The Evolution of Inanimate Objects

This is the type of novel guaranteed to make academics go "oof," especially if, like yours truly, they're academics who tend to till the fields of--ahem--minor authors.  Harry Karlinsky's (appropriately) slender The Evolution of Inanimate Objects: The Life and Collected Works of Thomas Darwin (1857-1879) is a combination mock-biography/mock-scholarly edition that harks back to a long tradition of such self-deconstructing "scholarly" texts, from Alexander Pope's The Dunciad to Virginia Woolf's Orlando to Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire.  Our intrepid biographer ("Harry Karlinsky"), drawing on relatively meager evidence, reconstructs the short and eventually unhappy life of the (imaginary) Thomas Darwin, Charles Darwin's "youngest" son, who takes his father's theories in an unusual direction: he comes to believe that technology changes over time through a process of sexual selection, in which, say, forks and spoons mate to produce new forms of cutlery.  Needless to say, poor Thomas' attempts to publish his findings in  Nature do not fare well, and he ends his days in a Canadian insane asylum, watched over by the (real) psychiatrist Richard Bucke.  

But as is often the case in the mock-scholarly form, much of the real interest lies in the parody of academic practice.  "Karlinsky's" intellectual obsession with Thomas, complete with the requisite self-promotion--"Until now, however, Thomas Darwin's legitimate insights as well as his interesting but flawed conjectures have been essentially unacknowledged and unknown" (191)--bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Thomas' own increasingly bizarre fixation on the sex lives of forks.  Moreover, the rhetoric of historical excavation, revelation, and remembrance pokes fun at the role of hyper-specialization and "the minor" in contemporary academia.  (As one reviewer observed, "[i]n this remarkable postmodern book, postmodernism’s theoretical underpinnings are also questioned as being inherently fraudulent or, at the least, under suspicion, suggesting in turn that the novel is a sort of fictional equivalent of Sokal and Bricmont’s critique of literary and social science theory, published in English as Intellectual Impostures (1998)."¹) The author justifies recovering Thomas because doing so will somehow change our understanding of the history of science, Victorian culture, and perhaps insanity--and yet, this urge towards "coverage" or "completion" calls the entire project into question: what kind of historical narrative can actually emerge from such tiny blips on the cultural radar? Is this not reducing pointilism to its dots? Thomas' mind-boggling inability to process "the role that man played in overseeing and controlling the manufacture of artefacts in his 'fusion' speculation" (148) is not identical to the narrator's own intellectual blind spots, but this fundamental confusion about agency invites us to raise questions about how "Karlinsky" understands human action in history--not least because Thomas' "contributions" consist of an unpublished manuscript, two reported speeches known only from club notes, and a youthful note about coins.  From a historian's point of view, what did Thomas do?

It is, of course, possible to write a long book about a short life, as the many biographies of John Keats sufficiently attest.  Alas, Karlinsky has a problem: prior to his mental breakdown, Thomas is utterly average.  Indeed, he is so mediocre that his school records reduce his progress to an "ibid." (48) and "the formulaic" (49): adult observers compress his life narrative to an endless repetition of "see previously," refusing to differentiate Thomas either from others or from himself.  In that sense, his adult insanity flips this repetition around, as Thomas'...unusual...beliefs about inanimate sexual reproduction are so outside the realm of common understanding that they can no longer be classified as anything but different (and, therefore, incomprehensible).  This leaves the narrator to stitch together Thomas' life out of random (and, often, repeated) non-events, seeking to find a plot arc in button-collecting and bee-observation; the tiny details collapse under the burden of their supposed significance.  Perhaps Thomas' observations on the erotic capabilities of cutlery emerged from his youthful chores, "returning the cleaned cutlery and serving pieces to the large antique sideboard that ran the length of the Darwin dining room"? (37)  The humor of Karlinsky's desperate quest for something--anything--to say about Thomas gains further weight from the novel's use of plain style, what David Hebblethwaite calls its "dispassionate, pseudo-academic framing."  Our narrator carefully eschews figurative language, sticks to active verbs, and favors relatively short sentences (often confined to just one or two clauses) that are noticeably short on colons and semi-colons.  The prose, that is, aims for transparency: until the conclusion, the academic author withdraws the signs of his own individuality from the narrative, purportedly leaving nothing but the facts.  (Clearly, this narrator is not an English professor...)  The plain style is portentous; the facts, trivial. 

The paratexts are equally parodic, if not as baroquely as in The Dunciad (where the footnotes multiply endlessly, swamping the poem) or Orlando (filled with impossible photographs).  After annotating cloth in Robert Elsmere, it was hard not to chuckle ruefully at a footnote about china patterns. Our narrator has facts, but they point out the paucity of the explanatory narrative. (Moreover, the narrator neglects footnotes where they're actually called for--shouldn't he have pointed out, for example, that Darwin didn't coin the phrase "survival of the fittest" [102]?)  The "manuscript" evidence, intended to authenticate the narrative, is often filled with illegible phrases; the photographs, which are also supposed to point outward to a "real," similarly call into question the role of such images in biographical works.  Specifically, they point out the hole in the entire enterprise, as the only "photographs" of Thomas are actually of his (real) brother William.  And why include a menu? What does it prove about the event it memorializes, other than that it happened? At the same time, the novel is bolstered by a real bibliography, interspersed with fictional secondary sources--the joke being, at times, that it can be rather difficult to tell the titles apart.  By the end, one begins to wonder about the academic survival of the fittest, the struggle to identify new avenues of research where there is, perhaps, only air. 

¹ Richard J. Lane, "New Canadian Fiction," UTQ 81.3 (2012): 522.