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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
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