Charles and the hopeful monster: postmodern evolutionary theory in 'The French Lieutenant's Woman.' - protagonist in book by author John Fowles

The French Lieutenant's Woman clearly enough tells a story involving the great crisis of Darwinism in Victorian England. But we should look closely at the precise way in which Fowles represents this crisis, otherwise we may miss the significance of the Darwin of our own time, which is equally important in the novel.(1) The book makes it plain that we have this later Darwin to consider. Of his protagonist, Charles Smithson, the narrator tells us that "Charles called himself a Darwinist, and yet he had not really understood Darwin. But then, nor had Darwin himself" (45). We here in the late twentieth century have corrected at least some of these earlier misunderstandings and in the process of doing so have defined ourselves historically. For as Dr. Grogan says at one point, The Origin of Species is "about the living ... not the dead" (131). Our understanding of evolution determines in a profound way our understanding of ourselves as living beings. And of course modern culture is "a culture dominated by evolutionary ideas" (Beer 5) to the point that many who have never actually read any evolutionary theory take the basic idea for granted.

Writers such as Gillian Beer, Sally Shuttleworth, and Redmond O'Hanlon have studied the effects of an actual reading knowledge of Darwin on famous Victorian writers. George Levine, on the other hand, in Darwin and the Novelists, has discussed the way Darwinism permeates Victorian realism, even "among writers who probably did not know any science first hand" (3). But Levine does not set out simply to show that fictional narratives and Darwin's evolutionary theory get constructed in similar ways. Rather he aims

to Shadow forth a Darwin more disruptive, perhaps, than even the greatest of his literary followers can suggest, a Darwin who, if fully absorbed by his contemporary novelists, might well have led to other kinds of narratives. (22)

In other words, Levine will read Victorian novels in light of what we now know of Darwin's ideas. For Darwinism has changed since Darwin himself was alive. In the same way that Darwinism embodied the assumptions of the Victorian novel and, conversely, the Victorian novel embodied the Victorian Darwin, so we shall find that the postmodern or "fully absorbed" Darwin embodies the postmodern novel and, conversely, the postmodern novel - in this case The French Lieutenant's Woman is a paradigmatic example of one of those "other kinds of narratives" suggested by Levine - embodies the postmodern Darwin. To explain this relationship, we will first need to establish what seems postmodern about recent Darwinian theory, and having done this we will then examine Fowles's novel.

By the postmodern Darwin, I mean that in the last 30 to 40 years certain ideas have become especially prominent in evolutionary theory, and these ideas are of a kind with a host of other ideas that many of us lump under the term postmodernism. Of course developments in evolutionary theory have arisen from within the scientific disciplines involved. But it is also true that disciplinary histories are not purely self-contained affairs. Historical periods may be defined by related complexes of thought appearing contemporaneously across wide areas of knowledge and interest. The elements of postmodern thinking that will be most relevant here revolve, as always, around the fundamental critique of metaphysical absolutes of all kinds, a metaphysical absolute being any representation that is taken consciously or unconsciously as entirely self-contained, self-identical, self-present, and therefore outside the realm of culture, history, desire, and ideology. The critique may be direct, as in overtly deconstructive kinds of interpretations, or it may be indirect, a corollary to certain other analyses. Thus Thomas Kuhn's recasting of the history of scientific revolutions plays a part in the critique of metaphysics even though this is not the specific aim of his argument. In any case, whatever the particular realm in which the critique of metaphysical absolutes occurs, one common outcome is the discovery that absolutes of this kind always function as unconscious anchors for a certain kind of identity. So the critique typically involves two most general results: It reveals that a given absolute is in fact a construction of history, culture, and desire, and it reveals that the construction has been misrecognized as an absolute because a certain self or cultural or sexual identity depends on not seeing the construction as a construction.

History has been a primary realm of investigation for the postmodern critique, and one common conclusion has been that chronological, developmental histories operate, simply as a function of their narrative form, to establish the absolute presence of a certain sense of self. The teleological form of the conventional narrative history presupposes the self-evident truth of cause and effect over time and of historical "facts" that precede the constructions of histories about those facts. One way or another, the influential writings of such thinkers as Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Paul de Man, and Kuhn (we will return to these below) have shown that this notion of history is not supportable as it has traditionally been conceived. Taking the critique further along, Foucault, de Man, and those coming after them have shown how this kind of history is unavoidably essentialist or anthropocentric: Not only historical fact but also the self who is the implied subject of this version of history is assumed by the discursive form of narrative history to exist as a kind of Platonic essence outside of that discourse. But this subject is in fact a production of historical and other discourses, and therefore it turns out that the subject of narrative history is a comforting illusion. Postmodern interpretations of history, in whatever realm they occur, work to avoid essentialism of this kind, and as a result they tend not to be narrative histories in the traditional sense.