All that having been said about Burke's quite untraditional conception of language and Wess's careful and estimable positioning of Burke's philosophy in the first section of this essay, I still get a little antsy when Burke uses language---like representative anything---that opens him up to charges of being a Cartesian representationalist. That's exactly the claim John Stewart and Karen Williams made in a paper presented at NCA in Atlanta in 1991, later published as a chapter in Stewart's book, ARTICULATE CONTACT (SUNY, Albany). Stewart and Williams were tendentiously selective about what they put into and left out of their Burkean bibliography. The LASA essay What Are the Signs of What was, for instance, nowhere to be found, as I recall. That treatise most surely undermines a case made for Burke as any kind of positivist, empiricist, or scientist. One does not have to lean just on Burke's late material, however, to subvert Stewart and Williams' interpretation.

Even Burke's notions about a positive level of language (GM, pp. 183-184) could be misconstrued by the inattentive. One could easily skim over Burke's part-deconstruction of the concept right near the end of the passage in question in which he propounds the idea: A skeptic might offer reasons to believe that such science is less positive than its apologists take it to be. Particularly one might ask himself [sic] whether the terms for RELATIONSHIPS among things are as positive as the names for the things themselves. But we need not attempt to decide that question here; we need only note that there is a basic terminology of perception grounded on sensation, memory, and imagination (GM, p. 14).

Necessary qualifications being duly made, Burke's offerings about positive terminologies, as well as his inclusion of metonymy among his Four Master Tropes as vehicles for helping us discern the truth about something, should remain readily at hand in our toolbox.

And we note that Burke's theory of the representative anecdote has been put to good interpretive use by exegetes like Barry Brummett, who almost single-handedly spawned a whole subgenre of Burkean criticism. Bryan Crable has even suggested that the representative anecdote forms the very basis of dramatism itself (QJS, August, 2000).

Anyway, as long as we're careful to separate representational realism from the critical realism or interventionist realism that seems to distinguish Burke's take on language, our employment of Burke's representative anecdote as interpretive and critical tool holds great promise. In the LASA chapter, when read side-by-side with the section in P&C on Interrelation of Analogy, Metaphor, Abstraction, Classification, Interest, Expectancy, and Intention, (pp. 103-107), Burke suggests that words are too airy, ethereal, and diaphanous---abstract, that is---to represent any particular thing in the real world, that, indeed, we should reverse the equation (persective by incongruity?) and view the thing as representing the word, rather than vice versa.

We might summarize the relationship this way, using the terminology of P&C:

In the service of a common interest, intention, expectancy, purpose, or value that functions as a unifying, metaphorical, teleological perspective, or by way of analogy between disparate beings, entities, or events (analogy, not synonymy), symbols generate the perception of similar strains in dissimilar events, leading to the classification of those events together in a common, idealized, essentialized abstraction.

On to Wess's use of Yamashita's novel as representative anecdote for Burkean ecocriticism.

To be continued.

I now turn to the second and climactic section of Wess's essay on Yamashita's novel as an appropriate representative anecdote for ecocriticism in general, and Burkean ecocriticism in particular.

First off, I like Wess's acknowledgment that representative anecdotes for anything are eminently negotiable, that no one exemplar will necessarily stand out from all other candidates as the perfect nominee. I've felt for some time that an excellent representative anecdote for drama---maybe even an ultimate anecdote, if we think of perfection in the sense of Greek philosophy (immanentized) rather than Christian philosophy (transcendentalized)---would be the honor killing in the Muslim Middle East that Nicholas Christoph, for one, has written about recently in the NEW YORK TIMES. So-called honor killings, apparently still very much in vogue in parts of that culture, involve the murder of female rape victims by a brother or some other male relative. Such a sacrificial hit supposedly redeems the family's good name, expiates the guilt incurred by that moral outrage. It makes for such a pristine example of drama, a ritual strategy of sacrifice to redeem sin and guilt, because it is so thoroughly drained of any pragmatic or legal justification whatsoever. It makes no sense at all. The victim is completely innocent. The guilty party goes scott free. The violated family member serves as arbitrary substitute for the criminal aggressor via a most perverted, indeed inverted, logic.

How this ritual might beat child sacrifice as representative anecdote for drama requires futher explanation I don't want to pursue just now.

Anyway, Wess argues for the probable superiority of Yamashita's scenario to Burke's Helhaven essays as a representative anecdote for ecocriticism. It expresses four themes highlighted in Burke Wess says make it so exemplary: technology, apocalypse, creativity, and counter-nature. Wess makes a good case, I believe, and, in the process, explicates these themes with great subtlety and clarity. I would argue that apocalypse in the Yamashita sense is present in Burkie's parable, but only implicitly. Burke foregrounds the haven on the moon, not the hell that presumably exists on earth for the great majority of less-well-healed unfortunates that can't escape to the life of artificial bliss Burke describes. Yamashita appears to focus on the catastrophe the unintended consquences of compulsive technology have produced. Her narrative faces that eventuality head on.

In addition, the metaphorical value of the Matacao plastic, a subterranean substance---generated by the myriad junkyards humankind's throwaway industrialism and cult of new needs has fostered---epitomizes in visual terms the eco in ecology, the innerconnectiveness of all things, artifactual and natural. It ostensibly snakes around the whole wide world, surfacing for further human exploitation, ironically, in the Amazonian rainforest. And its commercial use serves to underscore further the compulsive nature of man and woman's terminological fit: our human tendency to compound our technological depradations via new, resourceful, and naively optimistic technological cures.

Trained incapacity anyone?

I hope to get back to some further themes in Wess's paradigmatic essay later.');

'Wess's Essay', 'In my previous post, I made reference to a column by Nicholas Kristof, not Christoph. And I meant interconnectiveness, not whatever wayward spelling I may have conjured up on the spur of the moment.

There are lots of other neat touches in Wess's superb essay. His follow up on the distinction Burke makes between Christian futurism and scientific futurism, to the benefit of the Christian concept, is so apropos and so Burkean. As Burke says in Why Satire, and Wess reproduces in Note 4, Even now, the kingdom of Helhaven is within you. Yes, that future is already here for me, in miniature, in my bottled water in the cellar way, in my house high on a hill above the flood plain of the Conestoga River, in the distance I've put between myself and Tornado Alley and the Hurricane Charleys of the U.'S. Amerrican Southeast, in the conspicuous absence from my neighborhood of polluting refineries, factory farms, and generating plants. Whatever analogue to Burke's Helhaven actually eventualizes down the line, it will climax an incremental development, not mark a sudden, chasmic leap across some deep divide. It's very much present in our personal lives, for those of us with, or above, a middle-class lifestyle. In addition, we are all complicit in its production and fruition, as we merrily drive our cars, overconsume so-called goods we don't really need, and discard our refuse we don't know where to whatever long-term detriment to the interconnected state of things.