Popular books applying Darwinian logic to everything from religion to dating to dealmaking may fly off the shelves, but attempts to apply evolutionary theory to literary analysis tend to make novelists, English professors and other humanist types break out in hives.

So I was interested to receive a copy of William Flesch’s new book, “Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction” (Harvard University Press), blurbed by no less stout a guardian of the humanistic tradition than Harold Bloom as a “fresh account of the workings of high literature.”

Most so-called literary Darwinists — who are usually scientists first, and students of literature second (and often quite superficially) — argue that narrative evolved because it helps us to rehearse how we might behave in various hypothetic situations, or because it expands our capacity for human sympathy, a version of Matthew Arnold’s “sweetness and light.” Flesch, an English professor at Brandeis who cites E.O. Wilson and Robert Trivers as fluently as “Richard III” and “The Maltese Falcon,” asks a deeper question: Just why are human beings universally capable of deep absorption in narratives about people who are made up, or whose fates are so irrelevant to ours that they might as well be? (At this point, who among us can be sure that Britney Spears actually exists?) Literature — like movies and soap operas and gossip — may instruct, but we gobble it up because it delights.



Our pleasure in narrative, in Flesch’s account, has a double edge. On the one hand, we enjoy seeing bad guys — “defectors” or “cheaters,” in the jargon of evolutionary psychology — punished. But we do this not out of sadism, but out of an ingrained, evolved desire to affirm our shared moral community and to shore up the group. (Flesch cites a lot of classic research from game theory to back up this point, and digs into the decades-long debate over the evolution of altruism; among other things, his book is a challenge to Richard Dawkins’s idea of the selfish gene.) But equally powerful is our desire to make sure that those who observe wrongdoing do in fact punish it, often at a great cost to themselves. These are what Flesch calls “altruistic punishers,” and he counts among their numbers everyone from Moses, Achilles, Odysseus, Quixote, “many Shakespearean heroes,” Emma Woodhouse, Daniel Deronda, most of Henry James’s heroines, Ahab and Ishmael to “almost any modern detective, and almost any modern superhero.” We “instinctively approve of what altruistic punishers do,” Flesch writes, and, thanks to our evolved capacity to track complex social relationships and monitor reputations, we are “constituted to observe what they do with some attention.” Narrative, he argues, is both about the monitoring of cheaters and punishers, and a reenactment of that monitoring.

That summary doesn’t do justice to the complexity and texture of Flesch’s arguments. And it leaves out the comeuppance, so to speak, that Flesch himself aims to deliver to some on the other side of the science-humanities divide. While his book is clearly written for skeptical colleagues in literature departments, Flesch also scolds those more reductionist evolutionary thinkers who have taken an interest in “explaining” literature but assume that it cannot possibly be “as subtle and deep as the best literary criticism takes it to be.” “Comeuppance” is hardly an easy read, but readers from both of the two cultures would do well to take a look.