"The Kekulé Problem" is a 2017 essay written by the American author
Cormac McCarthy for the
Santa Fe Institute (SFI). It was McCarthy's first published work of
non-fiction. The science magazine ''
Nautilus'' first ran the article online on April 20, 2017, then printed it as the cover story for an issue on the subject of consciousness.
David Krakauer, an American evolutionary biologist who had known McCarthy for two decades, wrote a brief introduction. Don Kilpatrick III provided illustrations.
Summary
McCarthy analyzes a famous dream of
August Kekulé's as a model of the
unconscious mind and the
origins of language
Origin(s) or The Origin may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media
Comics and manga
* ''Origin'' (comics), a Wolverine comic book mini-series published by Marvel Comics in 2002
* ''The Origin'' (Buffy comic), a 1999 ''Buffy the Vampire Sl ...
. He theorizes about the nature of the unconscious mind and its separation from human language. The unconscious, according to McCarthy, "is a machine for operating an animal" and that "all animals have an unconscious." McCarthy postulates that while the unconscious mind is thus a biologically determined phenomenon, language is not.
Analysis
Despite appearing in a scientific journal, "The Kekulé Problem" lacks the formality and rigor found in most
scientific literature. The article lacks
citation
A citation is a reference to a source. More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of ...
s or references to other scientific authorities aside from McCarthy's acquaintances at SFI and Kekulé himself. Instead it is written in the style of a reflective philosophical
essay in McCarthy's own
first-person voice. There are flashes of direct
autobiography
An autobiography, sometimes informally called an autobio, is a self-written account of one's own life.
It is a form of biography.
Definition
The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly by William Taylor in 1797 in the English peri ...
, such as an anecdote stemming from one of McCarthy's frequent lunchtime conversations with his friend, the physicist
George Zweig. Such elements of memoir are virtually absent from any of McCarthy's published writings.
Peter Josyph called it "a reader's memoir. If you like, a thinker's memoir. A wonderer's memoir. Notes of a mental traveler. McCarthy Table Talk," placing it in the tradition of such essayists as "
Seneca,
Montaigne
Michel Eyquem, Sieur de Montaigne ( ; ; 28 February 1533 – 13 September 1592), also known as the Lord of Montaigne, was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance. He is known for popularizing the essay as a liter ...
,
Thoreau,
Twain,
Whitman,
Huxley
Huxley may refer to:
People
* Huxley (surname)
* The British Huxley family
* Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), British biologist known as "Darwin's Bulldog"
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,
Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitari ...
,
Cendrars
Frédéric-Louis Sauser (1 September 1887 – 21 January 1961), better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss-born novelist and poet who became a naturalized French citizen in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the European mod ...
,
Saroyan
Saroyan is a family name of Armenian origin. It may refer to:
* Camille Saroyan, a character in the TV series ''Bones''
* Sedrak Saroyan (1967–2022), Armenian general and politician
* William Saroyan (1908–1981), Pulitzer Prize–winning Arme ...
,
Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf (; ; 25 January 1882 28 March 1941) was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
Woolf was born i ...
, ,
Vidal,
Miller,
Kerouac,
Selzer."
Publication
"The Kekulé Problem" was published in the science magazine ''
Nautilus'' on April 20, 2017. The essay is about 3,000
words long.
Reception
In a review for ''
The New Yorker'', Nick Romeo said the essay was a successful adaptation of McCarthy's distinctive writing style into the realm of non-fiction, with its "folksy locutions and no-nonsense sentence fragments and even, at points, the vaguely biblical