The Story of the Evolution...
...Of the Tomato?

"'...it's a student thing....our shorthand for when we say, like, Professor Simeon's class is 'the tomato's nature versus the tomato's nurture', and Jane Colman's class is 'To properly understand the tomato you must first uncover the tomato's suppressed Herstory'--she's such a silly bitch that woman --and Professor Gilman's class is 'The tomato is structure like an aubergine', and Professor Kellas's class is basically 'There is not way of proving the existence of the tomato without making reference to the tomato itself', and Erkine Jegede's class is 'The post-colonial tomato as eaten by Naipaul'....But your class...is all about never ever saying I like the tomato. That's why so few people take it....they can't handle the rigour of never saying I like the tomato. Because...the tomato's not there to be liked....you're always saying...What's so beautiful about this tomato? Who decided on its worth?" (Victoria to Howard, in On Beauty, p. 312)

From Ahab's Wife (The Story of Evolution, Take One) Ahab: "There is a tragicalness in being human." Una's inner reply: "Yes--but that is only one way. There are many ways. We choose."

From Middlesex (The Story of Evolution, Take Two) Milton came face-to-face with the essence of tragedy, which is something determined before you're born, something you can't escape or do anything about, no matter how hard you try....But...there was a comic aspect to events that day, too....even a brand of harsh satire...because it typified the American belief that everything can be solved....All this comedy, however, is retrospective.

From Nice Cufflinks

From Zadie Smith's essay on Forster (The Story of Evolution, Take Three) "There is no bigger crime in the English comic novel than thinking you are right...a lesson that must also apply to the comic novelist."

Have we been reading tragedies or comedies this semester?

Is Smith's story tragic or comic?
How about Mayr's? Dennett's? Foster's?

What's the difference between tragedy and comedy?
What is the relation of each to truth?

Some working definitions:

• "In Wood Allen's 'Crimes and Misdemeanors,' a character...described [comedy] pompously and mathematically as 'tragedy plus time'...Schopenhauer believes it was based on a false syllogism [deduction], and other philosophers said it revolved around a hidden misunderstanding. (Lone Ranger: 'Looks like we're surrounded by Indians, Tonto.' Tonto: 'What's all this "we" stuff, kemo sabe?')" (Randy Kennedy, Hey, That's (Not) Funny, NYTimes, 4/15/07)
  
  
• a sense of distance--the ability to step outside of one's senses/one's self/one's world, and see it from a longer view....enables one to recognize the human tragedy--and its smallness; to laugh at it as human comedy, and to imagine counterfactual alternatives to what is (Re-Thinking "Being" in the Promised Land--With the Help of Some Humor )
  
  
• attending more to the "never entirely calculable interior" of the self may open the possibility for comedy, for an alternative to what is or has been (Where We End: An Exploration of a New Form of Reading and Writing)
  
  
• tragedy portrays the inevitability of a disappointing end, while
  comedy (=humor=play) holds out the hopefulness of an alternative.

Smith explores alternatives (as Howard reflects): "two old frends...on the last lap of their lives..were switching lanes out of fear, just to see if it felt different, better, easier, to run in this new lane--scared as they were of carrying on for ever in the lane they were in. But [for] this girl...the future still seemed unbounded: a pleasure palace of choices, with infinite doors, in which only a fool would spend his time trapped in one room" (On Beauty, p. 335) But (tragically?), Smith really doesn't think--or show--that they exist: "The Victoria incident was so happily concluded in his mind that it was a mental stretch to remember that this did not mean the incident was not a real thing in the world, capable of discovery." (On Beauty, p. 432)

One of the aims of this course
(including its challenge to "reality")
has been to give you some distance--
and some alternatives.**

These are both comic gestures:

In The Evolution of the Story of Story Telling:

• Evolution is a process of discovery of what living organisms work
  
  
• Science is a process of discovery of how to make sense of things
  
  
• Literature is a process of discovery of possible stories,
  usefully thought of in terms of evolution -> open-ended transactional inquiry
  
  
• Both science and evolution need to pay more attention to story telling and story sharing
  as a central element of their contemporary and future development.

What might this transaction look like?

What might it look like figuratively?

Ouroburous, the snake that eats its own tail

Theorizing Interdisciplinarity

What it might look like in literature:

• Howards End a groping toward connection of unconscious (non-narrative) and conscious (narrative)
  
  
• On Beauty a descendent with variation of Howards End:
  a reaction, emphasizing the unconscious, trying to make it conscious/narrative
  
  
• A better (more generative?) story: repeatedly interconnecting
  the unconscious non-narrative and the conscious narrative
  (Paul, what do you mean? giving more attention to the unconscious?)
  
  
• I think that's what poetry does:
  Philip Levine, "M. Degas Teaches Art & Science at Durfee Intermediate School" (Detroit, 1942)

But what about science? Where, and how, in science, is the unconscious at play? Where's the humor? Who's got the tomato?

** What we've been up to is very different than the current work of "literary darwinists," who argue that "human beings...are biological critters, products of evolution by natural selection....we unconsciously behave in ways designed to enhance our success.... These behaviors are the stubborn, indelible core of human nature...people...share a universal, evolved human nature...If there is a single take-home lesson to be derived from the progress of biological science...it is continuity" (Barash and Barash, Madame Bovary's Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature, 2005). Such scholars see evolution as promising "universal explanations" by the use of a single "explanatory tool," "providing literary criticism with the 'foundational principles' for analysis it lacks." But from our perspective, the shared study of evolution and literature is productive, not because it encourages explorers in both areas to focus on "foundational principles" and "universal explanations," but rather because it serves to highlight the underlying processes of diversity generation and selection. The resulting fertility and richness fuels the unpredictable and productive evolution of both biological and literary forms. (Dalke & Grobstein, Against "Human Nature": An Exploration of the Evolution of Stories. Mss. in preparation, 2007)