World Books Interview: Nino Ricci and ‘The Origin of Species’

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The Origin of Species by Nino Ricci. Other Press, 472 pages, $16.95.

By Bill Marx

Last year marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. The bicentennial provided plenty of opportunities to recognize Darwin’s contributions – as important now as they were in 1859 – and the importance of evolution in modern science. What the celebration also made clear is how Darwinism is expanding beyond the field of biology, providing a new perspective on virtually all human-related subjects, from anthropology and psychology to morality, politics, culture, and art.

How did the imagination evolve? Books such as Australian scholar Brian Boyd’s provocative study On the Origin of Stories explore the evolutionary origins of creativity and storytelling. In his ambitious and provocative novel The Origin of Species, Canadian writer Nino Ricci looks at how Darwinian ideas shape the consciousness of Alex, a thirtyish graduate student in Montreal during the 1980s who is trying to use Darwin to make sense of his wayward life and dissipating literary studies.

Ironically, Alex finds an evolutionary focus once he befriends Esther, a woman suffering from multiple sclerosis, and deals with his past, including his discovery that he has a five-year-old son and coming to terms with a horrendous encounter with nature “red in tooth and claw” during a trip to the Galápagos Islands.

Ricci has won international acclaim for his books, which have been best sellers in Canada. His first novel Lives of the Saints won a number of awards, including Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and England’s Betty Trask Award and the Winifred Holtby Prize. Lives of the Saints formed the first volume of a trilogy that was adapted for a miniseries starring Sophia Loren, Sabrina Ferilli, and Kris Kristofferson.

The Origin of Species also won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. I spoke to Ricci about his interest in the dark side of Darwinism, how evolution shapes his understanding of Canadian culture, and the strong presence of Montreal in his book.

World Books: How does The Origin of Species fit into your writing career?

Nino Ricci: This is my fifth novel. The first three were a trilogy, a kind of family saga that started in Italy and then moved to Canada and ended up in Italy in the third book. The books were fictional, but they are somewhat based on my family history. My next book was Testament, a secular re-imagining of the life of Jesus.

The Origin of Species continues my idea of writing books that take place at different times periods, but also at seminal moments of change. Jesus ushered in a world view that was with us for many centuries and is still with us. It seems to me the next big thing to come in after Jesus was Darwin, because he challenged fundamental notions of who we are and what life is. We are still coming to terms with some of those insights and I wanted to find a way to look at Darwin and evolutionary theory in a fictional context. The novel is set in the present day, the 1980s in Montreal, but Darwin and Darwinian theory form a significant backdrop to the story.

World Books: You are picking up a popular theme in contemporary thought. Darwin has become increasingly influential over the past decade or so.

Ricci: Legitimately so, but I hate to think I am riding the crest of a trend. Actually, I thought of this book about 20 years ago. It just took me a long time to get around to writing it.

We are coming to the point as a species where we are more willing to face certain kinds of truths about what we are. Freud comes up in the novel and he was formative in my own intellectual development, though as I wrote this book I came to see Freud in a different light, in some sense he steps back from the void that potentially opens up when you follow Darwin to his end point.

As dark as Freud can be, there is still a sense that humans occupy a special place in creation, that there is a kind of end point to existence, such as psychic wholeness or self-understanding. Freud debunks a lot of the old mythology, but he looks comforting when compared to Darwin.

The end point of Darwinism is a kind of biological determinism: all the things we value could be reduced to genetic switches and chemical reactions within us, so what we call love is in a Darwinian context a genetically evolved mechanism for ensuring procreation. When you pass human history and human civilization through that sieve you can end up with a picture that can seem sterile and even nihilistic. For that reason there has been resistance to follow Darwin through to the end point.

World Books: How, as a storyteller, do you shape your narrative to reflect Darwinian ideas?

Ricci: First off, I am not arguing in favor of Darwin. I wanted to explore how evolution impacts our lives on a daily basis. The novel’s main character, Alex, an English graduate student, uses Darwinian theory to think about literature and the world around him.

What interested me in a more practical sense is how Darwin sheds light on our tendency to over idealize the importance of humans in the scheme of things, which may have led us down some bad roads. For one thing, it has led us to think we are the masters of creation, that creation is there for our benefit as opposed to being elements within creation, elements within an ecosystem and that everything we do has effects on other aspects of the ecosystem.

Also, I believe that much that has passed for psychology over the past 100 years has been a bit soft, really, in its reasoning and its methods. If we shift the lens a bit, begin to think in more biological terms it might lead us to a deeper understanding of why we behave the way we do.

Why is it that we have such tremendous brutality going on in so many parts of the world next to this idea of ourselves as being civilized and moral beings? It might have something to do with our not coming to terms with our real nature, and until we do we will not be able to change or improve our behavior. Even in terms of how we deal with each other as human beings, our territoriality, our dysfunctional relationships, I find that it is helpful to keep a bit of Darwinian framework in your mind, to consider elements of animal behavior, such as protecting space or fending off a competitor.

World Books: You seem to take a dark view of Darwin. Yet there is research today that suggests that evolution is as much about the creation of community as it is a celebration of ‘the survival of the fittest.’

Ricci: That is a great point because in fact that gives us a sense of what it means to go forward in Darwinian terms. Yes, we see evidence of communal behavior all around us. In the novel, the character of Esther, who has MS, embodies different qualities than than those we would associate with ‘the survival of the fittest’ type of universe. And, as you say, much of the work being done in evolutionary theory today sees edible evidence around us that cooperation can be as successful a strategy as competition.

World Books: The novel is set in Montreal during the 1980s – in what ways were you talking about the evolution of the city?

Ricci: Place is very important for me in everything I write. I was very conscious of Montreal being a place with a long history and an interesting cultural mix among English and French that often leads to tension.

I am not sure I want to take the evolutionary theme too far though, because I hate to reduce the novel to me looking at Montreal in a schematic way. What I wanted to do was to look at the complexity of urban experience, seeing the 1980s as the beginning of a certain economic outlook we are now beginning to see the end of. It is closely connected to Social Darwinism, what in the 1980s we called the rise of Neo-Conservatism. Ironically, this approach was a resurgence of the liberalism of the 19th century that started with people like Darwin, who suggested the idea of letting the strong survive. Liberalism of the 19th century had a much different meaning than it does now.

I also wanted to look at the urban environment in terms of immigration, the mix of different kinds of cultures, different realities that coexist even though there are very few lines of communication among them.

It interests me to explore how immigration fits into Darwinian terms. Who are the people who immigrate? What does it mean for a country to accept immigrants? Is that some kind of beneficence the country is showing? Or is it a purely calculated act to cherry pick the best people and bring them into your country essentially to improve the genetic and intellectual stock?

World Books: The novel’s main character, Alex, comes off as somewhat cynical about the questions you raise about Darwin and the urban experience.

Ricci: I thought of Alex as a sort of everyman. He is just a guy trying to get by, to have a meaningful relationship, often behaving like a typical guy, starting relationships with women and ending them out of fear of commitment or whatever it is without intentionally behaving like a cad, yet somehow instinctively doing so. Someone at whom life has thrown a number of curve balls at this point, and in fiction you need conflict, to put the main character behind the eight-ball for things to happen.

In this case he is that unfortunate victim, but someone who brings a wide interpretative lens to his experiences, someone who is trying to see the big picture, someone who is trying to make sense of the contradictions he sees and tensions he sees in himself. He is trying, as many people are, to live the good life, but isn’t sure how to go about doing it.

World Books: Alex’s skepticism is balanced by his ready wit, intellectual honesty, and vulnerability.

Ricci: It is always a conflict for a writer to know where to draw that line. On the one hand, you want readers to be engaged with the main character. If they are not engaged in some way they will throw the book against the wall. At the same time, you want a character that challenges the reader. So you want them to have behaviors that make you uncomfortable.

Fiction seems to be a place where you can think about those sides of yourself that you would just a soon suppress in your daily life and that you don’t like to appear in your public persona. That was part of what I was trying to do with Alex. To take him to places that were awkward and uncomfortable, but they are places where many of us go to at one point or another.

Alex’s cynicism is common to that era, maybe less so now. But his cynicism is also an avoidance of commitment. If you are cynical about everything it frees you of having to commit to any belief system, and it frees you of trying to make a positive impact on the world around you.

But it’s also a fear of making the wrong choice, of believing in the wrong thing, of being a committed socialist and then discovering ‘oh, no, that system was flawed.’ Underneath this uncertainty lies the character’s commitment to truth seeking; his cynicism is partly an attempt to put everything to the fire if possible and seeing if it survives.

World Books: Mid-way through the novel Alex remembers a traumatic voyage to the Galápagos Islands, a novella length tale that takes the reader out of the urban experience of Montreal and into a more primal adventure crowded with Darwinian echoes. It is a nervy structural gamble.

Ricci: I thought of it as the peeling back of the layers of Alex’s psychology, but as also a revelation of the deeper thematic layers of the book. Alex has an itch at the back of his head he hasn’t dealt with. And it is only in the middle of the novel that he has progressed a bit, partly through his relationship with Esther, a positive and maturing force in his life, so that he is ready to re-integrate that painful material.

He’s ready, for instance, to own up to his son, the son he has discovered he has in Sweden. He’s also met a friend with a son who is his own son’s age and this allows him to have a direct experience of what it is like to have a child that age. He’s also confronted, through Esther, with the possibility of her death and what that might mean.

World Books: In that sense, the book is about Alex’s evolution from the familiar figure in pop culture of the boy/man into a mature adult.

Ricci: Men have a tendency to get stuck in that ambiguous stage, particularly in our time, when it is possible to defer the big life choices (marriage, career) indefinitely. I am not saying that is a bad thing, but it does allow this possibility of perpetual childhood.

In many of my books women are the strongest characters. In The Origin of Species I was conscious of my attempt to deal with men. In a certain way men are at a crisis point in Western society. I am not sure we have quite understood the feminist revolution. I am not sure it has taken as deeply as it should have, but at the same time we feel a kind of directionlessness associated with that fundamental shift in our awareness of the relationships between the genders. And we haven’t found our way to the next step of self-definition.

World Books: Did you have male readers specially in mind when writing The Origin of Species?

Ricci: Yes, male readers, especially younger males, have to be brought into the fold, because if they do not get their stories through literature, they will get them elsewhere, such as in video games, which offer narratives that are more simplified and much less instructive. The appeal of video games is that there is a story there with closure. There is an enemy and you seek out the enemy and kill the enemy.

Some of the research done studying the connections between evolution and storytelling shows that when you look at story formation in very young children those are the kind of stories they tell: the world is about to be destroyed and I came along and saved it. My son wrote stories like that and even girls write stories like that when they are two years old. It is an elemental story pattern; the problem is that we are not going beyond that.

World Books: What is the value of fiction for you?

Ricci: Fiction plays an important role in providing paradigms for understanding the world. The most important thing literature does for readers of any age, but particularly adolescents, is to make them feel they are not freaks, that what they think and feel is valid. And if you just give them anodyne, sterilized narratives, that are not saying meaningful things to them, they will not find the things that speak about the places in them that aren’t being acknowledged elsewhere.

World Books: In what ways are you a Canadian writer?

Ricci: I may not be the best person to point out how my writing reflects Canada. But the issue of identity is one that comes up often in a Canadian context, and I think it comes up often in any country that is not a central power, or feels itself on the edge of empire.

As a Canadian I am most likely to engage in those types of questions because our national identity and our cultural identity has been a problematic one from the start and continues to be. We have two official languages, we have two official cultures that are in tension with each other. We also have our indigenous past which we have not really dealt with and we have all these immigrant groups, as you have in the US, who come to Canada.

But but unlike in the US they often don’t feel a strong national identity to attach themselves to here and continue to keep a strong identification with the place they came from, so we end up with a lot of pockets of identities and not always a strong sense of what makes them cohere.

There are dangers in that kind of identity ambiguity, but there are also advantages. As a writer, it gives me the freedom to question things on a fundamental levels about who we are and how we define ourselves.

This is my only book where the specific question of Canadian identity comes up very directly. But I see it in an international context. I see this as an important question on many different fronts. The deeper issue of nationalism runs throughout the book: how do we identify ourselves? What does it mean to identify ethnically, for instance?

World Books: What were the literary influences on The Origin of Species?

Ricci: One of the things I find in American writing is a confidence Canadian writing lacks, the sense that you are allowed to say anything. Writers sometimes go further because they take for granted that there is no territory that is forbidden. Whereas in a country like Canada it seems more likely that a kind of cultural cringe will seep in, You feel you don’t have the authority or the right to go beyond a certain point.

I had Richard Ford’s Independence Day in mind. It is not a plot driven novel, things happen, somebody gets shot, but it essentially takes a study of a real estate agent and selling houses into very deep places. Increasingly, as I wrote the novel, Ulysses was in the back of my mind, a book that I have a problematic relationship with. But I was attracted to the idea of a character walking the streets of the city, the novel being about the city as seen through one character’s mind.

I would certainly have to include Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, a novel I loved years ago. What I took from that book was the creative desire to fit in everything. The story is about plastic and the Second World War, but it is also about obscure African cultures and the history of the world. Pynchon manages to go almost everywhere, some of them places where we might never really have wanted to go to.

But that encyclopedic urge is something that informed The Origin of Species, especially Alex’s sensibility. His wants to somehow make everything fit, despite his unease that literature may not be be that place, that literature may be too exclusive, too structured, too false to experience to ever really embrace all the muck and grime in the world.