Transcript Darwin and the Narrative of Human Origins

Darwin and the Narrative of
Human Origins
Effect
• Not about direct authorial influence
• But the operation of a radical new narrative of human origins and
story of human development upon cultural consciousness (and
unconsciousness) the evidence of which we can see in a range of
cultural products and by-products of the human imagination in the
late 19th century and early 20th.
• Perhaps the greatest “effect” of Darwin is Modernism itself, the
Great experimental period in western art from 1890-1940.
• Effect, After-effect, Side-effect
Perspective
• Major, seismic shift in perspective
• Exampled in Cézanne, where physical
perspective no longer obtains; upheaval in
the basic principles of the world.
• “Copernican” in scope
Paul Cézanne, Bibemus Quarry,
1895
Gaugin’s Questions
• Where do we come from? What are we?
Where are we going? 1897
Gaugin’s Questions
• Where does humanity come from? What is
humanity? How does humanity proceed?
Where does humanity come from?
• A more remote origin in an expanding
recessive (geological) timeline.
• A look further back to a more anterior
origin.
• The myth of Victorian progress punctuated
as a reverse story of regress.
• A fresh and startling glimpse into the
animal/bestial origins of humanity. We
come from animals.
What is humanity?
• Not advanced but “Primitive,” Savage,
Disgusting; not singled out and superior to
animals but continuous with them.
• Darwin, Descent of Man (1871): “There can
hardly be a doubt that we are descended from
barbarians.”
• Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)
• Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
(1899); animal drives, the irrational
Kurtz
Edvard Munch, Scream (1893)
Pablo Picasso, Les Desmoiselles
d’Avignon (1907)
Man Ray, Noire et Blanche (1926)
What is humanity?
• A function of natural laws, processes,
mechanisms.
• Reduction to physiology and materiality.
• Human consciouness a development of
the function of animals; natural
mechanisms.
• Not the nature of the Romantic English
landscape
Romantic Nature
Victorian Nature
• “nature red in tooth and claw” Tennyson
What is humanity?
• Constant battle for survival; survival
replaces purpose
• Not fully formed by God but cobbled
together by accident
Man (Woman) not fully formed
• Picasso, Head of a Woman (1936)
What is humanity?
• Man/Woman in Process
• Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (1912)
Where are we going?
• A creature looking before and after into an
infinite unfolding of time with an acute sense of
loneliness, alienation: no guide
• Anxiety, ennui, despair, absurdity, accident
• Purposeless proc ess? Loss of human agency?
Waiting?
• “The great revelation had never come. The great
revelation perhaps never did come.” Virginia
Woolf, To the Lighthouse
• Becket, Waiting for Godot