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Content KENNETH BURKE'S DRAMATISM
AND THE STUDY OF POPULAR CULTURE
by
Charles Ronald Kimberling
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
May 1981
UMI Number: DP23083
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D O C T O R O F P H IL O S O P H Y
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DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
INTRODUCTION ........................................ 1
Chapter
I. RECENT POPULAR CULTURE CRITICISM:
AN OVERVIEW.................................. 4
II. DRAMATISM AND AUTHORSHIP IN POPULAR
CULTURE...................................... 36
Dramatism and Popular Culture
Criticism.................................. 47
Dramatism, Authorial Intention, and
Artistic Conventions ................. 54
Jaws: Collaborative Authorship in
the Making of the Movie................... 6 5
III. FORM IN POPULAR CULTURE..................... 81
Kenneth Burke and F o r m ................... 82
Burke and Cawelti.......................... 92
Form and Television....................... 98
Shogun on TV: Some Observations on
F o r m ...................................... 102
IV. THE AUDIENCE AND POPULAR CULTURE........... 120
Aspects of Response to Popular Art .... 133
The Dead Zone: Supernatural Novel for
an Empirically Minded Audience ........... 143
V. ALEMBIC AT I O N ............................... 158
BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................ 173
..ii
INTRODUCTION
The work which follows represents an effort to scratch
an itch. The itch was my long-felt sense of frustration
when I was confronted by those literary scholars who per
sisted in avoiding serious discussion whenever they encoun
tered popular culture. Even though they should have known
better, these explicators of such popular writers as
Shakespeare and Dickens seemed to crumble when faced with
the popular art of their own age. Rather than admit they
knew little about the complexities of punk rock, for exam
ple, these guardians of the canon would resort to ad
hominem arguments about "plastic bubblegum music" and
"commercial exploitation." Few cared to use their training
in criticism to try to make sense of the popular fare of
our times.
Though I may be overgeneralizing, I am setting up no
straw men. "Serious" critics do not take popular culture
seriously. How does one demonstrate to them— in terms they
can relate to— that popular culture is worth investigating?
The present study is an essay with that purpose.
1
Kenneth Burke is my principal source. His theory of
Dramatism provides me with a methodological instrument to
investigate and unravel some of the mysteries shrouding the
production and consumption of popular art. In Chapters II,
III and IV, I explicate Burke's methodology and apply it to
some of the major questions concerning artistry, form, and
audience response in the popular arts.
The organizational scheme of this study follows the
outline of traditional rhetoric. After first presenting an
overview of the major trends in popular culture criticism
in the past twenty years, I move in Chapter II to a consid
eration of the artist, an examination of ethos, if you will.
A study of form in popular culture follows next, in Chap
ter III. Audience response— pathos— is dealt with in
Chapter IV. Finally, in Chapter V, I speculate briefly on
the type of studies of popular art that may follow from a
further application of Burke's ideas.
Throughout the study, I offer samples of "applied
Dramatism," practical criticism of the popular arts designed
to help demonstrate that Burke's is not an airy methodology
but one that has something to say about real works, of art
present in the real world of men and women. Though the
original sources are all novels, I have chosen a film
(Jaws), a television miniseries (Shogun) and a popular
novel (The Dead Zone) to help fend off those potential
2
critics who might suggest that Dramatism fails to work for
more than just the print medium. I hope I am forgiven for
confining my critical voyages to the narrow straits and
channels close to the land covered in a particular chapter.
More adventurous sailings can hopefully be scheduled in the
future, in a work less concerned with the development of an
overall methodology.
I. RECENT POPULAR CULTURE CRITICISM:
AN OVERVIEW
In its Fall 1975 issue, the Journal of Popular Culture
departed from its usual practice of publishing mostly
articles dealing with specific works of popular culture in
order to devote 159 pages to a discussion of theory and
methodology. This was a more significant event than one
would surmise, as is evidenced by the publishing history
of the journal. In its first five years (1967-72), only
13 of 281 articles dealt with popular culture theory.^ In
introducing the theoretical pieces, JPC editor Ray Browne
asserted that:
the time is obviously ripe for a full-scale and
comprehensive examination of where the study of
popular culture is, what its methodologies are,
and whether in our research we perceive where we
are headed and are using the most effective tools
to effect our intentions.2
The articles represent a wide variety of approaches to
popular culture, ranging from a critique of aesthetic the
ories which mandate normative evaluation to a polemical
piece attacking as artificial the separation of American
Studies and popular culture studies. Arguments are made
4
for the use of established methodologies as diverse as
Russian Formalism, structuralism, and iconographic analysis
of visual images. Several short pieces conclude the sec
tion by arguing for the relevance of particular academic
disciplines in shedding light on popular culture; among
those covered are cultural geography, political science,
history, philosophy and even foreign languages.
Three themes stand out. First is an effort to develop
critical positions running counter to the sentiments in
opposition to mass culture held by many modern critics.
The second theme represents a movement toward an "inte
grated" criticism which looks at the complete act of com
munication binding together the artist, the audience, and
the work. This new direction represents a turning away
from more limited modes of criticism, modes which fail to
consider each of these three key elements. While falling
short of developing a full-blown rhetorical criticism, the
authors who argue for an integrated approach do a credit
able job of highlighting the deficiencies of any theory
that merely sheds light on a single aspect of the communi
cative process, e.g., Marshall McLuhan1s obsession with the
effects of the medium. Finally, several of the 1975 arti
cles address previous attempts to develop a separate aes
thetic for the popular arts and argue in favor of descrip
tive rather than prescriptive criticism.
5
In tackling the anti-mass culture critique, Rubin
Rabinovitz argues that Oswald Spengler's theories on the
"decline of the West" are responsible for a series of
"spin-offs" on the same theme, best typified by the fol
lowing statement by T. S. Eliot:
We can assert with some confidence that our own
period is one of decline; that the standards of
culture are lower than they were fifty years ago;
and that the evidences of this decline are vis
ible in every department of human activity. I
see no reason why the decay of culture should not
proceed much further, and why we should not even
anticipate a period, of some duration, of which
it is possible to say that it will have no-
culture . ^
The lineage traced by Rabinovitz passes from Spengler to
Ortega y Gassett (The Revolt of the Masses) to Eliot to
Dwight Macdonald, whose essay "Masscult and Midcult" was
published as recently as 1960. A unified theme shared by
all four writers is that mass culture promises to overtake
traditional high culture and ultimately bring about its
demise.
An important discussion of these ideas took place at
a two-day conference on "Problems of Mass Culture and Mass
Media," sponsored by the Tamiment Institute in June 1959
and reported in the Spring 1960 issue of Daedalus. Schol
ars, critics, and mass media industry executives such as
Hannah Arendt, Edward Shils, Ernest Van Den Haag, Leo
Rosten, Frank Stanton, James Baldwin, Stanley Edgar Hyman,
6
and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., all took part. Though
definite "pro" and "anti" mass culture camps were repre
sented, the Tamiment essays clearly demonstrate that both
sides viewed the phenomenon of mass culture as a problem
resulting from twentieth-century technology, the main dis
agreement being whether the development of mass society
spelled the end of traditional standards in art or the
beginning of an educational process whereby the masses
might some day achieve the aesthetic sophistication hith- .
erto reserved for the elite.
The former position was most stridently argued by
Van Den Haag, whose suspicions about the effects of mass
media gave rise to the question, "Does not the constant
slick assault on our senses and minds produce monotony and
4
indifference and prevent experience?" Van Den Haag feels
that the standardization of aesthetic components in mass
art tends to do away with originality, thus crippling the
modern citizen's ability to exceed the boundaries of the
ordinary. He feels that an audience that becomes totally
accustomed to stereotypical characters and formulaic plots
will lose the ability to appreciate original genius.
Edward Shils takes the opposite stance, arguing that
"Modern technology has liberated man from the burden of
physically exhausting labor, and has given him resources
through which new experiences of sensation, conviviality,
7
5
and introspection have become possible." Shils reminds us
of our past, noting that in earlier ages most people were
forced to engage in the sort of backbreaking labor neces
sary for mere survival. His attitude is therefore optimis
tic, open to the suggestion that modern technology may well
be an "upward leveler," incorporating the mass of the popu
lation into cultured society. Shils does not take the
extreme position that works of popular art communicate the
same lofty values as works of high art, nor does he argue
that the mass audience obtains as much from its experience
of mass art as it would from high art. Nevertheless, he
proclaims that "The quantity of culture consumed in mass
society is certainly greater than at any other epoch. . . .
It is especially at the levels of mediocre and brutal cul
ture that an immense expansion has occurred, but the con
sumption of superior culture has also increased.
The argument made by Rabinovitz in his 1975 article
dovetails with the earlier one of Shils. Rabinovitz
asserts that "The expansion of mass art is part of a series
of cultural and social changes which never have threatened
traditional art. These changes have to do with altered
patterns of literacy, education, and the transmission of
7
culture over the last century." The tremendous increase
in literacy, according to Rabinovitz, has made cultural
products available to portions of the population that for
merly would have remained ignorant throughout their lives.
8
Mass culture is simply the culture of the masses, operating
in a different arena entirely from traditional culture.
Thus any remaining fears about an allegedly omnivorous
"masscult" must be laid to rest; scholars should get on
with the business of exercising their natural curiosity
and develop methods for dealing with popular culture.
In a companion piece in the JPC methodological issue,
Mary G. Land attempts to "rehabilitate" mass man from the
set of behavioristic assumptions that sees him as a hapless
victim of his environment, responding in a fixed manner to
norms, values and roles defined by others. As Land put it:
During the 1960s "All Power to the People" was
not limited to a tussle over a small piece of
Berkeley real estate. Critics, linguists, soci
ologists, historians set about regenerating mass
man. No longer a homogenized slob, used by his
culture and its symbolic manipulators, mass man
emerged in the studies of the new cognitive
anthropologists, ethnosemanticists, ethnohistor-
ians, ethnomethodologists, and symbolic integra-
tionists as using his culture on the basis of a
shared symbolic world. . . . The new empathizing
disciplines studied the way a given culture
classifies and systematizes its regulations, and
they presented mass man as a free, autonomous
being, capable of assessing what was presented g
to him and mapping lines of behavior accordingly.
Land draws upon the work of Hayden White in arguing that all
persons learn a particular culture in a fashion analogous
to the acquisition of one's first language. The rules of a
culture are given on the surface, and 'competence- in one's
culture is gained from one's interaction within the culture
rather than from a sort of distanced observation. Thus
popular culture is not different from any other sort of
culture, according to Land. It can best be studied as a
set of "complex sign systems between members of social
groups. Decoding these messages requires the kind of close
reading usually brought to bear on Virginia Woolf, and it
is a task rendered even more difficult because such signal
9
systems do not call attention to themselves as messages."
Besides attempting to defeat the positions taken by
earlier critics of mass culture, the contributors to the
theory and methodology issue of JPC generally focus on a
second theme, the notion that popular culture criticism
should treat all elements of the communicative chain— the
artist, the artifact and the audience— not just one element
taken in isolation. R. Serge Denisoff summarizes this
position when he writes:
The dominant technique in studying popular cul
ture frequently is inadequate to deal with the
entire iceberg. Many popular culture studies do
in fact transform popular art into an artifact
"suitable" for academic study, not by ideological
design but by the approach used to study the phe
nomenon. This approach, termed content analysis
in the social sciences or literary criticism in
the humanities, finds the scholar grabbing on to
verse, lyric, film, novel, and deriving meaning
which may or may not have anything to do with
either the intention of the creator or the per
ception or interpretation of the audience.10
Denisoff's use of the all-encompassing term "literary crit
icism" may indicate a lack of familiarity with recent ...
10
critical movements that turn away from the limited
preoccupation with textual study as promulgated by the New
Criticism of the previous generation. Nevertheless/ we can
see in his statement a strong underlying desire for a "rhe
torical" method, one which attempts to look at the entire
complex web of relationships binding together the artist,
the work, and the audience.
In moving toward such an "integrated" approach,
Denisoff and others go beyond the type of popular culture
criticism that seemed dominant in the Sixties and early
Seventies. Such criticism generally dealt with only a
single aspect of the communicative chain. An expressionist
critic, for example, would focus solely on the role of the
artist in developing a message. Much of the early artist-
centered criticism of rock music fits this description.
Mimetic critics, often sociologists by training, would
focus on how well a work of popular art reflected the
audience's "real world" of experience. A rational treat
ment of surrealistic or fantasy settings in such popular
fare as science fiction or the Tolkien trilogy suffered at
the hands of such critics. Objective critics followed in
the path of the New Criticism in dealing with the formal
aspects of a work at the expense of both the artist and the
audience.
Nonetheless, critics and popular culture theorists
such as Marshall McLuhan and Herbert Gans served to improve
11
the level of discussion about popular art. During the late
Sixties and early Seventies, the study of popular culture
made considerable progress from the days of Dwight Macdon
ald's masscult critique. In the next few pages, I will
explore the ideas of several of these critics.
We may begin with Marshall McLuhan, since he is, in
the estimation of many critics, the person most responsible
for the growth of a popular culture "movement." Trained as
a Shakespeare scholar, McLuhan was a moderately well-known
English professor from Toronto who established himself as
an original and speculative thinker with the publication of
11
The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962. Simply put, McLuhan1s cen
tral thesis is that changes in the media of communication
affect human cognition. Even if the surface "content" were
to remain unchanged, the presentation of such content in
one medium rather than another adds a dimension to the
experience, a dimension with content values of its own.
This is what McLuhan means by his oft-quoted assertion,
"The medium is the message."
A central issue for McLuhan is how much sensory
involvement is required for the audience to experience
material presented by a particular medium. All media are
seen as extensions of basic senses; the television camera,
for instance, is an extension of the eye and the telephone
an extension of the ear. As McLuhan states it;
12
A hot medium is one that extends one single sense
in "high definition." High definition is the
state of being well filled with data. A photo
graph is, visually, "high definition." A cartoon
is "low definition," simply because very little
visual information is provided. Telephone is a
cool medium, or one of low definition, because
the ear is given a meager amount of information.
And speech is a cool medium of low definition,
because so little is given and so much has to be
filled in by the listener. On the other hand,
hot media do not leave so much to be filled in or
completed by the audience. Hot media are, there
fore, low in participation, and cool media are
high in participation or completion by the audi
ence. Naturally, therefore, a hot medium like
radio has very different effects on the user from
a cool medium like the telephone. ■ * ■ 2
It cannot be overemphasized that whenever McLuhan writes of
the audience "filling in" data, he is not at all commenting
on what we would ordinarily term content. He is simply
addressing the sensory responses that are summoned forth by
the nature of each medium. To oversimplify, not only is
the sense of sight a prerequisite for the task of reading
ordinary print, but so is the social training that makes us
read from left to right and from top to bottom, so that
information is processed in a somewhat linear sequence.
Habitual encounters with different media, McLuhan suggests,
form certain patterns of thought that have a broad impact
upon social organization.
In Understanding Media, McLuhan develops the theme
that modern audiovisual and electronic media such as film,
radio, and television have shifted us from experiencing the
world as detached, rational creatures to experiencing it in
13
a tribal, mythic mode. The electronic media represent an
advance over nineteenth century sequential mechanization in
that they compress the temporal dimension of encountering
information by presenting much information covering an
array of senses in a small span of time. Television, in
other words, has more sensory "flesh" on it than a book.
One can think of the nexus of mental correspondences one is
forced to create upon viewing a cinematic "montage." As
the images fire rapidly before our eyes, they force us to
build a more elaborate symbolic array. Thus, as McLuhan
would have it, those of us living in the present "electric
age" are involved in pattern recognition instead of the
recognition of sequential, cause-effect relationships that
characterized the cognitive mode of Enlightenment man.
This, according to McLuhan, alters our very experience of
reality, so that it becomes mythic:
For myth is the instant vision of a complex pro
cess that ordinarily extends over a long period.
Myth is contraction or implosion of any process,
and the instant speed of electricity confers the
mythic dimension on ordinary industrial and social
action today.13
For McLuhan, then, the central focus of popular culture
study should be upon how different media shape the con
sciousnesses of their audiences. Content is unimportant to
McLuhan, at least in the way in which we ordinarily think
of content. The "denotative" aspects of content, such as
14
plot and character, matter very little. McLuhan is
interested in the "message" conveyed by a work of art, the
message being the "change of scale or pace or pattern that
14
it introduces into human affairs." Such changes come
about by our responses to new media, not by our responses
to plot, theme, characterization, and so on.
Though McLuhan's theories have failed to gain wide
spread adherence from within the ranks of traditional
English and comparative literature departments, they have
had a strong influence on commercial criticism and on other
disciplines, such as film and journalism, which deal with
popular culture materials. This influence has, unfortu
nately, led several scholars off the main path. I say
"unfortunately" because there are two basic shortcomings
in McLuhan's work. First, he neglects the role of the • *
artist. With media possessing "life energies" of their
own under McLuhan1s scheme, the conative aspect of dis
course is shifted entirely from the realm of the artist as
he strives to engage the audience, to the realm of "con
tact," in the sense that the linguist Roman Jakobson uses
15
the term. Fully half of the rhetorical department of
invention is lost under this scheme, since McLuhan neglects
entirely the artist's conception of audience, a factor that
most rhetorical theorists would see as quite important in
the creation of a work of art.
15
A second criticism has already been hinted at.
McLuhan refuses to see what we would ordinarily term "con
tent" as being important to audiences in terms of the
socialization process. The important thing for McLuhan is
the "mind massaging" we get from various media. Here I
suspect we are merely dealing with McLuhan's penchant for
overstating his case, for I find it difficult to envision
him postulating no significant difference between Evita
and Casablanca except that one is a play and the other a
movie. Singleminded attention to form over and above any
consideration of substance leaves out the possibility of
discussion on the role of shared culture in the creation
and experience of art. The concept of "identification,"
which will be discussed in later chapters, would be "unin
teresting" in McLuhan's scheme, since implicit in his
thought is the assumption that all transformations wrought
by media reduce content to a neutral substance serving no
useful purpose.
Another form of popular culture criticism to emerge
during the Sixties and early Seventies represented an
attempt on the part of sociologists to classify audience
*
types. Partly this was an effort to counter the arguments
of elitist critics with a plea for cultural pluralism;
working toward this end, sociological critics tried to
show that certain classes of people have an entirely dif
ferent cultural orientation toward "art" than other classes.
16
Any attempt to force the values and standards of one class
upon another would be a form of tyranny. According to this
argument, popular culture has legitimacy because it has a
rightful role in a cultural heterodoxy.
Perhaps the most widely read proponent of this view is
Herbert J. Gans, whose Popular Culture and High Culture
attempts to define five major "taste cultures" representing
16
different segments of the American Public. Gans* princi
pal concern is to establish a typology of culture creators
and consumers and to outline their shared value structures.
Unlike the rhetorician, Gans is more interested in explor
ing the group identifications of the various culture
consuming publics than he is in analyzing the acts of cre
ating and experiencing works of popular art.
Gans starts with the assumption that all persons have
aesthetic urges, but he asserts that the aesthetic appetite
may be satisfied in different ways. The bias against popu
lar culture is fed by a critical orientation away from
audience response:
High culture is creator-oriented and its aesthet
ics and its principles of criticism are based on
this orientation. The belief that the creator's
intentions are crucial and the values of the
audience almost irrelevant functions to protect
creators from the audience, making it easier for
them to create, although it ignores the reality
that every creator must respond to some extent to
an audience.
The popular arts are, on the whole, user-
oriented, and exist to satisfy audience values
17
and wishes. This is perhaps the major reason for
the antagonism of high culture towards the popu
lar arts and the tone of the mass culture
critique.^
High culture's orientation toward the artist, Gan argues,
explains the relative lack of refined criticism of the pop
ular arts. Formal criticism tends to focus upon the output
of a particular artist rather than upon the relationship of
a work of art to the values and expectations of the audi
ence it aims to reach. Thus, Gans feels, the inferior
taste cultures must rely heavily upon word-of-mouth peer
criticism of their cultural products.
There are five basic taste cultures, according to
Gans: high culture, upper-middle culture, lower-middle
culture, low culture, and quasi-folk low culture. The
principal differences among the five lie in creator versus
user orientation, preferences for art works conveyed by
different media, and the degree of abstraction (as opposed
to mimesis) present in works of art designed for particular
taste cultures. Participants in the first four taste cul
tures can be typed according to education and socioeconomic
status within a broadly defined American "national" cul
ture, while quasi-folk low culture consists of unamalga
mated ethnic groups whose lack of integration into a
national culture has managed to preserve many unadulter
ated elements of provincial or foreign folk culture. The
18
term "taste culture" refers to creators, audiences -and
critics who all share the same set of values and the same
attitude toward art; Gans reserves the term "taste public"
to refer to the audience for works of art produced by each
of the taste cultures.
In outlining the five taste cultures, Gans takes a
moderate position, in between those who argue that high
culture is the only valid culture and those who proclaim
that no standards can be set for categorizing art according
to the values held by different taste cultures. It is
important to note that Gans does feel the higher taste cul
tures are more comprehensive in dealing with universal
themes such as courtship and death. He also argues that a
higher level of education is needed for someone to appre
ciate the products of the higher taste cultures. But on
the other hand, he warns against using high culture as the
yardstick against which the products of the other taste
cultures must be measured.
Although the mass culture critics argue that a
taste public is desirable to the extent that it
lives up to the standards of high culture, I
would argue just the reverse: that high culture,
and all taste cultures, must live up to the
standards of their respective users and
creators.
This viewpoint demonstrates why Gans is seen as rather
reactionary by those who .advocate a descriptive, nonnorma-
tive criticism of the popular arts. Though he asserts that
19
all human experience has validity from within the
frameworks of reference of different taste cultures, Gans
nevertheless agrees with many mass culture critics that
normative standards should be applied in evaluating the
products of culture--if not the consumers. Such standards,
Gans feels, point to high culture as being a greater, more
comprehensive embodiment of human thought and feeling than
lower cultures. Thus we find Gans applauding the "cultural
mobility" that has raised the taste culture of the average
American from low culture to lower-middle culture within
the past couple of generations.
A major limitation of the approach taken by Gans and
many other sociological critics is the failure to demon
strate how works of art symbolically convey the values and
attitudes held by their taste cultures. For Gans and
others, culture is a priori to and outside of the work of
art, providing a set of common reference points and a sense
of community. The rhetorical analysis of how shared cul
ture is symbolized and transmitted from artist to audience
is ignored.
The limitations of Gans' "type classification" method
have been pointed out by Albert Kreiling in a paper enti-
titled "Toward a Sociological Approach to Popular Cul- .
19
ture." Kreiling argues for a "cultural studies" approach
to sociological criticism of the popular arts in order to
"circumvent some impasses in current work due to the lack
20
of an adequate strategy for explaining symbolism." Such
impasses come from three major types of sociological stud
ies: institutional, functional and ideological. Institu
tional studies focus solely on the social institutions
involved in the production of popular culture. The roles .
of record companies and radio stations in establishing
"Top 40" hits would be an example of such a study. Func
tional studies examine how popular culture meets psycholog
ical needs for its consumers or "system" maintenance needs
for the greater society. Finally, ideological studies
attempt to show how popular works reflect the values and
norms of a given segment of society. Gans' approach can
be classed as an ideological study.
Kreiling points to a major weakness in all three types
of research:
The most important shortcoming in all three soci
ological approaches— "institutional," "func
tional" and "ideological"--is that they treat
culture as a product of sociological forces or a
mechanism that serves sociological functions. In
each case, the analysis proceeds from the forces
or function— social, economic, technological or,
occasionally, culture•patterns or psychological
dispositions— to the cultural materials which the
forces and functions are said to explain. No
attention is paid to the cultural materials as
symbolic forms that express the meaningful reality
known and felt by a social group. When the cul
tural materials are explained as a reflection of
"cultural patterns," the culture patterns are
assumed to be external causes acting upon the
human process of constructing and experiencing
the symbolic forms.(emphasis mine)
21
This assumption that social values are a priori to the
experience of art fails to recognize the contribution of
art to the development of social values and norms. Popular
culture, according to Kreiling, plays a crucial role in the
socialization process of its audiences: "When construed as
symbolic action and interpreted sociologically, cultural
forms are generally enactments of the drama of social rela
tions as it appears in the imagination of the status group
22
which identifies with the cultural forms."
To summarize the difference between Gans' approach and
Kreiling1s, we find Gans arguing for the existence of a set
of external values and norms that bind artists and audi
ences together into various taste cultures. Different
works of art appeal to different taste cultures because
they contain symbolically the values and norms held by par
ticular taste cultures. Kreiling focuses on the role of
art in shaping the values and norms held by audiences. The
dialectic between the work of art and the audience helps to
reinforce existing values or to modify them.
Both of these sociological approaches, however, leave
out elements critical to a thoroughgoing rhetorical analy
sis. Gans ties together artist (ethos) and audience
(pathos) through something other than the work (logos).
It is the sharing of a common culture that makes artist and
audience understandable to each other in Gans' scheme, more
22
than the sharing of the work of art. Though Kreiling does
examine the influence of the symbolic world of the work
upon the internalized values of its audience, he neglects
to cover the relationship between the internalized values
of the artist and those of the audience as mediated by and
through the symbolic mechanism of the work. Thus one could
not explore a complete transfer of authorial intention by
using Kreiling's method.
Finally, we may examine the third theme raised in the
JPC theory and methodology issue, the critique of previous
attempts to discover an aesthetic of the popular arts.
Armed with appropriate citations from Northrop Frye, Norman
N. Holland, and others, Roger B. Rollin argues against any
attempt at erecting normative standards for judging works
of popular art. To Rollin:
The only possible functions of the teacher and
serious student of Popular Culture are descrip- ,
tion and interpretation— "illumination," in
short. Description, because the field of Popular
Culture is so vast and so varied that even its
most assiduous students are bound to have lacunae.
Interpretation, because explaining the dynamics
of a work of Popular Culture and of audience-
response to that work can reveal that which is
lost upon the casual viewer: what happens at the
interface between a work's.aesthetic form and the
desires and anxieties of its audience, and also
what extrapolations can be made from that inter
action with regard to the society of which the
audience is a p a r t . 2 3
Susan Sontag's mid-Sixties plea for a descriptive rather
24
than prescriptive vocabulary of form is clearly echoed.
23
To see why Rollin appears to be so stridently opposed
to any systematic attempt to outline aesthetic value in
popular culture, we need briefly to review some of the
work on popular art aesthetics that emerged during the past
two decades. The seminal piece in this dialogue is Abraham
Kaplan's essay on "The Aesthetics of the Popular Arts," an
outgrowth of a 1964 paper delivered to the American Philo
sophical Association. Kaplan's chief aim is to outline an
aesthetic system applicable to all art. To achieve this
end, he selects popular art as a convenient whipping boy,
so that by cataloging the "near misses" of popular art, we
can arrive at some sort of understanding of the nature of
a "true" aesthetic. Popular art is set aside as inferior
at the very start of Kaplan's essay, it being described as
"not the degradation of taste but its immaturity, not the
product of external social forces but produced by a dynamic
25
intrinsic to the aesthetic experience itself."
Kaplan's objection to popular art is that it fails to
provide sufficient challenge for its audience. "Popular
art," he writes, "is never a discovery, only a reaffirma-
2 ^
tion." On both perceptual and psychodynamic levels, pop
ular culture simply fails to stimulate us. Kaplan writes:
aesthetic perception is replaced by mere recogni
tion . Perceptual .discrimination is cut off, as
in most nonf.aesthetic contexts, at the point where
we have seen enough to know what we are looking
at. Moreover, the perception is faithful, not to
24
the perceptual materials actually presented, but
to the stereotyped expectations that are
operative. . . .
On the psychodynamic level, the aesthetic
response is replaced by a mere reaction. The
difference between them is this: a reaction, in
the sense I intend it, is almost wholly deter
mined by the initial stimulus, antecedently and
externally fixed, while a response follows a
course that is not laid out beforehand but is
significantly shaped by a process of self
stimulation occurring then and there. Sponta
neity and imagination come into play; in the
aesthetic experience we do not simply react to
signals but engage in a creative interpretation
of symbols.2 7
I plan to take up this model of response in greater detail
in Chapter IV, where I discuss audience response. At this
juncture we need simply note that Kaplan is postulating
that popular art triggers some sort of behavioristic reac
tion; a type of reaction that he would exclude from the
realm of aesthetics. Kaplan's model hinges on the distinc
tion between a cognitive response, which calls into play
the power of the imagination as it grapples with a work of
art, and an affective reaction, which simply involves
placing something into a particular type category.
All in all, Kaplan has simply restated an old theme,
the notion that popular art is unoriginal and that it stim
ulates memories of familiar social values and patterns of
experience rather than inviting us to explore a deviation
from the familiar. Yet it can certainly be said that many
"aesthetic" experiences associated with high art involve an
evocation of the familiar; part of the delight of reading
25
many a poem or novel is the joy of identifying the genre
to which it belongs or the literary tradition upon which it
is based. One might also question Kaplan's basic assump
tion that the act of recognizing the familiar in a work of
art is so undemanding. But the most damaging critique
would be one that points out that popular art contains
symbolized values and ideas just as any other kind of art,
since it is fashioned of the same symbolic material (pre
dominantly language), and that to assume that popular art
merely asks us to draw upon external social knowledge is
to deny the symbolic communication of values and ideas
from an "intending" consciousness to an audience. Kreiling
would label Kaplan's approach as "ideological" in the sense
that the culture patterns are assumed to exist outside the
work of art, manipulating our response. Thus Kaplan's sys
tem rules out the possibility for a dialectic between sym
bolized cultural values given by the work and the audi
ence's social values existing a priori and external to the
work.
Some writers have attempted to counter Kaplan's argu
ment by positing methods of developing an aesthetic of the
popular arts that would have greater descriptive power in
examining the relationships of popular artists, works and
audiences. Rather than attempting to tackle Kaplan's
assumptions head on, such writers have tried to broaden the
26
scope of popular culture criticism so as to demonstrate the
presence of aesthetic value in popular art. Thus John
Cawelti has argued in favor of auteur criticism as a means
for widening our understanding about the ways in which pop
ular artists use standard formulae in achieving desired
2 8
ends. David Madden, in "The Necessity for an Aesthetics
of Popular Culture," produces a lengthy list of quotes from
Santayana, Croce, Dewey and others to show that most tradi
tional aesthetic systems are defined broadly enough to
29
encompass both traditxonal and popular art. Increased
research in such areas as the psychology of audience
response to formulaic plots, Madden feels, will in short
time lead us to a fully developed "aesthetics of the
obvious."
Until Rollin's article was published, however, few
bothered to question the basic axiom that normative stan
dards should be established for evaluating popular art.
Rollin shares the view of many critics and philosophers
that all attempts to erect normative standards for judging
art are futile, since aesthetics arises from human
responses to art. He draws upon an essay by Northrop Frye
entitled "Contexts of Literary Evaluation" to argue that
"taste" arises from the struggle with one's cultural envi
ronment, not from some set of values inherent in a work of
art, and that therefore the prolonged search for standards
27
of taste as they may be applied to art will bear less fruit
than the search for means of describing the dialectical
interchange between works of art and their audiences. As
Frye argues, "the attemptV^tQ^'make^cxitic^sn^eifhef'
begin or end in value judgments turns the subject wrong
side out. . . . The value sense is, as the phenomenolog
ical people say, pre-predictive. •
The most important task for critics of popular cul
ture, according to Rollin, is to identify how popular art
is used by its audience. Rollin adheres to the thesis set
forth by Norman N. Holland that "A reader responds to a
literary work by assimilating it to his own psychological
processes, that is, to his search for successful solutions
within his identity theme to the multiple demands, both
31
inner and outer, on his ego." The search for an objec
tive set of values applicable to art, popular or otherwise,
is a diversion from the achievable task of mapping the
correspondences between the external substance of art and
the internal Lebenswelt of the audience.
Any discussion of recent popular culture criticism
would be incomplete without at least some mention of the
pioneering efforts of John Cawelti in developing a theory
of formulae in popular culture. Though a more detailed
presentation of Cawelti's work will appear in Chapter III,
a brief overview seems appropriate at this time, since his
28
ideas arose in the period we have been discussing in this
chapter, the late Sixties and early Seventies.
Cawelti's first published work on formula was an essay
entitled "The Concept of Formula in the Study of Popular
Literature," which appeared in the Winter 1969 issue of the
32
Journal of Popular Culture. In this essay, Cawelti
defines formula as "a conventional system for structuring
cultural products." Cawelti argues that popular formulae
contain conventions such as traditional stereotyped charac
ters (the white-hatted lawman of the West, the good-hearted
whore, etc.) and inventions, elements that modify or
expand a traditional formula. As David N. Feldman has
pointed out, Cawelti's model gained immediate acceptance
because it "embraced the social scientist's methodology
(usually content analysis) while exploring, primarily lit
erary/humanistic concerns (plots, themes, characteriza-
33
tions, etc.)."
The basic notion of popular culture formula was
expanded in a book-length treatment of the Western genre,
34
The Six-Gun Mystique. More recently, Cawelti has
embarked on an analysis of major popular genres, arguing
that each represents a particular desire on the part of the
35
audience. Adventure, for example, reflects the audi
ence's wish for victory, Romance for love, and Mystery for
knowledge. He has also argued that the concept of formula
29
has greater explanatory power than the much-maligned
"myth-symbol" school of criticism traditionally used by
many American Studies scholars, Cawelti notes that:
A myth can be almost anything— a particular type
of character, one among many ideas, a certain
kind of action— but a formula is essentially a
set of generalizations about the way in which all
the elements of a story have been put together.
Thus, it calls our attention to the whole experi
ence of the story rather than whatever parts may
be germane to the myths we are pursuing.^6
Bruce Kuklick's well-known argument that myth-symbol criti
cism is invalid because it is impossible to demonstrate a
cause-effect relationship between external cultural myths
and their apparent presence .in works of art would not apply
to formula analysis, according to Cawelti, since formula
analysis begins with patterns intrinsic to the work as a
whole and moves from there to the cultural values and
psychological appetencies of the audience as it encounters
37
a particular formula. Ultimately, the usefulness of
formula analysis is that the
examination of the dialectic between artistic
forms and cultural materials should reveal some
thing about the way in which people in a given
culture are predisposed to think about their
lives thereby providing us with useful hypoth
eses about motivation which can be explored in
relationv.to other forms of behavior. 38
Looking back at the development of popular culture
criticism over the past two decades, we find considerable
30
progress from the early debate over the alleged ill effects
of mass culture. The view that popular culture attracted
audiences of mindless zombies, ready and willing to be
manipulated in the most simplistic fashion imaginable, has
been replaced by a fairly sophisticated analysis of the
manner in which popular art both informs and shapes complex
attitudes while at the same time embodying the dominant
precepts of a given culture. We now tend to view the rela
tionship between popular art and its audience as a dialec
tic operating on a relatively grand scale, rather than as
a mechanism for behaviorist conditioning.
Yet if we were to pinpoint a single major lacuna in
popular culture criticism, it would be the failure to
develop a systematic theory of artistry. Though many
recent critics have paid lip service to the notion that
popular artists make contact with their audiences through
the sharing of cultural attitudes or through a common view
of the formula within which a particular work is presented,
none have bothered to examine in a thoroughgoing fashion
the act of creating a work of popular art. Issues such as
the embodiment of authorial intention in the work of art
and the subsequent "uptake" of this intention on the part
of the audience— a basic notion to the rhetorician— have
been completely ignored.
31
This is not to suggest that previous efforts have been
fruitless. Nor is it to suggest that it would be impossi
ble to meld some of the theories developed in earlier years
into a more comprehensive theory of popular culture. After
all, if Herbert Gans is correct in noting the basic "user
orientation" in popular art, it is not at all surprising
that the initial critical spadework would involve the rela
tionship between art and audience. But if popular culture
criticism is to develop, it must begin to recognize the
contribution of the creators of popular culture and to
develop theories that help explain why popular art seems
so transparent on the surface and yet why it involves such
a complex process of matching work and world for both
artist and audience. I hope to show in the following chap
ters how a rhetorical model stemming from the work of
Kenneth Burke can be put to use to achieve these'ends.
32
NOTES
i
. See Bruce A. Lohof, "Popular Culture: The Journal
and the State of the Study," Journal of Popular Culture, 6
(1973), 453-62.
^ Ray B. Browne, "Can Opener," Journal of Popular
Culture, 9 (1975), 353.
3
T. S. Eliot, Notes Toward a Definition of Culture
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1949), p. 17.
4
Ernest Van Den Haag, "A Dissent from the Consensual
Society," Daedalus, 89 (1960), 318-19.
^ Edward Shils, "Mass Society and Its Culture,"
Daedalus, 89 (1960), 289-90.
^ Shils, p. 293.
7
Rubin Rabinovitz, "Mass Art and Cultural Decline,"
Journal of Popular Culture, 9 (1975), 371.
8
. Mary G. Land, "Whatever Happened to 'The Ooze at
the Bottom of the Mass Mind'?" Journal of Popular Culture,
9 (1975), 423-24.
9
Land, p. 426.
10
R. Serge Denisoff, "Content Analysis: The Achilles
Heel of Popular Culture?" Journal of Popular Culture, 9
(1975), 457.
^ Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto:
Univ. of Toronto Press, 1962).
12
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Exten
sions of Man (1964; rpt. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965),
pp. 22-23.
13
McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 25.
14
McLuhan, Understanding Media, p. 8.
15
See Roman Jakobson, "Linguistics and Politics," in
Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press, 1960).
33
16
Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture:
An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (New York: Basic
Books, 1974).
17
Gans, p. 62.
^ Gans, p. 123.
19
Albert Kreiling, "Toward a Sociological Approach to
Popular Culture," Convention of the Association for Educa
tion in Journalism, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada,
18 Aug. 1975.
2^ Kreiling, p. 1.
21 Kreiling, p. 5.
22
Kreiling, p. 22.
23
Roger B. Rollin, "Against Evaluation: The Role of
the Critic of Popular Culture," Journal of Popular Culture,
9 (1975), 357.
24
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965).
25
Abraham Kaplan, "The Aesthetics of the Popular
Arts," in Modern Culture and the Arts, ed. James B. Hall
and Barry Ulanov, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967),
p. 50.
2® Kaplan, p. 52.
2^ Kaplan, pp. 53-54.
2 8
John G. Cawelti, "Notes Toward an Aesthetic of
Popular Culture," Journal of Popular Culture, 5 (1971).
29
David Madden, "The Necessity for an Aesthetics of
Popular Culture," Journal of Popular Culture, 7 (1973).
30
Northrop Frye, "Contexts of Literary Evaluation,"
in Problems of Literary Evaluation, ed. Joseph Strelka
(University Park, Penna.: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press,
1969), p. 18.
31
Norman N. Holland, Five Readers Reading (New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 1975), p. 128.
34
32
John G. Cawelti, "The Concept of Formula in the
Study of Popular Literature," Journal of Popular Culture,
3 (1969), 381-90.
33
David N. Feldman, "Formalism and Popular Culture,"
Journal of Popular Culture, 9 (1975), 384.
34
John G. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique (Bowling
Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Univ. Popular Press, 1971).
35
' See John G. Cawelti, "Notes Toward a Typology of
Literary Formulas," Indiana Social Studies Quarterly, 26
No. 3 (1973-74), 21-34, and Adventure, Mystery, and
Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976). Hereinafter
referred to as Adventure; subsequent reference citations
will appear in parentheses in the text.
3 6
John G. Cawelti, "Myth, Symbol, and Formula,"
Journal of Popular Culture, 8 (1974), 4.
37
See Bruce Kuklick, "Myth and Symbol in American
Studies," American Quarterly, 24 (1972).
3 8
Cawelti, "Myth, Symbol, and Formula," p. 5.
II. DRAMATISM AND AUTHORSHIP
IN POPULAR CULTURE
Each of the methodological approaches to the study of
popular culture discussed in Chapter I leaves out one or
more elements crucial to the communications process. There
are really two major activities to be examined in any work
of fiction. The first involves the basic act of artistic
creation and communication to an audience. The second
involves content and structure: such matters as plot,
theme, and narrative technique. Thus, for example, Mar
shall McLuhan neglects content with his insistence on deal
ing solely with the effects of media upon audiences.
Herbert Gans focuses on the interaction between plot types
and audiences, but he ignores the role of the artist in
fashioning a work that appeals to different types of
people.
In this study I have chosen to highlight a method that
seems best suited for the task of addressing both the
"outer" act of communication between artist and audience
and the "inner" action of the work as it reflects authorial
intention and as it captures the imagination of an audi
ence. The "Dramatistic" method developed by Kenneth Burke
36
fills the need for an instrument to develop both extrinsic
and intrinsic criticism. As we will shortly discover,
Dramatism has the flexibility to enable us to penetrate
several aspects of popular culture from a variety of
angles; unlike much of the earlier criticism of popular
culture, it is not steeped in the "ideological" paradigm
of a single academic discipline. While it may not be the
Ultimate Answer, Dramatism assuredly provides critical
insights that cannot be generated by any other method.
Burke derives his methodology from the basic assump
tion that human beings are divided from other members of
the animal kingdom by virtue of their ability to communi
cate symbolically via language. As Burke defines us;
Man is
the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing
animal
inventor of the negative (or moralized by the
negative)
separated from his natural condition by instru
ments of his own making
goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by
the sense of order)
and rotten with perfection.
Here Burke suggests that we are qualitatively different
from other animals by the fact that language enables us to
build symbolic models that become a "scenic" reality, serv
ing as a backgrop for our thoughts and experiences. This
is not an idea original to Burke; the concept is basic to
social anthropology, psychology, and several other ...
37
disciplines. But Burke builds upon this insight, using it
as the basis for a world-view wherein the major distinction
is between motion and action. In Burke's universe, things
move, persons act. No symbolic transformation is involved
when a rock rolls down a hill, gathering moss as it trav
els. But when I raise my wine glass to toast the good
company at my table, something magical occurs. My act
represents something for all who are present, and the
essence of all human activity occurring within a social
arena is best captured by a methodology that recognizes
and reveals something about the interaction among the
"imaginative worlds" of each guest as he or she is trans
formed by language.
Two possible philosophical premises may underlie such
a methodology. One way to build such a system would be to
start from epistemological assumptions, creating a system
based upon how humans "know" the world. Another would be
based on praxis, human action, with an emphasis on the
study of motivated behavior over modes of consciousness.
Burke chooses the latter approach, focusing on manners and
motives instead of knowledge and understanding.
This is not to suggest that Dramatism is entirely
without epistemological grounding. For Burke, human action
has its roots in language, language being the most funda
mental tool by which human beings symbolically.convey their
conceptions of reality to one another. As Burke notes:
38
The method would involve the explicit study of
language as the "critical moment" at which human
motives take form, since a linguistic factor at
every point in human experience complicates and
to some extent transcends the purely biological
aspects of motivation.2
Dramatism, as one might suppose, derives its name from
the drama, where the crucial focus is upon acts performed
by various players. Just as in a play, the act is central
insofar as it reveals human motives. Dramatism employs a
Pentad of terms used to provide a fundamental order by
which we may examine linguistic transformations of experi
ence. The Pentad consists of Act, Scene, Agent, Purpose
and Agency. Each term stands in contrastive relationship
to the other terms, yoked by a common ground or substance.
As Burke notes, "Their participation in a common ground
makes for transformability." (Grammar, p. xiii.) Thus
Burke tells us that the human body may be treated as a
property of Agent by the portrait painter, since the artist
focuses on the body as it expresses personality, while for
the physician, the body serves as the Scene or material
upon which medicine is practiced.
The terms are necessarily ambiguous because they are
generative. Going back to Burke's basic axioms, we dis
cover the need for a generative, ambiguous terminology.
Action, as distinct from mere notion, involves human
thought. Thought is centered in language, and language
39
by its very nature involves symbolic transformation of the
"raw" outer world. The best method for discussing human
action, Burke argues, is not one based upon static terms,
but rather one based upon the contrast and ambiguity inher
ent in language. He writes:
A perfectionist might seek to evolve terms free
of ambiguity and inconsistency (as with the ter-
ministic ideals of symbolic logic and logical
positivism). But we have a different purpose in
view. . . . We take it for granted that, insofar
as men cannot themselves create the universe,
there must remain something essentially enig
matic about the problem of motives, and that this
underlying enigma will manifest itself in inevi
table ambiguities and inconsistencies among the
terms for motives. Accordingly, what we want is
not terms that avoid ambiguity, but terms that
clearly reveal the strategic spots at which
ambiguities necessarily arise. (Grammar,
pp.::xii.~xiii>)
Dramatism thus articulates a unique position in the age-
old philosophical debate between subjectivists and objec-
tivists. It is not that reality per se is subjective,
Burke argues, but that human terms "enveloping" reality are
unable to capture reality in its objective essence. We
may recall that a key phrase in Burke's "definition of man"
is "inventor of the negative." Language provides us with
the means of knowing objects and events by way of contrast
and variation. We may not agree upon what something is,
but we agree upon what it is not.
By merging and dividing terms, we arrive at an under
standing of human motives dialectically. Each term of the
40
Pentad can be viewed in relationship to the other terms.
Each term can also be transformed into another as the con
text or ground of our attention shifts; earlier we noted
how the human body, ordinarily functioning as Agent,
becomes the Scene for a physician. Burke asserts that:
Distinctions, we might say, arise out of a great
central moltenness, where all is merged. They
have been thrown from a liquid center to the
surface, where they have congealed. Let one of
these crusted distinctions return to its source,
and in this alchemic center it may be remade,
again becoming molten liquid, and may enter into
new combinations, whereat it may be again thrown
forth as a new crust, a different distinction.
So that A may become non-A. But not merely by a
leap from one state to the other. Rather, we
must take A back into the ground of its exis
tence, the logical substance that is its causal
ancestor, and on to a point where it is consub-
stantial with non-A; then we may return, this
time emerging with non-A instead. (Grammar,
p. xiii.)
The concept of "substance" or "ground" (Burke uses
these terms interchangeably) is similar to what a phenom-
enologist means by the term "intentional object." It is
the pure context surrounding the act, providing us with a
framework within which our Dramatistic terminology may be
applied. Burke notes that substance in and of itself is
ironic because "though used to designate something within
the thing, intrinsic to it, the word etymologically refers
to something outside the thing, extrinsic to it." (Gram
mar, p. 23.) A thing's context, surrounding it "extrinsi-
cally," is by definition that which the thing is not.
41
Thus Burke arrives at the concept of "dialectic
substance," which
derives its character from the systematic contem
plation of the antimonies attendant upon the fact
that we necessarily define a thing in terms of
something else. "Dialectic substance" would thus
be the over-all category of dramatism, which
treats of human motives in terms of verbal
action. By this statement we most decidedly do
not mean that human motives are confined to the
realm of verbal action. We mean rather that the
dramatistic analysis of motives has its point of
departure in the subject of verbal action.
(Grammar, p. 33.)
The Dramatistic method suggests that we engage in a syste
matic search for key terms. "Ancestral terms" are terms
which reveal substance; "derivative terms" are terms which
stand in some sort of rational relationship to ancestral
terms, transforming them by revealing a multitude of ter
minological possibilities. "Act" is the ancestral term for
the Dramatistic method, "a terministic center from which
many related considerations can be shown to 'radiate,' as
though it were a 'god-term1 from which a whole universe of
3
terms is derived."
We should not be fooled into imagining that Act is
self-evident. The Pentad of Dramatistic terms must always
be placed within a certain Circumference which circum
scribes the stage upon which the drama is being acted out.
As Michael George Feehan observes, "Circumference is
Burke's term..for the scope of the analytic enterprise, the
42
range of interest, the breadth of the study to be
4
undertaken." Let us suppose, for example, that I am a
middle-level manager in a large corporation. I have just
fired an employee for being chronically tardy. The Act may
be viewed in terms of the immediate situation: a man
(manager) engages in the Act of uttering certain words to
another man ("You're fired!"). With a slightly larger
Circumference, the Act may be defined as that of providing
education about acceptable social roles; my firing the
employee becomes mere "negative feedback." Enlarge the
scope a bit more, and you may find an Act of victimage,
engaged in by an Agent (me) wishing to enhance his posi
tion in the social hierarchy (the bureaucratic structure
of the corporation). Alter the Circumference a bit more,
and it becomes my failure to practice the Christian vir
tues of charity and humility. Clearly, Circumference pro
vides a "container" which defines the boundaries of any
Dramatistic analysis. We may enlarge the scope of any
study to allow for a consideration of its "universal,
timeless" implications, though generally speaking, we tend
to examine a thing "in terms of" a more limited Scene.
The notion of Circumference reveals how interrelated
are the terms of the Pentad. Acts occur within Scenes,
though as we have noted in the example above, the Scene is
not always self-evident. If we place my Act of firing the
employee within a Scene involving two persons, the Act
43
involves me as Agent. But if we widen the scope, the Agent
may become the corporate hierarchy as a depersonalized
entity, with both myself and the terminated employee serv
ing as objects of an entirely different Act, the Act of an
anonymous hierarchy working its inexorable will upon those
within its compass.
Burke uses the term "ratio" to describe the interrela
tionships among terms. The dialectical method assumes that
one of the five terms will be ancestral in a given situa
tion, functioning heuristically to reveal the central
motive. Closely linked to the ancestral term will be
another term. In the example we have been using, Scene
becomes the ancestral term, operating indissolubly with
Act. As we enlarge or reduce the scope of the Scene, the
Act shifts as well. The Dramatistic method can thus be
described as an initial search for the ancestral term,
followed by a determination of the term most closely asso
ciated with it. Within a given Circumference, the ances
tral term has a certain effect upon the second term in the
ratio. The method becomes a rounded heuristic by virtue of
the twenty possible ratios existing among the five terms
(Burke, however, discusses only ten ratios in A Grammar of
Motives) as such ratios become possible, given alterations
in Circumference.
A "Scene-Act ratio," for example, offers us insight
into the way by which Scene influences and helps define the
44
nature of the Act. An Act-Agent ratio looks at how the
Act operates on the Agent. In our example of the employee
being fired, we may examine the point of view of the cor
porate executive who looks at my Act of firing the employee
as proof that I have the "strong fiber" required for
higher-level management responsibility.
As a heuristic, Dramatism is open-ended. As Circum
ference is enlarged or reduced, each of the twenty ratios
may be examined, and the nature of each term may shift
radically. The effect is like that of a prism, bending
rays of light in a variety of directions. What gives the
method some focus, however, is the notion of substance.
While not immediately apparent, substance can be "teased
out" by the dialectical method of Dramatism. The terms
involved in the Grammar reveal praxeological— if not epis
temological— "reality." As Burke writes:
The transformations which we here study as a
Grammar are not "illusions," but citable reali
ties. The structural relations involved are
observable realities. Nothing is more imperi
ously there for observation and study than the
tactics people employ .when they would injure or
gratify one another— and one can readily demon
strate the role of substantiation in such tac
tics. To call a man a friend or brother is to
proclaim him consubstantial with oneself, one's
values or purposes. To call a man a bastard is
to attack him by attacking his whole line, his
"authorship," his "principle" or "motive".(as
expressed in terms of the familial). An epithet
assigns substance doubly, for in stating the
45
character of the object it at the same time
contains an implicit program of action with
regard to the object, thus serving as motive.
(Grammar, p. 57.)
This passage reveals that a dialectical dynamic may
be established between the five terms and the concept of
substance itself. As Feehan notes:
With the introduction of Circumference and
Ratios, the Pentad clarifies the ways in which
quality of value enters into linguistic trans
formations. Widening and narrowing scope,
altering the direction of "dominance," changes
the quality of motivations, resulting in
"transcendence."5
It is this transcendental aspect of language that
stands behind the whole project of Dramatism. The Grammar
represents but a single aspect of a series tentatively
titled "On Human Relations." As Burke defined the project
in a companion volume, A Rhetoric of Motives, published in
1950:
The Grammar dealt with universal paradoxes of
substance. It considered resources of placement
and definition common to all thought. The Sym
bolic should deal with unique individuals, each
its own peculiarly constructed act, or form. . . .
The Rhetoric deals with the possibilities of
classification in its partisan aspects; it con
siders the ways in which individuals are at odds
with one another, or become identified with
groups more or less at odds with one another.
T^e Symbolic has not yet been published, though most of it
has reportedly been written. An unanticipated addition to
46
the project is Language as Symbolic Action, a collection of
essays published in 1966, dealing with the suasive power of
language as it directs human action apart from its location
in a specific Act. LASA thus treats language' as a unique
type of Agency.
Dramatism and Popular Culture Criticism
Thus armed with the basic tools of the Dramatistic
method, we may pause before considering the role of artis
try in the popular arts to view once again the critical
approaches to popular culture discussed in Chapter I.
Seen from a Dramatistic perspective, each method has funda
mental lacunae. It is the aim of the present study to
provide the serious student of popular culture with the
tools to engage in a more rounded discussion of the topic
than has occurred with the application of previous critical
methods.
From a Dramatistic perspective, the fears that Dwight
Macdonald and Ernest Van Den Haag had about popular culture
creating a nation of mindless robots result from their
begging the question at the very start of their analyses.
In their views, popular (or "mass"-) culture functions not as
Scene, as one might ordinarily expect, but as Agency.
"Masscult" itself is the force involved in the Act of
brainwashing the public into accepting lower standards of
art. This Act is accomplished with the "Sub-Agency" of
47
modern electronic technology, the mass media. The
question-begging occurs with respect to Scene. The Dram
atistic model pinpoints the masscult critics' acceptance of
a neo-Spenglerian "decline of the West" scenario as the key
element behind their fear of popular culture. Dramatism
leads us to an "Act within an Act" wherein we see the hap
less masscult critic, convinced that the world is going to
seed, forced to engage in an earnest search for a "devil
figure" responsible for all the doom and gloom. No "chief
conspirator" can easily be found, but the critic does note
that modern technology has provided the artist with new,
electronic modes of communication. The Sub-Agency of elec
tronic technology as well as the Agency of masscult in
general grow to become the necessary devil figures, danger
ous tools in the hands of those who unwittingly use them to
destroy traditional Western civilization. While others may
see a mere correlative relationship between the rise of
popular culture as transmitted by the electronic media and
a "decline" in Western civilization, the masscult critics,
feeling victimized, posit a cause/effect relationship
between the two.
It is interesting to note that Edward Shils' response
to the masscult critics employs the same premise, that
popular culture functions as an Agency in shaping the
behavior of audiences. In defending popular culture, Shils
48
merely enlarges the Circumference, taking a longer view of
history. Given the fact that the masses have been illiter
ate for most of history, Shils argues, and given that some
form of popular entertainment has always existed, the
"massification" of information is actually a blessing.
This enlargement of scope changes the nature of the Act.
For the masscult critics, the Act is the "decline of the
West" via the Agency of mass culture. For Shils, it is
modern technology helping to overcome the ignorance and
superstition of earlier ages. The Act thus becomes "edi
fication and enlightenment" instead of "suppression of
aesthetic excellence."
The Dramatist would view Mary Land, in her criticism
of the behaviorist premises of earlier critics, as someone
who is redefining the substance. Popular culture drops its
role as an Agency and becomes the Scene against which
human action may be measured. The Act becomes the trans
mission of cultural values and attitudes by human Agents,
popular culture artists. A separate Act involves the audi
ence as it uses popular culture as a "yardstick" against
which both cultural attitudes and aesthetic appetites may
be set.
The usefulness of Dramatism as a tool to probe various
critical methods is shown when we examine the views of
Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan is generally thought to be an
"original," a humanist whose ideas spring from unique
49
premises. Yet the Dramatist readily sees that McLuhan
stands close to the masscult critics in his focus upon the
power of mass media as Agencies. McLuhan does differ in
the sense that individual media are treated as primary
Agencies, overshadowing the "Agency" of masscult conven
tions. To McLuhan, form is a function of medium, and con
tent is irrelevant. Nevertheless, the emphasis in
McLuhan's work is placed upon the power of mass media in
creating specialized "response modes" for their audiences.
The member of the audience is thus not someone who has an
"appetency for content" and who enjoys popular culture by
virtue of having his or her expectations met by material
presented in conventional forms, but rather someone who
engages in a form of sensory reflex action in response to
a particular medium. Dramatism reveals McLuhan as a closet
behaviorist!
Turning to the model of various "taste publics" devel
oped by Herbert Gans, we find the sociologist engaged in a
type of criticism that stresses the Act of culture consump
tion. The Agent in Gans' model is the member of the audi
ence, functioning as a consumer of various cultural prod
ucts. Gans' theory of taste cultures, with corresponding
taste publics, is really a theory outlining the Scene
within which culture consumption occurs. A member of a
particular taste public identifies with a particular
50
cultural product, whether it be "Barney Miller" or
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for the Purpose of achieving
consubstantiality with other members.of the taste public.
Patterns of culture consumption become "badges" which
identify someone as a member of a particular taste public.
The main problem with Gans1 model is its failure to
go beyond the Act of consumption. The Act performed by the
artist, producing the work of art, is completely ignored.
Moreover, in terming popular art "user-oriented" and high
art "creator-oriented," Gans seems to be suggesting that
works of art have certain properties which inherently stim
ulate particular types of responses. With authorial inten
tion left out of the picture, all works of art are pre
sented as having some sort of "mystical" propensity to
attract certain audiences.
Elsewhere, however, Gans goes to great lengths to
demonstrate how the different modes of response displayed
by the different taste publics are explained by sociologi
cal factors such as education and income. Clearly, Gans
is confused in trying to explain how works of art and dif
ferent types of audiences "match up" with each other. If
the match results from properties inherent in the work of
art, we are back to the behaviorist model. If it results
from sociologically differentiated audiences "shopping" for
art which appeals to the appetites of these different taste
51
groups, we find ourselves examining significantly different
art products with no mention of the Agents (artists) whose
awareness of these differences in taste led to the produc
tion of different types of art geared to different types
of audiences. Surely Gans cannot attribute the differences
in art to differences in audience makeup; ,to do so would
be to suggest that the audience is the "real" artist.
Overall, we find that Gans' model is limited in
scope, reducing the overall Scene from one wherein multiple
Acts of communication and response occur to one focusing
solely on response. By leaving out any discussion of the
artist as Agent, he denies himself the opportunity to exam
ine how artists anticipate how their audiences will react,
and how this anticipation plays a significant role in the
Act of creating a work of popular art. Additionally, by
excluding the artist, Gans categorically denies himself the
opportunity to examine any "creator-oriented" component in
the audience's interplay with works of popular culture.
Finally, we may look at what the Dramatist would have
to say about the aesthetic commentary of Abraham Kaplan.
It will be recalled that Kaplan distinguishes between an
aesthetic "response" to high art and an affective "reac
tion" triggered by popular art. The distinction suggests
two different Acts, both involving the work of art as
Agency. The primary difference is in the Scene within
52
which a member of the audience is placed. For popular
art, the Scene is rather mechanistic, the work of art
simply "setting up" some sort of culturally conditioned
pattern of behavior. For high art, we find an enlarged
scope, whereby the work of art stimulates more complex
Acts of imaginative interplay on the part of the audience.
Thus to the Dramatist, Kaplan's aesthetic is dependent
upon an adjustment of the Circumference.
Kaplan's underlying premise is that art should always
serve the normative Purpose of promoting the development of
the individual. Such growth is placed within a Scene
whereby the member of the audience must use a work of art
as a tool (Agency) in sorting out values, attitudes, and
modes of being. Acts wherein the audience simply recog
nizes and affirms a "true-to-life" quality in the work'
("Yes, this villain is just like my uncle, that mean old
sadist I") are excluded from consideration. Thus by assign
ing value to the two different modes of response, Kaplan
portrays some kinds of art as being too "immature" to trig
ger.imaginative response.
For popular art, the "reaction" by the audience is
part of the single Act programmed by the popular artist
using the work of art as Agency. But the aesthetic
"response" to high art is a separate Act, part of a chain
event wherein the work of art becomes the Agency by which
a member of the audience achieves insight or personal
53
growth. Detached from the initial Act of stimulation,
this reponse achieves greater meaning for a philosopher
who stresses individual growth and the development of a
*
unique personality. For Kaplan, the formal conventions of
popular art inhibit free will in terms of audience response,
while the conventions of high art promote it.
Dramatism, Authorial Intention,
and Artistic Conventions
The first question on authorship for a Dramatistic
critic would be that which asks what Act is being per
formed when someone creates a work of fiction. Does an
author write a book or screenplay to find self-fulfillment?
Is he/she merely passing time, or desperately trying to
escape the nine-to-five world? Is the audience .given con
sideration at any point in the process? What possible
variations are there in how artists view the role of the
audience?
These questions all relate to the much-debated topic
of authorial intention. The common view is that authorial
intention encompasses the Act of investing a work with a
determinate meaning that may be understood by an audience.
The scope of this definition has come under serious ques
tioning, however, by New Critics such as W. K. Wimsatt and
Monroe Beardsley and by "newer" critics of all stamps,
54
especially Deconstructionists. ^ The New Critics argue that
a work of art can never mean exactly what an author may.be
thinking of, and that therefore meaning must be viewed as a
function of the audience's response to the linguistic
structures present in the text. The author must be written
out of the scenario.
More recently, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., has argued for the
existence of a "type idea" by which meaning may be shared
8
by artist and audience alike. The work of art, in
Hirsch's model, serves as a scene or backdrop against
which our consciousnesses project themselves. The act of
creating art is the mirrored counterpart to the act of
experiencing a work of art; the linguistic structures
inherent in the work bring both artist and audience to the
same type idea.
Hirsch1s model is compatible with a Dramatistic view
of authorship insofar as it recognizes that the creation of
a work of art is a social Act. While it may be true that
some works of art are designed for purely private purposes
(auto-entertainment, therapy, etc.), they become social
artifacts as soon as an audience comes into contact with
them. And just as it is possible for us to use the medium
of language to engage in discourse with ourselves, it is
equally true that language is an Agency designed for a
social Scene. If the Purpose of discourse is to convey the
Agent's attitude toward something to someone else, then
55
language by definition must be an efficacious tool. Since
language must employ symbols to stand for objects and
activities, the Agent-Agency ratio becomes critical when
we consider authorial intention; how the author uses lan
guage and how he/she understands its limitations will
determine how clearly meaning is conveyed.
A work of fiction is a more complex act of communica
tion than a simple command or promise. Fiction requires
an understanding of a variety of elements— plot structures,
character, the use of metaphor— before "type classifica
tion" may take place. Much more elaborate information is
presented to us, and much less emphasis is placed on what
we are to do with the information. Hirsch's notion of
"shared type" can be likened to the concept of "conven
tion," a concept which involves enlarging the scenic cir
cumference within which linguistic communication takes
place in order to give consideration to the additional
resources brought in from the artist's and the audience's
experience, resources involving both patterns of language
use and patterns of life experience.
Insofar as they facilitate communication, conventions
may be seen as agreed-upon structures which provide a con
text or Scene within which discourse may occur (and here I
include both linguistic discourse and "discursive" or
"message-containing" symbols in forms other than language,
56
such as photography). As Steven Mailloux has defined them,
conventions are "publicly-known and agreed-upon procedures
for making intelligible the world, behavior, communication,
and literary texts. They are group-licensed strategies for
constructing meaning, describable in terms of rules for
9
intelligibility." Mailloux distinguishes three types of
conventions: traditional, prescriptive or regulative, and
constitutive. Traditional conventions are those that
legitimize past regularities, e.g., standing up for the
national anthem at a football game. Prescriptive conven
tions regulate future action, e.g., "Use a gun, go to
prison." Constitutive conventions are descriptive rules
assigning meaning, e.g., adherence to all felicity conven
tions pertaining to a speech act equals (or "counts as") a
complete speech act. According to Mailloux, a general
theory of interpretation would view all these conventions
as constitutive in that they make meaning possible. A u
traditional convention such as standing for the national
anthem is constitutive insofar as we adhere or fail to
adhere to it: failure to stand counts as (constitutes) a
lack of patriotism, disrespect for the flag, etc.
The phrase "counts as" in the previous sentence is
significant in light of the Dramatistic model we have been
developing. It is a recognition of the fact that every act
of communication demands some sort of inner mental form
that "stands in place of" or counts as some object or idea.
57
We relate real-world objects and events analogically,
creating meaning-structures by ordering them into familiar
patterns. Kenneth Burke uses the term "patterns of experi
ence" to refer to the most basic patterns that the human
organism alembicates in the course of living in the natural
and social world:
Experience arising out of a relationship between
an organism and its environment, the adjustments
of the organism will depend upon the nature of
the environment. By "adjustments of the organ
ism" we refer to any kind of adaptation. . . .
We refer simply to the fact that the adjusting
organism will take some particular environmental
condition into account. A particular environ
mental condition may be: a cruel father, an
indulgent mother, a long stretch of poverty, the
death of a favorite aunt, rough treatment at the
hands of other boys, gentle years in a garden,
what you will. Any such specific environmental
condition calls forth and stresses certain of
the universal experiences as being more relevant
to it, with a slighting of those less relevant.
Such selections are "patterns of experience."
They distinguish us as "characters."10
Burke's model suggests the following description of
how meaning is transmitted through art: 1) an artist who
is a "character" in his own right by virtue of his pattern
of experience, 2) creates a work of art that symbolically
embeds a particular pattern of experience, a pattern which
may be similar to the author's or very different from it,
but which in any case has been "filtered" through it, while
3) individual members of the audience experience the work
of art and symbolically interpret the patterns in the work
58
via their own "filters." The symbol may appeal to members
of the audience for a variety of reasons: 1) the patterns
of experience may be similar for artist and audience; . .
2) the formal properties of the work may be so expertly
crafted that they present a "compelling" pattern for the
audience; or 3) there may be "compensatory gains" in the
appeal a different pattern has simply by virtue of being
"different." (Statement, pp. 178-79.)
Communicative perfection, to Burke, is impossible to
achieve. "Perfection," as Burke views it, involves a com
plete identity of experience between artist and audience.
Thus, "Perfection could exist only if the entire range of
the reader's and writer's experience were identical down
to the last detail. Universal and permanent perfection
could exist only if this entire range- of experiences were
identical for all men forever." (Statement, p. 179.) The
aim of the poetic dialectic, then, is to strive toward
perfection through the vicarious sharing of experience made
possible through art.
At this juncture we begin to notice the tremendous
challenge set before popular artists. Creating for a mass
audience, the popular artist must anticipate and satisfy
incredibly diverse patterns of experience. The heteroge
neity of the audience makes it virtually impossible to
create works of art which have symbolic appeal by virtue
59
of close similarities in the patterns of experience
undergone by both artist and audience. Indeed, as Gans
has suggested, the popular artist is generally of a higher
social class than his or her audience, and thus has little
11
experience in common with them. In contrast, the artist
fashioning works for the "high" taste culture has a pat
tern of experience much more identical with that of his/her
audience. As Gans notes, audience enjoyment of a work of
high art often involves identification with the artist and
the community of critics as much as it involves identifica-
12
tion with the work itself. Thus high art has a homoge
neous elite which maintains a spirit of communitas uniting
artists, critics, and audiences. The popular artist, on
the other hand, is most often an anonymous craftsman,
fashioning works that have formulaic content and formal
conventions as the basis of appeal. In general, we may
conclude that popular works appeal to their audiences
because they present expertly-crafted formal properties
which match the genre expectations of the audience.
These formal properties of popular art are highly
conventionalized, as we will discover in the next chapter.
They are constitutive conventions inasmuch as they "count
as" a set of guidebooks to the "real," everyday world.
From the point of view of the audience, these guidebooks
serve as an Agency to help make sense of the social uni-,
verse. Identification with "socially correct" procedures
60
for dealing with certain typical situations (e.g., a
"betrayed" wife in a soap opera has social approval for
bitterly announcing her reasons for seeking a divorce) sug
gests means of responding to similar situations in real
life. Just as we adopt the hairstyles of film stars, we
adopt speech patterns and methods of overtly displaying
our emotions. Popular art helps socialize its audiences
into a common culture by providing a set of conventional
responses which carry stock symbolic meaning. In Dramatis
tic terms, the Purpose of popular art within the Scene of
the larger social structure is that it can function as a
sort of "glue" uniting diverse peoples by providing con
ventional patterns of.social behavior.
The popular artist may on occasion be someone who
acts from within the same conventional structures as the
audience and who creates intuitively, by combining conven
tional symbols in an appealing fashion. (The lyrics of
country-and-western singer Hank Williams seem to have been
written in this manner.) Alternatively, the popular artist
may be someone who can hold two views simultaneously, on
the one hand capturing and making use of social conven
tions and on the other examining the outer world as it may
be encountered "purely," without appeal to stock responses.
Insofar as the popular artist serves as the "voice of the
people," he/she would tend to be the Hank Williams type,
61
creating from within the conventional structures. But
insofar as the artist serves the "classical function
described by British film critic Raymond Durgnat of making
the complicated world of flux and shadow more comprehen
sible to the general populace, he/she would tend to be
more representative of the second model, that of the
artist serving as a "bridge" between "pure" and "conven-
13
tional" response.
That such a bridge is necessary reflects an existen
tial knot that I call the "Dialectician's Dilemma." The
dilemma is that while we are individually capable of
"pure," unconventional responses, we are unable to commu
nicate them to others. They cannot be validated within a
social context because no Scene can be provided as a refer
ential backdrop. Only when symbolically transformed into
conventional structures can my sense of the world be
matched up against someone else's; a "pure," unfiltered
act of communication is impossible.
In this light> consider the many works of popular art
that are fashioned collaboratively, with no single artist
being "in charge." Motion pictures, for example, are pro
duced by a team of artists: directors, screenwriters,
cinematographers, designers, editors, composers, choreog
raphers, actors, and so on. The final product cannot be
said to have been fashioned by any one individual, the
14
claims of auteur criticism notwithstanding. Even popular
62
novels are often written by teams of writers and editors
working from elaborate style sheets emphasizing basic do's
and don't's of plot and characterization.
Several questions immediately come to mind when one
thinks of collaborative artistry in the popular arts. How
does one go about defining the "intentional act"? How can
a "unified vision" be presented under such circumstances?
Are there "major" and "minor" contributors? What differ
ences are there among different media? Where do we draw
the line between a "gatekeeper" function (such as copy
editing or designing a promotional campaign) and
"artistry"?
Not all of these questions can be answered in the
present study, though they certainly demand attention. Nor
can we assert with absolute certainty that "collective
ethos" is a valid concept for one medium but not for
another, or even that it should apply in all cases within
the same medium. A case-by-case investigation of the cre
ation of several works of popular art would probably reveal
several patterns. One detective novel may be written by a
single, original writer, while another may be produced as
a spoof by a team of New York Times staff writers working
collaboratively. What is clear is that there is a need for
more critical attention to the way in which several artists
work together to contribute to the final product. Tradi
tional concepts of unity and purpose must be reviewed, and
63
the Romantic assumptions underlying them must be modified
in light of collaborative creation.
I would provisionally suggest that collective ethos
involves a dialectic among various artists whereby individ
ual attitudes toward the phenomenal world and toward the
Purpose of the work get sorted out and merged into a uni
fied "intentional Act" embodied, within conventional struc
tures appropriate for the particular symbolic message. A
different sort of unity thus suggests itself to the critic
dealing with collaboratively produced works of popular cul
ture. Instead of asking how well the individual author
has woven the elements needed to make a good work of art,
the critic may concentrate on how well various creators
worked together to produce a harmoniously blended work. A
Western film in which the hero maintains a stern, silent
strength, as instructed by the director, and in which the
camera is set by the cinematographer at a low angle to
emphasize the height of the hero can be ruined by a capri
cious composer whose personal sense of the absurd leads him
to use a comic ragtime piece for the showdown scene. For
tunately for the audience, film producers are generally
motivated by dreams of box office revenues, and they would
seldom allow such contrapuntally clashing stuff to be
released.
64
"Jaws": Collaborative Authorship
in the Making of the Movie
In the final section of this chapter, I shall examine
how the popular film version of Jaws was created, so as to
illustrate the theory which I have been expounding. In
particular, I will use the Dramatistic concept of Agent to
shed some light on the process whereby several artists
worked in close collaboration to produce the final product.
The same organizational plan is intended for the chapters
on form and audience, first a discussion of theoretical
concepts and problems raised by the Dramatistic method, and
then examination of a sample work of recent popular cul
ture, with representation given to products of different
media. Ultimately, I hope to convince the reader that some
insightful practical criticism can result from an applica
tion of Dramatism to popular culture, criticism that goes
beyond the "objective" analysis of form and content and
begins to explore the interrelationships among producers
and consumers of popular culture.
The history of Jaws reveals that from the very outset
it was intended to be a "blockbuster," appealing to as wide
an audience as.possible. Jaws began its life as a film
when producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown acquired the
rights to Peter Benchley's novel in May 1973, eight months
before the hardback book was nationally marketed. Film
________ 65J
producers often have inside "leads" on major book projects
undertaken by the large publishing houses, so it is not
unusual for publishers to complete contracts for various
subsidiary rights, including film rights, before releasing
books they hope will become best-sellers. The additional
revenue from these rights, plus the assurance that a novel
stands a good chance of being released by a major film
distributor, aid publishers in promoting new novels. In
the case of Jaws, producers Brown and Zanuck helped market
the novel by appearing on television and radio "talk
shows," plugging both the book and film fully a year before
15
the movie version was released.
The conversion from novel to film required several
writers and considerable input from the director, Steven
Spielberg, and from several of the major stars. According
to screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, who shared writers' billing
with Peter Benchley, Benchley was paid approximately
$250,000 for the rights to the novel and for a "first
draft" screenplay that was altered considerably by Gottlieb
16
and by veteran screenwriter Howard Sackler. After
Benchley had written about three drafts, in consultation
with Spielberg, Sackler was asked to do a rewrite to deal
with "some elements of the novel that seem .to cry out for
change, a subplot to be eliminated, and an overall filmic
thrust yet to be developed." (Log, p. 48.) Sackler!s
work was produced after four weeks of intensive effort in
66
a Beverly Hills hotel room, though much of the dialogue and
many of the major scenes used in the final film were writ
ten by Gottlieb after he was hired as a screenwriter on
April 22, 1974.
By that date, some second-unit location shooting of
great white sharks had already been completed in the South
Pacific, a budget had been drawn up, some roles had been
cast, locations had been scouted and tentative plans had
been made for the filming schedule. These facts are impor
tant in understanding how ad hoc the production of a popu
lar film can be, with many major creative decisions being
made even as production efforts are fully underway. The
Scene within which the film director's imagination may act
is thus narrowed in scope, with possible plot lines being
reduced in number.
In a situation like,this, the dialectic is one of
Agency-Agents, with the demand of the cinematic medium and
the film business blurring the concept of authorial inten
tion. A "grammar of motives" for the film version of Jaws
would in many ways be more complex and less sharply defined
than a study of Benchley's intentions in the novel. Thus,
evaluations of quality aside, it is often more difficult to
deal responsibly with popular culture than with "high" cul
ture. That is to say, a work of popular culture embodies
all of the complex human motives that characterize "high"
67
art, multiplied by the stresses of the marketplace and the
fact that all these forces are at work with a number of
Agents: screenwriters, directors, film editors, and the
like.
An interesting sidelight developed from Gottlieb's
dual roles as screenwriter and actor, playing the part of
the publisher of the town newspaper. The publisher's role
had been more extensive in early drafts of the screenplay,
but as Gottlieb writes:
As the Writer, it was my said duty to write
myself out of the picture as superfluous, and as
an Actor, my heart bled with every cut. Talk
about ego splits— you haven't experienced schizo
phrenia until you sit in a story conference dis
cussing whether your presence in a scene is nec
essary or desirable, knowing that every cut you
make as a writer destroys you as an actor, and
that every objection you raise has to be judged
on two levels: the writer's defense of a charac
ter in a scene, and the actor's dismay at being
eliminated from a juicy role. (Log, pp. 65-66.)
The Dramatist would view this dilemma with tremendous
interest. Gottlieb had to consider his vision of the
unity of his artistic creation and its effect on audiences
while struggling with a desire to maximize his own private
gain as a performer. Purpose shifted as the Agent found
himself reflecting on the question: Which Act should I
perform, in what guise, and in which Scene?
The transformation of the character of Matt Hooper,
the young ichthyologist, as the novel was converted to film
63
is another instance where the collaborative efforts of
several artists can be seen. In Benchley's novel. Hooper
is an "outsider" who figures prominently in a subplot deal
ing with his affair with Sheriff Brody's wife. In the
film, Hooper is one of a trio of heroes (the other two
being the Sheriff and the grizzled old seaman, Quint), the
one "who represents civilization and education and modern
science." (Log, p. 70.) Earlier drafts had already elim
inated the sexual subplot, but when Richard Dreyfuss was
cast as Hooper in late April 1974, he had several objec
tions to the way in which his character had been developed.
In a three-way converence with Gottlieb and Spielberg that
took place in a Boston hotel room, Dreyfuss offered several
ideas designed to enhance Hooper's personality, including
the comic scene in which Dreyfuss, as Hooper, crunches a
styrofoam cup in mocking response to Quint's (Robert Shaw)
ostentatious crushing of a metal beer can. (Log, pp. 74-'
75.) 'The,calculus of "multiple Agents" is thus further
complicated in a medium such as film, where even the Actor
playing a role can become an Agent or "author" making major
contributions to the final product.
Some minor changes in the original conception of the
film came about by sheer accident. The original version of
a scene wherein the Sheriff and Hooper discover a silent,
floating boat and get scared out of their wits after Hooper
69
dives and discovers the severed, shark-gnawed head of a
local resident, had been written to include Meadows (Gott
lieb) , the publisher. The original scene was filmed during
the daytime, and during the shooting, Gottlieb accidentally
fell overboard, spoiling the footage. After some discus
sion with director Spielberg, it was decided that the scene
would play better if Meadows were cut from the scene and if
it were to occur at night, with a suitably eerie atmosphere
building up suspense. (Log, pp. 102-07.)
Jaws differs from most films in terms of its produc
tion history for two major reasons: 1) the principal
screenwriter, Gottlieb, was working on scenes used in the
final production even while shooting was underway in
Martha's Vineyard, and 2) the film's editor, Verna Fields,
was present with the rest of the company on location,
assembling sequences from the daily "rushes" even as the
film was being shot. Both Gottlieb and Fields were in
close, daily contact with Spielberg (Gottlieb even shared
the same rented house), so that a "triumverate" of top
collaborators can be said to be primarily responsible for
the final shape of the film. In most film productions, a
shooting script is in final form, except for minor, on-the-
spot dialogue changes, before location shooting begins, in
order to give set designers, costumers, property managers,
cinematographers and other support personnel plenty of time
to work out the logistics for each day's shooting. With
70
Jaws, it seemed to the support crew as if things were
being "made up" as shooting went along. (Log, p. 99.) It
is also customary for the film editor to start work only
after all location and studio shooting has taken place.
But Verna Fields, according to Gottlieb, "is one of those
who insists, if it's at all possible, on being present for
the entire filming of a picture, on location or at home,
and working in close collaboration with the director."
(Log, p. 134.) Spielberg had previously worked with Fields
on The Sugarland Express and found this sort of close col
laboration very helpful. Burke would view this mode of
creation as being well-suited to the development of a dia--
lectically unified vision against the challenging Scene of
location shooting, since both director and editor are
exposed to the same day-to-day variables that may alter
the final product. Essentially, a Scene-Agent ratio
exists, bringing about a set of common experiences on loca
tion that can be referred back to at the time of cutting
room conferences. Without such common experience, the
director and editor may find themselves at odds with each
other because the director may be drawing on "background"
impressions formed on location that would be difficult to
communicate to an editor who had not been physically
present.
Thematically, the film is designed to grip the
audience-on two.levels.. -.It is a. straightforward .
71
"monster/adventure yarn with overtones of social conscience
and individual action for the common good throughout."
(Log, p. 68.) As we have seen, the sexual subplot in the
novel was consciously eliminated in order to present a more
direct tale of man against shark. In addition, the artists
shaping the film develop the characters of Quint, Hooper,
and Brody differently in the film than the same characters
appear in the novel; the film stresses their contrasting
personalities in order to present more fully a unique con
ception of the American hero as someone who can recover
from guilt and error to achieve ultimate victory. This..was
a theme much on the minds of American audiences in 1974-75,
suggesting that perhaps one consideration in the minds of
the Agents who fashioned these changes from the novel was
an awareness that a bolder statement of the character dif
ferences would appeal more strongly to an audience looking
for a new definition of hero.
Quint, played by Robert Shaw, is a rugged old commer
cial fisherman and captain of a charter boat who lives
alone in a worn wooden structure on the water's edge, dec
orated with scores of sharks' jaws. He is grizzled and
tough-talking, a variant on the individualistic male hero,
type associated with John Wayne. Two factors are stressed:
1) he is a traditional male chauvinist, raising a toast to
"swimmin1 wi' bow-legged wimmen" and making fun of Sheriff
72
Brody’s wife when she expresses concern for her husband's
safety, and 2) he is a "walking ghost," a hero model out of
step with the modern age. The latter point is established
in a scene aboard Quint's boat, the Orca, when he tells
Hooper and Brody how he survived the sinking of a Navy
ship delivering atomic weapons in World War II, a disaster
claiming the lives of most of his fellow sailors, who were
eaten by sharks. This scene establishes Quint's ultimate
fate of being killed by the shark by qualitatively paral
leling the story of Ahab losing his leg in Moby Dick. The
artists know that the audience is familiar with Ahab's
story and his fate, and thus they prepare the audience to
accept Quint's eventual doom. The Agents are quite aware
that an audience can be easily sidetracked, worrying about
Quint's death. Since their main point lies in offering
various hero models up to the audience for comparison, the
artists use the Moby Dick parallel to foreshadow Quint's
doom. With the question of Quint's fate having become
unimportant in terms of dramatic development and the build
ing of suspense, the audience is free to assess the appro
priateness of his fate in comparison with that of the other
characters being offered as potential hero models. The
audience has "room to think" and judges that clearly . . . . .
Quint's macho methods are inefficacious in solving the
complex problems of the modern world. One message offered
by Jaws is that the iconoclast as hero is dead.
73
Hooper symbolizes the danger of placing too much
reliance on technology. A Sputnik generation hero, Hooper
represents the ultimate technophile, continually spouting
out precise, scientific terms for every type of shark
known to humankind, as if this were a way to ward off the
menace. To a generation nurtured on Mister Wizard and
Star Trek, Hooper is fascinating, because he has all the
fancy gadgets that whirl and flash and go bleep. Yet he
lives under a grand illusion. He imagines that he can
somehow protect himself from the monster by surrounding
himself with expensive scientific equipment. His gadgets,
however, become a symbolic device whereby the artists
"bait" the audience into identifying with Hooper and then
"switch" their feelings by showing how technology fails to
protect him when the real battle with the shark is at hand.
The pivotal scene occurs when Hooper enters his "invulner
able" shark cage, only to have it battered to pieces by the
force of the monster. Hooper manages to survive, but he
remains trapped underwater while the main battle takes
place overhead. He symbolizes the kind of person who gets
so wrapped up in material possessions that he loses all
sight of moral conflict. The didactic message of the
artists is again established: faith in technology will not
substitute for genuine heroism.
With Quint dead and Hooper trapped underwater, only
Sheriff Brody remains to do battle with the shark. Like a
74
Horatio Alger character, he combines pluck and luck to
singlehandedly defeat the monster, stuffing an air canister
in its maw and blowing it up with a well-placed bullet.
The audience cheers Brody's victory, identifying with him
as a hero who has overcome his own fear and his own past
errors to achieve ultimate victory. Brody’s initial guilt
over bowing to local real estate interests who influenced
him not to close the beaches in response to the first
shark attack ultimately is transformed into a resolve to
defeat the beast that has brought him to an awareness of
his own capacity for corruption.
In this section, I have dealt with some aspects of the
production history of Jaws as they relate to the working
relationship of the major Agents who "authored" the film,
and I have shown how the conscious reworking of the major
characters by these Agents serves to accentuate a didactic
statement to the audience concerning the nature of heroism.
The Pentad serves as an aid in both processes, but espe
cially in the latter. "Objective" criticism, which would
look at the formal characteristics of the film as they
stand alone from artists and audience, and "reader
response" criticism, as it would view the activities of
the audience, would both fall short of the insights
revealed by the Dramatistic model. The reader response
critic, for example, would show how the reader "comes to
75
an awareness" that Brody is a more acceptable hero than
Quint or Hooper. The Dramatist, on the other hand, expands
the Circumference of the discussion and allows for the Act
of creation to stand alongside the Act of response. Art
ists can thus be seen as "persuaders" who consciously
manipulate their audiences into adopting a particular
point of view by the way they ramify a particular symbol.
We see this manipulation occurring in Jaws as the
question, "What qualities should a modern American hero
have?" is forced to the front. Quint and Hooper serve as
foils, and are eliminated by artistic technique. Quint is
alienated from the other characters by his gruffness and
his antipathy toward women. He is alienated further from
the audience by his association with Captain Ahab. Hoop
er's alienation contains a twist, a twist which forces Mi:
members_of the audience to reflect upon their own blind
love for material possessions. The artists instill a
didactic message as they purposely "distance" the audience
from Hooper by robbing him of the opportunity for heroism
and the audience of a chance to see the person promoting
love of material objects prove victorious. We need to
keep this didacticism in mind as we reflect upon Abraham
Kaplan's assertion that popular culture creates only
"reactions," not "responses." Kaplan's assumptions about
audience passivity will be discussed further in Chapter IV,
76
but for now we may simply note' that popular artists do not
always simply fall into the trap of reinforcing conven
tional values.
To summarize, in Jaws we find that a group of close
collaborators has worked its stamp on a popular adventure
yarn, refashioning the major characters via a dialectic
involving several writers, an aggressive director and film
editor, and insightful actors, so that the end result is an
"intentional Act" designed to present a new model of a
"fallible" hero to an audience suffering from a common
belief that heroism is dead and that Watergate-style cor
ruption is the fated concomitant of leadership. Burke's
emphasis on the artist as communicator has led us to exam
ine how the artists' awareness of audience expectations
results in conscious craftsmanship in developing the prin
cipal characters. The saga of how the film came to be
made shows how several collaborators were brought together
and how they grew to develop a unified vision of the film
as they worked closely together on location in Martha's
Vineyard. It is in allowing for a consideration of this
Scene-Agent ratio— the impact of the working environment
upon the artists--that Dramatism differs most from other
forms of criticism. Dramatism thus opens up a wider range
of possibilities in the sources of information that can be
used by critics and researchers. Such relatively
77
unexplored tools as writers' diaries, trade magazine
interviews with film-makers on location, studio memoranda,
and the like may prove to be of considerable use as future
researchers document more thoroughly the decisions made by
popular artists as they engage in their craft.
78
NOTES
1
Kenneth Burke, Language As Symbolic Action: Essays
on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley, Univ. of Cali
fornia Press, 1966), p. 16. Hereinafter referred to as
Language; subsequent reference citations will appear in
parentheses in the text.
2
Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York:
Prentice-Hall, 1945), p. 318. Hereinafter referred to as
Grammar; subsequent reference citations will appear in
parentheses in the text.
3
Kenneth Burke, "Dramatism," International Encyclo
pedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David L. Still, (New York:
The MacMillan Co. and The Free Press, 1968) , Vol. VII,
p. 445.
4
Michael George Feehan, "A Dramatistic Grammar of
Literary Reception: Perspectives on 'Leaves of Grass,'"
Diss. Univ. of Southern California, 1979, p. 55.
5
Feehan, p. 59.
£
Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (1950; rpt.
Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969), pp. 21-22.
7
See William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe Beardsley,
"The Intentional Fallacy," in The Verbal Icon: Studies in
the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington, Kentucky: Univ. of Ken
tucky Press, 1954).
8
See E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1967).
9
Steven John Mailloux, "Interpretive Conventions and
Recent Anglo-American Literary Theory," Diss. Univ. of
Southern California, 1978, p. 123.
Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (1931; rpt. Berke
ley: Univ. of California Press, 1968). pp. 150-51. Here=:
inafter referred to as Statement; subsequent reference
citations will appear in parentheses in the text.
11
]Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture:
An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (New York: Basic •
Books, 1974), p. 24.
79
12
See Gans, pp. 75-79.
13
See Raymond Durgnat, "Art and Audience," British
Journal of Aesthetics, 10 (1970). Durgnat essentially
argues that current criticism is.oriented toward the
"Romantic" motives of the high culture artist who creates
for self-expression, and that it ignores the "Classical"
social role of the popular artist. This notion will be
taken up again in Chapter IV.
14
My own view is that auteur criticism represents the
desires of "elite" critics functioning within a set of
Romantic suppositions about the nature of artistry and
hoping to legitimize film as a high culture art form. The
magnificent creative consciousness of the director-auteur
is highlighted in emulation of the schools of literary
criticism which focus on individual writers, their belief
systems, and their stylistic innovations.
15
John Getze, "Jaws Swims to the Top in Ocean of
Publicity," Los Angeles Times, 28 Sept. 1975, Part 7,
pp. 1- 2 .
^ Carl Gottlieb, The Jaws Log (New York: Dell,
1975), see esp. pp. 19, 48 and 152. Hereinafter referred
to as Log; subsequent reference citations will appear in
parentheses in the text.
80
III. FORM IN POPULAR CULTURE
As we observed in Chapter I, most contemporary popular
culture critics are familiar with John G. Cawelti's work on
popular formulae. In a number of books and articles pub
lished in recent years, Cawelti has put forth a convincing
case for the notion that popular art works are enjoyed by
mass audiences because they articulate conventional themes
within the bounds of formulaic structures appealing to our
basic social and psychological makeup.^ Cawelti argues
that the "dialectic of cultural and artistic interests" at
a given moment in history can be studied in order to shed
light on the major social, political, and psychological
2
concerns of an age as revealed through its popular art.
At the same time, one can come to understand how art is
appreciated by observing how it reflects the concerns of
its times. Thus Cawelti justifies the study of formal
qualities of popular culture by demonstrating how much can
be revealed about social history and human psychology by
such studies.
Kenneth Burke, on the other hand, is a name virtually
unknown to the average popular culture scholar. This is
unfortunate, for not only is Burke's work on the nature of
81
form prior to Cawelti"s, and for the most part compatible
with it, but it is also much more comprehensive. Burke's
concept of form can be applied to a work of art viewed
extrinsically, as it relates to the wider social context
out of which it emerges, as well as intrinsically, in
terms of the formal structures inherent in the work itself.
It provides for an analysis of the contribution of the
artist and for the interplay between the work and its
audience. Before we return to Cawelti, therefore, we will
take a longer look at Burke's concept of form.
Kenneth Burke and Form
Most of Burke's major ideas on form can be found in
Counter-Statement, published in 1931, before a full-blown
theory of Dramatism had been developed. But like all of
Burke's writings, Counter-Statement is part of a natural
progression of consistent ideas. As a consequence, one who
looks back at Counter-Statement from the perspective fur
nished by the later writings would have no trouble melding
the concept of form stated in 1931 with the theory of
Dramatism developed in the Grammar and the Rhetoric.
Burke defines form as "the creation of an appetite in
the mind of the auditor, and the adequate satisfying of
that appetite." (Statement, p. 31.) This view is harmoni
ous with the assumption that art is a part of life experi
ence, not an element that can be separated from the other
82
components of human existence. In Burke's view, "Art, at
least in the great periods when it has flowered, was the
conversion or transcendence of emotion into eloquence, and
was thus a factor added to life." (Statement, p. 41.)
Formal conventions occupy a role critically intertwined
with human experience. Burke sees form as a tool that
helps us symbolize our inner feelings. Form has cause (the
human desire to externally express inner feelings) and
Purpose (as an aid in persuading us of the "human-ness" of
our works of art). From a rhetorical standpoint, form is
the "glue" that unites artist and audience.
In a chapter on "The Psychology of Form" in Counter-
Statement , Burke distinguishes between a psychology of
information and a psychology of form. In the former, the
human appetite for data is satisfied. The reader of Moby
Dick, for example, is given a considerable amount of infor
mation about the methods of whale hunting used in
nineteenth-century New England. Elements related to plot
(what occurs in a work of art rather than how it occurs)
are tied to the psychology of information. According to
Burke, audience interest is maintained most appropriately
when devices of surprise and suspense are used. As Burke
defines it, "Suspense is the concern over the possible out
come of some specific detail of plot rather than for gen
eral qualities. Thus, 'Will A marry B or C?' is suspense."
(Statement, p. 38.)
83
In instances where the psychology of information is
predominant in a work of art to the virtual exclusion of
the psychology of form, the audience is left with only a
partial sense of satisfaction. Devoid of symbolically ram
ified analogs to human emotion, or to what Burke terms
"racial appetites," such works give no pleasure in reread
ing. If the audience has been made to hunger for informa
tion alone, and if the appetite has been satisfied, then
even with the tools of surprise and suspense the excitement
is gone the second time around. An aesthetically impover
ished Whodunit loses its impact as soon as the audience
knows the name of the murderer. An aesthetically rich Who
dunit, on the other hand, may be read over and over again,
for it offers us insight into the depths of human motiva
tion. Only that eloquence which characterizes the psychol
ogy of form and which stimulates an approving "Yes, this ijs
the way of the human soul!" can maintain interest again and
again. As Burke puts it:
Truth in art is not the discovery of facts, not
an addition to human knowledge in the scientific
sense of the word. It is, rather, the exercise
of human propriety, the formulation of symbols
which rigidify our sense of poise and rhythm.
Artistic truth is the externalization of taste.
(Statement, p. 42.)
If form is a set of analogs to inner states of being
(Burke mentions both the "concrete" functions such as the
84
rhythm of the human heartbeat and the "ineffable" ones such
as love, guilt, sorrow, etc.), then the task of the criti
cal theorist must be to demonstrate how these analogs
actually are developed in works of art involving different
media of communication. This Burke attempts to do in the
longest section of Counter-Statement, the "Lexicon Rhetor-
icae." In the "Lexicon," Burke describes five aspects of
form: 1) syllogistic progression, 2) qualitative progres
sion, 3) repetitive form, 4) conventional form, and
5) minor or incidental forms. We will now take up each in
its turn.
Syllogistic progression, Burke writes, "is the form of
a perfectly conducted argument, advancing step by step."
(Statement, p. 124.) Thus a story of ratiocination by Poe,
wherein a detective - sifts through clues and eliminates pos
sible suspects one by one, tracking a culprit down in a
methodical manner, is an example of syllogistic progres
sion. Typically this aspect of form applies to our under
standing of the motives underlying a character's actions.
We may enjoy the final acting-out of revenge, for instance,
because our appetite has been stimulated by the acts of
malice perpetrated against the protagonist. We identify
with the situation the hero has found himself in and we
share in his experience as he grows in his desire for ven
geance, step by step, as the plot unfolds.
85
Qualitative progression relies not upon the logical
interconnectedness of the incidents in the plot, as with
syllogistic progression, but rather the interconnectedness
of the "quality" of certain scenes. Perhaps the best
example of qualitative progression is the "comic relief"
scene which frequently follows a scene of high tension or
violence. The comic relief allows us to briefly relax and
gain some perspective and distance on what we have just
experienced. Burke notes that unlike a syllogistic pro
gression, which usually occurs in such an orderly manner
that we come to expect the next incident, a qualitative
progression first happens, and then we "recognize its
rightness after the incident." Qualitative progressions
are well-crafted if they enable us to be "put into a state
of mind which another state of mind can appropriately fol
low. " (Statement, p. 12 5.)
Repetitive form, according to Burke, is the "consis
tent maintaining of a principle under new guises." (State
ment, p. 125.) This aspect of form can be articulated in
many ways. Burke offers the example of Swift enumerating
many details to illustrate the discrepancy in size between
Gulliver and the Lilliputians. Each detail reinforces the
main theme. Another way in which repetitive form may be
present is the "clustering" of images appropriate to a par
ticular theme or topic, a succession of nature images to
amplify a lyric poem on Spring, for example. Repetitive
86
form, Burke argues, is basic to any work of art, or to any
act of human communication. It is necessary in order for
us to be oriented properly to a particular topic, or as
Burke puts it, "It is our only method of 'talking on the
subject.'" (Statement, p. 125.)
Conventional form relies upon the element of "categor
ical expectancy" (Burke's term) among members of the audi
ence. The presence of the chorus in a Greek play, for
example, is anticipated by one who is about to witness a
Greek tragedy; it is a convention of the genre. Similarly,
the fact that a sonnet contains fourteen lines or that a
limerick has an aabba rhyme scheme are further instances
of conventional form. Like the English common law tradi
tion, it may be exceedingly difficult to trace the source
of many conventions, and all the bother involved may not
tell us anything of significance. Suffice it to say that
certain structures become associated with certain themes or
certain modes of presentation or certain moods, and that
these structures..are widely understood by artists and audi
ences, both giving assent to the "appropriateness" of the
structure for the particular work of art. In general,
Burke's concept of conventional form is compatible with
Cawelti's theory of popular formula, about which we will
have more to say in the next section.
Finally, we have minor or incidental forms. These
are the elements of style— metaphor, apostrophe, chiasmus,
87
etc.--which occur in great .number in'any work of art.
Minor forms may be dissected from the whole and treated as
aspects of the work unique unto themselves, but they serve
a greater general purpose when they are studied in terms of
their contribution to the unfolding of the work as a whole.
Ahab1s wooden leg, for instance, becomes important as a
synecdochic representation of the complete man, with all
his hurt and obsession.
Following this enumeration of the major aspects of
form, Burke addresses two key questions: 1) Why do..these
forms have appeal? and 2) By what standard are they to be
judged as "correct"? In responding to the first question,
Burke asserts that formal structures in art are not unique.
They are simply analogous to the structures by which the
human mind reasons. He writes:
There are formal patterns which distinguish our
experience. They apply in art, since they apply
outside of art. . . . We establish a direction
by co-ordinates; we establish a curve by three
points, and thereupon can so place other points
that they will be intercepted by this curve.
Thus, though forms need not be prior to experi
ence, they are certainly prior to the work of art
exemplifying them. Psychology and philosophy may
decide whether they are innate or resultant; so
far as the work of art is concerned they simply
are: when one turns to the production or enjoy
ment of a work of art, a formal equipment is
already present, and the effects of art are
involved in its utilization. Such ultimate minor
forms as contrast, comparison, metaphor, series,
bathos, chiasmus, are based upon our modes of
understanding anything; they are implicit in the
processes of abstraction and generalization by
which we think. (Statement, pp. 141-42.)
88
In sum, Burke asserts that "the formal aspects of art
appeal in that they exercise formal potentialities of the
reader. They enable the mind to follow processes amenable
to it." (Statement, pp. 142-43.)
The second question is really the essential question
for all criticism. Any critic who presumes to be able to
assess a form as "correct" or "incorrect" for a work of art
must be able to state the grounds by which he or she
arrives at such judgments. For Burke, the "correctness"
or appropriateness of a given form for a given work of art
must be ascertained dialectically. A mere intrinsic study
of the formal properties of the work will not suffice. The
critic must examine the entire continuum of communication,
from artistry to audience response. A general Burkean
principle is that "Form, having to do with the creation and
gratification of needs, is 'correct' in- so far as it grati
fies the needs which it creates." (Statement, p. 138.)
The "needs" are needs of the audience. The dialectic is
the interplay between a work of art, presenting a powerful
symbol of human emotion, made eloquent by the vehicle of
various aspects of form, and the members of the audience,
drawn into the work by formal properties that parallel, as
best as possible within the confines of a given medium, the
paradigms of "lived experience" that accompany human emo
tion. A form is judged to be correct if it satisfies all
89
the "categorical expectancies" which it sets up and if it
avoids setting up expectations that run against the grain
of the symbol.
Dramatistically, a form which has appeal is one which
"works" within two "Scenes." The first is the intrinsic
context of the work. Within the conventional form of the
Gene Autry Western, for example, the hero is always kind
to animals. For Autry to kick a dog would be a violation
of the conventions intrinsic to the work, even though dog-
kicking may be a "natural" act in the "outer" world. In
addition, there is the Scene of the lived world. This
Scene may encompass activities as subliminal as the work
ings of the autonomic nervous system or as overt and broad-
based as our common pool of knowledge about the political
structure of the United States. Thus we assent to the
appropriateness of Dagwood Bumstead acting nervous and
timid when approaching Mr. Dithers for a raise, because
we can picture ourselves in a similar situation.
Form thus can be seen as the vehicle by which "pat
terns of experience" are symbolized and transmitted from
artist to audience (see Chapter II, pp. 58-59). As Burke
defines it, a symbol is a "verbal parallel to a pattern of
experience." (Statement, p. 152.) He offers the example
of the self-pitying poet who feels his work has been unde
servedly neglected, and who translates his own experience
into a plot, "The King and the Peasant," about a kingly
peasant and a shallow-minded king. Burke does not suggest
that all works of art are simply embellishments of a given
artist's own pattern of experience; he simply observes that
such can be the case.
The symbol is easiest to transmit when the artist's
pattern of experience is close to the audience's. But a
symbol can have appeal for an audience even when the pat
tern it represents is new or strange. It can clarify sit
uations which have hitherto been complex and ambiguous.
It can touch on patterns that have been submerged (e.g.,
symbols of cruelty or incest). It can serve as a correc
tive to value conflicts. It can stimulate hidden desires,
or provide vicarious escape from the tedium of everyday
life. Other modes of appeal may be added to this list, but
in general we may note that the patterns of experience
lodged in a particular symbol do not necessarily need to
be part of the actual experience of the artist or audience.
The artist uses various aspects of form to explore the
ramifications of a particular symbol. For example, in
order to make "The King and the Peasant" a believable
story, there may be minor characters, quirks of personal
ity, appropriate setting and the like to "flesh out" the
characters. If the drama is written in a mimetic mode,
there may even be a few minor contradictions. The "noble"
peasant may have to have a few bad, peasant-like- qualities
91
such as roughness of speech. As a symbol is ramified by
the formal structures present in a work of art, it more
thoroughly articulates a particular pattern of experience.
Thus the symbol is generative in the sense that it suggests
the structure and course that the work of art will follow.
Stated in terms of the Pentad, Purpose (as represented by
the symbol) helps shape Scene .(the structure of the work) .
Burke and Cawelti
We are now ready to return to Cawelti, in particular
to some of the ideas presented in Adventure, Mystery, and
Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. In
this recent volume, Cawelti adds flesh to earlier essays
and articles, more fully elaborating his concepts of pop
ular formulae. In particular, Cawelti builds upon his
earlier general definition of formula by analyzing the
structures and the modes of appeal of various types of
literary formulae, e.g., the detective story, the romance,
the social melodrama, etc. Since he defines formula as
"a combination or synthesis of a number of specific cul
tural conventions with a more universal story form or
archetype," we can expect that Cawelti would make observa
tions about both the basic psychological appeal of a par
ticular story form and the specific appeal the form has
within a narrower cultural context. (Adventure, p. 6.)
For example, in discussing the Western, Cawelti notes that
it has general roots in the adventure archetype and
specific roots in the symbol of the American West as a
place where the hero is bound to be caught up in the con
flict between civilization and wilderness. (See Adventure,
Chapter 8.)
My general intent is not to spend a great deal of time
on Cawelti's theories, but rather to demonstrate how his
criticism as it is practiced is compatible with Dramatism
and Burke's concept of form. There are three essential
similarities between Cawelti and Burke: 1) both start from
the premise that the interaction between the audience and
the work is dialectical, not merely a behaviorist response
to the formal "stimulus" of the work of art; 2) both place
great emphasis on the artist's and audience1s social envi
ronment as a "Scenic" backdrop for the work; and 3) both
stress the prominence of the symbol as it is developed and
carried forth by the formal properties of the work.
Cawelti's position is staked out most clearly in his 1974
article "Myth, Symbol, and Formula.," where he writes:
The basic assumption of this theory [of popular
formulae] is that conventional story patterns are
enjoyed because they combine a maximal variety of
existing cultural and artistic interests and con
cerns. This approach is different from tradi
tional forms of social or psychological determin
ism in that it rejects the concept of a single
fundamental social or psychological dynamic in
favor of viewing the appeal of a conventional
literary pattern as the bringing into play of a
variety of cultural, artistic, and psychological
interests.3
93
Here we see quite clearly that Cawelti is an antibehavioris.t :
who views art as belonging to the world of Action, not
mere Motion. Cawelti1s basic orientation— here stressing
the audience's rather than the artist's perspective--is
similar to Burke's viewing art as a set of "strategies for
situations."
In Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, we find that
Cawelti views the social melodrama as perhaps the most
complex popular formula because it is not as rigidly con
structed as other forms (the Western, the hard-boiled
detective story, etc.), but rather is a complex mixture of
formulae that have evolved over time. As Cawelti defines
the social melodrama:
The structural characteristics of this formulaic
type involve an interweaving of the patterns of
melodrama with a particular set of current
events or social institutions, the result being
a complex double effect: the social setting is
often treated rather critically with a good deal
of anatomizing the hidden motives, secret corrup
tion, and human folly underlying certain events
or institutions; yet the main plot works out in
proper melodramatic fashion to affirm, after
appropriate tribulations and sufferings, that God
is in his heaven and all's right with the world.
The sympathetic and the good undergo much testing
and difficulty, but are ultimately saved. Evil
rides high but is, in the end, overcome, at least
as far as the main characters are concerned.
(Adventure, p. 261.)
One formal necessity of the social melodrama is that
the writer's voice must appear to be that of an "authority"
who "tries to make us feel that we have penetrated what
:n. 94
shows on the surface to the inside story; he offers what
appears to be the dust beneath the rug, the secret power . . .
behind the scenes." (Adventure, p. 262.) Structurally,
this necessitates the use of devices offering surprise and
suspense, since the conventional social Scene must be
"peeled away" to reveal the underlying Scene-behind-the-
Scene. Combined with the hallmark of melodrama, the pre
sentation of various trials and tribulations that the good
characters must undergo, and of the machinations and ulti
mate punishment of the wicked, this means that the overall
structure of the social melodrama must rely heavily upon
individual episodes supported by some larger organizing
principle.
The type of organizing principle that an individual
author typically uses will influence the formal arrangement
of these episodes. For example, Cawelti notes that Harold
Robbins "tends to write stories of the failure of success.
His central characters pursue the phantoms of wealth and
power only to discover that true fulfillment can only come
through love, loyalty, and compassion." (Adventure, „ .
p. 280.) The Robbins plot thus follows a protagonist
through a syllogistic progression of episodes; the reader
identifies with the symbol of the power-hungry hero whose
jaded experiences only reinforce conventional concepts of
goodness. The necessity for scenes of evil and corruption
95
makes it easier for Robbins to use implausible coincidence
and exaggerated spectacle in order to heighten the
melodrama.
It should be noted that I am borrowing some of Burke's
terminology in the discussion above, but the analysis comes
from Cawelti. Throughout his writings, Cawelti is con
stantly aware of the basic rhetorical situation grounding
all acts of communication, the dialectical triangle uniting
artist, work, and audience. In discussing formal proper
ties of popular art, Cawelti consistently addresses form as
it is used to achieve certain purposes for the artist and
as it guides the audience to a certain set of attitudes by
making use of the audience's social knowledge and its abil
ity to identify with symbolically ramified patterns of
experience.
Burke and Cawelti are closest in their analyses in
treating art as a social artifact emerging from a set of
attitudes toward the larger social Scene, attitudes which
may be explicitly understood and exploited by the artist
or implicitly present in the work. Thus both men focus on
how an author may use the audience's social knowledge to
achieve certain dramatic effects. In analyzing the social
melodrama, for example, Cawelti comes close to Burke's
concept of qualitative progression in noting how Robbins
strings together episodes of sexual experimentation and
"perversity" as his protagonists undergo a sort of
96
Walpurgisnacht on the road to eventually being satisfied
with monogamistic love. If the underlying social attitude
of mid-twentieth-century Americans did not favor a monoga
mistic ideal, Cawelti observes, then Robbins and other
writers would not be able to secure agreement from their
audiences as they construct works which qualitatively move
toward this ideal by artistically arranging episodes of
shocking contrast and harsh discord.
Indeed, as Cawelti traces the history of the social
melodrama, he notes that best-selling works in this genre
are more short-lived than most best-sellers in other popu
lar formulae (note the lasting impact of Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle's Sherlock Holmes detective stories, for instance, as
opposed to Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth's social melodramas
of roughly the same period). This failure of the social
melodrama to have a Tasting power on audiences, Cawelti
feels, is primarily due to rapid changes in social values.
The promulgation of "outworn" social values (e.g., the
belief in a traditional Christian God as the only mark of
goodness) is a hallmark of even fairly recent social melo
dramas. Unlike other forms, where archaic values can be
tolerated because they are not instrumental in advancing
the plot or in sorting out the "good guys" from the bad,
the social melodrama depends upon the audience adhering to
these values in order to gain assent to the appropriateness
of the denouement.
97
For the serious student of popular culture, then,
Burke and Cawelti provide a thorough base for understanding
the formal properties of popular art. As we have seen by
examining Cawelti's analysis of one popular genre, the
social melodrama, he provides a thoroughgoing examination
of the modes..of appeal of popular formulae, working out in
considerable detail how symbols are generated and ramified
through the conventions of these formulae. Burke is more
the pure theorist and less the practical critic,..but his
Dramatistic method offers three major concepts which can
be used in dissecting the formal aspects of any type of
art. First is the Pentad, which allows us to examine both
4
authorial intention and audience response. Secondly, we
have the concepts of identification and patterns of experi
ence, which provide the links between the incidents in a
fictional story and the Scenic backdrop of everyday life.
Finally, we have the specific types of form as outlined in
the "Lexicon Rhetoricae." Added together, these methodo
logical tools allow us to better penetrate the mysteries
of form in the propular arts.
Form and Television
As the newest and most powerful of the electronic
media, television is seen by many critics as something too
close to our daily experience for proper analysis. Most
98
television criticism, therefore, is of the garden variety
that appears in the daily newspapers or the FCC "social
scientific" approach, which makes use of statistics on
behavioral responses to Roadrunner cartoons as an aid to
formulating policy on television violence. Few critics
wander into the complicated area of television as a medium
that contains unique formal properties which distinguish
its content from that of traditional art forms.
One exception to this rule is Horace Newcomb, a stur*
dent of Cawelti's who has applied Cawelti's notions con
cerning popular formulae to the medium of television. In
TV: The Most Popular Art, Newcomb sets out to explore the
ways "in which television changes and modifies traditional
formulas, how it begins to create a sense of the ' televi-
5
sion formula' with its own cultural significance." In
dealing with the Western formula as it has been modified
by television, for example, Newcomb notes the diminution
of the importance of outdoor scenery (awesome on the big
screen in movie theaters but awkward in appearance on the
small screen of TV) and the importance of continuing char
acters in such long-running television Westerns as Gunsmoke
and Bonanza. The constraint imposed by a week-to-week
series format means that the traditional syllogistic form
of the Western film or novel, wherein a single action is
developed and drawn to closure, is impossible to maintain.
Instead, the continuing characters must be "without memory"
in order to confront a new problem situation each week.
As Newcomb notes:
In this circular framework the classic issues of
western adventure would have played themselves
out long ago. In order to avoid this the pro
ducers have applied the western vision to a host
of other problems. The problem-solution paradigm
of the sitcom and the family focus of the domes
tic comedy have been combined with the Western
formula in the creation of a new form of popular
art. 6
In this example, we see how Newcomb builds upon Cawelti's
general theory of formulae by demonstrating how the con
straints imposed by a particular medium will inevitably
lead to some sort of modification of the formula. A more
general statement of this view would be to say, for exam
ple, that a detective novel will be different in its formu
laic aspects from a detective film, and so on.
In TV: The Most Popular Art, Newcomb suggests three
components of an overall television aesthetic: intimacy,
continuity, and history. By intimacy, Newcomb means both
the closeness of the situation within which members of the
audience experience material presented on television and
the fact that interior scenes and face-to-face conversa
tions are more appropriate to the small screen than they
are to the wide screen in the movie theater. By continuity,
Newcomb refers to the regular appearance of characters and
standard sets (e.g., Archie Bunker's armchair) that form a
100
comfortable and familiar environment for those of us
watching regularly scheduled series. In probing aspects
of continuity, Newcomb comes to the thought-provoking con
clusion that:
These factors indicate that the real relationship
with other media lies not in movies or radio, but
in the novel. Television, like the literary
form, can offer a far greater sense of density.
Details take on an importance slowly, and within
repeated patterns of action, rather than with the
immediacy of other visual forms. It is this
sense of density, built over a continuing period
of time, that offers us a fuller sense of a
world fully created by the artist.^
Finally, by history, Newcomb means that television has
become a medium where contemporary issues are examined
within unique formulaic structures and where much of the
time, they are removed to a "mythical" historical time,
where values can be more firmly and concretely dealt with,
as in the case of the television Western, where contempo
rary topics such as racial prejudice can be treated within
the dramatic form of a Chinese worker passing through
Virginia City, Nevada, in the late nineteenth-century era
of Bonanza.
In focusing upon the formal properties which are
brought out by the nature of a medium such as television,
and by the nature of the audience's interaction with con
tent as conveyed by the medium, Newcomb is staking out a
position which stresses the role of the medium in a much
101
more integrated fashion than McLuhan, who has an almost
"transcendental" obsession with it. As we have noted
earlier, the theory of popular formulae as advanced by
Cawelti and enhanced, in this instance, by Newcomb is
closely related to what Burke means by the term "conven
tional form" (or "categorical expectation"). In Counter-
Statement , Burke discusses how conventional form may evolve
within a single medium over a period of time, offering as
an example the history of the chorus in the Greek tragedy,
from the "goat-song" of the incunabula period of religious
rites to the invention of the actor as someone independent
of the chorus, to the addition of several actors and the
relegation of the chorus to its now-familiar "backup"
Q
role. Yet Burke does not delve into the issue of how
conventional forms may be modified by the development of
new and different media. This is the principal contribu
tion made by Newcomb in his work on television, and it is
in the spirit of viewing this work as it may be absorbed
into the Burkean view of form that I have offered a brief
glimpse into Newcomb's ideas.
"Shogun" on TV:
Some Observations on Form
The rendering of Shogun, James Clavell's best-selling
1975 novel about seventeenth-century Japan, into a five-
night television miniseries presents the popular culture
102
critic with an appropriate sample of popular television
fare to which we may apply many of the concepts discussed
earlier in this chapter. Based upon the actual historical
rise to power of the first warlord or "Shogun" to unify
Japan, the television miniseries contains elements of both
the traditional adventure, as it follows the exploits of
the British navigator James Blackthorne (Richard Chamber-
lain) , and the romance, as it chronicles the relationship
between Blackthorne and Lady Mariko. The dynamics of the
private affairs affecting the lives of the principal char
acters contrast with the events in the wider public arena,
the struggle for power among various Japanese rulers and
the involvement of the Portuguese Jesuits in the destiny-
shaping events. Thus Shogun has many of the characteris-J
tics of the social melodrama, as defined by Cawelti.
Even to begin to summarize the plot of Shogun involves
one in the observation that the plot structure was tailored
to the television medium. As a miniseries running on con
secutive evenings, Shogun presented its producers with the
problem of maintaining an audience throughout the week.
The formal structures had to be developed so that any eve
ning's episode would not give off a sense of "finality"
which would encourage audiences to abandon watching future
episodes. Dramatic suspense had to be provided at the end
of every evening, much the same as episodes of the old
movie serials had "cliffhanger" endings which beckoned the
103
audience to return the following week. At the close of the
first three-hour episode, for example, we see Blackthorne
in prison, being summoned by the executioner just after
being told by a Spanish priest that no one is released from
prison in Japan; everyone is either incarcerated indefi
nitely or executed. Even though the audience knows per
fectly well that the series cannot run five evenings if
Blackthorne dies by the second episode, a sense of curios
ity forces audience members to tune in the second night.
The audience is left to porider several options: escape,
sudden release, rescue, or some other solution.
As an "adventure" story with strong romantic subplots
and dominant picaresque elements, Shogun alternates between
public and private themes. As a "strategy for a situa
tion," the situation being the maintenance of audience
interest over a five-night span, it is important that the
first evening start off powerfully, in order to build
audience interest, with much emphasis on the public arena
and the spectacle of a European Protestant navigator being
stranded in a strange and terrifying country. Some of the
most brutal incidents, subject of considerable attention
from popular commentators, occurred during the first eve
ning. These included the beheading of a peasant by a
Samurai, Omi, who was piqued because the peasant had
refused to bow in his presence, and the humiliation of
104
Blackthorne by the same Samurai, who made him lie down and
then urinated on him. These incidents are examples of
repetitive form, ..helping to reinforce the historical set
ting and to strengthen the image the public had been sold
on of the entire series as an action-oriented, violent,
historical drama.
The second evening was an initiation into the more
private relationships. After quickly establishing that
Blackthorne has been released by a curious Lord Toranaga,
we again meet Lady Mariko, whom we had a brief’glimpse of
the first evening. Mariko is appointed by Toranaga to
serve as Blackthorne's interpreter, and we find the begin
ning of the attraction between them. We also explore the
relationship between Toranaga as the strong and ambitious
leader and Ishido as the plump and evil master of Osaka
Castle in intimate castle scenes and in the suspenseful
drama of Toranaga1s secret escape from the castle. The
qualitative contrast between Toranaga's overt use of his
authority and Ishido's secretive and mysterious manipula-i . . .
tion of people and events reinforces audience identifica
tion with Toranaga and suspicion of Ishido. Finally, we
are also presented with the private plotting of the Jesuits
and with the Portuguese seaman Rodrigues, a confused man
torn between loyalty to faith and country and friendship
for Blackthorne, whose personal qualities of intelligence
and courage Rodrigues admires. In many ways, the second
105
evening is the most diffuse of the episodes, yoking
together so many disparate scenes of character development
that the dramatic incidents (the attempted murder of Black
thorne in the castle, Toranaga's escape, the sea battle at
the mouth of the harbor, etc.) are almost overshadowed.
The audience is left pondering what will follow, specifi
cally what events will occur to yoke together the destinies
of the various characters, whose thoughts and personalities
are now more familiar. For the second evening, we find an
"openness" to the structure, an openness which compels the
audience to tune in the following evening.
The third episode is devoted principally to the roman
tic attraction between Blackthorne and Mariko, a major
theme of which is the cultural indoctrination of Black
thorne (and the audience), in particular his exposure to
the concept of karma or fate and the concomitant attitude
that life exists in eternally present moments, not in the
anticipation of future events. Blackthorne's "rebirth" in
Japanese culture is accomplished when he very nearly com-
mits seppuku or ritual suicide in an attempt to convince
Lord Yabu to renounce his threat to destroy an entire vil
lage if Blackthorne doesn't become sufficiently proficient
in Japanese. Only the intervention of Omi, Yabu's Samurai,
saves Blackthorne's life.
The behavior of the Japanese characters is thus becom
ing more understandable to the American audience, since it
106
is gradually being placed within a philosophical context,
a context which hinges upon the formal development of the
principal characters. The techniques of surprise and sus
pense, necessary to keep us interested in the action at an
earlier stage, can now be replaced by more subtle tech
niques, such as dramatic irony. An audience unfamiliar
with the cultural norms cannot be expected to adequately
interpret information that may serve as a guide to future
events, events that will occur as the plot unfolds. But an
audience that is slowly informed about the Japanese belief
systems and values can understand syllogistic progressions
that hinge on Japanese notions. Such an audience can also
be moved by qualitative progressions based on feelings
motivated by non-Western values. We can now see that the
most profitable view of Shogun through the third episode is
one which views it as a working out of both qualitative and
syllogistic progressions, each of which is necessary in a
carefully planned "mix" if Shogun is to work for its audi
ence. Shogun depends upon audience expectations of vio
lence and action to initially draw viewers, even though the
real project is considerably different. By the end of the
third evening, the audience begins to miss the promised
action. The formal structures, however, help propel the
audience along as the indoctrination to Japanese values
proceeds at a more rapid pace. Despite themselves, Western
audiences begin to "think Japanese." One way by which
107
Shogun helped audience identification with Blackthorne as
protagonist was by presenting many conversations in Japan
ese, making the audience relate directly to Blackthorne's
confusion and anxiety as he remained dependent on
translation.
Thus by the third night, and with the aid of an epi
sode focusing almost entirely on the explication of the
Japanese value system, the audience is far enough advanced
in its indoctrination that it can begin to "think in both
cultures." The symbolic conclusion to this initiation
process is the earthquake scene, where Blackthorne again
saves Toranaga's life, and the ceremony where he is made a
Samurai. The qualitative progression which contrasts quiet
scenes featuring Mariko's and Blackthorne's romantic
attraction with the violent upheaval of the earthquake
makes the episode stand out. Toranaga is appropriately
"converted" to trusting in Blackthorne's good will pre
cisely at the moment where Blackthorne— and the audience—
stand ready to accept a Japanese world view. Fittingly,
the episode ends quietly with Mariko stressing the impor
tant values Blackthorne must now uphold as a Samurai.
The fourth evening's events serve;-to build up the
tension needed for the denouement. Public and private
events are brought together, and virtually every major
character is highlighted to some extent, in symmetrical
108
balance with their presence in the second episode. The
principal public event is the summoning of Lord Toranaga
to Osaka Castle by Lord Ishido and the Regents. The order
is delivered by Toranaga's half brother, and the tension
is enhanced by their blood relationship. Toranaga1s accep
tance of the order sets up audience expectations of a final
confrontation between Toranaga and Ishido.
The private relationship between Blackthorne and
Mariko is heightened by this anticipation of a public con
frontation between Toranaga and Ishido and the possibility
of death. The same sort of anxiety that accompanies the
Toranaga/Ishido relationship becomes a psychologically
important tool in qualitatively furthering audience anxiety
in a scene where Mariko contemplates suicide after her hus
band, Buntaro, fails in an attempt at reconciliation with
her. Mariko's near-death parallels Blackthorne's near
suicide of the previous evening, providing a "double"
instance of qualitatively progressive form. The fact that
both Mariko and Blackthorne have attempted suicide makes us
feel that both are now leading "specially-charmed" fates,
wherein time is suspended. The capstone is the sexual
culmination of their relationship as they journey to Osaka
Castle and vow to remain lovers until they reach "the first
bridge of Yedo."
This penultimate episode concludes with Blackthorne's
request to Toranaga that Mariko be granted a divorce and
109
be given permission to marry him. Toranaga1s rage at
Blackthorne's presumptuousness makes us ill at east. The
audience approaches the final evening with both public and
private questions looming large: Will Toranaga be success
ful on the battlefield? Will Blackthorne and Mariko ever
be allowed to find happiness with each other?
The final episode presents a series of events that
completely contradict the expectations of an audience
accustomed to the patterned conclusion which would ordi
narily be found in an adventure/romance story. Lord Yabu
proves to be a traitor to Toranaga, setting up a night
raid at Osaka Castle that results in Mariko's death.
Blackthorne is temporarily blinded, is treated and aided
by a group of Christian Samurai, and is ultimately res
cued from Catholic Inquisitors by Rodrigues, whose
admiration for Blackthorne1s abilities finally outweighs
his loyalty to Church. The expected battle scene between
Toranaga and Ishido does not occur; instead the narrator
tells us in a brief concluding voice-over that Toranaga
ultimately won victory in battle and became Shogun.
The focus at the end is on Blackthorne as one who
must accept a certain karma, a fate that decrees his
remaining in Japan for the rest of his life. His ship
has been burned on orders from Mariko (Blackthorne only
110
belatedly learns this) and like a seventeenth century
Tantalus, he is given money to rebuild his ship, never
knowing that provisions have been made for the destruction
of every new ship he may ever construct. The reinforcement
of the concept of karma leaves the audience with an • •
entirely different outlook on Shogun; by its conclusion,
one walks away with the knowledge that the story is not
"all about" adventuring and romance but rather about how
conflicting social value systems have an impact upon pri
vate lives.
Shogun is revealed to be a very unusual sort of social
melodrama. The stress is upon how the protagonist comes to
an understanding of how Oriental values work, as he experi
ences them against a backdrop of dramatic public action and
private feeling. Instead of following Cawelti's formula of
treating the "hidden motives, secret.corruption, and human
folly" underlying a familiar, contemporary, Western social
institution, Clavell has chosen a time and place unfamiliar
to most Westerners. Thus if we are to emerge from the
total experience convinced that "God is in his heaven and
all's right with the world'," as Cawelti suggests is the
proper attitude shaped by the social melodrama, we must
undergo a double indoctrination, being exposed at once to
the surface values espoused by the culture as well as to
the inner contradictions.
Ill
The technique used to accomplish this audience
indoctrination is to highlight the cultural differences
by selecting a sympathetic protagonist with whom the audi
ence can identify, and suddenly thrusting him into an alien
culture. In Shogun Blackthorne is the sympathetic protag
onist. We share his Western values and biases for the most
part, and when he differs from us (as in his fervent anti-
Papism), we understand the differences because they bear
the marks of our own Western past. The presentation of : . ;
much of the dialogue in Japanese is a stroke of genius, for
it allows us to further identify with. Blackthorne's bewil
derment as he is confronted by a strange culture.
As Blackthorne develops in his understanding of the
Japanese, so too do we develop. Repetitive form makes bits
and pieces of the Japanese language sound familiar to our
ears, so familiar that they are repeated by millions of
Shogun-watchers in bars and factories all over America.
Minor forms help reinforce our sense of Blackthorne1s
progress in becoming more Japanese. As an example of minor
form, we may note the use of contrast in displaying Black
thorne 1 s initial disdain for bathing as a custom "breeding
disease" and contrasting this disdain with the scene
involving a reunion with his men in the last episode. At
the reunion, Blackthorne can scarcely contain his disgust
at his crew's filthy habits and their stench, and he imme
diately bathes after leaving their midst.
112
The presence of the Portuguese Jesuits is an important
element in the qualitative progression of the plot. Their
value contradictions help prepare Western audiences for the
seeming contradictions in Japanese culture since our own
cultural background makes us more closely identify with the
Jesuits, and makes us more disturbed when they behave in
strange ways. An audience that observes Jesuit priests
plotting the assassination of Blackthorne by Rodrigues in
one scene and upholding a sacred vow not to reveal Black
thorne ' s request for Mariko's hand in marriage in another
can better (.understand the mingled elements of courtliness
and violence in Japanese society. Even for a modern Roman
Catholic, the portrayal of the Jesuits symbolizes a culture
just as alien to us and as complex as the Japanese.
Mariko's death represents the final moment in the
cultural conditioning of the audience. If Shogun is to be
perceived as an explication and "celebration" of a differ
ent culture instead of as a failed romance, the audience
must be carefully prepared to accept the appropriateness of
her fate. This preparation must be accomplished by the use
of appropriate formal techniques. Mariko's death must be
hinted at, it must be seen as a .'noble-.and. "necessary" end,
and provision must be made for Blackthorne to live on in a
"happy" manner even after her passing. All of these ingre
dients are provided for within the formal structures of
Shogun.
113
The near-suicides of both Blackthorne and Mariko, as
we have already noted, allow both of them to lead a sort of
"charmed" existence together. Life takes on a crystalline
immediacy, a special presence, when one knows that one has
been so close to death. Every moment becomes a special
extension of life, rather than simply continuity of life,
and so death, when it does occur, has less impact. An
additional preparation for Mariko's end comes in her vow
that the relationship with Blackthorne will end when they
reach the first bridge of Yedo. Members of the audience
may desire something else, but the vow foreshadows the
possibility that something will interfere with the lovers
finding ultimate fulfillment with one another.
Mariko's actual death represents a perfect syllogistic
progression, a classic unraveling of fate, though it
depends upon one factor— acceptance of the rules of the
Japanese social system. Let us review the events leading
up to her death: 1) It is a given that Ishido must give
his permission for Mariko to leave Osaka Castle. 2) In
order to fulfill her liege lord's (Toranaga's) orders, she
must leave Osaka. 3) Ishido denies her permission to
leave. 4) Mariko, caught between the horns of a dilemma,
prepares herself for ritual suicide, the only socially
acceptable way to resolve such a situation. 5) Ishido,
who would be publicly shamed by this, grants permission at
the last minute, but 6) Mariko is too weakened by the lack
114
of sleep and the emotional strain of being near death to
leave that evening, so 7) Ishido forces Yabu ("Choose death
or treason!") to help execute a night raid on Mariko's
party. 8) The night raid is successful, and Mariko is
killed.
At each major point of decision for Mariko, the
highest principles of loyalty, as they are expressed in
feudal Japanese culture, are called into play. Her uphold
ing of these values is noble, and her death is honorable.
Ishido, on the other hand, is motivated by personal pride
and a desire for power. Yabu, the traitor, chooses mere
self-preservation, an ignoble motive. The chain of events
is perfectly structured, and the values are compatible
with Western ideals. The syllogism hinges, however, on
the audience accepting that it is a genuine dilemma for
Mariko to be forced between choosing loyalty to Toranaga
and upholding the absolute custom of obtaining Ishido's
permission before leaving his castle. Fortunately, four
nights of cultural indoctrination brought about by the
careful use of qualitatively progressive form have left
the audience well prepared to accept this as a genuine
existential dilemma. In general terms, Burke's model
would show Shogun to be a drama where the minor forms of
contrast and repetition build up a qualitative progression
that serves to "graft" Japanese cultural values upon a
115
Western audience, in order to "set up" the syllogistic
progression that "explains" Mariko's death and gives it an
almost tragic dimension.
Finally, we have the appropriately "tragic" restora
tion of order following Mariko's death. In the public
arena, we hear of Toranaga1s victory. In the private
arena, we are assured that Blackthorne will find a measure
of happiness with his assigned consort, Fujiko. A pivotal
scene involves Fujiko calling his name and his momentarily
turning his gaze, imagining her to be Mariko. The sugges
tion made here is that Fujiko, who has been loyal and
accepting all along, will be a suitable mate. The fact
that she has been chosen for him in the Japanese fashion
further reinforces Blackthorne's total submersion into
Japanese culture. On a symbolic level, Blackthorne and
Fujiko are further united by the fact that both have been
scarred by burns, she in the earthquake and he in the
explosion that killed Mariko.
In sum, we may view Shogun as an elaborate contempo
rary social melodrama with a somewhat tragic dimension.
This dimension hinges upon the indoctrination of the audi
ence with the Oriental concept of karma or fate and the
presentation of strong characters who achieve nobility in
their acceptance of their karma. These factors are aided
by a skillful blend of qualitative and syllogistic progres
sions. Qualitatively progressive form is appropriate since
116
the social melodrama traditionally has an episodic plot
which intermingles public and private events. In Shogun,
this episodic structure is crafted to take advantage of the
presentation via the medium of television and the schedul
ing of the broadcast over five consecutive evenings. The
experience of American viewers with the vastly successful
Roots, in particular, probably gave the producers of Shogun
some idea of how to achieve a certain qualitative "effect"
each evening, sometimes stressing the public arena of
Samurai warfare and political intrigue and sometimes
stressing the development of the private romantic relation
ship between Blackthorne and Mariko, just as Roots alter
nated between public events and private lives.
Dramatism provides us with considerable insight into
Shogun because it bases its analysis of form on the premise
that formal structures work in art because they communi
cate an author's intentions effectively by appealing to
audience appetencies. A conventional analysis of Shogun
may view it as too diffuse, so filled with minor charac
ters and subplots that it fails by not showing us Tora
naga' s victory and by killing off the attractive heroine.
A Dramatistic analysis reveals tremendous unity in the
formal patterns of Shogun. The principal story line is
allegorical; Shogun is really the story of a Westerner who
gains true understanding of the seventeenth-century Japa
nese only by confronting the loss of his lover. Mariko's
117
death is Christ-like in the sense that it serves as
Blackthorne's redemption, making him "fit" to accept his
karma. Because the popular television audience expects an
action-adventure yarn, the formal structures must be care
fully crafted so that the philosophical development of
Oriental values does not proceed apace from the progressive
transformation of the audience's expectations. Audience
interest in the private relationships must rise as the
public conflict fades. As we have seen, the use of minor
forms such as repetition and contrast serve to aggregately
build up qualitatively progressive structures allowing for
value exploration. The logical calculus by which syllo
gistic progressive form hangs is thus "translated into
Japanese," so the audience can be ultimately prepared to
understand Mariko's death.
118
NOTES
See for example John G. Cawelti, "The Concept of
Formula in the Study of Popular Culture," Journal of Popu
lar Culture, 3 (1969), pp. 381-90; "Notes Toward an Aes
thetic of Popular Culture," Journal of Popular Culture, 5
(1971), pp. 255-68; The Six-Gun Mystique (Bowling Green,
Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971);
"Myth, Symbol, and Formula," Journal of Popular Culture, 8
(1974), pp. 1-9; Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula
Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1976).
2
Cawelti, "Myth, Symbol, and Formula," p. 4.
3
Cawelti, "Myth, Symbol, and Formula," p. 4.
4
Betty Cain has presented the idea of "multiple Pen
tads" applying to both artistic creation and audience
response. See "Kenneth Burke's Four Pentads," in Kenneth
Burke in the Eighties: Where Are We Now?, Southern Cali
fornia Occasional Papers in Rhetoric, No. I, ed. W. Ross
Winterowd (Los Angeles: Univ. of Southern California Dept,
of English, forthcoming).
5
Horace Newcomb, TV: The Most Popular Art (Garden
City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1974), p. 23.
^ Newcomb, p. 82.
7
Newcomb, p. 256.
® Burke, pp. 205ff.
IV. THE AUDIENCE AND POPULAR CULTURE
Having examined the role of the artist and the nature
of form in popular culture, we are at last ready to take up
the final link in the communicative chain— -the audience.
As we noted in Chapter II, the motives underlying one's
interest in a given work of art may vary tremendously. One
individual may identify personally with .the pattern of
experience outlined by the work. Another may be a "fan"
of a particular formula— the hard-boiled detective story,
for example. A third may be seduced by a pattern of expe
rience so foreign to his own that it proves intriguing.
Despite these differences, one thing is clear: many works
of popular art are able to attract and hold large, hetero
geneous audiences.
The Dramatistic model proves an excellent heuristic
for teasing out and organizing different patterns of audi
ence response. If we examine the Act of experiencing and
responding to a work of art, with the individual member of
the audience serving as Actor, we find a series of distinc
tions emerging from a consideration of Purpose. In very
general terms if the Purpose underlying my experience of a
work of art is to seek validation of my values and beliefs,
120
I will be more enthralled by a work that features a
protagonist whose pattern of experience is close to mine
than I will by a work that promotes values alien to me.
For example, the self-pitying poet's "The King and the
Peasant" story (alluded to in Chapter III) would no doubt
cause a starving artist to feel a strong sense of identifi
cation with the protagonist. In another case, my Purpose
may be to seek information about some of the values and
beliefs present in my culture. In this instance, I will be
inclined to value works featuring unfamiliar patterns of
experience, since there will be a "compensatory gain" in
my becoming more familiar with other personalities, values,
and customs.
A Dramatistic view of audience response to popular
culture is thereby far removed from Abraham Kaplan's aes
thetic approach discussed in Chapter I. Kaplan differenti
ated between a reaction and a response. A reaction is
presented as a virtually behavioristic, predetermined
result of being exposed to an external stimulus. Kaplan's
model suggests that popular culture sets a course "laid
out beforehand" for its audience to follow. The response
to high art, on the other hand, supposes an audience pos
sessed of free will, creatively melding the themes present
in the work of art with their own values and patterns of
experience.
121
Burke would view this model as dehumanizing. The
reaction mode of Kaplan would find its place, in Burkean
terms, in the world of motion, not action. The world of
human thought and language, however, necessarily implies
action, since it is a dialectical process of giving wings
to motive, transcending the linear stimulus-response realm
of mere motion. (See Grammar, pp. 194-95.) While granting
that motion occurs in the purely biological activities of
the body as they can be said to follow empirically-testable
natural "laws," Burke argues firmly that any activity
involving language, indeed, any social activity among
humans, falls necessarily within the realm of action, since
such behavior involves symbolic transformation. Thus even
if a member of the audience were merely to recognize famil
iar values in a work of popular art, that act of strong
identification with the material is one that can be just as
fully explored with the tools of Dramatism as a different
kind of response in which someone's entire value system is
upset following an encounter with a work of art.
Along with Kaplan's implied suggestion that popular
art merely reinforces the familiar is a counter-belief that
much popular art engages in unrealistic stereotyping that
leads its audience away from the real world by distorting
the lifestyles and values of certain classes of people.
Critics of popular culture who feature this belief in their
writings are generally those who rant against the
122
"escapist" elements of popular art, who argue that popular
formulae ill prepare their audiences for experiences in the
real world.
Burke easily counters both types of assumptions about
popular art, noting that all art deals with life, not nec
essarily as it is led, but as it may be understood through
the use of human symbols. As Burke notes:
A work deals with life for a great many people
when it symbolizes such patterns of experience
as characterize a great many people and ramifies
the Symbol by such modes of experience as appeal
to a great many people. It may, in so doing,
prove its unfitness to deal with life for others,
who require other kinds of Symbolization and who
happen--whether through their way of living or
through the conventions of their art— to demand
that the Symbols be ramified in other modes of
experience. A fiction designed for an audience
of workingmen, for instance, may give such pic
tures of life among the wealthy as could never be
said by the wealthy to deal with life. But these
pictures, however inaccurate, "deal with life"
so long as they serve as Symbols for arousing in
the workingmen such emotions as the artist wished
to arouse. (Statement, p. 191.) (emphasis mine)
We see once again the stress upon the act of communication
between artist and audience that I have pointed to all
along. The artist selects a Symbol and ramifies it because
he or she wishes to impart an idea to an audience. The
work consists of formal structures reflecting conventions
that have been established to help accomplish this aim.
The audience approaches the work with some initial Purpose
in mind (to learn something new, to have old values
123
reinforced, to be amused, etc.) and either has this initial
Purpose fulfilled or finds in the course of experiencing
the work that he or she is led to share in a different sort
of vision held by the artist.
Drawing upon Burke, we can outline a "Hierarchy of
Response" that expands the term Identification. At the
base would be a "pure" response to form, a parallel
match-up between the sorts of repetitive activities of the
body (such as the regularity of one's heartbeat) and the
repetitive patterns in art. This type of response is uni
versal and not dependent upon the development of unique
patterns of experience for different people. It does
involve identification in the sense that we become aware
of the match-up between what is occurring to us physiolog
ically and what is going on in the work of art. Repetitive
body movements (head-wagging, fist-shaking, etc.) in
response to the drum beat of primitive tribal music is a
good example of this type of response. It is no small
accident that nonlinguistic forms of art such as music
engender this type of response much more powerfully than
forms based in language. A cognitive bridge or internal
ized metaphor of some sort must be built in order to link
the repetitive forms in poetry with more fundamental phys
iological processes such as heartbeat and respiration. It
is fascinating, however, to note that in oral recitals it
124
becomes evident how powerful repetitive form can be, even
when expressed through the more "opaque" medium of human
language.
The next level of response is that of personal identi
fication with the patterns of experience symbolized in a
work of art. One may identify strongly with a pattern
expressed in the plot (the untimely death of an older
brother) or in the development of a character (a Horatio
Alger rags-to-riches story). Clearly there are all sorts
of experiences which commonly occur to a great number of
people, and on many occasions people who have undergone
such experiences will identify strongly with them as they
encounter them in works of art. The process of declaring a
"match" between one's own experience and an experience
presented in fictional form is a complex process of pattern
recognition, much more elaborate than the "reaction" mode
of Kaplan would suggest.
Conventional response would be one rung higher in the
hierarchy, since it involves the member of the audience in
a recognition of his participation in the social world.
It is a common convention in many Western movies that the
hero is a loner who saves a town from lawlessness only to
ride away empty-handed, giving up the beautiful woman to
the more domesticated rancher. This "man without woman"
theme involves a special set of rules applying to a partic
ular type of story form. The rules do not have to be
125
written as such; one thinks of the medieval quest stories
where the quester, after long journeys and many trials, is
ultimately rewarded with riches and a fair lady. Yet the
member of the audience, as a member of a social community,
comes to identify with the conventional pattern as he or
she experiences its recurrence in a number of works. The
process is dialectical, thus allowing for the modification
of old conventions and the establishment of new ones.
Finally, we have what might be called a "dynamic"
response, a response where the audience encounters patterns
or characters alien to their own experience. The usual
Purpose for exposing oneself to such "alien" art is curi
osity, the desire to widen one's knowledge of the world.
I can think of a recent example from my own experience, my
viewing the movie American Gigolo. I have never met a
gigolo, and I doubt that I will encounter one soon, but the
presentation of such a character on the screen allowed me
to "identify with the Other" in a manner far less threaten
ing than real-life experience. The dynamic response thus
allows a member of the audience to experience alien values
and lifestyles vicariously, without the need for arousing
natural defense mechanisms that inhibit one's ability to
understand and empathize when faced with such experiences
in everyday life.
It is important to note that no experience which can
be symbolically transmitted by human art is entirely
126
foreign to anyone1s experience. This is true even for
works far removed from us in time. As Burke observes:
In some cases the matter to be recovered is so
remote, is in a channel of thinking or feeling so
alien to our own, that even a savant's "restora
tion" of the environmental context is not ade
quate. This is always true in some degree--
though historical relativists have tended to
make too much of it. For in the last analysis,
any reader surrounds each word and each act in a
work of art with a unique set of his own previous
experiences (and therefore a unique set of impon
derable emotional reactions), communication
existing in the "margin of overlap" between the
writer's experience and the reader's. And while
it is dialectically true that two people of
totally different experiences must totally fail
to communicate, it is also true that there are
no two such people, the "margin of overlap"
always being considerable (due, if nothing else,
to the fact that man's biologic functions are
uniform). Absolute communication between ages
is impossible in the same way that absolute com
munication between contemporaries is impossible.
(Statement, pp. 78-79.)
At this juncture, we should anticipate and avoid any
appearance of the "tail wagging the dog" by keeping in mind
*
that form is the invention of writers and readers, not the
other way around. Form has no life of its own outside of
the human capacity to create and identify varying struc
tures and to take pleasure in them. Epistemological con
siderations and questions concerning the root causes of
this phenomenon aside, we note that audience response is
essentially a dialectical "game" between a member of the
audience and the work and simply acknowledge this capacity
127
for delight in form to be true on the basis of our
experience. The process of identifying with the Symbol
presented by a work of art is really the process of "iden
tifying" (in the sense of "naming") the forms present in
the work, and cognitively unraveling how these forms are
used by the artist to "court" the audience.
For Burke, the first step in understanding how form
and audience interact is a search for the "key terms"
which define the work. Burke asserts that "a Dramatistic
approach to language vows us first of all to considera-..
tions of pure verbal internality, as we seek to chart the
transformations within the work itself." (Language,
p. 369.) Here Burke is simply observing that when dealing
with language, the human mind should seek to discover how
associations are formed among clusters of terms, and how
it is that, aggregately, these clusters exclude other clus
ters. To offer a simple example: If I mention "sunshine,"
"blue skies" and "gentle winds," one quickly gets the
impression that I am focusing on the weather. This cluster
of terms makes it fairly obvious to one of average intelli
gence that I am not talking about poker or Watergate or
Kenneth Burke.
Burke outlines three stages for charting terms in fic
tion. The first is a raw count of the number of times a
particular term appears and a "comparison of all the con
texts in which a given word appears." (Language, p. 36 9.)
128
Secondly, there are "radiations of a term." This is the
process of building up the clusters of terms by noting how
particular terms constantly appear and reappear with each
other, building up "equations" that map the terms and
observing how they overlap. This process of clustering
leads us from word to theme, though Burke cautions us to be
aware of motivational distinctions between terms that seem
synonymous (for instance, the use of favorable and unfavor
able connotations of similar terms to draw distinctions
between good and evil characters). Finally, Burke suggests
that "subtitles" could be given to various parts of a poem
or work of fiction, moving in stages as the reader pro
gresses through the work, marking off the topics or themes
that cluster together as'the work unfolds. Though the
titles given by the reader may not agree with those which
would be given by the author or other readers, they do
reveal the pathways that may be followed in getting to the
essence of a work. Burke writes that:
Each title would sum up the overall trend or
spirit informing or infusing the range of details
that are included under this head. And as we
progressed from parts of chapters, to chapters,
to groups of chapters, and so finally to an
ultimate title of titles, we would have in
effect a set of terms ever-widening in scope,
until we got to the all-inclusive title that
was technically the "god-term" for the whole
congeries of words in their one particular
order. There would thus be a sense in which the
overall title could be said to be the infolding
of all the details, or the details could be
treated as the exfoliation-in-time of the
129
eternal now that was contained in the rational
seminality of the title. (Language, p. 370.)
This process as described by Burke suggests a mode of
response that is largely metonymic, in the sense of moving
from specific terms to broad themes implied by these terms
\
through the formulation of associational clusters. It is
worth noting that modern business firms use the statistical
tool of factor analysis to achieve similar ends; in ascer
taining "product image" as perceived by consumers, various
statements made about a product are correlated with each
other and grouped into "image clusters" that can be used
by marketing specialists to discover what attributes of
the product (size, shape, smell, packaging, etc.) appeal to
various segments of the consuming public. In contrast with
the more "left hemispheric" or "propositional" -logic asso
ciated with metaphor, these metonymic, image-clustering
activities have been associated with the "spatially ori
ented" right hemisphere of the brain. In "Brain, Rhetoric,
and Style," W. Ross Winterowd asserts that "there is good
reason to characterize metaphoric interpretation as L[eft]
H[emispheric], and there is equally good reason to charac
terize the interpretation of images as Rtight]
2
H[emispheric]."
Winterowd argues that both hemispheres are necessary
for the efficient processing of language. The right
130J
hemispheric talent of imaging, for example, is the easiest
and best tool for deriving answers to such propositional,
"left hemispheric" problems as: "Jim is taller than Bill.
Who is shorter?" More importantly, the right hemisphere
seems to be ideally suited for the synecdochic or metonymic
use of images to invoke cognitive categories. Cognitive
categories are simply the psychologist's means of describ
ing the tendency of the mind to categorize, to inductively
construct "ideal types" such as "mammals," "steamships,"
"professions," and the like. This process of image clus
tering in order to arrive at holistic meaning is precisely
what Burke is driving at with his "statistical method" of
charting key terms. It is a right hemispheric mode of
unraveling meaning.
The left hemisphere is equally important, according to
Winterowd. As Winterowd describes it, the left hemisphere
is "the propositional side of the brain; it works well with
deductive structures, handling the ghostliness of symbolic
logic and the bare-bonedness of the syllogism and the
3
sorites- with a proficiency of which the RH is incapable."
In art, the left hemispheric structures function best when
they help organize concrete details "served up" by the
right hemisphere. Thus one of the reasons why metaphor,
essentially a left hemispheric, "propositional" device, is
4
so effective, is that -it-"propositionalizes imaqistically."
131
"The night is a black bat," "Life is but a walking
shadow," and so on.
Bi-hemisphericity also helps explain a paradox noted
by Northrop Frye in his well-known essay, "Myth, Fiction,
5
and Displacement." Frye notes that the first reading of
a work involves the sequential assembling of bits and
pieces of information as the work "unfolds," chapter by
chapter. Finally we arrive at the end, and from there the
experience we have just had is lost forever as we come to
grasp the mythic reality of the work as a whole. This
mythic sense of the whole will pervade any and all future
readings; even though we may again proceed sequentially
through the work, there will never again be a "first time"
when the incidents that occur in later chapters are com
pletely unknown to us. Winterowd describes the process in
terms of the brain's laterality as follows:
The images (RH) are perceived in their temporal
sequence (LH). In retrospect, the sequentiality
of the images disappears, and the work becomes a
gestalt (RH) . Any one of the images becomes a
synecdoche (RH) for the whole. In discussing
Moby Dick, for instance, any one of its synec-
dochic images, frequently the substance of one
chapter, can become "the point of entry"— "The
Candles," "The Try-Works," "The Doubloon." In
this sense, the mythos of the fiction is analo
gous to the cognitive category.®
Thus it is readily understood how our experience of fic
tion, upon reflection, seems to be more of a "dreamy voy
age" than a rational enterprise that can be conveniently
132
recollected or duplicated. Recent brain theory may turn
out to be leading us to the root of language's seeming
ability to transcend the analytical boundaries suggested
by mere words and syntax and present itself to the imagina
tion holistically, through art.
Aspects of Response to Popular Art
There are certain aspects of audience response which
seem to apply principally to the experience of works of
popular culture. A broad-based critical theory applied to
a variety of popular art forms must be able to treat the
similarities and differences in audience response to mate
rial presented by different media. It must also be able to
deal with the apparent fact that mimetic forms are much
more prevalent in popular art than in art designed for a
more select audience. Finally, it must provide answers to
the frequently-asked question: Does popular art reflect
the values already present in mass society or does it
engender them? I propose to take up these topics in the
present section.
In Chapter I, we examined Marshall McLuhan's theories
that the media of communication were the most important
factors in influencing audiences, more important than con
tent, characterization, or form. To McLuhan, the medium _is
the message, since the effects each medium has on the
human psyche are more powerful than the effects of content.
133
Following this pathway of reasoning, McLuhan's research
emphasizes the differences among media in terms of how
they each help extend human senses— sight, sound, etc.—
and in terms of the extent to which individual media appeal
to particular senses to the exclusion of others. For
example, film is so powerful visually that it elicits con
centrated attention from the audience as the story unfolds
continuously on the big screen. Through the camera, human
eyes can travel faster and farther in a movie theater than
they possibly can in the same span of time in real life.
Human "experience" is therefore drastically changed by the
medium.
My principal objection to McLuhan, it will be .
recalled, is that he neglects the role of the artist and
thus seems to forget that all art is basically an act of
communication between an artist and an audience. In addi
tion, I objected in Chapter I to the "neutralizing" of such
aspects of content as plot and characterization by the
overemphasis on the role of the medium vis-a-vis form. In
light of Burke's distinction between the stimulus-response
mode of Motion versus the dialectical realm of Action, one
might further object to McLuhan1s theories on the grounds
that they "dehumanize" the audience by making them victims
of their nonsymbolic physiological responses to sensory
stimuli. We need to recognize that all experience is
134
brought to us through our senses, and that it is specious
to hold that we are therefore robots who function only in
the world of Motion. Humans have the ability to put sen
sory data back through the "black box" of their cognitive
powers and transform them into symbolic material.
Granted the above, it is still true that differences
in the medium of presentation can and do bring about dif
ferences in audience response. A common example comes to
mind. How often do we hear the comment: "That movie was
powerful when I saw it in the theater, but it just isn't
right for television's small screen. The outdoor scenery
lost its splendor and the musical score just wasn't as awe
some." Clearly the medium of presentation does make dif
ferences. Rather than lay down an exhaustive list, let us
simply note some of the more striking differences among
media in terms of audience response.
I. TIME: Both in terms of "real time" experience of
a work of art and "fictional time" as it may be presented
in the work, media vary widely. We are "stuck" watching a
film from beginning to end, and if we slip away to buy
popcorn, we feel guilty at having missed out on a portion
of the movie which cannot be recaptured except by viewing
the entire work again. Television series have some of the
same constraints, but as Horace Newcomb has noted, they
have "continuity" in terms of familiar characters who reap
pear from week to week. Even if we miss an episode, we
135
remain "in touch" with the characters. Novels, obviously,
are self-contained. We can reread passages, skip ahead,
and even read the conclusion first if we wish.
Fictional time is similarly different. Film has
invented the "flashback" technique and the use of frequent
"cuts" to effect a "montage" where small bits and pieces
of events move rapidly before our eyes to simulate the
rapid passage of time. Television has similar techniques,
but in written fiction, the words alone can be used quite
handily to indicate the passage of time or even to reverse
the flow of time. We may skip around in time as we follow
characters in fiction, but this technique, first tried with
a mass audience in the 1967 film, Two for the Road, is
difficult to carry off in cinema. In this film, the audi
ence is presented with a portrait of a disintegrating mar
riage, revealed by exposing a series of vignettes, high
lighting vacation trips made by the couple (Audrey Hepburn
and Albert Finney) over a span of several years. The vig
nettes flash back and forth in time, and the potential for
audience confusion is great. Fortunately, the film pro-
vides clues to the chronology. As time passes, the obvious
increase in the couple's income and social standing is
symbolized by their wearing more sophisticated clothing
and driving more expensive cars. The audience is also
oriented by changes in hairstyle and makeup, and by the
136
couple's ability to afford increasingly more expensive
vacation spots.
II. INTERIOR THOUGHT: It is relatively easy to pre
sent interior monologue in a written work; the author
simply states that so-and-so thought such-and-such, and
provided that there is consistency in narrative mode (the
third person, omniscient narrator is required for this),
the audience readily follows along with little or no objec
tion to being taken on a tour inside someone's brain.
Writers such as William Faulkner have perfected the art of
presenting interior thought, so that in a novel such as
The Sound and the Fury we are allowed to accompany the
imbecile Benjie as he "experiences" and remembers the out
side world.
Film and television are completely different. It is
difficult to present interior thought in these media without
seeming a bit silly; one readily thinks of the organ music
and whispered monologue representative of those moments in
daytime TV soap opera when we are exposed to a character's
innermost thoughts. The French have done better, at least
with the rise of New Wave cinema in the late Fifties and
Sixties. A common device in these films is the dream; fog,
filters, lens distortion, shifts from black-and-white to
color or vice versa, and other cinematographic techniques
provide a surrealistic mise-en-scene as we follow a charac
ter's innermost feelings as revealed through his dreams.
137
A similar technique was used in a more widely viewed work,
Stanley Kubrick's film version of A Clockwork Orange. In
order to enhance the suggestion that the principal charac
ter was violently insane, Kubrick used a wide-angle lens on
various interior shots taken from the character's point-of-
view. At close range, a wide-angle lens distorts subjects
considerably. This visual distortion, present every time
we witness something from the point-of-view of the insane
protagonist, symbolically parallels his "distorted perspec
tive" on the real world. Modern audiences, by exposure to
these sorts of films, are now trained to look for various
types of cinematographic tricks as evidence that they are
being exposed to "subjective" states of consciousness. In
that sense, they are more "literate" in reading these
"cinematic conventions" than previous generations of
film-goers.
III. PORTABILITY: Books and magazines can be carried
to a variety of places, and thus are often used by audi
ences in settings where it would be impossible to have
films or television. Thousands of office workers pack
away popular novels to read during their lunch breaks, and
to the extent that their Purpose for experiencing these
works is a function of the portable nature of the book,
portability is a significant factor in audience response.
Films are not only much less portable; they also are seen
138
in the company of a large audience. The experience is
different in the sense that the reactions of a member of
the audience are less personal; the individual is influenced
to some extent by the reactions of the group.
With television, on the other hand, the audience is
considerably smaller (usually,a family group), but the
commercial breaks seem to have conditioned TV audiences to
be able to readily switch their attention on and off at
will. The redundancy built into most television plots
seems to be a recognition of the fact that many members of
the audience are not giving the program their full
7
attention.
To sum up, it is clear that differences among the
major media used for popular art do exist and do influence
the experience of popular art by mass audiences. In the
Dramatistic model, the medium of presentation would be a
"sub-Agency" used by the artist as Agent. The primary
Agency would be human language and conventional form, the
latter differing somewhat depending on differences in
medium. The same symbol can be presented in a variety of
media, with the same ramifications and the same patterns
of experience. To this extent, Dramatism stands opposed to
McLuhan"s theories, suggesting that differences in medium
of presentation are perhaps matters best dealt with under
the classical rhetorical department of Delivery.
139
Turning from considerations of media to reflections
upon content, we take note of the fact that a great deal of
popular culture— science fiction being a noteworthy excep
tion— is mimetic. Recognizable people perform recognizable
tasks in recognizable surroundings. Dialogue is generally
fashioned from plain speech. Ordinary events do not sud
denly become surreal, as they do, say, in the short stories
of Donald Barthelme. Characters are motivated by love,
envy, greed, ambition, thirst for justice. Even when the
extraordinary is presented, as in Richard Dreyfuss' com
pulsion to journey to the aliens' landing spot in Close
Encounters of the Third Kind, the characters are surrounded
by various emblems and ornaments of everyday life. Drey
fuss, in Close Encounters, has an ordinary job as an elec
trical lineman, an ordinary family with a wife and two
kids, and an ordinary house in a suburban neighborhood.
Critics of popular culture have frequently used the
fact that mimesis is the predominant mode in popular art
as a sign of its simplicity. Abraham Kaplan and others
have used the presence of the ordinary aspects of life in
popular art to bolster their arguments that popular culture
merely reflects values already present in society, and
hence offers a passive experience to the audience. Kaplan
forgets a crucial aesthetic distinction that Burke reminds
us of in Counter-Statement. (See Statement, pp. 7-9.)
Value can exist in both an "art-to-display-art" aesthetic
140
and an "art-to-conceal-art" aesthetic. Elements of form
are highlighted in art-to-display-art, while realistic
details drawn from real life are stressed in art-to-
conceal-art .
From a Dramatistic perspective, we find that critics
such as Kaplan have lost sight of the Purpose with which
the popular artist uses mimetic elements. Aspects of the
ordinary world are most often presented in popular art
because they facilitate audience identification with the
patterns of experience symbolized by the work. The famil
iar world is presented from the distance made possible by
art, and audiences are thereby invited to participate in an
exploration of the values present in their society. At the
end of the voyage they may be persuaded to agree to the
values or to find fault with them, but the fact that the
experience itself involves active participation with the
work and cognitive transmutation-of pieces of language or
bits of flickering light should not be overlooked or
undervalued.
A recent popular culture critic argues that popular
art has been undervalued because it represents a Classical
style in an age just emerging from the prescriptive norms
of Romanticism. British film critic Raymond Durgnat writes
that the popular artist is not attempting to express his
personal feelings when he creates a work of popular art.
141
Nor is he following the Expressionist "art for art's sake"
dictum that the experience of creation is what counts, not
the final product. Rather, the popular artist
aims neither to communicate his own individual
feelings to others, nor to give himself a work
out in artistic activity, but to express other
people's feelings for them. It's true that he
can only know their feelings via his own. It's
true that he's not an objective machine and that
his feelings are bound to influence his picture
of theirs. None the less he uses his own feel
ings as a way of tracking other people's. His
self-expression is accidental, one almost feels
as if he would like to be invisible.8
Durgnat's concept is close to what Kenneth Burke
means by the term "courtship." Burke defines courtship as
"the use of suasive devices for the transcending of social
9
estrangement." The key words here are "suasive devices."
To Burke, these devices include all the aspects of form
outlined in Counter-Statement: repetitive form, syllogis
tic and qualitatively progressive form, and the various
minor forms. Popular artists use the details of everyday
life to grab the attention of mass audiences and focus it
on the symbol; they are "strategies for situations" whereby
an appetite is created and fulfilled. Artists who create
for elite audiences can afford to be more idiosyncratic
because their audiences have been trained to respond to
the unusual. The ordinary folk who make up mass audiences
are not specialists. They have in common only the world
of mass culture and the occurrences common to all human
142
lives-“birth, death, family relationships, etc. The • ”
popular artist recognizes this and uses these aspects of
the ordinary world as a set of "suasive devices" to court
the audience.
The Burkean model thus provides a tentative answer to
the frequently posed question as to whether popular art
reflects or engenders social values and mores. Dramatism
would suggest that it does both. Popular art reflects
social values because it presents universal patterns of
experience, patterns that the artist must recognize in
order to fashion the work and that the audience must recog
nize if it is to "understand" the work. It engenders val
ues by presenting dramatic scenarios placing ordinary val
ues in conflict situations, situations demanding that some
hierarchy of values be established, and by stimulating
audience identification with the processes of value forma
tion. Mimetic elements can thus be seen as a function of
the overall Act of communication and courtship between
artist and audience, not as the end-all, be-all of popular
art.
"The Dead Zone": Supernatural Novel
for an Empirically Minded Audience
Stephen King's 1979 novel, The Dead Zone, is an
attempt to portray a psychic with powers of precognition
to an audience presumed to be highly skeptical. King is
143
best known as the author of Carrie and The Shining, both of
which were made into major motion pictures. As a specials,
ist in popular novels dealing with parapsychological phe
nomena, alien states of being, and plain, old-fashioned
horror, King is adept at creating realistic characters and
settings designed to make the macabre more credible in the
eyes of those who grew up believing in the scientific
method.
The Dead Zone centers on the thoughts and deeds of
Johnny Smith, a young New England schoolteacher who spends
four and one-half years in a coma following an auto acci
dent and who awakens to discover that he has extraordinary
psychic abilities. While still in his hospital bed, he
informs his physician, Dr. Weizak, that the latter's
mother had not died at the hands of the Nazis in World
War II, as Weizak had always believed, but that she had
escaped, married again, and eventually settled in Califor
nia. Later, Johnny assists a small town sheriff in locat
ing a brutal, psychotic murderer. Shunning the resultant
publicity, he takes a job as a private tutor for Chuck
Chatsworth, son of a wealthy industrialist, only to see
his psychic abilities break to the surface once again when
he saves Chuck's life by predicting that a roadside inn
scheduled to host Chuck's graduation party will burn to the
ground during the celebration. Finally, after fleeing to
144
the West for several months in the wake of even more
publicity, Johnny returns to New England, obsessed with
the memory of meeting a corrupt Congressman from New Hamp
shire. This meeting had convinced Johnny that the Con
gressman would one day become President of the United
States and lead the nation toward a nuclear holocaust.
Ultimately, Johnny decides that this knowledge is too much
to bear, and convinced that no one will believe his psychic
prediction of the holocaust, he takes it upon himself to
assassinate the Congressman.
The Dead Zone is fast-paced, and as the brief plot
summary above attests, it contains a panoply of events.
Indeed, the most interesting aspect of the novel is that it
is clearly written for.a broad, general audience, not just
one that already comes with a propensity for enjoying tales
of the supernatural.' The details all contribute to the
character development and help establish a realistic back
drop for the more unusual events. In Dramatistic terms,
the challenge-that. King faces is-:one..of -building^ audience_
identification with a, .protagonist .who.'has supernatural
powers. The formal structures that help build such identi
fication must also help overcome the skepticism of those
audience members who resist a "willing suspension of dis
belief" in the supernatural.
In building Johnny Smith's character, King especially
focuses on the effects that the lengthy coma has had on
145
Johnny's relationship with his girlfriend— who has married
someone else during his long period of illness— and on his
relationship with his parents. His sad acceptance that
Sarah Hazlett could not wait forever for him to awaken when
all odds were against his recovery helps reveal Johnny as
a sensitive, loving individual. Similarly, Johnny is kind
towards his mother, even though she has psychologically
"cracked," defending herself against thoughts of losing her
only son by immersing herself deeper and deeper in relig
ious extremism, going so far as to join "The American Soci
ety of the Last Times," a small group of fanatics who have
plans to buy a farm and there await - the arrival of extra
terrestrial beings who supposedly had communicated with
them telepathically.
These pseudoreligious beliefs are an important element
in understanding how King is able to convince his audience
that Johnny's psychic abilities are perfectly plausible.
By placing Johnny's relatively "tame" powers in a middle
ground between Vera Smith's extraterrestrial evangelism
and the scientific skepticism of medical doctors and
reporters, King makes them more accessible to a large audi
ence. Vera Smith serves as a foil, becoming the scapegoat
for those who would enjoy denouncing the purely fantastic.
Rigid scientific empiricism, on the other hand, also comes
under suspicion for failing to allow for the possibility of
146
a metaphysical world. The empirical point of view is
enunciated by Dr. Jim Brown, one of the two physicians
treating Johnny, following the incident where Johnny
locates Dr. Weizak's long-lost mother. Weizak, who is a
sympathetic believer in Johnny's powers, tells him that
Brown cannot be judged too harshly for his failure to
believe:
He thinks you are having us on. Making things
up for some reason of your own. Seeking atten
tion, perhaps. Don't judge him solely on that,
John. His cast of mind makes it impossible for
him to think otherwise. If you feel anything for
Jim, feel a little pity. He is a brilliant man,
and he will go far. Already he has offers, and
someday soon he will fly from these cold north
woods and Bangor will see him no more. He will
go to Houston or Hawaii or possibly even to
Paris. But he is curiously limited. He is a
mechanic of the brain. He has cut it to pieces
with his scalpel and found no soul. Therefore
there is none. Like the Russian astronauts who
circled the earth and did not see God. It is the
empiricism of the mechanic, and a mechanic is
only a child with superior motor control.10
This argument lays the groundwork for the audience
believing in the possibility that an accident similar to
Johnny's could, in fact, cause someone to have parapsycho-
logical powers. The ethos projected by Dr. Weizak helps
"sell" the audience on the premise, since he is presented
as a sympathetic, "objective" analyst. As does Shogun, The
Dead Zone uses minor characters as foils to promote audi
ence identification with particular values.
147
Close identification with Johnny's fate is further
aided by the clustering of details which expand the sense
that Johnny has an unfortunate fate and that make his
psychic abilities seem like a curse rather than a blessing.
Ordinary readers can sympathize with Johnny's sorrow over
missing his chance for love with Sarah, his admixture of
guilt and pity over his mother's•self-destructive relig
ious beliefs and her neglect in taking her prescribed med
icine, and the isolation caused by his "Midas touch" that
turns most physical contact with other humans into psychic
experiences. Johnny becomes an outcast from the society
he loves, alone, miserable, haunted by reporters. Sharing
the experience of these ordinary feelings helps the reader
become seduced into accepting Johnny's total pattern of
experience, supernatural phenomena and all. In Dramatistic
terms, these experiences help "ramify the Symbol" of
Johnny as an unfortunate victim.
The suspense builds as the novel moves toward the
fated confrontation between Johnny and Congressman Still-
son. King has previously established Stillson as a clear-
cut villain by splicing several chapters tracking various
stages of Stillson's career into the primary narrative of
Johnny's experience. This is an interesting use of the
"cross-cutting" technique frequently used in film to dis
play two or more separate events occurring in different
locations at the same time. In The Dead Zone the effect
148
is similar to the "cross-cut" shot of the villain in the
melodrama, twisting his mustache as the heroine lies tied
to the railroad tracks. Thus as we build up sympathy for
Johnny, we are given glimpses of the evil Stillson. This
technique virtually "goads" the audience into "sneering"
at Stillson. Specifically, the audience is presented with
snapshots of Stillson as a young, duplicitous Bible sales
man in the Midwest, viciously kicking a farmer's dog to
death, and as a sleazy small town businessman who uses
supposedly reformed motorcycle gang members as "muscle"
whenever mere persuasion fails to work. The fact that such
a man could be elected to Congress as a populist, indepen
dent candidate is explained by the fact that he capitalizes
on post-Watergate fears about experienced Washingtonians.
This strikes a note of historical accuracy; the possibility
of such an implausible character being elected bears com
parison with the smooth rise of fascism in Sinclair Lewis'
It Can't Happen Here.
The first meeting between Johnny and Stillson does not
occur until the reader is three-fourths of the way through
the novel. Until that point, the reader is aware that
Stillson is fated to play an important role in the denoue
ment, but the exact nature of that role has not been
established. In Chapter 20, however, Johnny attends a
campaign rally and in the bustle of the crowd briefly
149
comes into physical contact with Stillson. Johnny's ;
precognitive powers are usually stimulated by touch, and
with Stillson the narrator tells us that:
For Johnny it had never been this strong, never.
Everything came to him at once, crammed together
and screaming like some terrible black freight
train highballing through a narrow tunnel, a
speeding engine with a single glaring headlamp
mounted up front, and the headlamp was knowing
everything, and its light impaled Johnny Smith
like a bug on a pin. There was nowhere to run
and perfect knowledge ran him down.,, plastered
him as flat as a sheet of paper while that
night-running train raced over him.
He felt like screaming, but had no taste for
it, no voice for it.
The one image he never escaped
(as the blue filter began to creep in) ^
was Greg Stillson taking the oath of office.
The imagery, the shift in tone and variation in point of
view— from objective, third-person narrator to the interior
thoughts of Johnny— and the emphasis on Johnny's being a
victim of his own "perfect knowledge," all enhance the
intensity of the experience.
What follows is a series of incidents that cement
Johnny's fate. Shortly after the meeting with Stillson
comes Johnny's prediction of the graduation party fire.
When his vision comes true, Johnny flees from the resulting
publicity, taking on a new identity in Arizona. But he is
haunted by his vision of Stillson becoming President and
by the knowledge that no one had believed his previous
predictions until after they had come true. Upset by the
150
fact that most people fail to distinguish between the
"valid" powers of precognition that he possesses and the
demented ramblings of disordered fanatics such as his
mother, he concludes that no act of public persuasion or
internal disruption of Stillson's political organization
will work. He sees assassination as the only viable
alternative. His resolve is enhanced when he discovers
that he has a fatal brain tumor associated with his acci
dent and with his powers, and he journeys back to New
England for the final confrontation, knowing that his deed
must be accomplished before the sands of time run out.
The denouement is thus "set up" by a set of logical
steps that depend upon the audience identifying with Johnny
as a protagonist and "believing in" his parapsychological
powers. In order to enjoy the novel, one must "cross the
line" from being a skeptic to being a supporter, since the
skeptics would help put a fascist in office.
The confrontation with Stillson occurs in an old New
England town hall. Johnny creeps into an upper loft with
a rifle, prepared to kill Stillson as the Congressman
addresses a public meeting, but his plans go awry. Johnny
turns out to be a poor marksman, and he winds up being shot
by Stillson's guards. Ironically, though, Stillson had
grabbed a small boy in a blue sweater (the "blue filter"
of Johnny's precognitive vision) during the shooting and
held him up before him as protection. This act_of cowardice
151
was captured by an amateur photographer and widely
reprinted, ruining Stillson's career. Johnny's intentions
were thus fulfilled, despite their not working out as
planned.
What is most striking about Stephen King's writing
in The Dead Zone is his ability to create a set of logical
conditions that aid audience identification with actions
that violate social norms. We have already seen how King
makes Johnny's supernatural powers seem plausible by con
trasting them with the "purely kooky" behavior of Vera
Smith and the stuffy scientism of Dr. Brown. But in order
to agree to the appropriateness of Johnny's decision to
assassinate Stillson, the reader must be convinced— at
least within the fictional framework— that Johnny's powers
are absolutely trustworthy and that he is a reliable judge
of right and wrong. This is primarily accomplished by
highlighting Johnny's sense of being the victim of his
abilities and by demonstrating that he only chooses to use
them altruistically. Johnny rejects a lucrative job offer
as a psychic columnist for Inside View (a thinly guised
substitute for the National Enquirer), preferring to
remain in the teaching profession. But the publicity
following the Castle Rock Strangler case causes him to
lose his teaching job. Alone and depressed, cut off from
physical contact by those who fear what Johnny may discover
152
about them by merely touching them, Johnny has the perfect
pattern of experience for an assassin. But by making his
powers credible and by making him a sympathetic "mysteri
ous stranger" figure who is the victim of a strange fate,
Stephen King convinces the audience that Johnny's final
act is one of martyrdom.
The "conversion" of the audience to a set of values
applauding an act of planned murder suggests that works
of popular art can accomplish far more than simply rein
forcing familiar beliefs. As a tale of the supernatural,
The Dead Zone is representative of its formula type as
John Cawelti describes it when he writes that for the story
dealing with alien beings or states, "the underlying moral
fantasy is our dream that the unknowable can be known and
related to in some meaningful fashion." (Adventure, p.. 499)
But it goes beyond its type insofar as it also serves the
purpose of challenging our presumptions concerning politic
cal assassination. In the post-Kennedy/King era, it would
be safe to say that most people believe that assassination
is an inappropriate way to deal with despotism. Stephen
King roughs up this belief by providing us with a moral
fantasy in which we identify with the assassin as a hero
who prevents the ultimate destruction of human values,
nuclear war. To kill a morally debased person whose con
niving or incompetence would lead inevitably to holocaust
is presented as an acceptable value.
153
If we relate back to the "hierarchy of response"
outlined earlier in this chapter, we find that The Dead
Zone invites the "highest" level of response, the "dynamic"
level. Cawelti1s formula prescription for stories of alien
beings or states would explain the audience's being able to
relate to Johnny's psychic powers. This would be an
instance of "conventional" response. However, for the
audience to assent to the appropriateness of Johnny's
assassination attempt, there must be a "deeper" involve
ment, a dynamic ivolvement with the work value conflicts
raised by the work. To this extent. The Dead Zone provides
a serious challenge to Abraham Kaplan's distinction between
"reactions" and "responses."
We are left, therefore, with the challenging thought
that audience response to popular art is every bit as com
plex as the response to high art. If standard values and
preconceived notions may be roughed up by popular art, then
what is there that distinguishes audience response to high
art? From a Dramatistic perspective, the difference may
lie in the Scene within which the audience exists. The
audience for high art, as Gans has noted, tends to be
"creator-oriented," with a great deal of knowledge concern
ing an artist's background and his aims. The popular audi
ence, on the other hand, tends to be oriented toward a set
of conventional social values that serve as a background
154
Scene for popular art. Thus, to refer back to Durgnat1s
distinction, the audience for high art may be better
equipped--by virtue of their training and exposure— to
relate to the "Romantic ethos" of high culture. In popular
art, the "Classically minded" artist must rely on formal
structures and appealing themes to "court" the mass
audience.
155
NOTES
1
Burke writes: "Such a process of abbreviation,
whereby some one element of a context can come to be felt
as summing up a whole, is no rarity. It is a normal
resource of the representative function that the old rhet
oricians called synecdoche, the resource whereby a part can
come to stand for a whole." (Language, p. 371.)
2
W. Ross Winterowd, "Brain, Rhetoric, and Style,"
in Linguistics, Stylistics, and the Teaching of Composi
tion , ed. Donald McQuade (Akron, Ohio: Univ. of Akron,
1979), p. 167. An interesting study which supports this
thesis and which suggests that image interpretation may
play a part in our understanding of metaphors has been
reported by psychologists Howard Gardner and Ellen Winner.
(See Gardner and Winner, "The Development of Metaphoric
Competence: Implications for Humanistic Disciplines,"
Critical Inquiry, 5 (1978), 123-41.) The researchers
noted that patients with right hemisphere brain injuries
were unable to correctly identify pictures designed to
illustrate such common metaphors as "He wore a loud tie,"
or "He had a heavy heart." In sharp contrast to those with
left hemisphere injuries and to a normal control group,
the right hemisphere patients were attracted to literal
images (e.g., a tie with noise emanating from it) rather
than to images correctly corresponding to. the meaning of
the metaphor.
3
Winterowd, p. 156.
4
Winterowd, p. 166.
5
Northrop Frye, "Myth, Fiction, and Displacement,"
in Fables of Identity (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovano-
vich, 1963).
g
Winterowd, p. 172.
7
As a side note, I offer the personal and perhaps
subjective observation that film audiences in the last ten
or fifteen years seem to be noisier and more restless; my
guess is that some of the behavior patterns developed from
watching television have crept into the movie theaters.
8
Raymond Durgnat, "Art and Audience," British Jour
nal of Aesthetics, 10 (1970), p. 18.
156
9
Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (1950; rpt.
Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969), p. 208.
Stephen King, The Dead Zone (New York: New Ameri
can Library, 1979), p. 127.
11 King, pp. 303-04.
157
V. ALEMBICATION
Students of Burke will understand why I have
substituted "Alembication" in place of the more traditional
title given to a concluding chapter, "Summary and Conclu
sions," since it is a term frequently used by Burke to
imagistically symbolize the distillation process whereby
human reason tries to make sense of the human environment
by means of language. It is simply impossible to "summa
rize" or "conclude" when dealing with Burke. Dramatism
provides us with a seemingly endless array of stages from
which to perform our analysis of human action. By enlarg
ing or reducing the scope of our endeavors, as we have
done throughout the present work, we can use the Dramatis-
tic method to reveal almost any sort of relationship. A
film script can be viewed as an opportunity to present a
new hero model to future-shocked Americans. The death of
a beautiful Oriental lady can become a more powerful symbol
to transmit Japanese cultural values to American audiences
than the dramatic rise to power of a feudal warlord. The
scientific empiricism of the post-Sputnik generation can
serve as a Scene of sedimented social values craftily
invaded by a skilled teller of supernatural tales. Thus
158
as we pause to assess the implications of this volume, we
arrive at a moment where the ideas put forward are not so
much "summarized" as they are "distilled" or "alembicated."
One concept that has distilled in the process of this
work is a new appreciation for the complexities of popular
art. As we have seen, twenty years ago most scholars
approached the subject of popular culture very cautiously.
Popular art was characterized as being the degradation of
taste, the cheapening of quality. The popular artist was
seldom paid attention to, though whenever he or she did
enter the picture, it was usually as a vulgar cartoon vil
lain, a commercializer who placed the Almighty Dollar
ahead of true concern for art. Popular art was said to
have no form; it was merely spectacle, like a Las Vegas
revue, attracting audiences by appealing to the "lowest
common denominator" elements--sex, violence and cheap
sentiment. Members of the audience were either lowbrow
Neanderthals or pitiable victims of a subversive movement
designed to cheapen cultural values and aesthetic taste.
Our new, Dramatistic outlook on popular art would
view it as the "glue" that helps a society hold to a com
mon center. By transmitting cultural values to a mass
audience and by providing a nonthreatening forum whereby
these values can be exposed, challenged and refined, popu
lar culture serves the "classical" function of making
159
clearer a society's axiomatic assumptions and root beliefs.
Popular art becomes a cooperative venture between the pop
ular artist and soceity; the creator of popular culture is
praised for his or her efforts to communicate to a large,
heterogeneous audience rather than condemned for making
money at the task.
The traditional concept of "aesthetic distance" begins
to evaporate under our new model, since popular art demands
close involvement with the material as it is used as a
utilitarian tool for living. Popular audiences do not seek
to "block out" the external world when they encounter pop
ular art. Rather, they must bring in every facet of the
external world to aid in interpretation. The signs,
totems, and taboos of ordinary existence help establish
heroes and villains; if John Travolta wears "Frye" brand
cowboy boots, then he must be "cool." Rather than con
demning such behavior, the Dramatistic popular culture
critic recognizes that signs and totems have always served
as social navigation aids, to primitive clans and modern
suburbanites alike.
It is this recognition of the social nature of art
that gives Dramatism a special advantage over other meth
odologies. The reader may perhaps have gotten the impres
sion that some of the critics and theorists mentioned
throughout this study are supposed to be "bad guys" or
"good guys." McLuhan, one might deduce, is a "bad guy"
160
because he practically breathes life into stone-cold media
and in the process of so doing nearly forgets the artist
ever existed. Kaplan may be seen as another "black hatted"
critic for his arrogance in treating popular audiences as
if they were all passive receptacles for mass-marketed
trash. Cawelti, on the other hand, would be a "Deputy
Sheriff," whose work on popular formulae provides to be
rather compatible with the Dramatistic method.
If the reader has gotten the impression that these
previous critics should be classed as heroes or villains,
then the reader is wrong. My purpose throughout has been
to show that Dramatism is a superior methodology in treat
ing popular culture, superior because it covers more
ground than other methods, not to cast out earlier critics
from the sacred ground. Marshall McLuhan, Herbert Gans
and others have had a serious interest in popular culture,
and as I noted in Chapter I, they have done much to lead
the study of popular culture out of the critical wasteland
of the masscult era. I have compared them with Burke
throughout this study merely to show the relevance of
Burke and to reveal the difference between the broad ter
ritory he covers and the narrower ground staked out by the
critical luminaries of the recent past. Ultimately, Dram
atism unearths more similarities than differences between
popular art and "high" art. That others have not quite
succeeded in demonstrating this is understandable, since
161
not everyone, to be sure, can accept the mission that
Stanley Edgar Hyman sees as Burke's, "to do no less than
to integrate all man's knowledge into one workable critical
frame.
In the present study, we have charted some of the
principal landmarks of this integrative frame. Although
the organization of the preceding three chapters has been
traditionally rhetorical in that it follows the three
major components of the department of invention— ethos,
logos and pathos--in each chapter we have seen the inter
dependency of the three. The artist must have a vision of
the audience, a notion of what elements in the work of art
will promote greater identification with the work, before
he or she even sets out to create. Likewise, in experi
encing the work, the audience is- forced to attend to the
symbolic ramifications placed there by the artist. As
Burke puts it:
A book in itself is a symbolic act of synthesis.
The writer of the book is in a personal situa
tion involving a myriad different factors. His
own particular combination is unique— and the
book that has engrossed him is the summing-up of
this unique combination. But though his situa
tion is unique, it is in many ways like the sit
uation of other people. Hence, their modes of
summing-up will manifest patterns that correspond
with his. 2
Works of art are the loci where public and private modes of
being meet. The sharing of symbols between art and
162
audience is a "transcending upward," to use another of
Burke's phrases, from the solipsism of the mind's inner
workings to the communal knowledge, dialectically achieved,
that other minds do, in fact, experience things as ours do.
Dramatism is, arguably, the best methodology for the
study of popular culture because it is descriptive, not
evaluative. Burke's terminology--"analytic radiations,"
"perspective by incongruity," "ratios of the Pentad"—
points to the open stance of Dramatism. Many critics start
from a closed stance, a set of axioms which attempt to
define precisely the relationships among artist, work and
audience. To dig behind the surface observations of var
ious schools of criticism is to unearth various sets of
philosophical assumptions. The New Critics, for example,
consciously or unconsciously all adopt the premise that
epistemology is at best limited to self-understanding.
The artist's private associations and attitudes cannot be
shared with the audience, and vice versa; therefore, spec
ulation on such attitudes should not be included in criti
cal discussion. The Dramatist, on the other hand, shares
with Whitehead a concern for the "problem of other minds."
Propinquity, the Dramatist suggests, physically, temporally,
spiritually, culturally, psychologically, and otherwise,
makes the inner life of individual experience a lot more
"knowable" than epistemological skeptics would suggest.
163
Dramatism assumes, at its base, that, all .human.under.standixiq
is tentative, whether it is understanding of the self, of
the world, or of other human beings. "Understanding" is
not fixed at some point in one's life or in the life of a
society, but rather is constantly evolving, dialectically,
through the searching playfulness of humans using their
powers of symbolic transformation to make sense of a raw,
unfiltered, unpatterned universe.
Thus Burke's root axiom is that all knowing is pro
visional. There will always be the possibility of a more
complete understanding of everything, since no human mind
can ever possibly have a complete grasp of all the ramifi
cations of even a single event or object. Self-
understanding, for Burke, can never really be said to be
any more complete than one's understanding of others.
Thus rather than artificially divide the process of artis
tic creation and the process of audience response, why not
try to come up with an expansive, open-framed methodology
that can "tease out" the common elements of both processes
and show their interrelationship? Dramatism is the result.
In the first two chapters of this study, I outlined
some of the principal critical methods used during the past
twenty years to study popular culture. In Chapter II, I
argued that Dramatism was a more comprehensive methodology
for the study of popular culture than the previous
approaches, and I used the tools of the Pentad to poke
164
and prod at some of the lacunae of these earlier methods.
At this point, however, I find myself more concerned with
the future of popular culture study than with its past. In
the bluntest of terms, I find that popular culture study
has reached a point of alarming stagnation.
In the late Sixties and early Seventies, young schol
ars began to break free from an unwritten rule that said
nothing scholarly should be done until a work of art or a
historical, event had become firmly cemented by the passage
of time. In literary scholarship, this rule was the famil
iar dictum laid down by Matthew Arnold that a work could
not be judged as great until at least a century had passed.
The Arnoldian dictum began to fade in the Twenties and
Thirties with the admission of American and early modernist
literature to the canon, but it took the general spirit of
rebellion in the Sixties, which took hold of scholars
almost as firmly as it took hold of political activists,
to bring about the first college-level courses in popular
culture. The students' cry for a "relevant" curriculum
was answered, in part, by the devising of courses in
science fiction and the aesthetics of Alfred Hitchcock
films.
Unfortunately, the band of scholars who are seriously
interested in popular culture has remained rather small,
and they are, for the most part, an inbred group of dedi
cated pop culture aficionados who turn their after-hours
165
hobbyhorses— detective novels, radio evangelism, images of
women in daytime TV serials and the like--into topics for
papers at Popular Culture Association meetings. Hidden
away in obscure corners in various departments— English,
sociology, American Studies, communication— -these popular
culture advocates lead double lives. In their curriculum
vitae you will find an odd assortment of published papers,
half on traditional topics within their respective disci
plines and half on specialized topics within popular cul
ture. Leisure time reading is all too often converted
willy-nilly into leisure time scholarship. In the process,
there now exists more thorough documentation of twentieth-
century American popular culture than for any other period
in history and for any other society.
Unfortunately, many of these popular culture "regu
lars" have never given much thought to methodology. For
the most part, they have simply built upon the training
they received in their particular discipline and used
whatever methodology was at hand to examine popular cul
ture. New Critics do objective studies of Agatha Chris- .,
tie's style. Sociologists compare socioeconomic status
with patterns of popular culture consumption. Mass commu
nication specialists do content analysis of male heroes in
Playboy magazine fiction.
Those who are interested in methodology are often
advocates for a particular "revisionist" approach currently
166
sweeping their discipline. When structuralism first
became widely known in America in the mid-Seventies, a
whole host of structuralists invaded the 1975 Popular Cul
ture Association meeting in St. Louis determined to make
structuralism the orthodox methodology for popular culture
scholarship. To their dismay, they encountered a handful
of rebels who advocated other alternatives, semiotics and
the "new" hermeneutics.
My point here is not that structuralism or hermeneutic
methods should not be applied to popular culture materials.
They obviously make a useful contribution. I am merely
observing that, in general, the study of popular culture
has reached an uncomfortable stasis. The search for
answers cannot move far forward because there are too many
voices, too many separate interests, too many conflicting
points of view.
I quickly add that Dramatism is not being promoted as
the methodological end-all, be-all for popular culture
studies. If I were to suggest that it were, I could right
fully stand accused of being a hypocrite, condemning others
for being too narrow in their application of particular
methods and then doing the same. I do feel that Dramatism
is the most comprehensive alternative yet put forward, not
because it is exclusive, but because it is inclusive of
other approaches. Dramatism has timely application in
167
popular culture studies because it may help open up the
discussion once again. Dramatism is praxeological, not
ideological; generative, not reductionist. The beauty of
Dramatism is that within its own borders it can encompass
all the newer methods--structuralism, semiotics, the new
3
hermeneutics. In many ways, Dramatism is not a methodol
ogy per se but a heuristic, a generative model which
enables us to ask a set of relevant questions on any topic.
The heuristic power of Dramatism has scarcely been
demonstrated in the present study. The observations made
in earlier chapters are simply a start. Many of the topics
I have raised could be expanded into full-length studies;
for example, the discussion of artistic collaboration in
Chapter II could become the basis for a complete study of
the creation of a single film or popular television pro
gram. A scholar writing on such a topic could begin to
use sources of information frequently overlooked or
ignored by those in academe: trade publications, personal
interviews, diaries, corporate memos, annotated copies of
shooting scripts, and the like.
Another useful study would be a comprehensive compar
ison between Burke and Cawelti. Cawelti is obviously well-
read in literary criticism, American Studies, and mass
communication, but for some reason he seems ignorant of
Burke. Nonetheless, his work focuses squarely on the
complex dialectic between popular art and social custom,
168
and throughout his writings he seems to be quite aware of
4
the role of the symbol in transmitting ideas and values.
In this study, we have barely scratched the surface of the
concept of popular formulae. These ideas definitely need
to be taken further.
The Burkean concept of identification, a crucial com
ponent of audience response, ought to be compared with
some of the psychological studies of literary response
emanating from Norman N. Holland. Savor for a brief
moment Holland's description of audience response, and you
will discover the obvious relationship with Burke's ideas:
The literary text provides us with a fantasy
which we introject, experiencing it as though it
were our own, supplying our own associations to
it. The literary work manages this fantasy in
two broad ways: by shaping it with formal
devices which operate roughly like defenses; by
transforming the fantasy toward ego-acceptable
meanings— something like sublimation. The plea
sure we experience is the feeling of having a
fantasy of our own and our own associations to
it managed and controlled but at the same time
allowed a limited expression and gratification.^
Along with studies of the psychology of audience response,
we might add response studies that integrate Dramatism
with some of the current psycholinguistic research on
reading theory and language acquisition. Is "learning a
culture" via popular art similar to "learning a language"?
This would be a fascinating point to pursue. Overall, I
feel that Dramatistic studies of audience response would
169
surely rescue us from the tedium of "quantitative" studies
of audience behavior.
Much practical criticism remains to be done. The
short sections on Jaws, Shogun and The Dead Zone in this
volume are simply illustrative examples of what could be
done with Dramatism to explore specific aspects of works
of popular art. It would be exciting to see Dramatism
applied in a full-length study of some aspect of popular
art, say an analysis of an individual genre or the career
of a particular artist. The "definitive study" of the
Harlequin Romance series of novels, for example, can and
should be written from a Dramatistic perspective. So
should a book on the writings of Mickey Spillane, or some
other popular writer.
For its own part, the present study has reached its
destination. With so many dreams to dream, and so much
more to be done in the area of "applied Dramatism," I find
it hard to disembark. The temptation is to stay on board
and ride to the next city, hoping the conductor will fail
to notice that my ticket is already punched. But he no
doubt will notice. And like it or not, I must trust that
the modest aims of this work have been fulfilled. Hope
fully the many audiences to whom this study is addressed--
students of Burke, students of popular culture,
170
rhetoricians, literary critics, sociologists, mass
communication scholars, Americanists and an assortment of
curious onlookers--will all have found something of inter
est. Like most syntheses, the observations and conclusions
in this volume are fragile and tentative at best. Their
value may be better determined by the type of work that
follows.
171
NOTES
Stanley Edgar Hyman, "Kenneth Burke and the Criti
cism of Symbolic Action," in Critical Responses to Kenneth
Burke: 1924-1966, ed. William H. Rueckert (Minneapolis:
Univ. of Mineesota Press, 1969), p. 213.
2
Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History (1937; rpt.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), p. 196.
3
See for example my comparison of Burke's methods
with those employed by the new hermeneuticists, Hans Georg
Gadamer in particular. C. Ronald Kimberling, "Kenneth
Burke and the Rebirth of Hermeneutic Scholarship," in
Kenneth Burke in the Eighties: Where Are We Now?, Southern
California Occasional Papers in Rhetoric, No. I, ed. W.
Ross Winterowd (Los Angeles: Univ. of Southern California
Dept, of English, forthcoming).
4
See especially John G. Cawelti, "Literary Formulas
and their Cultural Significance," in The Study of American
Culture: Contemporary Conflicts, ed. Luther S. Luedtke
(Deland, Florida: Everett/Edwards, 1977).
5
Norman N. Holland, The Dynamics of Lxterary
Response (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968). pp. 311-12.
172
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