Representing Kenneth Burke 9780801828775

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Preface (Hayden White, page vii)
Some of the Many Kenneth Burkes (William Rueckert, page 1)
Kenneth Burke's Poetics of Catharsis (Donald L. Jennermann, page 31)
Logology: Burke on St. Augustine (John Freccero, page 52)
The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis (Fredric R. Jameson, page 68)
Kenneth Burke, "Logology," and the Tribal No (William Wasserstrom, page 92)
Reading History with Kenneth Burke (Frank Lentricchia, page 119)
Volume and Body in Burke's Criticism, or Stalled in the Right Place (Angus Fletcher, page 150)

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REPRESENTING KENNETH BURKE

Selected Papers from the English Institute New Series

1, Alvin B. Kernan, ed., Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson

2. Geoffrey H. Hartman, ed., Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text 3. Edward W. Said, ed., Literature and Society

4. Leslie A. Fiedler and Houston A. Baker, Jr., eds., English Literature: Opening Up the Canon 5. Stephen J. Greenblatt, ed., Allegory and Representation

6. Hayden White and Margaret Brose, eds., Representing Kenneth Burke

7. Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret R. Higonnet, eds., The Representation of Women in Fiction

Representing Kenneth Burke ( ee Selected Papers from the English Institute New Series, no. 6

Edited by Hayden White and Margaret Brose

THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS BALTIMORE AND LONDON

Copyright © 1982 by The English Institute All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland 21218 The Johns Hopkins Press Ltd., London

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: Representing Kenneth Burke.

(Selected papers from the English Institute; new ser., no. 6)

1. Burke, Kenneth, 1897- —Criticism and interpretation— Addresses, essays, lectures. I. White, Hayden V.,1928- _—._—‘ II. Brose,

Margaret. III. Series. PS3503.U06134Z82 1982 818’,5209 82-47972

ISBN 0-801 8-2877-5 AACR2

Contents

Hayden White vil

Preface

William Rueckert 1

Some of the Many Kenneth Burkes

Kenneth Burke’s Poetics of Catharsis

Donald L. Jennermann 31

John Freccero 52

Logology: Burke on St. Augustine

The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis

Fredric R. Jameson 68 William Wasserstrom 92

Kenneth Burke, ‘“‘Logology,” and the Tribal No

Frank Lentricchia 119

Reading History with Kenneth Burke

Volume and Body in Burke’s Criticism, or Stalled in the Right Place

Angus Fletcher 150 v

Gc Pretace

cs collecti fK h Burke has b in SeokThis s collection of essays on Kenneth Burke has been the making for five years. The nucleus consisted of three papers given by John Freccero, Angus Fletcher, and Fredric Jameson at a meeting of the English Institute in 1977 as contributions to

a panel on ‘‘The Achievement of Kenneth Burke” of which I was chairman. Burke attended the meeting and in his interventions gave ample evidence that he was not about to take refuge in his status as the monument to which his achievement entitled him. He was as combative and as au courant with the latest critical scene as ever—at the time he was already at work on deconstructive criticism. Moreover, it was obvious even five years ago that he had anticipated, in his own inimitable way, much of what passed for structuralism and post-structuralism well before

either of these movements had taken shape. The Governing Board of the Institute decided, therefore, to sponsor publication of a volume of critical essays; I was charged with the task of editing it. The assembly of the volume proved more difficult than I had

anticipated. I discovered that, while there were few serious critics who had not studied Burke with profit and learned something from him that had helped them in their own fields of in-

vestigation, most were not confident of their ability to do justice to his work as a whole. Although anyone who has the stamina to read extensively in his vast oeuvre cannot fail to perceive its manifest integrity, and the ways in which it reflects a consistency of development and a progressive deepening of vision,

Burke’s work remains for many much too richly personal—in a way that, for example, Frye’s or Richards’ work is not—to be grasped as a whole. There is something densely autobiographical Vil

vill Preface in everything he has written, so that any effort to come to terms with his work requires that we come to terms with the man who

made it. It was this requirement more than anything else that intimidated many of the scholars whom I approached as possible contributors to this volume. I am especially grateful, there-

fore, to those who did not shrink before the enormity and delicacy of the task of “representing Kenneth Burke” as best they could. Bill Rueckert, of course, knows more about Kenneth Burke than anyone living, and his essay gives the overview suitable for

an opening essay. Bill Wasserstrom, I knew, possessed an unmatchable knowledge of the literary world in which Burke moved and a deep sensitivity to the social conscience that had motivated Burke throughout his long career. His essay is a model of how Burke’s work should be applied to the discussion of complex social issues, capturing the spirit as well as the letter of Burke’s theories. Donald Jennermann heard of the project and volunteered a piece that he had been working on for some time; I thought it especially useful for helping readers to comprehend the classical, and more specifically Aristotelian, elements in Burke’s thought. This seemed to me to be a good companion piece to John Freccero’s essay on the ways in which Burke’s “logology” reflects and illuminates certain themes of Christian, and especially Augustinian, theology; therefore I have bracketed them together.

Frank Lentricchia was putting the final touches on his epochal study of recent American critical theory, After the New Criticism, when we discussed the possibility of his contributing to the volume. He had not dealt with Burke in his book because

he was concerned with analyzing dominant conventions or schools of criticism, rather than individual critics; no one, he said, was more ‘‘individual” than Burke. Frank Lentricchia was

right: Burke does not have ‘‘followers,” he has founded no “school.” How could he have done so, since he has served as the very model of critical freedom while so many others have pursued the false god of ‘‘disciplines”? The title of Lentricchia’s

Preface 1x essay, “Reading History with Kenneth Burke,” indicates the kind of discipleship he inspires: collegial rather than subservient. I am especially grateful to Lentricchia for showing us how his-

tory can be ‘‘Burked.” Read in tandem with Fred Jameson’s essay, which, for all its praise of Burke as our teacher, did not shrink from criticizing him for a kind of lapse into ‘‘formalism,”

Lentricchia’s essay shows how a confrontation with history serves as a basis of Burke’s critical concerns.

I have chosen to place Angus Fletcher’s characteristically subtle essay at the end of the volume because it deals with what,

for want of a better term, I would call the ‘‘aesthetics” of Burke’s prose. Fletcher shows us not only what should be our attitude in approaching Burke’s work but also how to grasp the nuances of its complex recursive structures. He makes a point that should be borne in mind when reading anything that Burke writes, a point that may account for the fact that so many critics have found Burke’s work illuminating in parts but difficult to srasp in its totality. Fletcher notes that Burke can tell us almost everything we might wish to know about a literary work except why or how it is beautiful. This seems just, for it illuminates the peculiar position that Burke occupies vis a vis the whole modern fetishism of the ‘‘beautiful soul” that serves as the open content of ‘“aestheticism.’’ Burke is an unremitting intellectualist. The beautiful for him could never be that ‘‘end in itself” that modern aestheticism conceives it to be; for him, it is always, and perhaps

only, the outer form of truth. This does not, however, as Fletcher’s: essay amply shows, prevent us from recognizing the beauty of Burke’s long negotiation of the “‘critical path” and of

the tokens of that negotiation that, in the form of his essays, poems, letters, reviews, talks, conversations, and novel, he has left along the way.

I thank the contributors for their labors and Margaret Brose for her indispensable aid in the editing of this volume. HAYDEN WHITE

REPRESENTING KENNETH BURKE

(@ William Rueckert

Some of the Many Kenneth Burkes Working Proposition: There are as many Burkes as there are books and essays by him, and probably more Burkes than there are books because there are often many Burkes in one book—as for example, in Philosophy of Literary Form, Language as Symbolic Action, The Rhetoric of Religion, or A Grammar of Motives. And there are Burkes not in the books yet, the Burkes of the letters, or all those Burkes since 1966. The Burke we experience now, live, in 1977 is not the same one we experienced five years ago or ten years ago. None of the Burkes contradicts any of the others.

(s I have had a long and complex association with Kenneth Burke, in and out of print, going back now more than twentyfive years. Without exception, for me anyway, it has been a gen-

erative relationship. When I began to think about this paper, under its original title, “The Uses of Kenneth Burke,” the task of reducing all these generative uses of Burke to a manageable number seemed hopeless. I was confronted by what seemed to be mind-breaking alternatives: What uses? Which Burke—the early, middle, mature, or late Burke? Which of the many Burkes: the methodological genius, the ironic intelligence, the systembuilder, the ‘“‘dramatist,’’ the logologer, the counter-stater, the

poet, the aphorist, the rhetorician, the dialectician, the literary critic, or the tropist? Should I choose? Did I have a right to choose, subordinating one part of this magical man, this remarkable intelligence and achievement, to another? However, to go on, I would clearly have to choose at least some place to begin, since choice, as Burke reminds us, is intrinsic to the movement from motives to symbolic action. SoI chose: I would begin with Burke the aphorist, as we find him in his ‘‘Flowerishes’’—collec-

tions of sayings arranged every which way on the page so that one has to keep turning the book to read and to earn all of the sayings in any one ‘“‘Flowerish.” 1

2 William Rueckert BURKE THE APHORIST

Here is a sampling of aphorisms from the Flowerishes.! A huge collection could be compiled from Burke’s works as a whole. His friends said he could see around corners, his enemies said he had crooked vision. One must learn to be just morbid enough. In a world full of problems, he sat doing puzzles. By saying no to himself he gave form to his life. After fifty, one further thing to learn: how to ripen without rotting. Why leave of your own accord when you can contrive to be thrown out? Why does a chicken cross the road to get to the other side? Having nothing to tempt thieves, he was robbed by a kleptomaniac. Art turns liabilities into assets, guilt into solace, weakness into strength; it transforms the onus of owing into the honor of ownership. When you tried to make him feel good, he thought it was a plot; if you said hello, he accused you of lying. Always say grace before kicking about the food. When the mice are away the cats will play. Things aren’t so bad. Buck up! Put on your pants, put in your teeth, and go fora walk. The cure for digging in the dirt is an idea; the cure for any idea is more ideas; the cure for all ideas is digging in the dirt. Though he despised mankind he dearly loved an audience. He held that poets are made for critics, just as sick people are made for doctors. They got themselves good berths by policies that would sink a ship. Pity the weeds in your garden all trying to make an honest living. He resolved always to wait two weeks before committing suicide. God his goal and goad. For exercise, he read the sports column.

Burke the aphorist is most obviously Burke the ironist and humorist. Burke has always been something of a comedian, and these aphorisms show that part of him, but of course there is more contained here than mere humor. The aphorisms are often built on ironies, reversals, and deviated cynicism. Always say grace before kicking about the food—just in case God is really

Some of the Many Kenneth Burkes 3 up there, listening—even though, we realize, nothing so simpleminded and childlike as this is going to fool an omniscient God. The aphorisms bear a lot of analysis and they tell us a lot about Burke. They all contain a form of perspectival wisdom. They are

cautionary. They reflect a mind that cannot help but perceive ironically, seeing around corners to crooked vision, seeing through

to the ends of things where they reverse and become something else (god as goal and goad), perceiving that, whether we like it or not, our ideas perfect themselves and we are “rotten with perfection.” This ironic reversing, often incongruous, end-of-the-line thinking is very characteristic of Burke, in person and in print. Irony, reversal, laughter, end-of-the-lining, seeing around corners, seeing the backsides and insides of things while looking at the surfaces and outsides, and thinking of the low (say the urinary, fecal, and sexual Demonic Trinity) as one looks at and contemplates the high (say the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of the Divine Trinity)—this double, triple, multiple penetrating vision is one of the central characteristics of Burke from the beginning. It is intrinsic to all the books and is stated as an operative principle in the title of his first work of criticism—Counter-Statement. The aphorisms often work by effecting a change of perspective, by making you look at something from a sudden new angle of vision—for example, ‘When the mice are away the cats will

play,” or ‘He held that poets are made for critics just as sick people are made for doctors.’ They work by adding unexpected motives (‘‘He resolved always to wait two weeks before committing suicide”), by circling and cycling things back on themselves, or returning to the point of departure but with a difference

(as with the one about the cure for ideas being digging in the dirt), by pointing out ambiguities of motivation or situation (“He hated mankind but loved an audience’’) or absurdities (‘‘For exercise, he read the sports column’’), and by working out

ambivalent transformations (as in the most complex of the aphorisms about art, where negatives are transformed into positives by means of the creative process—liabilities into assets, guilt

4 William Rueckert into solace, weakness into strength, onus into honor), At every point, these aphorisms keep us from single-minded vision, from seeing things in only one way, from settling for simple-minded answers to complex or even simple questions, from looking at things from only one perspective, from staying on the surface. They refuse us the satisfactions of a single doctrine, and they won’t let us deny the complexity and variety of the world, the irony, ambiguity, and paradoxical and foible-ridden nature of language, human motives, and actions. These are all anti-doctrinal aphorisms; they tend to deflate or defeat (not debunk, for Burke has never been a debunker) doctrine in favor of fluidity, of the mind in action, of rationality and reasonableness, and of the mind’s ability to turn itself on itself and the world and perceive itself ironically, comically. Wherever and however you encounter Kenneth Burke, you are liable to see this aphoristic mind-set at work and at play in what he is doing. One is especially conscious of this when he comes into your presence as a human resource, as his own text, talking, lecturing, teaching, and commenting. Then you see him as a living perceptual apparatus, moving through time and human experience, working from inside a complete and enormously complex vision and methodology, a kind of Charlie Chaplin of dialectics and the word, performing with the same consummate, breathtaking (truly) skill, using the mind and words in the same way that Chaplin used his body and gestures—often to some of the same ends, By one of those strange conjunctions of life, I recently saw both Burke (at 80) and Charlie Chaplin (in Modern Times) within a week of each other, and was struck not only by how much they looked like each other back in 1936, but by how each was a truly magical presence in his own field. I might not even have made a connection between them beyond the physical resemblance except that at one point during his visit to The National Humanities Institute at The University of Chicago, Burke referred to himself asa comedian. The accuracy of this self-naming struck

Some of the Many Kenneth Burkes BD) me very forcefully then, after two days of watching him in action, and later, while I watched Chaplin in Modern Times—especially

in the department store scene, where he roller-skates with such exquisite grace and marvelous threat-tinged humor at the edge of the dark ‘“‘abyss.’’ This is precisely what Burke has been doing in some of his many roles for the past fifty years.

BURKE THE COMEDIAN

Comedy has always been central to Burke, so long as one realizes that by comedy Burke means the whole range of possi-

bilities intrinsic to this term, from the joke, through social comedy and the stage play, to The Divine Comedy—and beyond,

if that is possible, right to the end of the line, to some galactic or cosmic comedy, conceived, perhaps in the manner of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. In many ways, Burke’s vision is more comic than anything else, if one takes the trouble to find out what he means by this term. Only a comedian in Burke’s sense would indicate, in his most formidable book, A Grammar of Motives, which was published in 1945 and written during World War II, right on the title page that its larger purpose was “toward the purification of war.” “War,” Burke has said, ‘‘is a disease of cooperation.’”’ He dedicated his first book of poems to “‘My sparring partners’’ saying, punningly, ‘‘and long may we

spar without parting.’ If you purify war you do not get peace, but dialectics—that is, verbal sparring instead of physical killing, a war of words, which, so far as Burke is concerned, is where the great secular comedy takes place. If war is a disease of cooperation, then you should be able to cure it, by removing the malign

elements and retaining the benign. Health, then, is cooperation, and cooperation is promoted and maintained by the work of dialectics and by efforts to purify war. If war is recognized as a disease, rather than as inevitable, then it is susceptible to cure. If you dedicate your most creative and peaceful verbal acts to

6 William Rueckert your sparring partners—and Burke has had plenty of them—and hope that you can keep sparring without parting (becoming outand-out enemies), you indicate in this way a faith in the creative, cooperative, and restorative powers of the word, a belief that a

cure for the disease of war can be found, and a belief in the power of dialectics to purify war and to reduce it to, or keep it at, the level of verbal sparring. These beliefs are all intrinsic to a comic vision.

In Attitudes toward History (1938), Burke made a series of statements about comedy (as a frame of reference, a frame of acceptance, an attitude toward history) that it is still useful to keep in mind when trying to think about what he has been trying to do and to tell us all these years: “Like tragedy, comedy warns against the dangers of pride, but its emphasis shifts from crime to stupidity.”’* The shift in locus here is from the ethical and moral (law and sin) to the rational, stupidity being a function (or dysfunction) of mind, and curable by means of education, enlightenment, or knowledge, or by any of the means by which these can be promoted—say dialectics. In a now famous passage (for Burkeans, anyway) Burke says: The progress of human enlightenment can go no further than in pic-

turing people not as vicious, but as mistaken, When you add that people are necessarily mistaken, that all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness, you complete the comic circle, returning again to the lesson of humility which underlies great tragedy. The audience, from its vantage point, sees the operation of errors that the characters of the play cannot see; thus seeing from two angles at once, it is chastened by dramatic irony; it is admonished to remember that when intelligence means wisdom (in contrast to the modern tendency to look upon intelligence as merely a coefficient of power for heighten-

ing our ability to get things, be they good things or bad), it requires fear, resignation, the sense of limits, as an important ingredient. °

Clearly, Burke has been a comedian in this sense since he began the line of books that comes to us from Counter-Statement. He has, in fact, been writing comedy all along, even as he has

Some of the Many Kenneth Burkes 7 observed it, written about it, been involved in it, and acted in it.

Typical of Burke is the fact that he would write a four-part book, The Rhetoric of Religion, in which the first three parts are among the most complex and implicationally far-reaching things he ever wrote, and then follow these with a comic parody in dramatic form, entitled ‘Epilogue: Prologue in Heaven.” The two speakers are TL (the Lord) and S (Satan), who discuss the eschatological subject matter of the three preceding essays. The burden of this subject matter is the logological transformation of theology into logology (words about God into words about words) and the derivation of the Divine Comedy (that is, Christian creation and human history) from secular and naturalistic (rather than divine) grounds. The result is a secular comedy of words entirely accessible to the dialectician or logologer. It is this secular comedy of words (man is the symbol-using animal, Burke finally said in the fifties) that has always been Burke’s

principal concern and it is to the completion of the ‘“‘comic circle’? (as described above) that so much of his work has been devoted.

Burke admonishes us that, if we want to see something accurately, we should at least try to see it whole; therefore, I have taken his version of the essential secular human comedy from the end of his line of thinking about it, so that I can present it in its quintessential nature. Burke’s Comedy is, first of all, entirely secular—it is the great comedy of language, words—and it

is not necessarily moral at all, as it is in Dante, but derives its essential nature from man the symbol-user. This comedy can be studied anywhere man is, has been, or will be. It is a vast ironic drama in which man is his own victimizer, having invented words,

and having perfected them, and in their perfection created problems he can’t solve. It is a tragi-ccomic drama in which, according to Burke’s principles of entitlement and entelechy, everything human is being driven toward perfection of itself, to the end of its line. Burke says, for example, that machines are the perfection (caricature) of human rationality, or man’s

5 William Rueckert own entelechy is technology (the perfection of symbol-systems).

Pursue these for a whole and you come on comic ironies that are indeed very sobering; or apply the principle of entelechy, which Burke says is intrinsic to language (symbol-systems) and hence to man, to recombinant DNA research, and you again come on comic ironies of such a nature that you do not know whether to laugh or to cry, or both. Burke the comedian is also Burke the tragedian, whose model is the lost Greek tetralogy in which three tragedies are followed

by a satyr play, as in The Rhetoric of Religion. The logic of Burke’s own methodology and vision tell us that, pursued far enough, comedy reverses and becomes ironic, or that if we apply

the aphoristic perspective to comedy we see that tragedy is hovering around in there—both at the edges and in the center—

and vice versa, of course. Now I don’t want to put Burke ona wheel and just spin him (or run him around in a circle, as if he were a dray horse going round and round forever). I only want to indicate that, if, as I have suggested elsewhere, tragedy is Burke’s representative anecdote, all tragedies are followed by satyr plays, and that, as he gets older, more and more (as with so many other great minds and imaginations) his vision becomes

more purely, perhaps resignedly, comic. What does it mean to say that the vision is comic in the end? For one thing, it means that this extraordinary mind has avoided the sadomasochistic double-binding ironies of a Derrida, and that it has not yet lost its faith in reason (even as it acknowledges the irrational), in dialectics, and in the capacity of the human mind and language to purify war and to move mankind toward some form of enlightenment, This mind has not lost its capacity to believe ina future, and it refuses, stubbornly, to succumb to despair, cynicism, and the dubious resonances of doomsdayism. Even if man’s entelechy is technology, maybe it is still not too late: maybe technology can be taught how to save man from himself. This may be the perfection of the comic vision itself.

Some of the Many Kenneth Burkes 9 BURKE THE DIALECTICIAN

Dialectics, Burke has said, is the use of symbol-systems to check on symbol-systems. It would be a mistake to assume that Burke thinks that man is nothing but an aggregate of symbolsystems. Man is a symbolusing animal, in Burke’s definition, and the animal part is as important as the symbol-using part, except that, according to Burke, and from our own experience, we know that probably every part of the animal in man (and

outside of, and beyond man, to every part of the physical world and even to the moon) now has a symbolic ingredient added to it. Burke has even made the marvelous statement that words create things and that symbols create man. Of course, properly understood, both of these ideas are true and tell us, in part, why it is important to become a practicing dialectician and to come to as full an understanding as possible of symbol-systems and how they effect and affect our lives, This may not save us from symbol-systems; perhaps it may do no more than bring us to a perception of our dilemmas as symbol-using animals. However, ignorance has never been bliss for Burke: if he has preached or promoted anything throughout all of his writing and teaching life, it has been the value of knowledge and thoroughness, especially about language and symbol-systems generally. Nobody but Burke provides us with such a formidable set of dialectical tools for the analysis of verbal symbol-systems and symbolic action—and this includes the structuralist and poststructuralist critics. I have no interest in setting these people against each other; we have too much to learn from them all. I only want to make a statement about the quality and quantity of dialectical and rhetorical resources Burke makes available to

us, both in his specifically dialectical book, 4 Grammar of Motives, and elsewhere, say in A Rhetoric of Motives, The Rhetoric of Religion, and in some of the brilliant later essays collected in Language as Symbolic Action.

10 William Rueckert __ All terminologies and methodologies are also ideologies, as Burke has brilliantly demonstrated in his essay ‘Terministic Screens.”’* A given terminology and methodology both enable _ you to see and to do certain things and prevent you from seeing and doing others. What Burke says of others is also true of his

terminologies and methodologies, going all the way back to Counter-Statement and coming as far forward as Language as Symbolic Action, Even the most inclusive terminologies and methodologies are limiting and determining, if only because they limit you to inclusiveness. This might be said of Burke’s Pentad

and ratios, which, when applied, require one to identify scene, act, agent, agency, and purpose for any symbolic action, or any other action, for that matter, and then also require that one work

out the ratios or relationships between these five apparently inclusive factors. In the first place, the five terms of the Pentad are themselves a selection of terms from a possible range of terms too vast to enumerate, and the nature of the terms themselves implies either the metaphor or the analogy of the theater and lays a heavy stress upon the primacy of act or action. The five terms impose a pentadal, relational mode of thought on the __ mind, as is made clear by the Pentad matrix: PENTAD MATRIA, WHICH INCLUDES ALL POSSIBLE RATIOS

scene act agent apency purpose scene act agent agency purpose scene act agent agency purpose scene act agent acency purpose scene act agent agency ! purpose scene act agent agency purpose A complete set of ratios is gotten by reading across, through the reflexive ratios (scene-scene, act-act, and so forth). A reflexive ratio simply indicates the extent to which any one of the five

operates as the locus of its own motivation, or, to change terminologies, generates its own motives out of itself. This is most obvious with agent, but it is true of the other four terms. You can begin anywhere in the matrix but you cannot stop until

Some of the Many Kenneth Burkes 11 you have worked through the Pentad and considered the reflexive ratio. Wherever you begin, you shift the locus and move the primary values into that term. That is, scene or environment can be

primary and determining, act (whether verbal or physical) can be primary, agent (person, self) can be primary, agency or means can be primary, and purpose (end, teleology) can be primary. I do not want to try to say here what it took Burke 450 pages to say in A Grammar of Motives, I merely want to suggest some of the ways in which the Pentad is resourceful as a dialectical tool. What you cannot do with the Pentad and the ratios is also instructive. There is no way to discuss natural things except as scenic material, unless you treat them as agents; but an agent in Burke’s terms can’t act without language, and animals do not act in the human sense. A tree, for example, has to be scenic, or in an agency function as means (that is lumber or firewood). There is no term for ‘thing’ in the Pentad. The only ‘thing’ term is scene, in which things are part of the scene or instrumentalities, or are involved in the purpose, or are acted upon by the agent. Much of the Grammar is concerned with non-verbal substances (that is, things), but you have to get out of the terminol-

ogy of the Pentad to discuss them, because the stress in the Pentad is so heavily upon the act/action, agent/action set. There are an enormous number of variables here, as Burke well knows, and the apparently neutral terminology of naming, placing, and relating is hardly neutral at all. It imposes a pentadal

mode of thought on the mind; it forces the mind into acts of naming, differentiating, and placing. It makes it impossible not to think relationally. It celebrates the almost infinite variety of possible acts, agents, agencies, scenes, and purposes—even as it affirms certain universals or constants present and operative in the midst of this mighty plethora. It provides a way of placing and understanding without necessarily judging, although Burke

himself says that he favors the term act. He does not say you can’t favor some other term—say the pragmatic agency, the

12 William Rueckert romantic agent, the religious purpose, or the environmental scene. Set up as a pentadal matrix, as I have done it, so that all possible ratios are present, including the reflexive ratio of, say,

act-act, or pure act, the Pentad and ratios become a mighty dialectical tool—enough, one would think, for one mind to work with, but only one among many in Burke’s department store of terms and methodologies. One wonders why he must have so many terms and methodologies, since Burke has gone on inventing, borrowing, stealing, perfecting, and proliferating them for fifty years now. Furthermore, even as he has adjusted them to the needs of his own mind

and system, he has made them available for others to use differently—as the many users of Burke have shown. (As Burke once said in defending himself from some attack or other: ‘‘Well,

you don’t have to use a term the way the Pope does.”’) I have picked the Pentad and ratios as an example. I might have picked the ‘Lexicon Rhetoricae”’ from Counter-Statement, or ‘‘Perspective by Incongruity,” from Permanence and Change, or ‘‘The Dictionary of Pivotal Terms” from Attitudes toward History, or dream, prayer, chart, from Philosophy of Literary Form. Or I might have chosen the marvelously resourceful triad of formulas also from Philosophy of Literary Form: what goes with what (clusters), what versus what (agon), and what becomes what (transformations). Or I could have picked the theory of entitlement, the principle of entelechy, the temporizing of essence, the four master tropes (irony, metaphor, metonomy, and synecdoche), or cyclic and rectilinear form, or terministic screens, etc....One could fill pages just listing the hundreds of terms and methods available for use in Burke’s books from CounterStatement on. Burke is a truly formidable terminological and methodological resource for the analysis of language and symbolic action and symbol-systems, and, by extension, for the analysis of humans and human actions generally. What does the dialectician do with all this stuff? Why does he

Some of the Many Kenneth Burkes 13 need such a variety of tools, such a formidable symbol-system to check on other symbol-systems? For one thing, if the humanistic intellectual endeavors of the last seventy years have taught us anything, if they have converged upon a primary truth, it has been about the centrality of language to humans and human history. There is not a single branch of humanistic study that is not now language-centered, and if not specifically languagecentered, as in some kinds of ecology, then systems-centered, which is, after all, a variation of the symbol-system intrinsic to language. Our most sophisticated bodies of knowledge are now all language-centered, and language analysis, at a level of abstraction and theoretical and methodological complexity no one could have imagined twenty-five years ago, has become the central tool of almost all humanistic studies. Burke has always been ahead of his time. In the thirties he was saying things about the importance of language and symbol-systems that we have just now begun to appreciate. Since then, all of his work has been part of one of the most intensive, and extensive, studies of language carried out by anyone in our time. For Burke, the capacity for language is prior to the capacity for thought, and thought is really a function of language. Hence, man is not a rational animal or even a tool-using animal, but

a symbol-using animal. For Burke, then, it is language that one needs access to, because all of the most basic and fundamental human truths can be got at by way of language. For Burke, access to language is by way of dialectics, or, as he was later to rename it, logologic—not the logic of thought, but the logic of words. Dialectics is really a branch of what Burke was

later to call logology—the study of words, of language, of symbol-systems. Logology is really larger and more inclusive than dialectics or logologic, and if we are to answer the question posed above (Why does the dialectician or logologician need such a variety of tools, such a formidable symbol-system to check on other symbol-systems?) we must consider Burke the logologer.

14 William Rueckert BURKE THE LOGOLOGER

The subtitle of The Rhetoric of Religion (1961) is Studies in Logology, Logology, Burke says, is words about words, but that does not tell us much. As soon as there were written words, and no doubt before, there were words about words—or various forms of criticism and commentary. Burke as logologer is not just using words to study words. Logology is really what gives dialectics its controlling purpose. The Rhetoric of Religion is the book in which the work on language that Burke began to systematize in A Grammar of Motives comes to some kind of culmination. (Students of Burke were expecting A Symbolic of Motives when this book came out. That work, in fact, is essentially complete and exists in published form in different essays never yet brought together in a single book of that title.) It is the culmination of Burke’s study of poetics, which goes back to Counter-Statement, and insofar as poetry is for Burke (and for many others) one of the most perfect uses of language, it would also represent some part of the culmination of Burke’s work on language and the imagination. However, there is, for Burke, a use of language more ultimate than poetry, and that is theology —or words about God—and the central tenets of logology are developed by Burke out of this four-part logological study of theology—or words about words about god.

The table of contents of The Rhetoric of Religion is very instructive. There is a little introduction “On Theology and Logology,” a chapter ‘On Words and The Word,” a chapter on “Verbal Action in St. Augustine’s Confessions,” a chapter on “The First Three Chapters of Genesis,” and an epilogue entitled

“Prologue in Heaven.” The Rhetoric of Religion is one of Burke’s most difficult, brilliant, and original works. Its range of uses alone is considerable because it takes us right to the end of the line of Burke’s systematic thoughts on language and gives us both conceptual and methodological paradigms for much

Some of the Many Kenneth Burkes 15 of his work, from A Grammar of Motives (1945) on up to the present. One of Burke’s most recent (1977) summarizing essays, for example, is entitled “Theology and Logology”’ and returns to take up the basic postulates of The Rhetoric of Religion after twenty years of further meditation upon them. The attraction of this pairing for Burke is worth thinking about. ‘‘Theological doctrine,” Burke says, “‘is a body of spoken or written words.”’*

Whatever else it may be, and wholly regardless of whether it is true or false, theology is pre-eminently verbal. It is ‘words about ‘God.’”’

In being words about so ‘‘ultimate’’ or ‘‘radical’’ a subject it almost necessarily becomes an example of words used with thoroughness. Since words about god would be as far reaching as words can be, the rhetoric of religion furnishes a good instance of terministic enterprise in general.

Thus it is our logological thesis that, since the theological use of language is thorough, the close study of theology and its forms will provide us with good insight into the nature of language itself as a motive. Such an approach involves the tentative belief that, even when men use language trivially, the motives inherent in its possible thorough use are acting somewhat as goads, however vague.°

There is a lot of Burke in the above quotation, and the dense, continuous brilliance with which Burke carries out his logological

enterprise in the book itself is dumbfounding. Since the forties Burke’s primary interest has been in the nature of language, whether written or spoken, in the nature of language itself as a basic human motive, in the ways in which the paradigms of language (language in its most perfect or thorough uses) are present and operative in all verbal actions, and in the ways in which the top (the god term, the abstraction, the idea) is always present and operative at the bottom (the empirical, descriptive terms).

Much of Burke’s work consists of tracking the upward and downward transformations that language makes possible. For Burke, words, like theological discourse, go upward and come to a head, in God or in ultimate, perfect god terms. This is what Burke means by entelechy, the motive toward perfection that is

16 William Rueckert intrinsic to language. The genius of so much of Burke’s work

has always been his capacity to perceive the whole in the part, which is a function of thoroughness, and to read the whole back into the part, either by analogy, metonomy, synecdoche, paradigmatic modes of thought, or dense symbolic readings that discover the hidden secret motives and meanings in something. Burke has always been a marvelous cryptologist. What we need to recognize here is, to use one of Burke’s own phrases, ‘“‘the astounding thoroughness’’ with which Burke has worked out the analogies between theology, in particular Christian theology, and logology, and then made clear that logology

is to be our secular theology in the twentieth century. This is certainly the burden of the astounding essay ‘‘The First Three Chapters of Genesis,’ in which Burke works out and then substitutes a logological account of creation for the Christian one presented in Genesis, and so grounds himself, and anyone who wants to follow him, in an essentially secular, naturalistic, and linguistic account of human history. He derives man’s human history from language, or man as the symbol-using animal. If logology has an animating proposition, it is that logology can say as much about what is fundamentally human as Christian theology, and it does this by deriving God (god) from man’s capacities as a symbol-using animal, rather than deriving man, and the whole physical universe, from God’s powers of creation. In this way, man is grounded in words and God (whether he is

real or not) becomes a function of words. In fact, one of the arguments of The Rhetoric of Religion is that there is nothing that theology can say about man, the world in which he lives, and the worlds he creates that logology can’t say, working empirically with language.

Burke’s brilliant essay on the first three chapters of Genesis confronts this issue right at its source, where human history is given its sacred origins and is thus tied to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost through all of its long unfolding until it— human history—ends with the Apocalypse. We are at the highest,

Some of the Many Kenneth Burkes 17 furthest reaches of Burke here, where he addresses first and last

questions and tries to account for them with his own system. Burke has never been anything if not thorough, and to follow him, to use him, is to come on most of the basic and ultimate questions implicit in one’s own condition and in the things one is studying. This is one thing that is always disturbing about Burke. If you send him an essay to read, he will say that, yes, there is some good stuff here, but you have not worked it all out. If you begin a Burkean analysis, and do it carefully, it takes you to those often unanswerable questions. Put Burke on a man’s

methodology and he inevitably turns up the partialities of that methodology. Logology does not just insist on the priority and

primacy of language, it also insists upon a conceptual and methodological end-of-the-line thoroughness. Who else would think of taking on theology with logology or any other alternative, trying to demystify it yet still retain the grandeur of its moral-ethical conception of man and the drama of his existence in the world? Burke calls this not throwing out the baby with the bath. Recently (November 1977) Eliade spoke, in a brilliant reversal,

of the need to demystify the profane and secular in order to recover, or rediscover, the sacred—the universal world of spirit that men have in common. It is worth pointing out here that Burke has tried to keep both worlds in his scheme. He does not want to say God is dead, God does not exist; he wants to say God can never be dead, God—perfection—is intrinsic to language—in fact,

many gods are intrinsic to language, as many as you could possibly need. ‘“‘God” is the true confirmation to the generative powers of language. What other resource available to man has the power in it to conceive gods, and hence to provide man with a continuous source of generation and regeneration if he but learns how to use it? If we are looking for an energy source, we certainly have found it here, in a system that locates and concentrates the powers of the Word in words and makes it possible to start out in the body, from an empirical base, in man the symbol-

18 William Rueckert using animal, and to proceed upward by means of a series of analogical linguistic transformations until we arrive at the idea of, or words for, highest or most perfect authority and power (the Word), and then to bring all that high power back down with us and infuse it into the empirical base from which we began. To put it in Burke’s terms, we can find the powers of the Word in words everywhere. As Burke is fond of pointing out, this is both a good and a goad. We can even infuse this power into non-verbal things, so that, in one of those marvelous Burkean reversals, things become the signs of words. It is characteristic of Burke both to use this power to develop

his own symbol-system, and then to use the symbol-system to study the genius of itself in other symbol-systems, to demystify-

ing, ironic, cautionary ends, so that even as he does it he is undoing it, and one wonders what the end result could (should) be. There is no system that cannot be desystematized, there are

no holy terms that cannot be shown to have their demonic counterparts. We could say here that the aphoristic mind-set writ much larger is the genius of logology. If you do not believe this,

you should read the “Epilogue: Prologue in Heaven,” which is introduced by a Charlie Chaplin-like “Impresario”? whose upper half is dressed in formal attire and whose lower half is dressed in ragged pants and worn-out shoes. The Impresario’s introductory remarks consist of a series of swirling paradoxes about cyclical and rectilinear, logical and chronological, high and low, language and not language, human purpose, man the symbol-using animal,

and bodily motives and linguistic motives working for and against each other—to name a few. The “Prologue in Heaven” is offered to usasa ‘Parable of Purpose.” It consists of a conversa-

tion between The Lord (TL), a bearded Blakean patriarch, and Satan (S), ‘‘an agile youth,” in a “‘fool’s cap with devils’ horns and a harlequin costume of two colors, dividing him down the middle,”’ who greatly admires TL. The dialogue, with much good humor and irony, swirls through Burkean paradox after Burkean

Some of the Many Kenneth Burkes 19 paradox as TL and S discuss man the symbol-using animal before the Creation. The dialogue is primarily about the ‘‘Word People’’ and the ‘‘life of words.” It begins before words and the

word people, moves through the life of words created by the word people, and ends after words. It ends thus, to give us one of the great acts of ironic closure in Burke: S (pensively): In some ways they will be dismal, in some ways they will

have a feeling for the grandeurs of form. But when these WordPeople are gone, won’t the life of words be gone?

TL: Unfortunately, yes. S: Then, what of us, the two voices in this dialogue? When words go, won’t we, too, be gone?

TL: Unfortunately, yes. S: Then of this there will be nothing? TL: Yes... nothing... but it’s more complica—’

Yes, to use the refrain of this dialogue in Heaven, it is always “more complicated than that.”? Burke has been telling us this and showing us why it is true since the twenties. Burke the logologer is the Wordman of wordmen, nowhere more brilliantly represented than in The Rhetoric of Religion. The major resource

of the Wordman is the creative word. If this creative word cannot redeem us in the old sense, it can at least purify us in a new sense by bringing us to curative knowledge about the divine comedy of words. One cannot believe too much in or know too much about the creative word, the logologer tells us, even though it has great destructive powers. There is no other resource. When the conversation ends, the war begins. Conversations, dialogues (between TL [high] and S [low]) keep us in the middle realm of comedy as much as possible and away from the tragic abyss. The amazing thing about Burke the logologer is that he has kept on talking and skating at the edge of this abyss for sixty years now, strong as ever. To take him as a model is to commit oneself to the principle of, the value of, dialogue and dialectics, which means that we must keep talking and writing even as we stare

20 William Rueckert down into the abyss itself or dream upon the heavenly illusions of perfection. Remember the logologer’s perfectly ironic cautionary remark: “‘Man is rotten with perfection.”

BURKE THE DRAMATIST

Aphorist, comedian, dialectician, logologer, and now dramatist. Burke will forgive me this pun. Burke the system-builder is a dramatist because dramatism is the name he gave to his own system. In this system human relations are viewed as a drama. More accurately, Burke has taken drama as his model for human behavior and has accounted for the nature of the drama of human relations by means of his definition of man as the symbolusing animal. There are two kinds of drama that are never really completely separable: there is the actual real drama of human relations involving physical and verbal actions and there is the drama that consists purely of symbolic actions. The first is not possible without the second (or language), but the second (the

realm of potential freedom in Burke) is possible without the first and is in fact the main resource we have for studying the first. The drama of human relations begins and ends with language, symbol-using. The brilliance of Burke’s system is that it

makes so much available to us through the study of language and symbol-systems because it acknowledges the power and resourcefulness of this other reality (beyond nature) that man has created for himself, and it acknowledges all of those other things that language and symbol-systems have made possible, which are, according to Burke, everything man has added to nature, or all of human culture and technology, all the principles of governance and economics, the whole vast monetary system, and moral/ethical conceptions of law and love, or, in short, whatever is not part of nature before man and words. Dramatism

is a complete and complex system. (This is not the place to recapitulate it. Burke has done it elsewhere, and so have I.) It

Some of the Many Kenneth Burkes 21 offers a complete view of the drama of human relations. It is a powerful humanistic vision, centered on the primacy of moral action and ethical purpose, language, creativity, and the paradoxical human drive toward perfection, a drive that Burke says is intrinsic to the very nature of language itself. The point to be made here is that, since the forties, Burke has always worked from within this dramatistic system, and, even before that, in the thirties and twenties, he was building the beginnings of the system. There is a remarkable consistency to Burke’s work, especially to the basic, fundamental humanistic vision that is at the center of it. Over the last thirty years, Burke has seldom spoken from outside this system, and one has the sense in reading or listening to him that he is always somewhere inside it when he is writing or speaking about anything. This system has a complete theory of language (spoken and written), a complete erammar or dialectics and logic, a complete rhetoric, a complete poetics, and, I think, a complete ethics. At the center of it there is a vision of man/woman, complete with a basic definition of man as the symbol-using animal and a set of interlocked concepts from which everything else can be generated. It has a set of theoretical postulates that are common to all the parts of it—for example, the theory of entitlement, the concept of entelechy, the logological postulates discussed above, and the theory of the negative, to name a few among the many operative concepts found in his work from A Grammar of Motives on. It is a powerful, resourceful, and persuasive system. It is sane and humane. It is, when properly understood, a major contribution to human ecology.

I stress all of this because the system is, in fact, one of the major uses one can make of Burke. Most of the Burkes are in it, and it isso great a resource that few of us have yet begun to take out even a fragment of what is actually in there. We all tend to use bits and pieces of Burke, who must certainly have one of the

most generative minds of our time. Some, like the late Hugh Duncan, have tried to use great chunks of Burke, in the sense

22 William Rueckert that Duncan tried to develop a complete Burkean sociology and set it in among the other major sociological theories of his time. This is not the place to recapitulate the many uses to which Burke has been put by literary critics, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, rhetoricians, linguists, political scientists, speech theorists, and others. The range of his uses is as great as the in-

clusiveness of his system. One does not have to lock into the system to use some part of it, one of its concepts, or one of its methodologies. Even Burke himself uses his own system with great flexibility, often working almost entirely with one of his own most generative concepts—the principle of entelechy, which is the drive of everything human, including language, to perfect

itself—or with his theory of entitlement, the central idea of which is that language is not primarily descriptive but gives titles for things. These titles then become charged with symbolic

content and eventually you get that reversal whereby things become the signs for words; or, to put it somewhat differently, where words become capable of creating another reality—say the

whole, vast, technological realm, beyond nature, which, in Burkean and ecological terms, threatens to destroy the very nature from which it came and out of which it is made, because technology, like everything else, is striving to perfect itself and, in a classic Burkean paradox, the perfection of itself would be

the destruction of its resources and itself. There is a suicidal motive built into, intrinsic to, everything human in Burke, and it functions as a cautionary device when you think along Burkean lines.

Not many people have taken the trouble or have been inclined

to internalize Burke’s system or vision and to use it as a major conceptual resource for thinking about and dealing with the contemporary world. However, certainly there is a whole, coherent vision in this man’s work of the last thirty years that would make it possible to use him in just this way. Burke the system-builder is as usable as Burke the aphorist or Burke the comedian or Burke the dialectician or Burke the logologer. In fact, as system-builder

Some of the Many Kenneth Burkes 23 he probably includes all the other Burkes and constitutes a formidable resource. Even as one begins to master him to use him in this way, the central ironic postulates of the system begin speaking to you: “Empirically,” he says, ‘I sanction dialectic, which giveth and taketh away”’ and “‘Any terminology is suspect

to the extent that it does not allow the progressive criticism of itself.’’® What can one say in response to this? Attend, as always,

to the cautionary aphoristic voice in Burke: to criticize yourself is to move beyond yourself so that the dialectic can go on, the dialogue can continue. It is always more complicated than that, as TL says and Burke knows. No system is complete, and what one man has built up the next man will build upon. There is an archeology of systems just as there is an archeology of cities.

BURKE THE POET

Burke has been a poet longer than he has been anything else—

since at least 1915, or for more than sixty years now. He was also a creator of prose-fictions during his early years, and published a book of stories, The White Oxen, in 1924, and a novel, Towards a Better Life, in 1932. Later, in 1957, he made his last appearance (to date) as a fiction writer with a marvelous story entitled ‘‘The Anesthetic Revelation of Herone Liddell,” a dense symbolic account of the fundamental nonverbal grounds of his

being. However,. he has been a poet off and on continuously since 1915, and with great regularity since the mid-fifties. The bulk of his poetry has been published since 1955 (when Book of Moments, the first collection came out); and there has been a lot of poetry written and/or published but not yet collected since the appearance in 1968 of Collected Poems. The poetic voice of Burke has spoken most insistently in his later years, really from his late fifties on. One would not want to say that at the end he was primarily a poet; only that during the last years of his long and amazing career (and who can say how long, since

24 William Rueckert he is still going strong at eighty) he wrote a lot of poetry ona range of subjects and in a variety of styles and modes too great to enumerate here. Say only that, as in his discursive and theoretical books, his range is great and his voices are many. His talents were always myriad, as Faulkner’s were, and he is, like Whitman (to whom he returns so often in his own work), one of our fabulous wordmen.

Burke the poet is a voice that keeps singing, stronger and stronger as it gets older and realizes that the system-building days are over, and that the time for singing and summation is upon him. Burke the poet is closest to Burke the aphorist and Burke the comedian, although it is misleading to run them all together this way. Some of Burke’s poems resemble the aphorisms of the ‘Flowerishes” (which were published with the poems), and in some of the poems, as in the ‘Epilogue: Prologue

in Heaven,” Burke is clearly being a comedian. He has a great gift for the epigrammatic phrase, and for irony of all kinds, especially ironies of reversal. He has the comedian’s gift of timing and phrasing, and the artist’s gift for playing and joking with the medium itself (here, words and the conventions of poetry). There is the kind of creative gaiety to Burke’s poems that Yeats speaks of in his marvelous poem, ‘‘Lapis Lazuli.’’ Just as Burke the dialectician and Burke the logologer are voices that keep talking and analyzing, keep deconstructing (to use the current fad word for the process Burke has been engaged in for more than forty years—he was one of our first great deconstructors, dazzling in his ability to take a poem, play, prose-fiction, any verbal structure, really, apart—right down to the bare bones and then into the marrow bone, and back to the genes from which it all came), and just as Burke the system-builder is the voice that keeps putting things back together, so Burke the poet is the voice that keeps singing and creating. What is it singing about and why should we listen? (What do we hear?) Well, for one thing, we hear the playful, inventive voice of this genius wordman. The poems are full of high and low jinks; they are often very whim-

Some of the Many Kenneth Burkes 25 sical, often scatological, often very funny. Yet many of them are very serious, even somber, and it is a mistake to think that Burke the poet is all laughs. If we have all of the many discursive

and theoretical Burkes in the dramatistic system, then we have all of the bits and pieces of the many Burkes in these poems. We have the profound thinker in his odd personal moments. Actually, we find some other Burkes here that it is worth paying attention to, and I will quit playing around with phrases and get on to what (who) they are. “Our moods do not believe in each other,’ Burke says by way of Emerson on the title page of Book of Moments. ‘‘Lyrics are ‘moments’”’’ he says, “‘insofar as they pause to sum up a motive.” “In one’s moments, one is absolute.’’ ‘Day after day, year after year’? Burke says, a person ‘“‘may have a fairly fixed attitude towards something, and may in fact build the whole logic of his life in accordance with this attitude—yet of a sudden, for a spell, he may be invaded by some quite different attitude and this irruption may be the element that, for him, falls into

the pattern of a momentary poem.’’? These poems or past moments are ‘“‘records the dead selves” Burke says, and in them, he implies, he has ranged freely among many moods that do not necessarily believe in each other because ‘‘only by a maximum of such free ranging” can “‘poetry best help to keep us free.’’*®

In another place in Collected Poems,'' again discussing himself as lyric poet, Burke offersarandom list of subheads under which he might have arranged some of the poems collected in this book: nostalgia stock taking tinkering

impatient on the last time frisky

thrashing about bellyaching

26 William Rueckert anecdotage editorializing good clean fun (that is mildly doity) towards stentorianism (blustering) self-pity for others paranoid running scared petulant dwindling enigmatizing being complimentary on the Zeitgeist feeling mean apprehensive epistolating pious

At best, this comical twenty-four item list is but a partial index of the many moods, attitudes, motives, and styles of the Kenneth Burkes expressed in the 166 poems (plus ‘‘Flowerishes’’) of this 300-page book. Here, among the millions of words Burke has written and published in his lifetime, we see him at his most personal. As he said of Whitman, so we might say of him—that in his poems we see his policies made personal, and we discover the personality of the poet glowing in the words of the poems. The mighty thinker who can work out the fiendishly ingenious

analogies between theology and logology, the monumental symmetries of dramatism, the dazzling dialectical resources of A Grammar of Motives—this mighty thinker feeds birds from his hands, fights dandelions, stares into the black beady eye of the chickadee and sees into an essentially different realm, admires his outhouse, and writes a nursery rhyme, a “‘Jingle for Mother Goosey”’ that goes: Young Mrs. Snooks was sick of sex But Mr. Snooks was soaked in it

Some of the Many Kenneth Burkes 27 Wherever he beheld a hole He took a stick and poked in it. He even tried to frig a frog

But fell in the pond and croaked in it.”

Or he writes a poem addressed to ‘‘Alky, My love,” which begins: Spirit of Alchohol Bejeez,

One by one we have failed you. Jack’s liver, Tom’s kidneys Bill’s pump, Howard’s bean (they took him off in a wagon)

Always there was something or other Just couldn’t stand it.!°

Or he endsa poem entitled ‘‘Lines out of My Scatterhood” thus: Oh, lead me

to the dew at dawn in First-

Land“

And he writes a lovely, somber, highly formal poem, ‘‘The Scene Behind the Scene—Mystique of a Drunken Word-Man.”’ How can men help but misconceive When hearts are worn upon the sleeve Yet outward senses, duplicate within, Are but a passage to their nether twin?

In the attempt to get things true Poets confess to things they did not do, And reproduce the dutiful In clamoring for the beautiful. The worm of living death, Digestive tract with trimmings, Expends it evolutionary breath In exhortations, oaths and hymnings.

28 William Rueckert How far from where men daily dwell To that rare realm within the body’s shell, The scene-behind-the-scene’s unseen frontier And sounds like touch beyond the inner ear?

Up from the depths of secret utterance (The innerness beneath each vital thing) Into a trance of dance and chance Standing on tiptoe in a tide’s upswing Words rise unbidden Calling to and from the hidden The verbal engine throbs ahead full throttle While sick old age returns to nurse the bottle. Already will-less as the dead Except to swill while words get said, Merging of east and west and north and south The serpent-circle joining tail and mouth—

The sea sinks into oneness with its ships And universal Love would kiss its own orating lips. '°

The temptation is to go on quoting, for the pleasure and fun of it, but that will not hasten the conclusion of this essay. So I try another strategy: In the depths of his imagery, Burke said, long ago, that the poet cannot lie. I take this as axiomatic, in spite of stanza two of the above poem, and it applies to Burke the poet as well as to any other poet. What do we hear and discover in Burke the poet, then? The scene behind the scene? Surely not, even if we take the title and that poem as pure metaphor, for that would imply that the true inner Burke is in the poems and nowhere else. The agent within the scene, then? Surely not, again, for the other works cannot possibly be conceived as accidental or the scene for the poetic acts. All the works are symbolic

actions. The man within the critic? Well, that is closer, but the critic is a man, a human, all along, just as the poet is. At the very least, Burke is a ‘“‘batch of selves,’’ and, as he has admonished us

from the beginning of his own career, in what at first seemed to be a somewhat perverse assertion, he is a counter-stater. What his imagery tells us is that Burke the poet is always counter-stating,

Some of the Many Kenneth Burkes 29 counter-singing against the solemnities of his system, parodying the self that built the system, picking away at the overly serious dialectician, reducing the logologer to jingles, pushing the divine comedy on over into farce, and returning again and again to the ironic, often comic voice of the aphorist and the small, often trivial concerns of daily life. The most serious truths can be coached

into jokes. The system-builder, the maker of monuments, is finally to be seen as a little old man, with piercing blue eyes and white beard, standing at the base of his monument, looking up, dwarfed by the size of his own creation, realizing as he looks at it

that thieves will rob its inner secret chambers (which may be empty anyway), that time will alter its configurations, that even a great man—and surely Burke is that—must, can, write these cautionary lines about himself (in a poem entitled “Know Thyself’’): When I itch It’s not from fleas But from a bad case Of Burke’s disease. '®

I used to have a dachshund named Burke, and Kenneth Burke used to punningly refer to himself as Kennel Bark. Sometimes, visiting Burke the man, when I was accompanied by Burke the

dog, I would yell at the dog and the man would answer. This marvelous self-irony is similar to Burke’s capacity to say that war is the disease of cooperation, or that any system must provide the instruments for its own criticism. And that is what Burke the poet tells us—that he is not one, but many: that he is aphorist, comedian, dialectician, logologer, dramatist, and poet; that we must remember that the man who built the system is also the man who fought dandelions—fair and square.

If I could design a dust jacket for another book on Burke I would not have it display only a single picture, or an abstract design, but many pictures, arranged on the principle of the collage or surrealist painting, without regard to age, time sequence, or development, without borders, and in some ingenious arrangement that eliminated the center, or principle of centering,

30 William Rueckert so that no one picture would have temporal or spatial priority. I would try to produce the visual equivalent, for Burke himself, of Burke’s own logological concept of the timeless cycle

of terms implicit in the idea of order. I would like to minimize Burke’s own rectilinear development and try to suggest the timeless cycle of Burkes implicit in all the Kenneth Burkes (and Kennel Barks) one finds in all the books, essays, and appearances of Kenneth Burke over these many years. Burke is more than his system, He is more than any part of his system, and he cannot be reduced to any one of his books. As he says in A Grammar of Motives, the substance of anything is equal to the sum of its attributes. The uses of Burke, then, are as many as there are Burkes. He is truly one of our most protean figures, and it would seem that we have, at last, just begun to discover him. NOTES 1, Kenneth Burke, Collected Poems, 1915-1967 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 88-92, 297-300. 2. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 2nd ed. rev. (Los Altos, Calif.: Hermes Publications, 1959), p. 41. 3, Ibid., pp. 41-42.

4. Kenneth Burke, “‘Terministic Screens,’ in Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 44-62. 5. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. vi. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., p. 315. 8. Ibid., p. 303. 9, Burke, Collected Poems, 1915-1967, pp. vii and viii. 10. Ibid., p. viii. 11. Ibid., pp. 268-270. 12. Ibid., p. 14. 13. Ibid., p. 16. 14. Ibid., p. 296. 15, Ibid., pp. 189-190. 16. Ibid., p. 208.

(S Donald L. Jennermann

Kenneth Burke’s Poetics of Catharsis e Criticism has long been the perpendicular art, tangential to a text. The critical theory of Kenneth Burke, a puzzle to many, can be charted as an elaborate turn on the text of Aristotle,

particularly one formidable term, catharsis. In a postscript to his first, and for many his most important, book of criticism,’ Burke sums up his general purpose as a literary theorist: The whole project aims to round out an analysis of language in keeping with the author’s favorite notion that, man being the specifically language-using animal, an approach to human motivations should be made

through the analysis of language....The project begins in and never far departs from (since it never wants far to depart from) the Aristotelian notion of poetry as cathartic.

The Aristotelian text provides Burke with the concept he long has sought to develop: a medical and religious metaphor in the

realm of poetics. Aristotle applies the term to drama, the essential element of which he identifies as action, clues of great import for Burke’s theory of symbolic action and Dramatism. The concept of action, fundamental to Aristotle’s definition

of tragedy, figures importantly in the following issues of a theory of poetics: 1) The unity of action, or form (the division of an action into its parts, its beginning, middle, and end, a division that may refer to the stages of deliberative choice being enacted in imitation in tragedy as well as the obvious sequence of plot). 2) The relative importance of plot and character, the former regarded as the first principle or soul of tragedy (a comment clarified by Aristotle’s assertion in the Nichomachean Ethics that action alone shapes the character of man). 3) The concept of entelechy (for praxis refers not simply to a random motion, but to ‘‘an action imitated with a view to an end and carried out in pursuit of it’’?), Praxis thus connotes purposeful action, complete, serious, and involving ethical choice. 31

32 Donald L. Jennermann Burke integrates the spheres of the aesthetic, the ethical, and

the practical, thus removing, if only by degrees, his critical theory from strict Crocean or Marxist positions. As he noted in The Rhetoric of Religion: “Action involves character, which involves choice; and the form of choice attains its perfection in

the distinction between Yes and No (between thou shalt and thou shalt not). Though the concept of sheer ‘motion’ is nonethical, ‘action’ implies the ethical... .’? This dialectical relationship of key terms Burke has articulated in the succinct form of gradatio in his ‘‘Terministic Screens’’: “If action is to be our key term then drama: for drama is the culminative form of

action... But if drama, then conflict. And if conflict, then victimage. Dramatism is always on the edge of this vexing prob-

lem, that comes to a culmination in tragedy, the song of the scapegoat.”’* The ancient philosopher released the generative terms, the implications of which the modern critical theorist has

tracked down. Just as Burke has noted that Thomist realism was “‘shaped about Aristotle,’ so has Burke shaped his poetics. Within the frame of Dramatism, he has prepared a view of man’s action both in life and in literature as symbolic, culminating in catharsis of one form or another. In assigning to Aristotle such significance in the shaping of

his poetics, Burke has not exaggerated. Indeed, many of the topics that Burke has articulated are extensive glosses on important features of Aristotle’s work, the Rhetoric as well as the Poetics, The Nichomachean Ethics as well as the Politics. Burke’s

dictum, to use all there is to use, has guided his approach to Aristotle and the drama of life and literature: “Instead of saying, ‘Life is a drama and the world is its theater,’ and then hurrying on, we tried to ponder this metaphor long and hard.’’® To focus on catharsis in order to illustrate Burke as an Aris-

totle in modern dress demands perspective on that term in the ancient text as well as in Burke. Gerald F. Else has declared that “the great virtue, but also the great vice, of ‘catharsis’ in modern interpretation has been its incurable vagueness. Every variety of

Burke’s Poetics of Catharsis 33 moral, aesthetic, and therapeutic effect that is or could be experienced from tragedy has been subsumed under the venerable word at one time or another.’’® Its considered vagueness in the ancient text gives Burke license to offer his own explication of the term, to develop hisown modern-dress version. H.D.F. Kitto pointed out the basic debate about the metaphor: “‘is it religious and ceremonial, ‘purification,’ or medicinal and psychological, ‘purgation’?”” Francis Fergusson asked why the two views could not be combined.® This latter open-ended approach to the problem more closely resembles Burke’s interpretation: ‘‘Not that the extant parts of that old text should be taken either as authority or as the ‘enemy.’ But I consider it an ideal point of departure... .”””

The medicinal or purgative aspects of catharsis call to mind some archeological finds regarding the century in which Aristotle

wrote. Near the date of the writing of the Poetics, the grand theater at Epidauros was erected, significantly near the precinct of the Greek god of healing, Asclepius. Likewise, in Athens the ereat theater of Dionysus lay near the sacred temenos of Asclepius

on the southern slope of the Acropolis. During the Hellenistic period, a theater, small in comparison to these already mentioned,

was to be found in the groves sacred to Asclepius at Pergamon. Could not the performances of Greek tragedy have had intended curative value for those who came to the sanctuaries for healing?

Surely, to stress the social and medicinal effects of the term catharsis in articulating a principle of poetics does not invali-

date the interpretations of Aristotle’s text by Kitto, Else, Golden, and others. Rather, it reminds that ‘“‘Apollo has for his province both poetry and healing—not only of the body but the more important cure of the mind—the two being thus intimately related as means to an end.’’!° Burke finds an ally in George Thomson, whose holistic view

of the performance of Greek tragedy appears in his Marxistoriented interpretation Aeschylus and Athens.'* According to Thomson’s thesis, tragedies were performed for specific social and political purposes. In this light Burke has observed the close

34 Donald L. Jennermann correlation between the production of Euripides’ Trojan Women

and the Athenian destruction of the island of Melos, of which Thucydides gives an account in his Peloponnesian Wars, Burke tinds further reason to view the catharsis of tragedy politically

since the term appears with the promise of a definition in Aristotle’s Politics: Since it is stated in the Politics that the subject of catharsis is to get fuller treatment in the Poetics, 1 assume that there was such a section, and that the two are closely related. In the Politics the treatment seems to be rhetorical in the sense that music is there viewed as having utilitarilan (medicinal) effects upon the audience. And since the subject is discussed in connection with disruptive tendencies in the state, I assume there must be some analogous (though not necessarily identical) effect

with regard to Greek tragedy.

But to stress the social and civic aspect of catharsis is to minimize the cathartic effect achieved in psychoanalysis: Those paragraphs in the Politics at least give reason to infer that the treatment in the Poetics was not essentially different, and that the kind of “‘purge’’ produced by tragedy may have been specifically considered from the ‘“‘civic’’ point of view (as a species of political purge), in contrast with the stress on intimate, family relationships in Freud’s views on the cathartic effects of psychoanalysis. '°

Burke then treats the Trojan Women not intrinsically, but more as a programmatic piece offered by Euripides as an antidote to the contagion existing in the.body politic. Crucial to the Burkean approach to this tragedy is an understanding of a temporally prior condition to which the play ina sense responds, as part of the dialectics of catharsis. Burke states It was produced several months after the Athenians’ disgraceful destruction of Melos, an act that split Athens in two, since the War Party had prevailed despite the strong protests of a strong and conscientious Peace

Party (which included Euripides). As I analyze the play, its nominal concern with the destruction of Troy helps the audience ‘“‘transcend”’ the immediate civic issue ... However harrowing the play might have been, the translation of its possible local allusion into terms of myth

Burke’s Poetics of Catharsis 35 was in effect a euphemism. Thanks to it, the entire audience, be they members of either the Peace Party or the War Party, could join in the weeping together. And would not that movement, at least for the duration of the dramatic experience, be indeed a purging of the whole discordant city? ‘*

Clearly, the particular cathartic effect in Burke’s approach to the Trojan Women depends on the correspondence between history and drama. Simply put, had the attack on Melos not occurred, had the Peace Party effort prevailed, the tragedy would

not have had the same effect. Burke’s theory of catharsis here depends heavily on the knowledge of history, the drama serving as a vital element in the dialectical process. This is one type of cathartic effect. It is not the only one. “Tragedy might well be said to appeal not merely by resolving a

... conflict... but rather by causing us somehow to reenact this conflict. Thus, to be ‘cured’ of a ‘disease’ that we already have ...we should first be subjected to a much heavier attack of the disease.”’!5 Burke’s enlistment of the homeopathic principle in his theory of catharsis is essential and is related also to Burke’s insistence in his rhetorical theory upon the prinicple of identification.

In The Philosophy of Literary Form, Burke approvingly quotes the remarks on the homeopathic principle found in Milton’s preface to Samson Agonistes.'® Burke links this aspect of his theory with the Athenian historical practice of ostracism: Ostracism ... attempted to solve the problem of ‘“‘hubris” by amputat-

ing from the body politic whatever member seemed swollen to the point of becoming a threat to the public welfare. But tragedy, in a more “homeopathic” fashion, sought to provide a remedy for the pollution by aggravation of the symptoms under controlled conditions designed

to forestall worse ravages of the disease... there would be strong cathartic value in dramaturgical devices that brought this motive into

clear expression though in ways that, at the same time, served to neutralize its ravages. ‘7

This essay on catharsis reveals a key feature of Burke’s poetics,

vital to his theory of language and Dramatistic philosophy:

36 Donald L. Jennermann victimage. Because it is essential to his overall theory, Burke dwells on that idea to highlight his thoughts on imitation: I don’t see how one can get around the fact that the “tragic pleasure” involves sympathetic meditation on the suffering undergone by persons not ourselves. That is, it involves ‘“‘vicarious sacrifice.’? Yet too great a stress upon the “‘scapegoat principle’’. .. can incline us to treat the accident as the essence... And we should always remember that the “tragic pleasure,” as defined by Aristotle, concerns but the imitation of suffering (a notable difference from the Roman Circus or the Spanish bull-fight, or the motion picture’s use of documentary records). }8

Burke adds, ‘‘since an approach to Poetics in terms of tragedy spontaneously involves a sacrificial principle, we must always be ready to modify this stress or abandon it, if conditions seem

to warrant.’ Such dis-engagement from aspects of his own theory characterize much of Burke. He aims not to discuss only one work, nor to settle centuries of critical debate, but to interpret key terms, and to formulate principles that assist his approaches to any work of imagination. His is no ideal eclecticism.

In an essay published in 1963, Burke considers a publicoriented art in the modern era in terms of its potential cathartic

effect. Not all art fits this category, but Burke here extends his application of the cathartic principle along the lines of Athenian tragedy. To consider the cathartic principle of any art goes beyond the merely decorative; it seeks universality, significance: the case of the theatre in fifth-century Athens indicates that the element of regional or civic ‘‘pride’’ [was not] in itself enough. Art, viewed civically, is not merely a mode of dignification ... It is also a kind of ‘‘medicine,’’ a mode of ‘‘purgation.”’ For instance, in the case of such ‘‘regional”’ (and ‘‘universal’’) art as we find in Athenian tragedy, I incline to accept the views of George Thomson, in his Aeschylus and Athens, J refer to his notion that the institution of Greek tragedy, at its height, was primarily designed to purge the city of tendencies toward political unrest, and was subsidized, though at times unwillingly, by citizens whose interests coincided with such “catharsis.” !?

Burke’s Poetics of Catharsis 37 Burke seeks analogous situations in contemporary art, and focuses on the correspondence between the social situation and the art sponsored by those in power: any regionally, civically sponsored kind of art should make for catharsis

of some sort; and...it should not fulfill its role unless its mode of catharsis fitted the emotional needs and corresponding policies or attitudes of influential citizens who are in a position to sponsor it. *°

Such close correlation between society and the work of art need not exist for some cathartic effect to occur, but ‘‘the subject of

art, as viewed from the standpoint of institutions, comes to a focus in a problem of this sort” (ie., the struggle between the art and those sponsoring it). Burke’s most universal application of the concept of catharsis occurs in this theory of language. The dramatistic theory views man as the symbol-using animal, the inventor of the negative. He adds, ‘‘there are notable post-Freudian (as well as post-Marxian) ways of taking another look at the catharsis principle.’’?! Burke

transcends the limitations imposed by viewing catharsis as an effect achieved only in the historical moment of its production. Burke’s elaboration of the concept of catharsis depends on victimage, which implies a view of literature that connotes the Jungian universal psyche of man, whose needs, although dimly felt, are profoundly articulated in ritualistic terms. Burke finds that Greek tragedy accommodates this concept when he refers to tragedy (Tpaywoia) as the song of the scapegoat. The hero of tragedy, the victimized, the servant of society’s needs, performs a necessary and deep-seated social function, as well as fulfilling the designs of the dramatic work of art. The drama spells out needs basic to man. Victimage is another variant of the negative lurking in the quasi-positive. For the victim is positively there, in the most materialistic sense. Yet insofar as the victim is a scapegoat, being symbolically or ritually laden by the victimizer with the guilt of the victimizer, he is the positive-seeking vessel of the victimizer’s conscience-ridden response to the Great Nega-

tion of his tribe... .”

38 Donald L. Jennermann Often Burke designates man’s use of the negative as the essence of language, as he does here: “language by its very nature neces-

sarily culminates in the negative, hence negation is the very essence of language....”?? Burke links this essence to the carthartic principle, with man’s innate striving for perfection, particularly in the symbolic dimension of drama. Burke believes

that, in his use of symbols, man quests for the ideal, as much for the ideal victim as for an ideal love or an ideal state. Burke has stated this briefly in his opening to Language as Symbolic Action: man’s special prowess in the use of symbol systems drives towards the search for ideal victims, perfect scapegoats under one form or another. ... Shakespeare’s grotesque drama of sacrifice [Coriolanus] and what I take to be the curative (purgative, cathartic) effect of this sacrifice, is an imitation, or symbolic enactment, sympathetically participated in by the audience. In Greek tragedy, as well as in Shakespeare’s kind, the principle of perfect victimage (a victim perfect for the given dramatic situation) was enacted purely by imitation.

In his essay, ‘Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method,”’ Burke considers the “cathartic nature” of Iago’s role. First, he reviews “‘the definition of some Greek words central to the ritual

of cure,’ particularly katharma and its synonym pharmakos. In Burke’s view, Iago serves as a ‘‘katharma, which is thrown away in cleansing; the offscourings, refuse, of a sacrifice; hence,

worthless fellow,’ so closely related though to the sacrifice of Othello as to be ‘‘a voice at Othello’s ear . . . villain and hero are but essentially inseparable parts of the one fascination.’’?° Further, ‘Desdemona, Othello, and Jago are all partners of a single conspiracy.”?’ One of the main cathartic functions lago performs regards “‘the sexual tension centering particularly in sexual love as property and ennoblement (monogamistic love), since in reviling Iago the audience can forget that his transgressions are theirs... .’’?° Burke approaches Iago’s function within the drama from the perspective of the audience, recalling his definition of plot as

Burke’s Poetics of Catharsis 39 the arousal and fulfillment of audience expectation. Whether Burke focuses on form or on catharsis, he adheres to his major thesis that art is action and must so be analyzed. His theory of catharsis demonstrates its potential multiple operation, perhaps all types working at once. As he stated in his essay on catharsis, The present study of catharsis aims to establish a position to which the intimate, family aspects of the problem and the socio-political aspects are equally available, In this sense, we would see, brooding over society, not specifically the Oedipus Complex, nor even more generally, a con-

flict between “Eros”? and ‘‘Thanatos,’ but still more generally, the “Sacrificial Motive,” the theme of “mortification”? and its variants. This would be taken to sum up the element of suffering, of victimage, which is basic to tragic conflict. ””

Following Aristotle’s lead, Burke returns to drama, particularly tragedy, whether Greek or Shakespearian, as a form of linguistic expression most suitable for his investigations into the nature of language, human motivations, and poetics. Burke’s poetics, including his theory of catharsis, cannot be severed from his more general theory of Dramatism. Burke’s essay on Dramatism sheds more light on the linking of victimage, guilt, tragedy, and lansuage itself. Burke states that, by analyzing such terms as pride and humility, reward and punishment, he intends to show how the negativistic principle of guilt implicit in the nature of order combines with principles of thoroughness (or perfection) and substitution characteristic of symbol-systems, that the sacrificial principle of victimage (the ‘‘scapegoat’’) is intrinsic to human congregation. The intricate line of exposition might be summed up thus: If order, then guilt; if guilt, then need for redemption; but any such “‘payment”’ is victimage. Or, if action, then drama; if drama, then conflict; if conflict, then victimage. °°

Thus Burke’s poetics centers on such terms as symbolic action, Dramatism, and catharsis, terms that illustrate Burke’s theory of language. Freudian and Marxian shadings can be detected in the principles Burke has shaped around the generative and pervasive influence of Aristotle. Following Bergson in noting that nowhere

40 Donald L. Jennermann in nature exists the negative, only in the speech of man, Burke finds the prime expression of the negative in the drama, which he views as a ritualistic hub.*! In his essay on education, Burke explains that “Tragedies are quite convenient for our purposes, since we accept Aristotle’s statement that tragic poetry aims at a kind of ‘catharsis’—and the explicitly civic, stately, or courtly nature of the tragedies traditionally accepted as great, makes easier our search for routes that clearly link mere personal equations with the ‘great processional words,’ such as fate, law, right, justice, Themis, Moira, Nemesis, Necessity.’’>? The inclusion of terms weighty in dramatic or philosophical context demonstrates Burke’s deep concern for the ethical or social value of literature, and marks him as a major contributor to a humanistic literary criticism. In ‘‘Kinds of Criticism,’’ Burke suggests Freud’s contribution to his development of the term catharsis: ‘‘Aristotle’s Poetics ...

touches upon the cathartic aspects of tragedy, and... psychoanalysis may be said to contribute to Poetic in as far as it adds new precisions to the treatment of this matter. Here is an area where the Implicational impinges upon the Poetic.’’*? Freud’s investigations into the disguised motives of man’s actions richly contribute to Burke’s construction of a poetics, both in method

and assumption. However, Freud’s theory of sublimation assumes, as opposed to Burke, that the symbolic act stands for, or in place of, the real act; that, for instance, a fictional account of a murder is asubstitute only for an actual murder. The Freudian interpretation places the fiction in derivational status as far as its reality is concerned. For Burke, however, literary acts, although acknowledged as symbolic, are just as “‘real’’ as any action

in which man might engage himself. The distinction thus fades between the actual physical realm and the so-called artificial, since man, according to Burke’s definition, is the symbol-making animal. This distinction has considerable philosophical significance for a poetics. If the reasons for writing poetry are often obscured, even for

Burke’s Poetics of Catharsis 41 the poet, one can best work toward that discovery by means of indirection. Here Freud’s method of working by means of word association comes into play in Burke’s approaches to a poem. The famous essay “Symbolic Action in a Poem of Keats” ** and his exposition on ‘The Ancient Mariner’’** offer ample evidence of the associative technique. Burke urges readers first to see what goes with what within the poem; to note its image clusters, to detect the poem’s overtones, its implicational aspects; then to chart or index key terms within the totality of the writer’s work so as to learn what private meanings these terms may have had for him; and, if they are available, to use diaries, letters, whatever there is, in order to arrive at the most complete reading of the poem. The poem is a symbolic action, doing something of significance for poet and potential reader alike. Burke has noted the resemblence of poem to dream and to strategy. Thus, the poem is ready for the non-formalistic, Freudian-inspired investigations of Burke’s kind. Literature, Burke has noted, is equipment for living.

In order to know the poet’s catharsis, and thus to share it, one must engage in a variety of approaches to the poem. Basically, the Freudian implications of poetic catharsis support a view of the creative act as a necessarily transforming function, essential to the well-being of the poet. Burke nevertheless does

not insist on the latter point, at least by not arguing that the transformation functions in the same way in each case. Rather, he tracks down the implications of Freud’s insight, which then contributes to the protean texture of Burke’s poetics. A clear Burkean demonstration of the psychological catharsis

achieved by a poet, interpreting the poem of problems faced and transformed by the poet, can be found in Burke’s handling of the ‘Ancient Mariner.” His integrative approach to poet and poem supports his assertion that the poem is an act. Among Burke’s briefer, but similar, approaches to the literary act, is his observation on Milton’s “‘Lycidas.’’ Burke treats the poem as “the symbolic dying of the poetic self.”’°* After this poem,

42 Donald L. Jennermann Milton for some time wrote no major poetry, only an occasional

sonnet, while he engaged in the writing of political tracts, but the poet would triumph where even angels fall, in Paradise Lost.

Although such brief treatment does not strictly stress the cathartic effect achieved by Milton in the writing of “Lycidas,” the poem may still be viewed as a symbolic transcendence of a

specific and temporal conflict within the author’s poetic life. Similarly, and more extensively, Burke’s account of his only novel, Towards a Better Life, employs techniques that accent the cathartic, transcendent effects it had for him.*’ The poet, for Burke, differs from the rest of man, not in kind, but in degree—a distinction that supports his assumption about the wider range of application of his analysis of literary works. Whether Burke uses the term transcendence or catharsis, he retains the assumption that literature has therapeutic value and

he expands the application of the term catharsis. Far behind, for instance, is the catharsis of such specific properties as the emotions of pity and fear. Burke’s first major critical statements were done in the Crocean vein of aestheticism, and he returns to

the aesthetic of expressionism to compliment one type of catharsis known to the poet: poetic ‘‘catharsis” is not by any means confined to victimage, Croce, in his Aesthetics, identifies catharsis with expression in general—and there is certainly a sense in which, for a typically symbol-using animal, there would be a kind of “‘cleansing’’ got by the sheer fact of “getting some-

thing said.” More subtly, there are modes of catharsis internal to the work, respects in which it “purifies” itself, other than merely through the ‘‘pity and terror and similar emotions’? which Aristotle associates specifically in tragedy. *®

The delights of sheer expression, what Burke calls the internal cathartic, involve a certain “entelechial principle.” Burke has rephrased the cathartic pleasure of expression. Croce is seen in light of Aristotle, confirming again Burke’s overwhelming adherence to Aristotelian principles. He adds,

Burke’s Poetics of Catharsis 43 a catharsis purely internal to a poetic medium as such takes place when the work’s inner consistency is revealed or finished. Such emergence and completion being got in terms suited to the specific beauties of the various literary genres, they will differ in accordance with the genres.”

Whatever the genre or the historical occasion, the poet in the act of creating transcends the situation of his conflict, merely through the curative process of naming, akin to the Freudian cathartic principle in psychoanalysis. As Burke expands his concept of catharsis, enlisting the support of several along his way, he still proceeds in the directions Aristotle set out. In “The Thinking of the Body: Comments on the Imagery of Catharsis in Literature,’’*° Burke distinguishes the paired terms, transcendence and catharsis: Catharsis involves fundamentally purgation by the imitation of victimage. If imaginative devices are found whereby members of rival factions can weep together, and if weeping is a surrogate of orgiastic release, then a play that produced in an audience a unitary tragic response regardless of personal discord otherwise would be in effect a transformed variant of an original collective orgy (such as the Dionysian rites from which the Greek tragedy developed). Here would be our paradigm for catharsis. But transcendence is a rival kind of medicine. Despite the area of overlap, the distinction between the two is clear enough at the extremes.... Viewed as a sheerly terministic, or symbolic function ... transcendence is: the building of a terministic bridge whereby one realm is transcended by being viewed in terms of a realm “beyond” it.”

This distinction and the term he links with transcendence, ‘‘beyond,” he also anchors in his novel translation from Aristotle’s Poetics: If, then, in the case of tragedy, a dramatist contrives to imitate some of the most poignant situations conceivable, in bringing them to a state of formal resolution ... all the turmoil will somehow have been ‘‘cleaned up.” Through the pleasurable exciting of our capacities for pity and fear

as related to one particular sort of resolution we shall in effect have gone beyond this very tangle.... As for ‘“‘going beyond”’: In the final

44 Donald L. Jennermann clause of Aristotle’s definition . . . I find it of significance that the word that is translated “effecting” or “producing” (perainousa) is etymologi-

cally from the same root as peran, which means “opposite shore’... So, experimentally, I would propose to translate the Aristotelian formula: “through pity and fear beyonding the catharsis of such emotion.” This tentative invention fits perfectly for the one surviving tragic trilogy, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, a kind of form which is not even mentioned in the extant portions of the Poetics, In the Agamemnon, the Libation Bearers, and the beginning of the Eumenides, we confront the fearful and pitiable. But towards the end, we go beyond pity and fear, feudal justice gives way to the law courts, and Furies themselves have become

transformed.

In his treatment of the Trojan Women, Burke viewed the drama as answering a situation where the political passions are keen: the tragedy, despite its mythological subject, has historical im-

mediacy, a social relevance that calls for the cathartic effects the drama offers. How different Burke’s account of the Oresteia in the context of his “‘translation.”’ In Burke’s view of the Oresteia, the things which we go be-

yond in the course of the action of the trilogy are not as immediate and historical as they are abstract. Viewing them, however, would admit the spectacle, a formidable element in Aeschylean drama. In any case, Burke asserts in ‘“Form and Persecution in the Oresteia’” that “tragedy is best understood, not just ‘universally,’ but by remembering always that it is designed to resolve temporal tensions.’’**

Certainly one could argue that the resolution achieved in the trilogy is complex, more than the renaming of the Furies, who were convinced that they should accept the rather courtly honor Athens offers in exchange for yielding to the newer gods who chainpion the case of the matricide, Orestes. For the appearance of the Areopagus, recognized in the drama as the first lawful assembly asked to decide a case of homicide, and given the privilege of deciding a case involving the gods themselves, signals

great change in the history of Aeschylus’ own day. For the great traditional and aristocratic law court experienced major revision

|

. Burke’s Poetics of Catharsis 45 during this period. There were accompanying changes of values

| that followed the rise of a stronger ‘“‘middle class” in Athens, | after their courageous victories over the Persians. However, if Burke were to note the possible analogous situation of the Furies

in the drama and the Areopagus in the historical moment, and

| the very real political struggles for power and authority in | Aeschylus’ lifetime,** still such an approach would yield a far | less drastic type of catharsis than the one he has attributed to the Trojan Women, Perhaps the issues in Aeschylus’ day were presented in a more distant, or indirect manner, more in keeping

| with the attitudes of the Athenians, who had earlier expressed their dissatisfaction by fining Phrynicus when he produced The

Fall of Miletus, whose subject was taken from history rather than from the traditional myths. (Yet Aeschylus’ Persians suggests that the historical analogy is not the clue.) In any case, Burke has provided another important type of catharsis by considering the resolution occurring within the drama rather than viewing it from the perspective of the author or the audience. The catharsis peculiar to the Oresteia as Burke presents it is internal, achieved not in terms of an audience’s emotion nor their need for a victim. Primarily an intellectual or aesthetic catharsis rather than emotional, it pertains less to pity and fear than to the consternation and pleasure one might experience in watching a dramatic and majestic presentation of the civilizing of man by amonumental change in the concept of law. Catharsis

as resolution, Kitto argues, is what Aristotle intended in the Poetics, i.e., the cleansing or resolving of the action. Burke would permit us to view catharsis as a formal occurrence within the art

work, but would not restrict its possibility only to that sphere. In one of his major essays on the subject of catharsis, Burke observes that Partially as a result of the fact that the particular irreversible details of one cathartic drama are so different from those of another, some persons may contend that the catharsis of a drama is purely intrinsic to its form, and is not to be explained as borrowing part of its tensions from

46 Donald L. Jennermann clearly or vaguely felt analogies to personal situations outside the play

... unquestionably ...the drama must be analyzed first of all as a process intrinsically cathartic. But insofar as the cathartic process is intrinsic to the given drama, then that drama must somehow contrive its own terms to establish a sense of the unclean—for how otherwise could there be a sense of cleansing? ... it must do so in accordance with norms of propriety that also prevail outside the given work... .*°

He distances himself further from those who would locate the catharsis as internal only when he asks rhetorically, “Could we have a sufficiently comprehensive approach to the problem of catharsis if we treated it solely in .. . a formalistic manner? ‘Pity and fear and such emotions’ are strongly personal, they do something to one personally... .’*° Burke, however, does not quickly dismiss the importance of the internal cathartic. In his essay, ‘Fact, Inference, and Proof,” he maintains that his thoughts about hierarchical tension lead us to watch for modes of cathartic symbolic solution within the given symbol-system of the particular work we are analyzing, We are even willing to look for ways

whereby the artistic strategy that is a ‘“‘solution’” may serve to reestablish the very tension it is resolving. *"

Such adherence to the internal, formal aspects of the work of art has sometimes caused Burke to be categorized as a New Critic or a formalist, but, as Burke makes clear in his essay on the limits of formalism,*® such a critical approach is only one of several possible. Burke sometimes has been branded a formalist, as a result of his efforts to track down the implications of terms

internal to the action of a work of art. To read Burke only as a formalist ignores Burke’s prevailing concern to root his critical theory on more solid philosophical ground. Catharsis or transcendence may occur on several levels, among them the formal, in which a work “‘‘purifies itself? in the course of its unfolding. Beyond that, there is transcendence by the various ways whereby we feel ourselves similarly purified while undergoing the imag-

inary discipline of a story’s action and passion....’’*? Here

Burke’s Poetics of Catharsis 47 merge the intrinsically cathartic and the transcendence open to audience participation, far beyond the purgation of pity and fear, and beyond the historical necessity of Burke’s approach to Trojan Women.

Burke believes a cathartic process occurs in the poet that is related to getting beyond the problem that caused the creative action, but that process soon expands to admit other types of catharsis. In Counter-Statement, Burke maintained that ‘“‘the artist’s means are always tending to become ends in themselves. The artist begins with his emotion, he translates this emotion into a mechanism for arousing emotion in others, and thus his interest in his own emotion transcends into his interest in the treatment.’’°° Burke has formalized this notion of transformation in a later essay as follows: 1. Art begins in self-expression, spontaneous utterance, as with outcries, oaths, interjections. 2. Such motives are matured by translations into the great complexities

of language that owe their development to the use of language as a medium of communication (itself rooted in forms of political cooperation). 3. But the work of art moves towards the transcendence of both selfexpression and communication, °'

Burke adds that these three stages correspond to the three theological stages involved in St. Anselm’s formula, as follows: ‘“‘1) Fides: self-expression; 2) Intellectus: communication; 3) Contemplation: consummation.” The act of criticism would thus complete the process, each stage of which might be cathartic: for poet, for audience, for critic. “Opposites meet.”’ Burke is fond of quoting the Coleridgean

observation, and applauds the poet as dialectician when he observes also that opposite banks belong to the same river. As early as 1928, Burke stated a point that became a major facet of his own dialectics, his view of life, his poetics. The perspective is transcendent, doubtless related to the Hegelian dialectic so central to a Marxian view of history and to an art viewed as process

48 Donald L. Jennermann or action: “The only reason I could imagine for failing to choose

utility at the expense of aesthetic receptivity would be the belief that they need not be opposed to each other.” 5? The guid-

ing principle of Burke’s concept of art and his notion of the principle of catharsis is his merging of a philosophy of poetry with a philosophy of life. As Burke concludes his essay on “Kinds of Criticism,’’ he states that the aesthetic criticism he is proposing “approaches poetry not through the analysis of poems at one extreme, nor through general dialectical and philosophical considerations at the other, but through a philosophy of poetry, which expands into a philosophy of everything.”

Burke’s Aristotelian poetics is tempered by his reading of Freud and Marx, but eventually finds both Freudians and Marxists wanting. For, he states, ‘‘both Freudians and Marxists are wrong in so far as they cannot put their theories together by an

over-all theory of drama itself....°* Each places strong emphasis on action, they share a conviction that change is ever occurring, that man’s meaning is shaped in a theater of actions in which he is a participant, and that the implicational aspects of man’s language, his symbolic action, deserve serious scrutiny. In sum, Burke combines the closet drama of individual and family action (Freud), and the historical and sociological action of man in the world (Marx), and all of it is viewed in terms of the most succinct and potentially universal literary form (drama, as interpreted by Aristotle). As though he were still engaged in one of

his early literary occupations (translation), Burke has borrowed terms from Aristotle—such as entelechy, action, drama(tism), and catharsis—and charged them with meaning that makes them

at home in the twentieth century, as telling aspects of a vast poetics, at once analytic, systematic, and influential in its own right.

Burke is a strict disciple of neither Marx nor Freud, despite the Marxian and Freudian features of Burke’s theory of poetry. In a sense, Burke also is no disciple of Aristotle, that is, not simply a disciple. For Burke may be regarded as the twentieth-

Burke’s Poetics of Catharsis 49 century Aristotle in modern dress, tailored by Marx and Freud. And perhaps by others! Because the essential humanism of Kenneth Burke’s encompassing poetics has as its end, its telos, the reclamation of the human spirit, Burke should be regarded as a humanist, indeed as one of the most catholic in spirit of modern humanists. Despite the independence of his thought, he has followed a path already marked by two of his modern predecessors, with whom he shares

a deep interest in the workings of the human mind. Burke agrees with Wordsworth that the true poet is a man speaking to men and with Coleridge that the creative imagination calls upon

the resources of the human personality as a whole. He has developed this position in his own way, drawing upon ancient and modern students of human nature, in defense of the thesis, Aristotelian in spirit, that the creation and enjoyment of literature support the realization of potentialities that constitute the qualities of man. NOTES

1.Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement, 2nd ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 218-219.

2.D. W. Lucas, Aristotle: Poetics: Introduction, Commentary, and Appendices (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 96. 3. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 41. 4. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 54-55. 5. Kenneth Burke, ‘‘The Five Master Terms,” View (June 1943): 52, 6. Gerald F. Else, Aristotle’s Poetics: The Argument (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 439, 7.H.D.F. Kitto, ‘“‘Catharsis,’”’ in The Classical Tradition: Literary and Historical Studies in Honor of Harry Caplan, ed. Luitpold Wallach (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 133.

8. Francis Fergusson, Aristotle’s Poetics (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), p. 35.

50 Donald L. Jennermann 9. Kenneth Burke, ‘‘On Catharsis or Resolution, with a Postscript,”’ Kenyon Review 21 (Summer 1959): 337, 10. Frederick Clarke Prescott, The Poetic Mind (New York: Macmillan Co., 1922), p. 277. 11. George Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens: A Study in the Soctal Origins of Drama, 3rd ed. (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1968). 12, Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, p. 297. 13. Burke, ‘‘On Catharsis,” p. 337. 14, Ibid., p. 351. 15, Ibid., p. 341.

16, Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1941), p. 65. 17. Burke, ‘‘On Catharsis,” pp. 352-353. 18. Ibid., p. 340. 19, Kenneth Burke, ‘‘The Institutions of Art in America,” Arts in Society 2 (Spring 1963): 60. 20, Ibid. 21, Kenneth Burke, ‘‘Book Review,” Arts in Society 2 (Spring 1963): 181. 22, Kenneth Burke, ‘‘A Dramatistic View of the Origins of Language,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 38 (October 1952): 246. 23. Kenneth Burke, “‘Postscripts on the Negative,’ Quarterly Journal of Speech 39 (April 1953): 82. 24. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, p. 39. 25. Kenneth Burke, ‘‘Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method,” in Language as Symbolic Action, p. 153. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., p. 156. 28. Ibid., p. 157. 29, Ibid., p. 338.

30. Kenneth Burke, “Dramatism,” in Communication: Concepts and Perspectives, ed. Lee Thayer (Washington, D.C.: Spartan Books, 1967), p. 342. 31, Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, p. 103. 32. Kenneth Burke, ‘‘Linguistic Approaches to Problems of Education,” in Modern Philosophies and Education: The Fifty-Fourth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, part 1, ed. Nelson B. Henry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 275-276. 33, Kenneth Burke, ‘‘Kinds of Criticism,” Poetry 68 (August 1946): 227. 34, Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945), pp. 447-463. 35. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, p, 1-137.

Burke’s Poetics of Catharsis 51 36. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 2nd ed. rev. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 86. 37. Kenneth Burke, ‘“‘Art—and the First Rough Draft of Living,” Modern Age 8 (Spring 1964): 155-165. 38. Kenneth Burke, ‘““The Language of Poetry, ‘Dramatistically’ Considered,”’ Chicago Review 9 (Spring 1955): 69, 39. Ibid., p. 71.

40.Kenneth Burke, ‘‘The Thinking of the Body: Comments on the Imagery of Catharsis in Literature,” Psychoanalytic Review 50 (Fall 1963): 25-68. 41. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, pp. 186-187. 42, Ibid., p. 298. 43. Ibid.

44.Cf, The Cambridge Ancient History, 5:472-474; also Anthony J. Podlecki, The Political Background of Aeschylus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970).

45. Kenneth Burke, ‘“Catharsis—Second View,” Centennial Review of Arts and Sciences 5 (Spring 1971): 125-126. 46. Ibid., p. 126. 47, Kenneth Burke, ‘‘Fact, Influence, and Proof,’’ in Terms For Order, ed, Stanley Edgar Hyman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), p. 166. 48. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, pp. 480-506. 49, Burke, ‘‘Linguistic Approaches,” p, 292. 50. Burke, Counter-Statement, pp. 54-55. 51. Kenneth Burke, ‘‘The Criticism of Criticism,’? Accent 15 (Autumn 1955): 292. 52. Kenneth Burke, ‘‘Van Wyck Brooks in Transition?,’ The Dial 84 (January 1928): 58. 53. Burke, “Kinds of Criticism,” p. 282. 54. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, p. 291.

( John Freccero

Logology: Burke on St. Augustine ( St. Augustine’s thought seems dominated by what Kenneth Burke calls the “principle of perfection,” a constant move-

ment toward an absolute unity that cannot be expressed in words. Language is a symbolic system that is intrinsically dual,

for however much we try to represent an absolute in a single term, what Burke calls a god-term, language itself provides us with the capacity to call that absolute into question by use of the negative. The futility of the search for absolutes within such a system is thematized by the subject matter of theology: God is the undifferentiated affirmation in a system founded on the difference between “‘yes” and “no.” Thus, for Augustine, all language concerning God is oxymoric and must ultimately fade

into silence, while all desire, itself conditioned by language, moves toward its own extinction in a peace that passes understanding: ‘Our heart is unquiet, until it rest in Thee.” For Burke, this principle of perfection, the infinite referentiality of both language and desire, is an inevitable tyranny to which the human animal is subject. It seems to be an elusive concept, not readily reducible to other terms and not really discussed at

any length except in an imaginary dialogue at the end of The Rhetoric of Religion, Nevertheless, it isa key idea for Burke, who

finds in theology the purest expression of the “logic of perfection,” although it is also to be found in degraded form in all reductionism and in all exaggeration, in all the simplified schemes

that reduce human motives to a few drives or urges. Even the liar and the flatterer are moved, albeit to an infinitesimal degree, by the principle of perfection. The study of theology in its own terms thus receives an unexpected justification: it represents, in undiluted form, this fundamental motive, present, in varying degrees, in all human action. Burke’s interest in theology is the reverse of the theologian’s 52

Logology: Burke on St. Augustine 53 and is essentially deconstructive of the theological edifices of the past. It includes exposing the workings of the principle of perfection in those systems while acknowledging that none of us can escape it entirely, certainly not in expository prose. It is perhaps for this reason that his dazzling work is at the same time so difficult and so totally unconventional. The poems, dialogues, scholastic debates, and asides to the reader all seemed designed to avoid the absolutism that is one of the objects of his critique. His style as well seems the antithesis of Augustine’s, lacking the rhetorical closure that one might expect from the title or the subject. The antithesis is an indication of his dialectical relationship to Augustine’s text, which he nevertheless follows more closely than any exegete ever followed scripture. The structure of his work is also modeled on the Confessions, moving as it does from the confessional narrative to an exegesis of the first three chapters of Genesis. Finally, the book ends with a recapitulation in the form of an imaginary conversation between a puckish God, who keeps saying “It’s more complicated than that,’ and his favorite pupil, Satan, a “‘yes-man”’ if there ever was one. To make the antithesis complete, he calls his epilogue a ‘Prologue in Heaven.” The dismantling of Augustine’s work is a prodigious task that Burke accomplishes with a thoroughness and a rapidity that sometimes leaves the reader behind. In many ways, his analysis is a recapitulation of many of the themes of his own previous work, but because it is the Confessions or Genesis that determines

the sequence of this thought, the principles of this deconstruction are not always clear without recourse to earlier works. The obvious genius of even peripheral remarks, however, convinces the student of his work that patient rereading and some research are generously rewarded.

Burke’s method, and particularly his analysis of pertectionism, gives him what he elsewhere calls ‘‘technical immunity”’ from praise or blame. There is no way to discuss the achievement of this great book without troping the difficulty that it describes—

54 John Freccero the word “achievement”? itself, from Old French “‘chef,” meaning both head and ending, reveals a built-in ‘‘perfectionism”’ in its etymology that Burke could expose in seconds. Since flattery is also out of the question, the commentator has no choice but to try dialectics as an appropriate response. Accordingly, I will

present my admittedly partial understanding of logology and then try to see if there is a unitary principle in Augustine’s work that survives the logological reduction. Put most simply, Burke proposes to step back to observe the

formal principles upon which theology is founded in order to learn how those principles operate in all symbol-systems, includ-

ing those of governance and of language itself, in which more secularized mysteries have yet to be resolved. Purely apart from its content, theology affords him a virtually transparent archi-

tectonic for the study of “symbolicity,’’ which is to say, in Burke’s terminology, for all human motivations. If Augustine could use linguistic analogies in order to construct his theological system, it should be possible to move in the other direction and discover the latent linguistic principles in that theology. This is what Burke calls “‘logology”’: By logology ... I would mean the systematic study of theological terms, not from the standpoint of their truth or falsity as statements about the supernatural, but purely for the light they might throw upon the forms of language. That is, the tactics involved in the theologian’s ‘‘words about God”? might be studied as ‘‘words about words” (by using as a methodological bridge the opening sentence in the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God’’),

Although he scrupulously avoids making any judgment on the truth-content of theology, perhaps because he is used to the moral indignation of believers, it is fairly obvious that the absence of any verifiable content in theology or, at the very least, the abstract quality of whatever content it has, together with its traditional claims to governance, make of it an almost pure formalism of perfection with considerable political muscle. To

Logology: Burke on St. Augustine 55 illustrate how closely the content of theology comes to being pure perfectionism, one has only to recall the most famous proof for the existence of God, Anselm’s ontological argument. Burke does not mention it, but it clearly might have supported his argument. Indeed, it is so perfect an example of the logic of perfection that some contemporary language analysts (e.g., Norman Malcolm) still regard it as a valid proof. A logological reduction of the proof immediately reveals it to be a tautology: God is God.

Think of a being than which no greater can exist (that is, the definition of God according to the principle of perfection). It is better to exist than not to exist (that is, within this set of terms, the movement to ultimate perfection involves the transcendence of the negative “‘non-existence,’’ which isa purely linguistic attribution). Therefore, God exists (that is, perfection is perfection). It might be supposed, from this example, that the logological reduction is well adapted only to scholasticism, with its spiderweb formalism, and that Scripture, in its richness of detail, remains relatively immune to such an operation. In his masterful

essay on Genesis, Burke shows that this is not the case. The apparent circularity of Anselm’s argument derives from the state-

ment, in syllogistic form, of another, but more traditional, first principle: the principle of identity, essential to all theological systems. When identity is translated, not into the circular form of Anselm’s logic, but rather into the temporal terms of linear sequence, it becomes the basis of religious history, in which beginning and end coincide. God’s logical priority, as the apex of perfectionist reasoning, is translated into temporal priority, making him the originator of all things. History itself is a tautology, God’s identity spelled out, so to speak, in narrative form. The story, which is nothing but the exfoliation of identity, is relatively simple: all things flow from God and all things flow back to Him, if only we could rid ourselves of the negative, the principle that makes it possible to talk about it in the first place. The inescapable circularity of both Anselm’s argument and of Christian history are built into the symbol-system. If we privilege

56 John Freccero language, then God is its projection. If we privilege God, then our language is merely reflection, made in His image. It must be remembered, however, that theology is the ideology of religion and religion is a system of action—specifically, of governance.

God’s self-identity in the creative act is at the same time a defense of the idea of order. What is at stake in the logological enterprise is an understanding of the whole range of human motivation, at once constituted by language and constitutive of it. However harmless the principle of perfection may appear to be in the context of an intellectual puzzle, its manifestations in history have been in the most tyrannical absolutisms and in systems of oppression. Within Christianity itself, perfection takes the form of the search for the perfect victim and so becomes a motivation for the Crucifixion. No amount of deconstruction will make theology superfluous while ‘“‘symbolicity” remains intrinsic to human behavior, indistinguishable from language insofar as both are forms of action. In the whimsical dialogue that serves as the book’s epilogue (Burke calls it ‘Prologue in Heaven’’), we finally come to the question of why human beings still cling to theology when there are adequate logological explanations for its tenets. God explains that humans go on believing primarily because of the fear of punishment and hope of reward. Above all, logology fails to offer grounds for the perfection of promises and threats that theology allows for. And there are incentives in both animality and symbolicity that will keep man always asking about ulti-

mate principles of reward and punishment, in their attempts to scare the devil out of one another. Being creatures that necessarily think in terms of time, they will incline to think of such a culminative logological design in terms of sheerly temporal firsts and lasts. Hence, there is the goad towards theological translation into terms of a final destiny in an afterlife. A sheerly logological explanation must leave such doctrinally stimulated hunger unappeased.

It is of course true that, in terms of eschatology, theology can affirm the existence of Heaven and Hell, while logology must be

Logology: Burke on St. Augustine 57 content with pointing out that these are merely logological pos-

sibilities inherent in the system of governance based on the “dramatistic’’ version of the principle of negativity: ‘thou shalt’’

and “thou shalt not.’’ However, it does seem that the promise of reward and threat of punishment are temporal sanctions that are advanced in any system of governance; if they are theological,

then they must be so in a sufficiently wide sense to embrace Plato’s Republic and Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, Both of these treatises on justice end with a mythic threat of force, just in case the theories should happen to meet with a logological shrug of the shoulders. So, too, does Dante’s vision of the afterlife owe much more to Plato, Virgil, Cicero, and Macrobius than it does

to Christian sources. One prominent modern theologian, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, has recently called into question Dante’s reputation as Christian poet precisely because of the poem’s stress on reward and punishment, which Von Balthasar takes to be characteristic of pagan thought. Perhaps one should at this point distinguish between religion and theology, with a phrase such as official theology, although Burke sometimes uses the words synonymously. In the theology of the Confessions, the emphasis is much more on the satisfaction of ‘‘doctrinally stimulated hunger” than on threats. It might be argued that damnation is theologically defined as deprivation of God, just as evil is privation of good and night is deprivation of day, while Hell is constructed from the stories and legends of religion. About the only threat I can think of in the Confessions occurs in a context that, by coincidence, also involves the translation of a logical issue into temporal terms. To the question of what God was doing before he made heaven and earth, Augustine

replies, ‘(He was preparing Hell for people who ask foolish questions.”’

There is no doubt that ‘‘doctrinally stimulated hunger’’ is the motive force for much of the Confessions, from the discussion

of the first stirrings of the infant at the mother’s breast to the last references to the overflowing abundance of Heaven—ubertas,

58 John Freccero the word that, as Burke has convincingly shown, recapitulates the motif of nourishment at the breast. If we assume that we are second-guessing Augustine in making such an observation, however, as Burke sometimes does, then we are likely to miss an essential point about the text, to which I now turn my attention. Since the task I have set is reconstruction, my terminology will be largely Augustinian, but I shall indicate agreement or contrasts with Burke’s analysis where it seems ap propriate. In general,

any of my reservations about that extraordinary analysis may be summed up by saying that I do not think Burke has given Augustine enough credit for anticipating, however remotely, his own concept of logology. Augustine had worked out in considerable detail the relationship between words and the Word. What concerned him more, perhaps, was the relationship between

that master-principle and reality. To put the matter in scriptural terms, Augustine tells us in Book VII of the Confessions that he had discovered the substance of the doctrine of the word in the books of the Platonists: that is, that in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and that the word was God— the verse from the Gospel of John that Burke proposes as the methodological bridge between logology and theology. What he did not read in the books of the Platonists, however, was that the word was made flesh and dwelt among us. The Incarnation,

with all that it implies, was for him the difference between logology and theology at all levels: the theological, in the doctrine of the creation; the eschatological, mentioned by Burke in terms of the ultimate promise; the historical, as a principle of coherence within history rather than superimposed upon it; and finally, the personal, as the story of his conversion. Most extraordinary of all, however, is that Augustine himself provides us with a logological interpretation of that central and distinctive doctrine. In the Confessions, the insatiable hunger of human beings is inseparable from language. In infancy, language and desire are born at the same time when the paralanguage of gesticulation

Logology: Burke on St, Augustine 59 struggles to name the objects it would possess. At the same time, however, it is clear that the child eventually learns what to desire

from a world that adults have named. One might say that the outward trajectory of language represents a grammar of desire, while the inward trajectory of language represents a rhetoric of suggestion. Words can express desire, but the words of others, or of Another, can create it. This explains the polemic against pagan literature and the threat that it poses to the adolescent— one of the most famous themes of the Confessions, which became a major motif of medieval literature—i.e., that words are efficacious no matter who writes them.

Language and desire are also one, inasmuch as both are, in human terms, inexhaustible. As for desire, Augustine’s life suggests that each of the objects of desire, food for the child, sex for the adolescent, and power and fame for the adult, are mere signs, metonymically replacing one another, standing for ultimate satisfaction. This is the point of what Burke calls the ‘‘gratuitous act’’ of the theft of the pears. In essence, it contains the germ of all sin, the ‘‘non serviam’’ of Satan, for the ultimate goal is autonomous selfhood. The sin must be committed before an audience, just as Rousseau’s lie about his theft of the ribbon must be pronounced in society, not because of some homoerotic male bonding as Burke suggests, but rather to underscore the extent to which motivations can be created by the power of suggestion, given the human permeability to the words of others. The same referentiality is characteristic of signs: all signs represent, but cannot present their truths. To maintain that they in fact are the truths that they represent would be tantamount to idolatry as it was understood by the Jews: confusing the idol, that is to say, the image, of the god with the god itself. Augustine puts this clearly in the De Magistro: The import of words consists in this: they serve to suggest merely that we look for realities... . These they do not exhibit to us for our knowledge....If we do not know what words signify, we receive from them only the impulse to inquire. ...

60 John Freccero All meaning is ultimately translation into another system of signs. Moreover, closure seems always to be imposed, from the outside, from exigencies that do not spring from the nature of

language. It is perhaps for this reason that modern linguists seem relatively uninterested in the problem. Julia Kristeva has put it succinctly: closure is always a form of ideology. It is for this reason too, perhaps, that Burke seeks constantly to expose the tyranny of ultimates. If, however, one could imagine the grounding of language in a point that was at once its origin and its end, yet at the same time a point of intersection with reality, such a grounding would be found in the Word made flesh—a signifier that was, at the same time, its own signification, whose

lived reality rooted it to the concrete in a way that achieved what is the unrealizable goal of all language. In this sense, it is correct to say that Christ is the language of God. As desire and language reach out in a linear trajectory toward their grounding in the Word that is at the same time their point of departure, they form what might be called a syntax, a moving toward a definitive moment of closure. The rationale, the sense

of the movement has been present in a hidden, paradigmatic way, or, if one prefers, is retrospectively superimposed from the end term. The same model is a model of creation: the strophe of

the creative act, the conversion of the soul, the epistrophe of the return. History too isa spacing off, a periodization that gives a rationale to the otherwise infinite dispersion of matter into time, making of God’s creation a flowing out of the word toward

the Word made flesh. Von Balthasar gives a definition of this recapitulation, anakephalaiosis, a term used by St. Paul and borrowed by the early Greek Fathers in their theology of history: “Tt means not just flowing backward to the beginning, but move-

ment forward in time as the integration of the beginning in the end, and this is the significance of the movement forward itself, insofar as it is at once in time and above time.” This gathering up in an epistrophic movement is the essence of thought for Augustine. His etymology of cogito from cogo, I gather,

Logology: Burke on St. Augustine 61 is analogous to the etymology of logos from legein, to bind together. Careful readers of Burke will recognize several of the themes

of his logological analysis—in particular, the recapitulation of history would seem to be nothing more than the translation into narrative form of logical possibilities, as we have seen. However,

there is an empirical model upon which Augustine bases his master design, and it should come as no surprise that, for this former word-peddler, it is the act of speech itself. The pattern that gives a continuity between the career of the former rhetorician and the future bishop is to be found in the simplest of actions, pushed by the logic of perfection to resemble the inner life of the Trinity.

In the simplest of terms, we may say that the eternal Word of the Trinity is related to the Word made flesh as the intentionality of a speaker stands to his utterance in time. The perfect act of speech could be imagined as the articulation into time of the intentionality of a speaker until the sentence is completely uttered and, retrospectively, meaning emerges in time when the conclusion exactly matches its point of origin. The conversion of logical categories into temporality is no theological sleight of hand, For Augustine, it happens every time we speak.

Whatever the psychological reality, Augustine’s theory is spatially represented by sentence structure, the superimposition of formal closure on the natural syntax of language. In the fourth book Augustine laments the death of his friend and then checks his grief with an astonishing comparison that Burke quotes extensively. Augustine decides that a human being is no more to be mourned than is the death of one syllable making way for the next, so that, in the opposition, meaning may emerge. Human lives are like phonemes in the unfolding of God’s Word. Death, he tells us, is the law of all living things: So much you have given them, to be parts of a structure in which the parts are not all in existence at the same time: instead, by fading and replacing each other, they all together constitute the universe of which

62 John Freccero they are parts. Our own speech too, which is constructed out of meaningful sounds, follows the same principles. There could never be a complete sentence unless one word, as soon as the syllables had been sounded,

ceased to be in order to make room for the next.

The structure of history is like a sentence spoken by God. The end term, what the Bible calls the fullness of time, is the Word made flesh, an incarnation of the meaning that was present from the beginning. Ephesians I, 10: ‘That in the dispensation of the fullness to times, He might gather together in one all things in Christ.’’ Augustinian history, like his understanding of speech, is at once linear and circular, a syntax that moves toward its own beginning.

There are several implications of much interest in this idea, which I mention only in passing. For one thing, syntax is here represented as the logological equivalent of the synthesis of matter and spirit, or of body and soul. Platonic dualism was for Augustine the definitive separation of time and eternity, while the ancient notion of time as entropy until death was what he called ‘‘fallen time.’ Syntax, however, is the time redeemed, since it shows that time is necessary in order to allow meaning to emerge. Second, this conception of the act of speech represents the relationship of a Neoplatonic idea of Nous, or Mind, to the Word of the Gospels. The former is analogous to intention, the latter to the unfolding of that intention in time. It has

been suggested in recent scholarship that it was only after Augustine had changed his ideas about the inferior nature of language that he could bring himself to use the word ‘‘verbum” for both words and the Word. Finally, the syntactic model is a basis

for understanding biblical allegory and its relationship to confessional structure. The New Testament should be understood, not as a separate book, but rather as the definitive ending of the Old Testament—its closure. Syntax would be the horizontal axis along which the Old Testament events are unfolded. However, just as the speaker’s intentionality must be virtually present at each separate instant of an utterance, providing a vertical or

Logology: Burke on St. Augustine 63 paradigmatic axis, so to speak, in the same way the New Testament fulfillment of individual Old Testament figures and events subtends the narrative as a “type” or “figure” that is revealed only at the end. Ultimately, like all successful utterances with respect to their intentionality, it is a tautology. The ending is the Word made flesh, but in the beginning was the Word. All of the foregoing remarks about the syntactic analogy seem to be summed up in a single passage that applies the analogy to all symbolicity: Suppose I am about to recite a psalm which I know. Before I begin, my expectation is extended over the whole psalm. But once I have begun, whatever I pluck off from it and let fall into the past enters the province

of my memory. So the life of this action of mine is extended in two directions: toward my memory, with regard to what I have recited and toward my expectation, with regard to what I am about to recite. But

all the time my attention is present and through it what was future passes on its way to become past. And as proceed further and further with my recitation, so the expectation grows shorter and the memory erows longer, until all the expectation is finished at the point when the whole of this action is over and has passed into the memory. And what is true of the whole psalm is also true of every part of the psalm and of every syllable in it. The same holds good for any longer action, of which the psalm may be only a part. It is true also of the whole of a man’s life, of which all of his actions are parts. And it is true of the whole history of humanity, of which the lives of all men are parts.

This repetition of the same pattern, what Burke might call an exfoliation, traces a homology through successive stages of abstraction, from the act of recitation, to biography, to universal history. Conversion is, in each case, the end term, at which point all that was to be said has in fact been said. Time is contained in

the mind, in Trinitarian form, in its totality, while recitation, motivated action, history itself are its unfolding. The fact that it

is a psalm that is being recited reminds us that the psalms are explicitly mentioned at the beginning of the Confessions and serve as its models throughout. The suggestion is that we apply the pattern to Augustine’s work.

64 John Freccero In Augustine’s own comparison, there is an analogy between ‘‘a man’s life’? and the syntactic form. This in turn invited logo-

logical speculation about the relationship of conversion to its verbal description. Conversion is always a verbal event in the Confessions, but there is a sense in which this kind of verbal event, a confessional narrative, is always the story of a conversion. When any narration claims an identity between the narrator or authorial voice and the protagonist, some provision must be made for their coming together. When such a narrative claims to be definitive, with a point of closure marking the coming together

of author and persona, logic demands that it be a conversion narrative, a death of the self that was, whose plot is fixed for all time, and a resurrection of a new voice, from whose standpoint

the story can be told. Like the retrospective view of someone drowning, the existence of the story depends upon a survival of the crisis, yet the completeness of the story, the accuracy of the inventory, depends upon the evolution being ended. This epistemological exigency is met in the Confessions by the contrast between Augustinus and alter Augustinus, a conversion formally analogous to the conversio of the Old Testament to the New.

Conversion is both the subject matter of his work and the precondition for its existence. Form and content are therefore in some sense analogous, inasmuch as conversion not only is a traditional religious experience, but also has its counterpart in language, where it may be defined as that central syntactic moment in which the ending marks the beginning and the circular

identity of the author coincides with the linear evolution of his

persona. Burke would refer to this as the translation of the principle of Identity into narrative, temporal terms, while Augustine has in mind the recitation of a psalm, his own life, which he knows by heart. In either case, the unity of the work is to be found in language, whether we consider language to be the source of ideas of divinity or their dim reflection. The implications of this verbal representation of one’s own identity for subsequent literary history is obvious. It suggests that the formal

Logology: Burke on St. Augustine 65 verbal structure guarantees a principle of coherence in the events that it seeks to relate simply by virtue of giving them a beginning, middle, and end within an apparently temporal structure. When the subject is one’s self, the absurdity involved may be thematized

in terms of a conversion narrative. The difference between a deliberately open-ended autobiography, such as Sartre’s, and the Augustinian original is exactly the difference between Les Mots and le Verbe.

Finally, there are two further points that I should make, the first concerning historicity and the second concerning the representation of timelessness. Thus far, we have spoken of the Confessions as though it were a pure form, but I have also said that Augustine sought to anchor his book to history, which in his case necessarily means salvation history. His attempt is the emblem-

atic use of the fig tree to mark the moment of his conversion. On the one hand, it is certainly a tree in a garden, whatever its botanical species. Augustine goes to great lengths to insist upon the historicity, or particularity, of the scene. On the other hand, the fig tree is the New Testament’s emblem for salvation history:

Jesus refers to it as the “sign of the times.” It distantly recalls the estrangement of Adam and Eve from God, but the immediate reference is to the first episode in the Gospel of John, after the prologue of the Word. Nathanael is asleep under the fig tree when

he is called by Christ to follow him. The passage in the New Testament is a response to the prophet Micah, who had used the image as an emblem of the promise to Israel: “He shall sleep, every man, under his vine and under his fig tree.” In effect, the Gospel calls out to awaken the Jews to conversion. Augustine’s use of the image has the effect of giving to his story a typological dimension, suggesting that the episode in his life, however intimate and unique, is at the same time an instance of the continual

unfolding of God’s Word after the Resurrection, what later exegetes were to define as the tropological sense. For the logologer there are several implications: First, the appeal to some other literary text as authority for this one, which presents itself

66 John Freccero as trope. Then again, an attempt to synthesize the concrete and the universal, particular time with logical pattern, on the model

of the Incarnation. Finally, a demonstration of language as power, or as symbolic action. The conversion is a purely verbal event, not only because it is a reading of the Bible at the verbal command of the children to read, but also because the way had been prepared by Augustine’s reading of the conversion of Antony as he heard the word of God. What is more, the conversion of Alypius immediately following Augustine’s is a proleptic exhortation to us to convert, since we too are reading the story of how someone was converted by reading a story of conversion. The emblem of the fig tree grounds this progression at its source,

the Gospel of John, transforming even the landscape into a biblical citation.

With regard to the representation of timelessness, there is one other area where logology might be put to work, and that is

in the distinction between oral and written speech. There is a sense, of course, where theological speculation has always privileged the spoken Word, with all of the suggestions of presence, and denigrated writing as simply its pale shadow. In Augustine, we begin to see the reverse process, where the visual and spatial perception of the word as read becomes an emblem of a simultaneity that is preferable to sound and the fall into time. Since the Bible is the text that is privileged above all others, it follows that Augustine would insist upon its translation into visual simultaneity. This he does when, under the influence of a verse from Isaiah and from the psalms, which refer to the sky as,a parchment, he refers to the firmament as God’s book. The Bible itself is simply the physical manifestation of its ‘‘soul,” so to speak, which is represented by the stars. The same claim is made by all books, in the sense that they are the visual representation

of a non-representable totality in time. To return to Burke’s terminology, we might say that space functions as a logical struc-

ture, to which the reader lends his own temporality, interpreting ‘‘above”’ and ‘‘below”’ respectively as before and after. The

Logology: Burke on St. Augustine 67 heavens are a book in which there is no temporal interlude between alpha and omega, a musical score to be interpreted by all generations,

To return to The Rhetoric of Religion, its very genius is in the modesty of its claim. Its critique of what might be called the lust for unity, and its insistence on the complexity of the subjects it discusses, guarantee a continuing activity of its author.

I am very honored to have been given this opportunity to express my own continuing response to this critique and to a critic from whom all students of literature have learned so much.

(a Fredric R. Jameson

The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis (BF What has today for better or for worse come to be known

as literary theory may be distinguished from an older “philosophical”’ criticism by its emphasis on the primacy of language; and it has come to be widely, if loosely, felt that it is the discovery of the Symbolic in the most general sense which marks the great divide between thinkers and writers who belong to our world and those who speak an historical language we have first to learn. In what follows I will have much to say, at least implicitly, about this proposition; but it is certain that the older philosophical criticism was content simply to “apply” various philosophical systems to literature in an occasional way, so that we had the curiosities of an existential or a phenomenological criticism, or a Hegelian or a gestalt or indeed a Freudian criticism available on specialized shelves for the philosophically venturesome.

It is clear, however, that in an atmosphere in which technical philosophy—no less than literature itself—is felt to be the emanation of specific powers of language; in an atmosphere in which “literary form,’ to gloss a famous title of Burke’s, is felt to be a

philosophy in its own right, and in which language is itself theory in action; in such an atmosphere the older philosophical criticisms are as outmoded as the older philosophical aesthetics or “‘systems of the fine arts.’’ Not only does Burke’s pioneering work on the tropes mark him as the precursor of literary theory in this new, linguistics-oriented sense, his Freudo-Marxism itself is the sign of a different structural relationship to the abstrac© 1978 by Fredric R. Jameson. Reprinted from Critical Inquiry 4 (Spring 1978): 507-524.

68

The Symbolic Inference 69 tions of technical philosophy than that of many of his contemporaries; and it is a modification then supremely visible in the Grammar and Rhetoric of Motives, where the older philosophical systems are poured in one after the other to be melted down and lose their separate identities, much as the old bourgeois selves and individualisms were boiled down and transmuted by Ibsen’s Button Moulder.

Paradoxically, however, this displacement of traditional criticism and traditional philosophy by what has come to be known as theory turns out to allow the critic himself a wider latitude for the exercise of personal themes and the free play of private idiosyncrasies. The transcendence of the older academic specializations and the heightened appreciation of the inner logic and autonomy of language itself thus make for a situation in which the temperament of the individual critic—if the latter is not too self-indulgently aware of that fact—can serve as a revealing medium for the textual and formal phenomena to be

examined. So it is that when we think of the greatest of contemporary critics and virtuoso readers—besides Burke himself the

list would probably include Empson and Frye, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Viktor Shklovsky—we thereby instinctively designate bodies of criticism in which the practice of peculiar and sometimes eccentric textual interpretations is at one with

the projection of a powerful, nonsystematized theoretical resonance, and this even where the critic himself—Frye and Burke are the obvious examples, but also the Empson of The Structure of Complex Words or the Barthes of Systeme de la mode—misguidedly but compulsively submits his materials to a rage for patterns and symmetries and the mirage of the metasystem.

Yet it is not enough to say that Burke’s notion of the symbolic act is an anticipation, indeed a privileged expression, of current notions of the primacy of language; seen from a different angle, it allows us to probe the insufficiencies of the latter, which is in so much of today’s critical practice little more than a received

70 Fredric R. Jameson idea or unexamined presupposition. Indeed, Burke’s conception of the symbolic as act or praxis may equally well be said to constitute a critique of the more mindless forms of the fetishism of language, and this to the point where one of the most interesting historical issues raised by his work finds its implicit resolution, |

mean the question as to why this immense critical corpus, to which lip service is customarily extended in passing, has—read by virtually everybody—been uttterly without influence in its fundamental lessons, has had no following, save perhaps among the social scientists, and is customarily saluted as a monument of personal inventiveness and ingenuity (in the sense in which I’ve just spoken of the idiosyncrasies of the great critics) rather

than as an interpretative model to be studied and a method to be emulated. A really full and concrete solution to this particular enigma would of course involve us in a reconsideration and a virtual rewriting of the whole history of our recent intellectual past; in particular it commits us to rectify that falsification of the literary and critical history of the thirties and forties which, an ongoing legacy of McCarthyism, has in our own field never been systematically challenged even where its sterility is widely recognized. It is to be hoped that a generation of students and scholars no longer hysterical about Stalinism will undertake the task of this fundamental historical revision, which is underway in all of the social sciences but has not even been breathed as a distant and unconfirmed rumor in the human sciences, and most particularly in literature or philosophy. A very different Burke emerges, indeed, when we have under-

stood that, in the period in which his most important work was being elaborated, Burke’s stress on language, far from reinforcing as it does today the ideologies of the intrinsic and of the anti-referential text, had on the contrary the function of restoring to the literary text its value as activity and its meaning as a gesture and a response to a determinate situation. Thus conceived,

literary and cultural criticism takes its place among the social

The Symbolic Inference 71 sciences, and the study of language and of aesthetic objects in general recovers something of the dignity it had for the founders of philology when their program foresaw the analysis of literary texts and monuments as a unique means of access to the understanding of social relations. It is from this perspective that | here want to reevaluate Kenneth Burke’s contribution; more specifically, I want to determine whether his work can be reread or rewritten as a model for contemporary ideological analysis, or what in my own terminology I prefer to call the study of the ideology of form: the analysis, in other words, of the linguistic, narrative, or purely formal ways in which ideology expresses itself through and inscribes itself in the literary text. But this displacement of the terminology of the symbolic by that of ideology will seem arbitrary unless I add a word or two about the concept of ideology it presupposes, which is clearly construed in a much wider sense than that of sheer opinion, of those extraneous and annoying authorial interventions with which a Balzac or a Faulkner suspend their narratives and indulge some heart-felt prejudice. The view of ideology implied here is

one which springs from and indeed completes the whole rich development of narrative analysis today; and to put it this way is already to measure something of the distance across which we mean to interrogate Burke’s achievement: for it is evident that

to reexamine his descriptions of symbolic action in terms of narrative analysis is fundamentally to change the terms and the givens, the coordinates, of the problem and to cut across it in a new way. The older debates, indeed, raised the issue of the status of the aesthetic within the framework of an opposition between truth and poetry, an opposition which tended to box the latter, and literary discourse in general, into categories of fiction or the

fictive, the imitated, the unreal, the merely imaginary. But to defend the aesthetic on the terrain of an opposition of this kind was clearly to have surrendered everything in advance and to have resigned one’s self to a sandbox conception of literature and culture and their respective efficacy.

72 Fredric R. Jameson When now we substitute the term ‘‘narrative” for “fiction,” this epistemological false problem disappears, or at least goes out of focus: for it becomes clear, not only that narrative is a specific mode of thinking the world, which has its own logic and which is irreducible to other types of cognition, but also—and even—

that much of what passes for conceptual or scientific writing is itself secretly narrative in character. If, therefore, narrative is one of the basic categorical forms through which we apprehend realities in time and under which synchronic and analytic thinking is itself subsumed and put in perspective, then we no longer have to be defensive about the role of culture and the importance of its study and analysis. From this point of view, then, Burke’s apologia for literature as gesture and ritual—once an uncompromising statement of the active power and social function of the aesthetic—may no longer strike us as being uncompromising enough. As far as the relationship of ideology and narrative is concerned, however, it may be most useful first to grasp the function of the words “ideology” and ‘‘ideological’’ as the bearers and the signals of a kind of Brechtian estrangement effect to be applied to the operation of literary and cultural analysis itself. To pronounce these words on the occasion of a literary interpretation or a literary or artistic form itself—as when, for instance, John Berger speaks of the ‘ideology of light” in certain Renaissance paintings, or when the Althusserians denounce the conception for which ideology is mere false consciousness as being itself ‘ddeological’’'—to use these terms in such a way is less to pass judgments than to reproblematize the entire artistic discourse or formal analysis thereby so designated. The term “ideology”

stands as the sign for a problem yet to be solved, a mental operation which remains to be executed. It does not presuppose

cut-and-dried sociological stereotypes like the notion of the “bourgeois” or the “‘petty bourgeois” but is rather a mediatory concept: that is, it is an imperative to re-invent a relationship between the linguistic or aesthetic or conceptual fact in question

The Symbolic Inference 73 and its social ground. Yet this relationship is not programmed in advance, and indeed there are many strategically different ways in which such arelationship can be projected or formulated, just

as, correlatively, there are many distinct ways in which the literary fact itself or, on the other hand, what I have very loosely called its ‘social ground” can be described and thematized. This is obviously not the place to make an inventory of such possibilities, whose range is great but which have little more in common

than the repudiation of the ideology of the “‘intrinsic”’ and of the “autonomy” of the verbal artifact. It will have already become clear, however, that the usefulness of the term “‘ideology”’ lies—whatever the terms of the solution ultimately decided on—

in its exacerbation of the problem, in its capacity to make the re-invention of such a relationship unavoidable. It has therefore seemed to me preferable to describe ideological analysis phenomenologically, in terms of the mental and textual

operations it involves, rather than in the framework of any of the specific historical conceptions of ideology available to us. Ideological analysis may therefore be described as the rewriting of a particular narrative trait or seme as a function of its social, historical, or political context. Still, in the present atmosphere of theoretical sophistication, it is probably futile, if not regressive, to argue for an ideological analysis of literature in ontological terms by asserting the priority of historical or social or political reality

over the literary artifacts produced within it or, in other words, by affirming the ontological priority of the context over the text itself. While such assertions still seem to me to be true and obvious, it is equally certain that we need today to respond to the widespread realization that what used to be called a context is

itself little more than a text as well, one you find in history manuals or secondary sources, if not in that unexamined pop history or unconscious collective representation by which groups or classes or nations tend to organize their vision and their read-

ing of individual events. But this does not mean that history is itself a text, only that it is inaccessible to us except in textual

74 Fredric R. Jameson form or, in other words, that we approach it only by way of its prior textualization. This is why it has seemed more satisfactory to me to describe ideological analysis as the rewriting of the literary text in such a way that it may itself be grasped as the rewriting or restructuration of a prior ideological or historical subtext, provided it is understood that the latter—what we used to call the “‘context”’ —must always be (re)constructed after the fact, for the purposes of the analysis. The literary or aesthetic gesture thus always stands in some active relationship with the real, even where its activity has been deliberately restricted to the rather sophisticated operation of “reflecting” it. Yet in order to act on the real, the text cannot simply allow reality to persevere in its being outside of itself, inertly, at distance; it must draw the real into its own texture, and the ultimate paradoxes and false problems of linguistics, and in particular of semanitcs, are to be situated here, in the way in which language and the texts of language carry the real within themselves as their own “‘intrinsic’’ subtexts. Insofar, in other words, as symbolic action—Burke will map it out as “‘dream,”’ “‘prayer,”’ or ‘‘chart”?—is a way of doing

something to the world, to that degree what we are calling “world”? must inhere within it, as the content it has to take up into itself in order to give it form. The symbolic act therefore begins by producing its own context in the same moment of emergence in which it steps back over against it, measuring it with an eye to its own active project. The whole paradox of what we are calling the subtext can be measured by this, that the literary work or cultural object itself, as though for the first time, brings into being that situation to which it is also, at one and the same time, a reaction. It articulates its own situation and textualizes it, encouraging the illusion that the very situation itself did not exist before it, that there is nothing but a text, that there never was any extra- or con-textual reality before the text itself generated it. Meanwhile, this simultaneous production and articulation of “reality” by the text is reduplicated by an

The Symbolic Inference 75 active, well-nigh instrumental, stance of the text toward the new reality, the new situation, thus produced; and the latter is accompanied immediately by gestures of praxis—whether measurements, cries of rage, magical incantations, caresses, or avoidance behavior. Now to insist on either of these two dimensions of symbolic action without the other—to overemphasize the way in which the text organizes its subtext (in order, presumably, to

reach the triumphant conclusion that the “referent” does not exist) or on the other hand to stress the instrumental nature of the symbolic act to the point where reality, no longer understood

as a subtext but rather as some mere inert given, is once again delivered over into the hands of that untrustworthy auxiliary, Common Sense—to stress either of these functions of symbolic action at the expense of the other is surely to produce sheer ideology, whether it be, in the first alternative, the ideology of structuralism or, in the second, that of vulgar materialism. This said, we must add that the refusal of literary semantics, of the categories of the context or the referent, and the various assertions of the free-floating autonomy of the literary text, or the timeless universality of its themes and forms, is not mere opinion either, but is itself a historical phenomenon which reflects the historic process by which in recent times literature and culture have acquired a relative autonomy. Such aesthetics of the intrinsic thus reflect the realities of artistic production under the market system itself, and give expression to the free-floating portability of artistic texts in search of an impossible public, texts released from the social functionality which once controlled their meanings and uses in pre-capitalist social formations which have now broken down or been dissolved. From this initial fall, however, from the unavoidable historical reality of a breach between text and context, there can only spring mechanical efforts to reconnect what is no longer an organic whole. So the forced linkages of yesterday’s “‘interdisciplinary” experiments, in which one whole field of study—in our case, the formal or literary—is somehow wired up to other

76 Fredric R. Jameson disciplines, gives way to no less unsatisfactory models which can

be best exemplified by Lucien Goldmann’s “homologies,” in which the structure of the literary text is somehow supposed to be “the same,”’ at some level of abstraction, as the other related structures of economic exchange, conceptual episteme, class

psychology, or whatever. Yet the conception of “‘levels,” whether within the work or between the work and the extratextual systems that surround it, is unsatisfactory not merely because it projects the model of a merely additive or quantitative juxtaposition, but above all because it does not allow for an active or functional relationship between the text itself and its various conceivable subtexts; rather, its “expressive causality”’

folds each of these separate levels back into the other in a kind of global identity. This is then the context, if I may put it that way, in which the power of Burke’s conception of symbolic action can best be appreciated. The notion of language, of the linguistic artifact, as a verbal act is a strategy for going around behind the dilemma we have been describing, and for setting forth at a point before the fall, and positing a place of emergence that precedes the breach which so many mechanical models have proved unable to heal. Im Anfang war die Tat: this place of emergence is that of praxis or, in other words, of a unity in which subject and object, thing and language, context and projected action are still at one in the wholeness of a unique gesture. In the act—and this is as true of Sartrean praxis philosophy as of Burke’s dramatism, and explains the affinities of both for a certain Marxism—not only is a human intention still inseparable from its scene or situation, language, and the mental or structural categories which govern it are still at one with the raw material, the facticity, the data it is in the process of organizing. Hereby, or so it would seem, the false antitheses of an intrinsic and an extrinsic criticism are dispelled, and a new and more adequate conception of the function of literature and its criticism and history can begin to

The Symbolic Inference 77 be developed; unfortunately, it is a conception which is not without some serious new ambiguities in its own right.

This is therefore the moment to evaluate Kenneth Burke’s theory of verbal praxis and to reach some judgment as to his contribution to a theory of ideological analysis proper. The lesson I want us to learn and then to unlearn from Burke comes in two stages: the first of these is associated with that word which more than anyone else he added to our critical vocabulary, namely the notion of a literary ‘“‘strategy’’; while the second in-

evitably enough centers on his fundamental theory of dramatism and of the organization of all symbolic action according to the five basic coordinates of Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, and Purpose.

In one sense, of course, the term “‘strategy”’ is itself merely shorthand for that complex of symbolic determinants: it is the

term which governs their respective relations to each other, which names the provisional hierarchy established between them on the occasion of a siven act—that dominance of Agency over Scene, or alternatively of Scene over Agent and Act, which con-

fers to any given act, or analysis of action, its structure and its specific flavor. On the other hand, strategy precedes accomplishment and indeed action or realization itself: thus, since what we have to do with here is a theory of symbolic action, there is a sense in which none of the symbolic acts in question can be said to have come to its execution, in which all will have remained forever at the stage of project or sheer intention—a kind of permanently provisional hesitation on the threshold of being which the term ‘‘strategy” strategically perpetuates. One of the fundamental ambiguities of the concept of symbolic action is indeed precisely this shifting distance from nonsymbolic or practical or instrumental action itself, which sometimes it seems to want to absorb into itself on the grounds that in that sense all action is symbolic, all production is really communication, and from which, at other times or on other occasions, it seems to

78 Fredric R. Jameson ebb and retreat, leaving behind it some inhospitably arid and stony ledge to which all mere practical activity in the world is summarily assigned.

I suppose that it is only since we have witnessed the immense and paradoxical good fortunes of this term “strategy” in all kinds of formalizing critical discourse that we have thus come to sense its own inner ambiguity, to suspect it of harboring some secret strategy in its own right. The problem is that this concept, which so boldly proclaims itself a praxis-word, tends, by focusing our attention on the inner mechanisms of the symbolic act in question, to end up bracketing the act itself and to suspend any interrogation of what constitutes it as an act in the first place, namely its social and ideological purpose. Thus Burke’s great essay on the Ode on a Grecian Urn maps more triumphantly

than any textbook illustration of structural or semiotic analysis the transformation systems whereby Keats’ poem prepares a “transcendent scene... [in] which the earthly laws of contradiction no longer prevail’: * ‘the poem begins with an ambiguous fever which in the course of the further development is ‘separated out,’ splitting into a bodily fever and a spiritual counterpart. The bodily passion is the malign aspect of the fever, the mental action its benign aspect. In the course of the development, the malign passion is transcended and the benign active partner, the intellectual exhilaration, takes over.’’* Such a description luminously articulates the strategy of Keats’ “alchemy of the word” and isolates its exchange mechanisms and the key moments of its transfer of energies; yet what it takes for granted, what it

‘brackets’? and therefore represses from its critical discourse, is | what such an operation could possibly be symbolic of, in the largest sense, what it means, the concrete situation or context in

which the ultimate identification of Truth with Beauty and Beauty with Truth can be seen itself to be the symbolic resolution of some more fundamental social contradiction or ideologi-

cal antinomy. The concept of “strategy” in Burke’s critical practice thus seems to rule out of bounds the very perspective it

The Symbolic Inference 79 began by promising us, namely that vaster social or historical or political horizon in which alone the symbolic function of those symbolic acts which are the verbal and literary artifacts can become visible to us.

Let me now quickly generalize this critique and apply it to the larger dimensions of the overall theory of dramatism itself. I believe that the Achilles heel of this system is to be located in the shrunken function left over for Purpose in its grandiose mapping scheme (Purpose being, in the Grammar of Motives, amalgamated with Agency, and rather summarily dispatched as a kind of providential survival, a mystical or metaphysical “telos’’). Here are Burke’s own reflexions on this development: All told, of the five terms, Purpose has become the one most suscep-

tible of dissolution, At least, so far as its formal recognition is concerned, But once we know the logic of its transformations, we can discern its implicit survival; for the demands of dramatism being the demands of human nature itself, it is hard for man, by merely taking thought, to subtract the dramatist cubits from his stature. Implicit in the concepts of act and agent there is the concept of purpose. It is likewise implicit in agency, since tools and methods are for a purpose.”

To which one might add that it is evidently implicit in the category of Scene also, inasmuch as Marxism and historical materialism are not very satisfactorily assigned to that particular rubric of the system. The overall problem would appear to be that of the meta-category or meta-language: insofar as the five “‘ratios” are inclusive, they must also include their own fundamental principle as well, which thus proves to govern a set of which it is itself a member. The consequence of this for practical criticism is that in its

application to the texts the category of Purpose turns out to designate two very different things at once. On the one hand, it names the inner logic of the symbolic act itself, its immediate aims and official objectives or, in other words, the terms in which it explains its own activity to itself. On the level of kinesics, then, this category would designate the strategic organization of the

8&0 Fredric R. Jameson gesture, the immediate end toward which this particular muscular effort is mobilized; in the case of Keats’ Ode, Purpose con-

strued according to this first limited or restricted sense would have to be reconstructed from its terminus ad quem, as the intent to overcome the opposition felt to obtain between Beauty and Truth. Such an account of the restricted sense of Purpose in the analysis of a gesture or a symbolic act makes it clear that there is also room for a generalized use of the same term that would govern, not the immediate end and inner organization of a given gesture, but rather its place among all the other possible gestures

I might have made at that particular moment, and its more general relationship to the other gestures and symbolic acts in course and underway in the historical network of intersubjectiv-

ity of which I am myself a part. The restricted concept of Purpose thus stands to this generalized one as an immanent interpretation to a transcendent one or, to use another opposition which has been central in recent debates on hermeneutics, as the study of the Sinn or “sense”? of a given text, its inner

structure and syntax, as opposed to that of its Bedeutung or “meaning,” its ‘‘historically operative” significance or function. Only the first operation can be carried out without attention to the situation of the work; I would argue that the second, interpretation proper, is impossible without some preliminary (re-) construction of what I have called its subtext. This is the point at which to admit that such reconstruction, the beginnings of a (re-)writing of the subtext of Keats’ Ode, is in fact also present in Burke’s essay; and it may be worth taking a moment to watch this process at work: “Truth” being the essential word of knowledge (science) and “beauty”

being the essential word of art or poetry, we might substitute accordingly. The oracle would then assert, ‘Poetry is science, science poetry.” It would be particularly exhilarating to proclaim them one if there were a strong suspicion that they were at odds. ... It was the dialectical op-

The Symbolic Inference 5 1 position between the “‘aesthetic”’ and the “‘practical,’’ with “‘poetry’’ on the one side and utility (business and applied science) on the other that was being ecstatically denied. The relief in this denial was grounded in the romantic philosophy itself, a philosophy which gave strong recognition to precisely the contrast between “‘beauty” and “‘truth,”’... An abolishing of romanticism through romanticism. °

The central interpretative operation in this passage is clearly enough what Burke himself designates as the substitution—or in our own terms, the rewriting—of ‘‘truth”’ and “‘beauty” as Science

and Poetry. This rewriting then furnishes a subtext such that Keats’ Ode can be seen as its symbolic resolution—what Burke describes with sensory vividness as the “relief” of the concluding affirmation of the poem. What has to be resolved is evidently contradictory—Burke speaks of a “‘dialectical opposition” between poetry and science, and begins to rewrite the latter even more fundamentally as the “practical,” as ‘‘applied science”’ or “utility,” “business,” and implicitly, although he does not use the word, as capitalism. Still, we must observe that the operation by which this subtext has been constructed remains essentially

incomplete. We may indeed formulate a further principle of ideological analysis as follows: the subtext must be so constructed

or (re-)constructed as to constitute not merely a scene or backsround, not an inert context alone, but rather a structured and determinate situation, such that the text can be grasped as an active response to it (of whatever type). The text’s meaning then, in the larger sense of Bedeutung, will be the meaningfulness of a gesture that we read back from the situation to which it is precisely a response. The ‘‘dialectical opposition’’ Burke posits here between poetry and science is not yet a situation of that kind: if it is easy enough to see how this opposition might take on the form of a contradiction or an antinomy, a dilemma or a doublebind, a crisis that required some immediate resolution, we must nonetheless conclude that the critic has not been willing to go that far (although, given the urgency of the opposition between

8&2 Fredric R. Jameson science and poetry during the heroic age of the New Criticism, it may be supposed that he felt this opposition to be too familiar to his readers to need any further development). Indeed, in place of the construction of a subtext in the form of a situation, we find something significantly different, which we can only call a strategy of containment, a substitution designed to arrest the movement of ideological analysis before it can begin to draw in the social, historical, and political parameters which are the ultimate horizon of every cultural artifact. What shuts off the process of mediation and transcoding is the appeal to that entity which Burke calls ‘romanticism,’ which effectively enough fixes his “ultimately determining instance”’ or ultimate explanatory code in the area of the history of ideas, if not in that—even more ahistorical—of the psychology of the ereat world views. Here, too, an examination of the subtext of Burke’s own work would reveal “‘romanticism’”’ as a particularly charged term, a complex of moral, political, and poetic dilemmas whose formulation can be traced back to the attack on Rousseau by which Irving Babbitt dramatized his influential counterrevolutionary position. Yet this specification of the ideological context in which Burke is here working only allows us to admire the more intelligently the prestidigitation, the intellectual acrobatics, by which he manages to square this particular circle. The problem posed would then be that of saving the arch-romantic Keats from the inevitable contamination of that romanticism which for the generation of the New Critics vitiated poets like Shelley or Swinburne: the trick is turned by having Keats’ romanticism criticize itself, and under its own momentum resolve the very contradictions for which it was itself responsible—‘‘an abolishing of romanticism through romanticism!’’ Keats can remain a ereat poet, not merely in spite of but even because of that romanticism directly responsible for the ‘“‘dissociation of sensibility”? of the bad romantics of his period. In the meantime, from the point of view of ideological analysis, it may be observed that this way of construing romanticism, by projecting a situation which is its own

The Symbolic Inference 83 response, seals us off from any further need to consult the historical circumstances of romanticism itself, and makes this particular superstructural subtext a kind of autoreferential causa sui. We must therefore take the passage just quoted as evidence for a discouraging reversal in Burke’s critical strategy: his conception of literature as a symbolic act, which began as a powerful incitement to the study of a text’s mode of activity in the general cultural and social world beyond it, now proves to have slipped back over the line and, passing from the generalized sense of the word Purpose to its immanent and strategic, restricted sense, now to furnish aid and comfort to those who want to limit our work to texts whose autonomy has been carefully secured in advance, all the blackout curtains drawn before the lights are turned back on.

Still, it is a measure of the ambiguous power of Burke’s dramatism that we can use it to study its own strategies of containment, and to flush out those concepts external to his own system to which he tends to have recourse when it is necessary to arrest the evolution of his concept of symbolic action in the direction of a full-fledged analysis of the ideological function of literary and cultural texts. In what follows I want briefly to men-

tion three of these borrowed interpretative devices, three of these local strategies of containment which can be observed at work in Burke’s criticism: they are the notion of art as ritual, the appeal to the bodily dimension of the verbal act, and the concept of the self or of identity as the basic theme or preoccupation of literature in general. The insistence on the bodily elements, as it were the physiological infrastructure, of the literary work or verbal act—and some such physiologial interpretation served as the strategy of containment for the other end of the Keats essay from which I just quoted—needs little comment. Here Burke is the precursor of a kind of analysis which, from phenomenology to structuralism, has become associated with the name of Bachelard, and about which it is perhaps enough to distinguish Bachelard’s own

84 Fredric R. Jameson rather static interpretation, in terms of physical elements or humors, from that more dynamic language of gesture and bodily alchemy which we find in Burke. This will also be the place to

note, in passing, that the kind of interpretative operations we have proposed here can readily be reformulated in psychoanalytic terms as well, the work’s subtext in that case being rewritten in the language of the body, the psychosexual stages, the complexes, the Lacanian Imaginary, or whatever.

The question of ritual, however, demands greater attention, insofar as ritual has become, along with myth, one of the great fetishes of present-day American literary criticism and a strategy of containment which is scarcely restricted to Bruke alone. Still, a closer look at the idea of ritual shows that it is scarcely less ambiguous, in its uses and consequences, than that of the symbolic itself. The Cambridge School, and their earliest followers among the literary critics, were indeed concerned to reground tragic and comic drama in the social life of the primitive collectivity: in that context, the interpretation of the work of art in ritual terms dictated its rewriting as a trace or survival of the ways in which the primitive collectivity came to consciousness of itself and celebrated its own social unity. Now the problem arises—and this concept begins to release its dangerous ambiguity

—when we seek to transfer this model of the ritual function of primitive art to the culture and the literature of modern societies: the idea of ritual indeed entails as one of its basic preconditions the essential stability of a given social formation, its functional capacity to reproduce itself over time. Ritual as an institution cannot therefore be understood except as a function of a society of this kind, as one of the fundamental mechanisms for ensuring the latter’s collective coherence and historical perpetuation. It is precisely this precondition, however, which no longer holds for modern society, that is, for capitalism itself; and it would seem to me misguided, not to say historically naive, to attribute a Parsonian stability and functionality of the former primitive or tribal type to a social formation whose inner logic is the restless

The Symbolic Inference 85 and corrosive dissolution of traditional social relations into the atomized and quantified aggregates of the market system. Far from assuming a ritual function, far from ensuring the lawful reproduction of our own social formation over geological ages of time, the greatest aesthetic productions of capitalism prove on the contrary to be the cries of pain of isolated individuals against the operation of transindividual laws, the invention of so many private languages and subcodes in the midst of a reified speech, the symptomatic expressions, finally, of a damaged subject and the marks of his or her vain efforts to subvert and to negate an intolerable social order. To appropriate the rhetoric and conceptuality of primitive ritual to describe these broken fragments of the artistic discourse of capitalism is therefore a sheerly ideological enterprise. Enough has been said about the concept of ideology, however, to make it clear that such a characterization is not gratuitous invective, but rather designates our function as intellectuals in all its affective ambivalence, and implies that we are all ideologues in this sense. Indeed, the example of Burke shows us that the production of an ideology can have a certain grandeur about it, even where it must ultimately be refused: such is, it seems to me, the status of his desperate and ambitious attempt, in the Grammar and Rhetoric of Motives, to endow the American capitalism of the thirties and early forties with its appropriate cultural and political ideology. We are here after all in the thick of a New Deal and Deweyan rhetoric of liberal democracy and pluralism, federalism, the ‘“Human Barnyard,” the “competitive use of the coéperative,”’ and the celebration of political conflict in terms of what the motto to A Grammar of Motives calls the ‘“‘purification of war’: from the nostalgic perspective of the present day, the perspective of a social system in full moral and civic dissolution, what seemed at the time a shrewd diagnosis of the cultural and ideological conflicts of the capitalist public sphere and an often damaging critique of the latter’s strategies of legitimation must now come to have implications of a somewhat different

86 Fredric R. Jameson kind. The very forms of legitimation have been dialectically trans-

formed, and consumer capitalism no longer has to depend on conceptual systems and abstract values and beliefs to the same degree as its predecessors in the social forms of the immediate past; thus, what tends to strike us today about the Grammar and Rhetoric of Motives is less their critical force than Burke’s implicit faith in the harmonizing claims of liberal democracy and in the capacity of the system to reform itself from within. I turn, finally, to the concept of the self or the subject in Burke’s criticism, a problem which will also serve as a transition to a very brief concluding assessment of the dramatistic system

itself. Nowhere do the continental and the Anglo-American critical traditions diverge more dramatically than on this whole issue of the subject, or the ego, or the self, and the value and reality to be accorded to it. We do not have to go all the way with the current French repudiation of ego psychology and what

they call the “philosophies of the subject” to recognize in the American myths of the self and of its identity crises and ultimate reintegration some final trace and survival of that old ideology of bourgeois individualism whose basic features—juridical equal-

ity, autonomy, freedom to sell your own labor power—had crucial functions to fulfill in the establishment and organization of the market system. To repudiate that ideological tradition, to valorize the decentering of the subject with its optical illusion of centrality, does not, I would argue, have to lead to anarchism or to that glorification of the schizophrenic hero and the schizophrenic text which has become one of the latest French fashions and exports; on the contrary, it should signal a transcendence of

the older individualism and the appearance of new collective structures and of ways of mapping our own decentered place with respect to them. However this may be, it is clear that the rhetoric of the self in American criticism will no longer do, any more than its accompanying interpretative codes of identity crisis and mythic reintegration, and that a post-individualistic age needs new and

The Symbolic Inference 87 post-individualistic categories for grasping both the production and the evolution of literary form as well as the semantic content of the literary text and the latter’s relationship to collective experience and to ideological contradiction. What is paradoxical about Burke’s own critical practice in this respect is that he has

anticipated many of the fundamental objections to such a rhetoric of self and identity at the same time that he may be counted among its founding fathers: this last and most important of what we have called his “strategies of containment”’ provides insights which testify against his own official practice. Witness, for example, the following exchange, in which Burke attributes this imaginary objection to his Marxist critics: ‘Identity is itself a ‘mystification.’ Hence, resenting its many labyrinthine aspects,

we tend to call even the study of it a ‘mystification.’”’ To this proposition, which is something of a caricature of the point of view of the present essay, Burke gives himself a reply which we may also endorse: ‘The response would be analogous to the response of those who, suffering from an illness, get ‘relief’ by quarreling with their doctors. Unless Marxists are ready to deny Marx by attacking his term ‘alienation’ itself, they must permit of research into the nature of alienation and into the nature of attempts, adequate and inadequate, to combat alienation.’’® I have quoted this passage mainly to document Burke’s strange

reluctance to pronounce the word ideology itself as well as his fundamental hesitation to identify his own study of symbolic forms with any of the available strategies of demystification, or of what we have today, following Ricoeur, come to call negative hermeneutics, or the hermeneutics of suspicion. For the issue at stake in the imagined exchange from which I have just quoted is not the need, quite appropriately stressed by Burke, for inquiry into the cultural forms of alienation (‘‘the analysis of the ‘strategies’ by which men respond to the factor of alienation and by which they attempt to repossess their world’’)® so much as it is the status of the category of identity and of the self, which is itself ideological, and which can hardly be properly evaluated if

88 Fredric R. Jameson we remain locked into the very ideological system, the ideological closure or double-bind, which generates such concepts in the first place.

This is therefore the moment to characterize the ultimate structural distance between Burkean dramatism and ideological analysis proper: Burke’s system has no place for an unconscious,

it makes no room for genuine mystification, let alone for the latter’s analysis or for that task of decoding and hermeneutic demystification which is increasingly the mission of culture workers in a society as reified and as opaque as our own. The dramatistic modes, if I may put it that way, are all categories of consciousness, open to the light of day in classical, well-nigh Aristotelian fashion; the Burkean symbolic act is thus always serenely transparent to itself, in lucid blindness to the dark under-

side of language, to the ruses of history or of desire. Character-

istically enough, confronted with the great forerunners of ideological analysis, the great explorers of the unconscious proper, with Marx or Freud or Nietzsche, Burke’s inclination is simply to apply to their own insights the sorting mechanism of his modal typology.'° But now, after our digression on the ego or the subject, we may be in a better position to understand why this is so. The very figure of the drama is itself in this respect infinitely revealing and infinitely suspect: the theatrical spectacle, theatrical space, indeed furnishes the first and basic model of the mimetic illusion, just as it is the privileged form in which the spectatorsubject finds itself assigned a place and a center. Drama is then not so much the archetype of praxis as it is the very source of the ideology of representation and, with it, of the optical illusion of the subject, of that vanishing point from which spectacles— whether of culture, of everyday life, or of history itself—fall into place as metaphysically coherent meanings and organic forms. With the critique of the dramatistic paradigm and of its anthropomorphism, we return to the fundamental equivocality of the symbolic itself, at one and the same time the accomplish-

The Symbolic Inference 89 ment of an act and the latter’s substitute, a way of acting on the world and of compensating for the impossibility of such action all at once. It is this kind of ambiguity which Burke will himself articulate by shifting italics from substantive to qualifier: much depends, indeed, on whether you think of art as a symbolic act or as an act which is merely symbolic, Sebastiano Timpanaro

has underscored the structural instability of the analogous Gramscian or Sartrean notion of praxis in much these same terms: It is necessary first of all to show that a reference to praxis can have quite different meanings, according to whether one is declaring the inability of pure thought to make men happy and free (‘‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently, the point is to change it’), or declaring that knowledge itself is praxis tout court. In the latter case, since to know reality is already to transform it, one retrogresses from Marxism to idealism—i.e., to a philosophy of thought

as praxis [or in our present context, of symbolic form as real action], which makes action seem superfluous. M

At the beginning of the present essay, I proposed a checklist of the great contemporary critics, the great readers of an age that had discovered the symbolic; what I then neglected to add was that the art and practice of virtuoso reading does not seem to me to be the noblest function, the most urgent mission, of the literary and cultural critic in our time. In a society like ours, not stricken with aphasia so much as with amnesia, there is a higher priority than reading and that is history itself: so the very sreatest critics of our time—a Lukacs, for example, or, to a lesser degree, a Leavis—are those who have construed their role as the

teaching of history, as the telling of the tale of the tribe, the most important story any of us will ever have to listen to, the narrative of that implacable yet also emancipatory logic whereby the human community has evolved into its present form and developed the sign systems by which we live and explain our lives to ourselves. So urgently do we need these history lessons, indeed, that they outweigh the palpable fact that neither critic just mentioned is a good, let alone a virtuoso, reader, that each

90 Fredric R. Jameson could justly be reproached for his tin ear and his puritanical impatience with the various jouissances of the literary text. I will therefore regret that Burke finally did not want to teach

us history, even though he wanted to teach us how to grapple with it; but I will argue, for the bon usage of his work, that it be used to learn history, even against his own inclination. We have, indeed, in recent American criticism, a canonical example of how this can be done, in a confrontation between Burke and one of the few, rare, and neglected American avatars of the Lukacsean or Leavisite preceptor of history—I’m referring to Yvor Winters, whose rewriting, in his ‘Experimental School in American Poetry,’’? of Burke’s already classic ‘‘Lexicon Rhetoricae’’!* is a model of how productively to historicize a powerful but nonhistorical set of aesthetic observations, and of the transformation of the purely formal Burkean interpretative scheme into a powerful historical statement. To prolong the symbolic inference until it intersects with history itself—this is, it seems to me, the only way properly to pay homage to the incomparable critical and theoretical energy of which Kenneth Burke gives us the example.

NOTES 1.John Berger, The Look of Things (New York: Viking Press, 1974), p. 115; Louis Althusser, Pour Marx (Paris: Maspero, 1965), pp. 238-243; and see also Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: Verso, 1976), p. 69: “Ideology is not just the bad dream of the infrastructure.” 2. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 5-6. 3. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), p. 462. 4. Ibid., p. 461. 5. Ibid., p. 289, 6. Ibid., p. 447. 7. Ibid., p. 442.

8. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, p. 308. In fact, certain contemporary Marxisms—most notably those of Althusser and Lucio Coletti—

The Symbolic Inference 91 explicitly repudiate the concept of alienation as a Hegelian survival in Marx’s early writings. 9. Ibid.

10. The point is not the absence of the terms from Burke’s writing, but rather of the type of diagnostic or symptomal analysis to which they correspond, In fact, the concept of the unconscious is discussed at some length in an essay like ‘‘Mind, Body, and the Unconscious,” in Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 63-80; while for Burke’s position on demystification and negative hermeneutics, see “The Virtues and Limitations of Debunking,’ The Philosophy of Literary Form, pp. 168-190, 11. Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism, trans. Lawrence Garner (London: NLB Press, 1975), p. 56. 12. Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason (New York: Swallow Press and W. Morrow, 1947), pp. 30-74.

13.Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 123-183.

(8 William Wasserstrom

Kenneth Burke, “Logology,” and the Tribal No

(es |

Genet’s origin is a blunder... then a rejection... then a failure, Blunder, rejection, failure: these add up to a No. Since the child’s objective essence was the No, Genét gave himself a personality by giving himself the subjectivity of the No; he is the absolute opponent, for he opposes Being and all integration. —Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genét, Actor and Martyr, 1963

Xe-t Although I suppose not everyone shares my astonishment, I am myself amazed to find colleagues, academic critics in ap-

preciable number, rising in tribute to Kenneth Burke. The astounding thing about this turn of events in the history of fame, in the history of ideas, is its unexpectedness. After all, for fifty years Burke has staked out ground that scarcely anyone hitherto

has sought either to cultivate or to contest. On his own page long found to be rebarbative enough to repel both poachers and

colonists, his influence was pretty well confined to a coterie whose first leader, Stanley Edgar Hyman—himself thirty years ago a Pied Piper beyond the pale—attracted a following but barely

a crowd. Given this record, it is to my mind amazing to find in Burke a force, a power that, as Robert Coles says of William Carlos Williams, is less a matter of poetics than of temperament rare among writers in the United States: a knack of survival. For all that Coles intends his phrase to isolate and delimit the American grain of Williams’ life in art, its bearing on Burke’s career is indisputable. Although the secret of survival is in Coles’ small book left intact, its central feature is shared by writers, somehow set apart, who stand outside literary generation because they possess a genius too foxy for trapping, too fleet. Forever in-

imitable, at once out of fashion and always in touch, out of reach although always at hand, copious in invention, they dazzle not because there’s stardom in store but because their 92

Burke, “Logology,”’ and the Tribal No 93 glow is a glory of genes. They have the knack of being what they do.

Late though it is, then, how marvelous it is that Burke, this year eighty-two years old, is subjected to a shock of celebration in which I am honored to share. ‘(My own early encounters with

Burke,” Wayne Booth said in talk and in print five years ago, “led me to a quick and easy dismissal. ] heard him say, with his own lips, that ‘bombs’ and ‘poems’ are the same word; I heard him demonstrate that Conrad put himself into Heart of Darkness, the proof being that the sound involved in Conrad-Kurtz and the sounds involved in Heart of Darkness are equivalent if you'll allow...” and so on. I skip details of Booth’s confession and of Burke’s proof. Neither the one nor the other is any longer needed to clinch any case whatever, either for Burke’s “‘outlandishness’’? or for Booth’s straitness of mind. What this testimony offers, recollection of the “‘young student of Robert Crane”’ that Booth was at the time, is a memory both identical and antithetical to my own. On hearing Burke’s words, Booth decided that he ‘had heard enough: if criticism was to be the effort to know something, Burke was not a critic. It took me nearly twenty years to discover how wrong I was.’’? Burke’s a long way round from Ronald Crane. I’m a long way

removed from Booth. But Wayne Booth does indeed capture a trace of memory not unlike my own dating back about thirty years when, as a student of Trilling’s and Barzun’s, I wasn’t in truth urged to apply my mind to Burke himself but was indeed instructed to appreciate the virtue of pursuits associated with his name. The mentors I chose drove me to a consideration of the sreat philosophes of history and psychology and the theories of the sociology of literature and of knowledge—and whatever it was I hoped to get from these not yet celebrated men (‘‘Read Merton,” Trilling said. ‘“Talk to young Hofstadter. Go see Wright Mills.”) implicated the system of criticism Burke was trying to invent. Although very little sense of sequence, of chronology, is left in my mind, I recall subscribing to a series of lectures on

94 William Wasserstrom theology and literature that were given one season at the Jewish Theological Seminary, just north on Broadway. In part because I hoped to see the fabled Louis Finkelstein—stories about whom, along with selected tales of Tillich and invocations of Niebuhr, encircled the Upper West Side in the late forties—but mainly in order to get from spoken words what was impenetrable in print, I piously and purposefully went. Of the scheduled speakers, I recall two: Burke and Delmore Schwartz, both irregulars of the lectern in that uptown trove of academe, the one ablaze with talk and the other uncharacteristically damp. Unlike Booth, who was put off by bizarre Burkings of text (‘‘Keats’s famous last line should really be read ‘body is

turd, turd body’”’), I was bewitched. As a result I remember little of how Burke looked, very vividly some fragments of what he said. ‘‘Those who have heard him speak,’’ as Kermit Lansner was later to write in a review of The Rhetoric of Motives—a review that placed Burke within the camp of evangelical utopians

‘driven by a great enthusiasm for social reform,” by a belief that “‘man in some way can find salvation on this earth” —knew Burke at lecture was irresistible, as Lansner said. Observing him sweep “together art and life, pouring forth a stream of commentary,” the mind is ‘“‘amazed at the wonder of it all.”’? In my in-

stance, wonder was the more intense because Schwartz, not Burke, was by reputation a spellbinder. In fact, I remember nothing of what Delmore said, only how sodden he looked, like a defrocked shaman bewildered by that audience, who were a mixed bag of seminarians and their teachers, culture addicts off the street, and graduate students, all bloodshot. Many years later he would become a colleague, and when the wind was right, a

friend, but that day he was a stammerer, whose fits and starts came out strangled, a glue of condensations and condescensions.

On the other day, however, there was Burke at full blast on those ways of language he himself described as ‘‘Version-, Con-, Per-, and In-.”’ From that day until now, indeed, whenever I land on the words ‘‘Once you turn things round,” it’s his voice I hear

Burke, ‘‘Logology,’”’ and the Tribal No 95 turning Yeats round to get Devil-torn, God-tormented from dolphin-torn, gong-tormented sea. In contrast to Booth’s boggle at Burke’s presumed foreclosure of sense in equivalences of this kind, I was instantly sure of and grateful for equations, ‘“‘joycings,” that got me turned round, headed right. It’s obviously not a superior prescience I claim, just a fiercer desperation of need that led me to find in Burke a deliverer then and there. For all that Booth confesses to a delay of twenty years in discovering ‘how wrong” he was, unquestionably he’s traveled farther than Burkophobes both younger and older than he, gone deeper in and farther out than Burkophiles like me. Nevertheless, with a dangle of filament in hand, with Minotaur in mind, and Burke’s “logology”’ in view, I’ve sought to distinguish snare from kink and pleach from pinion within that labyrinth of history and cul-

ture and language in which I have constantly found myself entangled.

It was therefore not at all accidental when, ten years or so beyond that day at the Seminary, I found myself in touch with my deliverer, corresponding about one thing and another in con-

nection with The Dial. Chiefly in courtesy and devotion to James Sibley Watson Jr. (W. C. Blum in the pseudonymous role Watson adopted as a critic for the magazine he published), to whom both A Rhetoric of Motives and Language as Symbolic Action are dedicated, Kenneth Burke—unacknowledged mentor —became an indispensable ‘“‘source.’’ Having already written as it were under the auspices of Burke in his Freudian aspect, de-

termined to try my hand at the uses of synecdoche for the study of intellectual history, I undertook to turn that magazine right side out by way of selected figures whose character and attainment seemed to disclose previously unidentified traits of modernism—particularly, during The Dial’s final phase, by way of Burke. Those activities and pursuits that could not be accommodated in this program were set aside. However, what was set aside in the early sixties would not subside, and I’ve been harried since then by two intersecting motifs, two words that flare up

96 William Wasserstrom in Burke’s prose and fiction and verse, a phosphorescence at once fixed in focus and diffused: the ‘“negative’’ is one, “‘victimage’ is the other. And “logology,” the instrument toward which

both conduce, I have intermittently sought to apply more or less since 1958, when, in a letter dated December 23, Burke spoke of its value for the study of behavior and history, art and morals, I was delighted to receive the copy of your article (in Winter no. of The Yale Review). It moves along most convincingly, at least to this reader! Incidentally, it reénforces a consideration of this sort which I have been

tending more and more to tinker with: Just what is the ultimate difference btw. actual matricide (or any other form of the kill) and its sheerly symbolic form, as an artistic imitation? I incline more and more

to feel that the symbolic form (the sheer imitation) should be treated primarily as a species of negative (which I take to be a purely linguistic construct). A further bepuzzlement arises from the fact that imagery of physical violence can often be a surrogate for a sheerly sexual motive

(though here again, there should be a qualitative difference between positive sexual conduct, as with actual incest, and its sheerly symbolic analogues, as with ideas along the slope of ‘“communion,” “community,” and “‘communication’’). If you have a chance, and feel so inclined, I’d

be most happy if, before you came here, you took a glance at some articles I did in The Quarterly Journal of Speech (Oct., Dec., 52; Feb.,

Apr., 53). They indicate somewhat the ubiquity of the role I think might be ascirbed to the negative in language (though its negativity is generally concealed by quasi-positives, as when an act of rejection is symbolized in terms of the kill, which is a quasi-positive symbolization, as with the symbolizing of penance). Maybe I’m slapping this down too haphazardly, but I’m trying merely to indicate the drift, and we could discuss the point at greater length when we meet. (Cf. on Negativity in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, then translate his remarks from statements about metaphysics to statements about language.) °

In an essay called ‘The Thinking of the Body” (1963), an essay reflecting on ‘‘the genius of the negative,’’ on ties binding purgation to negation, he wrote, “I am living on a Florida key, where I love to walk among the whole and broken shells (skele-

tons and parts of skeletons) that waves toss up on the beach.

Burke, ‘‘Logology,”’ and the Tribal No 77 Never for a moment do I cease to think of these things as the detritus of death, aspects of life’s offal. I live with the thought that digestion and fertilization involve the life-giving properties of corruption, that life grows out of rot.’’* Particularly vivid in modernist fiction and verse—a “‘sprout-out-of-rot” literature, according to Denis Donoghue—No may well be “the marvel of language.”> For it is the negative that might possibly explain why today we speak of fighting “our dirty wars with ‘clean’ bombs,” why ‘‘in the name of power and progress” we pollute our waters with detergents and our food with chemicals, or even why, in the name of God, as he wrote in The Rhetoric of Religion

(1961), we derive an “Iron Law of History/that welds Order and Sacrifice.”’ Order leads to Guilt (for who can keep commandments!) Guilt needs Redemption (for who would not be cleansed!) Redemption needs Redeemer (which is to say, a Victim!) Order Through Guilt to Victimage

(hence: Cult of the Kill)... o

Hence, too, interdiction of the classic American cult of the child. It is indeed by these means, by relying on Burke’s analysis of the “ritualistic use of the ‘scapegoat’’’ and the “‘‘curative’ role of victimage”’ that I have elsewhere sought to address a problem—the craft, crime, and cost of child abuse—that verges outside the frame of literary theory but is contained within Burke’s linguistics of negation. A plenary subject and peremptory problem in the popular and professional literature as well as the domestic life of our time and place, ‘“‘victimage”’ of this sort not only occurs along a slope of “‘communion,’ ‘community,’ and ‘communication,’”’ but also locates the precise point at

which theological meditation and physiological function,

9§ William Wasserstrom psychological intent, poetic motive, and political purpose, order and sacrifice, intersect. Lest this seem too clever or parochial an exercise, consider the degree to which Burke’s cult of the kill squares with analysis and appraisal offered today by nonliterary intellectuals. Pioneers in a social science of No, they argue that ours is an era of deliquescence in the United States, unsurpassed

as a period in which, Philip Slater remarks in The Pursuit of Loneliness (1976), Americans of every “age group, social class or educational level’’ seem to be “‘most entertained by watching people get killed, bludgeoned, or mutilated.” Perhaps the most widely read in a rush of books that treat what Burke would call the genius of the negative and Slater calls “American culture at

the breaking point”—work by Herbert Hendin, Christopher Lasch, William L. O’Neill, and many others—The Pursuit of Loneliness equates “‘life-destroying technology” with primitive power excercised by the fiercest of patriarchs. As if engaged to prove the irreversibility of Burke’s iron law, Slater argues that

people in the sixties and seventies have taken a certain joy in oppressing others with whatever tools and devices of oppression

they are themselves subdued by. As a result, the young, chief victims of an almost feral appetite for devastation, are “poisoned,

bombed, gassed, burned”—in a word, nullified, scrapped by guardians who seem to adore the impersonal democratic vengefulness of machines far more than they love life itself.

Although the neglect, pollution, or murder of a dependent child may not touch a nadir of cruelty in an entrenched American vein, the remarkable thing about abuse is not its nationality, its promiscuity, or even its antiquity. Whatever features of technological distemper stylize the act of ‘‘victimage”’ in our era, the extraordinary thing is its conformity to the theories of language

with which Burke, roused by a chapter called ‘“‘The Idea of Nothing’’ in Bergson’s Creative Evolution, nearly three decades ago hoped to fuse the life of imagination and the life of society.

A “big eye-opener,” that chapter: having realized “that the negative is a peculiarly linguistic marvel,” that ‘‘there are no

Burke, ‘‘Logology,’’ and the Tribal No 99 negatives in nature, every natural condition being positively what it is,’® Burke thereupon was free to design a synoptic system in

which language and power, ritual and culture are concentrated, encapsulated, within The World Within the Word (1979). William Gass’s entrance into Burke’s realm, as felicitous and welcome an arrival as can be imagined, had been prefigured in an earlier book that Burked “‘blue,”’ even as Burke joyced “‘mater, matter, ma-

trix, matrimony, matricide, pater, patronage, patriotism, patrimony, patricide. Oof wadda woild!’’? Adding grace to genius, Gass reaps a harvest logologically sown. So, too, do we, in retracing the pattern of ideas that trail Burke’s effort to locate, within

a sweep of negation, the tightest possible fit “between human body, world’s body and body politic’’—even so do we, assigning

No to rites and ceremonies not usually associated with speech, fashion a frame for an American cult of the kill.

Memorializing the moment of origins, start and stem of Burke’s most original, inspired, and sustained work, we recall that it was Bergson whose recognition of the ‘“‘paradox of the negative” provided Burke with a vision of the incandescence of No. Realizing that nature discloses no nays, only ayes, Bergson initiated a “major movement in the history of language.” Perhaps the momentous thing about this movement, Burke maintained, supplementing Bergson’s authority with Spinoza’s and Hegel’s, was its efficacy in diagnosing both the health of language (‘“‘to use words properly we must spontaneously have a feeling for the principle of the negative’’) and the ills of culture (which ‘‘by its nature necessarily culminates in the Negative’’), During the fifties, therefore, at the outset of this inquiry, what engaged his

mind was the work of differentiating his own interest in a rhetoric of No from the existentialism of the reigning philosophers, Heidegger and Sartre, whose attention centered on the operation of ‘‘Nothing.’’ Instead of Nothing he preferred Not and No, ‘“‘The hortatory negative (thou shalt not)” rather than “the propositional negative (it is not)? of European thought. For, as he told Daniel Fogarty in 1957, it is within the hortatory

100 William Wasserstrom world of No and Not “that we find the deepest root of language as specifically and essentially human in its symbol-using function.’’!°

In the process of arriving at this famed definition, unflaggingly held—man is the ‘“symbol-using animal” who passes the “ultimate test of symbolicity” because of “an intuitive feeling for the negative’’—Burke precipitated and retrieved No from Nichts, Although he was willing to grant that Heidegger’s “kind of Weltanschauung”’ doubtless was “‘inescapably oper-

ating in all of us,’ he was himself not cheerless enough by nature to retain Angst as the ground of being. Conceding that an individual’s thoughts might not take any one of us ‘“‘to the end of the line,” nonetheless he agreed that thought itself

might ‘well imply this end if we were minded to follow” its drift.'! For if it is true that No identifies what he called the ‘one great motivational principle that man, in his role as the language-using animal, has added to nature’; and if it is in truth due to speech that human awareness is objectified, that the human animal achieves self-consciousness; and if, as Freud himself contended, comity on earth is derived from the principle of prohibition; then it must surely follow that a Burkean logologist must attend language and its operations as carefully as a “Freudian psychologist watches the nonsense of a patient’s dreams.”’!?

Despite Kenneth Burke’s absorption in language and _literature, therefore, his bent is incurably toward studies in the hazards of trespass and the costs of compulsion, dangers that manifest that ‘‘vast system of Nays” that governs our real and imagined worlds and symbolizes an ‘‘Annihilating Nothing”’

not subject to repeal. When we speak of child abuse as an unspeakable act, therefore, it is Burke who enables us to appreciate what’s at stake in what we say. What is at stake, ‘“‘victimage,” he has sought to illustrate in the most dramatic—and ‘“‘dramatistic”’— as well as the most discursive ways possible.

Burke, ‘‘Logology,” and the Tribal No 101

| Creation Myth |

In the beginning there was universal Nothing. Then Nothing said No to itself and thereby begat Something, Which called itself Yes. Then No and Yes, cohabiting, begat Maybe. Nest all three, in a ménage a trois, begat Guilt. And Guilt was of many names: Mine, Thine, Yours, Ours, His, Hers, Its, Theirs—and Order. In time things so came to pass That two of its names, Guilt and Order, Honoring their great progenitors, Yes, No, and Maybe, Begat History. Finally, History fell a-dreaming And dreamed about Language— (And that brings us to critics-who-write-critiques-of-critical-criticism.) 13 —Book of Moments: Poems 1915-1954 (1955)

In dreaming up an American dialectic and history of negation, Burke has repeatedly invoked the voice and figure of a progenitor, a myth-maker no less authentically tribal than Ralph Waldo

Emerson. Start with the ordering spirit of the Ten Commandments, Burke proposes in an essay on Emerson’s “I, Eye, Ay’’— begin with those “‘shalt-nots of the Decalogue” that supposedly rule our civilization. Then reflect on the theme of Emerson’s historic chapter, “Discipline,” in the fabled essay, ‘‘Nature,”’ and you discover Emerson growing “‘edified”’ at the notion “‘that

all things, for man, are permeated with the spirit of the ‘Thou shalt not.’”? Begin, that is to say, with “‘Compleat Negation and every material thing encountered”’ along the way cannot but be “negatively infused.’’ Because No, although omnipresent, is ‘“‘not

picturable,”’ and can be “properly shown by a sign only’’—a minus sign, the mark for zero, a handshake—the negative is especially pronounced in any act of “‘victimage” with which people attempt to “unburden guilt within by transference to

102 William Wasserstrom chosen vessels without.”!4 In this drama of negation, this “Dialectic of the Scapegoat,’ he wrote in A Grammar of Motives, human offspring are seen as “‘substantially one” with parents who “would ritualistically cleanse themselves by loading the burden of their iniquities’? on proxies of the same flesh. “That which was once a ‘part of’ the parent has become ‘apart from’ the parent” but may “still be considered consubstantial

with its ancestral source” and therefore ripe for the role of deputy victim and savior. According to this logology of signs, then, a victimized child in the United States today serves as a choice vessel of guilt and as a “vicarious atonement” among those members of society who enact rituals rooted in, and inspired by, what Burke calls the Tribal No.?*

Whether or not he’s right about dialectic and speech, and about consciousness and culture, in correlating negation and “victimage,’’ he contrived to spot an eerily national motif within those constellations of thought around which literary theory drifts today. At the moment, of course, its drift is from France. Seat of our age of semiology, structuralist and deconstructionist,

of ideas radiating from the Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes and the Collége de France—the Parisian schools, despite the industry of a local branch in New Haven, are not concerned with the history of ideas or sensibility in the United States. More’s the pity. For the pity is that American dilemmas do indeed add measurable pith to some post-modernist twaddle. So too does this ghastly matter of child abuse, sad to say, appear to anchor in concrete circumstance, in history, and in case study, certain of Burke’s more fanciful concoctions of pure reason. The critic who has long written critiques of critical criticism, who long ago arrived at the degree zero of motive, language itself, who now finds allies among structuralists convinced that “social life and culture in general [are] a series of sign systems which the linguistic model may clarify in revolutionary ways’’'®—Burke, together with the semiologists, composes an international circle of literary intellectuals whose

Burke, ‘‘Logology,”’ and the Tribal No 103 researches into the innermost nuance of tongue turn up evidence,

perhaps proof, that “violence is the father and king of everything.” Within any code that men can imagine, René Girard argues in Violence and the Sacred (1977), code of law, of language, or of

religion, provision is always made for ritual murder. Seizing a creature that can be struck down ‘‘without fear of reprisal since he lacks a champion,” men have killed in order to localize and discharge, purge, the will to disorder in society. Traditionally, this figure, the scapegoat, the pharmakos, is selected from a short list of candidates that includes ‘‘prisoners of war, slaves, the handicapped and those too young to have undergone initi-

atory rites, precondition of status within the community at large.” It is Girard’s view, then, that those best suited for sacrifice have usually been utterly powerless people whose very circumstance—as foreigners, enemies, captives, or children—is itself a denial of standing within, hence a perturbation of the life of society. Not at all an aberrant act, however abhorrent, the brutalization of children is instead a pervasive, purposive, and portentous event in the history of crimes committed in the name of law and order. Although Girard does not refer to American tribal customs, his recipe clearly strikes home. Indeed, the exclusion of data drawn from the United States is the more noticeable in that it is the custom of this country to elevate, far beyond the reach of every child, the powers and privileges, before the law, of natural parents no matter how unfit. Speculating why it is that parents’ rights take precedence over nearly all other civil rights and civic duties, one wonders: Can it be that in America child abuse is an accursed act somehow blessed by laws or conventions that confer on natural parents a covert but unquestioned authority to dispatch a sacrificial victim, as if in performance of some unacknowledged service to the State? Service of this kind is often, we know, overtly associated with father-daughter incest within families that would otherwise disintegrate. So, too, do

104 William Wasserstrom societies everywhere, as Girard concludes in a book saturated with evidence taken from anthropological, psychoanalytic, mythical, linguistic, and literary sources the whole world round, attempt to withstand collapse. If Girard’s thesis is true, if, as he says, not only do “all religious rituals spring from the surrogate victim”? but also all great institutions of civilization (government, science, medicine, law, art, learning itself) “spring from ritual,”

then it follows that stability among the nations of earth rests on a need to propitiate a killing passion, a phylogenetic passion, invariably and unavoidably directed against those powerless and dependent ones who stand nearest at hand.!’

Tendentious, circular, both far-fetched and far-reaching, Girard’s book has unquestionably caught a glimpse or two of one or another principle of ambiguity in the social life of this language animal—of manUNkind, as the poet Cummings said. Not only does Girard review the antiquity of dogma sustaining the political uses of cruelty, but also Violence and the Sacred enables us to locate a likely source of American resistance to reform, to radical change. Even if Girard fails to prove his case for the sanctity of violence, there’s no end of proof that a connoisseur’s taste in victims, drawn from nearly all categories of scapegoat and entrenched both in families and in government, underlies those characteristic American attitudes that William Ryan describes in Blaming the Victim (1971). Defect in the social order, Ryan says, referring to the Moynihan Report and matter of like kind, is habitually mistaken for stigma of person wherever social policy conforms to the sort of opinion exhibited by Cyril Burt’s infamous work on IQ, on race and intelligence. Ryan’s theme, the sociology of blame and its devastations, recurs in a book of entirely different kind and purpose: Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977). Technically an account of “the birth of prisons,” this book—which transposes parts of the body almost literally into parts of speech—is in fact a “‘history of the body” stretched along a frame that runs from political assassination to parental murder during the three centuries of

Burke, ‘‘Logology,” and the Tribal No 105 more or less modern times. Discipline and Punish therefore subsumes the abuse of children within a very long history of codes devised by nations to justify butchering the flesh of condemned persons. “Whatever systems of punishment” the world has developed, it is always the human “‘body that is at issue—the body and its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission.’’ Whether it is the control of convicts or the rule of parents, Foucault says, is no matter: ‘in our societies” the history of punishments is inescapably a “‘history of bodies” selected, appointed, to project in public the inner self of a nation. Bounded by a ‘‘network of relations” that ‘‘go right down into the depth of society,” a network that links ‘“‘coloonized”’ workers in an underdeveloped economy to union members “stuck at a machine” in our computerized and overdeveloped West—it is the supervised, trained, contained, corrected, and coerced human body that stylizes the spirit of an era. It is by studying the constraints, cruelties, and tortures visited today on madmen, on working classes, and ‘‘on children at home and at school,” that we acquire unimpeachable means to comprehend “the history of the present.’’'® That the collective self of the American nation, both past and present, has been said to manifest itself in children is surely indisputable. The birth of a child, Thoreau observed in Walden, as if in imprimatur of an American creed, begins the world anew. It was in accord with this precise credo, too, that John Dewey,

“speaking not as an educationist but as a philosopher in the American tradition,” announced that the “great discovery of the twentieth century was the child.’’!® Similarly, Robert Coles, who is still closer to our days, attributes two centuries of speculation

on the right method of childrearing to a tradition that induces us all to believe that our personal lives and the life of our civilization somehow hinge on this issue—‘“‘as if their outcome was our fate and their perfect outcome both possible and a clue to our immortality.” How then does one explain that historic failure of presentiment, of historical presence, among professionals

106 William Wasserstrom of child care who are today accused of a belatedness of publicity and a continued confusion of duty in this most brutish business, abuse? In a society captivated by Freud, as Erikson has noted, a

society that struggles to harmonize vanguard psychology with the Christian archetype of the Babe (‘‘the child is in the midst’’) —with that perennial vision of Nativity that sees “hope newly born in every child”—how is it that ‘“victimage’’ in America was

invisible until 1962, the year when the “battered child syndrome”’ was reported and broadcast? Not only is a wasted child among the most transparent themes in literature from primordial times until now, and the subject of texts treating homicide as an ordinary act of personal vengeance, social need, or even of transcendent duty, but also atrocity is at once an archaic fact of our history as a people and an early conceit in literature written well before the onset of our machine age. Given this antiquity of tradition, this weight of doctrine, it is all the more perplexing to find a prominent faction of spokesmen

applauding the memory and myth of perennial hope without acknowledging any other sentiment. Once we repudiate this habit of belief, we find victims everywhere. Indeed, our classic books constitute a literature of the misbegotten, a dialectic of the scapegoat in which our night thoughts as a people are recorded. Originating in the post-Puritan era and continuing into the present day, indenture and damage of children have symbolized the antinomy of belief and conduct inherent in this disorganized and unstable society. If, in fact, we were to select a not-quite-arbitrary date to mark the genesis of ‘“‘victimage”’ in American letters, we would find the moment of origin falling a

few years this side of the mid-nineteenth century. For it was then that Burke’s Tribal No was incarnated in beings whose genealogy was in doubt, whose lineage and color were cloudy, and whose connection to parents was based not on bonds but on bondage, irrespective of race. Resorting to those radical sources of imagination Burke assigns to No and Not, at that peak time of Victorian rectitude and regularity, writers registered—by

Burke, ‘‘Logology,”’ and the Tribal No 107 way of collapsing houses, fractured families, afflicted children—

a sense of immitigable stress in society at large. This is not to say that one hundred years ago the American home was suddenly

shattered. It is however to say that a rapture and rupture of faith in the American experiment is embodied in the scapegoat and landscape adopted by this “‘symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-using)”? and ‘“culture-bearing animal” profoundly discomfitted in a new-found land.?° In nineteenth-century lore and letters, therefore, a “vast system of Nays’ confirms an intermingled joy and despair, a hope of triumph, and a guilt of failure to legitimize the American Idea. Throughout the nineteenth century, as successive generations

strained to reconcile faith in Providence with the creed of Progress (unfinished business and steady work of politics and imagination then and now), literature recorded their effort in books that portray a main segment of the American people as orphans and outcasts—as if homelessness itself signified an incapacity to validate this fearful experiment in self-rule. In contrast to the English novel, as a British critic wrote twenty-five years ago, which usually ‘revolves about great houses and conjures with the perquisites of a settled order,” American fiction offers “few equivalents.” Our log cabins and prairie homesteads do not represent places of fixed or final abode, but rather serve as “milestones of exploration,” in moveable feast or famine along the landscape of adventure.”! Even our skyscrapers, always

going up and coming down, are seen by the English as a sheer virtuosity in the ‘inventions of science’”’—seen less clearly, indeed, than by Tocqueville, who observed that “men who live on a small scale in narrow dwellings frequently aspire to gigantic

splendor in the erection” of a fantastical and “imaginary metropolis.” Between these two extremes, he said, “there is a blank.” It’s therefore an unsettled order our buildings represent, both the shanties made of scrapped timber and scrounged stone and the castles, made of Carrara marble, designed by McKim, Mead, and White. It’s this unsettled order that recurs in books

108 William Wasserstrom that portray a nineteenth-century bungle of home and homeland, books that mythologize the life of a society given to totter and tilt. “There is a terrible truth in this American fable,” said

a fabulist of large powers and small fame, Edward Dahlberg: “every discoverer we have had has been a wild homesteader among the seers of the world. Melville, Thoreau, Parkman, Prescott, and [William Carlos] Williams are all river and sea and

plateau geniuses, ranging a continent for a house, and all of them outdoors.’’??

Because America is often represented in literature as a place at once hospitable and hostile to human need, not a paradise

but a paradox of hospitality, writers have concentrated the pressure of great events on disorganized groups of ordinary people, families whose vulnerability to ruin is the real property of their lives, lives set down in shelters built askew, oriented wrong for wind and weather. The structure of stress in an unsettled nation, a disordered society, is a subject that required one setting above all, as Harriet Beecher Stowe was, if not the first of our writers to perceive, perhaps the earliest to monu-

mentalize. From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, from Hawthorne’s fabled house in Salem (“emblem of aristocratic pomp and democratic institutions,”’ he

said) to Henry Roth’s tenement roof and cellar in Harlem, the uneven ground of our geography, rural and urban, has supported buildings whose very sticks and stones enclose a testing place, not a tabernacle of what we’ve been reared to call the American Dream. Or, said in a way that incorporates tendencies sorted out by Quentin Anderson and Lionel Trilling, the American household is split between avatars of the imperial and the opposing self. The former, Anderson says, adopt Emerson as a mentor and select their slogan from his line, ‘Our upper natures lie always in Day.” Their adversaries, led by Melville, take up Bartle-

by’s line, Bartleby’s litany of naught, of night, of No. “I prefer not to,”’ Melville causes him to say, this scrivener whose solitary, blameless, ‘‘wasted”’ life ends in a prisonhouse, the Tombs,

Burke, ‘‘Logology,” and the Tribal No 109 under an Egyptian gloom of masonry, Melville remarks in the end, as heavy as the “‘heart of the eternal pyramids.”’

Adventitious it may well be, but it is not in the least factitious to attach Burke’s linguistics of negation—‘“‘that essence of motive”—to sovereign themes in the history of imagination and culture in the United States. Studying the dialectic of the scapegoat from Burke’s angle of vision, locating an offal of persons at

the eye of a vortex toward which all lines of self-inquiry, of national identity, and of self-definition most suitably tend, and speculating on the root causes of an American cult of the kill, we are led back to one of Burke’s most coherent, comprehensive,

and least appreciated books, The Rhetoric of Religion. In a prodigious coda called ‘‘Epilogue: Prologue in Heaven,” Satan asks God whether He agrees that the creation of ‘“‘these new World-Using Animals, the Earth-People,”’ free to “disobey your all-powerful authority,’’ must perforce rest on a “nagging contradiction.” Responding with an utterance Burke transforms into a reprise at once ludic and linguistic, The Lord answers “Tt is more complicated than that”—far more complicated, we learn, because Earth-speech is an instrument intended for use at an opposite pole of utility from heavenly talk. In contrast to The Lord’s “eternal, Unitive Word,” which distinguishes ‘between is and is not,’? Earth-men, drawing distinctions of a different sort, are equipped by speech merely to differentiate between “‘shall and shall not.” As a result, The Lord continues, they ‘“‘can in principle carry the negative a step further to say no to any thoushalt-not. Thus the negative, in giving them the power, to be moral, by the same token gives them the power to be immoral.” Elevating this parable of linguistics to the highest imaginable plane of analogy in metaphysics and morals, isolating the curative from the contaminative effects of “‘victimage,’’ Burke in effect exempts a carnage of children from that law of history that welds order and sacrifice.*° Effectively Burked, and therefore considered logologically,

abuse is one of those serpentine strokes of tongue in which

110 William Wasserstrom Satan excels. Confounding “shall not” and “is not,” inviting disasters both of discourse and civility, sacrifice is ruinous in that it subverts the perfection of no. Or, expressed in a way that fuses logology and sociology: to the degree that a dismemberment of the very young in America today, like the dispatch of the very old, represents a conspiracy of assent to cloistered vice, to that degree do we as a people exercise a demented will to say No to Thou-Shalt-Not. To the degree, furthermore, that a wan-

tonness of crime and atonement rules the domestic habits of people in our time, to that exact measure does the neglect, pollution, or murder of a dependent child touch a nadir of inequity in a suicidal American vein. Not for nothing, therefore are we a

People of Paradox (1972), as Michael Kammen contends, for three centuries plagued by a peculiarly hectic sense of reprobation in the realm of personal conduct, of illegitimacy in the sphere of political action. “Insofar as legitimacy is a psychologi-

cal phenomenon,” Kammen remarks, “it depends upon the assumption that a particular set of institutions is appropriate for a certain society and that they function in a manner accepted or understood by society.”” However, for American society, whose eighteenth-century Constitution had no sanction in divine law, whose appeal to natural law could not be buttressed by undeniable proofs, whose innovations of civil law defied inherited wisdom, whose conquest of Indians and ownership of slaves, like

the introduction of engines into a pastoral land, stretched the limits of consistency beyond breaking point, in this unchartered land, the problem of social legitimacy ‘‘came down to the most literal levels such as marriage and the family.”’ A colonial people,

accustomed to, but uncomfortable with, an exceedingly high number of ‘‘clandestine and common-law marriages,” was both amused and abashed by the epigram that said that the two most visible effects of religious revival were literary and erotic—a burst

of books and bastards that undeniably, frighteningly, continues still. Even as our bicentennial year produced a bumper crop of bastards (nearly one-third of births in New York City that year

Burke, ‘“‘Logology,”’ and the Tribal No 111 were illegitimate), so too was it accompanied by a burst of books and movies about “children sired by machines and possessed by devils.’ Prodigious killers, ““emissaries of death and destruction,”

the aforementioned children attain their power not just from new technologies but as well from forces native to this continent

and by no means foreign to its first immigrants: “witchcraft, ancestral curses, demonic possession.’’**

It’s therefore not American Gothic but a flair for Satanism that’s dreadful. For all our rationalizing, our Freudianizing of evil, it is a Puritan substratum that provides a kind of American bedrock. Indeed, the current rage of pop flicks and quickie books must bespeak a sci-fi recapitulation of what the Puritans and their successors knew as Original Sin. “Thou embryo-angel,

or thou infant-fiend”—are you one or the other or both? the Reverend Samuel Davies asked his newborn child a century earlier. Writing his poem, ‘On the Birth of John Rogers Davies, the Author’s Third Son,” Davies raised the inevitable “issue of infant depravity and damnation’”—an unavoidable issue surely, given the “strength of the negative side of parental perceptions of infancy” that so beset that third of a nation (“‘moderates,”’ in Philip Greven’s usage) that was unable to decide whether children

were monsters or seraphs. It’s of course well known that mod-

erates of theology in the eighteenth century inherited their dilemma from those whom Greven in The Protestant Tempera-

ment (1978) calls ‘‘evangelicals,” guardians of a fanatic and obdurate zeal “‘to abase, to deny, and to annihilate” the “corrupted and sinful self,’’ adult’s or child’s, out of conviction that will-lessness conformed to ‘‘the sovereign will of God.’’ What has

until now not been appreciated is the degree to which, in this post-Freudian age, we revive a kind of cultural memory of postPuritan ancestral times, times in which parents whose ‘‘sense of

love and affection for their infant children” is negated by a “sense of distrust and fear as well.”’?* It is by no means uncommon today, say experts both in and out of psychiatric practice, to hear parents insist that their infant’s instinctual demands are

112 William Wasserstrom deliberately intended to “suck the life out of them” and to drive them crazy. How easily, how naturally, how aptly do children serve as “‘targets for our sadism and convenient receptacles for our fantasies.’’?° “Perversion,” says Kenneth Burke, is a ‘‘major aspect of No,”

both “sexual deviation from the biologic norm” and nays of another kind as well, typical of a people who habitually “get things upside down, inside out and backwards”’?’— typical surely

of that small tribe of provincials responsible for applying a theology of negation, Puritan theology and religious observance, to one of the most sterile and perverse systems of ““victimage”’ known to Christendom. Terrified of the very children over whom

as parents they possessed power derived from the Lord and authority confirmed by the State, and being absolute literalists of dogma, they devoted themselves to an immoderate degree to the work of carrying out God’s will by breaking the child’s will. In this way only could so “filthy” a being attain a right relation,

submission to parents and Deity. From that time forward, it’s only a touch melodramatic to say, an ancestral curse has been affixed to our history as a nation, fixed by that perverse band of settlers who first got things turned round on this continent. Whether negation is our sole legacy as a people is not at all the point. What is unalterably to the point is the fact that a Tribal No antedates, reverberates within, and eventually swamps subsequent Rousseauized utterances of Yes. In Europe, where the discovery of childhood occurred later, it was not an exorcism of demons but a reliance on the regimen

of education that was held as the right route to a “good and holy life’’—pedagogy justified those punishments that Foucault spoke of and that Philip Ariés, in Centuries of Childhood (1962), describes as usually reserved for convicts of the lowest order. An ‘“‘obsessive love,’’ he says, utterly unlike “the old indiffer-

ence,” underlay that severity that French parents visited on babes imprisoned at home and in school.?® Which is to say that

the remarkable thing about victimization of children in the

Burke, ‘“‘Logology,” and the Tribal No 113 United States—whole epochs before a pathology of parental power was called abuse—is its eccentricity, its ferocity, and its fixity in the sexual, spiritual, secular, imaginative, and fantasy lives of people on this continent from the early seventeenth until

the late twentieth centuries. Despite “the ancestral nature of the scapegoat’? as a ‘vessel of vicarious atonement,” Burke says,

whenever a “ritual transference of guilt” is frustrated, then “motives of self-destruction’? come irretrievably, inexorably “‘to the fore.’’??

For some time now, Kermit Lansner concluded his Kenyon essay, “certain critics have been in mourning” for a loss of “political sense’? among colleagues. ‘‘As I understand it, they feel that no one with a simplistic view of human nature or a Utopian view of human destiny can say anything relevant about that activity they call political. Well, Mr. Burke does.’’*° In another generation, twenty-seven years later, again a certain critic, Fredric Jameson, once more mourns the absence of good political sense in Burke’s judgment. Encumbered by what Jameson calls ‘the baggage of thirties Marxism,” Burke advances claims for the “free creativity of human language’’ and thus commits a blunder of precedence. By ignoring the prior role of “transindividual historical forces’? in determining and defining radical connection ‘“‘between sign systems and modes of produc-

tion,” Jameson argues, Burke bumbles theory. Because in any dialogue between ‘‘Marxism and semiotics’? production must precede language, Burke’s oeuvre—a “rewriting” of ‘“‘cultural artifacts and works of art as symbolic acts’’—constitutes at best a text that may well be useful to ‘‘any properly Marxist analysis of culture’? and at worst a “sandbox affair which threatens no one,’’?!

Maybe so, but Burke’s logology, which insists that all inquiry

“must begin, start with, start from’? the question, ‘What is it to be the typical symbol-using animal?’’—in dispensing with the iron law of class struggle, in its main tenet leads us to ‘“‘study ‘the human condition’ from a theory of terminology in general,”’

114 William Wasserstrom rather than Jameson’s way round. On Burke’s behalf, moreover, an historian of American ideas can point to 250 pre- and post-

Marxian and pre- and post-Freudian years during which this symbol-using people, his countrymen, have portrayed their dis-

illusion with theology and their distrust of technology, of progress asa dogma, and of the American political and economic process as an ideology, in literary texts both low and lofty that register an apogee and perigee of oscillation between the perversion and the perfection of No. Because mismanagement and misgovernment of society are perceived as a misprision of family,

we behold a literature whose pantheon of cherubs is smaller than tradition assumes, whose share of waifs and wards and foundlings and pariahs is far more considerable than inherited wisdom holds. Adopting the body of a debased and defiled child as an arche-

type of all those earmarked for slaughter, the victims of historical process in the United States—those who are sentenced, as Foucault says, “‘to carry out ceremonies, to emit signs’ that we become more and more adept at decoding—following Foucault’s plan and Burke’s dialectic, therefore, we trace manifestations of

a Tribal No to the womb of a teenage whore, a battered wife, and a sexually used infant. When we add to this doomed company the charred remains of an incinerated mate and the inert remains of an abandoned parent—not to mention the trashed countryside in which litter is landscape, just another feature of growth—we are in fact compiling a list that equates the price of progress with the cost of waste in our post-industrial age. A more

accurate gauge, however, is the membership lists of Parents Anonymous. If we agree that the stigmata borne by an abused child radiate a system of signs that we begin to know how to interpret, we must also assume that the Anonymous Parent— panicked by hazards of self-government, bewitched by the spell

of self-revulsion, benumbed by the habit of acquiesence to atrocity—does not indulge in a secret act, wanton and witless, but emits signals, pulsations linking each of us in a network of

Burke, ‘“‘Logology,” and the Tribal No 115 contradictory impulses that come from depths and distances far and near, time present and time past. ‘“Logology’s only contribution to the cause,” Burke comments in his latest and perhaps last word on the entire subject (1979), “‘is the reminder that, to our knowledge, the Law,” sacred and secular, “‘s the flowering

of that humanly, humanely, humanistically and brutally inhumanely ingenious addition to wordless nature, the negative,” without which neither heaven nor hell would be possible. ** Looping back near the end of these reflections on No to Philip Slater once more, to Slater’s thoughts on the origins of species in the United States, we find him preoccupied with pedigree. Searching out the beast that lurks “‘at the very root of American character,” he suspects that a “‘kind of natural selection,” not yet fully comprehended, governs the history of a civilization that “was disproportionately settled by a certain kind of person,” one quite opposite in temper from those founders, framers, and followers in whom traditionally we’ve taken pride. If truly there are ties linking a gain of rapacity in this machine age to a surge of intensity in our assault on offspring, these ties are certified by institutions that reinforce “the negative side” of our original settlers. However many of the ‘energetic and daring” arrived on

these shores, Slater says, this largely untenanted land “also gained a lion’s share of the rootless, the unscrupulous.” Like the cannibalizing father in Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, and like William Gaddis’ JR, Junior, the brat entrepreneur whose genius for business enables him to turn people into products, a pioneer line of Americans long ago mistook piety for love and self-aggrandizement for loyalty. The illustrations are mine, not Slater’s, and I conclude with another: the refusal of representatives of Kent State University to accept last autumn a statue, George Segal’s sculpture in memory of protestors killed in Ohio. “Princeton to get Sculpture Re-

jected by Kent State,” The New York Times headline goes. People around here, a member of the art faculty said, are very conservative and ‘“‘many of them believe that the kids who were

116 William Wasserstrom shot got what they deserved.” Many Ohioans felt that it was decidedly inappropriate, someone in administration agreed, to “observe the killing of four students and the wounding of nine others with a sculpture that indicates someone committing violence on someone else. We are afraid that people will see only the violence.’ That George Segal’s treatment of Abraham and Isaac should at Princeton be deemed an apt expression of “our culture and our society”? but in Ohio be regarded as a capitulation to “radicalism”? in politics and art, is authentication indeed for Foucault’s analysis of signs treating the body of the condemned, for Girard’s proposals on violence and the sacred, for Slater’s thesis connecting patriarchs and predators, and for Burke’s calligraphy of No. What sort of people are we then?, a logological critic is forced

to ask. What is it that leads people at Kent State, speaking for many compatriots, to say No to thou shalt not—to refuse a gift of sculpture that Segal describes as intended not to villify any-

one but to portray “the moral underpinnings of everyone’s belief”? As ‘‘Abraham moves to do violence with his right hand,

his compassion and love for his son are expressed in a gesture made” by the fingers of his left hand, fingers that dig into his thigh in ‘‘an agony of doubt.’’?? Who can it be after all?, Stanley

Elkin mused as he turned page after page in the Johnson Smith mail order catalogue of jokes, tricks, and ‘“‘practical gadgets,”’ which since 1914 has been distributed from the Midwest everywhere in the United States. What manner and kind of being is it that searches the whole globe round to compile this volume of dippy games, this zany store of novelties? What thwart of nature, what twist of invention stocks this warehouse with “electrical and scientific kits, fortune telling, magic,” practical jokes for every occasion? An American he must unquestionably be, Elkin believes: ‘“‘American, like some ingrained quality of the privative.” That is, there’s an American grain in that prefix A that is the grammatical sign of absence, of the state of being deprived— as in ‘‘amoral or apolitical” or “‘assimilation’’—of being beggared, dispossessed.

Burke, “‘Logology,”’ and the Tribal No 117 Artfully and wittily arguing a humorlessly held point, Elkin finds the clue to character and sensibility in the United States in a nomenclature in which denial—negation—precedes the very assertion to which it adheres. As confirmed by a catalogue that fails to distinguish between more and less, ours is a society hard put to differentiate between taking from and adding to, between promotion and privation, between confidence man and honest broker, and between ravishment and ravagement. Contemplating a culture that for generations has sped “‘joy buzzers and whoopee cushions to the world,”’ fusing history and grammar and art, El-

kin concludes that the American spirit beats in time to the “chythm in chaos.”’** In all of which, finally, we discern ultimate

signs of semiotic, lexical, moral, and historical equivalence: American as in a-buse—to use wrongly, to use up. First to last, America embodies a confirmation, a malediction of No. NOTES 1, Wayne Booth, ‘‘Kenneth Burke’s Way of Knowing,” Critical Inquiry 1 (September 1974): 2-3. 2. Kermit Lansner, ‘Burke, Burke, the Lurk,” in Critical Responses to Kenneth Burke, ed. William H. Rueckert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), p. 261. 3. Burke to Wasserstrom, December 23, 1958, quoted by permission. 4. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Litera-

ture, and Method (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 341-343.

5. Denis Donoghue, ‘When in Rome, Do as the Greeks,” in Critical Responses to Kenneth Burke, ed, William H. Rueckert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), p. 488. 6. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies of Logology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), pp. 4-5. 7. Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976), pp. 59-61. 8. Burke, Rhetoric of Religion, p. 19. 9. Burke to Wasserstrom, November 3, 1958, quoted by permission. 10, Daniel Fogarty, ‘Kenneth Burke’s Theory,” in Critical Responses to Kenneth Burke, ed. William H. Rueckert, p. 330n.

118 William Wasserstrom 11. Burke, Rhetoric of Religion, pp. 19-23. 12. Ibid., pp. 21. 13. Ibid., pp. 256-257, 14, Burke, “‘A Dramatistic View of the Origins of Language,” in Language

as Symbolic Action, pp. 430, 469, 478-479. 15. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives (Cleveland and New York: World, 1962), pp. 405-408. 16. Jonathan Culler, Saussure (London: Fontana/Collins, 1976), p. 117. 17, Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 148, 12, 13, 306. 18. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977), pp. 25, 26, 31. 19, Frances Fitzgerald, ‘“‘Rewriting American History,” The New Yorker, March 12, 1979, p. 104. 20, Burke, ‘Definition of Man,” in Language as Symbolic Action, p. 16. 21. Times Literary Supplement, September 17, 1954, p. lxiv. 22, Edward Dahlberg, Alms for Oblivion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1964), p. 27. 23. Burke, Rhetoric of Religion, pp. 273-315, passim. 24, Michael Kammen, People of Paradox (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), pp. 88-90; Peter Kihss, New York Times, September 29, 1977, p. 39; James S. Gordon, ‘‘Demonic Children,’ New York Times Book Review, September 11, 1973, p. 3.

25. Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of ChildRearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), pp. 12-13. 26. Gordon, ‘‘Demonic Children,” p. 53. 27. Burke, ‘‘Dramatistic View of Origins of Language,” pp. 473-474.

28. Philip Ariés, Centuries of Childhood, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), p. 413. 29. Burke, ‘‘Dialectic of the Scapegoat,” in Grammar of Motives, p. 408. 30. Rueckert, ed., ‘“‘Burke, Burke, the Lurk,” in Critical Responses, p. 270.

31. Fredric R. Jameson, “Ideology and Symbolic Action,” Critical Inquiry 5 (Winter 1978): 418-422, 32. Kenneth Burke, ‘‘Theology and Logology,’’ Kenyon Review, n.s., 1 (Winter 1979): 171. 33. Grace Glueck, New York Times, November 18, 1978, p. 23. 34. Stanley Elkin, ‘‘A la récherche du Whoopee Cushion,” Esquire 82 (July 1974): 126-129.

(oF Frank Lentricchia

Reading History with Kenneth Burke Co Maybe the most fascinating thing about our relationship to Kenneth Burke is the clever way in which we have managed consistently to avoid him while seeming always to pay homage to his work. By way of homage: in the spring of 1981 the Uni‘versity of California Press completed its honorable project of

republishing all of Burke’s books in a spacious paperback format. In the meanwhile, however, the ambitious studies of contemporary critical theory, with few exceptions, continue to ignore Burke almost totally. When he is mentioned, it is only fleetingly, out of a sense of scholarly duty, as if to demonstrate to knowing readers no ignorance of his large presence. My sense is that Burke’s brief recognition in these books assuages a traditional scholarly conscience that wants to dismiss him. Although to prove it would require a more far-ranging treatment than can be permitted in the confines of this essay, I think it true that contemporary theorists, critics, literary historians, philosophers, and other students of humanistic disciplines have needed to exclude Kenneth Burke, and I mean that harsh term (‘‘exclude’’) with the force with which it is applied in the writings of Michel Foucault. Until recent years the canons of truth and sanity that govern the writing of critical theory in the Unites States have implicitly decreed that much of what Burke does is a deviation from good sense, which I translate: disturbing, different, perhaps dangerous. Burke cannot be accepted in small, bearable doses; he must be taken all at once or not at all, but to take him all at once would require a radical reconception of the basis of what is usually called humanistic study. For more than fifty years, Burke— this man without tenure, a Ph.D., or even a B.A., who writes

books that cannot be touched by conventional academic definition—has been telling us that the conventional division 119

120 Frank Lentricchia of the humanities, with literature, philosophy, history, linguistics, and social theory each self-enclosed within the fortresslike walls

of the disciplines, housing experts too often ignorant and contemptuous of everything outside their respective castles, is all, at best, a lie of administrative convenience, and, at worst, a

re-enforcement in our institutions of higher education of bourgeois-capitalist hegemony. As a start, we (and I mean American academic intellectuals) would need to cease reducing the richly integrated and socially urgent European conception

of critical theory to the comfortably alienated ivory-tower formalism of literary theory. To take Burke seriously, therefore, requires a searching re-examination of our traditional values; no wonder that we continually put off our appointment with him.

To demonstrate adequately the several claims that I have made on behalf of Burke in these beginning paragraphs is the task of a book-length project. There is a route into Burke, however, that will at least afford us a number of rapid views of subjects he has opened up with his usual provocation. I am referring to his repeated turning to ideas of history and to his practice as a reader of history. Burke keeps coming back both to philosophical speculation on the nature of history and to the writing and doing of the historical discipline. These are not separate intellectual activities, as Hayden White has argued, and Burke is good evidence for White’s point of view, as if the confrontation with

history, more than the formulation of what he has called Dramatism, were the act that conferred identity upon his career. Dramatism is Burke’s official program, the name he has given to his system. Attitudes Toward History, the title of his fifth vol-

ume, gives us access to what I think is a more fundamental Burkean activity; a process of formulating, exploring, and making forays—in so many words, the various acts of reading and writing history. Although in my opinion Burke brings off this sort of act with maximum penetration and originality, and although I think it (not Dramatism) his true project, the historical act of thinking evidenced in his texts is not—and cannot be, by

Reading History with Burke 121 virtue of what he makes it—systematic. What may define him best as an historical thinker, in fact, is a series of decisive engagements, spread over his entire intellectual development, with the idea of system itself. As we'll see, the desire to be systematic is met at critical points by a resistance to system and in particular by a resistance to the essentializing consequences of systematic thought.

if

With the work of Martin Heidegger, his student Hans-Georg Gadamer, and, from another quarter, Hayden White, now behind

us, it need no longer be argued that the starting point for any consideration of “history”? (whether as discipline or as the temporal record itself) is necessarily with the act of interpretation and the location of that act within a sociocultural matrix. Burke’s major early work belongs to the late twenties and the thirties. Counter-Statement (1931), Permanence and Change (1935), Attitudes Toward History (1937), and The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941), while they can be read as preparation for the huge works on motives (A Grammar of Motives, 1945, and A Rhetoric of Motives, 1950), are interesting in their own right, as documents marked by the social and intellectual conflicts of the thirties. Burke is a man of the thirties, and when the Grammar and the Rhetoric are understood as productions of a man of the thirties, much of what appears forbiddingly abstract and even arid in those books comes richly to life.

In Permanence and Change, Burke’s thought on history is marked by an antiHegelian impulse to revere and preserve human differences in their nominalistic particularity, and therefore to check and resist the homogenizing sweep of teleological process; at the same time, his thought is marked by a desire to move directly to a transcendental perch above historical process

in an effort to find the essence of a single meaning for it all.

122 Frank Lentricchia Permanence and Change opens with a declaration that to our self-congratulatory retrospection sounds uncannily up-to-date: “all living things are critics.’”"! Burke means that all living things

are interpreters. He goes on to distinguish human interpreters from animals by proposing that human beings alone have the capacity to interpret their own interpretations, to reflect upon the very process of reading and interpretation itself.? Further along in the argument he adds that it is never reality in itself, but only and always interpretation of reality that we deal with.

He points out that even those things that we tend to think possess the most stubbornly natural being—he names stimuli and motives as chief examples—are distinctly linguistic products,

and, as such, texts of and for interpretation.*? Burke would refuse to grant to the interpretive process the reassurances that we feel when we anchor (think we anchor) our various readings to the truth of natural reality’s fixed rock. As a prolegomena to any future hermeneutics, we must investigate the basis of the interpretive act with the knowledge that ‘reality’? cannot be that basis. To this end, at an agonized moment in Permanence and Change, he describes the hermeneutic situation as a ‘‘Babel of orientations.’’ He asks ‘‘what arises as a totality” from this Babel? And he answers: “‘the re-enforcement of the interpretive attitude itself.’’* With no way of making a unified interpretation out of Babel, with no totality (‘‘totalization’’) possible, Burke would seem to have denied a shared basis for the interpretive process, would seem to have plunged interpretation so

deeply into the temporal and cultural differences of human particularity as to have engendered a vision of history as a chaos

of interpretive attitudes, all inaccessibly locked away within their prison-houses. This is no theory of history; it is rather the despair of history. However, at the end of Permanence and Change, Burke manages a double escape. By postulating an organic genius for free-

dom that exists “prior to any particular historic texture’’’ he finds a point of view outside of history from which to mediate

Reading History with Burke 123 (tame) the conflicting interpretations within it. Now, insofar as the notion of “point of view,” in its strict sense of spatially situated vision, implies that other “‘points’’ are possible, Burke’s is no point of view. To indulge a necessary contradiction, it is the spatially ubiquitous point of view of truth, an unsituated under-

standing of the congeries of interpretations that discerns an otherwise hidden principle of coherence: what all conflicting interprtations would commonly signify—a shared signified that may be called (after Jacques Derrida) “‘transcendental.”’ Moreover, this thesis of the innate genius for freedom that is “‘prior”’ to history, grounded in human nature, assumes “that no given historical texture need be accepted as the underlying basis of a

universal causal series.”® The principle of freedom not only resolves the hermeneutic Babel of history by providing a universal motive for interpretation, but also prohibits, at the same time, any locally engendered reading of the historical process from establishing priority as the key to all of history’s meaning. So the principle of freedom sanctions Burke’s transcendent innocence as an interpretive subject, situated over history’s local forces of determination, because, as the ultimate motor principle of interpretation, that which moves all interpretation but is not itself caught up in the conflicts and partialities of interpretation,

it is identical with the origin of a history that, in itself, is an arena of confusion and unfreedom. Burke’s response to historical complexity in Permanence and Change is traditional, conservative, and aesthetic—world-weary and nostalgic for the purity of an origin called freedom. This is

a side of Burke that cannot be ignored by his apologists; in various guises it reappears in each of his major texts. I have called it an ‘“‘aesthetic’’ response because it harkens back to Greek philosophy and to a distinction in Aristotle’s Poetics that

has structured (and biased) much of Western thought on the relations of artistic and historical disciplines: I refer to the idea that history (both as a kind of writing, a discipline, and as the untextualized temporal process) is bogged down in intransigent,

124 Frank Lentricchia irrational particularity (to echo Sidney’s neo-Aristoteleanism), while art traffics in the realm of the universal. The history of theories of history tends to show that if you begin with this assumption that historical process is an unintelligible chaos you will make it meaningful, you will textualize history (because you won’t be able to stand your assumption) in approximately the way that Aristotle said that the poet would make human reality intelligible: you will constitute historical process in and through a literary mode. The aestheticizing textualization of history (in Metahistory White claims that this process is inevitable) is its essentialization. From the vast and confusing panorama of human motives one motive is selected as the essence (ground, core, true meaning) of motivation and all others are done away with, as forces in their own right, by being relegated to the status of variants or departures from the essence, which is single, unitary, fundamentally real and, in a genealogical formulation of great moment, what Burke calls the ancestral cause of all other motives.” Against this essentializing strategy of interpretation, which he defines as the normal ideal of science to explain the complex in terms of the simple, Burke places what he calls a “‘proportional’’ strategy, which rests with complex interrelations of motives. Such complexities cannot be reduced; the interpreter must let them be. These two strategies of interpretation are at work in Burke’s texts from the beginning; although in his two interpretations of interpretation he clearly elevates one over the other, neither such valorization nor the mere fact of high-level hermeneutic self-consciousness permits him to master the essentializing impulse in his writing. I deliberately echo in this paragraph the language of Jacques Derrida’s essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,’ not to lay his ideas over Burke’s but to indicate two things. First, the rather complete anticipation of a major Derridean point of view in Burke’s essay on Freud of 1939. Second, to emphasize in Burke’s work a point easily missed, and too often ignored in Derrida’s well-known essay: that there is never

Reading History with Burke 125 a question of choosing between these strategies; no single interpretive subject is free to work its will in the hermeneutic process because the subject cannot control the forces at work in reading and on the reader. The relocation of the interpreter, as traditional Cartesian sub-

ject, from its place of mastery and freedom to a function of a process of interpretation larger and more powerful than itself, has crucial consequences in Burke’s later writings. At this point, however, and in somewhat artificial fashion, I want to segregate the essentializing impulse in him in order to examine its implications in greater detail. In Attitudes Toward History Burke offers two interpretive keys to history: the basic historical process he calls, in a phrase of considerable wit, ‘the bureaucratization of

the imaginative,” and the central interpretive attitude that he will take toward this process, his attitude of attitudes toward history, which is comic.® But let us not take his distinctions at face value, for what is signified by the phrase ‘‘bureaucratization of the imaginative” is not (Burke’s philosophical principles would

never permit it to be) the reality in itself of history’s process but an interpretation of it, and the comic attitude is a perfectly complementary way of responding to (living with) such a reading of history. The comic response is a consoling and accommodating interpretation of interpretation. After opening his definition of the ‘“‘bureaucratization of the

imaginative” by calling it ‘‘a basic process of history,” Burke quickly revéals the utopian, pastoral, origin-oriented bias of his position: “Perhaps it merely names the process of dying. ‘Bureaucratization’ is an unwieldly word, perhaps even an onomatopoeia, since it sounds as bungling as the situation it would characterize. ‘Imaginative’ suggests pliancy, liquidity, the vernal.

And with it we couple the incongruously bulky and almost unpronounceable.’’? With an aesthete’s vengeance, Burke has set up a critique of the everyday life of the historical process as the Calabanization of Ariel—or is it that what he bemoans is not so much the historical process at large as the coming to being of _

126 Frank Lentricchia repressive social organizations and the various hegemonic instruments which keep them in place? He continues: Gide has said somewhere that he distrusts the carrying-out of one possibility because it necessarily restricts other possibilities. Call the possibilities ‘“‘imaginative.’”’ And call the carrying-out of one possibility the bureaucratization of the imaginative. An imaginative possibility (usually at the start Utopian) is bureaucratized when it is embodied in the realities of a social texture, in all the complexities of language and habits, in the property relationships, the methods of government, production and distribution, and in the development of rituals that re-enforce the same emphasis, It follows that in this “imperfect world,” no imaginative possibility can ever attain complete bureaucratization. ... In bureaucratizing a possibility, we necessarily come upon the necessity of compromise, since human beings are not a perfect fit for any historic texture. !°

With this thinly veiled scorn for any and all sociohistoric tex-

tures that have been, are, and will be, with this concomitant projection of human being as a sort of platonic essence that can only be soiled, distorted, and encumbered by any and all actual and possible modes of government, production, and propertyrelations, and with this keen perception of what Antonio Gramsci called hegemony—the educative strategy of the ruling class to rule consciousness and thereby to extend and perpetuate its domination intellectually, with no need to coerce through physical force (“‘the development of rituals that re-enforce the same emphasis””)—Burke has given us a portrait of historical life as an arena of despair with no exit. Tragically, all hope is situated at the freshness of origins, where (and when) imagination freely creates and plays with its possibilities of utopian vision: all sub-

sequent historical movement away from the playful and contemplative consideration of multiple visions and into actions— into the actualization of vision—is synonymous with a process of degradation, of the loss of freedom, even of dying. No telos is discernible as an end to history’s futility because historical process is not purposive.

However, Burke’s response, his key reading of the bureau-

Reading History with Burke 127 cratization of the imaginative, is precisely not tragic. If tragedy implies necessarily dangerous limitations upon our capacity to know, and if an inescapable consequence of these limitations is that we act accordingly—self-destructively, in partial darkness, never able to free ourselves from a fatal mesh of circumstances— then Burke has appropriately named his attitude toward history

“comic,” for it postulates not fatal ignorance and death but foolishness and embarrassing exposure for the human agent, and

full consciousness for the comedic overseer of the twists and turns of the human drama, a confident and complete knowledge of how the game begins and how it will end. And Burke is that comedic overseer who would teach us the lessons of humility. With the security of his knowledge that history inevitably bungles imaginative possibility, that with amusing (because mechanical) repetition the insight of imagination will always, because it

is materially embodied, produce blindness in the bureaucratizing agents, and that historical action necessarily ends in gaping discrepancies between intention and actualization, Burke himself becomes the exemplary humble man, no champion of a single program because he knows in advance how all programs will turn out. History is thus essentialized in the mode of dramatic irony, with privileged place given to the man of comedic knowledge who, though he must be foolish actor, is somehow wise spectator as well. As comedic .overseer Burke becomes what he exhorts others to be—an observer of himself while acting, an achiever, therefore, of “‘maximum consciousness’? who can ‘‘‘transcend’ himself by noting his own foibles.”'t How

more openly can we aestheticize history than by seeing it through the lens of a literary category? How more openly can we essentialize history than by squeezing it all under the umbrella of a single genre? To jam history into the narrow room of a single comedic plot, as Burke has done, is surely to press, in most aggressive fashion, Aristotle’s claim for the poet’s universalizing power, while, as a consequence, such single-minded narrative conversion of historical process wipes out the differences of

128 Frank Lentricchia historical textures and moves in another way against the threatening Babel of interpretation that Burke had repressed in Permanence and Change, Although neither the older nor the newer generation of Yale New Critics has shown much overt speculative or practical con-

cern for history, some such essentializing and aestheticizing attitude as Burke’s would seem to commonly underwrite their respective formalist projects for literary study, with paradox, wit, and irony constantly at work in the essays of Cleanth Brooks to essentialize literary history (collapsing Wordsworth into Donne), and with différance, aporia, and undecidability similarly at work in Paul de Man’s writing (to wipe out the dif. ferences between Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Yeats). The recent essays of de Man are epitomes of comic vision and his key terms provide an unintended verification. His criticism of difference ends up affirming what the comedic overseer has always known —that in the end all human differences make no difference because all historical (“‘bureaucratizing”’) forces of differentiation

are simply “‘torn apart”’? (de Man’s words) by a power that returns literature to radical freedom from all context, just as Prospero, in the end, permits Ariel’s return to unfettered airiness. De Man’s earlier criticism of allegory and irony demonstrates that true comic mastery lies in the acute self-consciousness of the fall even as we fall—falling being inevitable.

The linkage of Brooks’s and de Man’s persistent formalist projects—their work stretches from the thirties to the present— with Burke’s comic meditation on history might remind us of what we are likely to forget in our zeal to banish formalism in the name of a ‘‘responsible”’ scholarship of historical life: that the comedic formalism of Burke was born in the thirties, in the midst of the worst socioeconomic crisis this country has known.

Comedic formalism may be denigrated as romantic escapism, but it is nevertheless one kind of response to crisis and certainly it is one kind of alternative to the aesthetic of social realism that Burke, Brooks, and de Man saw, especially in the earlier phases

Reading History with Burke 129 of their careers, as a major threat to the understanding of literary discourse. The inaugural step of any modern formalism constitutes a double negation: on the one hand, of naive theories of social realism, and, on the other, of the philosophical support of such theories in a vulgar version of Marxism. (To be a man of the thirties, as I have called Burke, is not necessarily to be a man of the left, although, as we shall see, in a sophisticated way he is that, too.) The formalisms of Burke, Brooks, and de Man have a social context, and they promise, for the contemporary literary mind, in the wisdom of their comedic sense of history, what another comedy—commedia—promised for the medieval theological imagination: a paradise, this one secular and literary, in which the fruit of transcendence is not the end of history but a maximum knowledge of what history is, has been, and will be, from a privileged vantage point beyond its conflicts. What the comedic historian knows, what he takes to be the

single truth of a history in which there is no truth but only fools of truth, is that: The progress of humane enlightenment can go no further than in pic-

turing people not as vicious, but as mistaken. When you add that people are necessarily mistaken, that all people are exposed to situations in which they must act as fools, that every insight contains its own special kind of blindness, you complete the comic circle, returning again to the lesson of humility that underlies great tragedy. The audience, from its vantage point, sees the operation of errors that the char-

acters of the play cannot see; thus seeing two angles at once, it is chastened by dramatic irony; it is admonished to remember that when intelligence means wisdom... it requires fear, resignation, the sense of limits, as an important ingredient. IS

We need to distinguish the Burkean theory of comedy from its classical forefathers. For, whereas Aristotle and numerous of his Renaissance progeny relegated to comedy the representation of man as worse than he is—more frail, more prone to error, with the implication that such representation is a deviation from a norm of human behavior—Burke and other modernists push the

130 Frank Lentricchia comedic deviation to normative status by declaring, in effect, that comedy is the representation of man as he really is. The Burkean comedic vision would encapsulate truth in a metaphysics of foolishness and failure. This comedic knowledge—this

ultimate of ‘humane enlightenment,” which we have no difficulty identifying as the repeated message of modernist literary theory from Brooks to de Man—this ironic vision that declares the inability of literature to declare, to refer, or to have a message, would term all injunctions to act at best naiveté, at worst fanaticism. This so-called “humane enlightenment” (which makes a dread of powerlessness) would, in the fatalism of its “wise” counsel of “resignation” and “fear,” uphold the status quo. The criticisms of comedy, paradox, irony, aporia, and différance, far from being socially innocent, or socially indifferent, sum up for many liberal humanist intellectuals, particularly for those with memories of the thirties, a certain attitude, a social posture—I will not call it a philosophy—that now passes, especially in literary critical academe, for sophisticated worldli-

ness; it is, in the end, I think, a mandarin cynicism that betrays itself in the bewildering variety of ways that it has found in which to declare noli me tangere, for I belong to despair.

I]

With this approach to a theory of ‘maximum consciousness” in Attitudes Toward History, Burke is prepared to stake out his most essentialist program in the introduction to A Grammar of Motives—what he calls Dramatism, but what we would now, with hindsight, call structuralism. The Grammar of 1945 is fullblown structuralism well in advance, of course, of the French

structuralist movement. Much more interesting even than his anticipation of Lévi-Strauss and company is the way Burke, in several keenly self-conscious moments in his text, forecasts the critique of structuralism mounted in the work of Foucault and

Reading History with Burke 131 Derrida. In less systematic form, Burke’s involvement with a structuralist method dates from the title essay of The Philosophy of Literary Form: it is in evidence there very concretely in his analysis of the binary coordinates of Clifford Odets’ Golden Boy. The binary code in Odets’ play is shown to be the productive mechanism, or model, behind the actual discourse of the play; at a certain level of analysis, this binary code is an expression of the ‘‘psychic economy’’!* of Odets’ mind—an economy

that, in turn, is expressive of a larger cultural economy. In theoretical terms Burke’s structuralism surfaces in The Philosophy of Literary Form when, in an attempt to claim an ur-form for drama, he argues that he is making no genetic or historical or empirical claim: ‘We are proposing it as a calculus—a vocabulary, or set of coordinates that serves best for the integration of all phenomena studied by the social sciences.””'* A few sen-

tences later he drops a footnote to the discussion in which he explains that he is at work on a text—it will be called A Grammar of Motives—in which the study of motivation will be identi-

cal with the “structure’’ of texts, and that, further, structure in all kinds of texts—philosophical, theological, fictional, juridical, scientific, and so on—can be accounted for by five key terms that, in their hierarchically disposed interrelations, and in their subtle play, can be thought of as exhausting the structural possibilities of textual expression.'® A little further on in the same general discussion, and in another footnote, Burke subtly qualifies this voracious synchronic totalization of history by introducing diachrony, difference, and dialectic into the system in such a way that the systemic power of his five key terms (act, scene, agent, agency, purpose) is prohibited from accounting for change before change in fact occurs.'” Again with hindsight, we can say that A Grammar of Motives is generated, at least in what I would think most contemporary critical theorists should find its most significant sections, by a conflict of hermeneutical impulses—call them synchrony and diachrony. Again, as both Burke and Derrida would remind us, there is never any question

132 Frank Lentricchia of choosing between them, never any question of segregating them as if the interpreting subject (Burke, Derrida, or anyone else) could master the process of reading. Burke introduces his dramatistic version of structuralism (“‘dramatistic”? because his five key terms are derived from an analysis of drama) via a Kantian essentialism of mind that he

converts into a plan for something like a “critique of pure motives”: “The book is concerned with the basic forms of thought which, in accordance with the nature of the world as all men necessarily experience it, are exemplified in the attributing

of motives.’’'* Then very quickly he textualizes Kant’s epistemological idealism by removing the “forms of thought’’ from their traditional Kantian intersubjective location to their contemporary home within intertextual space: “These forms of

thought ...are equally present in systematically elaborated metaphysical structures, in legal judgments, in poetry and fiction, in political and scientific works, in news and in bits of gossip offered at random.’”’!? This textualization of Kant is not quite enough in itself, however, to save Burke from the idealistic reduction of history at work in some of the theoretical sections of his earlier books. For when he speaks of this textualization he speaks of the forms of thought being “‘embodied’’”° in discourse—a term that would place ultimate value not on discursive practice but on the subjective and prediscursive origins of some disembodied geometry of mind. In this same vein, he recalls his preoccupation with the ‘“‘bureaucratization of the imaginative”’ when he refers to his grammatical resources as ‘‘principles’’ and

the various philosophies that apply these principles as “‘casuist- | ries” that seek to insert principles, by definition ahistorical, into “temporal situations.”’*' We are not surprised when Burke indicates in this introduction that he began his treatise not with the

notion of writing what in fact turned out, but with the inten- | tion of developing a theory of comedy as a way of investigating human relations.

The statement of intention in the Grammar is structuralist :

Reading History with Burke 133 through and through and a summation of where he has been as a thinker since Counter-Statement: We want to inquire into the purely internal relationships which the five terms bear to one another, considering their possibilities of transformation, their range of permutations and combinations—and then to see how these various resources figure in actual statements about human motives. Strictly speaking we mean by a Grammar of motives a concern with the terms alone, without reference to the ways in which their po-

tentialities have been or can be utilized in actual statements about motives, 2”

This intention to concern himself with the internal legality of terminological rules that governs globally the production of texts constitutes the classical austerity of the structuralist ideal. By the end of his introduction Burke has indulged the coldblooded platonism of the most extreme kind of structuralism when, with uncharacteristic contempt for cultural and historical differences and particularities and changes, he violently synchronizes the historical process, as he had done earlier in Perma nence and Change, with this claim: ‘Our work must be synoptic ...in the sense that it offers a system of placement, and should enable us, by the systematic manipulation of the terms, to ‘generate,’ or ‘anticipate’ the various classes of motivational theory.” 23 Kenneth Burke never played the role of the pseudoscientific structuralist god very well; other passages in the introduction to the Grammar and numerous places in the body of the text show that his heart was somewhere else. To be sure, as a synchronist Burke must necessarily endow his five key terms with a solidity and hardness massive enough to withstand diachronic pressure. Yet even in the process of formulating his high-flying platonic

structuralism Burke introduces theoretical qualifications that open up his method to a level of historical analysis generally untouched by structuralists. In The Philosophy of Literary Form, Burke distinguishes “between positive and dialectical terms—the

former being terms that do not require an opposite to define, the latter being terms that do require an opposite.”’?* The

134 Frank Lentricchia distinction between positive and dialectical is not quite the distinction of Saussure’s linguistics between “substantialist” and “differential” terms: “dialectical” sometimes implies a difference of a very special sort, a difference that eventually does not evade the metaphysics of a “‘postivie” or “‘substantialist” vocabulary. Nevertheless, the general intention of his distinction is clear and valuable. With it we move from a realm of natural, fixed, or eternalized meaning—where artichokes are pretty much always what they are—to the human arena, where meaning is made and unmade, enforced and subverted, and assented to and resisted in

collective acts of will, and nothing, or very little, is natural, fixed, and eternal. The further Burke can manage to move his key terms, and the temporally frozen model they imply, toward dialectical or differential status, the closer he engages the inherent synchrony of his grammatical project with a fluid diachrony of historical process. However, that is not quite a fair way to put the issue, insofar as I have implied that synchrony has nothing to do with history and that diachrony and “true” history are to be identified. What the joining of synchrony and diachrony does for Burke is to vastly complicate his idea of history and thereby to open up for analysis a historical reality that preserves the long endurance of a synchronic totality, the immense staying-power of certain deeply rooted habits of sense-making—we can call this activity in history “tradition” and “tradition-making”—and, at the same time, preserves forces of change internal to the totality (that untotalize, unsynchronize it), forces that provide a certain complexity within a system that is (this is one meaning of “system”) inherently simplifying. These forces thicken and make hetero-

geneous historical textures that tradition and system would homogenize. Like interpretation, history is never synchrony or diachrony, never essential or proportional (‘‘playful’’)—it is both, and there should never be a question of choosing. Some time in

the late thirties and early forties Burke develops theories of

Reading History with Burke 135 interpretation that begin to do justice to his practice as a reader of history’s texts.

As he puts it in that very complicated introduction to the Grammar, “what we want is not terms that avoid ambiguity, but terms that clearly reveal the strategic spots at which ambigutties necessarily arise.”?> The important words here are ‘“‘ambiguity,” “strategic,” and ‘“necessarily.”” Apparently, the terms do not

merely reveal ambiguity, being themselves free of it in their essentialist heaven: the terms themselves produce ambiguity. They are the “resources” of ambiguity, to use Burke’s word, and because they are the resources of ambiguity they are ultimately—as terminological grandfathers—producers of what ambiguity itself produces, “transformation”: ‘‘it is in the areas of ambiguity that transformations take place; in fact, without such areas, transformation would be impossible.” ?° I think it important to recognize that Burke is giving us here, both as

theory of interpretation and as theory of history, not the comfortable view of the structuralist lineage of sense-making, with principles of sense-making themselves outside the struc-

tural fields of history, nor the equally comfortable view of recent Yale critics in which ‘“undecidability” is made over into an instrument to cancel out the conflicts of force within history, in which the highest level of what is called textuality (the “literary”) is placed outside the domain of history. When Burke defines his task as that of studying and clarifying the resources of ambiguity, and hence of transformation, he is proposing the kind of genealogical approach to history that would situate itself between the misleading fictions of a sheer synchrony and a sheer diachrony; an approach so situated, with key structural coordinates enmeshed in historical texture, could properly be charged neither with the reductions of structuralism (or of his earlier theories), nor with the vaporization of history in the name of Derrideanism. The antidote to the sterilities of too much contemporary critical theory has long been available in some of Burke’s texts.

136 Frank Lentricchia If it is helpful to have a term for what Burke does best as a reader of history, then I think that the term “critical structuralist” might be fair. Since one of my purposes all along (however self-congratulatory) has been to argue his uncanny contemporaneity, then “critical structuralist”’ is doubly useful to me, for it indicates not only his anticipation of structuralism but also its most recent critique. If my claims for Burke as a continuing historical force are at all right, then we have good reason to understand the basis of his exclusion and repression. By 1945 Burke had not only articulated the structuralist vision, but had gone beyond it. The radically historical thesis of Harold Bloom (neatly summarized by his phrase “the anxiety of influence’’) may go a long way toward explaining the curious discomfort that contemporary theoreticians (Bloom excluded) have long felt in Burke’s presence. The crucial strategy in the service of this critical structuralism

is Burke’s ruthless investigation of his own terminological resources. The deep bias of his dramatistic system is unavoidably humanistic because the very notion of Dramatism (this is a point that Burke repeats tirelessly) rests on the distinction between “action” (a uniquely human movement) and “motion” (a process that presumably characterizes all nonhuman movement). At face value the five key terms (act, scene, agent, agency, purpose) are unarguably humanistic. It can be no accident that when Burke lists his terms, it is always in that order, with ‘‘act”’ leading off. His formulation of the master ratios (act-scene, agent-scene) only re-enforces the humanism of the system. Yet it is probably the humanist privilege granted to the autonomous actor-subject (with its corollary values of freedom, creativity, activity, and self-presence) that is the primary focus of Burke’s critical consciousness. He performs about as thorough an act of what is now called “deconstruction’’ as is possible, but when he is finished he has not destroyed the humanistic impulse of his Dramatism; he has only (and this by design) relocated the “free”

subject within a system that is now understood in a more

Reading History with Burke 137 complex fashion than his usual bare-bones formulation of Dramatism would permit. Let me put that point in another way: humanism is understood in the widest context—it is seen as having a constraining context, which is precisely what humanism can never admit about itself. However, such understanding does not, cannot, eliminate all humanist desire for the free subject—a point that many of our recent antihumanists have not yet apparently grasped.

Burke’s critique of what would be called structuralism is really a critique of systematic thought itself, including his own. A major portion of A Grammar of Motives is devoted to an investigation of the systematic dimension of the various schools in

the history of philosophy. More specifically, Burke wants to show how each of the philosophical schools derives its distinctive character from the peculiar genius of an “ancestral term.” ?’ Although all of the classical systems find a significant role for each

of the five terms to play, the identity of any given system will be generated by an ancestral term, and this term, to stay with Burke’s metaphor, in effect fathers all the rest because they are conceived, not independently, as having terminological lives and rights of their own, but only in relationship to the father: their identity is simply flooded by father-influence, Systems, then, are essentialized by their ancestral terms, and it is Burke’s greatest insight to point out that essentialization is the product of a genealogical will to power. By probing the notion of “ancestral term” Burke has uncovered the secret power of systematic thinking. At this point we are ready to appreciate the depth with which

Burke has probed the essentializing thrust of his own system. By moving critically against the terms ‘“‘act” and ‘‘agent” he has gone directly for the jugular of Dramatism. This criticism of act and agent—it will recall, before him, certain passages in Nietzsche’s The Will to Power and, after him, Derrida and de Man—

not only deliberately sets off an undermining effect throughout the Grammar, but also retrospectively revises his attitudes toward

138 Frank Lentricchia those quintessentially actional terms “freedom” (in Permanence and Change) and “imagination” (in Attitudes Toward History).

In order for an act to be itself, and not a disguised term for scene, Burke says that it must possess a wholly arbitrary (magical) dimension; the act that is truly an act presumes creativity in the literal sense.?® No act is truly an act, then, unless it can be shown to have a radically originating function. No matter how assiduously secular the philosophical systems that feature it, all ideas of act will easily be traced to some sort of theological conception: ‘‘God would thus be perfect action,” and of course perfect agent, “in that there would be no motivating principle beyond his own nature... .”*° The self-irony that runs throughout Burke’s discussion of act is that, for an act to be truly itself, it cannot be permitted to have a place within a system of other terms—it must (like God Himself) stand in a perfect purity of isolation. Now, if Burke’s analysis of act reveals that even the most secular and liberal-minded celebration of the human subject as autonomous source of action and value rests on theological support, what about his own featuring of act? Let us recall, again, that Burke inaugurates the system with a distinction between action and motion, and let us also recall that he situates act and agent within anetwork of five terms. Do act or agent essentialize Burkean Dramatism? Are his five key terms only thinly masked versions of an ancestral term? Is he, after all, a naive humanist?

Or is it the peculiar virtue of Burke’s system to subvert the essentializing power of even his own ancestral terms? Burke answers our questions (which are not really ours, since it is his text

that provides us with such ammunition). The answer sustains the highest level of philosophical sophistication: We may discern a dramatistic pun, involving a merger of active and passive in the expression, “‘the motivation of an act.” Strictly speaking, the

act of an agent would be the movement not of one moved but of a mover (a mover of the self or of something else by the self). For an act is by definition active, whereas to be moved (or motivated)

Reading History with Burke 139 is by definition passive. Thus, if we quizzically scrutinize the expres-

sion, “the motivating of an act,’ we note that it implicitly contains the paradox of substance. Grammatically, if a construction is active, it is not passive; and if it is passive, it is not active. But to consider an act in terms of its grounds is to consider it in terms of what it is not, namely, in terms of motives that, in acting upon the active, would make it passive. We could state the paradox another way by saying that the concept of activation implies a kind of passive-behindthe-passive; for an agent who is ‘‘motivated by his passions’? would be “moved by his being-movedness” or ‘‘acted upon by his state of being acted upon.’’*°

Burke’s unhinging of the traditional conception of the subject and its central category of a consciousness whose active power

is coincidental with itself, entirely in control, lucid, and selfpresent, is rooted in what he discovers to be the radical duplicity of the very cornerstone terms of Western philosophical discourse. What he has done to “‘act” could be extended to agent, agency, purpose, and scene and, more importantly even than those words, to the word of words for any mode of thought, philosophical or otherwise, that would consider itself disciplined. I am referring to Burke’s glancing reference to the “paradox of

substance.” Substance: a term indispensable not only to all manner of metaphysical thinking but also (and perhaps this is a way of gauging the impulse to metaphysics in us all) in every attempt to define—something, anything at all—in every attempt, in other words, to be intellectually rigorous, precise, and above all, serious.

In his stunning discussion of the ‘‘paradox of substance” Burke locates in the term “substance” a strange self-difference. Substance differs from itself because it moves between a sense that denotes what a thing intrinsically is—that part of the thing that is uniquely there and nowhere else, that which makes the thing what it is, what confers its special identity—to a sense (etymologically evident) that denotes a thing’s support: sub-

stance, that upon which the thing stands, what is beneath it (from the Greek: a standing under). The paradox, then, is that

|

140 Frank Lentricchia “the word ‘substance’, used to designate what a thing is, derives from a word designating what a thing is not. That is, though used to designate something within the thing, intrinsic to it, the word etymologically refers to something outside the thing, extrinsic to it.”*' Or, to sharpen the paradox still further: used ordinarily to refer to the special interior presence of a thing, etymologically

the word refers us to a context, “something that the thing is not.’’** In such a strategic terminological moment, when the “intrinsic and the extrinsic can change places,”°° we confront the bedrock of the antinomy of definition. It is a perilous kind of “bedrock,” however, since no secure footing is provided; it is precisely security that is being done away with. The concept of substance, the one thing that must not differ from itself if definition is to be definition, is endowed with what Burke calls an

“unresolvable ambiguity,”°* but which we can call, after Derrida, undecidability, since no choice can be made between two very different senses. This perverse playfulness of undecidability, in evidence in Burke’s cultivation of the paradoxes of substance and of act, is the very condition of transformation

that curtails the essentializing desire of interpretation and thereby makes a certain kind of history possible. With the self-presence of key Western terms like substance and act so profoundly fissured, so radically unstabilized by Burke’s analyses, we are prepared to confront, in the terminological dimension itself, a more detailed level of historical process than we have been accustomed to knowing.

lil Burke’s interest in philosophical history is focused on the power of systematic thought to reproduce and extend itself while at the same time engendering internal fissures and conflicts—and in general the very possibility of the transformation of modes of thought that tend to essentialize and eternalize

Reading History with Burke 141 themselves. This kind of interest in the history of philosophy is not for its own sake; the history of philosophy for Burke is part of a larger sociopolitico-historical totality, and the analysis of philosophical discourse is meant to be exemplary, a way into that totality. Up to this point in this essay I have been concerned with exposing the theoretical bases of the act of interpretation in Burke, rather than with his analysis of any concrete historical texture. I turn only now to his practice, not because theory is a

higher thing, and must come first, but because I don’t think that his readings can be appreciated in their wider implications

unless their theoretical qualities are grasped: his theories of reading imply an historical process of a particular sort—and the opposite is true as well. The closer we move in Burke toward the analysis of specific

historical textures the more we need the conception provocatively put forth by Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks: I refer again to the conception of “hegemony,” Gramsci’s great contribution to Marxist dialogue on the relations of an economic

base to superstructural expressions of culture.** Although he could not have known Gramsci’s writings until most of his own texts had long been written, Burke’s dialogue with Marx has been persistent—and remarkably close to Gramsci’s revision of the vulgarities of economism. In simplest terms: hegemony in Gramsci, and its counterpart in Burke—he gave it no name—is fundamentally a process of education carried on through various institutions of civil society in order to make normative, inevitable, even ‘‘natural” the ruling ideas of the ruling class. The hegemonic process is a way of gaining ‘“‘free” assent to a dominating and repressive political structure without needing recourse to violence (the domination of bodies through the means of the military and the police). Hegemonic rule is therefore the mark of the stable, ‘‘mature” society whose ideological apparatus is so deeply set in place, so well buried, so unexamined a basis of our judgment that it is taken for truth with a capital letter. Because the process of domination is an educative one,

142 Frank Lentricchia involving techniques of psychological manipulation on behalf of ruling economic interests, its theory represents a certain union of Marx and Freud, of materialist and psychoanalytic views of

history. The ground of Freudo-Marxism is a common one for Burke and Gramsci. If Burke as the comedic historian, or even as the programmatic theorist of parts of the Grammar, isa dispassionate observer of historical inevitability, and therefore an implicit affirmer of the status quo, then the critical structuralist and student of hegemony is (at the least) an implicit interven-

tionist who teaches not comedic lessons of humble passiveness | but the muscular exercise of a collective will for the ends of social change.

Gramsci’s theory of hegemony has its parallel in Burke’s idea of a silent ethico-juridical process that, mainly at subterranean levels, coerces consciousness to assent to the structure of prop-

erty relations authorized by “rules, courts, parliaments, laws, | educators, constabulary, and the moral slogans linked with each.” °° These various constituents of the ruling class, especially what Gramsci would call their “organic intellectuals,” and what Burke calls the various “‘priests”*’ of the pulpit, schools, press,

radio, and popular arts (and we add television), educate the socially dispossessed person to feel “that he ‘has a stake in’ the authoritative structure that dispossesses him; for the influence

exerted upon the policies of education by the authoritative structure encourages the dispossessed to feel that his only hope of repossession lies in his allegiance to the structure that had dispossessed him.” ** Perhaps Burke’s most complete example of how this works is his examination of the “medieval synthesis,” the way Thomist philosophy was a thorough re-enforcement and a technique of maintenance of established property relationships. *°

Now, if we add, as Burke does, that a sociopolitical structure of authority and the hegemonic process proper to it, and which keeps it in force, have astonishing stamina to dominate history over the longest duration—he explores, for example, the morpho-

Reading History with Burke 143 logical parallels of Thomism and capitalism*°—then it would seem to follow that visionary social programs, in utopian and Marxist varieties, with their desire for radical rupture in the movement of history, a desire to make it new in the literal sense, can only be frustrated without hope. For such desire has for its object the formation of an identity that would imply, in order to be achieved, the destruction of all genealogy, an obliteration of one’s entire past lineage, a symbolic suicide that involves a symbolic parricide.*! Burke is speaking of the personal desire for rebirth, but his analysis holds equally well for collective social desire to be reborn in a revolution that would destroy the historical lineage of every society’s collective past. Burke’s lesson, easily missed with his stress on the marathon

character of historical repression, is that radical rupture, not change, is impossible. The structure of hegemonic authority that he traces in the curve of history from ancient Greece through “periods” of Christian evangelism, medieval synthesis, protestant transition, naive capitalism, and emergent collectivism, while massive and ominously persistent, is not monolithic.

Like the terminological keystones of Western philosophical tradition, the dominant sociopolitical structure of the West, despite its totalizing desire to saturate every corner of history, is internally divided, different from itself in its very “‘substance.” One of Burke’s ways of pinpointing that structural instability in the tradition.is to declare that every so-called historical period is

transitional; no period is there, in full presence—historical texture is ineluctably heterogeneous. ** Another way is to point out that, unlike real estate, the language of privilege and authority is not the private property of any person or class. The linguistic symbols of authority, like “rights” and “freedom,” are appropriable—they can be seized by a collective and turned against those who appropriated them in order to dispossess yet earlier appropriators. This oscillation of rights depends, of course, on the oscillation of power between possessors and dispossessed; the locus of power/rights is never fixed because the locus is not

144 Frank Lentricchia natural. This process, described by Burke as the “stealing back and forth of symbols,”*® is the beginning of any hegemonic education and rule. The point is clear: no hegemonic condition is fatal because no hegemonic condition rests on natural or God-

given authority, although it is one of the key strategies of hegemonic education to inculcate those very claims. Like the term “substance,” and its paradox of intrinsic and extrinsic, the term “‘rights” is paradoxical, although in this instance the “inside” and the “outside” are not ontological but social terms, better given as the “‘ins” and the “outs.” It is precisely the radical instability (appropriability) of terms like “rights” that makes for transformation in philosophical and social history: The divine right of kings was first invoked by secular interests combat-

ing the authority of theocrats. It held that God appointed the king, rather than the church authorities, to represent the secular interests of

“the people.” Later, when the church made peace with established monarchs, identifying its interests with the interests of the secular authorities, the church adopted the doctrine as its own. And subsequently the bourgeoisie repudiated the doctrine, in repudiating both monarch and state. It did so in the name of “rights,” as the doctrine had originally been promulgated in the name of “rights.’’ Among these “rights” was ‘‘freedom.” And Marx in turn stole this bourgeois symbol

for the proletariat.“

In another meditation on the same phenomenon of the passage of “rights,” this rite of appropriation, which reflects the increasing stress on language as the ultimate center of his theory, Burke notes that it is precisely the ontological emptiness of the term—it is always differentially, or dialectically, or contextually defined—that permits it to be undecidable, unresolvably ambiguous at a high level of analysis, and yet at a more concrete level, set in place, stabilized, and appropriated by a particular class, even though such settings, stabilizations, and appropriations will in turn be upset by other classes, other times. As if looking ahead critically to the current partisans of undecidability, Burke wrote in The Philosophy of Literary Form: “the statement that

Reading History with Burke 145 a term is ‘dialectical,’ in that it derives its meaning from an op-

posite term, and that the opposite term may be different at different historical periods does not at all imply that such terms are ‘meaningless.’” Far from it: such terms shape the course of

political history, as Burke demonstrates in his genealogical analysis of our Bill of Rights, from the emergence of the Magna Carta, to the American Revolution, to the early twentieth cen-

tury and the origin and growth of the supercorporations and, once again, a critical revaluation and renaming of majority and minority rights, the will of the people, and the centralization of authority.*° One final, complicated example compresses Burke’s interests in philosophy, science, and sociopolitical history: I allude to his section on Darwin in the Grammar and to an earlier provocative

comment on Darwin in Attitudes Toward History. Burke is struck by the preservation, in a period so profoundly committed to liberalism, of a feudalistic mode of thought in the nineteenth century’s “extreme emphasis upon genesis, origin.” *° The em-

phasis on genesis and origin is produced, as he shows in his analysis of Thomism and medieval economics, by a familial metaphor: ‘‘From this metaphor there flowed the need of obediance to authority, as embodied in customs. In families one does not ‘vote.’ Authority does not rise by deputation, as in parliamentary procedure—it is just where it is, being grounded in the magic of custom.”*” By developing this familial perspec-

tive to universal limits, Thomism interwove the hegemonic, symbolic architecture of medieval feudalism, a structure uncan-

nily built upon “the foundations of human guilt.”** “The Church bureaucracy was pictured as a large-scale replica of family relationships, with ‘fathers,’ ‘mothers,’ ‘brothers,’ ‘sisters,’ ‘Father,’ and ‘Mother’ (a particularly serviceable pattern in that

it readily shunts the erring son into the role of symbolic parricide).”*° Darwin’s formula of the “descent of man” is genealogical (feudalistic) to the core in that it analyzes man ‘‘by reference to his parentage: what he was.’*® At one level, at least, what is

146 Frank Lentricchia preserved in Darwin’s texts, great books of objective knowledge for the liberal nineteenth century, is the political vision of feudalism: the thorough crushing of individual liberty. If Burke’s earlier analysis stresses how a discourse presumably

beyond ideology, committed to scientific truth, is strongly marked in its theoretical underpinnings by a repressive Thomist

ideology, then his later analysis of Darwin demonstrates that those same texts are marked as well by forms of political idealism more contemporary to Darwin’s life. The long duration of feudalist hegemony that in one way captured Darwin’s writing is resisted and interrupted by a newer (bourgeois) hegemony of liberalism. Despite his nominal, programmatic commitment to scenic principles, Darwin’s philosophy of deterministic materialism, in which existence can only be explained by its conditions,

is invaded by idealistic notions of “‘purpose” and “agent” that stress a quality of ‘“‘action” internally motivated that cannot be reduced to the “motions” of environment. Many of Darwin’s key terms “lend themselves readily to appeal by ambiguities of the pathetic fallacy.”*! Hence, although his conscious intention (his ‘‘act”) seems purely materialistic, examination of his discourse reveals that a larger discursive force of intention—a politi-

cal unconscious?—which no single subject can control, is at work in Darwin’s texts, binding them over to a liberal political discourse more encompassing than his own scientific writing, and more encompassing even than its purely scientific history of evolutionary thought, even as those texts had been bound over in another way to the political discourse of feudalism. Burke’s analysis of this liberal phase of the politics of Dar-

win’s science comes to sharp focus on the occurrence of the term “variability” in The Origin of the Species. In an effort to deny an internal force of change in an organism, a force appropriate to an agent, not a thing, Darwin finds himself conceding a minimal ‘‘tendency to ordinary variability”*®? that cannot be reduced to observable scenic factors. This pressure of an agent term on his vocabulary, while it points once again to the heraldic

Reading History with Burke 147 or familial perspective of his theory, and the consequences that Burke has read out of that metaphor, also points, as Burke concludes, to the politics of “‘nineteenth-century English liberalism, in stressing the selective factor of competition ... and in deriving new species from individual variations.” °° All of this conflict is condensed in an exquisite ambiguity in Darwin’s term “‘variability,” which allows simultaneously ‘for two quite different meanings... one referring to a cause ab extra and the other to some internal principle of action. It stands pliantly where scene overlaps upon agent.” ** With his rare integration of the resources of technical, formalist criticism and social and political investigation, in this analysis of the political forces struggling to dominate Darwin’s biological texts, Burke set standards for the ideological role of intellectuals that contemporary critical theory would do well to measure itself by.

NOTES 1. Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (Los Altos, Calif.: Hermes Publications, 1954), p. 5. 2. Ibid., pp. 5-6. 3, Ibid., p. 35. 4, Ibid., pp. 117-118. 5. Ibid., p. 226. 6. Ibid., p. 228. 7. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), pp. 261-262.

8. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. vu. 9. Ibid., p. 225. 10. Ibid., pp. 225-226. 11. Ibid., p. 171.

12. Paul de Man, ‘‘Political Allegory in Rousseau,” Criticial Inquiry 2 (Summer 1976): 650, 13. Burke, Attitudes Toward History, pp. 41-42.

148 Frank Lentricchia 14, Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, p. 34. 15. Ibid., p. 105. 16. Ibid., p. 106.

17. Ibid., pp. 109-11in. 18. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), p. xv. 19. Ibid, 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., p. xvi. 22, Ibid. 23. Ibid., pp. xxii-xxiii. 24. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, p. 109n. 25. Burke, A Grammar of Motives, p. xviii. 26. Ibid., p. xix. 27, Ibid., p. 128. 28. Ibid., p. 66. 29. Ibid., pp. 68-69. 30. Ibid., p. 40. 31. Ibid., p. 23. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., p. 24. 34. Ibid. 35. See, for example, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and

translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 5-14. For commentary see Walter L. Adamson, Hegemony and Revolution: A Study of Antonio Gramsci’s Political and Cultural Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980). 36. Burke, Attitudes Toward History, p. 329. 37. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, p. 307. 38. Burke, Attitudes Toward History, pp. 329-330.

39. Ibid., pp. 124-134. 40. Ibid., p. 93-94. 41. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, pp. 41-42. 42. Burke, Attitudes Toward History, p. 135. 43, Ibid., p. 328. 44, Ibid. 45. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, pp. 109-111n. 46. Burke, Attitudes Toward History, p. 66n. 47. Ibid., p. 129. 48. Ibid., p. 128.

Reading History with Burke 149 47. Ibid., p. 129. 48, Ibid., p. 128. 49, Ibid., p. 129. 50. Ibid., p. 66n. 51. Burke, A Grammar of Motives, p. 153. 52. Ibid., quoted p. 154. 53. Ibid., p. 156. 54. Ibid., p. 158.

(wr Angus Fletcher

Volume and Body in Burke’s Criticism, or Stalled in the Right Place (BF In The Philosophy of Literary Form, Kenneth Burke com-

plains: “My procedures have been characterized as ‘intuitive’ and ‘idiosyncratic,’ epithets that make me squirm.”! Those words date from 1941; in 1929 William Carlos Williams wrote that ‘Kenneth Burke is one of the few Americans who know what a success of good writing means—and some of the difficulties in the way of its achievement.” Noting that Mr. Burke’s “designs are difficult, possibly offensive, at times recondite,” he added that Burke was eminently a writer, who knew that “writing is made of words, of nothing else.”? The good doctor went on to say that in a time of widespread poverty, it was essential to be writing, if only obsessively, about the need for nourishment. “Burke,” he said, ‘‘seems to be stalled in the right place. But that doesn’t finish him.”? To strike out “toward a better life” meant, as another great critic, R. P. Blackmur, said some years later in “A Critic’s Job of Work,” that Burke took literature “‘not only as a springboard but also as a resort or home, for a philosophy or psychology of moral possibility.”* By concentrating on the various ways ‘“‘the mind works in the written word,” Burke seemed to Blackmur to present literature ‘‘as an inexhaustible reservoir of moral or character philosophies in action,” particularly as these philosophies were enacted ‘“‘through curiosities of development and conversion and duplicity.” * The

strength of Burke’s contribution appeared then to be that his essays ‘‘widened critical curiosity about the endlessly metamorphosing shapes of symbolic action.” Praise from Williams and Blackmur is significant in that both were students of the somatic, body-centered powers of poetic expression, Williams as practitioner, Blackmur as the student of linguistic “gesture.” To be concerned with “‘the thinking of the 150

Volume and Body in Burke’s Criticism 151 body” is to involve oneself with that unity-in-difference to which Coleridge gave the name ‘“‘psychosomatic.” One cannot survive amid what Burke recently called the “whole great clutter of our civilization” unless one accepts the psychosomatic nexus

and follows the Coleridgean road of method. Method is not mechanistic system, it is not a positivistic program, it is certainly

not dogma. Yet it is not without order—its order is that of a road—a logological route followed to its end, whatever turnings

occur in the middle of the way. Coleridgean method may at first look like random wandering in a maze, but finally it reveals a different order: the perfect route through the maze—Ariadne’s thread, perfectly reeled in. Method traces the logic of the maze. If we were not human, we would not need method; we could do well enough with the most parsimonious, elegant instructions

for thought and action. Our destinies would be perfectly straight lines, shortest distances between fixed points. But we are an odd species. Our lives have a mazy, meandering antistructure, Again, if man were a machine, this would not be so, but man is a body joined to its Siamese twin, the mind, and there’s nothing we can do about the psychosomatic crossover: it seems to be our nature. If we don’t squirm physically, we squirm mentally. Pleasure and pain, itching and tickling, are so ambiguously close to each other, that a full methodical account of their experience will require that almost equal attention be paid to both soma and psyche, or rather, psyche and soma interacting with each other. From an unusually strong awareness of this cofunctioning of mind and body comes the body, and the volume, of Burke’s criticism.

It may help to get some perspective on Burke, to note initially that literary critics are at least of three kinds: some do technical criticism, analyzing the structures and functions of poetic artifacts, others philosophize about the larger destiny of poetry, and still others make diplomatic missions between watring parties to controversy in the technical and philosophical

realm. The largest-minded critics engage in all three modes

152 Angus Fletcher simultaneously. Burke, however, has mostly taken the philosophic direction. He has invented hypotheses about man’s symbolic behavior, he has speculated about these hypotheses and their extension, and he has allowed himself to wonder how to

extrapolate from the things he has said. Aristotle said that philosophy begins in wonder; we can suppose that it also ends there. Mr. Burke’s capacity for philosophic wonder could be named a high curiosity-quotient, and we would expect him to possess much intuition. He objects to the epithet “intuitive” only in its familiar pejorative sense. He objects to the label “idiosyncratic” in the strict sense of that term; he is the last critic in the world one would seriously want to accuse of imposing his own will, his “idiotic” private vision upon others. He has a right to squirm. By studious labors, over many years, he has pioneered various

methodological routes for the channeling of intuitions into symbol-using behavior. This strategic choice of multiple routes gives Burke a much wider range of interest than we find with most critics. To begin with, he has written and published his own poems. He has known, from the inside, the things he had mainly been

talking about. He has embodied his technical interests. Like Richards, Empson, and other modern critics, including R. P. Blackmur, he has made himself one with his formal subject of study. Also, as translator he early acquired another sort of technical skill: he made the first English translation of Mann’s Death in Venice, Tristan, and Tonio Kréger (1925). He confesses to having worried, not only over Mann and Gide, but specifically

and linguistically over their German and French. Such active linguistic concerns imply the two interests that lie inside the broader philosophic range, the technical and the diplomatic. As to the latter, few critics before the most recent period have done so much to bring European literature and thought home to North America. Few have gone so much “outside” their own native orb, to bring back news of foreign affairs.

Volume and Body in Burke’s Criticism 153 Thus, as philosopher, Burke adduced classic doctrines from European tradition—in A Grammar of Motives, for instance, he reworked old ideas about substance and consubstantiality, to show how the dramatic process of “identification” worked. In The Rhetoric of Motives he restricted the ontology of characteridentity to the narrower compass of rhetoric, by whose principles

human beings interact with each other as persons, as roleplayers—a move that led the argument into increasingly political

areas of discourse. Politics and its consequences have always bothered Burke, and we are not surprised to find that he early encountered a most ancient paradox of symbolic action, namely the fact that while human beings may feel free individually, they can turn en masse into symbolically controlled slaves, working the will of demagogues. This concern gets much attention in The Rhetoric of Motives; it appears in specific studies elsewhere, notably his essay on Mein Kampf, “The Rhetoric of

Hitler’s Battle,” where he analyzed perversions of ancient religious belief.

Only science is perpetually modern. Poetry and philosophy are both ancient—their interests recur again and again, without diminishing returns. The earliest poems we know give us the old story of passion and its troubled, troubling consequences—our suffering, which, in its most acute form leads to victimage, the dramatistic invention of the scapegoat. Techniques for symbolic survival keep changing, like styles, but the humanistic conditions for this survival seem to be constant—as well they might, considering the shortness of man’s history, as compared with the “history” of our universe. Whatever the changes and refinements of technique, our projection of self through poetry and our analysis of self through philosophy seem forced to return ad nauseam to the oldest questions. One is impressed by Burke’s continuous recourse to older thinkers. In one short recent paragraph he recently made an articulate set of moves from Occam, to Freud, to Santayana, to Morris Cohen, back to Spinoza, and on again, to Hegel. He is as much at home with Heidegger and

154 Angus Fletcher Kierkegaard as others are with Holmby Hills and Forest Lawn. There are some philosophers who seem not to have engaged his

attention, such as Wittgenstein, but I can think of very few critics who have made more active use of earlier Western thinkers. Burke is also the child of his times: he recurs to the American Pragmatists, to Bergson, to early twentieth-century thought. However, despite his own modernity, the more impressive fact is that Burke devoted his single most concentrated argument to the ‘“‘rhetoric of religion,” where he analyzed the ontology and epistemology of Saint Augustine, which are consequences of the ancient Hebraic-Christian theory of original creation and “‘origin sin.”’

Such enterprises suggest a typical American problem: the autodidactic desire to go back to original roots and then to develop all possible thoughts that might be imagined to follow from those beginnings. Our search for originalities owes much to our being members of a derivate, and very new, culture. Burke

shares in this nostalgia for beginnings. One understands why a historian of European thought, René Wellek, has little patience with Burke’s search for his own new diagrams. To a European, the circles of understanding appear already fixed in scope, but toa North American they have a different form: they are spirals, engendered by our belief in our own newness—by, if you wish, our revolutionary origins. In Language as Symbolic Action we find a series of essays on Shakespeare, Goethe, Coleridge, and Djuna Barnes—all of which are drawn into a single spiral of discourse. Northrop Frye has said that, starting from Blake, he too adopted what Jerome Bruner called a “spiral curriculum.” That, too, is Burke’s format for work. Such spiral curricula presumably take various forms, depending on whether they begin at the widest circuit of the spiral or begin at some single, central point of departure. The main thing about gyring spirals, however, is the alternation of emphasis between center and outer ring. Let me give an instance of this alternation. The overall structure of The Rhetoric of Motives is

Volume and Body in Burke’s Criticism 155 given by its three subtitles: “the range of rhetoric,” “traditional principles of rhetoric,” and ‘“‘order.” Each subtitle implies a broad perspective on major rhetorical issues, and in each major section of the book we find sub-subtitles, such as ‘‘positive, dialectical, and ultimate terms,” or “dramatic and philosophic terms for essence.” Such abstract titles alert the reader to most general philosophic concerns, but these are intermeshed with highly specific case studies, which owe as much to Freud as to any other literary model. Part One of The Rhetoric of Motives thus begins in medias res with treatment of a set of texts, Milton’s Samson and Areopagitica, Arnold’s ‘“Empedocles on Etna” and ‘‘Sohrab and Rustum,” Coleridge’s “Religious Musings,” and Adams’s autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams. Thereafter, similar textual commentaries intersperse with passages of general reflection. The structure of the whole is a spiralform, a springing movement back and forth between highly concretized textual readings and highly rarefied philosophic extrapolations. The dynamic is that of a coil of spring-steel, rising and falling, expanding and always finally contracting. If The Rhetoric of Motives begins with the spiral constricted to the engineering of discourse, the more recent Language as Symbolic Action takes an opposite course. It starts at the outer edges of the argument, with nothing less than a ‘“‘definition of

man,” on which Part One discourses in five “summarizing essays.” It soon narrows, with a series of eleven essays on “‘par-

ticular works and authors.” This second part is followed by a springing back and out, through a third-phase return to the general argument about man as symbol-user. Yet Part Three’s “further essays on symbolism in general,” while they officially and in substance do spiral back out to general issues, such as “rhetoric and poetics,” “myth, poetry and philosophy,” also display cryptic narrowing of focus. That is, in Part Three of Language as Symbolic Action Burke develops a central mystery

of his overall argument, a critical motif that narrows an argument that simultaneously seems to be expanding outward from

156 Angus Fletcher considerations of particular works and authors. This central motif is “the thinking of the body,” a congeries of ideas about the way bodily processes, movements, inner states, and ejaculations (and excretions), are found to be “central” to the analysis of the symbolic, projective life of man. These inward-spiralling

subessays comment on the rending of the body in Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony and Aeschylus’ Prometheus, and on somatic purity and purification as these inspire Mallarmé’s invention of a “pure poetry.” We even get an essay on excretory continence, ‘‘Somia ad Urinandum,” which among other things explains the emphasis on urination in the Porter scene in Macbeth, On the other hand, while such constrictions of focus comprise the basic subroutine of Part Three, this larger subdivision of the book nevertheless begins to spiral back out to larger issues,

almost to the very extent that its subroutines compress the ‘‘particular works and authors” section into a final central knot. Language as Symbolic Action does not end here, however. It

distends its third part by including a 260-page essay on the “dramatistic view of the origins of language,” then caps the whole book with an attack on the limitations of “Formalist Criticism” as exemplified by Cleanth Brooks’ analyses of Faulkner. Why the 260-page insertion, why the essay on formalism?

And why, to add one more question about Burke’s method, does he occasionally include his own poems, while he follows each initial ‘‘summarizing essay” with a section of “Comments”?

Surely, all this shows a wild refusal to be verbally economical. Surely the procedure is bound to inhibit understanding of its author. As long as we fail to recognize the spiral-form of the whole, we will find we are inhibited, but if spiralling is permitted the critic, then all will be well. There seem to be two obvious barriers to understanding any critic, any poet, or any scientist (although with the last, typically, the first barrier is less troubling). The first barrier might be called stylistic, the second formal. Let me dwell briefly on the stylistic problem. Every professional has his characteristic style.

Volume and Body in Burke’s Criticism 157 Thus I have suggested that there is a method to Burke’s expository strategy, and have hinted that a certain style will express

that strategy. If an author’s style is too unfamiliar, we have trouble paying attention to him (the same would be true in the field of clothing, one might add). If, having assimilated an author’s style, we persist to the deeper level of intellectual structure, we may find that while the course of his argument is stylistically intelligible, its logic or empirical basis may “make no sense.” Or conversely we may find that although the style is aesthetically scandalous, the gist of an argument does come across; at that point we have managed to surmount the second, formal barrier to understanding. Some authors, like Northrop Frye, are stylistically so available that they leave us mainly wondering about the larger impli-

cations of their arguments, their discourse. Others may be stylistically no problem at all, but their observations and arguments give us nothing worth worrying about. Still others, like Burke and Empson, present a stylistically worrisome surface, and also make it equally difficult to hold to the level of larger issues. However, I would distinguish Burke and Empson. The latter is very intricate on verbal distinctions, but he does not, like Burke, keep extending and overextending his verbal niceties in the direction of larger philosophical conclusions. Empson’s large subject, which is traditionally English, is the class struggle. Burke’s is the typically American subject: the struggle of man as an individual to survive in a world that is not, ab initio, limited by accepted national, traditional, or even class lines of demarcation. So, to Burke’s difficult style—his rhetorical surface—may be added the sheer mass and complexity of his human interests. He’s a bit like Walt Whitman, who besides singing of himself, sang of everything else he could think of. Mr. Burke is a bardic critic, full of “the accumulation of critical lore.” ® No doubt because he falls in the Coleridgean line, he keeps

on thinking about the psychosomatic unity. For this reason Freud is congenial to him, and so is Marx, the theorist of the

158 Angus Fletcher instrumental alienation of the human body, an alienation resulting from the pressure of modern economic technology. For this same Coleridgean reason, scientistic epistemology, as reflected let’s say in the work of Cassirer, does not satisfy him. Owing to his late-romantic development of philosphy, he is at home with

the odd mixture of pragmatism and metaphysics we find in thinkers as different as Bergson, Mead, Veblen, and Weber. Such

thinkers continue the development of a modern science of man as a social being. Burke is one of their youngest scions. His method consists of the most extreme concentration of spiral movement into a center (a word in a text) and simultaneous dispersion away from a center (a general sociological or metaphysical principle). His obsessive self-admonitions, his use of the expository “figures of thought” known in rhetoric as correctio (“I’ve just said this, but a better way to put it would be that,”

and transumptio, “having thus concluded, I can see that we might go even further, thus and so”), and above all the use of “the figure of summation,” suggests that, with Burke, we are looking at a modern scholastic, that is, a neo-Coleridgean. The scholastics, so far as I can see, thought that all the common lore about the human species was relevant to philosophy;

their commentaries thus made endless ad hoc corrections and accumulations as they went along. Coleridge, who modernized this method (again, as I see it), similarly had to develop a discourse in which no room is left for expository parsimony. Preternaturally sensitive to aesthetic nuance, Coleridge found no expressive detail too small or too insignificant to be worthy of inclusion in his commentary. It is to this mode of thinking that Burke adheres, insofar as he is a writer.

His most recent collection of essays states the underlying principles of the theory of symbolic action, which the author himself must obey.

Language as Symbolic Action begins by laying down five basic ‘‘clauses” for a definition of man: 1) Man uses, misuses, and is used by his symbols—i.e., his various languages. 2) Man

Volume and Body in Burke’s Criticism 159 invents and endlessly reinvents ‘‘the negative;”” he posits state-

ments about his world by forever noting that x is “not this,” y is “not that.” In short, man is by nature a dialectician. 3) Man, having invented language and other symbolic instruments of his psychosomatic being (clothing or microscopes, for example), soon finds that these instruments alienate him from both himself and all that surrounds him. 4) Man remains “‘goaded by the spirit of hierarchy.” He keeps on trying to increase the amount of order in his world. 5) Man is driven to perfect his thoughts, his actions, his productions, even his dreams, to the extent that

Burke says man is “rotten [not even just ripened] by perfection.” Man, in short, hasa perfection mania, if you take a Freudian view of the matter. Or, if a modern biochemical view, man is driven by his own teleonomy, his purposive nature, to follow out the lines of his thought to its ultimate limits. Of the five clauses I shall stress two, the second and the fifth. Man is the inventor of the negative. The final, sixty-page essay in Language as Symbolic Action, like much of The Rhetoric of Religion, is concerned with the elaboration of the negative. In traditional philosophy, No is treated propositionally, as the dialectical mechanism of definition: we draw the difference between the A and Not-A. Burke jumps quickly to a further distinction between propositional negation and dramatistic negation, where No takes the form of a command: Thou shalt NOT. Imagine the consequences of this shift in perspective. Burke holds that, in action, the negative involves a more than intellectual issue: The command mobilizes or immobilizes our motives, our feelings. Hence psyche and soma are reconnected. Body as well as mind assents to, or rejects, the command. From childhood on, man

keeps rediscovering that his own body is not someone else’s body, that his “body image” needs defining, that his body has endlessly to say Yes and No to an outside, impinging world. Burke once showed his colleagues how criticism resembled the ancient defensive art of the quarter-staff, Little John’s weapon. One had to keep one’s balance, one’s physical integrity, one’s

160 Angus Fletcher peripheral vision, and one’s side-glances, tuned to a situation of potential error at every moment.

Each fully conscious self-negation helps to define one’s borders, in relation to what’s happening around one. What interests me about this art of the quarter-staff is that it does require endless jumping about, a lot of agility—because who knows who’s coming at you, from here, there, everywhere?

If one asks, who needs all this agility, one can answer the question quite simply: Kenneth Burke needs it. He has studied many famous generalizations about man, has created a few of his own, and finds himself surrounded by thinkers who come at

him from all sides with a “What about this one ... what about that... take this... take that,” side-blows that he keeps parrying as he notices they may follow a given statement he has made. “I guess,” he recently wrote, “the truth is that, even more urgently than trying to help people ‘get along with people,’ [diplomacy] I was trying to get along with myself.”

In The Philosophy of Literary Form, the author called this “debating with myself in public.” If one were to adopt Berel Lang’s distinction between Expository, Performative, and Reflexive philosophic styles,* one might say that Burke mediates his own exposition and performance in a highly controlled, ongoing reflection upon the objective structure and subjective structuring of his own essays. However, I am inclined to think that Burke is mainly the performative type of philosopher, but for whom acts of seemingly “pure” exposition and reflection are incorporated into the performance itself. At any rate, he does debate with himself in public, again like Whitman, and, we might add, like Emerson. If youraise the art of the quarter-staver to Apollonian heights,

you get the back and forth motions of Plato’s dialectic. Such contests of mind force the dialectician to take a stand, from time to time, but at that very moment to anticipate a possible counterargument, which will require a shift in argumentative stance. Yet the underlying assumption is that a given person will,

Volume and Body in Burke’s Criticism 161 as dialectician, take up characteristic positions, which he may sustain more or less flexibly in the course of mental combat. I have deliberately essentialized (if not simplified) Burke’s philosophic “character” by holding that, with him, the persistent individual (Sam Weller’s ‘“‘indiwidal”) is a mixed creature—a psychomatic individual. Given this individuality, the quarterstaver specializes in the art of recovering his balance. To lose one’s balance in exposition is to digress too far for recovery. To retain balance is to return, at that perfectly chosen “‘last moment,” to the line of defense and attack. To my mind Burke keeps regaining his balance, more or less effectively, and thus keeps the game going. He manages this by rather confidently getting along with his own warring self.

Of course, getting along with oneself is not the usual definition of philosophy, unless by philosophy we mean a “philosophy of life,” when to get along with oneself may be the highest of human achievements. However, usually the philosopher is expected to be a more committed expositor, performer, or reflective mediator between exposition and performance. Given his commitment to philosophical writing, we are forced to evaluate Burke’s writing as something that he is doing when arguing with himself—a private affair made public.

In A Grammar of Motives, Burke showed, in effect, how the art of the quarter-staff could be a model for effective critical discourse. Because criticism is symbolic action, like poetry but with a different end, it could be analyzed as a ‘“‘dramatistic”’

method. The arguer would be the hero of discourse, as protagonists were heroes of plays, as the lyric “I” is the hero of a poem. This is possible because, dramatistically, the philosophic hero enacts what Burke calls ‘‘the paradox of substance.” This

paradox comes down to the fact that the more intently any character seeks his own identity or essence, the more he will need to define that identity and essence through dramatic interaction with the opposed or adjacent identities of others, Hamlet becomes what he is when he lets himself wrestle with the court

162 Angus Fletcher politics of Denmark; Prince Mishkin becomes a holy idiot only because he begins his career of self-discovery against the hierarchical setting of the older Russian aristocracy, and so on. The more the hero (the thinker) is or stands for something, the less

he will be something else. Thus Kenneth Burke has always stressed the main element of drama, its insistence on negativity, on conflict, on difference. As I have been trying to suggest, where Burke differs from so many philosophic critics is in his refusal to adopt the positivist’s “neutral” or ‘‘anonymous” stance. He includes himself in the

symbolic action of his own argument. He enters his own discourse as its hero, and dwells there. If the word autobiography did not normally refer only to past events, we could say that he has been busy writing his intellectual autobiography. We could even believe that his life has been what we see in his accumulated body of texts, each of which is a testimony to his presentness at the moment of composition. One quick way to assert one’s presence is to disagree, sensibly, with others who also claim to be present, or, as in this case, to disagree with oneself. The dramatic archetype of such self-analysis may be the soliloquies of Hamlet; modern equivalents appear in

Browning, Whitman, and even Tennyson (Maud is a ‘“‘monodrama’’),

To signal his own self-questioning, Burke usually tells us he has just made or is about to make a defensive or anticipatory jump. Let me give a few examples. In an essay on Emerson he asks: ‘“‘Where, then, are we?’ and adds, “I am trying to do at least three things at once.’’® Similar signals, culled at random, would be: “In the choice of examples, it suddenly occurred to me....”!° “Yet so far as I can see... .”*! “Gaining courage as we proceed, we might even contend....”!* “But we were referring to an essay on medieval rhetoric....”'* “We have not been trying to abolish, or debunk or refute, or even ‘to approve with reservations’... .’’'* “Maybe there would be no mystery. Maybe there would be none. For our present purposes, it does

Volume and Body in Burke’s Criticism 163 not matter....”15 I particularly liked another signal, which reminds me of Tristram Shandy: “If the point about the relation between Death and Mortification is already clear, the reader should skip this section.” *®

A more diachronically sequential philosopher would not need

these signals. He would write so economically that either the previous section, or the later en plus section, would be unnecessary, but Burke composes a bit like Eric Satie, who made fun of stubborn musical sequence in Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear. Burke does claim that the further section on Death and Mortification is not absolutely required, but he puts it in, in effect twice, just in case the reader might want the argument “one more time.” Who knows?—reiteration might be profitable. To signal changes of direction and redirection, minute drama-

tistic negations and definitions of body, Burke uses the sort of phrases I have mentioned. To prevent the whole argument from becoming totally Shandyan, he uses another and even more important figuration. In rhetoric it would be called a “‘summation scheme.”’

For example, Language as Symbolic Action begins with five “summarizing” essays, but the expressions “‘to sum up,” or “‘in sum,” occur throughout Burke’s discourse, at beginnings, middles, and ends. They signal what Burke at one point calls “our windup.” !7 Section IX of “A Dramatistic View of the Origins of Language” is entitled “In Sum;” Section IX lists five major distinctions already reached in previous pages—yet the essay itself has another forty-seven pages to go. Its last section, ‘“‘Postscripts on the Negative,” rounds to its conclusion with yet another “In Sum,” which lists seven interlocking ideas, the last of which is simply give as ‘‘Da Capo” —i.e., ‘‘Dear reader, you now go right back to the beginning again, and play the whole piece through once more.”

Da capo: that is the formal implication of a summational method. The summary forces the reader back over a previously

articulated set of moves. The previous argument has spiraled

164 Angus Fletcher outward: the summary gathers that argument into a deliberately

reductive list, into a primal embodiment of thought. Treated purely as poetry, the summation scheme recasts the argument into allegorical epitomes. One might go further: Burke’s summary lists of ‘“‘principles” have an effect of personification, which prevents them from acting simply as a last reminder of basic axioms. They do function mnemonically, but they also re-

cast ideas into reforged ingots. I think Burke is aware of this double effect, which he justifies by his claim that if you push an argument far enough into all its highways and byways, you find you have described a wide discursive circle of associatively linked ideas. These can only be put in order by means of tautological ‘‘cycles’’ of key terms, the coordinates of the “‘terministic screen.”” However, the rhetorical and poetic effect of the summational scheme is not unexpected: the recycled terms soon become archetypal figures in an allegory.

If summational schemes produce archetypal repetitions of “principles,” if the da capo technique tends to fixate the terministic screen, there is a risk that the critic will be stalled in a vicious cycle, but it seems to me that Burke’s fifth symbolic principle prevents him from arguing and discoursing in bad circles. Instead, this fifth principle accounts for a pulsating format of discourse, which moves through spirals of argument. In brief, the notion is that symbolic action implies a “principle of perfection,” its own entelechy, which Burke’s own writing reveals, even when he is describing how it works for others. Aristotle’s entelechy is ‘‘the notion that each being aims at the perfection natural to its kind (or, etymologically, is marked by a ‘possession of telos within’).”'* Perfected discourse thence must pursue its inner intentions to their last possible stage of development. But what is the last stage, what is the telos? How do you know you have reached the end of the line? My supposition is simply that Burke finds himself close to the end of an argument when his discourse has, to his satisfaction, unravelled what he calls the ‘“‘motivational tangle.” *? Such

Volume and Body in Burke’s Criticism 165 a tangle ensues when, for example, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus finds himself entangled by the conflicting forces of his nationality, his social class, his particular family, and his own identity. An even more complex unravelling occurs in two other more extended dramatic works: the two parts of Goethe’s Faust, to which Language as Symbolic Action devotes about fifty pages, and the Oresteia, which develops a “labyrinthine puzzle at the ultimate verbally attainable depths of the trilogy.” 20 Such works

are symbolically so involuted that they comprise the total furnishing of a perfected symbolic space; in them we find a literature so fully furnished that it can be exemplary for Burke, for whom, as Blackmur said, literature is ‘‘a resort or home, for a philosophy or psychology of moral possibility.” Such ideal documents permit the critic to domesticate his literary thoughts, so that he can walk round and round within their clarified tangle, at home in their endless circularity, their perfect clutter. Whether such models need work for everyone is not my chief concern. Rather, I want to suggest how Burke’s “principle of perfection” enlivens his endless walk around the house, his delighted revisitation of all its rooms, seen always in slightly different perspectives. How does one give life to the repetition compulsion? Perhaps the answer lies in the way Burke aligns perfection with transcendence. For him the movement toward or into perfection, the entelechy, requires a very flexible pursuit of what he calls ‘“‘transcendence.”

He has been thinking about transcendence for many years, and has written many pages to clarify his evolving thoughts on the subject, but about ten years ago he wrote an essay on Emerson, “I, Eye, Aye—Concerning Emerson’s Early Essay on ‘Na-

ture,’ and the Machinery of Transcendence,” reprinted in Language as Symbolic Action, which more or less summarized

his position regarding the matter. In this essay he recalled an earlier study, where, following Cicero, he had tried to designate the seven major offices that people perform for each other.

166 Angus Fletcher These were: government, service, defense, teaching, entertainment, cure, and one final function, which he found hard to isolate, but which seemed, in essence, to be “consolation.” Having thought further about this last function, Burke concluded that consolation, performed usually by a priesthood, must involve a connection of man and some domain beyond his material world. We typically console, on death, by statements about an afterlife, a life beyond human mortality. This thought led to the idea that transcendence authorizes the seventh general “office” of a developed human society. “IT suddenly realized,’ Burke says, that ‘a realm HERE is being talked about in terms of a realm ELSEWHERE.” ?! So he decided to say that men pontificate for each other, they make bridges; “that’s what [as symbolic function] transcendence is: the building of a terministic bridge whereby one realm is transcended by being viewed in terms of a realm ‘beyond.’”?? From the ensuing discussion of Emerson we learn that, while the redeeming catharsis of bodily need is aesthetically most prominent in the drama, transcendence appears mainly in ‘‘processes of dialectic,” as surely the example of one founding father, Plato, demonstrates. Burke notes the close affinity of drama and dialectic, their common use of the competitive, combative, mode. He notes that drama pits persons against each other, whereas dialectic pits thoughts. He then moves through a various and fluent account of the way Emerson, in his early and optimistic essay ‘‘Nature” (Burke calls it a ‘happiness pill”), develops the terministic process of pontifical bridge-building. Emerson said it clearly enough: “the fact is seen in the light of an idea.”?? Nature will appear as super-nature, if one invents an intermediate being, ‘‘the god-man,” who can move between this world and the world beyond. Burke’s detailed discussion of Emerson argues for a general theory of transcendence. The essay dilates notions that can also be found in Heidegger’s meditation, ‘‘Building Dwelling Thinking.” Just as Heidegger argues that a building, most perfectly a

Volume and Body in Burke’s Criticism 167 bridge, brings together the “fourfold” of earth and heaven, mortal and divine, Burke, following Emerson, traces transcen-

dental bridgings between the natural and the supernatural. Emerson, like the later philosophers, was looking for a way in which symbolic bridgings permit a manifold ephiphany of life and things.

Technical philosophy may have an abstract definition of transcendental bridging that will enclose the idea in a museum display case. For Burke, to transcend means simply to force the symbolic value of something beyond its local meaning, its meaning in situ. This, in a way, was also true of Plato. He would see the model transcendence of a thing in its idea. Burke, having loosened up the terministic screen of ‘‘the ideal,” holds that the direction of ideas is not, however, the only symbolic route beyond things. One thing can go beyond another thing, by metonymy, as a chair can go beyond a table, if you range them in a dining room. Or anirony can go beyond a direct statement. Or a metaphor can carry one thing’s meaning beyond itself into a symbolic conjunction with another meaning. Above all, a single thing goes ‘“‘beyond itself” when it becomes the sign of a larger whole, through synecdoche. Language as figured speech, in short, implies immediate verbal transcendence. As soon as you have poetry, figured speech, you have a beyonding of plain indication. You point, and you point beyond. Thus, in this larger view, signs can be transcendences of other signs. Words for general classes can transcend words for particulars, and, of course, as in traditional dialectic, ideas can transcend things and even other ideas. If such games are played out to the full, as we find in another Heidegger essay, ‘What are Poets For?” we discover that language itself possesses transcendental competence, owing to its capacity for metamorphic figuration of speech. For Heidegger, language is the precinct, the house of Being. Before the rise of modern semiology, with Peirce, let’s say, such a tenet would appear scarcely possible to hold. But now

we are more bouyant, more skilled in the permutations of

168 Angus Fletcher rhetoric. Through a meditation on language we discover the oscillation between the inner and outer, and we can control this oscillation specifically because we have a clear object of analysis, actual language, which allows an endless back and forth between the two worlds. Whereas idealist or positivist philosophy was more or less forced to strengthen the walls between things and

ideas, because it failed to speculate sufficiently on the nature of symbol, we are somewhat more competent to pass through these walls.

In Burke’s case I believe that, while his thought is, as I have said, focused by an intense awareness of body, his writing is shaped by his own version of transcendence. This, in turn, is his principle of symbolic ‘“‘perfection.” The “negative” body keeps

checking flights of fancy, while the mind keeps projecting further and further beyond the limits proposed by body. The effect of this projection is to give Burke’s writing its characteristic ‘‘volume.”

Few critics are manifestly more voluminous, but I have in mind something other than mere bulk. The key to Burke’s method is its way of rolling and unrolling an argument. With him arguments evolve, revolve, involve, and devolve. (Cf. remarks on Giuseppe Borgese,** “‘books in the ‘end of the line’ mode exemplifying the serial or ‘involute’ method.”’) They keep

on turning because, with him, one thing leads to another, in spiral expansion and contraction. Every idea can be expressed in

base form or in transcendent form. The latter expansion, as when one speaks of the CIA as an ‘‘arm” of the government, requires a heavy emphasis on the organicist figure of synecdoche,

a figure which in turn assumes the a priori truth or power of some form of supreme ‘“‘wholeness.” The government is assumed

to be a whole body-politic, whose parts have a living relation to its wholeness (and its health), just as they have an active role to

play in terms of dramatistic functions of government as the “heading” of the yet larger whole entity, the state. At some point in this process the critic must give hierarchical precedence

Volume and Body in Burke’s Criticism 169 to some highest court of appeal, to the body’s “head,” and thence arises the need (in Burke’s view of things) for man’s recourse to what he calls “‘god-terms,” terms for supreme being.

If one asks how Burke’s discourse keeps track of itself, or how it almost loses track, as in the devolution of the essay, Philosophy of Literature, one has two options: 1) Analyze a particular discourse in detail—we have no time for that. 2) Claim

a general Burkean procedure. Option 2 promises brevity, if not clarity. I would say that Burke’s peculiar mixture of realism and transcendentalism, his theoretical mixture of clear dramatic plotting and misty transcendental slithering, depends, if not precisely on the rhetorical figure, then generally on the rhetorical attitude, which may be identified with transumption, transumptio, metalepsis, a figure of speech and thought that might be called Burke’s benign addiction. Recently, Harold Bloom identified metalepsis as “the largest single factor in fostering a tone of conscious rhetoricity in Romantic and Post-Romantic poetry.” *° “To transume means ‘to take across,’ and as a transfer of terms we can define transumption as a taking across to the poem’s farther shore,” ?* a Bloomian definition that recalls the last page of Burke’s essay on Emerson.”’ There Burke epitomizes the

“pattern” of transcendent thought with the Virgilian line: Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore (and they stretched forth their hands, through love of the farther shore). The critic’s gloss on this line makes clear its meaning: ‘“‘In the early part of his trip to the Underworld, Virgil encountered those of the dead who could not cross Cocytus and the Stygian swamps. Charon would not ferry them to their final abode because they had not been buried.” As Burke carries Virgil one stage further: ‘“‘Wheth-

er there is or is not an ultimate shore towards which we, the unburied, would cross, [cf. Vico’s idea of humanity: humans are those who bury their dead, make humus], transcendence involves dialectical processes whereby something HERE is interpreted in terms of something THERE, something beyond itself.”** Note: not beyond this world. The genius of Burke’s method lies in the

170 Angus Fletcher the way he finally connects the vision of a Beyond with a vision of the here-and-now: thus the various “modes of ‘beyonding’ . . . overlap upon connotations of victimage where symbolic fulfill-

ment is attained in the ambiguities of death and immortality (with technical twists whereby, if ‘death’ means ‘not-life,’ ‘immortality’ compounds the negative, giving us ‘not-not-life’.” 9

Thus, indeed, if we care, “we stretch forth our hands through love of the farther shore,” and we find that “the machinery of language is so made that things are necessarily placed in terms of a range broader than the terms for those things themselves.” *°

To use an athletic metaphor, the transumptive or metaleptic method is set up like a relay race, where each symbolic equation (arm=government in action, probably executive) ceases to be a static equation in the mind and becomes the symbolic act by which each symbolic event, each transport of a term, leads to a ‘‘handing on.” The baton passes; each developed term, each sentence, each figuration of an idea, each paragraph, each section, and finally each summation-scheme becomes only the lap in a relay race. An Elizabethan critic, with the beautiful name of Angel Day, defined metalepsis or transumption thus: “when by a certaine number of degrees we goe beyond that which we intend in troth, and have meaning to speake of, as to say: Accursed soyle that bred my cause of woe.” *! Or, as Blair refined the notion in his eighteenth-century text on rhetoric: “When the Trope is founded on the relation between an antecedent and a consequent, on what goes before, and immediately follows.” * Quintilian had stated: “It is the nature of metalepsis to forma kind of intermediate step between the term transferred and the thing to which it is transferred, having no meaning in itself, but merely providing a transition.” ** Bloom glosses “no meaning in itself” as equivalent to ‘‘no presence or time in itself.” °* The definition of the term remains obscure, and examples are rarely given which would help to define it. The OED gives, from Smith, Mystical Rhetoric (1657), a possibly useful instance: “Metalep-

sis, which is when divers Tropes are shut up in one word: as

Volume and Body in Burke’s Criticism 171 2 Kings 2.9: I pray thee let me have a double portion of thy spirit,”°5 where “portion” encapsulates a variety of apportioning senses through the metaphor of a measured drink. Every sentence in Burke possesses this metaleptic value: it is a crossing (as Bloom would call it) or a bridging (Burke’s and Heidegger’s term), which draws conscious attention to the leading character of the leading question. Each question then becomes a leading answer to a precedent question and another consequent answer,

which in turn becomes a question for what is to follow. Sentences in Burke, paragraphs certainly, are laps in this endlessly overlapping race toward an infinitely receding finish line. Anyone who has trouble reading Montaigne will have trouble

with Burke. Finding himself always on a bridge of exposition will upset a certain kind of reader. This reader hurries to get to the point. He rarely pauses to reflect. His criticism is usually geared, as we say, to reach an externally required standard (not to a poetic standard). He associates integrity with efficiency, instead of the other way round. To such critics and readers of criticism Burke will have little to say, although even they may pick up good ideas here and there, especially from his many incisive analyses of dramatic plot

and poetic structure. However, his larger concerns will elude them, because they allow insufficient time for thought to addict their minds. If I have dwelt too little on the many quite masterful reductions of literary form Burke has given us, it has only been, once again for lack of time. Let me confess that I believe confusions about how to “spend our time” underlie many major troubles today in trying to survive with wisdom, humor, and dignity. (One of the odd things about twentieth-century revolutions is their awareness that only the die-hard revolutionaries have enough time; those who would evolve, who would be voluminous in politics, never have enough time—one wonders, has it always been so? Ironically, the die-hard quick-change artists are the first to capitulate to the failure of efficiency as a ‘moral possibility.”’)

172 Angus Fletcher Again, oddly, the New Critics, who were Burke’s first true competitors, wanted a quickly understood poetry. They (Brooks and Warren) got it, ingeniously, by overstressing ironic contemplation. But Burke has always taken a longer view, has been willing to run a more complex relay. The relay is the most interesting and complex race to run, perhaps because it most closely mirrors the human condition of achievement, in this case what Williams called ‘‘a success of good writing.” Burke is not the only person who runs the relay, but he has specified the necessity of overlap, if we are to continue to communicate, without dropping the age-old baton of the cry for “‘more humanity,” not less. More handing on, not less. Belatedness, as Bloom has shown, is a fact of life. None of us can reach the ultimate shore. Only the sense that enough love and enough knowledge move us to reach out toward it, beyond our hidden selves, can constitute our small portion of success. Perhaps this is a dream, only, of success. If so, it is not a bad dream; anxious, but no nightmare. It is a brightly, athletically lived daydream. How strange, then to recall my basic analogy: that Burke writes criticism from the stance of the quarter-staver. In this analogy he must be waiting for a proper blow to his argument,

so that parry may meet thrust and he can knock me back a step or two. Very well: what’s the matter with Burke’s stance? I cannot attack him on common-sense grounds—for example, on the way he stresses drug addiction in Coleridge. I cannot attack his control of discourse within paragraphs. How then,

leaving other things aside, should I attack him? It suddenly occurs to me that | can ask, where is beauty in all this? Maybe Blackmur was right, when he said Burke’s method could as well be applied to Marie Corelli or Dashiel Hammett, as to King Lear, or to some other sacred text of Western literature. There is per-

haps too much even-handedness about Burke’s enterprise. It’s not that all is grist for his mill. It’s that he grinds everything so evenly. Not evenly in political terms: he singles out only those

Volume and Body in Burke’s Criticism 173 works that he finds most politically dangerous or benign. However, aesthetically he fails to give us an account of beauty, except by occasional implication. Rather, he focuses ‘‘on the sublime.” All his literary moments are, then, too awesome or made too awesome, to satsify me. In art there is repose, there is beauty, and there are standards of beauty, some true “‘garlands of repose,” and these transcend rhetoric. To this transcendence Burke has paid too little systematic heed. Note that I say nothing of his sins of commission— they don’t bother me. (They bother other readers.) A critical

issue thus remains, to be dealt with by fine-honed and wise analysts. What bothers me about Burke is not his mode of argument (which is usually incisive, tense, and logical, always selfconsciously on its toes), nor his larger humane concerns, nor his humane interest in the theology of revealed religion, but quite simply that he never tells me why works of art have their main quality, which, for lack of a better word, we call their ‘‘beauty.”

He reveals their symbolic energy and power, but not their beauty. Maybe, like Richards, he regards the aesthetic as a dead issue, but if so I would like to hear what he has to say, in sum, about that particular ‘‘motivational tangle.” Somewhere Burke writes that he started out as an aesthete, and then was converted, perhaps influenced by Richards, to a new, and to him more important, interest: communication. This

interest bears upon any aesthetic analysis, but notice that the setting of critical interest in rhetoric, linguistics, and other communicational fields has changed over the years since Burke began his work. Can we still say, with Blackmur, ‘‘Criticism ... is the formal discourse of an amateur?” The field has turned into a technical one, what with the introduction of novel critical subdisciplines, such as semiotics and structuralism. Burke remains an amateur, in Blackmur’s honorific sense. Perhaps his most important gift to us is his imperturbable critical “‘interdependence with the other arts.” °° This interdependence marks the true amateur, and although one critic might want Burke to

174 Angus Fletcher do it better (how?), my belief is that his work is now and will remain an exemplary pursuit of the twin aims, the twin perfections, of form and value, as these define the destination of a criticism that strives to equip us in the dangerous art of living.

NOTES 1. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), p. 68. 2. William Carlos Williams, ‘‘Kenneth Burke,’ in Critical Responses to Kenneth Burke, 1924-1966, William H. Rueckert, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), p. 16. 3. Ibid., p. 17.

4.R. P. Blackmur, ‘“‘A Critic’s Job of Work,” in Form and Value in Modern Poetry (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1952), p. 360. 5. Ibid., p. 362. 6. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, p. 68. 7. Ibid., pp. 272-273. 8. Berel Lang, ‘“‘Space, Time, and Philosophical Style,” Critical Inquiry 2 (Summer 1976): 263-280. 9. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), p. 191. 10. Ibid., p. 322. 11. Ibid., p. 91. 12. Ibid., p. 43. 13. Ibid., p. 173. 14, Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Cleveland and New York: World, 1962), p. 122. 15. Ibid., p. 123. 16. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 200. 17. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, p. 252. 18. Ibid., p. 17. 19. Ibid., p. 91. 20. Ibid., p. 126. 21. Ibid., p. 187.

Volume and Body in Burke’s Criticism 175 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., p. 192. 24. Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form, p. 88. 25. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 102. 26. Ibid. 27. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, p. 200. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. “Metalepsis,” OED, 1971 edition. 32. Ibid. 33. Quintillian, The Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), VIII, vi, p. 323. 34. Bloom, A Map of Misreading, p. 102. 35. ‘‘Metalepsis,” OED, 1971 edition. 36. Blackmur, ‘‘A Critic’s Job of Work,” p. 339.