Mutations of Romance: Evolution, Infidelity, and Narrative

This is a post-print version of the article. For citation purposes, please refer to Modern Fiction Studies 56.3 (2010): 592-613. DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2010.0010 http://muse.jhu.edu/article/392858 MUTATIONS OF ROMANCE: EVOLUTION, INFIDELITY, AND NARRATIVE Venla Oikkonen Dear Dr. Tatiana, My husband and I have been faithfully married for years, and we are shocked by what we read in your columns. As black vultures, we engage in none of the revolting practices you advocate so regularly, and we don't think anyone else should either. We suggest you champion fidelity or shut up. Crusading for Family Values in Louisiana —Olivia Judson, Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation Since its reincarnation in the early 1990s under the new disciplinary title of evolutionary psychology, sociobiological thought has appropriated, dominated, and refashioned popular discourses of gender and sexuality. 1 Advocating an understanding of gender roles and sexual behavior as written in the human genome, evolutionary psychologists have portrayed modern humans as driven by their Pleistocene adaptations, or, as one sociobiological account apocalyptically puts it, as "hunter-gatherer women and men lost in a concrete jungle" (Potts and Short 312). These visions of innate gender characteristics and sexual dispositions are usually argued with reference to what some have called the neo-Darwinian reproductive imperative: the urgent need for organisms to propagate in order to guarantee the passing of their genes to subsequent generations. 2 This logic assumes that almost any behavior – including our twenty-first-century fantasies and obsessions – contributes to the reproductive fitness of the organism or is the end product of past reproductive successes. Within such framework, all deeds and desires serve reproductive ambitions. In evolutionary psychological accounts of human evolution, promiscuity and infidelity are often portrayed as the ultimate expression of this reproductive imperative. Resonating closely with popular assumptions about gender relations as a heterosexual battlefield, evolutionary stories about infidelity have proved extremely compelling as cultural narratives. These narratives have repeatedly appeared across the popular cultural spectrum from afternoon talk shows, prime-time television series, and Hollywood cinema to advertising, magazine articles, and self-help books such as John Gray's best1 A number of scholars have considered the movement from sociobiology t o evolutionary psychology as mainly cosmetic. Roger N. Lancast er, for example, calls evolut ionary psychology " sociobiology lit e" because it has deemphasized t he darker t hemes of earlier sociobiology—rape, murder, racism—and focused on " tales about how men got t o be risk-t aking (but prot ect ive) and women got t o be nurt uring (but savvy) and t hus how t he t wo ought t o get t oget her and cooperat e (copulat e)" (" Sex" 110). See also Val Dusek, who views evolut ionary psychology as " sociobiology sanitized" for similar reasons. 2 See, for inst ance, Jennifer Terry's " Unnatural Acts" and Angie Burns's " Women in Love". selling Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.3 In popular science this evolutionary infidelity narrative is often spelled out in the very titles of texts; consider, for example, Tim Birkhead's Promiscuity: An Evolutionary History of Sperm Competition, Robin Baker's Sperm Wars: Infidelity, Sexual Conflict, and Other Bedroom Battles, or Helen Fisher's Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray. Such texts typically proceed from a simple statement of a clash between male and female reproductive interests – synecdochically represented by the endless multitude of minuscule sperm and the large but rare eggs – to an extended speculation of how evolutionary mating strategies are visible in today's gendered sexual norms and practices. Reflected in such chapter titles as Matt Ridley's "Polygamy and the Nature of Men" and "Monogamy and the Nature of Women" and David M. Buss's wonderfully euphemistic "What Women Want" and "Men Want Something Else," this strict gender dichotomy organizes the texts' discussions of specific instances of behavior that, with very few exceptions, are always reduced back to the reproductive imperative. One of the most striking features of the evolutionary infidelity narrative is its insistence on the genetic hardwiring of human emotions. As cultural critic Roger N. Lancaster somewhat sarcastically puts it: "Supposedly, the evolutionary effects of natural selection on the endocrine system have rendered us 'prewired' to have certain feelings, and (non sequitur) to express these emotional dispositions in certain pre-given institutional forms" (Trouble 208). In particular, the evolutionary infidelity narrative has moved romantic love from the pedestal on which it has historically been placed and challenged its cultural status as a unique, near-transcendental experience. Viewed as a mere trick of our selfish genes in evolutionary psychological discourse, romantic love exists only to improve our reproductive fitness" (that is, to make us copulate with the right kind of person in the right circumstances and stick with that person for the period of time that most likely leads to optimal reproductive success for the given individual). As feminist psychologist Angie Burns observes, when "love is grounded in sexual and reproductive imperatives, it becomes explainable in biological and sociobiological or evolutionary terms as part of 'mate selection' and 'parental investment'" (150). This challenge to the "realness" of romantic love has been echoed in the media. The New York Times, for example, reported in April 2007 on a genetically coded "program for romantic attraction that makes people fixate on specific partners" (Wade), and in January 2008 Time magazine published a special issue on "The Science of Romance," subtitled "Why We Need Love to Survive," which included an article on why "Romance Is An Illusion" (Zimmer). This paper explores how recent works of fiction have responded to the highlighting of infidelity and the consequent challenge to romantic love in evolutionary psychological discourse. Since narratives about romantic love – both those ending with the lovers' union and those depicting the failure of love to deliver that union – have had a central role in the literary tradition, how do contemporary novels concerned with evolution negotiate the conflicting narratives of genetically programmed infidelity and all-transcending love? I hope to give some tentative answers to this question through my analysis of two novels, David Lodge's Thinks . . . and Jenny Davidson's Heredity. These texts address the conflict between the ideas of prehistoric infidelity and all-conquering love not only in their treatment of narrative content but also through the narrative structures they deploy. I show that Lodge's novel, while skeptical of romantic love, nevertheless enacts its infidelity plot through the structure of a romance plot. I contrast Lodge's text with Davidson's novel, which insistently rejects romance not only as an empirical phenomenon but also – and more significantly – as a narrative structure. In their 3 Perhaps t he most t ypical version of the evolut ionary infidelit y narrat ive in popular cult ure is the port rayal of male desire t oward young, slim , and big-breast ed women as genet ically programmed and t hus presumably irresist ible. For a more ext ensive discussion of the im pact of evolut ionary psychology on popular cult ure, see, for example, Lancast er (Trouble and " Sex"), Judit h Roof (Poetics), or Heat her Schell. own ways, both of these strategies point to a curious parallelism between the structures of the evolutionary infidelity narrative and the romance plot. While investigating the influence of the evolutionary infidelity narrative on contemporary fiction, I also want to advance another argument. Throughout the paper, I ask what fictional texts like Lodge's and Davidson's tell us about the structure and function of the evolutionary infidelity narrative as a cultural narrative. I suggest that the two texts subtly undermine the coherence of the evolutionary infidelity narrative and reveal its fundamental reliance on a constant repression of the risk of failure inherent in the reproductive imperative. While the structure of the romance plot serves as a means by which evolutionary psychological discourse negotiates this lurking threat, I trace how reproductive failure nevertheless surfaces in fiction that represents infidelity as an evolutionary adaptation. Promiscuous Plotting Before turning to the novels, however, I want to take a look at the evolutionary infidelity narrative as it appears in popular science. Popularization is the mechanism through which science becomes, to quote Gillian Beer, "part of the imaginative currency of the community" present in cultural products and processes that are not directly "about" science (179). Popular science, then, is more revealing about the cultural significance of scientific theories than professional literature. In particular, the assumptions, hopes, and anxieties surrounding scientific theories of gender and sexuality in culture at large arise from and respond to popular scientific accounts of evolution. It is precisely this cultural role of evolutionary ideas of infidelity that contemporary novels invoke and negotiate. The evolutionary infidelity narrative we encounter in popular science has two main storylines. The first (and the normative) storyline assumes that men are naturally promiscuous and women naturally monogamous. As a result, men are assumed to be cheating whenever they can while women are seen as searching for a reliable breadwinner endowed with good genes. We find this narrative in Matt Ridley's The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, a book whose structure, style, and argument represent the mainstream of popularized evolutionary psychology. The Red Queen is based on the premise that "there are, in fact, two human natures: male and female" (13) represented by "ardent, polygamist males and coy, faithful females" (178). While the text represents evolution as a process of constant change, gender differences emerge as curiously fixed, as modern men, like the Pleistocene hunter, strive to "use wealth, power, and violence as means to sexual ends" (206) and modern women, like the prehistoric woman, seek to "monopolize a man for life, gain his assistance in rearing the children, and perhaps even die with him" (218). While Ridley occasionally complicates these gendered scenarios – for instance, a woman might want to have an occasional affair "with one well-chosen male" (217) in possession of superior genes to boost her children's genetic makeup – these exceptions are subordinate to the general principle of dichotomous sexuality, as is suggested by the inclusion of female promiscuity in the chapter entitled, "Monogamy and the Nature of Women" (209). The second version of the infidelity narrative arose in the 1980s after genetic tests revealed that in many species seemingly monogamous females give birth to offspring by multiple fathers. 4 Accordingly, this alternative infidelity narrative portrays both sexes as seeking opportunities for what is known in technical literature as "extra-pair copulation." Olivia Judson's Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advise to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex is premised on this assumption. Written in the agony aunt format familiar from teen magazines, Judson's popular science book consists of letters from anthropomorphized animals – ranging from parasitic worms to mammals 4 This line of argument has been developed by feminist sociobiologist s, most famously Sarah Hrdy in The Woman that Never Evolved. – and Dr. Tatiana's answers to their sex-related worries. Judson's Dr. Tatiana rejects female monogamy outright as "nonsense" (10), declares that "in most species, girls are wanton" (9), and in her answer to the letter from "Crusading for Family Values in Louisiana" that serves as my epigraph, names monogamy as "one of the most deviant behaviors in biology" (153). This popular feminist assumption of "equal promiscuity" organizes the whole text, pitting fierce, competitive, and shamelessly promiscuous females against equally fierce, competitive, and shamelessly promiscuous males. Despite the obvious differences in their representation of female sexuality, these two storylines are nevertheless variants of the same narrative. Driven by the same antagonistic rationale—outwitting the other sex is the key to reproductive success—both Ridley's and Judson's texts portray the two sexes as trapped in an oppositional logic. Invoking the Red Queen episode in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, Ridley envisions the males and females of every species as participants in an evolutionary chess game, in which survival depends on the ability of competing genotypes to adapt to the ever-changing evolutionary environment and, most importantly, to the manipulative tricks developed by the other sex. This never-ending genetic sex war acquires capitalist and colonialist tones: "For a man, women are vehicles that can carry his genes into the next generation. For a woman, men are sources of a vital substance (sperm) that can turn their eggs into embryos. For each gender the other is a sought-after resource to be exploited" (Ridley 175). Similarly, Judson's furious females and males are caught in an "evolutionary arms race" (140), a biological cold war in which "greater success for her often means less success for him" (7). The reproductive imperative functions as the main narrative impetus in both versions of the narrative. That is, the evolutionary infidelity narrative is organized by the assumption that those traits that help organisms reproduce will survive to future generations and, conversely, that any surviving trait "must once have been (or must still be) the means to a reproductive end" since no "other currency counts in natural selection" (Ridley 243). This has two main outcomes. First, only events leading to reproduction can be structurally meaningful. Robert J. O'Hara argues that evolutionary history is always retrospective: for example, the "event" of an adaptation or speciation can be construed only when the process is already over and has been followed by further events. 5 In the same way, the reproductive logic that organizes the infidelity narrative is always a retrospective logic. If reproduction is indeed the only "currency" that "counts," as Ridley puts it, then acts that do not contribute to reproductive success cannot function as proper narrative events since they do not advance the progress of the evolutionary narrative – except perhaps as impediments that the master narrative needs to negotiate.6 Second, the eon-spanning macro level narrative of evolution—in this case, Ridley's endless chess game and Judson's perpetual arms race—comes to determine what H. Porter Abbott calls "a multitude of little stories of love and death" acted out by individual organisms (147). Placed within this antagonistic master narrative, all individual deeds, desires, and decisions become portrayed as opportunistic maneuvers by dichotomously gendered organisms, who, driven by their presumably selfish genes, are always only trying to outwit each other. Searching to secure posterity, the 5 See O'Hara's " Homage" (144–46) and " Telling" (153). This problemat ic is furt her complicat ed by t he fact t hat a species cannot funct ion as a proper narrat ive agent since it is an abstract ion construed from a const ant ly changing set of genet ic variation. See H. Port er Abbot t for analysis and discussion (148–51). 6 Judit h Roof ident ifies a similar logic in Freud's writings about t he development of sexual ident it y. For Freud, t he risk of perversion (homosexualit y) functions as t he narrative impediment t hat provides t he development of het erosexual ident ity wit h t he narrat ive t ension, climax, and denouement t hat are considered int rinsic t o a good st ory (Come xviii– xxii). reproductive narrative logic renders infidelity the preferred outcome of all the little plots assigned to individual organisms. The status of the reproductive narrative logic as a universal truth is assumed rather than explained in both texts. In The Red Queen, the differences between male and female sexual inclinations appear as frozen in time and without history. While Ridley argues that the differences between the "two human natures" (13) follow from the fact that Homo sapiens is a sexually (as opposed to asexually) reproducing species, this connection remains theoretical rather than temporal. In the same way, the connection the text claims to have located between human mating strategies and the evolutionary battle between host and parasite is analogous rather than strictly causal, and never quite explains the historical development from molecular level disease resistance to the particular shapes human desire takes. Instead, the Red Queen chess game appears as an a priori rule. This representation echoes Lancaster's observation that evolutionary psychology tends to assume a "mythic time of evolution" ("Sex" 117), a past that is everywhere but yet not anywhere specific, thereby turning nature into a "great timeless mirror" that reflects the value systems of today's communities (Trouble 96). This "timelessness" can also be seen as an effect of what Jay Clayton calls "genome time," a discourse of "perpetual present" that, through a set of textual metaphors associated with the genome, assumes unlimited possibilities of rewriting evolution, thereby blurring the distinction between the past, present, and future (33).7 Furthermore, Priscilla Wald suggests, this kind of genetic discourse follows the logic of future perfect ("what will have been" [698]), in which the "past, hypothesized on the basis of the present, grounds the prediction for the future" (700). Unlike Ridley, Judson imagines a point of origin for the ongoing adulterous arms race. Yet that point, too, is described in mythic terms that tend to freeze it into a curiously timeless occurrence in the distant past. Consider Dr. Tatiana's account of what she calls "the honeybee version of a chastity belt" (17), the phenomenon of the male honeybee leaving his genitals inside the queen after copulation in order to prevent the queen from mating with other males: Once upon a time, queens mated with only one male. Then a mutant queen appeared who mated with more than one. She was more successful at reproducing than her virtuous sisters, and the gene for multiple mating spread throughout the honeybee population. Then a male appeared who, by exploding, prevented the queen from mating again. Genes for exploding males spread throughout the population. In a counter-countermove, the queen evolved to block the male's advantage, either removing the plug herself or perhaps having it removed by the workers (this step would have happened swiftly, since any female who did not remove the plug would not have been able to lay eggs). Then males evolved their own counter-counter-countermove. And so on. (18–19) In this comic-mythical portrait of originary monogamy ("once upon a time"), the female acts the part of Eve, initiating the fall that marks the beginning of the ever-accelerating, never-ending reproductive battle, epitomized in the endless ("and so on") chain of counter-counter-countermoves. The appearance of the first promiscuous female thus emerges as the foundational moment that alters the concept of time and the very mode of being, transforming peaceful but monotonous stability into a competitive dynamic of constant change. Finally, the reproductive logic that organizes the evolutionary infidelity narrative renders adulterous behavior reproductive not only in the sense that it produces more of the same (more reproduction of the same genes), but also that it produces something entirely different that exceeds mere copying (new genetic combinations, useful adaptations). Beer observes that narrative as a structural pattern has a "tendency to align itself with a purposive explanation of the world it describes" (187; emphasis 7 See also Turner (55–60). added). Judith Roof takes a somewhat stronger position: "Narrative brings the assumption of certain values and cause-effect relationships with it. We assume, for example, that conflict will eventually produce something like a happy ending, knowledge, a victory, a product, a marriage, a child. This notion of production parallels our ideas of capitalist investment and payoff as well as our imagination of a heterosexual reproductive scenario" (Poetics 18). This is precisely what happens in the evolutionary infidelity narrative: infidelity is understood as initiating the evolution of something novel that reaches beyond what was before. In Judson's text, for example, "Conflicts of interest between males and females" produce "new weapon[s]" or "behavior[s]" that lead to the development of still more advanced weapons and still more effective behaviors, such as the skill to "manipulate and thwart" one's conspecifics (20). This productive logic is even more prominent in The Red Queen, as Ridley connects "the need to outwit and dupe" (192) in the evolutionary infidelity game with the evolution of human intelligence and maintains "that adultery may have played a big part in shaping human society" (219), thus positioning adulterous desires as the engine that drives the narrative of human evolution toward its climactic endpoint, the emergence of modern culture. 8 Narrative Masquerade Published in 2001, Lodge's novel Thinks . . . addresses the debates about the nature of consciousness that gained attention in the 1990s. Like many of Lodge's earlier campus novels, Thinks . . . is built on a developing relationship between two characters that represent opposing viewpoints on the debated issue. This juxtaposition of contradictory views through two protagonists enables the author to educate his readers about intellectual controversies, as Robert P. Winston and Timothy Marshall observe in the context of Lodge's 1988 novel Nice Work (4). In Thinks . . ., Lodge's protagonists embody C. P. Snow's famous "Two Culture" divide between the humanities and sciences. Director of the Centre for Cognitive Science at the imaginary University of Gloucester, Ralph Messenger is highly skeptical of both ends of the humanities: he constantly attacks traditional humanism (especially its belief in the "soul") while he simply "can't stand . . . postmodernists, or poststructuralists, or whatever they call themselves" (Lodge 228). A writer-in-residence at Ralph's university, Helen Reed represents the traditional humanist point of view, writing novels that, one of her reviewers comments, are "so old fashioned in form as to be almost experimental" (340). In the course of the novel, the two characters engage in an extended debate about the meaning, function, and development of human consciousness and emotions. While Lodge's novel focuses on theories of consciousness, evolutionary infidelity discourse provides it with a strong narrative undercurrent. As in Lodge's earlier fiction – in the aforementioned Nice Work, for example – the central characters of Thinks . . . not only debate theories but also negotiate the possibility of an intimate relationship. And, as in many of Lodge's novels, this potential relationship is adulterous, thus providing the narrative with a site for speculation on the evolutionary rationale for infidelity. Ralph's character functions as the main locus for these evolutionary psychological speculations. Throughout the book, Ralph, a married man with a number of previous extramarital affairs, tries to persuade the recently widowed and monogamous Helen to sleep with him. A chronic adulterer, Ralph reasons about his existence: "I think about sex, therefore I am" (293). He also repeatedly argues in 8 Infidelit y is, of course, only one explanat ion t hat has been given t o such key human development s as t he birt h of int elligence, language, or particular social st ruct ures. Ot her explanations refer, for example, t o t he int roduct ion of hunt ing (or in some feminist versions, gat hering) as a key event t hat led t o t he evolution of int elligence and language. However, t he productive logic behind t hese alternat ive models is t he same. They are also based on t he same reproduct ive imperat ive – t hat is, reproduct ion as t he only means t o post erit y – even t hough t his imperat ive does not t ake as ext reme a shape as it does in t he infidelit y narrative. terms of what things are "for, in evolutionary terms" (69). On the issue of adultery, he concludes: "addicted to sex, men are biologically programmed to want as much sex as they can get with as many women as they can get . . . only culture constrains our urge to copulate promiscuously" (79). This view of adultery as arising from evolutionary biology is reflected in other characters, most importantly in Ralph's wife, Carrie, who at one point in the text views female bodies as a set of "attribute[s]" that "got selected" (207), and – Ralph reports to Helen – "knows most men are not one hundred per cent faithful to their wives" (174). Carrie's portrait of male-female relationships is merely a variant of the battle of the sexes outlined in Ridley, Judson, and others: "Whenever you have a situation where the men have power and the women have youth and beauty, there's a trade-off. The men exploit their power to get sex, and the women exploit their looks to get promotion, or good grades, or just a good time" (206). The view of infidelity as based on natural laws is further echoed in the number of adulterous relationships the novel introduces, including that between Carrie and a family friend, Nicholas Beck, and the one that had taken place between Helen's late husband, Martin, and one of her current students at Gloucester. What is interesting about Lodge's novel is that it articulates these evolutionary psychological arguments for a biological basis of adultery through the narrative structure of romance. In A Natural History of the Romance Novel, Pamela Regis identifies eight elements that are integral to any romance novel: definition of society (corrupt in the beginning but reformed by the lovers' union), the meeting between the heroine and hero, the barrier that prevents the union, attraction between the lovers, declaration of love (by both parties though not necessarily simultaneously), point of ritual death (the moment when the desired union seems absolutely impossible), recognition of love (again, by both), and betrothal. According to Regis, these eight elements can occur in any order (30–31), constituting, as Eric Murphy Selinger puts it, a kind of "neoclassical aesthetic" that "returns to first principles" (312). While Regis focuses on the romance novel rather than romantic narrative in general, most of the elements she identifies are familiar from popular culture – especially from romantic comedies and television series, the latter of which recast them as an endlessly repeated pattern. These elements, then, reflect and reproduce popular ideas of what constitutes true love and what pattern (narrative structure) that love should follow. Lodge's novel appropriates several of these elements. The actual courtship plot opens with the meeting of Helen and Ralph at a dinner party during which both characters feel instant (though still unacknowledged) attraction to each other. The two begin their professional and intellectual relationship – they discuss consciousness over lunch and Ralph shows the Centre to Helen – and in due course Ralph declares his (not love but) lust. The barrier in the relationship is Helen's feeling that an illicit affair with Ralph would offend her late husband's memory. The point of ritual death is reached when Helen finds out that her husband had been sexually involved with other women during their marriage. At this point, adultery appears as absolutely condemnable and repulsive to her. The barrier is lifted when Helen discovers that Carrie, too, is involved in an extramarital affair. This is followed by Helen's declaration (again, of lust rather than love). While the novel's plot obviously lacks a betrothal—it is, after all, a story about adultery—these narrative elements associated with the romantic tradition establish a narrative momentum that is immediately recognizable. The tension, evocation of impediments, and eventual climax and denouement that these elements produce resonate with our ideas of a romance plot. Yet by replacing a discourse of love with a discourse of lust and the infinite monogamous union with a finite affair, the infidelity narrative in Lodge's novel appropriates – one might even say masquerades as – romance rather than simply aligns itself with it. Lodge's use of two characters that represent opposing viewpoints (on adultery as well as other issues) might suggest a turn toward an intellectual compromise at the end. This consolidation, however, never quite materializes. Even though the novel ends with Ralph's (false) cancer scare that, we learn, makes him "less assertive, more subdued, more middle-aged" and results in his "los[ing] his reputation for chasing women at conferences" (340), this narrative conclusion does not question the evolutionary rationale for adultery outlined earlier in the text. It merely suggests that the adaptation in question (infidelity) may have become maladaptive in modern life and needs to be subjected to self-imposed control – that is, it does not suggest that the adaptation would not exist. This interpretation is supported by the way in which the characters' intellectual exchanges are intertwined with the courtship plot. Initially against adultery and resistant to Ralph's persuasions, Helen gradually adopts elements from his neo-Darwinian discourse. Crucially, Helen's intellectual move toward Ralph's viewpoint coincides with her becoming Ralph's lover. For example, after exchanging a tentative kiss with Ralph in the backyard of his country cottage while his wife and children are waiting inside, Helen ponders on her and Ralph's behavior in terms that connect adulterous deception with human evolution: "We did not betray to the others what had happened by so much as the flicker of an eyelid or slightest tremor of the voice. How adept at deception we human beings are, how easily it comes to us. Did we acquire that ability with self-consciousness?" (105). In the same way, she uses words like "the sexual instinct" (223) and, recalling their previous sexual encounter, imagines Ralph as "a Stone Age man taking his mate, short and sharp" out in the field (261). The significance of Helen's sexual and intellectual yielding to Ralph is further underlined by the fact that this double move coincides with her awakening to the factuality of adultery as she discovers her late husband's affair. While the intellectual differences between Ralph and Helen are never quite resolved – Helen retains the core of her humanist views after leaving Gloucester – the intertwining of courtship and intellectual debate on the level of narrative structure suggests that there is a profound if unarticulated agreement between the characters. In their discussion of Nice Work, Winston and Marshall observe that while the novel's lovers are separated at the end, "the intellectual coupling of Robyn Penrose and Vic Wilcox is every bit as 'real' as their sexual adventure in Frankfurt" (10). In Thinks . . ., this parallel appropriation of courtship narrative and the novel of ideas results in a similar intellectual and sexual coupling. As a result, the two levels on which the evolutionary infidelity narrative is invoked – the intellectual exchanges between the characters and the courtship acted out by them – appear as if reaffirming each other. It is as if by yielding sexually Helen also accepts Ralph's claims about the genetic basis of adultery. In this way, Lodge's novel subtly yet powerfully endorses evolutionary psychological discourse on adultery. Structural Resistance Davidson's Heredity shares several similarities with Lodge's Thinks . . . . Like Lodge's novel, Heredity refers to developments within the sciences in the 1990s. As in Lodge's text, evolutionary psychology appears as a significant part of the discursive framework within which the novel's sexual relationships are portrayed. In terms of plot, Heredity tells the story of a young American woman, Elizabeth Mann, who accepts the job of the London correspondent for an American budget travel guide. In London, Elizabeth meets Gideon Streetcar, a gynecologist and fertility specialist who idolizes her father, the famous Dr. Mann of Yale. Unlike Lodge's monogamous Helen, by page fifteen Elizabeth has initiated an adulterous affair with the married Gideon, and the rest of the novel portrays—often in blunt detail—a series of sexual encounters between the two characters. This narrative of Gideon and Elizabeth's illicit affair is paralleled by a historical narrative set in eighteenth-century London. Early in the novel, Elizabeth accidentally discovers the journals of Mary Wild, wife of Jonathan Wild, the notorious eighteenth-century criminal and self-acclaimed "Thief-Taker General of Great Britain and Ireland" (39). In the journals Mary Wild records her life first as Jonathan Wild's housekeeper, then as his wife, and finally as his son's lover. Rather than a simple narrative of an adulterous relationship, then, Heredity is an account of Elizabeth's obsessive search for the truth about Jonathan Wild who – unlike Gideon with his asthma inhaler and low sperm count – stands for the mythic figure of the brutish but sexually irresistible evolutionary alpha male. This obsession culminates in Elizabeth's determination to give birth to Jonathan Wild's clone. Elizabeth persuades Gideon to assist her, but desperate for a child and knowing that the procedure is still technically unfeasible, Gideon implants eggs carrying both Wild's and his own DNA. The novel ends with Elizabeth's realization that she is pregnant with Gideon's child instead of Wild's clone. Evolutionary psychological discourse enters the text through Gideon and Elizabeth's dialogue and Elizabeth's first-person account of the novel's events. Like Ralph in Thinks . . ., Gideon delivers evolutionary psychological dictums about men and women's innate desires. Evoking the role of reproduction in the evolutionary narrative, Gideon states, for example, that every woman has a "right to pass on her genetic material to her offspring, to perpetuate the family line in her descendants." In the same way, he echoes the evolutionary understanding of relatedness as a matter of genetic inheritance and refuses to consider adoption as a way to build a family: "You think I'd be willing to raise a child who doesn't carry my genes? I can't afford it. Generations of dead Jews, all depending on me to propagate. I'd do anything for a child of my own. Anything." He projects this "pull of heredity" (27) not only on his inherited membership in an ethnic and religious minority (the Jewish expatriates in the UK) but also on the evolutionary reproductive imperative itself, asserting that "Evolutionary biology has shown pretty conclusively why it is that stepfathers kill their children at a higher rate than natural fathers" (218). At several points in the text, Elizabeth adopts similar discourse. After their first sexual encounter in Gideon's office, for example, she likens herself and Gideon to "wolves on the Discovery Channel" (14), and elsewhere she fluently employs technical terms like "extra-pair paternity" (126). If Gideon's view of gender differences is in many ways conservative – despite his extramarital pursuits he seems to idealize women – Elizabeth acts out the feminist version of the evolutionary infidelity narrative we encountered in Judson's popular science. She not only initiates the adulterous affair with Gideon but also has casual sex with other men when occasion permits. The historical subplot reflects this representation of female sexual initiative: like Elizabeth, Mary Wild actively proceeds to seduce the then-married Jonathan Wild, and later initiates the adulterous relationship with Wild's son. Moreover, both characters seem to be driven by uncontrollable sexual urges: Elizabeth is often "in a state of acute sexual arousal" (214) and decides to "take what [she] can get" (215). Likewise, on first meeting Jonathan Wild, Mary Wild "could hardly take [her] eyes off the man, and . . . thought [she'd] need little persuading to consent even to [her] own ruin" (46). Furthermore, Elizabeth and Gideon's affair is always more about lust than love. Right before seducing Gideon, for example, Elizabeth notes that she doesn't "like him much" (10), and later she names relationship as "a word I hate" (108). Even her reluctant admission that she might love Gideon ("I guess so . . . Yes.") later in the novel is never really substantiated by anything she does, says to Gideon, or reports to the reader (189). Despite these explicit and implicit references to evolutionary psychological discourse, I would argue that Heredity does not advocate a sociobiological view of infidelity. First, Elizabeth's attitude toward evolutionary explanations of gender and sexuality is ambiguous at best, as her listing of Gray's Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus as one of "the more offensive classics of the self-help movement" suggests (112). She also dismisses Robert Wilson's The Moral Animal – a well-known work of evolutionary psychology – as "reactionary polemic" (208). Second, while the novel marginalizes romantic discourse, it also rejects the romance plot so central to Lodge's novel. Unlike Thinks . . ., Heredity lacks all of the key elements that Regis identifies in the popular romance novel. There is no narrative arc in Elizabeth and Gideon's relationship: their sexual encounters appear as a linear sequence that lacks development and thus tension, climax, or denouement. There is no structurally significant impediment in the relationship either. Since the affair is not built primarily on love but lust, Gideon's marriage does not represent what Regis calls a barrier. Similarly, Elizabeth and Gideon's attraction to each other is reduced in significance by the fact that both have previously been engaged in other similar relationships, and there is no climactic scene of recognition or declaration. Moreover, the element of recognition has been displaced into the female Bildungs narrative – Elizabeth's search for direction in life – that emerges from the structural and thematic intertwining of the modern and historical plots through Elizabeth's obsessive interest in Jonathan Wild. This Bildungs narrative, however, differs significantly from the conventional Bildungs narrative, since Davidson does not use romantic love as a life lesson that contributes to the main character's development as many Bildungs narratives do. In fact, we do not even recognize the novel as a Bildungs narrative until the very end. In a further act of displacement, this educative function is projected onto the cloning plot. It is Gideon's professional betrayal in their joint cloning project and Elizabeth's own false beliefs about genetics that lead to her subsequent pregnancy, forcing her to face her situation and, we assume, reject the fantasy world she has invented. Read in the context of Lodge's narrative strategies, Davidson's refusal to rely on the narrative dynamic of the romance plot is also a refusal to let the evolutionary infidelity narrative fully develop and gain textual control through the structures of romance. In this way, Heredity subtly questions the selfevidence of the reproductive imperative as the logic driving evolutionary change and organizing narrative. This structural resistance is further supported by the novel's deployment of infertility imagery. Both Gideon and Elizabeth's father are infertility experts, and many of the characters are unlikely to reproduce without technological assistance: Gideon's wife Miranda is unable to conceive, Gideon has a low sperm count, his mother Clara had trouble getting pregnant, and Jonathan Wild's first wife dies in childbirth when finally pregnant. Furthermore, Elizabeth's ambiguous relationship with her father and her determination to have "a child that would have nothing of myself in it" suggests that the title Heredity refers as much to cultural and social forms of relatedness as to genetic inheritance (269). Through its rejection of the romance plot and its evocation of infertility imagery, Davidson's novel parodies the exclusive focus on reproduction in the evolutionary infidelity narrative. By doing this, the text also suggests that the reproductive logic underlying the evolutionary infidelity narrative relies on a rather awkward precondition: the evolutionary narrative can proceed only if reproduction succeeds. By thematizing infertility, the novel implies that the evolutionary infidelity narrative depends on a constant denial of the risk of reproductive failure. Interestingly, Davidson's novel is not alone in articulating such cultural anxieties about futurity. Simon Mawer's Mendel's Dwarf, for instance, evokes infidelity, infertility, and evolutionary discourse, and Alison Anderson's Darwin's Wink makes explicit references to the understanding of infertility as a fatal failure in the Darwinian paradigm. This concern about reproduction and posterity is also evoked in Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex, which portrays the ethnic and genetic history of Cal Stephanides, the novel's narrator. Rendered infertile by the genetic mutation that produced his intersex condition, Cal describes himself in linguistic terms as "the final clause in a periodic sentence" that is the genetic history of his family (22). If the evolutionary narrative is based on reproduction, these texts suggest, infertility signifies the end of all narrative. Negotiating Failure In "Homosexuality and Narrative," Dennis W. Allen analyzes the inherent precariousness of what he calls the narrative of heterosexuality. Using Homi Bhabha's notion of the nation as produced and maintained through two narrative modes, the pedagogical and the performative, Allen suggests that our understanding of the primacy of heterosexuality is produced through a similar "double narrative movement" (615). While the performative narrative of heterosexuality includes the constant repetition of everyday acts and utterances, the pedagogical master narrative has two alternative storylines that both insist on a connection between heterosexuality and reproduction and, by extension, between heterosexuality and the origins of human existence: Understood in religious terms, heterosexuality is seen as the literal originary moments of creation in the Garden of Eden and of the fall that inaugurated sexual reproduction (the resulting status of homosexuality then being summarized by the catchphrase, "God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve"). Alternatively, when understood "scientifically," heterosexuality is seen as indistinguishable from a transcendentally conceived sexual biology, and its originary status is displaced from a particular "historical" moment into an image of temporality itself: the infinite regress of the generations. (616) Hiding the precariousness of its central claims – the falsely assumed connection between all heterosexual activities and reproduction, for example – behind the powerful image of "the infinite regress of the generations," the evolutionary narrative naturalizes a particular set of sexual practices. By doing this it reinforces what Lee Edelman has called "reproductive futurism," a logic that posits reproduction as the single gateway to posterity (2). In this sense, evolution – even when concerned with the past – is always a discourse about the possibility of a future. According to Allen, what makes the pedagogical narrative of heterosexuality unstable is that "unlike national narratives, whose originary moment(s) are historical, its emphasis on reproduction, at least in the scientific version of this narrative, means that it must be exemplified, endlessly repeated, by individual performance" (618–19) failures of which "produce . . . conceptual instability" (619). So when Ridley writes in The Red Queen that women are men's "means to genetic eternity," the neverending future he evokes is essentially an illusion (244). I suggested above that the infertility imagery in Davidson's Heredity can be read as symptomatic of this inherent precariousness of the evolutionary narrative in general and the evolutionary infidelity narrative in particular. Infertility imagery is, however, practically absent in Lodge's Thinks . . . which, in fact, does not seem to be at all concerned with reproduction (all the main characters are in their forties or fifties). 9 If Lodge's text is indeed a key example of a fictional rendition of the evolutionary infidelity narrative, how does it negotiate the risk of reproductive failure inherent in that narrative? I would suggest that the romance plot that Lodge's novel appropriates can be seen as a means of insisting on narrative continuity against the risk of discontinuity inherent in the reproductive imperative. Feminist critics have long argued that the romance plot – whether in popular romance novels, romantic comedies, or female Bildungs narratives ending in marriage – privileges narrative closure.10 While working from diverse theoretical positions, such feminist scholars as Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Teresa de Lauretis, and Roof have suggested that the privileging of closure reproduces the implicit logic by which gender relations are organized. As a narrative structure concerned with closure, the romance plot tends to yield a sense of continuity and futurity. When evoked in evolutionary discourse, the romance plot helps guarantee symbolic reproduction amid the threat of reproductive failure. The narrative pull produced by Lodge's appropriation of the romance plot camouflages any doubt about the ability of the infidelity narrative to produce more narrative. Through association with the productive logic of romance, the evolutionary infidelity narrative appears as always moving on, thereby exemplifying what Stephanie S. Turner describes in 9 This of course is not unusual in evolut ionary psychology, which typically argues that our t rait s and behaviors dat e back t o t he Pleist ocene era and t herefore might not be adaptive any longer. Pot t s and Short 's port rayal of modern humans as " lost in a concret e jungle" quot ed on t he first page of t his essay is an illust rative (if overly melodramat ic) example of t his t rend. 10 See Janice Radway's or Tania M odleski's works for pioneering analyses of t he popular romance novel, and Rosalind Gill and Elena Herdieckerhoff for a discussion of "chick lit" romances. See Rachel Blau DuPlessis on t went iet h-cent ury women writ ers' at t empt s t o break with patriarchal narrat ive politics. See Susan Winnet t or Teresa de Lauretis for a feminist psychoanalytic reading of narrat ive dynamics, and M argaret Homans or Rut h Page for a discussion of t he complexity of t he connection bet ween narrat ive and ideology. the context of popular extinction narratives as the need to do "anything to keep the story going," even when "our non-existence as a species is inevitable" (76). Thus, in a kind of self-containing loop, the productive logic of romance suggests a reproduction of cultural order, while that order – imagined as a strictly gendered economy of prehistoric adulterous desires – signifies what Roof calls "the promise of more narrative" (Come 8). In this sense a child and another story are not just alternative narrative endings but are embedded in and defined through each other. This does not mean, of course, that the romance plot fully suppresses the threat of reproductive failure. No narrative structure holds such power. Nor does the absence of infertility imagery directly follow from the presence of the romance plot (or vice versa), since the presence or absence of a textual feature is always a decision made, consciously or unconsciously, by the author. However, the romance plot does produce a feeling of narrative momentum that coincides with cultural ideas of how stories should go. As a result, the fact that the text does not necessarily reward adulterous behavior with reproductive success, contrary to the evolutionary psychological claims it invokes, seems insignificant. In other words, the productive pull of the romance plot makes reproductive failure seem hardly like a failure. Narrative Mutations In his introduction to One Culture, the 1987 landmark collection of essays on science and literature, George Levine argues that science and literature do not occupy separate discursive fields but rather "draw mutually on one culture, from the same sources," feeding again back into each other (7). Science "percolates through our imaginations," Levine writes: "Our sense of the constitution of matter may be no more up to date than our high school science, our understanding of DNA shadowy, but our vocabularies are thick with the languages of science" (8). The task of the literary critic, then, is to trace these interactions between scientific and literary discourses, to capture and dissect "the emergence of a rhetorical and visual vocabulary that inflects public understanding of science," as Priscilla Wald and Jay Clayton put it (ix). This task is a complex one, since this new vocabulary is often produced at multiple textual sites. As Beer observes, the "implications of scientific ideas may manifest themselves in narrative organizations. They may be borne in the fleeting reference more often than in the expository statement, condensed as metaphors or skeined out as story, alive as joke in the discordances between diverse discursive registers" (186). In order to capture this complexity, a critical analysis of popular evolutionary discourse needs to trace faint echoes of technical tongue, unorthodox uses of scientific metaphor, as well as strategic mutations of narrative form. This paper has attempted such a reading of the infidelity narrative, one of the central narratives in evolutionary psychology. I have suggested that literary works have evoked this narrative in their vocabularies, creating characters that repeat evolutionary psychological axioms, like Gideon in Davidson's Heredity or Ralph, Carrie, and to some extent Helen in Lodge's Thinks . . . . The evolutionary infidelity narrative is also visible in the novels' framing of fundamental questions about human existence. The texts ask, for instance, if the reproductive imperative frees us from concerns about morality: if something is in our nature, can it be wrong? Most importantly, however, the evolutionary infidelity narrative is implicated in the narrative structure, so that a text's attitude toward evolutionary psychological discourse takes shape through the narrative structure it employs. Thus Lodge's appropriation and Davidson's rejection of the romance plot align the two texts, respectively, with endorsement and critique of evolutionary psychology. Read side by side, the two texts point to an inherent weakness in the evolutionary infidelity narrative as a narrative: the story can go on only if reproduction succeeds. In radically different ways, then, the two texts show how the romance plot functions as a means to symbolic reproduction and thus as a claim to futurity. What are the consequences of this simultaneous rejection of romantic discourse and appropriation of the romance plot for fictional narratives? Has the evolutionary infidelity narrative devoured romance? It is true that evolutionary psychology has had a considerable impact on popular discourses on romantic relationships, insisting that promiscuity and infidelity are genetically-coded traits, as we saw in Ridley's and Judson's texts. Yet literary representations of the clash between romantic beliefs and the evolutionary psychological rejection of those beliefs are far from monolithic and unambiguous. The romance plot may serve a strategic purpose in evolutionary accounts of infidelity, but evolutionary psychological discourse can hardly contain or fully control the narrative structures it appropriates. The romance plot, like any literary form, is open to rewriting and appropriation, yet it is also unruly and unpredictable. Writing about the changes in romantic discourse in the past decades, Lynne Pearce and Jackie Stacey suggest that "the continued success of romance as a cultural institution might be seen to depend, in large part, on its ability to change. To invoke the metaphor of the virus, it is its capacity for mutation which has enabled romance to survive" (12). The same could be said about the romance plot as a narrative structure. What we are witnessing in evolutionary psychological discourse on infidelity and in Lodge's and Davidson's deployment of that discourse could be described as a mutation of the structure of romance – a particularly apt metaphor considering the evolutionary context. Like genetic inheritance, the romance plot has proved amazingly flexible, adapting to new conditions and environments. And as with genetic mutation, it is difficult to predict what shape the romance plot will next take and what its cultural function may turn out to be. Although seemingly irreconcilable with evolutionary psychological discourse on infidelity, the mutation of the romance plot that this essay has traced provides one means by which the evolutionary narrative keeps going. Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter. 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