A.S. Byatt's "Morpho Eugenia": prolegomena to any future theory.(Essays)(Essay)

In a recent essay on A.S. Byatt's resistance to theory as dramatized in Angels & Insects, Michael Levenson argues that theory is a belated intellectual event, "a late, parodic form of a once momentous conflict" (2001, 162), specifically "the mid-Victorian struggle of faith and doubt" (163). Central to Levenson's argument is his view of theory as "the work of those who claim spiritual authority" (162), so the theorist resembles the pre-twentieth century "man of faith [who] insists on a supervening order" (163). In contrast to the theorist/man of faith is "the naturalist, the observer, [who] can only make individual labels that fail to compose a system and that make a mockery of theory" (163-64). After working through the logic of this structural similarity between "Christian apologetics and literary theory," Levenson concludes that both are "inimical" to the "imaginative adventure" of Byatt's literary project, a project that uses language to weave "the world beyond itself, inventing connections, illuminating obscurities" (173).

While Levenson's claim that crucial nineteenth-century intellectual debates anticipate contemporary theory is compelling, his conflation of theory and religion and his analysis of Byatt's "Morpho Eugenia" are unconvincing at best and totally misguided at worst. In the following pages, I want to draw some sharp distinctions in order to clarify how Byatt's novella creatively documents the central intellectual dilemmas that have given birth to contemporary theory. According to Levenson's interpretation, the nineteenth-century crisis in knowledge led Byatt to construct a reinvigorated realism, which is based on a fluid theory of language as incarnation. By contrast, I contend that the nineteenth-century crisis led Byatt to distinguish two separate rhetorical stances, one that takes into account the role that anthropomorphism plays in the construction of knowledge about self, the world, and the other, and one that either dismisses or ignores the role of anthropomorphism in the construction of knowledge. For Byatt, since anthropomorphism is inescapable, it is impossible to overcome it. Therefore, instead of trying to overcome anthropomorphism by reinvigorating realism, humans should learn how to interact responsibly with others and the world given the inevitability of the anthropomorphic. Those who fail to understand the role of anthropomorphism adopt a destructive relation to the world and the other, while those who take into account the power of anthropomorphism can develop a healthy, productive, and life-affirming relation with the other. Such is the primary lesson to be learned from the nineteenth-century crisis in knowledge, according to Byatt.

I.

Before turning to my discussion of contemporary theory, let me detail some of the momentous intellectual crises of the nineteenth century, specifically as Byatt dramatizes them. Central to "Morpho Eugenia" is the shift from a supernatural to a natural universe, a shift from "a world in which angels and devils do not battle in the Heavens for virtue and vice," but "a world in which we are what we are because of the mutations of soft jelly and calceous bone matter through unimaginable millennia" (1994, 69). These are the words of Harald, the patriarch of the Alabaster family, who is obsessed with proving God's existence, but who, as a relatively well-educated Victorian gentleman, is painfully aware of the radical challenges to belief during his time. Percy Bysshe Shelley's "The Necessity of Atheism," (1) Ludwig Feuerbach's philosophical analysis of anthropomorphism, (2) Charles Lyell's geological discoveries that undermined traditional Christianity, (3) James A. Froude's The Nemesis of Faith, (4) Charles Darwin's work on evolution--these are all distinctively nineteenth-century developments that posed a serious challenge to faith before the central events of "Morpho Eugenia" take place. While the loss of God certainly pains a character like Harald, what upsets him most is the way that nineteenth-century intellectual developments ultimately undermined two seemingly distinctive human attributes, the capacity to act as an altruistic being (to love) and the capacity to have objective knowledge. Both capacities depend upon the existence of something "disinterested and spiritual" (67) within the human, something that stands above nature and is uninfluenced by ideological interest or worldly desire. Lacking this something "disinterested and spiritual," the human is, according to Harald, nothing more than a "brute beast," a creature of instinct. Indeed, if human love is biologically predetermined or governed by a primal instinct, then God, the spiritual life, and the heavens would be nothing more than the seething products of an overheated imagination. The implicit argument that Harald accepts is this: if there is something disinterested and, therefore, spiritual within the human, this would justify belief in the existence of a disinterested and spiritual realm, a realm associated with God and Reality. Therefore, Harald desperately constructs arguments throughout the text to justify the existence of disinterested and spiritual "love" (96), for he believes that, were he able to demonstrate that there is something within the human that can transcend the mechanistic laws of natural necessity, he would be able to justify the existence of a spiritual reality and/or a divine being. As he says to William: "'But you do not feel your own sense of wonder corresponds to something beyond yourself, William?'" (68)

The terror of losing love in a godless universe is certainly an important theme in "Morpho Eugenia," but it is the loss of objective knowledge that interests Byatt most. For Byatt, what ultimately undermines the idea of objective knowledge is the concept of anthropomorphism, which dominates the novella more than any other theme. Here I do not just mean Feuerbach's idea that humans create God in order to satisfy their needs and desires, but a more comprehensive view of the concept, one that irrevocably impacts literature, philosophy, and science. Like Harald, William is in tune with the developments of his time that have made belief in God extremely difficult, but he differs from Harald in that he does not try to save God. As a young man, William found God in all things, especially nature. During this time, he looked "for signs of Divine Love and order in the meanest flowers that blew" and he wrote "in his journal of the wonders of divine Design" (1994, 11), but after his journey to the Amazon, he changes his view considerably:

 
  He had sat alone under a roof woven of leaves in an earth-floored hut, 
  and scribbled descriptions of everything: the devouring hordes of army 
  ants, the cries of frogs and alligators, the murderous designs of his 
  crew, the monotonous sinister cries of howler monkeys, the languages 
  of various tribes he had stayed with, the variable markings of 
  butterflies, the plagues of biting flies, the unbalancing of his own 
  soul in this green world of vast waste, murderous growth, and lazily 
  aimless mere existence. (Byatt 1994, 13) 

The aimless suffering in nature in this passage is significant, because it is such suffering that caused so many Victorians to lose their faith. In his article "Nonmoral Nature," Stephen Jay Gould cogently details how the most popular design-argument from the nineteenth century was effectively refuted. In the nineteenth century, God, in His infinite wisdom and goodness, had constructed a moral universe, and if we attend to the moral order within creation, we can infer the existence of a benevolent Deity. Stated more concretely, lions do not prolong the suffering of their prey; the "death of victims ... is swift and relatively painless, victims are spared the ravages of decrepitude and senility, and populations do not outrun their food supply to the greater sorrow of all" (1982, 19). The laws of nature function this way because a moral God has created it so. Basing his findings primarily on Darwin's famous letter to Asa Gray, Gould concludes: not a lion, a tiger, or a bear, but the ichneumon posed the greatest challenge to the argument that inferred the existence of a benevolent Deity through nature. This insect first paralyzes its victim, usually a caterpillar; it then deposits eggs within the host's body. Once these eggs hatch, the ichneumon larvae begin the work of devouring the caterpillar; however, should the insects damage any of the vital organs, the host would die and the insects would lose their food source. For this reason, the insects instinctively eat only those parts of the body that will not result in the caterpillar's death, an act that leads to the worst of all possible worlds for the caterpillar. For those theologians and philosophers who held that God created a moral universe, and that we can discern God's benevolent presence through the creation, this act of instinctive torture posed insurmountable problems.