A 1985 Critical Inquiry review exploring Charlotte Birch's theory that consciousness is narrative and literacy enables reason—foundational to Emotional Forensics.
Reviewed by Martin Hollister
Critical Inquiry Vol. 11, No. 4 (Summer 1984), pp. 847–862
Reprinted with permission from Critical Inquiry, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Summer 1984).
Charlotte Birch Blackwell was my first college professor. Her book was so obscure that it took me 20 years to find it. This review—which I encountered years later during graduate studies—helped me understand the theoretical depth beneath her teaching. Her insights and Hollister's 1984 analysis of them helped shape the framework of Emotional Forensics: the idea that consciousness itself is a narrative construction and that literacy enables self-examination and reason.
Is literacy reason?
Charlotte Birch's Narrative, Language, and Reason arrives at a peculiar moment in intellectual history—when cognitive science is beginning to challenge humanistic assumptions about consciousness, and when literary theory is increasingly suspicious of the very notion of authorial intention. Birch's book, published last year by Meridian Press to little fanfare, achieves the rare feat of addressing both camps without capitulating to either. It is a work of genuine intellectual ambition, though one that sometimes stumbles under the weight of its own claims.
At its core, Birch makes a deceptively simple argument: human consciousness is not a thing we possess but a narrative we construct. This is not new territory—Gazzaniga's split-brain work, the hermeneutic tradition, narrative psychology—all have gestured toward this insight. What distinguishes Birch is her insistence that this insight has civilizational consequences. She does not merely argue that we tell stories; she argues that without the technology of written narrative, human reason itself becomes impossible. It is a provocative claim that deserves serious engagement.
Birch's background—a Master's in Linguistics from Georgetown and another in English Literature from Oxford—positions her uniquely to make this argument. She writes with the precision of a linguist and the interpretive sensitivity of a literary scholar. Early chapters draw on Gazzaniga's split-brain research, particularly the concept of the left hemisphere's "Interpreter" function. But where Gazzaniga treats this as a neurological curiosity, Birch sees it as the foundation of selfhood. "The self," she writes, "is not a unified entity that narrates itself; it is the narration itself. Remove the capacity to narrate, and the self dissolves into a series of disconnected, incoherent moments." (47)
This is striking precisely because it is difficult to refute. Consider a patient with severe anterograde amnesia, unable to form new memories. They live in an eternal present; their sense of continuous identity collapses. Consider too the illiterate adult: unable to review their own thoughts in externalized form, they struggle to construct a coherent autobiography. One does not need to accept Birch's full thesis to recognize the force of these observations.
Where the book becomes genuinely interesting is in Part II, where Birch argues that the history of consciousness itself can be traced through changes in literacy practices. She offers three case studies: Homer's epics as the liminal space between oral and written consciousness, the emergence of the psychological novel in the 18th century, and the development of the scientific method as a fundamentally narrative enterprise. The Homer section is particularly deft. Rather than dismissing formulaic epithets and episodic structure as "primitive" or "fatras," Birch reads them as sophisticated memory technologies—the oral poet's equivalent of the written word. When the Greeks adopt the alphabet, there's a change: narrative can suddenly become introspective, reflexive, and philosophically abstract in ways that oral narrative cannot.
Her treatment of the novel is less surprising yet well executed. She argues (following Ian Watt, though she does not cite him) that the novel is a technology for developing Theory of Mind—the ability to simulate another person's consciousness. The 18th-century novel, with its proto-modernist ineriority and psychological depth, trains readers to imagine mental states different from their own, and follow in the footsteps of strangers. This has civilizational significance: empathy is a literate skill. Without exposure to the psychological depth that novels permit, without the practice of imagining oneself into another's mind, we remain trapped in immediate, tribal consciousness.
The section on science is more controversial. Birch claims that the scientific method is itself a narrative form—that hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion follow the structure of a story with beginning, middle, and end. Moreover, she argues, the peer-reviewed journal, the laboratory notebook, the replicated experiment—these are all narrative technologies. Science without writing is unthinkable because you cannot verify claims across time and populations without a written record. This will strike some as reductive (is mathematics merely narrative?), and Birch does not entirely resolve the tension. Yet her central point holds: reason requires the externalization of thought into written form.
Part III, "Language as the Container of Reason," is the book's philosophical heart and the most complex, and therefore the most difficult to follow. Birch argues against what she calls "the Platonic error"—the assumption that reason exists independently of language and that language is merely its external garment, a decorative esthétique. Instead, she proposes that reason is language thinking about itself. Abstract reasoning—mathematics, logic, philosophy—requires the manipulation of symbols without immediate reference to the physical world. This is uniquely enabled by written language.
Her examples are compelling: a person can speak about their feelings, but only through writing can they examine the structure of their feelings and potentially transform them. A person can speak a rule, but only through writing—through making it visible, auditable, and revisable—can they verify it against exceptions and refine it into law. A person can speak a theory, but only through writing can they build upon it cumulatively, standing on the shoulders of giants (to paraphrase Newton, whom Birch cites). Here, one senses Birch moving beyond empirical claims toward a more philosophical notion: that consciousness and civilization are inseparable from the written word.
The book's final section, "The Crisis of Meaning," is where Birch's argument becomes most urgent and, one must say, most speculative. Written in 1982, before the full weight of mass media culture was apparent (The MTV Effect, broad commercialization, VHS dominance, etc), she warns against what she calls "the return to orality." As television, advertising, and mass communication increasingly dominate public discourse, she argues, societies risk reverting to "oral consciousness"—reactive, myth-based, tribal. She writes: "A literate person thinks. An oral person receives thoughts from authority." (198)
This is polemical, perhaps too much so. One can acknowledge that broadcast media operate differently from the printed word without accepting Birch's apocalyptic framing. Yet her underlying concern is not unreasonable: How do democratic institutions and free societies function when large portions of their citizenry lack the literacy skills to evaluate complex arguments? This question, she suggests, is not merely educational but civilizational.
Where Birch's argument becomes most intriguing (and most problematic) is her claim about the loss of self. If the self is constructed through narrative, and if that narrative capacity atrophies due to illiteracy or the dominance of oral media, then individuals lose the capacity for self-awareness, autonomy, and self-determination. They become, in her phrase, "passengers in narratives written by others." This echoes both Foucault's claims about discourse and power, and the Frankfurt School's critique of the culture industry. But Birch does not engage deeply with either tradition, which is a missed opportunity.
The book's prose oscillates between rigor and lyricism in ways that are sometimes effective and sometimes distracting. Birch frequently weaves in personal narrative—her own struggles learning to read Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, an anecdote about the origin of her love of Latin, a meditation on reading her own undergraduate papers and seeing how her thinking had evolved through writing. These moments are genuinely moving, and they exemplify her thesis: we understand abstractions through stories. Yet they also occasionally obscure her arguments. The reader sometimes struggles to distinguish between Birch's empirical claims and her more literary speculations.
Still, what emerges from Narrative, Language, and Reason is a coherent and challenging, albeit unsettling, vision: that human consciousness, reason, and civilization are not natural facts but linguistic and narrative constructions. This will be unsettling to some and obvious to others. But Birch's particular contribution is to show how high the stakes are. Literacy is more than merely a skill; it is the foundation of selfhood and of democratic reason. In an age when that literacy is increasingly under pressure, her voice—earnest, rigorous, lyrical—deserves to be heard. An opus in D-minor, but an opus nonetheless.
What Birch does not entirely resolve, however, is the question of what to do with this insight. If she is right that the loss of literacy leads to the loss of reason and self, what follows? Is she advocating for a return to print culture? A new pedagogical approach? A cultural critique? The book gestures toward these questions without fully answering them. One closes the book with admiration for her analysis but uncertainty about its implications.
Even so, Narrative, Language, and Reason is a rare and refreshing thing. A work of genuine intellectual ambition that speaks across disciplinary boundaries. It will interest cognitive scientists, literary scholars, educators, and anyone concerned with the future of liberal democratic culture. It is not a perfect book, but it is an important one. In ten years, we may look back and recognize that Birch identified something crucial about our moment—the moment when the written word's dominance began to fracture in the face of electronic media, and when we had to choose what kind of minds, and what kind of civilization, we wanted to be.
Literacy is reason.
Martin Hollister is Sterling Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University, where he has taught since 1982. Previously, he held appointments at Columbia University and Princeton University. He received his B.A. from Yale (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) and his Ph.D. in English Literature from Harvard University, where his dissertation on narrative form in the late Victorian novel was supervised by the distinguished scholar Harry Levin.
Hollister is the author of The Burden of Awareness: Self-Reflexivity in Modern Fiction (Harvard University Press, 1973) and Textual Labyrinths: Reading Modernism After Joyce (University of Chicago Press, 1980). His essays on narrative theory, modernism, and literary consciousness have appeared in Daedalus, Critical Inquiry, Partisan Review, and The New Yorker. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1988. His scholarly work is distinguished by its attention to the relationship between narrative form and philosophical consciousness, and by his resistance to interpretive extremism in favor of nuanced close reading and sustained cultural critique.
Dean Bowman
Dean Bowman
