Subversive Seduction: Darwin, Sexual Selection, and the Spanish Novel

Abstract

Travis Landry , Subversive Seduction: Darwin, Sexual Selection, and the Spanish Novel. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 2012. 327 pp. ISBN 978-1-935709-10-7.In this volume, Landry attempts to reconcile Darwinian biology with postmodernism, science with literature, and female choice with patriarchal oppression, to name but a few of the issues he wrestles with in this important and innovative work. In order to explain why I think Landry's contribution is both important and innovative, I need to supply a bit of context for those not familiar with the issues surrounding Darwinian literary criticism.In 1859 Darwin published On the Origin of Species (1859) and in so doing introduced a biological basis for human behaviour. Herbert Spencer soon morphed biological Darwinism into Social Darwinism by positing a scale of evolution among humans which ran from 'primitive' peoples to white Europeans. Darwin's half cousin Francis Galton followed up by suggesting we improve the human species through selective breeding and culling. He called this programme 'eugenics', and when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany his government announced a massive programme to sterilize eugenic 'undesirables'. The upshot of this was that biological explanations of human behaviour were effectively ruled offlimits, a new explanation for all things human was needed, and Franz Boas supplied it with the idea of cultural relativism, in which all social phenomena could be explained by social facts alone: Omnia cultura ex cultura.Shortly thereafter one of Boas's students, Edward Sapir, would argue for linguistic determinism, and Claude Levi-Strauss's would follow on, contending that human relationships were coded like a linguistic system, and everyone acquired meaning through their relations to everyone else within the system. Thus human relationships became a self-enclosed, textual, system, Nietzsche and Jameson's 'prison house of language'. Following Wittgenstein's 'The limits of my language are the limits of my world', later French thinkers such as Jacques Derrida would take all this a step further and insist 'No escape from language is possible', 'Text is self-referential', and 'There is nothing outside the text'. That is, they would argue that both language and culture are self-contained systems, either semiotic or ideological or both, constructed by their own internal principles. They do not refer to the world but rather construct it from their internal rules and relationships. Society and culture become semiotic constructions free of real world 'foundations', or objective truths.The net effect of decoupling language from reality, and society from nature, has been a decades-long process of denaturalization. Gender roles, sexual orientations, social norms, and so on became historicized, that is, the products of specific historical and social forces. The discourses of dominant groups such as white European men are 'situated' in their privileged positions, and the supposedly objective foundations of their knowledge turn out to be simply subjective desires camouflaged as universal truths. By denaturalizing the myths of power, cultural relativism has sought to liberate the victims of these oppressive discourses and create a new, carefully and justly constructed world. This is the position Landry seeks to defend and he appeals to such authorities as Bataille, Derrida, Delueze and Guattari, Foucault, Freud, Lacan, Jameson and Levi-Strauss to do so.His challenge is reconciling postmodern social constructivism with biology. Sexual selection is innate, universal, and inescapably ties society to human nature, a product of genetic evolution. How, then, does Landry reconcile these apparent opposites? Well, first of all, he does not take on current evolutionary biology, but rather Darwin's theories as posited in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). An essential element of Darwin's theory of sexual selection is female choice, and Landry plays this idea offagainst a patriarchal society's denial of women's rights. …