Literary Appreciation: a Biocultural View

chapter 9 Literary Appreciation: A Biocultural View

Marcus Nordlund

Abstract

This paper puts forward a biocultural approach to the problem of literary value, argu- ing that such a theoretical framework might avoid reductiveness by working across three interlocking levels: panhuman, cultural, and individual. I explore the first level by means of a model derived from the field of environmental aesthetics: Steven Kaplan’s “environmental preference matrix,” which is rooted in the fundamental human need to Understand and to Explore. My account of the second level introduces Shakespeare’s Hamlet as an illustrative example and focuses more closely on how a single factor in Kaplan’s model – “Mystery” – is modified by cultural means. On the third level we find yet another complication in the form of individual differences, represented here by the Five-Factor Model of Personality, which can also throw important light on our aesthetic preferences. I end with a brief discussion of some consequences of my findings for the teaching of literature.

Keywords literary value – aesthetic preference – environmental aesthetics – biocultural literary theory – environmental preference matrix – Five-Factor Model of Personality – Shakespeare – Hamlet

1 Introduction

Aesthetics is the last frontier of evolutionary explanation. In the wake of the Darwinian sea change in the social sciences, a number of writers from the humanities have begun to apply similar principles to questions about the origin and function of art.1 So far the main focus has lain on whether human beings

1 What began as a Quixotic mission on the part of a few individuals in the mid-nineties has now grown into a fully fledged literary-critical movement, represented alongside more famil- iar schools like deconstruction or Russian formalism in the Glossary of Literary Terms (entry:

Literary Appreciation: A Biocultural View 155 tell stories and create beautiful objects because it is in their evolved nature to do so, or whether we are manipulating pleasure buttons that evolved for en- tirely different purposes.2 Much less attention has been paid to the axiological and normative problems that will be the subject of this essay: that is, whether a modern scientific account of human nature can throw some light on the grounds for aesthetic judgement.3 Given its difficulty, this latter question may well seem hopeless, and it cer- tainly cannot be dealt with satisfactorily in the course of a few pages. My aim here will rather be to sketch what a biocultural approach to the problem of literary value might look like. Such a theory, as I envisage it, might offer an antidote to more reductive or more narrowly conceived accounts by working across three different levels: the panhuman, the cultural, and the individual.4 To embark on such a counternatures project, which questions the longstand- ing suppression of naturalistic explanation in the humanities, is not to replace culture with biology, society or culture with genetics, or the individual with the species. It is rather to posit a deeper, more inclusive, and more holistic sense of the environment in which the individual literary judgement can be said to operate. I will begin by explaining how a biocultural account might subsume and improve upon rival approaches to the basic problem of literary appreciation, and by relating my argument to previous accounts of art and literature from an evolutionary perspective. My next step will be to apply a simple evolutionary- psychological model derived from the field of environmental aesthetics – Steven Kaplan’s “environmental preference model” – to the problem of literary appreciation, and then to integrate it with cultural factors as well as recent re- search into personality, using Shakespeare’s Hamlet as an illustrative example. My argument ends with a brief discussion of the potential consequences of my findings for the teaching of literary works at university level.

“Darwinian Literary Studies”). A broad sample of the best efforts in this field is offered in Boyd, Carroll, and Gottschall (2010). 2 For an introduction to this debate, see Carroll (2008), Section 7; for two recent contributions to the debate, see Dutton (2009) and Boyd (2009); and for a summary of the main objections to viewing art as an adaptation, see Pinker (2007). 3 Some books on evolutionary aesthetics devote a final, tentative chapter to the problem of literary value: see, for example, Dutton (2009) and Dissanayake (2000). Two essay-length dis- cussions of literary value from an evolutionary perspective can be found in Carroll (2004, Part 2, Chapter 5), and Easterlin (2005). 4 I derive these levels from the general framework erected by Carroll (1995).