Cross-posted at The Valve.
As I’d originally planned it, this series of posts ended with the one on The Cosby Show (where you can find links to the earlier posts). However, I’ve decided to add one last post in which I briefly think about what it would mean to consider this succession of texts – The Winter’s Tale, Huckleberry Finn, A Passage to India, Light in August, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and The Cosby Show – as being the product of cultural evolution. That, of course, links this post with my ongoing series on cultural evolution (here, here, and here).
Let me begin by noting that, in a private email, Jeb suggested that we consider Caliban as an instance of the Medieval trope of the Wild Man. That makes sense to me. Now consider my last comment in that discussion, which loosely follows from a conception of cultural evolution:
Let’s think of literary texts as indicators of the cultural psycho-social dynamics existing in the population in which the texts circulate. Other dynamics may also be circulating in those populations. And, of course, it’s quite possible that there are similar dynamics in populations which pay no attention to these particular texts of interest.
So, on the one hand there’s a certain dynamic of projection in the relationship between Prospero and Caliban in The Tempest, a text that is known to a certain population which we’ll call X. Just what this population X might be, that’s a tricky question, as that particular text has been read far and wide (and acted on the stage) for four centuries or so. Are we interested in that whole population, smeared as it is all over geographical space and historical time? Well, I don’t want to try to come up with a precise answer to that, not here and now. Not so much because this is merely a comment to a blog post, but because I simply don’t know how to do it. Let’s say that we’re particularly interested in the subpopulation of X that existed in early modern England in the early 17th century.
Imagine, then, that we find a similar dynamic in some other text or texts, texts that circulate in some different population Y. Under what circumstances does it make sense to argue for a historical and causal connection between the underlying psycho-social dynamics of population X and population Y? I think, for example, that there is a projective psycho-social dynamic in A Light in August that is similar (but not the same) to the one in The Tempest. Is there some kind of causal connection between the cultural psychodynamics operating in that early modern English population X (in the case of the Shakespeare) and the cultural psychodynamics operating in that mid-20th century American population Y (in the case of the Faulkner)?
Consider a similar, but different question. That early modern population X spoke some version of English. That language is similar, but not the same, as the version of English spoken by the mid-century American population Y. Those versions of English are similar enough that people in the two populations could converse with one another and have some degree of mutual understanding, though there certainly would be difficulties. Is there some causal connection between the English spoken by X and that spoken by Y? If so, how does that causal connection work? There certainly isn’t any direct influence (there’s that word) between early modern England and mid-20th century America. But there is something. What is it and how does it work?
I note, first of all, that if we are going to think in terms of cultural evolution, we must think of a large family of texts, of which the one’s we’ve examined are only a sample, and not at all a random one. Except for the last two, they’re all canonical “high culture” texts, but popular texts surely are relevant as well. In particular, we’d need to look at minstrelsy, which was at the center of American popular culture from the second quarter of the 19th century until the end, where it morphed into vaudeville and, a bit later, movies. Minstrelsy is the major expressive vehicle through which white America encountered black America, and after the Civil War, black American’s donned black-face make up and formed their own minstrel troupes.
So that’s one issue, more texts need to be considered. A second major issue is that of the so-called meme, the genetic units of cultural evolution in Dawkins’ influential, albeit superficial, formulation. What are the separable components of the Wild Man trope and how did some of them become assimilated to the depiction of black Americans, or even to the depiction of Indians in Forster’s case (if indeed the Wild Man trope is relevant there)? This is a serious issue, but I don’t know how to go about it. I have some idea about how to think of musical memes – I’ll be considering “rhythm changes” (a harmonic structure popular among mid-20th-century jazz musicians) in the cultural evolution series – but I’ve not given much thought to literary memes. I suppose we should start with existing notions of tropes, motifs, and imagery, and work from there.
The third issue concerns the underlying cultural psychodynamics, which I’ve characterizes as one of projection. I have the notion from psychoanalysis, and I’m comfortable with that. However, I’ve deployed it in discussing relationships between characters in the stories, e.g. that Prospero is projecting his own sexuality onto Caliban. I don’t think that will fly, for neither of them are real creatures. Both are, if you will, “projections” of playwright and audience. Caliban and Prospero and Ariel, each represents aspects of Shakespeare and of audience members (see this paper on Shakespeare*).
That dynamic of representation is the one that we have to capture. For that’s the dynamic that’s driving this particular cultural evolutionary process (see my paper on American music**). How do our fictional representations shape our sense of ourselves, and how does our sense of ourselves affect the representations we choose to share with one another?
* At the Edge of the Modern, or Why is Prospero Shakespeare's Greatest Creation? Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, Vol. 21 No. 3, pp. 259-279, 1998.
** Music Making History: Africa Meets Europe in the United States of the Blues. In Nikongo Ba'Nikongo, ed., Leading Issues in Afro-American Studies. Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 1997, pp. 189-233.
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