Hidden Mickeyisms 2: Burke’s Circles and Mickey Mouse

In Chapter One of her book, Mouse Morality: The Rhetoric of Disney Animated Film, Annalee R. Ward makes a strong case for the importance of studying the rhetoric of Disney stories. Citing Kenneth Burke’s essay “Literature as Equipment for Living,” Ward presents “one of the goals of [her] book: seeking to discover how Disney films provide equipment for moral living.” Ward draws support from comments by many others in asserting that Disney is a moral educator: William Powers of the Washington Post, Henry Giroux writing in the Socialist Review, John Taylor in his book Storming the Magic Kingdom, Michael Real writing in Mass Mediated Culture, and Benjamin Barber of the New York Times. Along with Robert L. Schrag, Ward argues that “children ‘are more vulnerable, more persuadable than adult audiences.’” Following Connor Freff Cochran, who analyzed the music of Hans Zimmer in Lion King, she states: “Film is a powerful storyteller; employing narrative, visuals, and music enhances its power to communicate a vision of moral living.” Ward cites Hayden White, asking: “Could we ever narrativize without moralizing?” She observes in “Kenneth Burke’s language of ‘terministic screen’ . . . or ‘frame of interpretation’” Burke’s use of the phrase “trained incapacity,” which she sees as a “limit [on] how a person is able to see the world.” What is that limit? She cites Robert L. Schrag: “[T]hese . . . stories are not subjected, in the minds of those young children who view them, to the test of narrative fidelity. These children are in the process of constructing the criteria against which they will judge the narrative fidelity of other stories.” Schrag has, in this comment, stated the essence of Kennethy Burke’s concept of entelechy, as it applies to Disney films. Disney films become circles by which the various other circles of the children’s own personal lives are critiqued.


Disney exercises vast global influence. Disney artistic creations are better known by children than those of DaVinci, Mozart, or Shakespeare. Through its films, Disney provides powerful entelechies to children and their parents. These films are cow paths that implicitly offer self-persuasive rhetoric to children. Just as cows mindlessly follow paths that have been established by the cows that preceded them from pasture to pasture, so children (and adults) mindlessly follow the psychological and interpretive paths established for them. Of course, parents and older siblings establish some of these paths. The proverb “The acorn doesn’t fall far from the oak” is illustrative. Children frequently grow up in the same patterns established by their parents. History, as children learn it, establishes patterns. Some people fear the coming of another Great Depression because contemporary historical data may appear to remind them of the earlier historical event. George Santayana said: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."


Religion establishes entelechies. In earlier generations, Christian children were accustomed to attending Sunday School. At Sunday School (and, for that matter, in the public schools, in years past), the children became “biblically literate.” They learned stories about Jesus, Adam and Eve, Moses, Joseph, Abraham, King David, Daniel, etc. Bracelets, pins, and tee shirts proclaim: WWJD (symbolizing: What would Jesus do?). The catch phrase “What Would Jesus Do?” is designed to evoke Biblical entelechies to be followed by Christians. With the decline of Sunday Schools and the progressive exclusion of religious stories from the public schools, another moral force has stepped in to fill the entelechial void. Disney now establishes many of these paths for children through its films.


Kenneth Burke's term for the type of rhetoric implicit in Disney films is entelechy. More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle coined the term entelechy [entelecheia] to indicate a process. The process to which entelechy refers in Aristotle's writings is the most common process. Entelechy, according to Aristotle, refers to natural processes (such as the cosmic circles mentioned in the previous commentary):


Aristotle thought of seeds, for example, as possessing within themselves the "final cause" or telos--the goal of what the mature plant would be. He believed that there exists within a grain of wheat the formula that makes the seed first produce roots and a sprout, then grow a blade, which grows into a stalk, until finally an ear of new grain develops. The plan for the fully grown stalk with its ear of grain is implicit in the seed. To use a computer metaphor, the seed is "programmed" to produce a fully developed wheat plant. The telos (or goal) of the fully developed plant is held in the seed and in the plant throughout the growth process. Thus Aristotle called the process "entelechy." "En" means "within." "Tel" is short for telos, the goal. "Ech" means "to have." "Y" indicates "process." Thus, "En-tel-ech-y" means: the process of development (cf. Attitudes Toward History, hereafter ATH, 107) while having one's telos within oneself.

Burke extends Aristotelian entelechy from this biological realm to the symbolic realm. He finds it necessary, however, to replace the implicit determinism of Aristotelian biological entelechy with the implicit freedom of human action in Burke's concept of entelechy. The term entelechy, as Burke and Aristotle use it, may be defined as: the process of changing from what something is into what something should become, which process is directed by an internal principle of change which allows the thing to possess internally the final form toward which the thing is changing. In the Burkean variety, this internal principle of change supplies the implicit persuasion that directs human behavior. One major source of any individual's internal principle of change is the literature that individual consumes. The question becomes, what story are you living out? Each person's life becomes a story line, a plot with three stages--a beginning, middle, and end. Each stage of the story implicitly contains the other two stages.

There are clearly many potential sources from which each individual may derive his/her personal story line. As mentioned, many children derive their story lines from the life stories of their parents; hence, the proverb "Like father, like son." Aspiring political leaders derive their story lines in part from historical leaders such as Gandhi, Washington, Lincoln, even Lenin and Chairman Mao. Some individuals such as David Koresh derive their story lines from dreams, visions, prophecies, or interpretations of prophecy. Koresh feels, for example, that he must live out what his prophecy has prescribed even if that spells a fiery death. Many religious individuals, for that matter, see their story lines as the imitation of certain biblical characters--the suffering but faithful Job, Daniel being fed to the lions, the Apostle Paul converted from the sinful Saul of Tarsus. Burke sees that Milton developed his personal entelechy somewhat along the lines of Samson the great biblical hero whose strength was removed when Delilah had his hair cut. Yet, other factors such as Milton's religion (which forbade suicide) reshaped Milton's entelechy significantly (Rhetoric of Motives, 5). Just as it is the entelechy of many Christians to live out the Jesus story, it is the entelechy of many Moslems to be like Mohammed. Those opposed to powers or public institutions may see in Robin Hood, or Jesse James, or Osama bin Laden a story line for their own lives.

These are powerful entelechies. Yet, they are not deterministic in the Aristotelian sense of natural entelechy. Humans choose from those entelechies available to them. So, what are the entelechies available to children from the literary works produced by the Walt Disney Corporation? We will consider those entelechies in future commentaries.

Hidden Mickeyisms 1: Cosmic Circles and Mickey Mouse

The universe is comprised of circles. As each fireworks display typically explodes into a circular image, the theme song of Epcot’s daily fireworks display states poetically: “Our dreams begin another thousand circles round the sun.” We understand a “circle round the sun” to refer to a year, 365 days. But is the poetry limiting us to an astrological year? Not only does the earth circle the sun, but other planets do, as well. The “thousand circles” may refer to a millennium, but each millennium is exponentially compounded by the thousand circles of other planets. How many millennia has the earth existed? And isn’t every decade, century, and millennium also a circle of sorts? The number of circles in the universe is again exponentially compounded. For that matter, while the earth is circling the sun once, it is also rotating in a circle on its axis 365 times. These are 365 additional circles to factor in. And once, every 28 days, the earth’s relationship to its moon creates another circle—a month (or as my Hebrew professor at Indiana University, Henry Fischel, called it, “a moonth,” since the word month was coined to recognize the circular pattern of the moon's cycle). Remember also that the sun is only one of billions of stars, all of which have their own circling planets, and those planets, their moons. The number of circles in the universe is mind-boggling. Don’t forget that these stars all seem to be circling within their own galaxies. The Milky Way is only one circular galaxy, with countless circles occurring within. Have you considered enough circles? We are not finished. Now, consider the atom with its nucleus, and circling protons and neutrons, and try to envision the number of circles in the universe, since every planet, moon, star, asteroid, and meteor is comprised of countless atoms. This is what I mean when I say the universe is comprised of circles.

Every one of those astrophysical and atomic circles to which I have just referred is what Aristotle refers to as an entelechy. Each circle has a beginning, middle, and end. And, once each circle completes one entelechy (one circle), it begins a new entelechy (a new circle). With all of these circles in the universe, we are bound to find a few “hidden Mickeys.”

Of course, Aristotle is not content to consider as entelechies only astrophysical circles. He is primarily interested in geophysical and biological entelechies. The circle of a drop of rain falling from the sky, running from a stream of water into a creek, then into a river, then into the sea, after which it evaporates into the atmosphere and helps form a cloud, until it becomes too heavy and eventually condenses and becomes a drop of rain again is an entelechy, a circle. A kernel of corn is planted in the earth. It puts forth roots, then a blade, which becomes a stalk. The stalk develops leaves, tassels, and ears—composed of husks, silks, and cobs. The cobs develop rows and rows of kernels. Once these kernels of corn have matured, that entelechy is complete, but these kernels are ready to begin new entelechies, new circles. My wife tells me all of these circles have her head spinning. But we have not reached anywhere near the end of even Aristotelian entelechial circles. There is the biological “Circle of Life,” as Disney’s Lion King names it. That circle includes not only the circle of biological reproduction and maturation of every single animal, followed by another reproduction and maturation, etc. It also includes the circle of the food chain, the circular nature of the respiratory, circulatory, and digestive systems of each biological organism, and so on.

Your mind is oriented to circles. Once you complete one circle, you start another. This series of commentaries on “Hidden Mickeyisms” is based on the many circles your life encounters. If you had wondered why we think in terms of circles, perhaps this consideration of cosmic circles has given you a hint. Small wonder, as Burke observes, that the human psyche is oriented to circles. We measure the human concept of time in circles, as the second, minute, and hour hands of our clocks go round and round in circles. We conform even the days of our lives into smaller circles than the astrophysical circles of years and months. We divide months into 4 circles which we call weeks. Arthur Miller discovered that 7 items are about the maximum number of items we can easily remember. So, we have only 7 days in a week. We have only 7 numbers in our basic phone numbers. Weeks are new, human-created symbolic circles. In academic “circles,” the completion of each grade in school, each level of education (elementary, middle, high school), each degree (Associate’s, Bachelor’s, Master’s, Doctor’s), each college course, each paper written, each quiz studied for and taken, each book written, and each conference paper proposed, prepared, and presented is a circle—an entelechy—usually followed by another similar circle.

This series of commentaries will concentrate on a specific type of circle—that which is presented in Disney films. To understand these circles, I will rely on Kenneth Burke’s concept of entelechy. Burke is interested in the study of circles, but his circles are qualitatively different from the cosmic circles observed by Aristotle. Burke is interested in the type of circles humans invent. And, Disney is a very influential inventor and distributor of those circles. I will explain Burkean circles and how Disney films contain them in my next commentary.