The Survival of the Unfit - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

The Survival of the Unfit

Wai Chee Dimock

Is there room for weaklings in Darwin’s theory of evolution? The “survival of the
fittest”–that muscular phrase taken from Herbert Spencer–would seem to suggest
non. A more nuanced and counterintuitive picture emerges, Tuttavia, when fitness is
remapped: as a form of mutuality between the human and the nonhuman, Piuttosto
than an exclusively human attribute vested in a single individual. I explore that pos-
sibility in the contemporary novel, a genre evolving steadily away from its Victorian
antecedent, and circling back to the epic to reclaim an elemental realism, alert to the
reparative as well as destructive forces of the nonhuman world. In Barbara King-
solver’s The Poisonwood Bible and Richard Powers’s The Overstory, these non-
human forces turn the novel into a shelter for disabled characters, granting them a
testing ground and a future all the more vital for being uncertain.

I n the fifth (1869) edition of On the Origin of Species, Darwin added a subti-

tle, “The Survival of the Fittest,” to his pivotal Chapter 4, “Natural Selec-
tion.” Taken from Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Biology (1864), this muscu-
lar phrase gives the impression that evolution is also a muscular reflex, a straight
path from effortless strength to effortless victory. Featuring sure winners chasing
superlatives, there is no surprise in its outcome. Those who are the fittest–most
equipped to survive–survive.

It is a ringing tautology, but there would have been no need for Origin if things
were that simple. Complications arise right away, for evolution does not seem to
be a straight path for anyone, not even those who win out. Survival is chancy, cir-
cuitous, the effect of complex adaptation, and by no means guaranteed. It does
not seem to be an autonomous process, and it is never without its ugly twin. Dar-
win insists there can be no survivals without a matching number of extinctions, UN
volatile endgame making evolution not the self-evident triumph of those destined
to come out on top, but endlessly fluctuating, with winners and losers continually
recalibrated, their fates tangled up to the end.

That tangled fate is clearly at play in a section of Chapter 4 titled “Extinction
Caused by Natural Selection.” Here Darwin says: “as new forms are produced,
unless we admit that specific forms can go on indefinitely increasing in number,
many old forms must become extinct.”1 Extinction is a correlated development,
the system-wide housekeeping done by a planet with finite resources. It is integral

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to the workings of any ecosystem, indeed the only thing we can count on. Darwin
returns to it, with great eloquence, in the penultimate paragraph of On the Origin
of Species:

Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit
its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will
transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for the manner in which all or-
ganic beings are grouped, show that the greater number of species in each genus, E
all species in many genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct.2

In this and scores of other similarly haunting passages, Darwin depicts the
future as a closed door to most of Earth’s inhabitants. He could not have known
about the mass extinctions of the twenty-first century, but he would have been un-
surprised–if also horrified–by the May 2019 UN report predicting that one mil-
lion species will go extinct within the next decades.3 Writing before the impact
of human behavior on the climate was understood, Darwin seems nonetheless to
have anticipated its stark reality. So he is with us again today, speaking with eerie
prescience not of the fossil records from the distant past, but the daily headlines
from our immediate present. Ancora, things are not altogether hopeless. What Dar-
win says, after all, is that “not one living species will transmit its unaltered like-
ness to a distant futurity.” Unaltered likeness, it seems, is the problem. It is going
nowhere. For those that manage to evolve and adapt, a path to the future is not out
of the question.

What might this stern but sometimes forgiving prophet have to tell us about
the fate of the novel, looking ahead to a century of great turmoil, with outsized
unknowns greeting us at every turn? Literary scholars Gillian Beer and George
Levine have alerted us to the many overlaps between Darwinian evolution and
narrative fiction.4 Adam Gopnik points out that this naturalist writes like a nov-
elist, raising the possibility that literary observations about humans might have
something in common with scientific observations about the nonhuman world.5
I will be exploring the contemporary novel through this lens, drawing especial-
ly on Darwin’s insight that survivals and extinctions are correlated and continu-
ally evolving, system-wide events with cascading effects. These cascading effects
cast an interesting light on the past and future forms of the novel as it takes note
of the fate of adjacent forms and adapts accordingly, with not always predictable
outcomes.

I n an unintentionally prescient moment in Origin, Darwin writes: in “the case

of a country undergoing some slight physical change, for instance, of climate,
some species will probably become extinct” right away. But “from what we
have seen of the intimate and complex manner in which” all life is “bound to-
gether,” we may predict that “any change in the numerical proportions of the in-

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150 (1) Winter 2021Wai Chee Dimock

abitanti, independently of the change of climate itself, would seriously affect the
others.”6

Darwin is speaking, Ovviamente, only of biological species. Tuttavia, biology for
him is also a conceptual template, a way to think about evolving forms. Languag-
es, for instance, are much like biological species in their nested classifications,
their correlated flourishing and decline, as he takes pains to emphasize in The De-
scent of Man (1871):

Languages, like organic beings, can be classed in groups under groups, and they can be
classed either naturally by descent, or artificially by other characters. Dominant lan-
guages and dialects spread widely, and lead to the gradual extinction of other tongues.
A language, like a species, once extinct, never, as Sir. C. Lyell remarks, reappears. IL
same language never has two birth-places.7

So far, a strict zero-sum game is in play in both the biological and linguistic
realms. Yet, while the extinction of languages is well-known and well-document-
ed, the extinction (or not) of other classes of linguistic objects–for instance, IL
“artificial” class called the novel, or the epic–is not so clear-cut. How fixed and
long-lasting are these genres? Are they here for good, or are they mutable, ephem-
eral? And is there a built-in end date to these narrative forms, making extinction
inevitable at some point? By his own example, Darwin seems to suggest that there
is considerable fluidity here, evidenced by the low-probability survival of certain
linguistic objects that, on the face of it, might not seem the fittest.

Darwin’s own “Abstract” (his name for On the Origin of Species) is an example
of such a low-probability survivor. He had not meant to publish it in this guise.
But as the full treatise “will take me many more years to complete,” and as “my
health is far from strong,” he had been urged by geologist Charles Lyell and bota-
nist Joseph Hooker to get it out even in an “imperfect” form, especially since an-
other naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, “who is now studying the natural history
of the Malay archipelago, has arrived at almost exactly the same general conclu-
sions that I have on the origin of species.”8

Published under duress, the resulting volume is hardly optimized for survival.
Fortunately, unlike languages that go extinct thanks to a strict zero-sum game, his
own linguistic creation seems subject to a different calculus. Darwin is not with-
out hope that it would have a future, though arrived at through a peculiar process:
“I can here give only the general conclusions at which I have arrived, with a few
facts in illustration, but which, I hope, in most cases will suffice. No one can feel
more sensible than I do of the necessity of hereafter publishing in detail all the
facts, with references, on which my conclusions have been grounded; and I hope
in a future work to do this.”9

The existing weakness of Origin turns out to justify its bid for a future. Rushed
into print by the actions of others–including the unwelcome but crucial input of

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesThe Survival of the Unfit

Wallace–it adapts by claiming time as a medium of remediation. Not entirely fit
at the moment, it promises to do better the next time around. Second try is an evo-
lutionary necessity. Variants are a must, since the only way Origin could survive is
as a long-term project, a work-in-progress kept afloat by future editions, with gaps
to be filled, new information to be added, and shaky points to be shored up. IL
survivors here do not have to be the fittest, for the unfit, with ongoing help, can
sometimes beat the odds and gain traction over time. Such assisted outcomes turn
the zero-sum game into a statistical unknown, with the future anyone’s guess.

I t is this statistical unknown that I would like to bring to bear on Mikhail

Bakhtin’s account of the rise of the novel, a zero-sum game correlated with
the demise of the epic. We come upon the epic “when it’s already complete-
ly finished, a congealed and half-moribund genre,” Bakhtin says. Because “it is
walled off from all subsequent times, the epic past is absolute and complete. È
as closed as a circle. Inside it everything is finished, already over. There is no place
in the epic world for any openendedness, indecision, indeterminacy. There are no
glimpses in it through which we glimpse the future.”10

Fans of “epic” science-fiction novels, movies, TV shows, and video games
would have no idea what Bakhtin is talking about. This supposedly extinct genre is
not behaving like one. Morphing from noun to adjective, it is everywhere, show-
ing up on every platform and in every shape and size, a variant-rich survivor with
a future stretching far into the distance. Taken apart and repurposed in countless
ways, it is versatile and tenacious, responsive to crises thanks to its continual up-
dating. At once the most ancient and most recent, it is able to offer glimpses of
monstrous futures, elided or censored in other genres but given an airing here, COME
befits an old-timer schooled by nonhuman catastrophes from the first.

In The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), Amitav
Ghosh pays tribute to the “awareness of nonhuman agency” in ancient epics, even
as he takes a swipe at what he imagines to be the dominant form of the contempo-
rary novel.11 According to him, elemental forces and off-scale events have no place
in this hidebound genre, an absence especially noticeable in the “serious fiction”
featured in The New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books. E-
changed since Victorian times, these literary dinosaurs continue to assert the sta-
bility of the human world even when that stability is no longer tenable, banning
anything cataclysmic:

To introduce such happenings into a novel is in fact to court eviction from the man-
sion in which serious fiction has long been in residence; it is to risk banishment to
the humbler dwellings that surround the manor house–those generic outhouses that
were once known by names such as the gothic, the romance or the melodrama, E
have now come to be called fantasy, horror, and science fiction.12

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150 (1) Winter 2021Wai Chee Dimock

Like Bakhtin, Ghosh seems to be describing an object deliberately ossified for
the sake of argument. This disaster-averse form of the novel has ceased to be the
dominant form some time ago, as writers as different as Norman Mailer, Toni
Morrison, and Don DeLillo could have attested. More recently, the novels of Mar-
garet Atwood, Ian McEwan, and Cormac McCarthy show just how far catastro-
phes have been integrated into our experience of the everyday: as a realism ren-
dered epic by the Anthropocene, a realism of the nonhuman returning with a ven-
geance as the superhuman.

In a recent interview with David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable
Terra, Ghosh conceded that “the ground had shifted,” that the hidebound nov-
el was finally changing, citing Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) as a “major
turning point–not just because it is a great book, which it is, but because it was
taken seriously by the literary mainstream.”13 The house of fiction is a different
house when a novel about trees can win the Pulitzer Prize. Lest we forget the bad
old days, Ghosh offered Barbara Kingsolver as a cautionary tale, an author whose
reputation had suffered because her nonhuman subjects–say, monarch butter-
flies in Flight Behavior–had always been dismissed as a fringe concern.

Kingsolver herself, in her New York Times review of The Overstory, seems to echo
this point. Titled “The Heroes of This Novel Are Centuries Old and 300 Feet Tall,"
the review begins with a taunt to the reader:

Trees do most of the things you do, just more slowly. They compete for their liveli-
hoods and take care of their families, sometimes making huge sacrifices for their chil-
dren. They breathe, eat and have sex. They give gifts, communicate, Imparare, remember
and record the important events of their lives. With relatives and non-kin alike they
cooperate, forming neighborhood watch committees. . . . Some of this might take cen-
turies, but for a creature with a life span of hundreds or thousands of years, time must
surely have a different feel about it.14

All interesting to Kingsolver herself, but not necessarily to the general public.
“People will only read stories about people,” she observes. Knowing this all too
BENE, Powers has come up with a “delightfully choreographed, ultimately breath-
taking hoodwink,” fooling us into thinking that the novel is about humans, Quando
it is gradually revealed that these are just the “shrubby understory.” In time, these
shrubby characters will become ecoterrorists, tree defenders, necessary to the
fleshing out of the plot, but the animating core of the novel belongs to the trees
towering above them. It is these trees that give the novel its experimental form,
a web of connectivity initially unemphatic but eventually inexorable, making it
possible for Powers to tell a converging tale about a cast of mostly strangers.

Powers is the “winner of a genius grant,” Kingsolver reminds us, known for his
brainy creations. Given that he has “swept the literary-prize Olympics, he should
be a household name, but isn’t quite. Critics have sometimes blamed a certain

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesThe Survival of the Unfit

bleakness of outlook, or a deficit of warmth in his characters.” It is an odd mo-
ment in the review, a sly jab at an author she otherwise admires. Powers is not
quite a household name when the standard is set by Kingsolver herself, whose
books since 1993 have all been New York Times bestsellers. And that 1993 novel that
set her on this path, The Poisonwood Bible–an Oprah’s Book Club selection and a
finalist for the Pulitzer Prize–in fact has more than a little in common with The
Overstory. From the tree-centric title to the cast of characters revolving around it,
this novel, written at the end of the last century, has already decided that business
as usual would not do, that a new literary form is needed to tell a different story
about the world: who inhabits it, what disasters look like, and what it takes to
keep going.

The poisonwood makes its appearance almost as soon as the novel begins. IL
year was 1959. Nathan Price, Baptist missionary newly arrived in the Belgian Con-
go with his wife and four daughters, is alerted by Mama Tataba, his housekeeper:
“‘That one, brother, he bite,’ she said, pointing her knuckly hand at a small tree
he was wresting from his garden plot.”15 And sure enough, when Nathan wakes
up the next morning, his arms and hands are covered with rashes. “Even his good
right eye was swollen shut, from where he’d wiped his brow. Yellow pus ran like
sap from his welted flesh.” As his daughter Leah observes, “Among all of Africa’s
mysteries, here were the few that revealed themselves in no time flat.”16

Initiation into the mysteries of Africa begins with bodily mortification. On this
continent, the nonhuman bites. It has no trouble fighting back when an intruder
tries to impose his will on a native habitat. With pus running down his good right
eye, Nathan has been taught a lesson in local knowledge, one that also teaches him
something about himself. Shining a light on his preexisting condition (his left eye
was injured in the war), it reveals just how invisible many disabilities are, how less
than fully intact many functional humans prove to be. His appearance as well as his
vision now compromised, Nathan looks not unlike Mama Tataba, who has a “blind
eye. It looked like an egg whose yolk had been broken and stirred just once.”17

The deformity is hard to miss, but nobody pays it any mind around here, for in
this community as in many others in Africa, “they’ve all got their own handicap
children or a mama with no feet.” Another neighbor, Mama Mwanza, was even
more seriously disfigured when her house burned down. Her “legs didn’t burn all
the way off but it looks like a pillow or just something down there wrapped up in a
cloth sack. She has to scoot around on her hands.” Not having the use of her legs,
Tuttavia, is not necessarily disabling. She carries all her laundry in a big basket on
her head, and “when she scoots down the road, not a one of them of them falls out.
All the other ladies have big baskets on their heads too, so nobody stares at Mama
Mwanza one way or another.”18

Is “disability” even the right word here? Mama Mwanza is able-bodied,
though not by a standard yardstick. Literary scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

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150 (1) Winter 2021Wai Chee Dimock

refers to these nonstandard characters as “extraordinary bodies.”19 In her fire-rav-
aged form as in her off-the-charts performance, Mama Mwanza is far outside the
bounds of normalcy. She would have been stared at anywhere else but not here, UN
fact hugely gratifying to Adah Price, no standard character herself:

My right side drags. I was born with half my brain dried up like a prune, deprived of
blood by an unfortunate fetal mishap . . . we were inside the womb together dum-de-
dum when Leah suddenly turned and declared, Adah, you are just too slow. I am taking
all the nourishment here and going on ahead. She grew strong and I grew weak. (Yes,
Jesus loves me!) And so it came to pass, in the Eden of our mother’s womb, I was can-
nibalized by my sister.20

Disability is not an African problem, symptomatic of a backward continent.
It is everywhere, back home in Georgia, inside the Eden of the womb, shorthand
for a kind of congenital imbalance plaguing the world, a root inequity with no ob-
vious solution. Pieties such as “Jesus loves me!” can only be a sick joke here, for
this Eden is Hobbesian rather than Christian, a state of nature in which life is “sol-
itary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”21 Here humans will cannibalize one an-
other, showing that we are matter after all, edible morsels that can be gobbled up.
Bodily harm is simply something that happens, as it happens to other embodied
creatures, a random and not infrequent fact of life. Our vulnerability speaks to our
kinship with the nonhuman world.

That certainly seems to be the case with Adah. But it is not the whole story
either, for as we have seen, the nonhuman world, vulnerable as it is, is not alto-
gether helpless, not without means of self-affirmation. So too with Adah. Her dis-
abled right side has not stopped her from quoting poetry (Emily Dickinson and
William Carlos Williams are her favorites) or learning the Kikongo tongue. È
she, knowing that tongue, who gives us an inside view of what happens to Chris-
tianity when, like Nathan, it too comes into contact with the poisonwood tree, In
this case, linguistic contact: “‘Tata Jesus is Bangala!’ declares the Reverend every
Sunday at the end of his sermon,” Adah reports, and she adds: “Bangala means
something precious and dear. But the way he pronounces it, it means the poison-
wood tree. Praise the Lord, Hallelujah, my friends! For Jesus will make you itch
like nobody’s business.”22

It is not for nothing that the novel is titled The Poisonwood Bible, for the scrip-
ture being disseminated here is indeed a sharply local variant, touched by the Ki-
kongo tongue and the vengeful tree that bears its signature. This is a bible found-
ed not on a special dispensation for humans, but the impartial matter-of-factness
of elemental forces, giving Homo sapiens no special status, treating our physical
bodies as just that, physical bodies. What Kingsolver is offering here is not a novel
speaking to one particular catastrophe, but rather the generalized coordinates of
a newly chastised realism, no longer insulated or human-centric, and not looking

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesThe Survival of the Unfit

away from any unthinkable future it might bring. This elemental realism will have
tremendous consequences for how twenty-first-century disasters are perceived
and responded to.

The power of this new realism is fully on display in the novel’s climactic scene,
featuring the African equivalent of “the Hand of God,” the arrival of the flesh-eat-
ing nsongonya, the army ants. These ants feel like “burning liquid that had flooded
our house . . . that had flooded the world,” Leah says. “Every surface was covered
and boiling,” like “black flowing lava in the moonlight.” Adah, so often aligned
with the nonhuman world, is trapped for once in her inadequate humanness. Help
me. This cry of desperation sums her up and holds her prisoner. Endlessly playful
and expansive on other occasions, she is reduced to just these two words now, un-
adorned and involuntary. They come out of her mouth almost to spite her, for they
will be in vain. Her mother, already carrying her younger sister, Ruth May, will ig-
nore these words. “She studied me for a moment, weighing my life. Then nodded,
shifted the load in her arms, turned away.”23

Adah goes under almost instantly and is trampled upon, but regains her wits at
just this moment, getting from anonymous strangers the help she fails to get from
her own mother, a means of locomotion that propels her forward:

I found my way to my elbows and raised myself up, grabbing with my strong left hand
at legs that dragged me forward. Ants on my earlobes, my tongue, my eyelids. I heard
myself crying out loud–such a strange noise, as if it came from my hair and finger-
nails, and again and again I came up. Once I looked for my mother and saw her, far
ahead. I followed, bent on my own rhythm. Curved into the permanent song of my
body: left . . . behind.

I did not know who it was that lifted me over the crowd and set me down into the
canoe with my mother. I had to turn quickly to see him as he retreated. It was Ana-
tole. We crossed the river together, mother and daughter, facing each other, low in the
boat’s quiet center. She tried to hold my hands but could not. For the breath of a river
we stared without speaking.24

In that unworded and unforgiving stare between mother and daughter, King-
solver translates her new realism into terms no one can fail to understand. Proud
monuments of civilization–the human language, for instance, or the human
family–can look very different when tested by catastrophes. They are less than
what we think. Kingsolver is not waving any flags here, not even going out on a
limb. Ancora, it is the case that one of the best known topoi of the epic genre–Ae-
neas fleeing Troy with his father Anchises on his back and his son Ascanius by his
side–is being turned upside down to yield a modern variant, a novel grappling
with large-scale calamities like the epic, but doing so on a new terrain and yielding
almost the opposite outcome.

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150 (1) Winter 2021Wai Chee Dimock

the day.

I n the Aeneid, it is the iconic trio of Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius that saves

This beacon of hope, shining through the convulsions of a sacked city,
speaks to the integrity of the family and the sanctity of the civilized tongue: “Then
come, dear father. Arms around my neck: / I’ll take you on my shoulders, no great
weight. / Whatever happens, both will face one danger, / Find one safety. Iulus
will come with me / My wife at a good interval behind.”25 Anchises’s bodily frailty
is not a problem here. If anything, it is that frailty that anchors this timeless tab-
leau, this charmed circle of filial piety and generational continuity.

The only thing that mars it is Aeneas’s inexplicable decision to have his wife,
Creusa, follow at a distance. Not surprisingly, she soon gets separated and is never
seen or heard from again:

Creusa, taken away from us by grim fate, did she / Linger, or stray, or sink in weari-
ness? / There is no telling. Never would she be / Restored to us. Never did I look back
/ Or think to look for her, lost as she was, / Until we reached the funeral mound and
shrine / Of venerable Ceres. Here at last / All came together, but she was not there;
/ She alone failed her friends, her child, her husband.26

In Aeneas’s telling, it is Creusa’s fault that there is now this gaping hole with-
in the family. Ancora, even he admits he never once looked back to make sure she
was keeping up. Even more tellingly, when he goes down to the underworld, In
Book VI of the Aeneid, the entire episode is dominated by his meeting with Anchis-
es and the latter’s prophesy about the future glories of Rome. There is no mention
of Creusa, no attempt to find her and hear from her lips what happened that fate-
ful night.

There is a flinty core to epic, unyielding and untender. This is a pre-Christian
genre, after all; salvation is not part of the script, not a legitimate hope with theolog-
ical backing. Humans here are mortals and never more than mortals, finite through
and through, distinct from nonhumans only for a brief spell of time. The uncere-
monious dispatch of Creusa, like the unforgiving slaying of Turnus at the end of
the Aeneid, or the indiscriminate massacre of the suitors at the end of the Odyssey,
is simply the intensified form of a finitude that will sooner or later overtake all hu-
mans. Epic realism is without illusion from the first about who we are, how we die,
and how we are forgotten. This realism Kingsolver takes to heart. For her, Anche se,
human finitude is not necessarily fatal, for it is above all a form of life, clear-eyed
about what it can and cannot do, pivoted on limits and energized by limits, not a
lack but a need-based perseverance, a form of life daily lived by the disabled.

Adah is exemplary for that reason. Her ordeal might not be a minority report
after all, but a general portrait of humanity. Being overwhelmed is nothing special
in a century of floods and wildfires and pandemics. Cognitive disabilities unite
us as calamities spiral beyond our control. A planet-wide need for help puts all of

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesThe Survival of the Unfit

us on the same footing. But then again, needing help does not have to mean help-
lessness either. Adah is once again exemplary here: she might not be able to move
fast on her own, but her quick-thinking brain and her “strong left hand” turn the
heels of others into an effective means of locomotion. Disability here goes hand in
hand with an ability to use help in whatever form it comes, an inventiveness cru-
cial to the survival of the unfit, and to the novel itself as it looks ahead to a future
in which characters like Adah are probably closer to reality than characters living
unhandicapped and unimperiled lives.

S ome such thought seems to have been percolating in the Richard Powers

corpus for the past twenty-five years. From Galatea 2.2 (1995) to The Echo
Maker (2006), disabled characters have always had a nontrivial presence in
his fiction. The Overstory outdoes all of them. Best known as a novel about trees,
it is more remarkable still in its cast of nonstandard characters, each disabled in
a unique way. Patricia Westerford, eventually the celebrated author of The Secret
Forest, was a “thing only borderline human” as a little girl, born with a “deforma-
tion of the inner ear” that makes her face “sloped and ursine,” and her speech a
“slurry hard for the uninitiated to comprehend.”27 Douglas Pavlicek, ejected from
an exploding plane, his tibia shattered by a misfiring sidearm, and saved from
death only by a gigantic banyan, ends up with “one and a half good legs.” And Ray
Brinkman, once an articulate property lawyer, can only speak “one syllable at a
time,” each syllable “mangled and worthless,” after a stroke.28

Among these, none is more striking than Neelay Mehta. Falling from an oak
tree when he was eleven, Neelay will henceforth be “fused to his wheelchair,” his
legs “shriveled to thick twigs.” While remaining conscious for a minute after the
autunno, Anche se, he has a chance to see the tree as it is rarely seen:

stacks of spreading metropolis, networks of conjoined cells pulsing with energy and liq-
uid sun, water rising through long thin reeds, rings of them banded together into pipes
that draw dissolved minerals up through the narrowing tunnels of transparent twig and
out through their waving tips, while sun-made sustenance drops down in tunes just in-
side them. A colossal, rising, reaching, stretching space elevator of a billion indepen-
dent parts, shuttering the air into the sky and storing the sky deep underground, sorting
possibility from out of nothing; the most perfect piece of self-writing code that his eyes
could hope to see. Then his eyes close in shock and Neelay shuts down.29

Nothing can be further apart from the boiling lava of the nsongonya. This puls-
ing, swaying, photosynthesizing apparition, a miracle of sky, sun, and earth, is na-
ture as we would like to imagine it. Yet the damage done to Neelay is tenfold great-
er than the damage done to Adah by the ants, even though the tree does not set out
to cripple and maim. It is just an oak tree observing the law of gravity, enacting the
consequences of its own height. From The Poisonwood Bible to The Overstory, IL

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150 (1) Winter 2021Wai Chee Dimock

nonhuman world has evolved still further. It is on its own now, a primary reality,
densely and superabundantly inhabited, and no more solicitous of humans than
nonhumans. Epic realism here is the realism of elemental forces, impartial in their
power to nourish and their power to destroy.

For Neelay, the run-in with these forces is life-changing, and not necessarily for
the worse. Sure, he looks helpless, but his disability, like Adah’s, has turned him
into something almost like a force of nature, with not a little in common with the
nonhuman world. At the novel’s end, his mind is once again on fire, his “heart is
beating too hard for what little meat is left on his skeleton, and his vision pulses”
as he thinks of the next installment of the game that already has millions and mil-
lions on the planet hooked. An even more memorable scene, Anche se, is probably
an earlier one, the epic undertaking of lifting himself from his bed into his wheel-
chair. This requires, first, grabbing the overhead bar, “reaching out to one of the
many hanging hooks filled with gear,” snagging “the U-shaped canvas sling and,
in a hundred small increments,” spreading “it out in the bed around his body’s
upright stem.” Next,

He stabs out again and spears the head of the winch, drags it across its horizontal brace
beam until it’s positioned directly above. All four sling loops go over the winch’s latch-
es, two per side. He pops the remote in his mouth and, holding the straps in place, bites
down on the power button until the winch lifts him upright. He affixes the remote to
the sling and detaches the catheter’s urine sack from the side of the bed. Holding the
hose in his teeth to free both hands, he attaches the bag to the satchel he has wrapped
himself in. Then he presses the winch button again, holds on, and goes airborne.30

Powers’s description goes on for two pages. This spare-no-details account of
Neelay and his wheelchair is not exactly fun to read. But it is a full-throated variant
on Homer’s full-throated account of Odysseus, “master shipwright,” painstak-
ingly building his ship in Book V of the Odyssey.31 That ship will take him to what
he yearns for day and night: “my quiet Penelope,” who, he tells Kalypso, “would
seem a shade before your majesty, / death and old age being unknown to you /
while she must die.”32 For Odysseus as for Neelay, mortality is the beginning of
life rather than its terminus. And for both, that beginning can have a future only
if the nonhuman world is on board as friend and foe, a means of locomotion and
a projectile into the unknown. Assisted survival is multiform and endlessly inven-
tive. Darwin has already intuited it, but it is the twenty-first-century novel that
will give it its fullest expression, claiming it as the still serviceable home of the
unfit.

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Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & SciencesThe Survival of the Unfit

about the author

Wai Chee Dimock teaches at Yale University. Her new book Weak Planet: Litera-
ture and Assisted Survival (2020) has just been published by the University of Chicago
Press.

endnotes

1 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection of the Preservation of

Favoured Races in the Struggle of Life (New York: Signet, 2003 [1859]), 326.

2 Ibid., 459.

3 Stephen Leahy, “One Million Species at Risk of Extinction, UN Report Warns,” National
Geographic, May 6, 2019, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/05/
ipbes-un-biodiversity-report-warns-one-million-species-at-risk/.

4 Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century
Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983); George Levine, Darwin and the Novel-
ist: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge, Massa.: Harvard University Press,
1988); and Adam Gopnik, “Rewriting Nature: Charles Darwin, Natural Novelist,” The
New Yorker, ottobre 23, 2006, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/10/23/
rewriting-nature.

5 Gopnik, “Rewriting Nature.”
6 Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 90.

7 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (New York: Penguin Random House, 2004 [1871]), 111.

8 Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 27.
9 Ibid., 28.
10 M. M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Caryl Emerson (Austin:

University of Texas Press, 1981), 14, 16.

11 Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2016), 64. Other references to this edition will be included in
the text.
12 Ibid., 24.
13 David Wallace-Wells, “Amitav Ghosh: ‘We Are Living in a Reality that is Fundamentally
Uncanny,’” New York Magazine, settembre 30, 2019, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/
2019/09/amitav-ghosh-on-our-failure-to-face-up-to-the-climate-crisis.html.

14 Barbara Kingsolver, “The Heroes of This Novel Are Centuries Old and 300 Feet Tall,” The
New York Times, April 9, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/books/review/
overstory-richard-powers.html.

15 Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible (New York: HarperPerennial, 1999), 39.
16 Ibid., 40–41, 40.
17 Ibid., 39.
18 Ibid., 52–53, 51, 52.

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150 (1) Winter 2021Wai Chee Dimock

19 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American

Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

20 Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible, 33–34.
21 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Harmondsworth, United Kingdom: Penguin, 1968 [1651]),

186.

22 Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible, 276.
23 Ibid., 299, 306.
24 Ibid., 306.
25 Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage, 1990), Book II, 921–925.
26 Ibid., Book II, 960–968.
27 Richard Powers, The Overstory (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 11.
28 Ibid., 88, 497.
29 Ibid., 105, 103.
30 Ibid., 496, 194.
31 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux,

1998), Book V, 243–270.
32 Ibid., Book V, 225–229.

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