Afterword

The afterword evaluates the potential ranges of the methodology for reading comparative modernism proposed in The Evolutions of Modernist Epic. Many more epic works than those discussed in detail could be analyzed in relation to the eclipse of Darwinism in the early twentieth century. These include, for instance, Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In addition, there are a number of benefits promised by a thorough understanding of biocentric modernism. Hitherto, however, little attention has been paid to the eclipse and its impact on modernism. One reason for this is that for many years the eclipse was regarded as a scientific mistake. The afterword describes how scholars of evolution, including Lynn Margulis, Elizabeth Grosz, and others, have come to reconsider its place in relation to Neo-Darwinism. It is within this larger reconsideration that it is worthwile returning to modernist epic as a source for radical thinking about human and literary evolution.

Comparing Tales of the Tribe

This chapter compares two texts written in the same year, 1928, in very different geographical settings: Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Both works narrate, in peculiar allegorical form, the history of their nations embodied in one unusual hero. Macunaíma tells the story of Brazil’s modernization; Orlando begins in Elizabethan England and works its way up to the moment of composition. Although each is deeply idiosyncratic, they arrive at a similar set of conceits for national representation. Orlando famously changes sex halfway through Woolf’s narrative, while Macunaíma changes race, from black to white. To make sense of the contiguities between Macunaíma and Orlando, the chapter reads both as epics responding to the changing discourse of large-scale social Darwinism in the 1920s. In particular, it points out that both authors were aware of fascism’s increasingly rigid interpretations of evolution’s significance. Drawing out the similarities between Andrade and Woolf’s narratives, the chapter explains how Macunaíma and Orlando exemplify and expand this book’s methodology for reading modernist epic fiction comparatively against changing perceptions of evolution. It shows how such a bifocal reading allows us to see connections across traditional disciplinary borders of high and low, center and periphery, European and post-colonial.

Joyce’s Atavism and the New Ireland

Atavism plays a central role in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Describing the return of an earlier evolutionary state in the present, atavism, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was loosely associated both with the epic genre (itself a kind of fossil) and with supposedly less-developed nations. This chapter argues that Joyce shaped Ulysses as a response to both associations. Joyce rejected the idea that literature evolves or improves through history. He also recognized that Ireland lost out when seen through the hierarchies of social Darwinism. In order to counter both, he presented Ireland’s modernity in terms of Homer’s Odyssey. Bringing back the deep past as radically contemporary, Joyce’s fiction questions our assumptions about the archaic and primitive as well as the progressive nature of national and literary history. In Ulysses, scientific ideas of biological and literary evolution are subordinated into Joyce’s own idiosyncratic vitalism to produce a new and quite queer national vision. In a series of detailed readings of various episodes, including “Oxen of the Sun,” “Cyclops,” and “Proteus,” the chapter establishes the logic of Joyce’s imagined lifeword. It then suggests how Joyce’s work on atavism reveals a larger trend in modernist epic fiction, opening up to this book’s rereading of the genre more generally.

Introduction

Epic and evolution have a complex relationship. For some thinkers they have nothing in common—belonging to separate spheres. For some sociobiologists, on the other hand, they have everything to do with each other. The Evolutions of Modernist Epic describes how the two were coordinated in a number of modernist national narratives. It argues that global modernism is better understood through this encounter than through more conventional economic, political, or ecological readings. The introduction lays out the theoretical grounds for this reading. It tells how epic came to contest social Darwinist narrations of national progress at the beginning of the twentieth century. It explains the ways in which experimental narrative participated in the so-called eclipse of Darwinism. And it makes the case for epic’s continued vitality in late modernity, describing its creative nationalisms, as well as its uses of queer forms of sexuality.

Survival of the Unfittest on the Eastern Front

In 1911, F. T. Marinetti imagined war as “the only hygiene of the world.” Such social Darwinist visions are contested by modernism’s antimilitarist fictions. Focusing on Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (1921–23), this chapter explores the dynamics of this contestation and its ramifications for understanding modernist epic. The eponymous protagonist of Hašek’s fiction, Švejk, is not a standard hero. Rather, he is imbecilic, alcoholic, lazy, rheumatic, “degenerate,” mongrel-like, and speaks an “impure” colloquial version of the national language. His only positive feature is how, ironically because of his stupidity, Švejk always manages to escape a terrible destiny, delaying his arrival at the Eastern Front. As this chapter describes, the story is a moral of survival of the unfittest, dramatizing how the underdog can succeed in a violent world and how the Czechs emerged from under the Austrian empire. Analyzing this alter-Darwinian nation-building, the chapter places Hašek’s work into relation with the larger genre of modernist epic. It shows that although Hašek was not invested in any modernist movement, and did not read Joyce or Stein, his text was nevertheless shaped in relation to the same underlying historical forces. It reveals, consequently, an encompassing narrative of evolutionary thought that different national modernisms can be coordinated against, which also crosses the cultural divide between high and low.

Beginning Again with Modernist Epic

This chapter offers a revisionary account of the emergence of modernist epic through a detailed reading of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans. In the late-nineteenth-century United States, the prevailing paradigm for narrations of national destiny was Darwinian. Mostly written between 1903 and 1911, Stein’s book opens as if it were in agreement with such narrations of the national story. Stein announces it as a developmental narrative of the United States, tracing two families’ progressions and westward movement, from a first generation of immigrants to their children and then grandchildren. The Making of Americans, however, does not fulfil its developmentalist prospects in any straightforward manner. Rather, the book stalls, digresses, and—to use Stein’s words—“begins again and again.” In its second half, the narrative comes to resemble less the work of nineteenth-century historians, and more the extensive later portions of modernist modern epics by Robert Musil, Marcel Proust, or James Joyce. The chapter describes how Stein’s turn to a digressive open-form narrative corresponds to her shifting interests in biological science and experimental writing. Her work, it argues, marks the advent of new kind of modernist epic, motivated by attempts to find a way to represent national life beyond social Darwinism and its heteropatriarchal protocols.