Although their vocabularies differ, biologists, biblical authors, and serious playwrights describe the paradox that Charles Darwin outlined in The Origin of Species (1859) when he observed the coexistence of a drive for permanence and a contrasting capacity to modify, deviate from, or transform established identities. The paradox generates evolutionary consequences reported by notable dramatic and biblical works. The Hebrew Torah, the Books of Ecclesiastes, Job, and Matthew, and plays by Shakespeare, O'Neill, and Beckett embody a convergence of constancy and change. Their principle literary mechanisms-their challenge-response narrative design, rhetorical repetitions, and metaphorical associations-translate a biological contradiction into a moral dilemma that leads to recurring Darwinian outcomes. An evolutionary process becomes the template for the progressions and problems of belief systems transmitted by masterpieces of Western literature. Surprisingly, most biblical writing celebrates an outcome entirely consonant with the narratives of evolution.This study does not focus either on popular superheroes whose perfected integrity never engages in moral revision, or on monstrous mutants who have dissolved integrity. It deals primarily with characters and their communities in biblical and tragic texts who toil mightily, usually with limited success, to integrate the certainty of inherited dogma with the originality of useful change. The supreme necessity to implement a balanced cultural adaptation will serve as our subject, and The Origin of Species, though it is silent on literary accounts of that endeavor, will serve as our guide. Darwin's insight can expand our understanding of literature, and literary analysis will support Darwin's insight.

Driven by his concern for the tortuous human pursuit of "ideal values," Joseph Conrad sometimes tells more than he shows. He indulged his talent for philosophical speculation, and critics usually follow that lead. They fix their attention on broad themes (imperialism, nihilism, etc.), with only passing reference to literary strategies. But fiction is not philosophy. This study, rather than rehash the "big ideas" that preoccupy most commentators, focuses on technique, Conrad's ingenious variations on a recurring narrative plan animated by images mingling light with darkness and by exhilarating rhetoric. Paradox shapes the narrative plan, the images, and the rhetoric. The story "design" unfolds a test of manhood with ironic consequences; characters oscillate between impulsive desires and elevated moral convictions, degrading the shadowy standard they desperately try to enact; the rhetoric proposes certainties and yet uncovers negations, vacillations, and contradictions. As one of Shakespeare's characters says, "I would by contraries execute all things." Appropriately, Conrad's images bring together, or alternate between, clarity and obscurity. The geographical settings are often exotic, but nature's most "common everyday" visual facts, light and darkness, become the author's chief pictorial reference. Conrad exploits the coupling of "sunshine and shadows" not only as antagonists but also, surprisingly, as paradoxical partners. That coupling may be his most original artistic contribution.

Paradox informs the narrative sequence, images, and rhetorical tactics contrived by skilled dramatists and novelists. Their literary languages depict not only a war between rivals but also simultaneous affirmation and negation voiced by a tragic individual. They reveal the treason, flux, and duplicity brought into play by an unrelenting drive for respect. Their patterns of speech, action, and image project a convergence of polarities, the convergence of integrity and radical change, of constancy and infidelity. A fanatical drive to fulfill a traditional code of masculine conduct produces the ironic consequence of de-forming that code-the tragic paradox. Tragic literature exploits irony. In Athenian and Shakespearean tragedy, self-righteous male or female aristocrats instigate their own disgrace, shame, and guilt, an un-expected diminishment. They are victimized by a magnificent obsession, a fantasy of un-alloyed authority or virtue, a dream of perfect self-sufficiency or trust. The authors of tragedy revised the concept of "nobility" to reflect the strange fact that grandeur elicits its own annulment. "Strengths by strengths do fail," Shakespeare wrote in Coriolanus. The playwrights made this paradoxical predicament concrete with a narrative format that equates self-assertion with self-detraction, images that revolve between incredible reversals and provisional reinstatements, and speech that sounds impressively weighty but masks deception, disloyalty, cynicism, and insecurity. Three heroic philosophers, Plato, Hegel, and Nietzsche, contributed invaluable but contrasting accounts of these literary languages (Aristotle's Poetics will be discussed in connection with Plato's attitude toward poetry). Their divergent descriptions can be reconciled to show that invalidations as well as affirmations-the transmission of contraries-are essential for tragic composition. An equivocal rhetoric, a mutable imagery, and an ironic progression convey the tortuous pursuit of personal preeminence or (in later tragic works by Kafka and Strindberg) family solidarity and communal safety. I am trying to integrate the disparate arguments offered by several notable theorists with technical procedures fashioned by the Athenian dramatists and recast by Shakespeare and other writers, procedures that articulate the tragic paradox.