An ELC Framework for Kenneth Burke, part 7: Literature and Real Life

This blog is supposed to be about John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces (COD). However, I have been working on a parallel track on the theory and practice of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC), as is evidenced in my book chapter on the comic mechanisms in COD. This post is another installment in a series of posts reframing the ideas of Kenneth Burke within the theory of Evolutionary Literary Criticism. This series has little relation to COD per se. Thank you again for your patience, my 2 followers.

I have been using a book published in 1996 by C. Allen Carter for much of what I know about Burke's ideas. I hope his assessment fairly characterizes Burke's thought. After studying Carter, I discovered that his book has not been reviewed by any text indexed in the JSTOR database, which suggests that it made very little impact on the scholarly community. Either Burke does not interest scholars, or Carter's work does not. One fact that suggests that Carter might not have a complete perspective on Burke is that Barbara Foley described Burke as having two kinds of scapegoat, which Carter does not mention. Carter mentions at the beginning of his book that he has mixed with Burke's ideas the ideas of William Rueckert, Rene Girard, and others. Carter also admits that some of the categories he ascribes to Burke (the religious dimension, for example) are not ones that Burke himself explicitly named. So this book is more Carter's synthesis than pure Burke. I will below refer to this synthetic body of thought as being from "Carter and Burke."

According to Carter, Burke argues that criticism sometimes can and should include facts about the author's life and how the text relates to political and social issues. Literature worthy of discussion are those texts that speak to all of us, can be related to by all humanity. As Carter writes, "While discussing the poem qua poem, he reserves the right to make observations 'concerning its relation to nonpoetic elements such as author or background' (Counter-Statement, 41)." (Carter, 91).

Burke's statements before 1940 come out of a Communist philosophical framework, but they can sound like they come from evolutionary literary criticism. As Carter writes, ''[Burke] views the poetic dimension as one that arises 'out of the relationship between the organism and its environment' (Counter-Statement, 150)" (Carter, 91). To see how this relates to dialectical materialism, Carter quotes a letter from Burke to Cowley in the 1920s, "Art ... is the building up of a superstructure to encompass and provide for contemporary material facts" (Carter, 92). "Burke adds a caveat: 'the encompassing superstructure is erected according to principles inherent to humanity as a whole'" (Carter, 93). Similarly, evolutionary psychology puts a premium on behaviors that are universal to the human species as a whole.

I have discovered that many evolutionary psychologists do not take the issue of group selection pressure seriously. I advocate for an evolutionary psychology which includes Multilevel Selection Theory, a type of group selection theory that has been supported for years by David Sloan Wilson. In the context of Multilevel Selection Theory, I view one of the fundamental conflicts facing a human individual to be between the values of individual fitness, what benefit the individual directly, and the values of group fitness, which benefit the group directly and the individual indirectly.

Carter, interpreting Burke, says, "Life's problems shape an artist's concerns, and these concerns shape the art." He quotes Burke's Philosophy of Literary Form, "The poet 'will naturally tend to write about that which most deeply engrosses him--and nothing more deeply engrosses a man than his burdens' (17)" (Carter, 94). A fundamental burden that engrosses the human is the tension betwee between loyalty to the group's values and the needs of the individual. Again, Burke, or Carter/Burke, can be reframed within evolutionary literary criticism which includes multilevel selection theory.

Carter, C. Allen. Kenneth Burke and the Scapegoat Process. U. of Oklahoma Press, 1996.

WorldCat Has Eliminated Book Reviews

For over fifteen years, I have been posting book reviews on WorldCat through their worldcat.org interface. I had over 250 reviews on the site.

For the last several years, OCLC has been redesigning their WorldCat system, especially the free web interface, worldcat.org. Even though I am a librarian, I did not offer them feedback in the process, because, for my library, we primarily use the FirstSearch interface to WorldCat. Had I realized that they were going to discontinue the book review function, I would have participated. They could fault me for not participating; I could fault them for not contacting people who were actively posting reviews to ask us for our input. (It may be the case that there were very few of us. The service was not well-advertised and in fact worked poorly.)

From the beginning of worldcat.org, OCLC has ported in reviews from the company Goodreads. That importing of reviews from Goodreads is continuing. When I contacted OCLC to file my complaint, they recommended that I write my reviews on Goodreads. I have noticed that there is now a link in Goodreads to worldcat.org. OCLC may have cut a deal with Goodreads in order to get the WorldCat link in the Goodreads system, which may facilitate Goodreads users finding the books in their local library rather than being pressured to buy the book. Whether or not that was the price for dropping reviews in WorldCat, the new arrangement may prove to be a benefit to both readers and local libraries.

For me, there are two strong reasons why I posted most of my reviews on WorldCat. First, Goodreads is owned by Amazon. Amazon is already a gigantic corporation which has an outsized influence on the realm of books. WorldCat was an independent, non-commercial space in which individuals could express their opinions and ideas about books. While I occasionally post an Amazon review, I prefer not to supply free intellectual labor to the Bezos empire. I do not consider him a charity to which I should donate my intellectual property.

The second, more important reason is that Goodreads only has books that are available on Amazon. I had written reviews for many items in Worldcat that are not currently in print and are not on Goodreads. I would venture to guess that a majority of the items cataloged in WorldCat are not available on Goodreads. Many of the master's theses and doctoral dissertations that are in Worldcat have no Goodreads records. There are many archival items cataloged in WorldCat that have never been for sale commercially.

For example, many of the texts that discuss the novel A Confederacy of Dunces are graduate school theses which are not in Goodreads. Carolyn Gardner's Comedy of Redemption (OCLC #:31977194), Helga Beste's What's That Crazy? (OCLC #: 54375485), and Jessica Gatewood's Decoding the Body (OCLC #: 173660454) are three examples. I had reviews on WorldCat for all of them.

Worldcat provides discovery to a billion texts (and other items such as DVDs that are available or licensed through libraries), but it just eliminated the ability of users to communicate with each other about those texts on its own platform. Instead, OCLC is now relying on one of the world's largest and most aggressive corporations to provide reviews for the subset of items in WorldCat which are commercially available. Sad. Fortunately, I saved copies of all my reviews on my own computer, so I have not lost the work I did. It is just no longer public.

ELC Saunders #6, Notes on American Classics (2018)

Although this blog is primarily about the novel A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, I have also started adding entries regarding the practice of Evolutionary Literary Criticism (ELC), which is more or less the application of evolutionary psychology to literature. Here are some observations on the monograph below, a recent publication in the field. This entry is observation number five.

Saunders, Judith P. American Classics: Evolutionary Perspectives. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018.

This month's discussion is on the chapter: "Bateman's Principle in 'Song of Myself': Whitman Celebrates Male Ardency," pp. 61-77.

Saunders shows that Walt Whitman's main theme in "Song of Myself" is an "ebullient celebration of key male sexual strategies," which he then expands into philosophical, political, and even spiritual dimensions. According to Saunders, the speaker in the poem "inhabits a wish-fulfilling environment that favors the expression of reproductive strategies evolutionarily advantageous to men" (61).

For evolutionary sexual strategies, Saunders draws from David Buss's The Evolution of Desire. The basic observation (made years earlier by Trivers) is that male mammals have an evolutionary advantage in producing as many offspring by as many females as possible. Females on the other hand, because they have at the very least to gestate the fetus, realize an evolutionary advantage if they chose the male with whom they reproduce carefully, whether to mate with physically superior males or to partner with males that are more likely to help them and their children. Saunders refers to this as the Bateman's Principle, with ardent males and choosy females.

If you are wondering how Whitman was able to publish his poem dripping with sexual references in socially conservative 19th century America, he merged his sexuality with spirituality. Saunders quotes James Miller: "Like many writers before him, notably St. Theresa and John Donne, Whitman repeatedly borrows the language of physical passion to communicate the non-corporeal ecstasy of transcendent experience" (Saunders, 61). Saunders points out that Whitman "exploits the Transcendentalists' often reiterated metaphor of seeing or piercing through material phenomena in order to appreciate their spiritual essence" (Saunders, 65); however, Whitman uses that metaphor to give the poem's speaker license to see nude bodies beneath clothes, becoming, as Saunders says, "a Transcendentalist Peeping Tom."

Whitman unites his sexuality with both democratic political ideals and aesthetics. Saunders quotes Jimmie Killingsworth, "Determined to join with even the lowiest, he infuses the notion of egalitarian belonging with erotic fervor; he becomes the spokesman for a 'democratic sexual politics'" (Saunders, 61). Further, Whitman links artistic creativity with the erotic spreading of the male seed.

Saunders emphasizes that the sexual strategy of the poem is one of wish-fulfillment, unmoored from actual practical reproduction. "No demand for long-term investment is anticipated, no curtailment of sexual liberty." Far from being faced with demands for child-support, he has multitudes of clamoring suitors. "Even elemental forces desire the poem's speaker. The 'crooked inviting fingers' of the incoming tide 'refuse to go back without feeling' him (lines 449,450)" (Saunders, 68). The speaker also has no male competition for these eager mates. He even displaces a bridegroom on the wedding night without a struggle (Saunders, 69). Likewise, impotence and rejection are absent.

Saunders points out that the poem is primarily focused on male bodies and desires, with little reference to women. "The absence of any prurient interest in women's bodies may contribute, in fact, to readers' willingness to interpret the poet-speaker's ardor in spiritual and / political terms" (Saunders, 70-71). Some critics argue that his focus on men signals that his erotic spirituality is specifically homosexual. Saunders disagrees with that exclusivity in her essay's conclusion, "'Song of Myself' reassures men of any sexual orientation that their desires are wholesome and even admirable. Their erotic make-up is fully in tune with natural process and cosmic design: within the framework of Whitman's poem, male ardency enjoys political, aesthetic, and transcendent validation" (77).

I have nothing to add to Saunders' observations. In this case (and unlike the case of her work on Sherwood Anderson) the evolutionary interpretation by Saunders adds a valuable perspective to the understanding of Whitman's poem.

An ELC Framework for Kenneth Burke, part 6: Rod, Ladder, Skull

This blog is supposed to be about John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces (COD). However, I have been working on a parallel track on the theory and practice of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC), as is evidenced in my book chapter on the comic mechanisms in COD. This post is another installment in a series of posts reframing the ideas of Kenneth Burke within the theory of Evolutionary Literary Criticism. This series has little relation to COD per se. Thank you again for your patience, my 2 followers.

I have been using a book published in 1996 by C. Allen Carter for much of what I know about Burke's ideas. I hope his assessment fairly characterizes Burke's thought. After studying Carter, I discovered that his book has not been reviewed by any text indexed in the JSTOR database, which suggests that it made very little impact on the scholarly community. Either Burke does not interest scholars, or Carter's work does not. One fact that suggests that Carter might not have a complete perspective on Burke is that Barbara Foley described Burke as having two kinds of scapegoat, which Carter does not mention. Carter mentions at the beginning of his book that he has mixed with Burke's ideas the ideas of William Rueckert, Rene Girard, and others. Carter also admits that some of the categories he ascribes to Burke (the religious dimension, for example) are not ones that Burke himself explicitly named. So this book is more Carter's synthesis than pure Burke. I will below refer to this synthetic body of thought as being from "Carter and Burke."

In his book on Burke, Carter argues that Burke has three domains from which we humans receive anxiety and produce guilt: the Rod, the Ladder, and the Skull. The Rod seems to relate to physical violence; the Ladder seems to relate to social hierarchies; and the Skull is the fear of death.

I have written before about the structure of human groups. In my Theory of Humor series, the blog entry regarding Status Hierarchies discusses my own observation that group hierarchies can either be either dominance hierarchies, which are enforced through threats of violence, or statue hierarchies, which can be driven from the bottom-up. Burke's Rod seems to refer to dominance hierarchies, though according to Carter, they also seem to be tied up in the moral system that forms the basis of language.

One thing I like about Carter / Burke is that they recognize the necessity of social hierarchies. "Like the ethical negative, hierarchy is an unavoidable feature of human life. As Burke has demonstrated, order, including social order, is 'impossible without hierarchy' (Attitudes 374)" (Carter, 8). Burke even acknowledges that non-human animals have hierarchies similar to human hierarchies; however, human hierarchies are qualitatively different because of the moral negative. To recast this in terms of evolutionary psychology, all social animals have hierarchies within their cooperating groups, but humans have evolved a level of strong reciprocity that allows group selection that goes far beyond the cooperation of most other social hierarchies.

Carter / Burke's symbol of the ladder seems to refer largely to status hierarchies rather than dominance hierarchies. Burke sees the human status hierarchy emanating from language. "Use of language creates social stratifications, each consisting of individuals anxious to consolidate their seemingly shaky position by asserting themselves over those beneath them, and, as a result, abuse of power is endemic." (Carter 10). "By the operation of linguistic rigidification (or reification), the hierarchy is perpetuated over time." The fact that dominance and status hierarchies are present in animals without language suggests that Burke is wrong to conflate language with social relations. Humans might use language to enforce hierarchies, but hierarchies do not come from language.

A nice aspect of Carter / Burke is that the lower classes police the upper classes as much as the other way around. "Workers have their own local hierarchies of knowledge, skill, and power, in the terms of which any newcomer is a lowly beginner who must earn respect" (Carter, 11).

I disagree with Carter / Burke that status hierarchies come from language, but I do appreciate Burke's identification of guilt and moral commandments as being part of human social organizations. "Even one's relationship with one's own self has an ingredient of hierarchical rhetoric, with 'conscience' defined as the effort to address one's conduct to the spirit of an ideal community in whose esteem one wishes to be raised." (Carter 12). I concur with Carter: the guilty look on your dog's face after he has stolen your dessert is a sign of submission by a group member lower in status for an act that may trigger violence by a dominant member of the group.

I view hierarchies as within-group orders. Dominance hierarchies in particular benefit the individual fitness of the group members at the top. (How many wives did King Solomon have?) However, I view many of the aspects of moral systems as efforts to improve group fitness by suppressing individual fitness. As Bowles and Gintis would say, moral systems allow for "reproductive leveling" (Bowles and Gintis, 112). The moral condemnation of polygamy, for example, is beneficial to lower status males who thereby have a better chance at finding a mate.

The symbol of the skull relates to the fact that we humans are smart enough to realize that we will all die and to fear that death. The guilt from the fear of death drives the sort of human sacrifices that James Frazer incorporated into his magnum opus, The Golden Bough. Curiously, Carter talks about an historian of religion named Eliade, but he never cites or refers to Frazer, who dealt with similar patterns. Perhaps by 1996, it was taboo to mention Frazer, part of the moral negative of post-modern literary theory. These fears of death relate to scapegoats: "Indeed, for Burke, it is the anxiety resulting from the fear of death, in addition to anxieties resulting from ethical guilt and hierarchical insecurity, that cry for 'cathartic discharge.' Our stories do not just symbolize the death we fear but often argue for the deaths of others" (Carter, 51).

Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis. A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution. Princeton UP, 2011.

Carter, C. Allen. Kenneth Burke and the Scapegoat Process. U. of Oklahoma Press, 1996.

ELC Saunders #5, Notes on American Classics (2018)

Although this blog is primarily about the novel A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, I have also started adding entries regarding the practice of Evolutionary Literary Criticism (ELC), which is more or less the application of evolutionary psychology to literature. Here are some observations on the monograph below, a recent publication in the field. This entry is observation number five regarding this book.

Saunders, Judith P. American Classics: Evolutionary Perspectives. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2018.

This month's discussion: Chapter Seven: Sherwood Anderson, "The Untold Lie"

To me, this chapter is not as illuminating of literature as others. The evolutionary interpretation of "The Untold Lie" seems to be a straightforward application of the theories of the male sexual strategies developed by Robert Trivers and Donald Symons and popularized by David Buss in his book The Evolution of Desire. These strategies are part of Buss and Schmitt's Sexual Strategies Theory (Buss, D. M., and Schmitt, D. P. (1993). "Sexual strategies theory: An evolutionary perspective on human mating." Psychological Review, 100, 204–232.)

The two primary male characters in the story are Ray and Hal. Ray is an older man who has many children. He has worked hard to provide for his large family, and he is exhausted by the effort. He questions the wisdom of the path he has taken.

Hal is a young man whose dashing looks and fearless behavior has attracted women. His father had also had a reputation as a man who pursued high-risk behavior. He is not yet committed to one woman, and he has apparently had sex with many. Hal is now in a relationship with a young woman with whom he is contemplating settling down and raise children. He comes to Ray for advice. Should he propose marriage to her?

Ray, thinking about his own life, is jealous of Hal. He wishes he had been able to pursue a life of sexual adventures with many women in which he did not accept responsibility for the subsequent children. He is strongly tempted to urge Hal not to settle down with this woman.

Evolutionary psychology predicts that males should have different sexual strategies from females. Because it is possible for males to invest very little and still achieve reproductive success, while it is not possible for females who gestate a fetus and nurse the resulting offspring to do the same, males might achieve more reproductive success by mating with many females.

Symons and David Buss fleshed out a theory that men might pursue two different sexual strategies, summed by the sound bite, "Dad or cad." The male might invest a great deal in the offspring in a committed relationship with one female, or the male might attempt to reproduce with many females and not invest much in their offspring. Because of the biologically required female investment, females have biological tendency to be more selective in mate choices and may have different sexual strategies.

In this story, Ray has pursued the first sexual strategy. He is committed to one woman and has invested heavily in their children. Hal has up until now pursued the second sexual strategy, having sex with many women and not committing to their possible children. Hal is now considering changing strategies.

When Hal poses the question of his future to Ray, Ray comes to the realization that he might have wanted to pursue a different course of action than he did. He does not consciously think of it as an example of biological evolution, but he has devoted his life to his family because of psychological tendencies that had evolved not for his own happiness but for the continuation of his genes. As Saunders says, "For one luminous moment, he recognizes himself for the 'gene machine' he is and longs to detach himself from its designs" (Saunders, 136).

This is a competently written essay, but the conclusion is not as unexpected as was the essay on Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome, which I discussed in the March, 2021, blog post.

ELC Theory, Part 5: Evolutionary Psychology and Social Hierarchy

I am currently studying Evolutionary Literary Criticism (ELC). ELC takes the findings of Evolutionary Psychology and applies them to the study of literature.

I have been a student of evolutionary psychology (EP) for most of its history. I first read Steven Pinker's Language Instinct in 1995. I studied both Pinker's How the Mind Works (1997) and David Buss's textbook Evolutionary Psychology (first edition, 1999) when they first came out. For EP social psychology, I read David Berreby's Us and Them (2005).

To be systematic in my studies, I decided to go back and review exactly what EP is. What is the current state of understanding in the field? To that end, I obtained the most recent edition of Buss's Evolutionary Psychology (sixth edition, 2019). I also obtained a British textbook by Lance Workman and Will Reader called Evolutionary Psychology: An Introduction (fourth edition, 2021).

One major difference between the two textbooks is in the area of human social psychology. Buss has lengthy discussions of dominance and status hierarchies within human groups. Workman and Reader do not. Buss has an entire chapter on the subject; in Workman and Reader, the words Dominance and Status are not listed in their index.

As for my own perspective, I follow Buss and Berreby and place a high priority on dominance and status hierarchies. I differ from Buss in that I view the formation of status hierarchies as a complex interplay between those higher in the rankings and those lower in the rankings. Sometimes status is determined collectively by the lower-ranked members of the group: through a bottom-up decision process they confer higher status on some members of the group. Dominance rankings might be determined by violence and threats of violence, but not all forms of status are generated from the top down.

For example, I do not believe that one can arrive at a rich understanding of how humor and comedy work in human beings without recognizing the centrality of status hierarchies within human groups. Someone who asserts a position higher than the group consensus will be ridiculed and laughed at.

People who know me might find it ironic that I subscribe to the importance of hierarchies. I am a Quaker, and one of the defining features of the Religious Society of Friends is a commitment to not having formal status hierarchies. Early Quakers were jailed for not taking off their hats to their betters; they defiantly rejected the formal hierarchies of their day. In a Quaker Meeting for Worship, anyone can speak up to a point. Decisions are made by a process related to group consensus.

What I have observed from Quaker process is that informal status hierarchies form in any human group, even ones that explicitly reject formal hierarchies. The Quaker process prevents top-down hierarchies from forming, especially dominance hierarchies based on violence, but bottom-up, informal hierarchies characterize the organization. A person upon whom status is conveyed by the group is called a Weighty Friend. A person who has been expelled from the group has been "read out of meeting," or explicitly rejected.

Back to evolutionary psychology. My point is that the field of evolutionary psychology is not crisply defined. There can be multiple ways of characterizing it. Some include status and dominance hierarchies, and some do not. Because some versions of evolutionary psychology see status hierarchies as fundamental, and other versions do not even broach the topic, this can result in widely divergent schools of evolutionary psychology and, from them, different toolboxes which can be employed in evolutionary literary criticism.

An ELC Framework for Kenneth Burke, part 5: Bicamerality

This blog is supposed to be about John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces (COD). However, I have been working on a parallel track on the theory and practice of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC), as is evidenced in my book chapter on the comic mechanisms in COD. This post is another installment in a series of posts reframing the ideas of Kenneth Burke within the theory of Evolutionary Literary Criticism. This series has little relation to COD per se. Thank you again for your patience, my two followers.

I have been using a book published in 1996 by C. Allen Carter for much of what I know about Burke's ideas. I hope his assessment fairly characterizes Burke's thought. After studying Carter, I discovered that his book has not been reviewed by any text indexed in the JSTOR database, which suggests that it made very little impact on the scholarly community. Either Burke does not interest scholars, or Carter's work does not. One fact that suggests that Carter might not have a complete perspective on Burke is that Barbara Foley described Burke as having two kinds of scapegoat, which Carter does not mention. Carter himself admits that some of the categories he ascribes to Burke (the religious dimension, for example) are not ones that Burke himself explicitly named. So this book is more Carter's synthesis than pure Burke. I will below refer to this synthetic body of thought as being from "Carter and Burke."

This month: According to Carter, Burke is part of a tradition that sees the human mind as having two modes of thinking: logical and temporal. The word bicameral indicates that there are two houses of reason within the mind.

An example of the two modes can be seen in the Christian Bible. On the one hand, the Christian set of moral rules about behavior forms a logical framework within which we should be able to live our lives. On the other hand, the moral system is presented as a set of episodes in time: first, there was Adam and Eve, then there was Noah, then there was Moses, and eventually there was Christ and his disciples. The moral system builds up as a narrative of history.

Evolutionary psychology does not have a position on bicamerality per se. Neuroscience performs experiments to show how the mind works. That having been said, there is a line of argument within evolutionary literary criticism that argues that our use of narrative is an evolutionary adaptation. That is why we respond to narratives so strongly and seem to need them. That position is best argued by Jonathan Gottschall in his book The Storytelling Animal.

One can wade ankle-deep into brain science to see some results that might relate to bicamerality. From the little I have read, our brain's hippocampus has cells that form grids that allow us to remember the location of objects in space. For a review of this field, see Moser, et al. (2008). Experiments have shown that we use that grid to map out logical arguments as well. Even though this is a wetware data structure designed for spatial reasoning, we can nevertheless follow arguments by mentally traveling through our map of the landscape of abstract concepts.

People who excel at remembering lists of items often use a technique that illustrates the point. They will first memorize the layout of a large house with many rooms and articles of furniture. They then assign each item in a new list to each piece of furniture in that house. To recall the list, they imagine walking through the house, noting each piece of furniture in a temporal sequence and thereby retrieving each item in the list.

I am not saying that bicamerality itself is necessarily an accurate description of how the mind works, but there are scientific results that suggest that it is not completely wrong. It also does not seem to be an issue critical to evolutionary psychology. Nevertheless, Gottschall's theory of the importance of storytelling as an adaptation can be a reframing of the theory of bicamerality which Burke endorsed.

Carter, C. Allen. Kenneth Burke and the Scapegoat Process. U. of Oklahoma Press, 1996.

Gottschall, Jonathan. The Storytelling Animal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.

Moser, E. I., Kropff, E., & Moser, M. B. (2008). Place cells, grid cells, and the brain's spatial representation system. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 31, 69-89.