The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Don Carlos Thorvald Steen
Philip Landon

Thorvald Steen. Don Carlos. Trans. James Anderson. Sun & Moon Press, 1998. 158 pp. $21.95.

This is an epistolary novel by a Norwegian author, written from the viewpoint of an Italian laborer, set in Argentina in the year 1833, and preoccupied with the ideas of an Englishman, Charles Darwin—“El Naturalista” Don Carlos, as he is called in the book. Steen’s novel strikes at the heart of western cultural history by reminding us of the spiritual shock caused by evolutionary biology.
Darwin’s discoveries, which destroyed creationist theories of a divine human genesis and demonstrated a natural origin of species, were a central concern in nineteenth-century literature from Tennyson to Strindberg. Contemplation of the newly secularized universe, with its blind and inescapable forces, was for nineteenth-century writers a question of philosophical self-definition: a means of mapping out human prospects in the modern world. Twentieth-century literature of alienation also has a Darwinian lineage, although the name of the great naturalist is rarely pronounced by today’s literary authors. Steen is a welcome exception. His narrator is wrenched from religious faith by Darwin’s scientific outlook: “I am doomed to live with my body in the absence of God.”
Technically, Steen is a close disciple of his famous compatriot, Knut Hamsun, who was in his twenties when Darwin died and whose work so powerfully charts the tribulations of the individual consciousness amid the pressures of a secular world. It may be tactless to ask what Steen adds to Hamsun’s innovative subjectivism, or whether the nineteenth-century spiritual crisis was more powerfully attested by nineteenth-century authors. Don Carlos is an austere and ambitious book which probes the roots of modern alienation. [Philip Landon]