Beginning Again: Darwin’s Caterpillar from George Eliot to Beckett

The chapter examines one particularly evident case of literature borrowing from biology: the case of what Samuel Beckett calls “Darwin’s caterpillar.” This caterpillar, described in The Origin of Species, exemplifies a kind of repetition compulsion which prevents it from completing the stages of its metamorphosis into a moth. I trace the increasingly innovative ways in which novelists incorporated the repetitions of Darwin’s caterpillar into their novels. I briefly chart the caterpillar’s role in the narrative dynamics of fiction by George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, Samuel Butler, and Henry Green, before devoting the bulk of the chapter to its function in Molloy, Malone, The Unnamable, and How It Is, where it evidences the continuing relevance of development in Beckett’s fiction.

Mendelian Inheritance, ‘Eternal Differences’ and Entropy in Howards End

This chapter reads Howards End as a Bildungsroman whose developmental trajectory straddles two generations (those of parents and offspring) instead of being limited to the growth and acculturation of a single protagonist. This unusual take on the genre follows from Forster’s underappreciated interest in Mendel’s genetic theories, which enable him to re-imagine atavistic throwbacks as necessary deviations from the entropic path of linear progress. The chapter rehabilitates Forster’s interest in contemporary biology by harmonizing his recurrent use of procreation and genealogy with his queer poetics. Building on the significant revisionist interpretations of Forster by queer theorists such as Robert Martin, Scott Nelson, and James Miracky, the chapter redresses the intuitive conclusion that Forster’s fiction favors culture and elective affinities over biology and filiation; instead it suggests that it exploits new science in order to re-imagine how genealogy might participate in a queer, modernist vision of personal relations.

Introduction

The introduction outlines historical and formal links between Bildung, biology, and the narrative strategies used by modernist novelists. The classical Bildungsroman, with its insistent linearity, originated from the same organicist aesthetics and ideology as one of the nineteenth-century’s most pervasive biological narratives: recapitulation, in which individual development (ontogeny) repeats species evolution (phylogeny) in miniature. By the early twentieth century, however, this linear biological paradigm was giving way to a more complex set of nonlinear developmental models, which served as inspiration or even templates for the formal experiments of several prominent novelists seeking to rehabilitate the ideals associated with the Bildungsroman. Linking the various new models is the concept of reversion, a developmental disruption of simple chronology that would seem, from the perspective of recapitulation theory, to be regressive or otherwise pathological. Each of the novels featured in the book incorporates some form of biologically derived reversion into its narrative structure, allowing it to retain Bildung’s spiritual and aesthetic ideals while challenging the reductionism and sinister political implications of recapitulation theory.

Bildung, Biology and the Narrative Structure of Development

The first chapter elaborates on the Introduction’s claim that the coming-of-age plot and the scientific model of recapitulation share basic structural features, drawing on the history and philosophy of Bildung in its artistic, scientific, and political forms, as well as on narrative models developed by Mikhail Bakhtin, Peter Brooks and Judith Roof. In addition, the chapter explains the mechanics of recapitulation theory and the models that replaced it between 1890 and 1940, notably those of Mendelian genetics and experimental embryology. It finally outlines how various scientific concepts relate to one another, and how they pertain to the literary works considered in subsequent chapters.

Conclusion

The brief conclusion charts some of the ways in which fiction continues to engage with contemporary biology after 1960—as Simon Mawer’s Mendel’s Dwarf and Ali Smith’s How to be both do with molecular genetics, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go with cloning, and Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed and Ian McEwan’s Nutshell with evolutionary genetics. Linking modernist to contemporary Bildungsromane, I propose that using biological models to dissociate development from chronology is not only a narratological practice but also an ethical and political one. Investigating how biology participated in the modernist search for an expanded understanding of development, Modernist Life Histories positions itself within a multidisciplinary attempt to negotiate the condition of “alternative” or “multiple modernities.”

Anachrony, Neoteny and the ‘Education of an Amphibian’ in Eyeless in Gaza

This chapter examines the only Bildungsroman written by Aldous Huxley, one of foremost modernist advocates of Bildung, and one of its most intimately linked with contemporary biology. Reviewers and critics have long struggled to make sense of the disorienting and seemingly unmotivated use of anachrony in Eyeless in Gaza, which I attribute to Huxley’s careful study of biological studies by his brother Julian (among others) on the embryology, endocrinology, and evolutionary biology of frogs and salamanders. Central to Huxley’s search for full, harmonious development is the phenomenon of neoteny (the retention of juvenile characteristics into sexual maturity); once interpreted as a pathological failure of development, neoteny was by the 1920s heralded as the biological key to human evolutionary and social success.

‘Tampering with the Expected Sequence’: Heterochrony and Sex Change in Orlando

This chapter reads the fantastical sex-change and longevity in Woolf’s Orlando in relation to contemporary experiments on the genetic and developmental determination of sex, notably the concept of heterochrony. The chapter argues that Orlando’s transformation from man to woman should be read literally, as a metamorphic change in the protagonist’s body; the embodied nature and the specific manifestations of the metamorphosis are designed to counter the recapitulatory plot that inheres in sexological discourses of the day. The corporeality of the Orlando’s development is rarely acknowledged in queer and feminist studies, which tend to emphasise gender and performance at the expense of sex and embodiment. By linking Woolf’s novel to contemporary biology, I complicate this common view and provide a positive alternative to the correlative argument that Orlando’s sex change amounts to a mere wish-fulfillment fantasy.

A Portrait of the Artist as a ‘Biologist in Words’: Language, Epiphany and Atavistic Bildung

This chapter explores how James Joyce’s Bildungsroman disrupts the recapitulatory plot by fusing the ostensibly primitive body to the ostensibly advanced linguistic faculties of its budding poet-protagonist, Stephen Dedalus. This fusion results in repeated reversionary digressions from the progressive movement toward artistic self-realization: the very words that Stephen seeks for his art bring him instead into the realm of the sexual and procreative body. These atavistic reversions allow Joyce’s to ironize and supply an alternative to his protagonist’s desire to separate the body from aesthetic experience and artistic maturity.