Literary Darwinism and Death in Venice Part 2

Part 1.

At one point, Tadzio smiles at Aschenbach, and the famous author is “so deeply shaken that he was forced to flee” (67). The poor man nearly collapses hyperventilating.

Whether the character is wrestling with a temptation to molest the boy or not, however, it may seem as though Mann has gone far afield of the domain accessible to evolutionary biology, especially in light of the Achenbach’s ultimate fate in the story. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson map this domain in their introduction to the essay collection The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. The authors whose work they’ve included in the book focus on three main questions: “First, what is literature about?” (xxv), in other words, what can an evolutionary approach tell us about the contents of literary work? Gottschall and Wilson preview the answer, suggesting that “survival and reproduction are ‘on the minds’ of all species that have minds and should dominate the stories of the one speaks and writes.” Joseph Carroll’s contribution to the collection, “Human Nature and Literary Meaning,” exemplifies this approach. Carroll goes so far as to schematize seven of what he terms “behavioral systems” into a diagram of human interests we can expect to find in successful stories (89).

The elements of Death in Venice critics like Carroll would probably emphasize are Aschenbach’s concern for his status, his awareness of his parents’ legacy, and his own “paternal fondness” (51) for Tadzio. However, Tadzio is not in fact Aschenbach’s son, meaning the older man has no genetic interest in the boy. And, though “Mating” is on Carroll’s diagram, pederasty really doesn’t have any place on it. A case could be made that Tadzio somehow hijacks Aschenbach’s parenting system, and that his mating system, though misdirected, is still functioning. But the explanatory power of the model is further diminished by each of these exceptions—as well as the one represented by the “Survival” system. And the second question addressed by the authors of Literary Animal, “what is literary for?” (xxv), the question of function, poses its own problems for readings of Mann’s novella. In her essay, “Reverse-Engineering Narrative,” Michelle Scalise Sugiyama argues that our proclivity to tell and attend to stories evolved as “a low-cost, readily available means of amplifying social experiences” (189). This didactic function may also overlap with one akin to play or exercise, leading to “a feedback loop between storytelling and theory of mind: storytelling may help build or strengthen theory of mind, which in turn enriches storytelling, with further enriches theory of mind, and so on” (189). As intriguing as this idea is, it can only account for stories about people in general, and say much about why any specific story is more compelling than any other. The third question posed in The Literary Animal is what would an application of a scientific epistemology to literature look like? But to my knowledge no research that even approaches the rigor of science has been conducted on Death in Venice.

William Flesch makes a significant advance for evolutionary theories of literature by not focusing on either content or function; instead his interest lies in what he calls “narrative interest,” which he defines as “anxiety on behalf of and about the motives, actions, and experiences of fictional characters” (7). In concentrating on why we experience anxiety and other emotions—what he calls “volunteered affect”—Flesch is moving into the realm of phenomenology (but he fortunately steers clear of the absurd obscurantism of past theorists in that realm). Merely by attempting to explain this experience of what he, along with several of the authors in The Literary Animal, recognizes as a “cultural universal,” he is effectively countering Eagleton’s argument about the necessity of theory. Indeed, Donald Brown reports in his book Human Universals, everywhere we know there are people, we have good evidence that they routinely immerse themselves in stories, even if many of them take much more rudimentary forms than the most sophisticated world literature. There are several other research programs that have demonstrated the immediacy of our experience with narratives. One study that was conducted after Flesch’s book was published found that “Different neural systems track changes in the situation of a story” (Speer et al. 989). The interesting thing about these different neural systems is that they aren’t all associated with language. “Some of these regions mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities” (989). What this study and others like it suggest is that, contra Poststructuralism, we take meaning from language by referencing it against our experiences—experience and meaning may be inseparable, but experience takes precedence.

But why should our brains be so engaged with the activities of fictional characters? Why, for that matter, should so much of our minds be devoted to following what even real people do? Flesch takes another important step toward a viable theory of narrative engagement when he eschews what is known as “The Selfish Gene” approach to ethology, named for the 1976 book by Richard Dawkins. According to this view, all behavior is the end result of a chain of causation ending with the genotype of the individual performing the behavior. The corollary to this assumption is that all behavior must somehow serve the genes that are its ultimate cause. So, for instance, any behavior which appears to benefit another individual can usually be shown to favor the genes of the one performing it. The two main examples or this genetic selfishness resulting in apparent altruism are inclusive fitness, whereby individuals favor relatives because they are likely to carry many of the same genes, including the ones causing the behavior, and reciprocal altruism, whereby individuals engage in tit-for-tat or quid pro quo exchanges with non-related others. Recent theorists, however, most notably Elliot Sober, David Sloan Wilson (the co-editor of The Literary Animal), and Robert Axelrod, have developed models in which cooperation rather than selfishness, genetic or otherwise, is the norm. And these models have held up against, partly because they were informed by, tests of real human behavior.

The problem with cooperation within a group is that as soon as it is established individuals can benefit themselves (and their genes) by treating the cooperators selfishly—i.e. by cheating. From the selfish gene perspective, selection at the level of the group is all but impossible because “group boundaries,” in Flesch’s words, “are too porous” (5). Any population in which acting for the benefit of the group is the norm will almost certainly be infiltrated by individuals acting for their own benefit. To conceptualize and test the various models of cooperation, many biologists use a scenario borrowed from the economic field of “Game Theory” known as “The Prisoner’s Dilemma.” The prisoner is arrested with one of his accomplices, from whom he is immediately separated so that they have no chance to communicate. Each prisoner then has the option either to confess or to keep quiet. If neither prisoner confesses—i.e. if they cooperate—they will each serve a meager one-year sentence. But if the first prisoner keeps quiet while the second confesses, then the first gets twenty years and the second goes free. This scenario simulates the conditions under which small benefits accrue to cooperators, but there is much more to be gained by cheating. If they both confess, they each get five years. Cooperation can still take hold over multiple iterations if the prisoners simply remember how their accomplices responded to the dilemma in the past. Reciprocal altruism is what develops in the scenarios when reputations for cooperating or cheating come into play. But something still more interesting happens when you put humans, who can be counted on to have not only reputations but also myriad social ties, through scenarios like the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Flesch finds an important clue to the mystery of human engagement with fictional narrative in the outcomes of experiments based on a variation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma called “The Ultimatum Game.” In this simple set-up, one participant is given a sum of money which he must then propose to split with another participant with the only proviso being that the receiver must accept the cut being offered. If the receiver thinks the cut is unfair, say if the proposer offers a measly ten percent, he or she can veto the offer and neither participant gets any money. The key here, as Flesch points out, is that

It is irrational for the responder not to accept any proposed split from the proposer. The responder will always come out better by accepting than by vetoing. And yet people generally veto offers of less than 25 percent of the original sum. This means they are paying to punish (31).

People experience this costly indignation even when they aren’t themselves the potential beneficiaries of the proposed cut. In another variation of the game called the “3-Player Dictator Game,” the first player, the dictator, receives the sum of cash and then offers the second player a cut, this time without any threat of veto. The catch is that the third player can reward or punish the other two, but to do so he or she has pay. For every dollar the third player contributes, he or she can add four dollars to the receiver or deduct four dollars from the dictator. “It is highly irrational,” Flesch observes, “for this player to pay to reward or punish, but again considerations of fairness trump rational self-interest. People do pay” (33). And it seems they actually enjoy paying. Flesch goes on to cite research showing that pleasure centers in the brain become active when people are witnessing these types of interaction and anticipating this type of punishment, which because of its cost to the punisher is called “altruistic punishment.” It has a real-world corollary in the Italian Mafia’s strictly enforced code of silence known as “omerta,” under which anyone who informs against his colleagues can expect to be killed.

Groups in which the type of behavior demonstrated by third players in dictator games, known as “strong reciprocity,” which Flesch defines as occurring when a group member “punishes and rewards others for their behavior toward any member of the social group, and not just or primarily for their individual interactions with reciprocator” (21-22), can sustain a norm of cooperation. On a basic level, a taxonomy can be created of different types of individual within a cooperative population: there are the cooperators, the defectors, who act solely for their own (or their genes’) interest, and punishers. Adding strong reciprocity to the equation, though, gives us what are called “second-order” players. If, for instance, an individual defects, or free-rides on the cooperation of the other group members, anyone who witnesses this behavior and fails to punish it becomes a second-order free-rider. By extrapolation, someone who fails to punish a second-order free-rider becomes a third-order one, and so on ad infinitum. So we now have a model in which individuals track each other’s behavior to see whether they are altruistic or selfish, and in which individuals are emotionally inclined to favor the altruistic and desire punishment, from first or second or however many order punishers, for the selfish, but there is one more piece of the puzzle of human cooperation, one which is integral to an evolutionary account of our interest in a character like Gustav von Aschenbach.

Death in Venice is the story of a man who has devoted himself so completely to his writing that any part of him concerned with all the other aspects of his life, and in particular his social life, has atrophied to the point of paralysis. His writing has been his grand, altruistic gesture to society, a gesture made at a great personal cost.

Hidden away among Aschenbach’s writings was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame (30).

Read part 3

A Literary Darwinist Take on Death in Venice Part 1

There is comfort to be had in the orderliness of solitude, but that orderliness will be the first casualty in any encounter with other people. Such is the experience of Gustav von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s 1911 novel Death in Venice. Aschenbach has not, however, strived for solitude and order for the sake of comfort—at least not by his own account—but rather for the sake of his art, to which he has devoted himself single-mindedly, even monomaniacally, his whole life. Now, at age fifty, newly elevated to a titled status, Aschenbach has become acutely aware of all he has sacrificed on the altar of his accomplishment. The desire for fame, as philosopher David Hume explained, is paradoxically an altruistic one. At least in the short-term, no one has anything to gain from the dedication and toil that are the hallmark of ambition. And status will tend to be awarded to those whose services or accomplishments benefit society at large and not any select part of it the ambitious has special designs for or interest in. As selfish as we may seem at first glance, we humans tend to be drawn to the ambitious for the other-directedness their ambition signals.

Evolutionary Literary Critic William Flesch incorporates Hume’s argument into the theoretical framework he lays out in Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, in which he posits that one of our biggest joys in reading fictional narratives derives from our capacity to track characters while anticipating rewards for the altruistic and comeuppance for the selfish. With this biological perspective in mind, Aschenbach’s fate in the course of the novel can be viewed as hinging on whether he will be able, once he’s stepped away from the lonely duty of his writing, to establish intimate relationships with real humans, as he betrays a desperate longing to do. When he ultimately fails in this endeavor, largely because he fails to commit himself to it fully, Mann has the opportunity to signal to his readers how grave the danger is that every artist, including Thomas Mann, must face as he stands at the edge of the abyss.

Mann’s novel was published at an interesting time, not just geopolitically, but in the realm of literary theory as well. Most notably, the years leading up to 1911 saw the ascendancy of Freudian psychoanalysis. Mann has even suggested that Death in Venice was at least partly inspired by Freud’s ideas (Symington, 128). And it has gone on to be re-evaluated countless times in light of not only psychoanalytic developments but of those of several other newly christened and burgeoning literary theories. Readers of this nearly hundred-year-old story may rightly ask whether it has any meaning to anyone not steeped in such paradigms, especially since the value—and validity—of literary theory in general, and psychoanalysis in particular are being questioned in many arenas. Terry Eagleton notes in the preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition of his popular Literary Theory: An Introductionthat there has been “in recent times the growth of a kind of anti-theory” (vii). In the original preface to the same work, he writes:

Some students and critics…protest that literary theory “gets in between the reader and the work.” The simple response to this is that without some kind of theory, however unreflective and implicit, we would not know what a “literary work” was in the first place, or how we were to read it (xii).

Authors like Flesch, however, along with others who subscribe to the recently developed set of theories collectively labeled Literary Darwinism, would probably insist that Eagleton vastly underestimates just how unreflective and implicit our appreciation of narrative really is.

If there are cases, though, in which Eagleton’s argument holds up, they would probably be those works which are heavily influenced by the theories that would be referenced to interpret them, and Death in Venice certainly falls into that category. But these special cases shouldn’t overshadow the fact that when Eagleton makes the seemingly obvious point that we must have some theory of literature if we’re to make any sense of our reading, he is in fact making a rather grand assumption, one in keeping with a broader poststructuralist paradigm. According to this view, objectivity is impossible because our only real contact with the world and its inhabitants is through language. This observation, which in a banal way is indisputable—if it’s not rendered linguistically we can’t speak or write about it—takes the emphasis away from any firsthand experience with either the world or the text and affords to language the utmost power in determining our beliefs, and even our perceptions. The flipside of this linguistic or discursive determinism is that any social phenomenon we examine, from a work of fiction to the institutionalized marginalization of women and minorities, is somehow encapsulated in and promulgated through the medium of language. Poststructuralism has led many to the conclusion that the most effective remedy for such inequality and injustice consists of changing the way we talk and write about people and their relations. This political program, disparaged (accurately) by conservatives with the label “political correctness,” has been singularly ineffective.

One possible explanation for this failure is that the poststructuralists’ understanding of human nature and human knowledge is grossly off the mark. Indeed, to Eagleton’s claim that we need a theory of literature or of language to get meaning out of a novel, most linguists, cognitive neuroscientists, and any other scientist involved in the study of human behavior would simply respond nonsense. Almost all of the “structures” discursive determinists insist are encapsulated in and propagated through language are to be found elsewhere in human (and sometimes non-human) cognition and in wider cultural networks. It is perhaps a partial concession to the argument that discursive determinism can only lead to infinite regresses, and that any theory of literature must be grounded in a wider understanding of human nature, that the longest chapter of Eagleton’s book is devoted to psychoanalysis. And what could Death in Venice be if not a tale about a repressed homosexual who has achieved eminence through the disciplined sublimation of his desires into literature, but who eventually buckles under the strain and succumbs to perversion and sickness? More importantly, if Freud’s model of the unconscious has been shown to be inaccurate, and repression a mere chimera, must Mann’s novel be relegated to a category of works whose interest is solely historical? (One of the most damning refutations of Eagleton’s argument for the necessity of theory is that such a category is so difficult to fill.)

If Flesch is correct in arguing that our interest in fiction is inseparable from our propensity for tracking other people, assessing their proclivity toward altruism, and anticipating the apportionment of just deserts, Gustav von Aschenbach, who has devoted his life to solitary public service, but who through the course of the novel abandons this service and sets out on an adventure consisting of multiple potential encounters with flesh-and-blood humans, may still attract the attention of post-Freudian (or simply non-Freudian) readers. Another way to frame to the repression-sublimation-perversion dynamic central to Death in Venice is as an enactment of the benefits of an intense devotion to art being overwhelmed by its costs and risks. An excerpt that can serve as a key to unlocking the symbolism of the entire novel comes when Aschenbach is at last settled in his hotel in Venice:

The observations and encounters of a devotee of solitude and silence are at once less distinct and more penetrating than those of the sociable man; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Images and perceptions which might otherwise be easily dispelled by a glance, a laugh, an exchange of comments, concern him unduly, they sink into mute depths, take on significance, become experiences, adventures, emotions. The fruit of solitude is originality, something daringly and disconcertingly beautiful, the poetic creation. But the fruit of solitude can also be the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden (43).

Can Aschenbach, a devotee of solitude, be considered prosocial or altruistic? He can when the fruit of his solitude is the poetic creation prized by the society as a whole. However, the plot of the story focuses more on the perverse and the forbidden, on the great man’s fall from grace. Any yet these costs are suffered, not by society, but by the artist alone, so in the end he can be seen as even more of an altruist—he is in fact a martyr. (And many a poststructuralist critic would take this opportunity to highlight the word art in the middle of martyr.)

In the lead-up to this martyrdom, however, Aschenbach toes the very selfish waters of pedophilia. What little suspense the plot has to offer comes from uncertainty over how far the august author will allow his obsession with the young boy Tadzio to take him. Are we monitoring Aschenbach to see if he gives into temptation? Interestingly, his attraction for the young boy is never explicitly described as sexual. There are suggestive lines, to be sure, especially those coming in the wake of Aschenbach’s discovery of the epidemic being covered up by the Venetian authorities. His response is to become elated.

For to passion, as to crime, the assured everyday order and stability of things is not opportune, and any weakening of the civil structure, any chaos and disaster afflicting the world, must be welcome to it, as offering a vague hope of turning such circumstances to its advantage (68).

This line can not only be read as proof that Aschenbach indeed has a selfish desire to satisfy, a passion awaiting the opportunity to press—or take—its advantage; it can also be seen as a piece of puzzle that was his motivation for coming to Venice in the first place. Did he gravitate to this place because of the disruption of the daily order, the chaos, it promised? Soon after the narrator refers to this “vague hope” he reveals that Aschenbach has begun doing more than merely watching Tadzio—he’s been following him around. All the while, though, the unease about whether the devotee of solitude will ever get close enough to do any sort of harm to the object of his obsession is undercut by the great pains he goes to just to keep the boy in view juxtaposed with the fact that it never seems to occur to him to simply approach and begin a conversation.

Read part 2