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.