific and literary ideas together and adding his own valuable insights. His ultimate aim is to build a cohesive argument about the parallel development of the novel and the 19th century scientific revolution.
In the first chapter, Duncan provides a philosophical background to the debate over human nature, as well as the development of the human individual and species, in the late 18th century, focusing on thinkers such as Kant, Herder, Rousseau, and Buffon. His main interest lies in how the modern “science of man” began to treat the human species as a unifying object of study. The subsequent chapters consist of literary analyses of several authors and their approaches towards the new conception of the human. The second chapter examines three texts connected to the rise of the 19th century novel in the form of the Bildungsroman (Madame de Staël’s Corinne and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) and the historical novel (Walter Scott’s Waverley). Duncan argues that these novels are interested in the formation of humanity (Bildung der Humanität) as a species, by following the development of their protagonists. Two Romantic historical novels, Scott’s Count Robert of Paris and Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, constitute the subject of the third chapter. These novels display the new interest in monsters at the beginning of the 19th century, and the author demonstrates how they describe the monstrous in terms of a Lamarckian evolution gone wrong. The fourth chapter focuses on Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, which undermines the objective point of view typical of the Victorian novel in order to highlight its concern with the dehumanizing effects of the modern city. Duncan considers Bleak House and other novels by Dickens to be constructed on the premises of a “transformist natural history” in the line of Lamarck, not Darwin, whose theory of natural selection was only emerging in that historical period. George Eliot is the final writer discussed in the book. Duncan establishes her position in relation to the Darwinian evolutionary debate by analyzing three of her most important novels, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. These examples nuance our understanding of George Eliot; whilst Darwin’s influence on Eliot has been previously investigated, Duncan’s merit is to show that she was more skeptical towards Darwin’s hypotheses than previously thought.
Duncan manages to grasp in a professional way on a broad variety of historical sources. He references texts from different fields of knowledge relevant to the debate on human nature, such as philosophy, aesthetics, natural science and, of course, novels and other literary texts. However, it is essential to note that his analysis does not stop at identifying common tropes and themes in science and literature. Instead, he goes further, demonstrating how the novel uses its own literary means (setting, characters, narrative, language) in order to add significant nuances to the conversation about human nature in the 19th century. In other words, this means that Duncan does not approach literature as a cultural product that simply borrows ideas from other types of discourse and then reformulates them in a more accessible language. On the contrary, he emphasizes that the writers he examines are conscious of the freedom offered by the novelistic genre, so that they take advantage of it in order to reflect on issues that the sciences may find harder to describe or imagine. As he explains,
“The ‘perfect form’ the novel lays claim to is not a resolved, determinate scheme, but form as process, dynamic and evolving—a symbolic system that is imaginatively grasped as figural rather than as literal, or rather, a knowledge that inheres in the vibration between literal and figural senses, not yet hardened into habit and fact.” (184)
One of the book’s limits might constitute the cases chosen. While the examples the author selected for his analysis are examined in a very detailed manner, the fact that he limits himself to only a few authors and a few texts could give the impression of a less comprehensive study. Although Duncan often mentions other writers he does not discuss at length, the following question may arise: did he choose the literary examples that best supported his argument or does his demonstration still hold up if we were to look at other 19th century novels? For sure, we need to take into account that the novel is an extremely prolific genre in the 19th century, so that an exhaustive study is nearly impossible. However, one can argue that, generally speaking, the Victorian novel is not as innovative as Duncan’s examples may at first indicate. In fact, the 18th century novel is often considered more experimental than the 19th century. For instance, if we look at Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, published between 1759 and 1767, we will quickly understand the radical experimentalism of the relatively young novelistic genre, even before the life sciences started to seriously reconsider the idea of human nature. In comparison, most 19th century novels appear quite conventional. Consequently, even if major themes of the Victorian novel have certainly been influenced by Lamarckism and Darwinism, its formal innovations may derive from its history as an open, unfixed genre, rather than from its interest in evolutionary debates. Nonetheless, it is clear that the author opted for depth rather than breadth, focusing on works that are interesting precisely because of their formal experiments differentiating them from other standard realist novels.
The intended audience of the book is the academic public. It requires at least a general knowledge of the historical period and its cultural developments, as well as a good grasp on 19th century literature, since Duncan does not summarize the novels he discusses. Even if his analysis offers insights that may be interesting to the general public, the ordinary reader will most likely be lost among the numerous references and the specialised language the author prefers. Nonetheless, his academic vocabulary and his scientific style contribute to the rigorousness of his argument, thus making it more convincing because it rests on such a thorough research process.
Despite this lack of accessibility, which unfortunately limits its intended readership to academics specialized in 19th century literature, the transdisciplinary nature of the book is perhaps its most important methodological contribution to the field of literary studies, often adverse to approaching scientific problems in works of literature. But, as Duncan’s whole argument shows, science and imagination are not mutually exclusive. In reality, they are two cognitive means through which we ask questions and find answers about human nature and its relationship to other forms of life. Even if they may not always arrive at similar conclusions, both provide precious paths of inquiry towards the essential questions that preoccupy the consciousness of the human species.
Luca Mătăsaru is an Assistant Editor for the Democracy and Culture section. He is a PhD researcher in Comparative Literature at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. His thesis focuses on the concept of cyclical history, as well as on the idea of biological and civilizational decline in 20th century science fiction literature. He holds a BA in English and Comparative Literature and an MA in History of Ideas, both from Babeș-Bolyai University. His research interests include the relationship between speculative fiction and its cultural and scientific context, the history of philosophical and political thought, as well as the historical inspirations and parallels present in various cultural products.
