“EVOLUTION,” WRITES ANNIE DILLARD IN Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), “loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe. The words are simple, the concept clear—but you don’t believe it, do you?”1 Dillard recalls a brief but memorable moment from the third chapter of The Origin of Species, where, also writing in personal terms, Charles Darwin describes the same dilemma: “Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult—at least I have found it so—than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind.”2 If the difficulty these writers describe can be understood as a form of denial, it is not what we usually have in mind when we talk about “science denialism.” At issue here is not the open rejection or deliberate obfuscation of evolutionary science but the acknowledgment of an emotional obstacle, some kind of internal resistance to fully accepting the picture of nature it paints. Darwin’s word is “admit,” which he tells us is easy enough to do verbally. But “admit” of course has another sense—to allow inside—and this is where things get “more difficult.” “Admission,” we might say, is denial’s mirror image, its more obliging twin. Both words are cleaved semantically between a mere speech act of attestation (or gainsaying) and a deeper, more psychologically fraught acceptance (or rejection) of whatever uncomfortable, alienating, dislocating, or aversive thing is under discussion. Darwin’s metaphor of “bearing” in mind—so common, admittedly, as to almost no longer count as a metaphor—suggests something burdensome about these ideas when allowed inside and carried around “constantly.”3 It was a burden Darwin sometimes wished he could relinquish.
For both Dillard and Darwin, the problem is not about whether to accept certain natural realities as true but how to live with them. What both writers express is a version of that special category of denial known as disavowal. Disavowal—often glossed as “knowing and not knowing at the same time”—is a complex concept, the various terminological issues surrounding which will be taken up later. For now, I would point to the ways in which it has increasingly become a part of the popular and scholarly conversation about the response to anthropogenic climate change. The sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard describes a “failure to integrate” certain forms of scientific knowledge into everyday experience, which produces a “double reality.” “In one reality,” she writes, there is “the collectively constructed sense of normal everyday life. In the other reality . . . the troubling knowledge of increasing automobile use, polar ice caps melting, and the predictions of future [extreme] weather scenarios.”4 The sociologist Stanley Cohen calls this “implicatory denial,” to suggest a disconnect between accepted knowledge and the implications that knowledge holds for how one should live.5 The French psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni’s famous line “I know well, but all the same . . .” (Je sais bien, mais quand même . . . ) captures the sense of disconnect: the split in the disavowing subject that is accompanied (crucially) by the subject’s own self-awareness of that split.6 In this book, I lean on Naomi Klein’s term “soft denial” because of the way it pairs with its extremist counterpart “hard denial” to suggest not only something of the range of evasive responses but also their interarticulation.7 The expansion of the idea of denial to include many who actually accept climate science speaks to the much-observed gap between widespread knowledge of the crisis and the lack of urgency on the part of policy makers and the public to respond in a way commensurate with the nature and scope of the problem. As Bruno Latour puts it in Facing Gaia, “We can’t say that we didn’t know. It’s just that there are many ways of knowing and not knowing at the same time.”8
The tactics of hard deniers are all too familiar to those of us watching with horror as clouds of misinformation about evolution and climate science continue to spew from right-wing media outlets, corporate-funded think tanks, and a rogues’ gallery of various cynics, grifters, and con artists. But if the hard denial of evolution persists well beyond the nineteenth century into the present, Dillard’s musings in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek illustrate that soft denial clearly does as well, even among those who are actually trying to come to terms with it. “I ought to keep a giant water bug in an aquarium on my dresser, so I can think about it,” she writes. “We have brass candlesticks in our houses now; we ought to display praying mantises in our churches. Why do we turn from the insects in loathing?”9 Dillard’s book is in many ways a record of an entire year in which she works to “bear constantly in mind” the basic natural processes upon which Darwin’s theory depends, discovering along the way that she could still use some imaginative aids around the house. Because, of course, the answer to her question about the pull of denial—why we turn away “in loathing”—has everything to do with those houses and churches and brass candlesticks and any number of other cultural practices, commodities, and features of the built environment that function—implicitly or explicitly—to enforce a spurious sense of difference between human life and the world of “nature.” The reason churches don’t have statues of praying mantises and people don’t keep water beetles on their dressers is that such objects would undermine the whole point of such spaces and artifacts, which is to make possible a reality where one can feel, for a time, that insects don’t really matter. Don’t, in some sense, exist. Dillard’s journey in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is framed as an individual soul’s solitary struggle to confront the natural world, but in some ways what it really documents is the struggle of an individual soul trying to free herself from a culture of denial.
What Dillard makes clear, in her many moments of “turning away in loathing” from unsettling natural scenes, is the divide between accepting something to be true and real and fully assimilating it into one’s sense of identity or experience of the world. In her last book, The Weather in Proust, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick usefully frames this in terms of the split between “reality and realization,” defining the former as propositional forms of knowledge and the latter as “process and practice”—a more comprehensive “nondual” striving toward the integration of the emotions, the senses, and the understanding at once.10 Sedgwick is talking about her struggle to come to terms with her own terminal illness and the difference between acknowledging her mortality as a fact, on the one hand, and actually “understanding it as real,” on the other.11 Her short essay doesn’t mention the climate crisis or anything like it, but in its critique of an ingrained subject-object binarism that is partly responsible for the “shrunken impoverishment of any Western psychology of knowledge and realization,” it speaks to recent deconstructive work on ecology by Elizabeth Grosz and Timothy Morton (more about which later) and gets at the reasons why climate or evolutionary science can be treated as entirely real while nevertheless remaining stubbornly “unrealized” for most people, most of the time.12 “How normal it is,” she writes, “for realization to lag behind knowledge for months or eons”—or, to take the middle scale perhaps most appropriate to the climate crisis, for decades.13 Of course, “normal” here means something more like “normalized”—taken as normal even if it is maladaptive or destructive. Or entirely mad.
Thus, it is a short step from The Weather to the climate. The neurobiologist Janis Dickinson has recently argued that the denial of climate change is really an expression of the denial of mortality with which Sedgwick struggles.14 For the anthropologist Ernest Becker, upon whose work Dickinson draws, the denial of death produces what he calls “immortality projects”: culturally generated fantasies that keep anxious thoughts of extinction at bay at the steep cost of fundamentally misrepresenting the nature and reality of our animal existence to ourselves. These “projects” can be religious of course (where personal immortality is explicitly on offer), but they can also take the form of discourses of entrepreneurial success, myths of heroic individualism, or utopian ideologies of both left- and right-wing varieties. For Becker, the “New Universal Immortality Ideology” is, at its root, all about wealth accumulation and the fantasy that money can bestow power and permanence, can rescue its possessor from fears of insignificance and oblivion. Though Becker doesn’t specifically discuss disavowal, clearly “immortality ideology” at least partly falls under this category—excepting those who plan to freeze their heads in cryo-storage, even rich people know you can’t buy your way out of death. Becker’s argument is that the worship of money represents not so much an outright denial of creaturely existence but a transmutation of it into a sense of immediate, palpable control over one’s environment: “Man succumbs easily to the temptation of created life, which is to exercise power mainly in the dimension in which he moves and acts as an organism. The pull of the body is so strong, lived experience is so direct; the ‘supernatural’ is so remote and problematic, so abstract and intangible.”15 Becker’s line of argument has been taken up more recently in the work of the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, who argues that all of human culture is, at heart, fundamentally about denying the body: “Culture is the totality of means by which I escape from my animal state of being.”16 Struggling to maintain a false belief in one’s exceptional status is the thing that makes one exceptional, even though, of course, it also doesn’t. As the novelist John Fowles puts it, “We are all in a flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens.”17 “Escapism,” argues Tuan, “is human—and inescapable.”18 Thus, on some level, to be human is to refuse to accept being human. Reality is produced in the efforts to flee it.
And yet, of course, such universalizing accounts themselves tend to obscure—we might even say “deny”—the social, historical, and political dimensions of denialism: its roots in capitalism and the commodity form; in the numerous contradictions of the Enlightenment project of Western humanism; in empire and all its attendant mystifications and erasures. Although “denial” often gets used to identify an individual psychological shortcoming or moral failing, it is also, and more importantly for our purposes in this book, a complex, organized, well-funded cultural production that trades upon, as it generates, elaborate fantasies of various kinds (security, innocence, uniqueness, agency, superiority, virtue). This is ignorance not as lack, or shortcoming, or failure, but as a product intrinsic to the logic of capitalism, because it is needed to disguise its rapaciously anti-human operations and its fundamental incompatibility with equality, democracy, human rights, and all of the other putative ideals of the liberal humanist project. Indeed, as we are discovering, capitalism’s fundamental incompatibility is with life itself. So while it may be entirely true that Homo sapiens is hardwired for denial, that we are somehow not rigged, neurally speaking, to dwell for long in remote, transpersonal vistas of space and time; while it may be the case that we have, by and large, not evolved to consistently extend our radius of sympathetic attention much beyond our own short-term needs and those of our own family or kin group or tribe, it is also true that advanced consumer capitalism has become expert at exploiting and supercharging those predispositions to denialism; at fortifying and celebrating (fortifying by celebrating) the felt experience of individual centrality and significance; at fueling fantasy life and then inviting us at every turn to push whatever is unwanted—which it has also worked tirelessly to define—out of mind.
The unresolved contradiction in the cultural uptake of evolutionary ideas—a widespread acceptance of Darwinian science accompanied by a refusal of its implications—has been noted in recent works by Bruno Latour, Adam Phillips, Donna Haraway, and many other critics we’ll encounter in the following pages. Latour notes that many card-carrying “Darwinians,” including Richard Dawkins, are guilty of this: “It is safe to say that one hundred and fifty years after his discoveries, the full originality of Darwin’s thought has still not been absorbed by public consciousness. I am not alluding here to the masses of results and models obtained by evolutionary biologists, but to the metaphysical consequences of evolutionary theory. The problem is that the full originality of Darwin’s understanding of the world is obfuscated not only by so-called creationists but in part also by neo-Darwinians.”19 Latour locates the obfuscation of Darwinian ecology at the root of our inability to adequately respond to, or even just successfully imagine, the magnitude of the environmental crisis we face. A similar critique was frequently leveled by the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who argued that the idea of progress produced, and was produced by, a form of denialism that implicitly or explicitly re-encoded hierarchy and direction in the natural order despite the profoundly anti-teleological thrust of Darwin’s entire project.20 “We are still not ready for the Darwinian revolution,” he writes, because we refuse to “own the plain implications of evolution for life’s nonpredictable nondirectionality.”21 “Owning” those implications would mean accepting that humanity is neither point nor pinnacle of organic life; that we differ from non-human animals only in degree, not in kind; that we do not and cannot “transcend” or “subdue” nature but remain fully embedded within and dependent upon it; that the earth, not having being made for us, might change, or be changed, in ways that make it no longer hospitable to us. It would mean, as he puts it in Ever Since Darwin, once and for all letting go of the “fallacious equation of organic evolution with progress,” which “remains a primary component of our global arrogance, our belief in dominion over, rather than fellowship with, more than a million other species that inhabit our planet.”22 Pretty obvious, but Gould contends that such implications are not taken “seriously” because, if they were, there would be a radical rethinking of so many of the most basic categories of human meaning and modes of social and political organization.23 Gould’s target is not so much those who openly deny the facts of evolution but self-described Darwinians, including his own colleagues in evolutionary biology, who practice a more cagey kind of disavowal, which he calls “spin” and “special pleading.”24
One biologist who gets singled out for special criticism is E. O. Wilson, who surely would have objected to the description of his work on Darwin as “spin.” And yet, interestingly, Wilson also somewhat cryptically admits to practicing the kind of denialism Gould lays at his door. In the final passage of On Human Nature, he mounts a defense of the progressive vision of modern science:
In the spirit of the enrichment of the evolutionary epic, modern writers often summon the classical mythic heroes to illustrate their view of the predicament of humankind: the existential Sisyphus, turning fate into the only means of expression open to him; hesitant Arjuna at war with his conscience on the Field of Righteousness; disastrous Pandora bestowing the ills of mortal existence on human beings; and uncomplaining Atlas, steward of the finite Earth. Prometheus has gone somewhat out of fashion in recent years as a concession to resource limitation and managerial prudence. But we should not lose faith in him. Come back with me for a moment to the original, Aeschylean Prometheus:
Chorus: Did you perhaps go further than you have told us?
Prometheus: I caused mortals to cease foreseeing doom.
Chorus: What cure did you provide them with against that sickness?
Prometheus: I placed in them blind hopes.
The true Promethean spirit of science means to liberate man by giving him knowledge and some measure of dominion over the physical environment. But at another level, and in a new age, it also constructs the mythology of scientific materialism, guided by the corrective devices of the scientific method, addressed with precise and deliberately affective appeal to the deepest needs of human nature, and kept strong by the blind hopes that the journey on which we are now embarked will be farther and better than the one just completed.25
The philosopher Charles Taylor argues that Wilson displays “a sublime indifference to inconsistency” here and throughout this book, insofar as he argues, on the one hand, for a reductive view of human moral life as fundamentally irrational, emotive, and unconscious (because hardwired by thousands of generations of natural selection) and, on the other, for a vision of heroic human self-fashioning aimed at the progressive loosening of the bonds of nature.26 But it seems to me that what we have here is not so much indifference to inconsistency as a strategic embrace of it. To subscribe to “scientific humanism” (as Wilson calls it) is to posit a world in which the human is decentered in reality but is still kept centered in the story of “reality” that we all agree to tell ourselves. It is what he calls the “evolutionary epic . . . probably the best myth we will ever have.”27 Wilson is not so much declaring his belief in the “myth” of human progress as arguing for the importance of suspending disbelief in it.28 But note that, in order to do this, other concerns must be minimized or ignored—the focus on “resource limitation and managerial prudence,” for example. That is, what gets backgrounded are precisely the kinds of ecological pressures and limits that might cast doubt on Promethean ambitions. The validity of such concerns is not disputed; instead, they are simply pushed to one side, consigned to a different mythological framework we are deciding not to adopt.
Taylor calls Wilson’s “a split-screen vision” of nature, which recalls Norgaard’s “double reality” and which, Taylor argues, originated in the nineteenth century. It is characterized, in his account, by the sundering of “the scientific explanation of the natural order” from its “moral meaning.”29 His discussion of Wilson’s On Human Nature occurs in a chapter called “Our Victorian Contemporaries,” which traces a number of still-unresolved moral and epistemological fissures in the secular imagination back to their roots in nineteenth-century science. And, as we’ll see, many Victorians shared Wilson’s interest in the value of “blind hopes” as a means of attending to “the deepest needs of human nature,” which might otherwise be threatened by the picture of reality being painted by evolutionary biology. And yet, it seems clear today that the real threat to our “deepest needs” inheres not in confronting our diminished ontological significance but in continuing to avoid facing it. It seems clear, indeed, that our deepest needs demand not a mythopoetic construct to help us organize a coherent, developmental narrative of “hope” for our species but rather a livable planet for ourselves and our non-human brethren, which is precisely what our Promethean ambitions have put at risk.
Of course, if other potential organizing myths are being pushed aside, we might wonder what else is getting sidelined for the sake of Wilson’s chosen evolutionary epic. Who is included in the “we” being hailed, and, more important, who is excluded from it? What groups, exactly, are imagined to enjoy “some measure of dominion over the physical environment”? Wilson’s implied answers to these questions are also at heart quintessentially Victorian, even if he takes more rhetorical pains than his nineteenth-century predecessors to whitewash the imperial and racial hierarchies that structure his narrative of progress:
Man’s destiny is to know, if only because societies with knowledge culturally dominate societies that lack it. Luddites and anti-intellectuals do not master the differential equations of thermodynamics or the biochemical cures of illness. They stay in thatched huts and die young. Cultures with unifying goals will learn more rapidly than those that lack them, and an autocatalytic growth of learning will follow because scientific materialism is the only mythology that can manufacture great goals from the sustained pursuit of pure knowledge.30
The word “manufacture,” literally used to describe the generation of ideas, clearly also has a material ring, suggesting that the mythological itself is a source of motive power: “autocatalytic” and self-sustaining. Believing something is real in some ways makes it so. This, as we’ll see and as I’ve written about elsewhere, is also a very Victorian kind of slippage, where energy the organized material resource is confounded with energy the organizing (or “unifying”) quality of character or culture in a way that obscures its materiality.31 But I’ve buried the lede here, because the much stranger part is the beginning of the passage. Because in what sense, it seems fair to ask, can “anti-intellectuals” be considered a “society”? Certainly not in the sense implied by the first sentence, which seems to be gesturing to a much broader scale—the national or imperial—and the historical questions of which groups of people “dominate” others. The image of “thatched huts” is obviously a loaded one, and it conjures neither Luddites nor anti-intellectuals but rather indigenous societies and inhabitants of the Global South. Wilson can’t quite say this out loud, but this is clearly a carefully coded Social Darwinist argument for, and rationalization of, Western global hegemony as the great hope for humanity.32 It is as clear an example as one could want of the dynamic Sylvia Wynter describes as “the overrepresentation of Man,” which is the way that “the present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man . . . overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself.”33 In her account, discussed further later, the newly reimagined, inclusive, biocentric category “human” emerges in evolutionary writing as it gets, at the same time, effaced by the exclusive, hierarchically structured, sociogenic fabrication “Man.” Inclusion becomes exclusion through the logic of disavowal—signaled in Wynter’s “as if.” No one actually believes that the Western bourgeois ethnoclass is the human itself; all the same, so much cultural and economic life seems tacitly organized upon precisely this hierarchy that it becomes impossible to conclude this is not, in fact, what many people actually believe. Indeed, the pervasiveness of such an assumption is what allows Wilson to not quite say what he means but know the message is coming across anyway. The point here is that the discourse of progress, and the need to find some way to demarcate the human from the rest of the natural world—whether metaphysically, historically, mythopoetically, or narratively—inevitably depends upon racialized exclusions and the logic of white supremacy. Those exclusions are sometimes explicitly owned, sometimes tacitly assumed, sometimes only ambiguously voiced or acknowledged, but in all cases they make only a privileged subset eligible to be included in the mythmaking.
“How do we hold the two together,” Dipesh Chakrabarty asks, “as we think the history of the world since the Enlightenment?”34 Chakrabarty’s question is to some degree an attempt to address the problem of disavowal on the level of the historiographical: that is, to figure out how to integrate competing frameworks for the human, each of which has a claim upon the “real,” but each of which establishes discursive boundaries that stabilize one aspect of the object of study while excluding another, equally important, aspect. What to do with “Anthropocene,” “species,” and “human” when the very universalizing power that makes such concepts valuable in one kind of analytical framework is exactly what obscures the histories through which such universals have been constructed, as Wynter shows, on a hierarchical racial logic of exclusion? To track the history of those constructions is necessarily to track the history of colonialism and empire and the suicidally extractivist drive that produced the so-called Anthropocene in the first place. The philosopher Axelle Karera argues that the unexamined use of such universalizing terms means the social, political, and historical dimensions of the climate crisis routinely get ignored in much environmental and new materialist discourse: “The new regimes of Anthropocenean consciousness have been powerful in disavowing racial antagonisms.”35 Such erasures, she argues, risk replicating the deep structure that generated, and continues to generate, the crisis: “what gets lost when the urgencies of anxious petitions to obtain ‘a solution’ aggressively compete with the difficult work of finding the conditions that render stable the repetitions and the duration of anti-blackness, or the legacies of slavery and colonialism.”36 Thus, what scholars like Chakrabarty, Wynter, and Karera make plain is that it is no contradiction to find that the Promethean Wilson, who wove his disparaging insinuations around people living in “thatched huts,” was also a committed environmentalist and outspoken critic of that reckless “planetary killer,” humanity.37 Chakrabarty notes that Wilson’s solution to environmental crisis is more knowledge, more self-awareness, more technological sophistication—“the unity possible through our collective self-recognition as a species,” as he glosses it.38 “Humanity,” Wilson writes, “has consumed or transformed enough of Earth’s irreplaceable resources to be in better shape than ever before. We are smart enough and now, one hopes, well informed enough to achieve self-understanding as a unified species.”39 The idea that humanity’s collective consumption of energy will be transformed into a universal species brain to help us manage the disasters that consumption has caused is a daft fantasy, a story straight out of the nineteenth century and its narratives of inevitable human progress. It also rings of imperial mythmaking and the belief that there exists a special “we” destined to benevolently administer the world, its peoples, its resources. It’s a story we’ll see repeatedly in the following pages: the promise of the emancipatory power of knowledge that turns out to be just one more way of not knowing.40
In an address delivered a few years before Dillard wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Rachel Carson told her audience that “today, it would be hard to find any person of education who would deny the facts of evolution. Yet so many of us deny the obvious corollary: that man is affected by the same environmental influences that control the lives of all the many thousands of other species to which he is related by evolutionary ties.”41 The toxic effects of pesticides and other industrial chemicals are well understood, she says, and yet, incredibly, they still continue to be fed heedlessly into the air, water, and soil “to serve the gods of profit and production.”42 Turning away from the insects in loathing has metastasized, via big agribusiness, into eradicating them wholesale. The disconnect between environmental knowledge and economic practice has everything to do with the incentive structure of capitalism where short-term gain is privileged over long-term health and an illusory sense of human difference is strategically conjured to keep concerns about the latter at bay. Evading the radically species-decentering thrust of Darwin’s theory—which we might gloss briefly and incompletely here as the non-hierarchical enmeshment of the human and the non-human—means evading a clear-sighted reckoning with our status as biological beings and thus the vulnerability of our own animal bodies to the chemical warfare we have unleashed upon other animal and plant species in the name of ever-increasing profits. It is a failure to acknowledge the manifold forms of environmental damage being visited at and across nearly every imaginable scale—from the microbiological to the planetary—and through much wider temporal horizons than the quarterly demands of the profit motive can admit. For Carson, the ontological and the ecological are entirely bound together and co-constitutive, which means that the denial of evolution and the denial of environmental destruction are not just structurally similar but are interarticulated aspects of the same phenomenon. The relationship is both analogical and genealogical, and the failure to fully realize the “obvious corollary” of Darwinian thought—that we are fully enmeshed in material environments like all other organisms—is both sign and cause of a deliberately impoverished ecological imagination, a culture of denial.
This book is about that culture: the way it was shaped by (as it helped shape) the response to Darwin’s theory in the nineteenth century; its warping effects on environmental thought in that period and beyond; its relationship to other forms of social and political evasion, especially those connected to the imperial project and racialized hierarchies of humanness; and its expression in the literary imaginary of the long nineteenth century. My focus in these pages is primarily on soft rather than hard denial, although these seemingly distinct responses are more difficult to distinguish than first appears and were, indeed, often entangled and interarticulated in the Victorian period, as they are today. As we’ll repeatedly discover, the very focus on the stark irrationality of hard denial can help tacitly normalize soft denial and make it seem harmless by comparison. This is partly what Klein is after in her discussion of these terms: the very desire to demarcate (my, understandable, harmless) soft from (their, irrational, destructive) hard denial actually highlights their interconnections.
In recent years, there has been something of a renewed interest in Darwin in the humanities, especially as ecological concerns have become more insistent and central to literary studies, critical theory, anthropology, sociology, history, and any number of other disciplines. Not a revival of Darwin, exactly, because that would imply he went somewhere, but something of a new emphasis on, and interest in, Darwin the theorist, the thinker who radically challenged the place of the human in the natural order and, along with it, many of the most basic categories of Enlightenment thought.43 For the literary critic Timothy Morton, Darwin is a deconstructionist avant la lettre, upending not just the binaries animal and human, but organism and habitat, and even subject and object. Such distinctions and reifications need to be broken down, in Morton’s view, in order to bring a new kind of environmental imaginary into being, and it is Darwin who begins to show the way, “who thought through many of the complex and hard-to-face issues that confront the ecological thought.”44 In a similarly deconstructive vein, Elizabeth Grosz puts Darwin’s reconceptualization of life at the center of her own eco-feminist project and argues that “philosophy has yet to recover from this eruption, has yet to recompose its concepts of man, reason, and consciousness to accommodate the Darwinian explosion.”45 Devin Griffiths, meanwhile, argues for understanding Darwin “as a foundational process philosopher and ecotheorist” and persuasively argues that “Darwin’s theory of natural selection has overshadowed his more audacious lifelong project: to explain how, in the absence of a design and in the face of constant flux, natural patterns sustain themselves.”46 Darwin’s ecology, Griffiths argues, provides us with a resource for thoroughly reimagining our understanding of form, literary and otherwise. We can also see the interest in Darwin the theorist in recent work by Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, as well as work in the so-called animal turn in the humanities.47
This book, you might say, half-participates in this critical trend. That is, it is also interested in these radical, bracing, paradigm-exploding, eco-theoretical aspects of Darwin’s work, but it is just as focused on the ways in which such challenging ideas were avoided, downplayed, euphemized, sidestepped, twisted, evaded, and denied (and continue to be). You can see this tension in the brief quotes earlier by Morton and Grosz: the implications of Darwin’s ecological ideas are “hard to face,” difficult to “accommodate,” and this book explores not only all of the ways the Victorians avoided facing and accommodating them but also the many ways in which that avoidant response persists. Evolutionary science’s decentering of the human was so extreme—Herbert Spencer, as we’ll see, called it a “laceration”—that it seemed to have encouraged a powerful, compensatory recentering project on other, more contingent, precarious, and in some cases knowingly fictitious grounds. Before Darwin, the idea of human exceptionalism always had the immortal soul to fall back upon; this meant that denial involved the refusal to accept the animal part of the human rather than the refusal to accept the human as an animal. But the human-as-animal is an immensely more challenging proposition because it punctures many cherished and deeply rooted beliefs, explicit and implicit, about the possibility of human transcendence over the merely material and the role some humans want to give themselves as the special avatars uniquely equipped to realize that possibility. It’s no wonder, then, that so many Victorians struggled to face it.
In what follows, I discuss the ways in which this struggle expressed itself in the literature of the nineteenth century and beyond. In Chapter 1, I examine the concept of denial, discussing its connections to Marxist ideology critique; its operation in the history of imperial conquest and white supremacy; and its development in Freudian psychoanalysis. One of the key aims of this chapter is to show the complex interdependence of various forms of denialist thinking and how they might be understood in relation to the challenge to human exceptionalism posed by Darwinian theory. Ian Duncan describes how late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ideas about human development made a case for human exceptionalism that was ultimately self-undermining: “The formal qualities supposed by late Enlightenment philosophers to set man apart in nature—plasticity, perfectibility—embed him more deeply within it.”48 In Chapter 2, I’m interested in something like the other side of this coin: not in the upending of human exceptionalism through the science meant to fortify it but in its ironic reconsolidation through the science that had seemingly dismantled it. That is, the way that, after Darwin had systematically and decisively undermined anthropocentric thought, nineteenth-century evolutionary scientists and anthropologists used a version of his ideas to provisionally return “humanity” to a place of centrality in the natural order. The features of human existence that Darwin made increasingly difficult for secular humanists to flatly deny—our animal nature; our full enmeshment in natural systems and processes; our inevitable extinction—could still be “softly” denied: pushed out of mind, temporarily suspended, explained away. This took place through a developmentalist and indeed “Promethean” mythmaking that provided cover for the imperial project, as that project helped organize the entire discursive field of scientific inquiry. Crucially, this meant that the radical ecological import of The Origin of Species was evaded as soon as it was articulated, resulting in a divided view of the natural environment in which a select minority of humans were somehow imagined to be from, but not of, nature.
This book is thus interested not so much in the ways literature refuses, suppresses, or excludes Darwinian ecological ideas but in how, on what terms, to what extent, and with what implications (for morality, affect, politics, form) it admitted them into a given field of representation. Where are the borders drawn, how are principles of inclusion and exclusion defined, how does all that is going unacknowledged get acknowledged, and how does acknowledgment itself sometimes function as a dodge? Organizing the discussion of Victorian and modernist texts in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 is the question of “realism,” but only if that term is understood in a capacious and somewhat unorthodox sense. That is, I discuss those supreme monuments of realistic fiction, George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, and the ways they give vivid expression to the operations of disavowal. But I also consider novels like The Time Machine, Heart of Darkness, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and To the Lighthouse, among others, not to convince you that these should all be reclassified as “realist” but to show how they all stage, in various ways, through various literary modes and formal devices, a cognitive and affective clash between the ordinary world that is the province of realist representation and the more disorienting and destabilizing evolutionary “realities” described by Darwinian science. What unites this array of texts is a common interest in the construction and reconstruction of, the departure from and the return to, the ordinary, human-scaled, “real” world. Chapters 3 and 4 are further organized around the question of voice: the former focusing on the question of self-consciousness in first-person narration and how the felt experience of inner autonomy and personal significance sits uneasily with a conceptual understanding of the profound cosmic decentering of both individual and species entailed by Darwin’s theory. This contradiction is further complicated by the fact that the capacity for self-conscious reflection was frequently claimed as the final line of demarcation between fully human and other, non- or only partly human, existences. This could take the form either of a tautology—we know we’re different because we know we’re different—or a paradox—we know we’re different because we know we’re not different. Disavowal was thus often encoded in the very formal structure of first-person texts, dwelling in an experience of distinction they also know is illusory.
Chapter 4 pivots from first to third person to consider the “dual voice” of free indirect discourse and the way the merger of the “omniscient” narrator with the limited, self-dealing, but also always potentially self-aware perspective of a given character, creates a necessarily indeterminate zone of knowing and unknowing, making this technique uniquely suited to expressing the divided state of mind known as denial. Beginning with a discussion of free indirect discourse in a number of nineteenth-century writers, the chapter then turns its attention to Eliot’s Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda and the way those novels use it to both voice and muffle the destabilizing implications of Darwinian science. Chapter 5 focuses on Virginia Woolf and her masterful exposure of Victorian denialism in To the Lighthouse. I consider how her novel registers the allures of the organizing consolations of bourgeois life while dramatically, breathtakingly, extending the field of representation to admit the inhuman scales and realities that constantly press in upon the awareness of her characters and the stories they tell themselves. Woolf draws upon her lifelong interest in Darwin, and her preoccupation with the culture of denial bequeathed by her Victorian predecessors, to directly connect the evasion of natural realities to the forms of willful blindness that resulted in the Great War. By making vivid the relationship between widespread denialism and an otherwise avoidable, human-made, global catastrophe, Woolf’s novel looks both forward and back, anatomizing the Victorian past while imagining the ways it continues to inflict itself upon the environments of the future. The book ends with a brief(ish) concluding section that features a surprise guest whose books helped establish much of the conceptual groundwork for this one. The Conclusion considers the persistence, in contemporary works of fiction, of the questions I track through the nineteenth century, including how the formal and aesthetic resources of the novel continue to be employed to express the unresolved fissures in the secular liberal imagination of Darwin and the implications for environmental thinking. The challenge Darwinian theory poses to human stories, the human image, the construction of “everyday” reality can be said to contranymically “cleave” all of the texts I discuss, creating splits and fractures that also attach and bind. Disavowal, as we’ll see, is form making and form breaking at once.
“How do we hold the two together?” Chakrabarty asks. It’s a question Darwin and his fellow scientists ask about the conflicting images of the human coming into being in the wake of his theory. It’s a version of the question George Eliot asks about the place of science in the liberal imaginary, how Darwin’s work could at once open up new possibilities for humanist reimaginings of social organization while also threatening to destroy the very boundaries and structuring assumptions needed for that reimagination to occur. It’s a version of the question Woolf poses to her readers when she insists upon the absolute significance of the daily life of the Ramsay family and its sphere of human meaning and its absolute insignificance against the backdrop of the ocean, the elements, the catastrophic convulsions of natural and human history. This book is all about the ways this question gets asked—the forms it takes, the terms in which it is put, the pressures it exerts on perspective, structure, and voice—as well as the many ways it gets answered and evaded, approached and dodged, in the never-ending story of the nineteenth century.
1. Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 176.
2. Darwin, The Origin of Species, 65.
3. Although psychoanalysis is still some decades away, these terms—“deny” and “admit”—have already begun to accrue something of their more psychologically fraught meaning. As Catherine Hall and Daniel Pick argue, this shift can be traced back as far as the eighteenth century: “Denial, even in the specific sense of the quelling of an internal conflict, is not some exclusively modern concept, nor the preserve, alone, of Freud and his followers. Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755 glossed denial to mean negation, refusal, or even abjuration; the latter defined as the contrary of an acknowledgment of adherence. Johnson also included an entry for the term ‘denier,’ meaning a contradictor, an opponent, one that holds to the negation of a proposition, but also potentially a ‘disowner,’ ‘one that does not own’ or acknowledge, or even a ‘refuser,’ ‘one that refuses.’” “Thinking about Denial,” 9.
4. Norgaard, Living in Denial, 5.
5. Cohen, States of Denial, 8.
6. Mannoni, “I Know Very Well,” 68.
7. As Klein puts it, “We focus too much on climate deniers and not enough on the more widespread ‘soft denial.’ How is it possible to know about this crisis, then forget? What is all this aversion about—how can we know something so profoundly disturbing and then behave as if it isn’t happening?” MacDonald, “Naomi Klein on Climate Change.”
8. Latour, Facing Gaia, 9.
9. Dillard, 64.
10. Sedgwick, The Weather in Proust, 212, 208.
11. Sedgwick, 210.
12. Sedgwick, 212.
13. Sedgwick, 209.
14. Dickinson, “The People Paradox.”
15. Becker, Escape from Evil, 85.
16. Tuan, Escapism, xiii.
17. Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 97.
18. Tuan, xvi.
19. Latour, “Will Non-humans Be Saved?,” 468.
20. Gould, Full House, 19.
21. Gould, 29.
22. Gould, Ever Since Darwin, 37–38.
23. As the semiotician Paul Bouissac argues, this would include the human relationship to non-human animals. In his critical review of the edited collection What Is an Animal? he takes issue with the category “animal” as it is commonly used in philosophy and anthropology, arguing along lines very similar to Gould’s: “Even if their authors pay lip service to evolutionary theory (e.g., Clark) or state their disagreement with Descartes’ extreme position (e.g., Midgley), they all appear to be concerned primarily with the defense and illustration of man’s uniqueness in the universe. This assumption is so much an integral part of the current Western world-view and system of values that the mere uttering of the question ‘What is an animal?’ can only emanate from this world-view (which holds that there is such a cognitive category) and at the same time cause a deep anxiety, since the question implies that one might overlook or even ignore the dividing line which negatively defines humans. Darwin’s theory and its subsequent developments are still scandalous for a culture still firmly established upon markedly different principles.” “What Is a Human?,” 505.
24. Gould, Full House, 19.
25. Wilson, On Human Nature, 209.
26. C. Taylor, The Sources of Self, 406.
27. Wilson, 201.
28. Seen in this light, Wilson is not exactly being inconsistent in his picture of human nature, since his view of biological reductionism and his argument for attending to the affective “needs” of people are, on some level, describing different aspects or spheres of the human experience, one of which is founded on necessary illusion. There is an implicit divide between a strictly scientific view of Homo sapiens and a social or political imaginary that, he thinks, depends upon “mythology” and the production of “blind hope” and puts the idea of the human to purposes other than accurately describing the organism in material terms. And yet, we can also see how entirely unstable this situation is, since it is itself a fantasy to believe the scientific can be cordoned off from the social or the political.
29. C. Taylor, 416–17.
30. Wilson, 207.
31. See MacDuffie, Victorian Literature, especially 43–49.
32. Leaving aside the (newly reopened) question of whether Wilson’s evolutionary ideas were structured by white supremacist ideology, it is beyond dispute that they have been eagerly taken up by various racist and eugenicist causes, and there are at least some clear genealogical links between modern sociobiology and what once was known as Social Darwinism. For a discussion of these links, see Mary Midgley’s “Selfish Genes and Social Darwinism” and Janna Thompson’s “The New Social Darwinism.”
33. Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being,” 260.
34. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 219.
35. Karera, “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics,” 32.
36. Karera, 50.
37. Wilson, The Future of Life, 79.
38. Chakrabarty, 215.
39. Wilson, “Foreword” to Sachs, Common Wealth, xii. Quoted in Chakrabarty, 215.
40. Chakrabarty calls Wilson’s solution “quasi-Hegelian” in its emphasis on the process of coming to self-knowledge (215). As we’ll see, the valorization of self-consciousness was a key hinge in the disavowal of the ecological implications of Darwin’s work.
41. Carson, Lost Woods, 245.
42. Carson, 210.
43. Indeed, George Levine’s Darwin and the Novelists and Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots, both published in the 1980s, are as canonical as canonical gets in the field of Victorian studies, and books in the last twenty or so years by Cannon Schmitt, Gowan Dawson, and Devin Griffiths have all brilliantly followed Beer and Levine in exploring the manifold connections between evolutionary biology and literature in the long nineteenth century and beyond.
44. Morton, The Ecological Thought, 18.
45. Grosz, Becoming Undone, 13.
46. Griffiths, “The Ecology of Form,” 72–73.
47. The “animal turn” often features Derrida and his late work The Animal That Therefore I Am rather than Darwin, although Colin Nazhone Millburn and Philip Barrish both make the case for Darwin as an unacknowledged forerunner of deconstructive thought. As Barrish puts it, “Darwin’s account of the origin of organic species prefigures a wide range of theoretical models that have recently become influential in the reading of literature.” “Accumulating Variation,” 431.
48. Duncan, Human Forms, 14–15.
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