An Evolutionary And Ecocritical Interpretation

Darwin, Wells, and Herzog. An Evolutionary and Ecocritical Interpretation

Darwin’s cultural revolution
The relevance of evolutionism in the most diverse branches of knowledge is widely known, and still spurs heated debates. Darwin still exerts his influence not only among scientists for the biological consequences of his theories, but above all for the havoc that these theories have triggeredin Western civilization. In ecocritical studies, human culture is seen as part of the evolution process, too. The German scholar Hubert Zapf suggests that “imaginative literature, in comparison with other textual genres and types of discourse, can be described in its functional profile in such a way that it acts like an ecological principal or an ecological energy within the larger systemdiscourses” (Zapf 55). Zapf proposes his triadic functional model through which literature “appears both as a sensorium for the deficits and imbalances of the larger culture, and the site of a constant renewal of cultural creativity” (Zapf 49). The first function is the cultural-critical metadiscourse, that is the representation of those “typical deficits […] within dominant systems of civilizatorypower” that frustrate “fundamental communicational and ‘biophilic’ needs of human beings” (Zapf 62). The second function is the imaginative counterdiscourse, through which literature foregrounds the culturally excluded, and charges it with special aesthetic energy (Zapf 63). The third function of literature as cultural ecology is the reintegrative interdiscourse, “through which literature contributes tothe constant renewal of the culturally center from its margins […], by the very act of reconnecting the culturally separated” (Zapf 64). Zapf argues that literature displays its generative and innovational power, keeping alive “its productivity by relating […] the cultural memory to the biophilic memory of the human species” (Zapf 67).
Therefore, literature serves as an adaptive strategy in therelation between the human species, its culture and the environment. Mary Midgley adds that even scientific writing itself has a symbolic force, and this is particularly true in the case of the theory of evolution, which is also “a powerful folk-tale about human origins” (Midgley 239), “the creation myth of our age” (Midgley 246). While scientists usually complain about the “webs of symbolism” onhuman origins, and call “for a sanitary cordon to keep them away from science” (Midgley 239), Midgley critiques this conception of science as an ‘omnicompetent’ and objective religion. In fact, she states that scientific theories are always influenced by the scientists’ world-pictures: “It seems to be assumed that […] Science is something so pure and impersonal that it ought to be thought of incomplete abstraction from all the motives that might lead to practice it. This, unfortunately, cannot work because of the importance of world-pictures” (Midgley 240). Darwin’s humanistic education played a significant role both in the long process that led to his theories on evolution and in the language of his books. His readings of Paley’s theological textbook The Evidence of Christianity and ofMilton’s Paradise Lost were neither a waste of time nor a distortion of his scientific project. In fact, “[h]e was seriously working his way through a range of life-positions which lay on the route to the one he could finally use” (Midgley 242). He was a man of his moment, with some of the prejudices of a British bourgeois of the XIX century and George Levine argues that he was not free of blame forsome of the later uses of his theories, like capitalism and eugenetics. “The historical Darwin is quite another man from the more purified, almost hagiographically treated genius whose theories are seen as growing only from the internal logic of his discipline” (Levine 46), he was immersed in the myths of his time, and his theories would have been noticeably different otherwise. However, his...