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