Seeing Creation last night reinforced for me the fact that there are many Darwins. Not only in the trivial sense that the Darwin clan was (and still is) a large one, but also in the more interesting sense that a great many Charles Robert Darwins were born on 12 February 1809.
History can be viewed as matter of fact; or as interpretative; or as literary. Surely it can be viewed in other ways too - for instance, some people regard it as being essentially unimportant - but here I want to consider these three views. I should add that although I focus here on Darwin, much of what follows is applicable to all other (historical) figures, not least among them Emma Darwin and the other characters we meet in Creation.
There are, as Randal Keynes has put it to me, at least three Darwins: the Darwin of his published work, the Darwin of his correspondence, and the Darwin of his notebooks. These are in roughly increasing order of intimacy. They are also in roughly increasing order of knowledge assumed and therefore, one might say, in roughly decreasing order of penetrability for the non-Darwin scholar. (Fortunately, much valuable work continues to be done by professional Darwin scholars to provide the necessary contextual information to render the letters, notebooks and even the publications accessible to non-specialists.)
I view this trinity of Darwins as being compounded by a trio of fearsome multipliers: the multiplier of moments in Darwin's life, the multiplier of individual interpretations of Darwin, and the multiplier of the interpreter's days. I will discuss these briefly.
By talking of the multiplier of moments in Darwin's life, I mean that at each moment Darwin - as with all people - was maturing, physically and mentally. If we take the Darwin of his correspondence, we find that he was in a great many ways not the same in, say, 1836 as he was in 1866. Taking a smaller span yields smaller differences, but the point remains: a living human being is dynamic, not static - and is therefore somewhat new and different at each turn.
The multiplier of of individual interpretations of Darwin recognises the subjectivity inherent in learning. The Darwin of Janet Browne's biography is not the same as that of Desmond and Moore's accounts. Nor is either of them the Darwin of Annie's Box; and the latter is in turn not the Darwin of Creation. It is plausible that each person who learns about Darwin imagines him slightly differently; partly because of learning about him from different sources, perhaps, but also because of associating the information in those sources with understanding gained by personal experience, which necessarily differs from person to person.
By referring to the multiplier of the interpreter's days, I really mean the multiplier of moments in the interpreter's life. Darwin is not alone in being a dynamic human being. Each of us modifies his or her view of the world continually, prompted by experience. I feel confident in hypothesising that the mental models Janet Browne has of Darwin now are not the same set that she had when she finished writing her biography of him, and that those are again not the same as the ones she had before she embarked upon the biography. You needn't be a professional historian of natural history to change your mental model of Darwin in the light of new information about him, whether this new information comes from external sources or is produced analytically in your own mind. For instance, each person who sees Creation may well, as I did, find that it adds new sensory elements to his or her mental model of Darwin. (They may also find that some parts of it clash with existing elements, not least because Creation is a literary, imaginative - and thus somewhat novel - account of Darwin.)
These multipliers are fearsome because of the quantity of multiplication they produce. From three Darwins (which is more than enough to keep a small army of historians and modern scientists very busy indeed), we have in addition at least one Darwin in the mind of every person who has thought about Darwin, and in many cases multiple Darwins in each of those minds: new Darwins produced by shifts in the insights the thinker, and new Darwins for each moment of Darwin's development. Mathematically, assuming the number of ideas ever held by people is finite, this is an infinite but countable number of Darwins. Practically speaking, it is an uncountable number of Darwins.
The three views of history I mentioned earlier are all valid to some extent. History may indeed be factual: it may be objectively true that some things happened and others didn't. Yet even if we were there when those things happened, our accounts of them would be informed by our own subjective interpretations of them; and equally, if we were not there to experience them directly, our understanding of those events will still be informed by our personal experiences, try as we might to avoid this and to achieve an uncoloured perception. Finally, the human aching for narrative prompts us to view and to communicate history in the form of stories. These may be ostensibly objectively true stories, as modern historians strive for; or they may be more imaginative ones, as Creation is and as we see in the work of historical writers across the centuries, from Curtius to Eric Temple Bell and beyond.
What is not so valid is presenting a consciously imaginative account of historical events as a factual one, and consequently I was glad that at the screening last night, both Jon Amiel and Randal Keynes were present to discuss Creation with the audience and to explain some of the uses of dramatic license that were made in writing the film. They were enjoyably frank about its imaginative nature, Amiel saying at one point, There is plenty for the anoraks to cavil at [but] it's just a movie, get a life!
. This is not unjustified, for what they have created is an affecting and at times deeply inspiring cinematic spectacle with many superb performances and striking, memorable vignettes. It is a worthy addition to the cinematic canon.
Still as I hope I have shown, if you want to learn about Darwin interpretatively, you will need to do more than to just see this film. Dive into his letters, his notebooks, his published works, and the secondary scholarly literature. Produce, for yourself, a set of Darwins of your own.
Your post reminds me of this passage in Livingstone’s Putting Science in Its Place: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7230309@N05/3948036042/
I see what you mean. Thanks for the reference; I’ll add it to my reading list!