And, have you seen Comeuppance? –Billy

We end the conversation at this venue now, but not without first encouraging everyone to continue in the Facebook group ( http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=52472677549 ).

Each of these simple propositions leaves open multiple possible formulations with different implications. We are at the point now where we all need to be thinking hard about how to bring such formulations within the range of testable propositions.

In synoptic overview, that’s what looks like consensus to me. But I’m sure that if this thread were to go on indefinitely, every item in my own impression of the consensus view would be disputed with energy and conviction. Hence the need for integrating empirical methods to reduce the scope of possible plausible formulation—“narrowing possibility space,” as Jon Gottschall would have it. The literary people need to continue moving in the direction of empirical methodology, and the people with social science backgrounds need to recognize the crucial significance of the imagination and its works. They need to bring this subject area into their active research agenda, not leaving it to the formulations of purely speculative commentary.

The weakest aspect of “biocultural” theory so far has been the “cultural” part. Getting past this limitation is the single most important challenge facing the evolutionary human sciences. Collaboration between people with humanities expertise and people with expertise in scientific methodology will be almost indispensable in taking the next major step toward turning the evolutionary human sciences into a truly comprehensive explanatory framework for all things human.

We have seen a little of that kind of collaboration so far—far too little. The literary people are afraid of scientific methodology, and the scientists are afraid of moving into areas of culture that seem to them nebulous and mysterious. There is a lot of resistance based on prejudice and the comfort of routine practices—with the literary people harboring a distaste for the impersonal and technical character of scientific methods and the scientific people harboring a distaste for the messiness and imprecision of literary thinking.

I understand the resistance—have felt it all myself, from both sides. But we are now at something like a bottleneck, an impasse. Until we break through the routine of our current practices, our habitual attitudes and methods, we aren’t going to get a comprehensive, integrated theory of culture. And until we get that, the evolutionary human sciences are going to be spinning their wheels just below the point at which they can begin to explain specifically human nature, and the humanists are going to be spinning their wheels in endless theoretical discussions, exercising their rhetorical ingenuity but not getting very far with positive results, just as we have been doing here. (I note that this discussion included perhaps just one evolutionary human scientist. That is bad for us, and bad for the evolutionary human science.)

So, the two cultures are still with us. And within at least one of those two cultures, there are subcultures that scarcely speak to one another. Reading over the discussion that followed Katherine Hayles post, I was once again struck, rather depressingly, with the Balkanization of studies in the humanities. The folks in that other discussion speak a different language, with different references and different assumptions. I don’t think there is much hope for “conversion” between these two sects. As with the evolutionary humanists and evolutionary human scientists, everybody is pretty comfortable with their routines. I do think change will come—how swiftly, I can’t predict. And I think it will come by grandfathering or grandmothering out the whole population that relies fundamentally on continental speculative theory divorced in principle from the evolutionary human sciences.

Perhaps I’m being overly optimistic, but I do think, without forcing the issue in my own mind, that truth and reality will ultimately carry the day against entrenched institutional ideologies. The biggest barrier to the development of the humanities in the direction of the evolutionary human sciences is that bright young people are systematically prohibited from taking up this line of research. But a few small chinks have occurred in the armor of resistance and suppression. Purely defensive fortresses can never hold forever against the pressure of sustained friction. Cliffs wear away under the grinding of the waves.

Perhaps optimistically, then, the chief factor that will ultimately determine the future direction of the humanities is the potential for the development of knowledge. Despite routine, fear, prejudice, and entrenched interests, I am myself confident that in that one crucial factor, the “biocultural” approach is the only possible road to the future.

The statement that specific texts are emotionally neutral seems clearly false, and it also seems out of accord with Bob’s subsequent statement. “Beckett chose Schopenhauer because Beckett was Beckett, that intractable individual, and the philosophical ‘story’ of human life most congenial to that particular individual was Schopenhauer.”

Now, If Schopenhauer were neutral, why would he be more “congenial” than anyone else to Beckett? Presumably, Beckett wanted a philosopher who was pessimistic, and Schopenhauer fitted the bill. David Hume, though epistemologically skeptical, was very cheerful, so presumably he would not have been nearly so “congenial” to Beckett.

Offering his own experience as an illustrative case, Bob says, “In my youth, personality dictated that I choose Jack Kerouac over Milton; in my early manhood, it threw over Kerouac for Mann; later it was Beckett that my blind hungry temperament sought. Literature was not “guiding” me; it was simply offering in strong light the behavioral possibilities that I, in my unconscious but temperamentally headstrong way, was stumbling through.”

I don’t think we need quibble over the meaning of the word “guide.” If Bob picked the authors he did because they fulfilled his imaginative needs, helped articulate the vision latent in his “blind” temperament, that’s good enough for me. That’s the kind of thing I have in mind.

When you (following Charles Johnson) assert that human behavior rests upon “the stories that we tell ourselves [about ourselves],” you are getting the (inappropriate) benefit of saying two things at once: (1) our behavior rests upon the stories we, as a species, tell about ourselves as a species; and (2) our behavior rests upon the stories we, as individuals, tell about ourselves as individuals. But (1) does not imply (2). As you point out in your last reply to my last response, literature indulges, even sanctions, behavior much more reprehensible than I myself seemed to imagine (Nabokov, Burgess). In fact, you agree there, as you have agreed elsewhere, that, like human life, literature runs the complete gamut of behavioral possibilities, from those in Sade to those in, say, the New Testament. These are all the stories that the species tells itself, and they’re all fanned out for it, in the mature reader’s imagination, like a large hand of playing cards, murmuring Take and Benefit. They’re all available for the “total vision” of life that “guides” us. This is in fact what I meant in my last response when I said that literature “broadens” the species’ understanding of itself—precisely because it offers a card, as it were, for every behavioral possibility of that species.

But the stories that we as individuals tell ourselves are not synonymous with the ones we tell ourselves as a species. As individuals, WE GUIDE LITERATURE, not the other way around. Let me give you an example: Sam Beckett, being a scholarly type as a youth (and blossoming writer), had a plethora of imaginative possibilities available to him as “guides” in the forms (among other things) of Continental and American philosophy. And yet, as a thinker assembling a “total vision of life” (to be found by his readers in his PROUST and his early stories and [eventually] his novels and plays), he quite young seized upon one philosopher, and one philosopher only, whom he never abandoned: Schopenhauer. Why is that? After all, everyone from John Dewey to (heaven forbid) Ayn Rand (and beyond) was at his disposal. He chose one. Why? Because the “stories we tell ourselves” as a species do not come with differentiated emotional valences: like playing cards, they’re in themselves emotionally neutral. In other words, they offer no inherent reason for our choosing one of them over the other. What differentiates them and gives them emotional weight, one AGAINST the other, is the temperament of the “player.” Beckett chose Schopenhauer because Beckett was Beckett, that intractable individual, and the philosophical “story” of human life most congenial to that particular individual was Schopenhauer. And this is the reason that literature AS A SOURCE OF VARIEGATED NARRATIVES cannot be regarded as “adaptive”: those narratives no more “guide” the individual adaptively toward enhanced survival and reproduction than anything else in that individual’s life—his brute experiences, his reading of the newspaper, his overhearing of chance remarks. To say that literature, in its cornucopia of narratives, guides life is tantamount to saying that life guides life. It’s saying nothing. In the end, we’re back to the mysteries of personality-formation—and the vagaries that the life-history funnels that personality through. In my youth, personality dictated that I choose Jack Kerouac over Milton; in my early manhood, it threw over Kerouac for Mann; later it was Beckett that my blind hungry temperament sought. Literature was not “guiding” me; it was simply offering in strong light the behavioral possibilities that I, in my unconscious but temperamentally headstrong way, was stumbling through.

This, as the late Jacko would say, will be my final curtain-call.

No, this isn’t the special and unique accomplishment of evolutionary criticism. The arguments for adaptive function are of course more substantive than this. And the aims and accomplishments of evolutionary criticism in general extend well beyond arguments about adaptive function.

Here’s a paragraph on the kinds of literary criticism the Darwinists have been practicing:

The Darwinists have been using evolutionary psychology to examine the motivations of characters in novels, plays, and (less frequently) poems, concentrating chiefly on the sexual aspects of reproductive success but taking in also family dynamics, social dynamics, and survival issues such as acquiring resources and avoiding predators. Several studies have located individual works or literary traditions in relation to an evolutionary analysis of specific ecological and cultural environments. Cognitive science has been used to assess form, and basic emotions have been combined with basic motives to analyze tone and genre. Personality psychology has been used to assess individual differences in characters and authors. A few studies have analyzed authorial intent and the emotional responses of readers, considering not just characters and plots but also relations among the differing perspectives of authors, characters, and readers. Most studies so far, though, have been “thematic.” That is, they have focused on the motives of characters and the organization of characters into plots. Reproductive themes include differences between males and females in the criteria for selecting mates, competing male and female reproductive interests, the neurobiology of romantic infatuation and monogamous bonding, sexual jealousy, conflicts between investments in mating and parenting, paternal uncertainty, maternal bonding, attachment theory, the emotional and cognitive development of children, parent-offspring conflict, and dispositions for favoring kin. Basic social dynamics include the tension between dominance and affiliation in the organization of social groups, the interplay between intra-group cohesion and inter-group conflict, reciprocal altruism and the morality of contractual obligation, the evolution of egalitarian behavior, tribal instincts, group-selection, tit for tat, cheater detection, the adaptive function of religion, and gene-culture co-evolution. Ego-psychology and interpersonal relations include Theory of Mind, manipulative deceit, self-delusion, and costly display. In most literary studies drawing on evolutionary ideas, human universals play a large part, since species-typical characteristics imply genetically mediated dispositions constraining cultural formations (hence the inherent conflict with cultural constructivism).

And here is a synoptic description of what a comprehensively adequate Darwinist reading should take into account:

Practitioners of the more sophisticated forms of evolutionary literary criticism recognize that literature does not simply represent typical or average human behavior. Human nature is a set of basic building blocks that combine in different ways in different cultures to produce different kinds of social organization, different belief systems, and different qualities of experience. Moreover, every individual human being (and every artist) constitutes another level of “emergent” complexity, a level at which universal or elemental features of human nature interact with cultural norms and with the conditions of life that vary in some degree for every individual. Individual artists negotiate with cultural traditions, drawing off of them but also working in tension with them. The tension derives from differences in individual identity, the pull of universal forms of human nature, and the capacity for creative innovation in the artist. Individual works of art give voice to universal human experience, to the shared experience of a given cultural community, and to the particular needs of an individual human personality. Literary meaning consists not just in what is represented—characters, setting, and plot—but in how that represented subject is organized and envisioned by the individual human artist. Moreover, literary meaning is a social transaction. Literary meaning is only latent until it is actualized in the minds of readers, who bring their own perspectives to bear on the author’s vision of life. A thorough interpretive effort would subsume represented subjects and formal organization into an overarching concept of literary meaning, and it would expand the concept of meaning to include its transmission and interpretation. Still further, instead of looking only at intentional meanings and the responses of readers, a thorough evolutionary critique would look at the kinds of psychological and cultural work specific literary texts actually accomplish—the functions they fulfill—and it would locate those functions in relation to broader ideas of adaptive function, thus bringing the interpretation of individual works to bear as evidence on the larger, still controverted question of adaptive function.

Here’s a similar description applied to the issue of interpreting a single specific work, Hamlet:

To generate adequate interpretive commentary from an evolutionary perspective, we must construct continuous explanatory sequences linking the highest level of causal explanation—inclusive fitness, the ultimate regulative principle of evolution—to particular features of human nature and to particular structures and effects in specific works of art. It is never enough to say, for instance, that people seek survival, sex, and status, or that artistic works depict people seeking those things. We have to be more specific both about human nature and about the nature of artistic representation. In “human life-history theory,” we now have a set of ideas that link inclusive fitness with a fully articulated model of human nature. Life history theory concerns itself with the distribution of effort across the life cycle of any given species, weighing the different portions of life effort given over to birth, growth, somatic maintenance, mating effort, and parenting effort (Hill; Hill and Kaplan; Kaplan et al.; Low, “The Evolution,” Why Sex Matters; Lummaa; MacDonald, “Life History Theory”). The model of human nature that emerges from human life history has numerous distinctive features: altricial birth, extended childhood, male-female bonding coupled with male coalitions (Flinn, Geary, and Ward), dual parenting, post-menopausal survival, longevity, the development of skills for the extraction of high-quality resources (Kaplan et al.), the growth of the neocortex to enhance powers for suppressing impulses and engaging in long-term planning (Hawkins; MacDonald, “Evolution, Psychology”), the evolution of egalitarian dispositions operating in tension with conserved dispositions for individual dominance (Boehm), the development of symbolic capacities enabling identification with extended social groups (Boyd, On the Origin; Deacon; Dissanayake; Dutton; Richerson and Boyd; D. S. Wilson; Wade), and the power to subordinate, in some degree, all direct impulses of survival and reproduction to the formal dictates of imagined virtual worlds (Baumeister; Carroll, “An Evolutionary Paradigm”; MacDonald, “Evolution, Psychology”; Mithen; E. O. Wilson).

All these features together entail distinct motives, emotions, dimensions of personality, and forms of cognition that have a bearing on literary meaning. To link human nature with literary meaning, we have to recognize that universal, species-typical characteristics form a common framework for understanding. Individual and cultural differences define themselves as variations on the basic, universal patterns of human nature. In recognizing the importance of a common framework, we implicitly conceive of the arts as communicative media. Consequently, we think of individual artists and readers as centers of consciousness, capable of formulating and understanding intentional meanings.

A comprehensively adequate interpretive account of Hamlet would take in, synoptically, its phenomenal effects (tone, style, theme, formal organization), locate it in a cultural context, explain that cultural context as a particular organization of the elements of human nature within a specific set of environmental conditions (including cultural traditions), register the responses of readers, describe the socio-cultural, political, and psychological functions the work fulfills, locate all those functions in relation to the evolved needs of human nature, and link the work comparatively with other artistic works, using a taxonomy of themes, formal structures, affects, and functions derived from a comprehensive model of human nature.

Well, actually, that isn’t true. Modern humans evolved in Africa. They left about 55,000 years ago (Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn). Is all of modern human culture pathological? That is of course one of the implications of early EP doctrine. Thus, “mismatch” theory was one of the most prominent elements in early EP. There is something to mismatch, a little. But like the idea of “modules,” the gradual, tacit relegation of the idea of mismatch from Primary Theoretical Principle to Minor Modulating Effect discloses the inadequacies in the early EP conception of human cognitive evolution.

Denis Dutton (I think) prominently displays a cartoon in which two cavemen, sitting before a fire in a cave, are shooting the breeze. One says to the other (quoted from memory), “I just don’t get it. Everything we eat is organic; the atmosphere is clean and pure, the water unpolluted. And yet, the average life expectancy is only 35 years.”

The point of this joke is that nature isn’t all it is cracked up to be. It admits of improvement, at least from the perspective of human well-being.

Kevin remarks, “Evolutionary Psychology traces nearly every modern affliction back to the advent of civilization. It seems as though civilization, in order to function, either required natural, evolutionarily-conditioned instincts be repressed or rendered grotesque, morbid. Either way, the outcome was pathological.”

Darwin traces afflictions to a deeper source. In the conclusion to The Descent of Man, he says, “We must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” (2: 405)

conflict is built into the very nature of life. Natural selection is a struggle. More are born than can survive—that is an integral piece in the logic of selection. In sexually reproducing species, males and females share fitness interests but also have conflicting individual interests. Parents must make choices between effort devoted to mating and effort devoted to parenting. Parents and offspring share some fitness interests but in other interests diverge. The same principle applies even to siblings; and it applies to all individuals who form parts of a social group.

Life is hard. Everything comes with a cost. Every fulfilled impulse stands victor over some other impulse left unfilfilled.

The contrast between the Pleistocene and Civilization is just another instantiation of the contrast between The Noble Savage and The Corruptions of Civilization. It is a myth, more false than true. What is the truth beneath and obscured by the myth? Flexiblity, emotional, cognitive, and ecolgical, built into the most peculiar adaptive specializaton of Homo sapiens. Working out the exact relations between the heavily conserved featues of hominids and the adaptive cognitive flexibility of Homo sapiens is perhaps the central, most promising area of research for the coming generation, the genertiona personfied by Kevin Cullen. I await with tranquil expectation what they will find. (Here’s a clue, one that worked wonders for me: look into a single article by a person you might otherwise never have occasion to consult, Arnold Buss, in a handbook put together by three personality psychologists:

Buss, Arnold. “Evolutionary Perspectives on Personality Traits.” Handbook of Personality Psychology. Ed. Robert Hogan, John Johnson, and Stephen Briggs. San Diego: Academic Press, 1997. 346-66.

Yes. But this strikes me as a truism. If evolutionary criticism couldn’t support this idea, evolutionary criticism would be in trouble. But it can hardly claim it as its special and unique accomplishment.

As for Hamlet, it so happens I’ve given some thought to him, or rather, to the difference between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the earlier Amleth of Saxo-Grammaticus. I’m not so much interested in Hamlet as a universal figure as I am in how he and his story is remade to suit cultural needs. This discussion is from an old paper on The Evolution of Narrative and the Self; it starts with a comment on the biochemical difficulty of achieving a coherent self-image, moves to a consideration of the Winnebago Trickster tales, next to Homer and Sophocles and then to Shakespeare. This discussion is followed by a consideration of The Winter’s Tale and then Pride and Prejudice.

From one age to the next, Amleth to Hamlet:

. . . It is all well and good to talk of literary evolution and to demonstrate one type of structure at one point in time, and a different type at a later point. It would be even better to show how a particular story is told at one time and then becomes modified at a later telling. In this case we can look at what remains the same, and what changes, attributing the changes to evolution. We had a taste of this in the difference between Homers’s and Sophocles’ Oedipus, but we can do much better with Shakespeare, for almost all of his plays are based on stories which survive in several earlier versions. So, I want to begin with the story of Hamlet, dealing with the difference between a medieval treatment of the story and Shakespeare’s proto-modern account. . . .

We begin with Hamlet. While Shakespeare’s version is the one we know best, the story is considerably older. The version in the late twelfth century Historica Danica of Saxo Grammaticus (reprinted in Hoy, 1963, pp. 123-131) is different from Shakespeare’s. The cultural level is low Rank 2 or, perhaps high Rank 1–the Dark Ages really were dark and not until the twelfth century did Europe manage to work its way back to Rank 2. Amleth–for that is how Saxo named him–faced the same requirement Hamlet did, to avenge his father’s death. His difficulty stems from the fact that the probable murderer, and therefore the object of Amleth’s revenge, is his uncle, and thus from the same kin group. Medieval Norse society had legal provisions for handling murder between kin groups; the offended group could seek the death of a member of the offending group or ask for the payment of wergild and a public apology. But there were no provisions for dealing with murder within the kin group (Bloch, 1961, pp. 125-130; cf. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1974, p. 226). Thus Amleth faced a situation in which there was no socially sanctioned way for him to act. In fact his situation was a less extreme version of the problem faced by Orestes in its most extreme form–how to exact vengeance on one relative for the murder of another relative. Both men are bound to avenge the death of their father; and both are similarly bound to the person they must kill. Amleth exacts vengeance against an uncle, whereas Orestes exacts it against his mother. Amleth deals with his problem by feigning madness. Being mad, he is not bound by social convention, a social convention which binds him both to his murdered father and the father’s murderer. Amleth’s madness allows him to act, which he does directly and successfully. He kills his uncle, the usurper, and his entire court and takes over the throne.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet was not so fortunate. He is notorious for his inability to act. When he finally does so, he ends up dead. And whether his madness was real or feigned is never really clear. What happened between the late twelfth century version of the story and the turn-of-the-seventeenth century version? The change might, of course, be due merely to the personal difference between Saxo Grammaticus and William Shakespeare. However, European culture and society had changed considerably in that interval and thus to attribute much of the difference between the two stories to the general change in culture is not unreasonable. Saxo Grammaticus told a story to please his twelfth century audience and Shakespeare told one to please his audience of the seventeenth century.

Something had happened which made Amleth’s madness ploy less effective. An individual can escape contradictory social demands by opting out of society. But if the contradictory demands are within the individual, if they are intrapsychic, then stepping outside of society won’t help. If anything, it makes matters worse by leaving the individual completely at the mercy of his/her inner contradictions, with no contravening forces from others. That, crude as it is, seems to me the difference between Amleth and Hamlet. For Amleth, the problem was how to negotiate contradictory demands on him made by external social forces. For Hamlet, the contradictory demands were largely internal, making the pretense of madness but a step toward becoming, in reality, mad.

The difference between the story of Amleth and Shakespeare’s Hamlet parallels the difference between the Oedipus story as it was in Homer’s time and as it came to be in Sophocles. Just as the superego evolved between thirteenth century Greece and fifth century Greece, so it had to be recreated between twelfth century Denmark and seventeenth century England. The Elizabethan audience demanded defense against their dark impulses while the Medieval audience settled for some slight of hand which let the impulses work toward a happy ending.

Yes. From my Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (Basic, 2001) pp. 89-90:

Intelligence allows humans to anticipate the future, to imagine what might happen in this or that circumstance, to imagine what we might do, and to thus prepare for things in advance. This surely is useful and adaptive. But it has disconcerting side-effects.

What do we do about possible events over which we can assert little control? What if we have seen a calamitous storm or an earthquake or a fire devastate our group, injuring many, destroying our animals, our dwellings? The group knows, though experience passed down through generations, that we can neither predict such things nor do anything to prepare for them. While the scope of these possible disasters draws our attention to them, our inability to do anything constructive makes this attention useless at best. At worst, it is dangerous, as it may distract us from beneficial activities.

There is one disaster we may be sure will occur, though we cannot anticipate just when. Our intelligence allows us to know that we will die, and the rituals though which we mark death are among the most important and intense we perform. I suggest that without such rituals, death threatens to become a psychological trap for the living. Periodic participation in ritual musicking reduces one’s sense of isolation and attaches one to the group, as Freeman has suggested, making one’s individual fate a matter of less concern. When we lose a parent, spouse, or close friend, ritual helps us mourn the loss and strengthen our ties to the living. It helps us, literally, get the deceased out of our (nervous) system.

Yet the same ritual that gives us comfort in the group has its dark side. If we are immortal in the group, why fear death? And if there is no fear of death, why not wage bloody war on those not in the group? The last century has seen violence on a grand scale perpetuated by people who gathered together in large groups, marched to military music, and sought meaning and belonging in war.

The difference between using music and being used by it would thus seem to be a subtle one. The price for relief from death anxiety can be high. But we should not think that music’s pleasure is merely the obverse of anxiety. Even when we have dealt with our anxiety through other means, there will be purpose in musicking. Perhaps only then can music’s pleasure set us free.

I don’t claim that literature makes us good people according to this or that ethical code, certainly not in the post-WWII and post-Vietnam and post-second wave feminism liberal humanist ethical code implicit in Bob’s judgments on the works he mentions. If literature made us good people, why would English professors be among the most intellectually craven and ethically opportunistic of all academic populations? Why would our faculty meetings include so many people no sane person would wish to take with him to a desert island?

All I claim is that literature and other forms of imaginative construction powerfully and inescapably influence our total vision of the world and that our total vision of the world powerfully influences our behavior. So far as I can tell, no one contributing to this discussion has yet seriously questioned that basic proposition–which should be something of a relief. It means that we aren’t just constructing another Tower of Babel here but can in fact reach reasonable consenus of some matters of real importance.

For no better reason than that Bob brought up Victorianism, and that I just finished writing a concluding section of an essay on Hamlet in which I compare it with Victorian, ancient, medieval, modern, and postmodern literature, I’ll copy out that section below. Bob and Brian have both also written on Hamlet (I discuss their commentaries in the literature review section). Actually, I’ll also include a few paragraphs preceding the final section, since they concern Hamlet’s personality, which if not quite up to the standards of malevolence set by Bob’s evil-doers, to say nothing of child molesters and psychopaths, still offers occasion for some serious ethical reservations:

Hamlet’s Personality

As Hazlitt, Bradley, and many others have recognized, Hamlet is both profoundly introverted and intellectual. He thus has a naturally meditative personality. He engages not directly with persons and situations but rather with his sense of them. He is conscientious and thus tormented by his own inability to function effectively. He is emotionally unstable, a trait that renders him particularly susceptible to depression—to being overwhelmed by stress, unable to cope. As a depressive, he is characteristically vacillating, indecisive, and ineffectual. In this respect, his emotional instability converges with his introversion. All of this is captured in Goethe’s concise characterization in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship:

“A lovely, pure, noble, and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden which it cannot bear and must not cast away. All duties are holy for him; the present is too hard. Impossibilities have been required of him; not in themselves impossibilities, but such for him. He winds, and turns, and torments himself; he advances and recoils; is ever put in mind, ever puts himself in mind; at last does all but lose his purpose from his thoughts; yet still without recovering his peace of mind.”
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(Boyd gives a similarly concise verbal portrait of Hamlet’s personality [“Literature” 18].) There remains the question of Agreeableness. Is Hamlet a nice, warm, friendly person? His admirers would like to think so. Hazlitt tries to palliate his behavior to Ophelia. I think Samuel Johnson is closer to the truth in speaking of Hamlet’s “useless and wanton cruelty” to Ophelia. And it isn’t just Ophelia, embodiment of frail womanhood. More often than not, Hamlet is verbally caustic. He finds his vocation in witty put-downs. He delights in mocking Polonius, even after he has killed him. He sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths with no flicker of remorse or sadness. Quite the contrary, he exults in the success of his cunning stratagem. He tells Gertrude that he must be cruel only to be kind, but such rationalizations are common. Children readily detect the hypocrisy that so frequently lurks behind the phrase, “It’s for your own good.” Add all this up, and it seems unlikely that Hamlet would score even at the average on the factor “Agreeableness.”

Protagonists tend to be agreeable, since readers do not readily cotton to disagreeable characters. But Hamlet never quite loses his audience, even when they flinch from his cruelty. There are at least five reasons for this. First, he is, after all, mightily put upon, struggling against crime and depravity that dwarf mere unpleasantness. Second, he pre-empts readers’ resentment by being as brutally hateful to himself as he is to others. If in his accounting Ophelia is Representative Woman, fickle and false, Hamlet is himself Representative Man, “proud, revengeful, ambitious” (III. i. 122). Third, he is a satirist as well as a protagonist. He entices the audience to participate with him in exposing folly, wickedness, deceit, debauchery, treachery, venality, sycophancy, and foppishness. He is not merely depressed. He is angry, and because he is also driven to disguise, his anger finds vent in satirical wit. Hamlet is not a “tragi-comedy” precisely, but it is a very funny tragedy. Ophelia fails to see the humor in her father’s death, but most readers are irresistibly entertained by the patter of wicked puns that follow the good old man to his dinner, not where he eats but where he is eaten. Fourth, Hamlet never succumbs to mere egoism or cynicism. He is capable of filial affection, admiring friendship, and romantic love. And finally, perhaps most importantly, Hamlet’s relations to other individuals are almost incidental to his central motive—to articulate his own imaginative sense of his situation. The high moments in Hamlet, the moments most remembered, are the soliloquies. Even in his tirade against Ophelia, she is scarcely more than a prop, an occasion for a monologue denouncing human nature. His one bosom friend, Horatio, is merely a sounding board for Hamlet’s reflections. Hamlet speaks to himself, and we but overhear him.

Early evolutionary psychology deprecated the significance of individual differences and focused exclusively on human universals. This was a serious theoretical mistake (Carroll, Literary Darwinism 190-91, 200, 206; MacDonald, “A Perspective”; Nettle, “Individual Differences”). Moreover, it lends support to the false charge that literary Darwinism cannot cope with individual texts because evolutionary psychology concerns itself only with human universals (Deresiewicz; Smee). Individual variation is integral to the evolutionary process, and differences of personality allow individuals to occupy different niches within variable social ecologies (Nettle, Personality; Sulloway). Hamlet occupies a niche in the literary canon in good part because Hamlet’s personality makes it possible for him to define a range of emotion—morbid, unhappy, bitter, angry, resentful, contemptuous, disgusted—that touches powerfully responsive chords in his audience. He articulates his condition as a general human condition, and while that representation is not the whole truth, it is enough of the truth to fix our attention and win our grave approval.

Just How Universal Is Hamlet?

Tooby and Cosmides are right, I think, in declaring that Hamlet’s condition symbolizes an evolutionarily ancient adaptive problem: “the struggle for coherence and sanity amidst radical uncertainty” (19). The way that problem manifests itself, though, depends very much on cultural, historical circumstance. Hamlet could not have existed either in Periclean Athens or in medieval Europe. His mind roams free over the whole scope of human experience, probing all questions, finding no clear answers, no firm structure of belief and value. Oedipus, in contrast, is always certain—first of his own rectitude, and then of his guilt. Socrates questions everyone else’s beliefs and values, but Plato has the ideals of The Republic always comfortably in reserve for himself. Dante’s inferno has its precise hierarchy of guilt and torment. Hamlet is different. Matthew Arnold registers this difference in describing Hamlet as a truly “modern” figure. In the 1853 Preface to his Poems, Arnold explains why he has not included in the volume his one most ambitious poem, the closet drama Empedocles on Etna. Though wearing ancient garb, Empedocles is a voice of Arnold’s own time, expressing all the doubts and perplexities—philosophical, moral, and social—that characterize the intellectual life of the Victorian period (Carroll, The Cultural Theory 1-37).

“What those who are familiar only with the great monuments of early Greek genius suppose to be its exclusive characteristics have disappeared: the calm, the cheerfulness, the disinterested objectivity have disappeared; the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced; modern problems have presented themselves; we hear already the doubts, we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust.” (1)

Doubt and discouragement do not first appear in human experience in the 17th century, much less the 19th, but there is no age before the Elizbethan in which doubt and discouragement achieve a supreme form of articulation, and no age before the Victorian in which they come to dominate the imaginative life of a whole culture. The three great philosophical poems of the Victorian period, Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Arnold’s Empedocles, and Browning’s Bishop Blougram’s Apology, are all meditations on religious and philosophical doubt, and to this canon one can add, as an appendix, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, the collected poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, and Pater’s Marius the Epicurean. In the postmodern period, we have stopped tormenting ourselves, for the most part, with religious doubt—not because we have solved the problems with which the Victorians struggled, but because we have given up on them and have resigned ourselves to the existential conditions they still hoped to avoid. The descendants of Hamlet in the modern period are works such as The Waste Land, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Waiting for Godot, La Nausée, The Seventh Seal, and Crow.

One can hardly imagine what Sophocles or Dante would have made of Hamlet, or even what Chaucer would have made of it. We have made of it one of our very few most essential texts. We have taken it to heart and made it an anthem for our own imaginative lives. By assimilating the insights of the humanist tradition to an evolutionary understanding of human nature, we can now gain a better understanding of what that choice means.

Hamlet is a long, magnificently articulated cry of emotional pain and moral indignation. Mortally hurt in his inmost feelings, Hamlet clings to an imaginative ideal of courage, honor, dignity, and chivalrous love. That ideal is embodied in a ghost—“such a questionable shape” (I. iv. 44)—and that shape is almost all that stands between Hamlet and an actual world given over to bestial indulgence, false shows, treachery, and foolishness. He is slow to act, and when he does act, he brings cataclysmic ruin to himself and most of those who are closest to him. And yet, he is not a failure. He learns to look at death with clear and open eyes, accepting the frailty and transience of life. He is sensitive enough to register our worst fears in our most vulnerable moments and still in his own person give unmistakable proofs for the nobility of the human mind.

If this is not a tragedy for all times and seasons—not the kind of thing that would fulfill the deepest imaginative needs of Sophocles, Dante, or the Tiv—it nonetheless fulfills a tragic potential originating in the basic features of human nature. Perhaps at some point, possibly centuries from now, we shall no longer regard Hamlet as one of the voices that speak most intimately to us, probing our fears, winning our fervent sympathy, voicing our outrage, making us laugh, and giving us an unsurpassed standard of meditative power. If that ever happens, we shall know that we have truly entered into yet another phase in the development of the human imagination.