I’ve noticed that many of us have been following similar threads in our fascination with Darwin’s defamiliarizing rhetoric—such as attention to his curious syntactical choices, unusual mini-narratives, and key word repetitions—in our posts as well as in class. I’m not sure how much of anything new I’ll be able to add to the discussion at this point, then, as we’ve been both diverse and thorough in this venture already, but I’ll throw a few more (potentially troubling or complicating) things out there about Darwin’s language, as well as Darwin’s reflections on that language. I’d like to point to a passage in the final chapter that we didn’t have the chance to discuss earlier today, in which Darwin notes that “analogy may be a deceitful guide” (422). Analogy, of course, is a tool that Darwin employs constantly, and to the reader’s benefit. However, it’s also as much about necessity as it is about being rhetorical, because without his many analogies, Darwin’s readers may be left with no real means by which to “comprehend” natural events so far beyond the cognitive limits of the human mind, as he designates them. Analogy thus serves to reduce this comprehensive gap. Yet here, at the very end of the book, Darwin steps back for a moment and questions that tool he has been relying on steadfastly all along. I should say that I’m building in simile and metaphor under the heading of analogy here, as well, though no doubt there are also particularities at work in Darwin’s recourse to certain figures of speech at different moments. I think, however, that his doubt about the possibility of rhetorical “deceit”—not only perpetrated by text upon reader, but words themselves upon their own thinker/writer—is relevant to each of them.

In this passage, Darwin notes that it can be all too easy to extend an analogy; as a way of simplifying and working through a problem, it’s language that can become all too accessible; the analogy-maker is tempted to get caught up in a kind of repetition compulsion (to use Freudian terms, for there is a singular pleasure there). Darwin’s embryo analogy, should he carry it further, would have him embrace one common progenitor for all species without sound evidence apart from resemblance (the embryo’s physical likeness to other species and to an imagined chain of ancestors throughout its developing stages) and it is resemblance, after all, which he panned earlier in the chapter for being the exclusive basis of many naturalists’ false judgments about species. It is resemblance that is also the foundation of judgment by analogy. But then Darwin continues (“nevertheless all living things have much in common”), seemingly dismissing the just-admitted danger of the “deceitful guide” and saying that “therefore I should infer from analogy…some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed” (422). The disjunction here, and the ignorance of a possible overreaching almost immediately after admitting that analogy allows for the intrusion of various falsehoods, is startling to me.

It isn’t only that Darwin uses analogy as a tool to persuade and clarify; analogy, he knows, may also be “using” him. It constructs spaces for imaginative liberties that might otherwise not be taken (and this goes against those other coveted principles of slowness, in nature and in human judgment, that I examined in my last post). In class today, Allison also brought up Darwin’s idea that “rudimentary organs may be compared with the letters in a word, still retained in the spelling, but become useless in the pronunciation” (398). I think we were all quite taken by the potency and eloquence of Darwin's rhetoric here, but of course, that statement too, is an analogy. Since argument by analogy is generally considered a weak form of reasoning, Darwin doesn't apparently utilize it often to demonstrate a proof of his theories (the instance above of his turning to analogy in order to "infer" a fact is more unusual), but rather to provide his reader with something more easily mentally “graspable,” and capable of visualization, thus enhancing that evidence he has already provided.

One question to ask, then, is how comparisons made for clarification’s sake--like the rudimentary organs/no-longer-pronounced letters analogy--can have side effects of potentially obscuring? I think that Darwin does not want us to forget that, as fitting and illuminating as the juxtaposition is, the adaptation of language and the adaptation of species are also fundamentally different.