An ELC Framework for Kenneth Burke, part 1: Introduction, Mentalese

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, published in Theology and Geometry: Essays on John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. This post starts another series of posts on the theory of Evolutionary Literary Criticism which have little relation to COD per se. Thank you again for your patience, my two followers.

In 2020, I was reading Barbara Foley's Wrestling with the Left, which investigates the leftist origins of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. In that book, Foley discusses and then uses Kenneth Burke's theory of the dual nature of the scapegoat in ritual, myth, and literature. I thought about writing a single blog entry reinterpreting Burke's theory of the scapegoat in terms of ELC, but as I study Burke more, I believe that I can write a series of entries reframing several of Burke's ideas within the ELC context. This entry begins the series.

NOTE: In the discussion below, I use the convention that the brain is the physical hardware (okay, wetware), and the mind is, roughly, the operating system running in the brain. Steven Pinker wrote a book called How the Mind Works, not How the Brain Works. But the mind cannot do things that the brain does not allow.

Burke's writings are voluminous enough and complex enough to devote a lifetime to teasing out every aspect of his theories and reframing them. I will not devote that much time to the effort, so this series will necessarily lack the scholarly rigor and thoroughness to which I would like to give it. I am heavily relying on C. Allen Carter's book about Burke for this series (below). Hopefully, Carter's interpretation of Burke is a fair one. One aspect of Burke that Foley explores and which Carter does not is his early involvement with communism.

For this first entry, I focus on what I consider to be Burke's position on language in the human mind, which I consider to be foundational to his philosophical outlook. Kenneth Burke is part of a philosophical school that says that all human thoughts worth discussing are handled and stored in the medium of a human language. He acknowledges non-human animals can think and behave, but that the human mind is fundamentally different because we have adopted narrative as a framework for our thinking, and it is a narrative in a human language inside of the mind. Further, that language begins with a moral negative. As C. Allen Carter explains, "According to Burke, the language system evolved as a system of moral negatives that gives rise to guilt. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word said, 'Thou Shalt Not!'" (Carter, 3).

Steven Pinker is one of the major theorists of Evolutionary Psychology (EP), upon which ELC is built. It is not necessary for every advocate of EP to embrace all of the ideas of Steven Pinker, but his approach to how the mind works is an important voice in the field. In that way, I consider any theory of Pinker's to be practically a tenet of EP.

Pinker has argued persuasively that the thoughts within the human brain are not in a human language. Pinker calls the native medium of thought within the brain mentalese. Language is a encryption technique for communicating information between two human minds, not the medium within the brain for handling thoughts. The brain has structures for translating internal thoughts into statements in language. It is literally possible to be at a loss for words.

Pinker is an expert on how the brain processes and constructs linguistic utterances; it is not wise to pick a fight with Pinker over the neurology of linguistic processing. In his most famous book, The Language Instinct, he showed how the abstract universal grammar of Noam Chomsky is implemented within the living mind. He further argues that our ability to adopt a language with a Chomskian structure is instinctual and is built into the human brain. It evolved.

Burke is your typical philosopher, which I mean in a negative way. He takes an interesting idea and universalizes it. Instead of saying that moral reasoning is important, he says that moral reasoning and language are the same thing, and that they are the basis of all human thought. Give him an inch, and he takes the universe. Burke has many valuable ideas, but he supersizes them until they form almost a cult religion. Pinker, by contrast, is well-grounded to evidence coming from neuroscience labs, and in a fair debate, Pinker would tear Burke to pieces.

The reason I have dedicated a series to Burke, though, is because Burke does have many good ideas, and they can be productively reframed within the context of evolutionary literary criticism. Until next time ...

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

Foley, Barbara. Wrestling with the left: the making of Ralph Ellison's Invisible man. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010.