In response to William Deresiewicz's dire prognosis in The Nation for criticism's future in the academy—'the number of students studying English literature appears to be in a steep, prolonged and apparently irreversible decline'—Jonathan Gottschall has offered what we might call a more 'diagnostic' response in the Boston Globe. In what is by now a familiar refrain, Gottschall claims to have found criticism's salvation in 'the sciences,' and, specifically, as he later elaborates, in the fertile scene of geneticism.
'Literary studies should become more like the sciences. Literature professors should apply science's research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof. Instead of philosophical despair about the possibility of knowledge, they should embrace science's spirit of intellectual optimism.'
The precise solution Gottschall offers has been oft-repeated: Literary theory, to survive in an age where students are evidently turning in increasing numbers away from the humanities, must accept the methodology of the 'sciences' and, specifically, operate upon the exciting and fertile predications of evolutionary biology. In the latter, it is claimed, lie the answers to Theory's originary preoccupations with signification and universality: For every human behavior is physically instantiated by a genetic 'site,' and signification is a universal process coextensive with the 'nature' of the mind. Hence Gottschall claims that the purported 'blank slate' theory of mind upon which Theory is predicated is done away with by the discovery that the tropics of sexism are not particular to 'Western culture.' Rather, the manner in which women's bodies are understood is a universal movement and is located, then, on one level, in culture, but in the final instance on a more or less unchanging 'nature.'
Evolutionism has simply replaced the base with 'nature.' The same troubles with economism, then, are apposite, but perhaps more radically in this case: 'Nature' can only be contemplated within brackets, despite the ambition on the part of the category's proponents to naturalize the concept, as it were...to place it simultaneously outside of signification and yet fix it within a system of nameability. Are we to ignore the fashion in which the limits between 'nature' and non-'nature' have hardly remained fixed since the seventeenth century? Are we to overlook 'nature's' always shifting political significance?
The final irony is that geneticism is itself the scene most wanting in terms of skepticism, restraint, and an awareness of meaning's production. Geneticism and its proponents operate on a sleight-of-hand in which cultural practice is deployed to schematize human behavior, in a movement that claims to be at one with the 'nature' to which it appeals, but which finally is always caught within culture. It can't get past language. It can't get past the abuse of metonymy necessitated by the locating of behavior in 'genetic material'—when precisely the behavior which evolutionary biologists attempt to explain is a culturally specific category in the first instance. Nor can they get past the throbbing and obfuscating will to knowledge—whether manifested in the search for an originary, non-figurative point of genesis for all manner of human activity and its correlates, from moral aptitude to cigarette smoking to masculinity—that inheres in the always also retroactive discovery of a 'genetic' location to explain those precise cultural practices (out of which appeals to nature necessarily emanate, at once at present and in history).
Gottschall offers another appalling preview of 'science's' power of incision in criticism's endeavors. He asks readers to 'consider this shibboleth of modern literary theory: the author is dead,' which he proceeds to incorrectly translate as meaning 'that authors have no power over their readers' and to incorrectly read as suggesting 'there can be no shared understanding of what literary works mean.' He then excitedly announces that the author's figured 'death' is 'also testable'!
'Hijacking methods from psychology, Joseph Carroll, John Johnson, Dan Kruger, and I surveyed the emotional and analytic responses of 500 literary scholars and avid readers to characters from scores of 19th-century British novels. We wanted to determine how different their reading experiences truly were. Did reactions to characters vary profoundly from reader to reader? As we write in "Graphing Jane Austen," a book undergoing peer review, there were variations in what our readers thought and felt about literary characters, but it was expertly contained by the authors within narrow ranges. Our conclusion: rumors of the author's demise have been greatly exaggerated.'
We can only hope that the next time Gottschall and colleagues subject an independent variable to the rigors of 'science' that they would, at the very least, correctly define the 'dependent variables.' The figure of the author's 'demise' suggests neither the impossibility of 'shared understanding' nor the author's lack of 'control' over the reader: Rather, the figure draws from a contemporaneous renewed interest in psychoanalysis to suggest intentional multiplicity. Reader-side, meanwhile, it is rather odd to infer the irrelevance of universality from the author's figured death. After all, Barthes was himself among the most ambitious in making efforts to schematize the structures of narrativity and the processes of semiosis. The findings of Gottschall and colleagues then do not even speak to the author's 'death,' but rather belong firmly within the history and possibilities of structuralism.
The academic bookstore: Never to buy—online and used is of course the way to go—but for wandering and wallowing when in need of bibliographic inspiration and a setting less grave but nearly as abundant as the stacks. Unfortunately, these oases must be shared with the people who actually run the places—invariably insane seventh-year graduate students who might pen something like this. The worst offender would have to be Columbia's Book Culture (formerly Labyrinth), where the sneer I received several years ago when buying Writing and Difference from the clerk has left a remarkably vivid psychic etch. True, blank stares from the clerks at popular bookstores are infuriating: I'll admit to a bit of blood boiling when, in Mumbai, I was trying vainly to locate a copy of Écrits, but before I could utter past the 'La' the request had been eagerly filled in by the clerk as '...nce Armstrong!' But at what price must we suffer those who commit what is, of course, the worst sin of all—seriousness?
