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Content KENNETH BURKE AMONG THE MODERNS: A RHETORIC OF THE SYMBOL by Sue H. E. Warnock 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 1983 UMI Number: DP23095 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI DP23095 Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106 - 1346 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA TH E G R A D U A TE SC H O O L U N IV E R S IT Y PARK LOS A N G ELES. C A L IF O R N IA 9 0 0 0 7 t V \l Wo This dissertation, written by Sue Eggers Warnock s v % > under the direction of h ^ f..... Dissertation Com mittee, and approved by a ll its members, has been presented to and accepted by The Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of requirements of the degree of D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y S Dean DISSERTATIO N C O M M IT T E E .. }air TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS............................................ iv INTRODUCTION .......................................... 1 CHAPTER ONE - CRITICAL RESPONSES TO BURKE: PERSPECTIVES AND PERTURBATIONS ..................... 7 A Partial Overview ............................ 7 Burke's Problematic Status in the History of Modern Literary Theory ..................... 11 Strategies for Coping with Burke: Rhetoric Rather Than Poetics......................... 20 Strategies for Coping with Burke: Reading Burke on His Texrms ....................... 22 CHAPTER TWO - BURKE AMONG THE MODERNS: THE PHILOSOPHY OF SYMBOLIC ACTION AS REVISION OF CASSIRER'S PHILOSOPHY OF SYMBOLIC FORMS ................. 26 Burke and Classical Philosophy: Aristotle's Enthymeme and Burke's Qualitative Progression 26 Burke and Cassirer: The Revision from a Philosophy of Symbolic Forms to a Philosophy of Symbolic Action ............... 38 Burke and Modern Literary History: Rhetoric, Poetics, and Philosophy ..................... 52 CHAPTER THREE - BURKE AMONG THE MODERNS: BURKE’S RHETORIC OF THE SYMBOL AND THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE 69 Burke and Modern Symbolism.............. 69 Burke's Qualitative Progression and the Symbolist Movement in Literature ........... 74 From Poetic Texts to Critical Theory: The Complete White Oxen and Towards a Better Life as Symbolic Actions ........... 82 "A Disjointed Kind of Form".......... 85 "'Inside' Knowledge of Motives".......... 95 The Rhetoric of Symbols............... 107 Towards a. Better Life: Symbolically Speaking.............. 115 CHAPTER FOUR - BURKE AND CONTEMPORARY LITERARY CRITICISM: WAYS IN, WAYS OUT, AND WAYS ROUNDABOUT.........125 Burke in the Contemporary Critical Scene . . . 125 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS (Cont.) "Ways In": "Frames of Acceptance" and "Attitude of Assent" ' . . . . ................. 128 The New Critic in Kenneth Burke.......... . . 131 The Determinist in Burke: E. D. Hirsch as Scientific Type.............. 135 Burke’s Determination of Reader’s Intentions 142 "Ways Out”: "Frames of Rejection" and "Attitudes of Dissent" ...... ......... 144 Preface: "Loosely Topical" Instead of "Pinpointingly Specific" ................. 148 The Indeterminist in Burke: Terms for Order.............. 151 Differance .............................. 151 De-Centering . . ........................157 Bricoleur.......... 162 In Defense of Indeterminacy: "The Concealed Offense".............. 164 Burke's Determination of Reader's Attitudes of Dissent..................................... . 168 CHAPTER FIVE - SCOPE AND REDUCTION: "NOW WHERE ARE WE?" .... 180 Reading and Writing as Rebirth Rituals: Dialogic and Dramatism................. 181 A Recalcitrant Reader's Response to Burke's Symbolic Action . . .............. ..... 187 Thou Shalt Not Speak in Contradictory Tongues 188 Thou Shalt Not Be All-Inclusive ........ 191 Thou Shalt Not Be Implicit .......... 193 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................... 195 iii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS CWO The Complete White Oxen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. CS Counter-Statement. Revised paperback edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. TBL Towards a. Better Life: A Series of Epistles, or Declamations. Revised edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. PC Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. Second revised edition, with introduction by Hugh Dalziel Duncan. Indianapolis, Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1954. ATH Attitudes Toward History. Revised edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959. PLF Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. Third edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. GOM A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. ROM A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. ROR The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. LASA Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. DP Dramatism and Development. Barre, Massachusetts: Clark University Press with Barre Publishers, 1972. iv INTRODUCTION How to read Kenneth Burke? How to take him? Where to place him? What does he mean? These questions arise because Burke’s critical writings do not arouse and fulfill most readers' expectations of the genre of literary criticism— logical, explanatory, clear. Since his earliest publi cations in the 1920s, Burke has received conflicting responses. He remains a perspective by incongruity in Modern literary history, although several contemporary critics acknowledge him as their precursor in creative or deconstructionist criticism. In this study, I propose two answers to the question of how to read Burke, both consistent with his theory of language as symbolic action. First, I recommend that he be read scenically, as a Modern, by placing his critical and literary texts in the context of other Modern texts, those which he discusses and those from which he draws his own performative theory of language. Reading Burke in the context of the two major symbolist movements of the Modern period— the phi losophy of symbolic forms and the literary symbolist movement— makes clear that Burke integrates and revises both into a rhetoric of the symbol. He transforms the philosophy of symbolic forms into a phi losophy of symbolic action, and he redefines the literary symbolist movement in terms of the rhetorical functions of symbols. 2 Symbols, for Burke, are "patterns of experience," abstractions from particular scenes. They are, therefore, incomplete and non- referential. Because of this metaphorical nature of language, and because people share only "margins of overlap" in their experiences, writer and reader must collaborate actively in symbol-using. Language is performance, not reference; language is rhetorical. Second, I argue that Burke’s critical writings be read on his terms, as symbolic and poetic, for their psychology of form, as well as for their psychology of information. From his rhetorical per spective, there is no contradiction in reading a critical text as a poetic text, for all language is metaphorical— poetic and dramatic. Burke focuses on the changing functions of forms in specific scenes, rather than on the recurrent features of forms across time and space. His "terministic screen" is rhetoric, not poetics. The meaning of Burke, then, is not only in his matter but also in his methods of reading and writing which he enacts with readers. His texts include his readings and rewritings of other texts, ranging from those of Aristotle, De Gourmont, Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence, Mead, and Piaget, to current works, such as Wayne C. Booth's writings on Burke. Burke's readers participate in the symbolic performances, playing the role of "recalcitrant reader." As Burke rewrites texts for his own purposes, readers learn to use Burke's for their purposes. While we have come to realize that people, not texts, make meaning, Burke has engaged readers in symbolic action since the 1920s by exploiting the rhetoric of the symbol. In Counter-Statement, he 3 posits three types of readers. The "hysteric" approaches the text for his own purposes, to revel in his own responses. The "connoisseur" denies his own motives to appreciate the text itself. The "recalci trant" becomes dialectically involved in the action. Reading Burke educates us in reading other Modern texts, literary and critical, for his writings revise definitions of "reading," "writing," "criticism," and "literature." They also teach a critical vocabulary appropriate to his texts and to other Modern texts. Burke anticipates in the 1930s, at the height of a New Critical approach to texts, such current terms as "indeterminacy," "difference," and "creative criticism." Furthermore, Burke revises the definition of "Modern," so that the term indicates the use of language as performance, not reference. The performative definition of language is a rhetorical definition. As we shall see, Burke’s rhetoric of the symbol can provide a coherent framework for various definitions of "Modern," ranging from the emphasis on psychology, to concern for spatial forms, to the focus on language itself. • * - n Permanence and Change, Burke says that language— or a particu lar attitude towards language— gives us the capacity to "interpret our interpretations": Though all organisms are critics in the sense that they interpret the signs about them, the experimental, speculative technique made available by speech would seem to single out the human species as the only one possessing an equipment for going beyond the criticism of experience to a criticism of criticism. (P & C, p. 6) 4 Burke's terms lead to self-criticism of his major terministic screen, the definition of language as symbolic action. Although for Burke a definition is itself performative, not referential, he recognizes that to act on a definition gives it an appearance of truth. He constantly undermines what he does, questions what he says, and shifts back and forth between exploratory writer and recalcitrant reader of his own texts. My intentions in this study imitate Burke's motives throughout his career: to "inquire," not to "pamphleteer"; to be "interpret tative," rather than "informative"; and to write "songfully," not "clinically." My aim is to create a cluster of terms in the following chapters, a context for rereading Burke. In Chapter One, "Critical Responses to Burke: Perspectives and Perturbations," I summarize the contradictory views of his work in order to demonstrate that he does not arouse and fulfill reader expectations because he writes from the perspective of rhetoric, not poetics. In Chapter Two, "Burke Among the Moderns: The Philosophy of Symbolic Action as Revision of Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms," I place Burke's critical texts in the context of Modern philosophy to show Burke's revision of symbolic forms into symbolic action as his creation of a rhetoric of the symbol. I begin by discussing Burke's rewriting of Aristotle so that the rhetorical enthymeme becomes identified with "qualitative progression" and other symbolic forms in Modern literature which engage readers in action. 5 In Chapter Three, "Burke Among the Moderns: Burke’s Rhetoric of the Symbol and the Symbolist Movement in Literature," I place Burke's literary and critical texts in the context of Modern literature. I first demonstrate how he develops a rhetoric of the symbol by redefining Symbolist poetry as enthymemic, a syllogistic structure with a missing premise, which invites readers to create meaning by supplying connections. He identifies this rhetorical function of symbols with "qualitative progression" and with non-linear progressions that he finds characteristic of Modern plot structures, methods of character development, and symbol use. I then discuss how Burke derives his dramatistie theory of language as symbolic action from his own fiction and from early Modern texts which exploit the performative nature of language. In Chapter Four, "Burke Among the Moderns: Burke and Contemporary Literary Criticism^" I place Burke's critical texts in the context of Modern literary theory to argue that Burke anticipates and even supercedes post-structuralist criticism, as he includes more traditional methods. First I discuss Burke's "frames of acceptance," "attitudes of assent," and "ways in," associating them with intention- alist and historical methods which locate determinate meaning in the text, the author, or the historical situation. I then discuss Burke's "frames of rejection," "attitudes of dissent," and "ways out," associating these with methods of indeterminacy which, in fact, locate meaning in readers' responses or contexts. 6 In general, Burke supercedes contemporary critics by admitting the performative effectiveness, rather than the referential truth, of his own assertions. For Burke, the linking verb "to be" creates a metaphor, not a truth. In Chapter Five, "Scope and Reduction: Now Where Are We?" I conclude by questioning Burke's terministic screen of language as symbolic action. CHAPTER ONE CRITICAL RESPONSES TO BURKE: PERSPECTIVES AND PERTURBATIONS A Partial Overview Burke's literary criticism does not meet reader expectations of the genre. Few critics would ask in the middle of a digression, "Now, where are we?" Few would mean that "we advocate nothing, then, but a return to inconclusiveness." And few would acknowledge that "my own thesis seems a stodgy step indeed." Throughout his texts, Burke invokes his readers' "charity": We must ask the reader, if he can, merely to consider it as being on the track of something. We are trying to bring up an issue— rather than to persuade anyone that we can make it crystal clear. (ATH, p. 86) Perhaps on the surface Burke's criticism looks like recent deconstructionist criticism, with footnotes undermining the main text, with prefaces within prefaces, and with creative thinking predominant over logical arguments and amalgamated facts. I argue later, however, that Burke's criticism is unlike deconstructionist and•revisionist criticism in basic attitudes and motives. His criticism does not even meet the recently revised expectations of the genre, primarily because, while he often advocates indeterminacy and inconclusiveness, he rarely does so exclusively. By examining conflicting responses to his works, we can clearly see that reading Burke is problematic. A major difficulty in reading 8 him results from the fact that no standard view exists. Assessments range from dismissing him as incoherent, jargon-ridden, and unsystematic, to praising him for originality and lucidity. For example, one of his strongest proponents, Stanley Edgar Hyman, in The Armed Vision: A Study of the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism, 1948, describes Burke's criticism as something "almost unequalled for power, lucidity, depth, and brilliance of perception." He predicts that "it will be a literary criticism constituting a passionate avowal of one ultimate and transcendent importance of the creative act."^" In direct contrast, Marius Bewley, in The Complex Fate: Hawthorne, Henry James, and Some Other American Writers, 1952, explains a possible reason for the "Burke boom in America": The critical popularity is partly due to the fact that although Burke has committed himself against the technological aspect of contemporary society he has evolved a 'methodology' of criticism that cannot help playing into the hands of those^to whom technology may be much less present as a danger. Bewley adds that Burke's "originality consists chiefly in the creation of a vocabulary so well oiled and metallic that one would almost swear 3 the machine is wholly a new thing." Such widely discrepant views of Burke are not atypical. Critical assessments of Burke differ to such a degree that no standard interpretation exists to guide readers. Moreover, because critics of various schools find Burke as precursor, he cannot be read from the framework of one particular critical theory. Critics who find Burke as host range from Brooks, Cowley, and Ransom, to Bloom, Hartman, and White. New critics, historical critics, psychoanalytic 9 critics, phenomenological critics, ideological critics, and deconstructionists, all find themselves— their terms, tools, and interpretations— in Burke. Therefore, those who dismiss him from the outset as being at best eclectic, at worst incoherent, recognize a truth about Burke: he is the rhetorical critic who advises others to use whatever methods are available to them, and he heeds his own warning to others in Attitudes Towards History: In view of such a motivational jungle, a good basic proposition to have in mind when contemplating the study of motives would be anybody can do anything for any reason. (ATH, p. 353) Burke's texts dramatize various kinds of criticism; they are grab-bags of various critical tools. Critics of any persuasion, it seems, can find places where Burke is ally and enemy. Readers do not know what to expect, as he constantly challenges preconceptions and predictions. Another major problem in reading Burke is that he cannot easily be read historically, since he has often been counter to the current of the times. He has written over a long period of time, from the 1920s to the 1980s, and during this time criticism has changed radically in methods, assumptions, and purposes. In addition, his own criticism changes. To read Burke for his intentions, or to read him psychoanalytically, creates problems because his own motives are in flux. For Burke, writing is a discovery process, and so he seldom ends where he begins and where he ends is not predictable from the beginning. Burke situates readers in unfamiliar positions. His methods of development are analogical, not logical; his own identity, 10 as well as his definitions and discourse strategies, are fluid; and his rhetorical relationship with readers is cooperative rather than authoritative. Finally, Burke is difficult to read because he draws from many disciplines, and specialists in various fields use Burke. The literary critic has limited access to him and to readings of him. Many disagree about the value of Burke's interdisciplinary and context- dependent criticism. As early as 1948, Hyman recognizes the impossi bility of placing Burke in one discipline and the consequent trouble in saying what he means: The reasons reviews and editors had such trouble fastening on Burke's field is that he has no field, unless it be Burkology. In recent years it has become fashionable to say that he is not actually a literary critic, but a semanticist, social psychologist, or philosopher. Would be that he is not only a literary critic but a-literary critic plus more things and others.4 In time, the inability to classify Burke according to academic discipline or critical school has been seen as a strength; but awareness of his interdisciplinary character has not lessened the problematic status of his writings, nor the problems any single reader has in gaining a broad view of him. In his 1965 introduction to Permanence and Change, Hugh Dalziel Duncan reinterprets the inter disciplinary dimensions to Burke's criticism and the subsequent problems which arise: In an age of specialists, Kenneth Burke's writings offend those who are content with a partial view of human motivations. He is offensive to many academicians because he cannot be stuffed into any of the bins whose occupancy brings fame and fortune in the groves of Academe. Yet Burke is nothing if not erudite. 11 While he is the soul of gentility as a critic, and, it may be added for the record, as a person, those who tangle intel lectually with Burke soon learn to buckle on their heaviest armor for the fray. Many writers on communication use Burke without crediting their source, or they paraphrase without too much understanding. Whether this practice is the result of guile or ignorance it is hard to say, but if there is any modern thinker whose work has been pilfered shamelessly, it is Burke. Fortunately for the vitality of American social thought, however, Burke has attracted followers who are distinguished as much by their productivity as by their reverence.5 Reading Burke becomes problematic because views of him come from many disciplines, too many for most individuals to have access to.. There is not even concensus among literary critics about Burke, only partial perspectives on him. Burke exists somewhere in the parallax, to use Joyce's term, created by contradictory angles on him. Therefore, readers must create their own images of Burke, aware, however, that no single view captures the whole of Kenneth Burke. Burke’s Problematic Status in the History of Modern Literary Theory While critical reactions to Burke vary radically, we can trace a line of response to his criticism, to illustrate more specifically the difficulties that readers have in performing the symbolic action invited by his writing. The following review of book-length and extended studies of Burke demonstrates the tendency to extract propositional content, the psychology of information, and to ignore appositional meaning, the psychology of form.^ Although there is little concensus about what Burke means, about his value, or about his place in literary history, most critics agree about their own purpose in writing about him. They aim to defend or attack Burke by purifying, clarifying, and locating determinate meaning. Ironically, criticism of his rhetorical criticism has been essentially text-centered. Rhetoric, in the broad definition of that term which Burke acts on, includes figures and tropes within a text, but it also includes the interactions of writer, reader, subject, language, and context. Motives and situation determine the starting-point. In addition, in Burke's theory, symbols themselves are patterns of experience, scenically grounded and yet biologically motivated. This is not to say that Burke does not examine symbolic relationships within a text. Some of his best-known studies, such as his analysis of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," and "The Rhetoric of Hitler's 'Battle,'" are exemplary New Criticism; but they are exemplary of only one aspect of Burke's critical method. Stanley Edgar Hyman, in The Armed Vision, attempts to make a primary place for Burke in critical history by redefining "Modern." He identifies Burke's "integrative" method as characteristic of Modern literary criticism, despite the text-centered emphasis of the 1940s and 1950s. Hyman, like most of Burke's critics, feels compelled to clarify his meaning since his "characteristic" method causes such a "tremendous shock of novelty." Hyman proceeds to define terms and locate meaning, but he also briefly places Burke's texts in the context of other writings. In conclusion, though, Hyman admits that he slights the poem-audience relationship, while acknowledging that 13 Burke himself is as much concerned about rhetorical action as he is about symbolic action. Although Hyman is correct about Burke’s rhetorical concerns, his final distinction— between symbolic action and rhetorical action— is his own, not Burke's. As we shall see later, Burke defines symbolic action as requiring audience participation in the creation of meaning because symbols are incomplete. Symbols are inherently rhetorical, according to his definition. In contrast, Hyman equates symbols with the test itself, not with situations and biology. He views symbols as objects of poetic inquiry; Burke understands symbols as functioning rhetorically. Hyman's intentions are clearly not rhetorical or integrative, as he aims to "study the nature of modern critical•method," to "note the ancestry of their techniques," and to "suggest some possibilities for an integrated and practical methodology that would combine and consolidate the best procedures of modern criticism."^ Hyman approaches Burke from the perspective of poetics, the traditional approach of literary criticism, rather than from the perspective of rhetoric, the more integrative approach which Hyman defines as Modern. Perhaps more than any critic Hyman recognizes Burke's value, but George Knox also seems to understand a crucial point about Burke's ways of meaning. In Critical Moments: Kenneth Burke's Categories and Critiques, 1937, Knox attempts to locate determinate meaning and, as his title suggests, to classify Burke. But Knox also recognizes that Burke exploits the Cult of Perhaps. His goal, however, is to orient the reader so that he can "walk into Burke’s world and feel 14 relatively at home" by providing the propositional content in 8 simplified or orderly form. Although one of Burke's primary motives is to promote language as strategies for coping, he seldom tries to make readers feel at home. Burke aims to cultivate doubt and uncertainty as the most practical strategies for coping in today’s world. Despite Knox's recognition of Burke's Cult of Perhaps, he aims to reduce the reader's uncertainty by explaining what Burke means, rather than by educating readers to the Attitude of Perhaps. Similarly, William H. Rueckert, in Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations, 1963, attempts to "purify" Burke, to hack away the "stylistic and terminological underbrush," which he describes as an 9 "irritation, a distraction, the rank growth of a fecund mind." Rueckert is another of Burke's strongest supporters, but in this early work he ignores the rhetoric of the psychology of form. For example, Rueckert describes the "pure art" of Burke's collection of short fiction, The White Oxen, as progressing towards the "exploration of words as non-cognitive," but he does not relate Burke's use of language as non-cognitive in the fiction with his use of language as non-cognitive in the criticism. Burke understands all language as poetic, symbolic, and rhetoric, with critical writing being a minor form of this all-inclusive form. Burke's "stylistic and terminological underbrush" in criticism is meaningful, though in a formal rather than informational way, in an analogical rather than logical way. At another point, Rueckert relates Burke's notion of qualitative progression, which puts readers into a "state of mind which another 15 mind can appropriately follow," with the writings of T. S. Eliot. But once again, he does not read critical writings as poetic and symbolic, and he consequently reads stylistic features as the "rank growth of a fecund mind," not as formal meaning. For Rueckert, to develop Burke's connection between qualitative progression and Eliot’s poetry would mean asserting the rhetorical dimensions to Eliot's writings at a time when Eliot and his followers were advocating autonomy of the text and denouncing authorial intention and audience reaction, under the headings of the intentional and pathetic fallacies. Rueckert, in 1963, only minimally develops the connections between Burke's critical writings and Modern literary writing, perhaps viewing his critical task as the extraction of propositional content and the elimination of formal complexities. To correct earlier attitudes towards Burke's methodological madness, Armin Paul Frank, in Kenneth Burke, 1969, claims that Burke's methods are more than "mere stylistic vagaries": With him verbal figures virtually merge with figures of thought. He proceeds, by preference, on the byways and roundabouts of the mind. He will 'with assays of bias/By indirections find directions out.' In his own words: he likes to radiate. Even if he criticizes a view, he is reluctant to abandon it.-*-® Frank continues to explain the significance of Burke's unusual style: "Such a reflexively ironic turn of mind makes for much essential complexity which cannot be hacked away without intrinsic damage." He identifies the collage as a Modern literary technique and traces its intention to De Gourmont's and Flaubert's theories of pure art. Frank 16 also discusses how Burke makes his reader a dramatis persona and how the collage has value as a "presentational device and as a heuristic method subject to verification": Verification, as Burke sees it, operates through 'recalci trance' — the strategic alteration of one's arguments when they meet with opposition, their modification for the purpose of communicating one's vision.H t Although he identifies Burke's roundabout method with that of Modern writers and discusses the reader's role as dramatis persona in the symbolic performance, Frank does not further develop these ideas. Instead, he agrees with his predecessors on key terms, clusters, critical moments, watershed moments, and attitudes. Frank's perceptions seem fixed by the binary opposition between "critical" and "creative," a bind contemporary critics attempt to blast. He does not pursue connections between Burke's critical style and Modern literary techniques of indirection, radiating mode of development, self-reflexive irony, and the collage technique which juxtaposes disparate parts so that readers must fill in the blanks to make meaning. In a sense, he does not play the role of recalcitrant reader who opposes and modifies the text for his own purposes. Instead, Frank receives information from the text and, as critic not creator, passes it along to other readers as truth. Most recently, Wayne C. Booth, in Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism, 1979, takes up the challenge to defend and explain Burke to reluctant rather than recalcitrant readers. Booth, however, recognizes that the meaning of Burke is not only in 17 propositional content, and therefore he also adopts Burke’s role and imitates his formal methods. Booth’s rhetorical stances seem to be contradictorily motivated. He establishes himself as the legitimate, academic critic who has grown to respect the "outlaw" Burke. At the same time, he identifies with Burke, but he chooses to legitimize Burke in traditional terms, not in Burke's terms. Such mixed motives to not qualify as perspectives by incongruity; such an attempt to legitimize Burke does not fulfill the role of reclacitrant who speaks dialectically in his own voice. Booth begins by admitting his earlier doubts about Burke but his growing admiration: "Without pretending to defend all of Burke's moves, many of which he himself later repudiates or contradicts, I do want to argue that his is one of the great pluralizing minds of our time." He openly admits Burke's faults, the grounds on which many literary critics dismiss him, and in so doing Booth outlines reader expectations of the genre of literary criticism: His whole enterprise is impossibly, outrageously, shockingly, ambitious, yet it finally frustrates intellectual ambition by undermining all solutions. But for anyone who will enter that enterprise, there is no reason why Burke's circularities, or even his imprecisions, should be condemned. Traced out in their richness, his circularities should trouble us no more than the circularities pursued by a Plato or a Cicero or a John Dewey— or by Crane or by you or me. Unless the defender of rigor can refute Burke's claims that all thought is in one sense circular, that all conclusions are in a sense chosen 'in the beginning,' at the moment a thinker chooses his terministic screen, he should attend closer to Burke's richer music: even the most linear and logical of critics is finally only spreading out in temporal sequence the individual notes from the musical chord that is sounded the moment he chooses his terms and begins.12 18 The conventional goal of poetics is to find answers and locate correct meanings, but Burke is imprecise, not linear nor logical. He writes to think, discover, and create, not to communicate a point which he has already discovered and wants others to accept. Burke’s criticism is not rigorous in the traditional sense; it is dance-like. Ironically, Booth attempts to defend Burke in traditional terms. His major defense is that Burke, contrary to opinion, is rigorous and even consistent in his arguments: He remains "constant, as he moves from field to field, even while the surface of his work revels in irridescent variety." Again, Booth separates form and information. He admits that Burke's paths are "seldom straight and clear; his allusions are often obscure: his arguments often seem to depend on puns and questionable etymologies or on conjectures so wild that he does not even try to defend them." Burke does, indeed, violate R. S. Crane's criteria for good criticism— coherence and commonsensical correspondence with what is "really there." Burke's performance criticism, his dramatistic rather than referential definition of language, clearly defies such criteria. Booth primarily addresses the main objection to Burke, his method of proof: "Whatever the accepted canons are for organization and proof seem as often violated as honored." Booth shows that Burke is consistent, at least, in his unacceptable methods— he always "claims to make connections in what appears disparate." He admires the power in Burke's unfamiliar methods of proof: "His dialectics of similarities and differences is so deliberately flexible and so 19 neatly aggressively opposed to neatly fixed meanings that in a sense all literal proof is made suspect." Furthermore, Booth identifies Burke's methods with poetry: "By the same token, efforts at speculative discourse like Burke's will at times become more like 'poetry' than like argument." Here Booth maintains the distinction between poetry and criticism which Burke's own theory denies. To Booth, Burke is a poet— "Burke is at every moment performing his own poem, his symbolic act in the great drama"— but all critics are not. As Booth defends and explains Burke's method of proof, he fails to make the obvious connection between Burke's proof and the enthymeme, the rhetorical proof which Aristotle in the Rhetoric calls the soul of rhetoric. Although Booth is a rhetorical critic himself, he still approaches texts, even Burke's texts, from the perspective of poetics. Perhaps because of his audience of literary critics who expect logical proof, Booth overlooks the fact that Burke remains constant, not to logic nor to the criteria of good literary criticism, but to rhetoric. Throughout his criticism, Burke relies primarily on enthymemic proof which persuades not by logic but by involving the reader in the process of discovery. Persuasion occurs because the reader experiences the steps, the disconnected steps, and makes leaps and bridges among disparate parts, not because the reader verifies connections by reference to external, objective logic. Burke's criticism is primarily performance, rather than reference. Although Booth performs Burke's role and imitates his methods, he relies finally on traditional terms 20 and logical proof expected of literary critics writing from the perspective of poetics. As we shall see in Chapter Three, Burke argues that enthymemic structures characterize Symbolist poetry. Burke's circularity, illogic, and radiating mode are not simply, as Booth claims, his repudiations of "many of the canons of demonstrations that most traditional scholars would take for granted." They are, in fact, the traditional canons of rhetoric, and, according to Burke, the charac teristic modes of Modern poetry and fiction. It is quite true that Burke is "guilty of circular reasons," but he "hails circular reasoning as what every thinker commits." And it is true that Burke 13 performs his own.poems, "his symbolic act in the great drama." For Burke, all language is symbolic and therefore rhetorical: all proofs are enthymemic. Strategies for Coping with Burke: Rhetoric Rather Than Poetics As the survey of critical responses to Burke shows, most readers approach Burke from the perspective of poetics, while he writes from the perspective of rhetoric. According to Burke's interpretation of Aristotle, which we will explore in Chapter Two, rhetoric deals with the changing functions of forms, while poetics focuses on the parts, species, and kinds of forms which remain constant across time and space. Poetics focuses on the accurate representation of reality established by artistic forms; rhetoric focuses on the dialectical relationships between forms of the text, world, and mind. Poetics 21 hypothesizes a referential truth; rhetoric Is performance based on probability. The motive for imitation from the perspective of poetics is referential truth. The motive for imitation from the perspective of rhetoric is dialectics. In general, Burke focuses on what changes, what is transformed in a particular scene or text situation. The rhetorical view is most practical to him because he perceives the world from the Cult of Perhaps and understands matters as doubtful and probable, not true. What follows most directly from his rhetorical terministic screen is that his method of proof is the enthymeme or, to use his term, qualitative progression. Burke rarely mentions the enthymeme— which therefore assumes significance by its absence— but as early as Counter-Statement, he distinguishes between two forms of progression, syllogistic and 14 qualitative. Qualitative progressions "lack the pronounced anticipatory nature of the syllogistic progression"; they put readers into a "state of mind which another state of mind can appropriately follow." Readers are "less prepared to demand a certain qualitative progression than to recognize its rightness after the event." Unlike the syllogistic progression expected in literary criticism, Burke’s enthymemic writings rely not on logic but on the "recalcitrant" reader who plays a vital role in the symbolic action. Burke’s criticism is analogical, appositional, and exploratory; thus, readers make meaning, but with the understanding of the tentative, performative nature of their own interpretations. 22 Ironically, the enthymemic quality of Burke's writing might be the source of the typical critical response to him— the motive to clarify, explicate, and classify what he means. Burke persuades readers towards logical proof by his own analogical methods. The emphasis on the psychology of form yields a hypertrophy of the psychology of information in many cases. Burke's rhetorical aims, however, seem to be to spar dialectically with readers, including himself as reader, rather than to create either/or binds between form and information, writer and reader, text and reality. Meaning becomes a context-dependent action, subject to revision as motives and scenes change. Strategies for Coping with Burke; Reading Burke on His Terms Burke defines all language as symbolic action— poetic and dramatic. He revises "Modern" to mean the use of language as performance not reference, and key critical terms cluster around his dramatistic definition. His critical texts integrate the two Modern symbolist movements— the philosophy of symbolic forms, articulated by Ernst Cassirer and designated by Suzanne K. Langer as the "pervasive key change of the Twentieth Century," and the literary symbolist movement. But in both cases, Burke rhetoricizes the symbol by emphasizing function not form. His revision of language as symbolic action entails revisions of other terms, such as "reading," "writing," "literature," "poetic," "dramatic," and "narrative." Reading Burke on his terms means that a scenic and motivational approach shares importance with a textual approach. Burke's rhetoric of the symbol also invites readers to engage in enthymeme-making, in the dancing of attitudes. 24 Notes ^Stanley Edgar Hyman, The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism (New York: Alfred A. KnopfT 1948Tj p. 394. ^Marius Bewley, The Complex Fate: Hawthorne, Henry James, and Some Other American Writers (London: Ghatto and Windus, 1952), p. 212. 3 Ibid., p. 212. 4 Hyman, p. 374. ^Hugh Dalziel Duncan, "Introduction," Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, p. xiii. Duncan’s other texts, Language and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953) and Communication and Social Order (New York: The Bedminister Press, 1962), are examples of how scholars in other disciplines use Burke. ^The neurosurgeon Joseph Bogen uses the term "appositional" to characterize the functions of the right hemisphere and the term "propositional" to characterize the functions of the left hemisphere. In general, left hemisphere functions are analytic, linear, and logical, whereas right hemisphere functions are holistic, non-linear, and analogical. ^Hyman, p. ix. g George Knox, Critical Moments: Kenneth Burke’s Categories and Critiques (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1957), p. xvii. 9 William H. Rueckert, Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963), p. 5. Rueckert’s other valuable collection of selected criticism, Critical Responses to Kenneth Burke: 1924-1966 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), provides a running commentary on Burke. More recently, Representing Kenneth Burke, Selected Papers from the English Institute, New Series, no. 6, edited by Hayden White and Margaret Brose (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), provides eight contemporary responses to Burke. ■''^Armin Paul Frank, Kenneth Burke (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1969), p. ii. 1;LIbid., p. 91. 12 Wayne C. Booth, Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 126. 25 ^Ibid., p. 126. 14 The only time Burke uses the term "enthymeme," to my knowledge, is in his recent essay "Rhetoric, Poetics, and Philosophy," published in Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Literature: An Exploration (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1978), pp. 15-34, edited by Don M. Burks. In this essay, Burke explains the connections that he and Aristotle see between truth, the syllogism, and the enthymeme, connections which I develop specifically in Chapter Two but which form the basis of this study as a whole: "Similarly, with regard to rhetoric, I take it that not truth but opinion is the surest ground of persuasion— and Aristotle seems to have implied considerations of that sort when distinguishing between enthymeme and syllogism. Often, though not always, truth helps— yet many questions are called 'rhetorical* precisely because there is no ’truth* to which one can refer" (p. 16). 26 CHAPTER TWO BURKE AMONG‘THE MODERNS: THE PHILOSOPHY OF SYMBOLIC ACTION AS REVISION OF CASSIRER'S PHILOSOPHY OF SYMBOLIC FORMS Burke and Classical Philosophy: Aristotle*s . Enthymeme and Burke* s Qualitative Progression In general, readers agree with Marie Hochmuth Nichols' argument that Burke is "essentially a classicist in his theory of rhetoric."^ Readers also agree with Laura Virginia Holland's further association of Burke with Aristotle: There is nothing in Burke's rhetorical theory which is not implicit in Aristotle. In several respects, however, he has gone beyond Aristotle, and made the implicit explicit.^ Burke acknowledges his debt to Aristotle, but he does not declare himself a recalcitrant reader who revises Aristotle to suit his own purposes. Burke claims Aristotle as his authority for treating all language as rhetoric, as probable, uncertain, context-dependent— -as dramatistic. However, Aristotle maintains for the most part the distinction between a rhetorical and a poetics approach to language. Rhetoric deals with the changing functions of forms within specific situations, and it reflects the view of the world as doubtful and uncertain. Rhetoric is a performance definition of language. Poetics, dealing with the parts, kinds, and species which remain constant across time and space, reflects a view of the world as certain and stable. Poetics is a 27 referential definition of language. Burke typically merges poetics with rhetoric, which remains his primary terministic screen. Clearly Aristotle is one of Burke’s precursors, whom he revises for his own purposes. His angle on Aristotle is not the standard view: it is a rhetorical view. Critics typically stress the similarities rather than the differences between Burke and Aristotle, and connections are obvious. Burke's treatment of motives extends Aristotle's discussion of emotions and types in Book II of the Rhetoric. Burke's theory of "innate forms of the mind" and his theory of "patterns of experience" can also be traced (in Derrida's sense of that term and in Burke's sense of "tracked down") to Book II. They share a pragmatic approach to language, and Burke's dramatistic, performance theory, can be seen as a development of Aristotle's discussion of imitation in the Poetics where the aim is catharsis. Burke's five forms, first classified in "Lexicon Rhetoricae" in Counter-Statement, are comparable to specific devices which Aristotle discusses from the perspective of both rhetoric and poetics. Burke's indebtedness to Aristotle is also obvious in more specific ways. We can view Burke's key term, "identification," as a variation of Aristotle's definition of rhetoric as the art of finding 3 what will persuade in a given circumstance. In Burke's rhetoric, identification of speaker and listener constitutes the essential grounds for persuasion; therefore, the rhetoricians's task is to determine points of similarity and difference, the "margins of overlap" 28 and the areas of unfamiliarity. We can compare his definition of language as "strategies for coping" with Aristotle’s conception of catharsis in the Poetics and with the function of rhetoric to express motives and realize intentions. We can also link Burke's speculations about oppositions, dissociations, and negations with Aristotle's definition of rhetoric's function to prove opposites. Finally, we can see that Burke and Aristotle share similar world views and epistemological assumptions— Burke's "Cult of Perhaps" and his dramatistic theory advocate a tentative, revisionary approach in this world of doubt and uncertainty, and Aristotle's theory of forms and emphasis on probabilities support a rhetorical approach to life and language. But the differences in time— Burke in 1930 and Aristotle in 330 B.C.— expose limitations of stressing such "margins of overlap" and ignoring larger areas of difference. Instead of perceiving Burke as developer of Aristotle's explicit or implicit ideas, we can perhaps better understand him as recalcitrant reader of Aristotle who, in Harold Bloom's terms, misreads his precursor. And we can perhaps benefit from understanding Burke's texts first as counter-statements to Aristotle's and second in a broader philosophical context. Before looking at Burke's texts in the context of Modern philosophy, particularly that of Ernst Cassirer and Suzanne K. Langer, we can briefly reread Burke's revisionary interpretation of Aristotle. Burke revises the classical philosophical tradition by merging Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics into a rhetoric of forms. He claims 29 that both he and Aristotle begin with form but that the movement from aesthetic issues to issues of communication in general is an easy and natural one. Burke describes this shift in his latest book, Dramatism and Development: My first book of criticism, Counter-Statement, begins in the aesthetic tradition, with the stress on self-expression, but en route it shifts to a concern with the 'psychology of audience,' discussing the role of form in the arousing and fulfilling of expectations. (DD, pp. 15-16) A page later, Burke appeals to Aristotle for corroboration of his shift, but here he broadens the development from the "aesthetic tradition" to aesthetics in general and from audience to "human relations": "A work such as Aristotle's Rhetoric . . . shows how readily an approach through such formal principles can shift from specifically aesthetic concerns to thoughts on human relations in , general." Burke drops "self-expression"; "form" becomes the pivotal term. Earlier in the preface to the second edition of Counter-Statement, Burke appeals to Aristotle's authority, but this time he refers to the Poetics: I take this to be the principle in Aristotle's view of tragedy, this somewhat homeopathic notion that we are cleansed of emotional tensions by kinds of art deliberately designed to affect us with these tensions under controlled conditions. (CS, p. xii) Burke then explains the "lightning rod" principle of the Poetics— to cure men of ills by expressing their emotions— as opposed to Plato's "censorship principle" which suppresses emotions. Burke associates 30 himself with Aristotle's more "liberal" view of the relationship between art and society: "Purification, in this scheme, is got by drawing off of dangerous charges, as lightning rods are designed, not to ’.suppress’ danger but to draw it into harmless channels." Again, even in connection with the Poetics, Burke focuses on the functions of forms and identifies Aristotle as having similar rhetorical concerns. Burke typically argues for the rhetoric of forms and appeals to Aristotle for corroboration, even though Aristotle also views forms 4 from the perspective of poetics. Although Aristotle distinguishes between rhetoric and poetics in his two texts, we can find that, as Burke claims, the two views overlap and that Aristotle discusses the rhetoric of forms in the Poetics. The two texts merge at several points. Aristotle uses poetry in the Rhetoric as a "mine of illustrative material,""* and specific cross-references connect the texts. For example, in discussing "thought," one of the six parts of tragedy, Aristotle refers to the Rhetoric: Concerning Thought, we may assume what is said in the Rhetoric, to which inquiry the subject more strictly belongs. Under Thought is included every effect which has to be produced by speech, the subdivisions being,— proof and refutation; the excitation of the feelings, such as pity, fear, anger, and the like; the suggestion of the importance or its opposite.6 Strictly speaking, an essential part of tragedy, the part controlling effects, belongs under the heading of rhetoric. Catharsis, then, a major subject in the Poetics, belongs more strictly under the heading of rhetoric, when catharsis is approached as creating effects. The 31 effects of imitation, as opposed to the kinds and means of imitation, are also the proper concern of rhetoric. Aristotle also discusses character and style in both the Rhetoric and the Poetics, but he treats them sketchily in the Poetics, without allusions to the complex discussions in the Rhetoric. Aristotle maintains a distinction between a rhetorical and a poetics approach in his treatment of character. On the belief that rhetoric does not consider what "seems probable in each case" but what seems probable "to this or that class or persons," Aristotle discusses the psychology of the audience in Book II to show what the orator must consider in order to produce convictions. He discusses emotions and character in terms of ethical and pathetic proofs. Although he systematizes a body of knowledge, he asserts that the orator's task remains uncertain, for the universals or norms are only probabilities which need adjustment to specific people and places. Therefore, Aristotle presents the emotions in terms of the disposition of the mind which leads to the emotion, the persons who usually incite the emotions, and the occasions which give rise to them. The norms of behavior dialectically imply the exceptions and variations with which the rhetor deals. In the Poetics, Aristotle treats character differently. There he lists four aims— goodness, propriety, truthfulness, and consistency— but without complex psychology. As in the Rhetoric though, "the poet should always aim either at the necessary or the probable." Further discussion of changing purposes and situations belongs in the Rhetoric: 32 Nor should he neglect those appeals to the senses, which, though not among the essentials, are the concomitants of poetry; for here too there is much room for error. But of this enough has been said in our published treatises.? He maintains the appropriateness of appeals to the senses to the Rhetoric. Burke claims Aristotle as his authority in approaching all language as rhetoric. His case can be seen best in Aristotle's discussions of metaphor, enthymeme, and plot. Discussions of metaphor in both texts strongly link the two, and there is an emphasis on the rhetorical functions of metaphor even in the Poetics. Aristotle justifies his Rhetoric by the fact that previous compilers overlooked g the fact that enthymemes are the "body of proof.” He explains how the metaphor functions similarly to the enthymeme, and he shows that metaphor, simile, proverb, maxim, and other figures, all draw on thought processes analogous to those drawn on by the enthymeme. He again discusses metaphor in the Poetics and shows that plots work similarly, enthymemically. A closer look at particular passages in Aristotle verifies, to a degree, Burke's claims that Aristotle understands language in terms of effects and motives. For Aristotle, the enthymeme, a two-legged syllogism with a missing premise, is the body of rhetorical proof. In supplying the missing link, in filling in the blank, readers experience wonder and learning, a kairotic moment, a sense of wholeness and harmony in an otherwise fragmentary and chaotic world. The enthymeme concerns "things which may, generally speaking, be other than they are"; it 33 concerns, then, things which have metaphorical potential. Probability defines the enthymeme, and the rhetorician's task is to discover the possible means of persuasion in a given situation: For the conclusion must neither be drawn from too far back nor should it include all the steps of the argument. In the first case its length causes obscurity, in the second, it is simply a waste of words, because it states much that is obvious.9 When the elements, of the enthymeme make too many or too few demands on readersj they do not experience the pleasure of learning, nor are they persuaded. Aristotle explicitly relates rhetoric and poetics as he connects the discussions of the enthymeme and the metaphor in the Rhetoric with the discussion of metaphor in the Poetics. He refers to the Poetics as where he defines kinds of metaphors, but in the Rhetoric he explains metaphor as affecting a sense of wonder and pleasure in the listener, when the terms are in "due proportion" and not too "far-fetched": "so that as soon as it is uttered it is clearly seen to be akin."^ As with the enthymeme, terms of the metaphor must be neither too close nor too far apart if the figure is to persuade. The metaphor, like an enigma created by the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate parts, persuades the reader to solve the puzzle with delight. Aristotle outlines four causes of "frigidity of style" which result in the audience's inability to respond and connect the disparate parts to make meaning. In the Poetics, Aristotle defines metaphor, and does not usually consider it as affective structure. The term itself and his examples 34 remain the same in both books, but "metaphor" means something different from the angle of poetics: Metaphor is the application of an alien name by transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by analogy, that is, proportion.H Here he names parts and kinds without concern for effects. Aristotle explicitly attends to effects and probabilities in discussing plot, imitation, and catharsis. Burke can base his claim that Aristotle approaches language rhetorically on these passages. In the Poetics, Aristotle writes of the audience’s enjoyment of representation: "Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, 12 and saying perhaps, ’Ah, that is he.’" For imitation to persuade, the audience must be able to relate their lives to the actions on stage, but, as with the metaphor and enthymeme, the two terms— actions on stage and actions in life— must not be too close or too distant if the audience is to experience wonder and learn. Therefore, the poet, like the rhetorician, gauges similarities and differences between his and the audience's "patterns of experience"; he also determines the possible means of persuasion in a given scene. From the perspective of poetics, the motive for imitation is to accurately refer to reality. From the perspective of rhetoric, the motive behind imitation is to create dialectical relationships among the forms of the text, the mind, and the world. Rhetoric exploits the performative rather than the referential possibilities in imitation. 35 Effective plots also function enthymemically. The structuring of action leads readers to recognize the familiar in the unfamiliar and to experience pity and fear. The best effects, Aristotle says, occur when events appear logical and unexpected, even though they are not: Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect.13 As with qualitative progression, readers experience rightness after the event, although in process connections are not predictable and logical-seeming. Ironies and reversals also work on the basis of probability; twists and turns must be neither too sharp nor too conspicuous, but neither can they be too easily predicted. In summary, the Rhetoric and the Poetics reflect different approaches to language, one in terms of effects, the other in terms of internal parts. We have seen, though, that even in the Poetics, Aristotle speaks of tragedy as affecting emotions in the audience, of imitation as causing the audience to relate to the action, and of plot leading the audience to compare their lives to that on stage. In each case, the relationships are established as performance, not as reference, to generate responses, not to fix exact correspondences. Aristotle relates these affective forms to metaphor and enthymeme, because they all demand that the writer gauge probabilities so that readers supply missing premises and links and thereby participate in the creation of meaning. He says that the enthymeme, the body of rhetorical proof, draws on thought processes analogous to those drawn 36 on by other figures, such as metaphor, simile, maxim, and proverb, and by plot. This rhetorical approach to language focuses on the dramatistic, performative functions. Although Burke claims Aristotle as his authority in the approach to all language as symbolic action, as rhetoric, there are important differences in kind and degree in his views and those of Aristotle. In Counter-Statement, Burke discusses metaphor in terms of probability and the psychology of audience. He says that metaphor can function as part of the whole discourse but that it can also be considered apart from context because it is a "formal event," with "sufficient evidences of episodic distinctness" (CS, p. 127). Burke explains that the structure, an event, can be classified as syllogistic, qualitative, or repetitive, as can larger structures. For Burke, however, these three are not exclusive; any event can contain more than one kind, even though each elicits a different reader response. Burke does not make explicit connections between his three forms and the forms of Aristotle. We can see, though, that syllogistic progression compares to Aristotle’s syllogism; both depend on logic to persuade readers. Aristotle's enthymeme compares to Burke’s qualitative progression, as both call for emotional and analogical connections by the reader which result in a sense of rightness after the event. In Burke’s syllogistic progression, he adds a rhetorical dimension by arguing that the premises force the conclusion (CS, p. 124). A work is formal insofar as the audience "feels the 37 rightness of the conclusion" (CS, p. 124). Here Burke refers to Aristotle's discussion of peripety, or reversals of the situation, as "one of the keenest manifestations of syllogistic progression." What is important is that Burke now blurs his own terms, using syllogistic to apply to non-logical developments. Of repetitive form, he also says that the "reader is led to feel more or less consciously the principle underlying theme" (CS, p. 125). Burke merges syllogistic progression and repetitive form with qualitative progression. Burke capitalizes on places where Aristotle develops a rhetorical approach to language in order to affirm his rhetoric of the symbol. Burke continues to say that "every word a writer uses depends for its very ’meaning’ upon the reader’s previous experience with the object or situation which this word suggests." But there can be no "perfect reader" whose experiences match "down to. the last detail" the writer's experience (CS, p. 179). Some distance, some gap, some "differance" always remains between the writer and reader and the word and referent; at the same time, there must be some "margin of overlap" for communication to happen. As a rhetorician, Burke focuses on what changes— on the gaps, distances, and missing premises— and defines language as performance not reference. His interpretations of Aristotle reveal his own motives and not "the" correct reading. Burke uses Aristotle to make his own point convincing. Burke is never concerned about "the" right reading of a text; that is the aim of poetics. Instead, he searches for the most persuasive reading, given the specific context. 38 It follows from Burke's understanding of language that qualitative progression gradually becomes the characteristic rhetorical form and the major form in Counter-Statement. Qualitative progression also characterizes Burke's own writings, which persuade by poetic logic and analogic, rather than by the logic of syllogistic structures. Out of this form, which he associates with Aristotle's enthymeme, Burke develops his theory of language as symbolic action, his rhetoric of the symbol. Burke and Cassirer: The Revision from ja Philosophy of Symbolic Forms to a. Philosophy of Symbolic Action In presenting Burke's texts as counter-statements to Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetics, I have not yet mentioned the fact that in Counter-Statement Burke directly presents his works as opposed to contemporary texts and ideas: Perhaps it should be said, by way of preface, that this book does not set itself as an 'attack.' It deals but secondarily and sporadically with refutation. We have chosen to call it Counter-Statement solely because— as regards its basic concerns and tenets— each principle it advocates is matched by an opposite principle flourishing and triumphant today. Heresies and orthodoxies will always be changing places, but whatever the minority view happens to be at any given time, one must consider it as 'counter.' Hence the title— which will not, we hope, suggest either an eagerness for the fray or a sense of defeat. (CS, p. vii) What becomes clear by placing Burke in the context of the Modern philosophy of symbolic forms are the differences between him and other proponents of that view. Burke revises the philosophy of symbolic forms into a philosophy of symbolic action, and in changing "form" to 39 "action" he introduces a rhetorical dimension to the study of symbolic expression. Burke declares both his debt to and his departure from Cassirer in his expanded definition of man as animal symbolicum. Several literary critics identify Burke with Cassirer and with his Modern philosophy, but no one has yet explored fully the relationships between the two. Perhaps a major reason why literary critics do not consider Burke in this philosophical context is because the relation ship between rhetoric and philosophy remains problematic, as does the 14 relationship between rhetoric and poetics, as we have seen. Con temporary literary critics are becoming aware of the important relationship between literary studies and philosophic studies through the influential French philosophers. Where to place Burke— in philosophy, in anthropology, in psychology, in linguistics, in sociology, or in literary criticism— constitutes a fundamental problem in reading Burke, for he seems to be everywhere, and everywhere at once. By placing Burke in the context of the philosophy of symbolic forms, we can better understand how and why Burke can play so many roles and why his "integrative" method, as Hyman identifies it, can characterize the Modern period. As Cassirer revises Kant's theory of forms into a theory of functional forms, Burke revises Cassirer's theory of functional forms into a theory of rhetorically functioning forms. These revisions mark the paradigmatic shift from perceiving language as reference to language as performance. Whereas Cassirer distinguishes between 40 "discursive symbolism" and "presentational symbolism," Burke understands all symbols as presentational or performative. Discursive symbolism is one rhetorical function of the key term symbolism, which in his theory is synonymous with rhetoric, poetic, and dramatistic. Through his own elaborate "dancing of attitudes," Burke transforms forms into actions to revise the major philosophical movement of the Modern period into a rhetoric of the symbol. Suzanne K. Langer, in Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art, 1942, provides the most compre hensive view of the "new key change" in Modern philosophy which Ernst Cassirer articulates in philosophy and which Burke articulates in his theory of symbolic action: The universality of the great key-change in our thinking is shown by the fact that its tonic chord was first sounded by thinkers of a very different school. Logic and science had indeed prepared the harmony for it, unwittingly; for the study of mathematical ■1 transformations' and 'projections,' the construction of alternative descriptive systems, etc., had raised the issue of symbolic modes and of the variable relation ship between form and content. But the people who recognized the importance of expressive forms for all human understanding were those who saw not only science, but myth, analogy, metaphorical thinking, and art as intellectual activities determined by 'symbolic modes,' and those people were for the most part of the idealist school.15 Throughout her study, Langer acknowledges Cassirer as the "pioneer in the philosophy of symbolism" which recognizes the "transformational nature or human understanding." In this discussion I will refer both to the seminal work of Cassirer and to Langer's more general overview, which documents the pervasiveness of the understanding which Cassirer articulates. 41 Langer lists titles of philosophical works in the recent past as evidence of the trend in philosophy which she shows is widespread in all disciplines: the "new generative idea" has dawned but its "power is hardly recognized yet." She does not include Burke in her list, although he began developing his theory of language as symbolic action in his 1931 Counter-Statement. Many of the titles she lists are ones that Burke discusses to articulate his philosophy of symbolism: Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (1923); Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Syntax of Language (1935); Charles W. Morris, Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938); A. N. Whitehead, Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effects (1927); and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus (1922). She includes, of course, the three volumes of Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923, 1924, 1929), which were not translated into English until 1944, after Bu<rke had already published Counter-Statement (1931), Permanence and Change (1935); Attitudes Toward History (1937), and The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (1941). Throughout the text, Langer also cites other contemporaries of Burke, in anthropology, psychology, linguistics, and other fields, whose work he discusses from a rhetorical viewpoint; some of the Modernists she refers to are Dewey, Sapir, Malinowski, Harrison, and Piaget, all of whom Burke relies on in the development of his philosophy. Specific points which Langer identifies as aspects of this symbolist movement are points which Burke also argues for, but with a significant difference. In her overview, Langer argues that man's 42 symbolizing is what characterizes him as essentially human, as distinct from his ancestors. She also, like Burke, argues that while symbolizing distinguishes man from animals, it is instinctual in him: The function of symbolic transformation is a natural activity, a high form of nervous response characteristic of man among the animals. The study of symbol and meaning is a starting-point of philosophy, not a derivative from Cartesian, Humean, or Kantian premises. Although Langer grounds her theory in man’s instinctual nature, rather than in philosophic premises, Burke would agree only in part. For Burke, man’s symbolizing is both natural and learned; man's symbolizing is rhetorical: rhetoric is a natural response and a learned response, Burke would agree with Langer's image of the brain as a "transformer," as opposed to the earlier image of the brain as a "great transmitter, a super switch-board," Both agree with Cassirer’s essentially constitutive theory of symbols, as opposed to the "law of direct combination": But the brain is following its own law; it is actively translating experiences into symbols, in fulfillment of a basic need to do so. It carries on a constant process of ideation.17 Although Burke would agree with the image of the brain as transformer, he would argue against the "scientistic" view which ignores motives and expectations, desires and fulfillment. The technological image of the brain obscures the biological and psychological reality of man. In Burke’s theory, the brain would be, not simply biological, but also sociological, and therefore the brain is a rhetorical phenomenon. 43 Although, one of Cassirer's major insights is the purposive character of symbolic forms, Burke goes further to define purpose as psycho logical, biological, and scenic— as rhetorical. In general, then, the broad view Langer presents of the radical changes in the Modern world provides a background for Burke's symbolist theory of language. She documents the pervasiveness of the understanding that human response is a "constructive, not a passive thing," and she convincingly shows that epistemologists and psycholo gists agree that symbolization is the "key to that constructive process." Burke's is surely one of the "various positions" which reaches the "fecundity and depth" of man's symbolic nature. He agrees that man’s symbolicity is his defining characteristic and that language is a creative action. Having established Burke as part of this pervasive key change of the Twentieth Century, we can now determine his particular angle on this change. Like Burke, Langer presents man's symbolizing self as counter-statement to man's scientific self, and she proposes both a psychological and a logical aspect to meaning: Meaning has both a logical and a psychological aspect. Psychologically, any item that is to have meaning must be a sign or a symbol _to someone. Logically it must be capable of conveying meaning.-*-^ At this point, as at many points throughout her text, Langer seems on the brink of recognizing the rhetorical dimension in all meaning. Although the psychological implicitly introduces the rhetorical, in its attention to motives and expectations, Burke would add to Langer's 44 description the idea that for an item to have meaning it must be employed as a sign or symbol not only _to^ someone, but also by someone. In Burke's philosophy, items do not have meaning: people make meaning through their interactions with each other through symbols. Langer explains how the word "meaning" has "thoroughly confounded" in it both the logical and the psychological, both the "it means" and the "I mean." Burke would add, to complete the rhetorical triangle, the "you mean," and he would also introduce the ratios among these aspects of meaning. Confusion, inherent in communication among people because it is inherent in symbolic action, is not a sign of incompetence for Burke, as it is for Langer. Confusion is the condition of the world, the generating force of rhetoric. Burke also distinguishes himself from the tradition of the philosophy of symbolic forms, the tradition which Langer says defines the Modern period, by advocating the primacy of rhetoric. As does Cassirer, Langer draws a sharp line between discursive forms and presentational forms. An extended quote by her allows us to see clearly the differences between the philosophic tradition and Burke, who sees all forms as fundamentally presentation and performative: It appears, then, that although the different media of non verbal representation are often referred to as distinct ’languages,* this is really loose terminology. Language in the strict sense is essentially discursive; it has permanent units of meaning which are combinable into larger units; it has fixed equivalences that make definition and translation possible; . . . In all these salient characters it differs from wordless symbolism which is non-discursive and untrans latable, does not allow of definitions within its own system, and cannot convey generalities. The meanings given through language are successively understood, and gathered into the 45 r whole by the process called discourse; the meanings of all other symbolic elements that compose a larger, articulate symbol are understood only through the meaning of the whole, through their relations within the total structure. The very functioning of symbols depends on the fact that they are involved in a simultaneous, integral presentation. This kind of semantic may be called 'presentational symbolism,' to characterize its essential distinction from discursive symbolism, or 'language' p r o p e r . For Burke, language "in the strict sense" is not discursive, nor \ are there "fixed equivalences." Although he distinguishes between wordless symbolism and verbal symbols, he also constantly draws attention to the connections among language symbols, gestures, art, and music, all of which he views as rhetoric. Language is essentially rhetoric for Burke, and therefore there must be a looseness in language, an adaptability to purpose and situations. While Langer and Cassirer argue that language is essentially discursive and focus on what is permanent in language, Burke does not make their distinction between "language proper" and "presentational symbolism." He emphasizes, as a rhetorician would, the changes rather than the constancies in language use. Although Cassirer and Langer do argue for the function of forms, their aim remains to stabilize the function, whereas Burke wants to keep the functions unspecified, except as they are determined by a particular scene. Another significant difference between the philosophy of symbolic forms and Burke's philosophy, even though both start with the basic understanding of symbols and forms, is their understanding of part-whole relationships. Cassirer argues for the priority of whole over part, but he and Langer both claim that at some 46 point the part takes precedence over the whole. In Burke’s theory of symbolic action, the presentational and the discursive— in his terms * the psychology of form and the psychology of information— are in the eyes of the beholders, in their purposes and expectations, in the situation, and in the language itself. People can make choices about the part-whole relationships, even though he argues that particular texts are more conducive to one approach than to another, and even though expectations usually operate at the more general level. The major difference, then, between Burke’s philosophy and Cassirer’s is that Burke defines all language as symbolic action and therefore defines various symbolic forms, such as math, science, art, and literature, as first and foremost language, which is rhetorical; but Cassirer identifies language as just one among the other symbolic forms and regards these symbolic forms as bodies of knowledge not as language. Cassirer does unite the various forms by saying that all of the symbolic forms transform and construct meaning, but he dis tinguishes among their areas of concern and distinguishes some as presentation and others as discursive. He distinguishes between, for example, language and literature. One of Cassirer’s major contributions to philosophy is his understanding of a theory as a fiction and of the hypotheses of science as constitutive of reality, not reflective of reality, but he does not perceive the various disciplines as fictions themselves, as constitutive of themselves. Burke understands all names as "terministic screens” which both constitute reality and reduce the 47 possibilities of perceiving reality. For Burke all language is metaphorical and rhetorical, but this does not mean that he denies biological and physical realities: he only argues that language is performance, not reference. Cassirer begins by distinguishing among the symbolic forms, with "symbolic forms" as his key term; Burke begins by uniting the various symbolic forms under his key term, "rhetoric." This crucial difference can be seen more clearly through a specific example from Cassirer. Although he says that "this remarkable aspect of knowledge, the role both of a priori and of thought construction, was not realized in science until modern times," Cassirer finally denies a complex view of motives and the context-dependent aspect of perception: In the objective content of science these individual features are forgotten and effaced, for one of the principal aims of scientific thought is the elimination of all personal and anthropomorphic elements.^ Burke does not maintain the idea of the scientist's pure motives, as we saw in the discussion of Counter-Statement's defense of poetry; he understands science as complexly motivated, with one of the strongest motives being to persuade others of its objectivity. Cassirer does say that "side by side with conceptual language there is emotional language" and that side by side "with scientific language there is language of poetic imagination," and this argument was revolutionary, especially because it came from Cassirer, of scientific and philo sophical background. Burke, however, argues that all language is 48 fundamentally poetic, and that conceptual language is just less obviously so for rhetorical reasons. For Burke, all language is purposive and therefore rhetorical in that it aims to find the possible means of persuasion; in some situations, scientific language or philosophical language just happens to be what is persuasive. Burke's rhetoric of the symbol never aims to eliminate the human from language use. A final example can best demonstrate the major distinctions between Burke's rhetorical perspective on the symbolist movement and Cassirer's philosophical view. In his definition of man, Burke is most obviously indebted to Cassirer, but it is at this point where Burke acknowledges his debt to and his departure from Cassirer. Both Burke and Cassirer agree that "man lives in a symbolic universe": "No longer can man confront reality immediately; he cannot see, as it were, face to face." For both, man no longer confronts the world as primarily a reasonable being; instead, man creates the world through symbolic forms: Reason is a very inadequate term with which to comprehend the forms of man's cultural life in all their richness and variety. But all of these forms are symbolic forms. Hence, instead of defining man as an animal rationale, we should define him as an animal symbolicum. By so doing we can designate his specific difference, and we can understand the new way open to man— the way to civilization.^ Cassirer and Burke both revise Aristotle's definition of man, but Burke further revises Cassirer's definition of man as animal symbolicum to animal rhetoricum. In Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method, 1966, Burke defines man lyrically: 49 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 instruments of his own making goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order) ^ and rotten with perfection. In comments to this essay, Burke explains that man is the kind of "animal that can haggle about the definition of himself, in this sense he is what Ernst Cassirer has called the animal symbolicum." As Burke acknowledges his debt to Cassirer, he also denies his father: "Yet I feel the post-Kantian way of understanding such a formula tends to get epistemologically ('Scientistically1) side-tracked from the more ontological ('Dramatistic') approach grounded in the older scholastic tradition." In this sweep, Burke cuts himself off from Cassirer and furthermore cuts Cassirer off from the older tradition, thereby aligning himself with the more persuasive scholastics, Burke's conceptual meaning here, as distinct from his poetic and rhetorical meanings, is one he maintains, that while language does constitute the world, a real world does exist. Language does not reflect or refer to the real world directly, but language does not deny reality. He never stops with such simple antinomy, which is the fault he several times attributes to Cassirer. For Burke, language exists in a dialectical relationship with reality and yet both are real. The integrative word for Burke is not "symbolic forms" as it is for Cassirerj Burke's god-term is "rhetoric," which sends men on their 50 upward way and on their downward way, to civilization and to self-destruction. In general, Burke's criticism of his precursor in the philo sophical symbolist movement is that Cassirer sets up a "dialectic of simple antithesis" between science and myth, which becomes a distinction between bad science and good science. Burke's objections to Cassirer are made clear in "Rhetoric and Primitive Magic," in A Rhetoric of Motives: In this scheme, 'rhetoric' has no systematic location. We recall noting the word but once in Cassirer's Myth of the State, and then it is used only in a random way; yet the book is really about nothing more nor less than most characteristic concern of rhetoric: the manipulation of men's beliefs for political e n d s . 23 Burke's final denouncement of Cassirer, and of others in philosophy, anthropology, and other fields, is that they do not "recognize the factor of rhetoric in their own field." Burke does not oppose rhetoric to science, nor to myth, or religion. In "Realistic Function of Rhetoric," in A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke "gains courage" to contend that rhetoric is a factor in any field. Rhetoric is language and is therefore part of any discipline: For rhetoric as such is not rooted in any past condition of human society. It is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and is continually born anew; the use of language as symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols. (ROM, p. 43) Burke, therefore, introduces rhetoric into the philosophy of symbolic forms and changes "forms" to "action" to indicate that for 51 him the theory of functional forms is not adequate. He approaches philosophy from his rhetorical perspective; instead of seeking absolute truth, he seeks the "truth" of the moment and immediate situation: rhetoric. His explicit criticism of Cassirer and the philosophical symbolist movement is that the tradition does not recognize the rhetoric of the symbol: "Here again we come upon the fact that our contemporary views of science are dislocated by their failure to consider it methodically with relation to rhetoric." He goes further to argue that the rhetorical motive.is itself scientific— "realistic in the more practical and pragmatic sense of the term." As with Burke's revisions of Aristotle, my point is not that Burke's rhetorical approach is better than Cassirer's philosophi cal approach. Burke's own terministic screen motivates his revisions of philosophy; rhetoric seeks what works in a given scene, not what is absolute truth. Despite Burke’s flexibility and all-inclusiveness, he remains constant in viewing philosophy, religion, science, and literature— all the symbolic forms which Cassirer integrates in his theory of man and culture— from a rhetorical perspective. He, thus, integrates symbolic forms, not just under the heading of "symbolic forms," but under the title of "language as symbolic action." For Burke, all disciplines, such as science, literature, and philosophy, are essentially language, which is symbolic action. In .his philosophy, the various symbolic forms are themselves fictions— poetic and dramatic fictions— as they are for Cassirer, but for Burke the subject matter is also a fiction, 52 not a verifiable reality. The primary motives of expressing and affecting attitudes characterize these fictions. Furthermore, and unlike Cassirer, Burke accepts the fiction, the symbolic basis, of his own actions and theories. The theory of symbolic action is not referentially true; it seems, however, to be rhetorically right. Burke and Modern Literary History: Rhetoric, Poetics, and Philosophy Few literary critics associate Burke with Ernst Cassirer, partly because literary theorists are only beginning to acknowledge the relationship between poetics and philosophy, through the predominant French philosophers of today, and partly because they are only beginning to recognize the influence of Cassirer and the Germanic symbolist movement. Furthermore, few literary critics give Burke a significant position in Modern literary history. Having placed Burke's critical theory in the context of Cassirer's philosophy, we can begin to understand why neither literary critics, writing from the perspective of poetics, nor philosophers, writing from their own terministic screen, grant Burke the rhetorician a place in their traditions. We can also begin to see that Burke integrates poetics and philosophy under his key term rhetoric, recognizing that both are powerful means of persuasion in certain situations and with particular audiences. Hazard Adams, in The Interests of Criticism: An Introduction to Literary Theory, 1969, places Burke within a broad view of literary history, mentioning him only once. (Often critics reduce Burke to footnote status, often, as we shall see, at critical points in their 53 arguments.) Typically, Adams regards Burke as synthesizer, not analyzer: "In the contemporary critic Kenneth Burke we see a similar curiosity and search for synthesis that takes him into psychology, 24 politics, anthropology, and other areas." Several times, Adams refers to Cassirer in connection with the "epistemological shift set in motion by Kant" which argues that art is "not an imitation but a discovery of reality. He does not, however, directly relate Cassirer's constitutive theory of forms to Burke's. As we have seen earlier, Adams associates Burke in "Recent Considerations" with Cassirer as eclectic critics of culture, though not as critics who understand culture itself as symbolic: Surely the great critics have always been open to suggestions from all experience. Aristotle and Coleridge, to name only two of the greatest, had far-ranging intellects and did not seem content until they were able to place their theory of literature in its relation to their other theories. In the contemporary critic Kenneth Burke we see a similar curiosity and search for synthesis that takes him into psychology, politics, anthropology, and other areas.^5 Adams then discusses Cassirer’s move from critic of science to critic of culture and says that Northrup Frye's The Modern Century "demon strated how a social criticism can be evolved from a literary theory." He does not explore connections between Burke and Cassirer as eclectic critics of culture, nor the connections between critics of culture and symbolist critics, such as Burke, Frye, and Cassirer. Briefly he identifies Burke with the characteristic Modern critical theory— "dis cussion of systems or families of symbols"— but he treats symbols from 54 the perspective of poetics, classifying and systematizing them, with little concern for rhetorical functions or their connections with life. In contrast, Hyman, in The Armed Vision, focuses on critical methods characteristic of Modern criticism and specifies Burke as prime example of the integrative critic, identified by "the organized use of non-literary techniques and bodies of knowledge to obtain insights into literature." In contrast to Adams' definition of Modern criticism as concern for systems or families of symbols, Hyman asserts that literary criticism of the "past quarter of a century is quali tatively different from any previous criticism" because it employs non-literary tools, such as psychoanalytic associations, semantic translations, ritual patterns of savages, and the nature of capitalist society. By this definition, Burke is exemplary critic of the Modern period: With a kind of limitless fertility Burke has done everything in criticism’s bag of tricks, including several things he put there, but the choice is either to let him represent every aspect of modern criticism, in which case he has written your book for you, or else to.restrict him arbitrarily to that critical area, symbolic expression, in which he has particularly specialized, with the additional factor that it is something no one else covers adequately.^6 For practical purposes, Hyman presents Burke as representative of one critical area, symbolic expression, although he admits that this is only one of Burke’s critical interests. Hyman reverses here the terms of Burke's theory, in which the key term is symbolic action. Rhetoric provides the framework for all other critical methods, all of which are language, or symbolic action. Hyman also does not recognize that 55 Burke's specialization in symbolism is what allows him to be integrative. By adopting the term "symbolic expression" from the German philosophic school, Hyman overlooks Burke's concerns with symbolic effects and symbolic contexts. In focusing on motives alone, as they are realized in the text, Hyman reveals his own New Critical approach to Burke's rhetorical criticism. Despite this primarily text-centered approach, Hyman does trace the "respectable ancestry" of the study of symbolic expression, but he does not include Cassirer, perhaps because of historical events in the 1940s when he published The Armed Vision, but also because Cassirer's works were not translated into English until 1944. In his brief discussion of Burke's forebears— Plato, Aristotle, Coleridge, Ruskin, Tolstoy, I. A. Richards, D. H. Lawrence, Bentham, and Veblen— Hyman does not distinguish between action theorists and metaphorical critics, nor does he explain how these two strands merge into symbolic action theory. He concludes this section, intended to determine Burke's philosophic lineage, with the following admission: The general pattern of Burke's philosophic indebtedness, however, is rarely more than the adoption of a basic concept or two, combined with widespread 'discounting' or outright attack, and until the emergence of Aristotle as his major influence in the latest books, no philosopher was ever recognizably his master.^ In Burke's interpretation of Aristotle, metaphor becomes action on the writer's and the reader's parts. As we have seen, Burke revises the writings of his predecessors to create his rhetoric of the symbol, and so rather than a continuous line of development from either Aristotle 56 or Cassirer, we see a discontinuous development; in other words, a revisionary or rhetorical development. Adams and Hyman, then, recognize Burke for his integrative capacities and interests in symbolism, but neither develops Burke's point that, because literature is primarily language, the study of literature cannot be separated from other language studies. And since symbols are "patterns of experience," language and literature cannot be separated from life, except for specific purposes. Hyman acknowledges that his study ignores the poem-audience relationship that is fundamental to Burke, but he and Adams maintain basically a text-centered, New Critical approach to Burke's rhetoric of the symbol. A final critical perspective clarifies Burke’s place in the Modern scene. Hayden White, in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, 1978, gives a more recent view of Burke, and in his study White uses Burke, rather than ~focuses on him as an object* of study. We can see White's history as an application of Burke's theory of language as symbolic action to the social sciences, although White cites Burke only three times. Burke is obviously fundamental to his argument that tropes are characteristic of language in the social sciences, and Burke anticipates most of what White says about the tropological nature of the works of Freud, Marx, and Piaget. White bases his study of tropes on the classical rhetorical tradition. Most important, for our purposes, White begins his study of tropes by arguing for the enthymemic quality of language, even the 57 apparently logical syllogism, and he links the rhetorical enthymeme with tropes: So too, any prose description of any phenomenon can be shown on analysis to contain at least one move or transaction in the sequence of descriptive utterances that violates a canon of logical consistency. How could it be otherwise, when even the model of the syllogism itself displays clear evidence of troping? The move from the major premise (All men are mortal) to the choice of the datum to serve as the minor (Socrates is a man) is itself a tropological move, a ’swerve' from the universal to the particular which logic cannot preside over, since it is logic itself that is being served by this move. Every applied syllogism contains an enthymemic element, this element consisting in nothing but the decision to move from the plane of universal propositions (themselves extended synecdoches) to that of singular existential statements (these being extended metonymies). And if this is true even of the classical syllogism, how much more true must it be of those pseudosyllogisms and chains of pseudosyllogisms which make up mimetic-analytic prose discourse, of the sort found in history, philosophy, literary criticism, and the human sciences in general? Like Burke before him, White argues that even syllogistic progression is enthymemic, qualitative progression. But Burke locates troping not only in the choice of datum for the minor premise; the major premise is itself a rhetorical, performative action, not a referential truth. The writer’s choice of all symbols is troping, the dancing of attitudes, as are the reader's choices in reading. Burke even identifies the human sciences as metaphorical tropes and science as rhetoric. Despite the fact that White grounds his argument in the rhetorical enthymeme, he studies tropes as text-features, not as actions performed by people, for specific purposes, in particular contexts. He develops his own text through seemingly syllogistic arguments, not through , 58 qualitative progression, and even in his initial statements about the enthymemic quality of language he does not examine fully the rhetorical dimensions of the enthymeme. After the introduction, he drops the term "enthymeme" in favor of "tropes," a term which gives itself to a^rhetorical study, since it is typically used in poetics. Tropes, unlike enthymemes, can be discussed as if they are verifiable realities in the text; enthymemes are characterized as much by what is absent as by what is present. White's tropology very quickly becomes a typology. White's text is yet another argument in the Modern period which advocates the redefinition of language as performance, not reference. In a manner increasingly more familiar, he posits the constitutive power of symbols, their complex motivation and incompleteness; equally familiar, he does so from the perspective of science, history, and philosophy, not from the perspective of rhetoric. Implying that language cannot be purely mimetic, White locates this "failure" in the trope itself; not in people's motives and expectations, not in their various experiences, and not in changing contexts. He remains primarily text-centered, and he fails to recognize what Burke finds crucial to communication, that the inability to communicate fully and accurately is not a "failure" but, rather, the motive for continuing to try to communicate. Unlike Burke, White obscures the tentative, fictional character of his own theories; his aim is absolute, referential truth, achieved by logical consistency. 59 Most obviously, Burke and White differ in their styles and modes of presentation. White writes as a social scientist who presents arguments about the validity of metaphorical thinking in syllogistic progressions. He defines terms precisely, he analyzes deductively, and he attempts to fill in all holes in his theory. Burke relies on enthymemic progressions which are digressive, inclusive, and analogical, and, most important, he invites reader’s active particiaption in the performance, not their agreement to referential truth. My point is that for rhetorical reasons White makes his arguments about troping in the social sciences with as little evidence of troping on his part as possible. Burke, for rhetorical reasons, makes his attitude dancing obvious. Despite his arguments about poetic logic in the human sciences, White avoids metaphorical thinking in his own writing and seems to find logical arguments more persuasive for his intended audiences. For rhetorical reasons, he relies on pseudosyllogisms. White seems to base his arguments on Burke’s theories, even on specific arguments about Marx, Hegel, Freud, and Piaget, but he cites Burke only three times, once parenthetically. These brief references make clear how fundamental Burke is to his understanding and how current his ideas are today. Gradually, the enthymemic quality of language is being recognized, although to admit this quality in one’s own arguments is not yet persuasive as it undermines the truth of one’s arguments. 60 White identifies the phrase "master tropes" as Burke’s, but the whole context of the introduction is Burkean: This process of understanding can only be tropological in nature, for what is involved in the rendering of the unfamiliar into the familiar is a troping that is generally figurative. It follows, I think, that this process of understanding proceeds by the exploitation of the principal modalities of figuration, identified in post-Renaissance rhetorical theory as the ’master tropes' (Kenneth Burke's phrase) of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Moreover, there appears to be operative in this process an archetypal pattern for tropologically construing fields of experience requiring understanding which follows the sequence of modes indicated by the list of master tropes as given.^9 White bases his study on the master tropes. In note 2 to the introduction, in which this quote appears, White says that "one should also mention the works of Burke, Gennette, Barthes, Eco, and Todorov in a bibliography of literature on tropes." He thus assigns Burke, and others, to footnote and bibliographic status. White's other two references to Burke are equally off-hand, although they too appear in clearly Burkean contexts, at critical points in White's arguments. He says that "Burke has suggested that irony is inherently dialectical, and that we might consider it the tropological ground of a specifically dialectical mode of thought," but he adds, "I am not sure this is the case." Despite this hesitation, over what Burke himself proposes speculatively, White admits that his overall argument here is "following a suggestion of Kenneth Burke": Following a suggestion of Kenneth Burke, we may say that the four 'master tropes' deal in relationships that are experienced as inhering within or among phenomena, but which are in reality 61 relationships existing between consciousness and a world of experience calling for a provision of its meaning.30 He explains how the four tropes are processes which exist between consciousness and a world of experience. White's basic argument throughout— about forms of the mind, forms of language, and forms of the world— is rhetorically developed throughout Burke's writings, not merely suggested. Burke, however, would agree that the relationships are experienced as inhering within or among phenomena but not that they are "in reality" relationships existing between consciousness and a world. Rhetorically, not referentially, this understanding seems to be the best strategy for coping, given our purposes and situations. White's final reference to Burke shows again his large debt to Burke and the currency of ideas which Burke has been developing since 1931: Considerations of semblance are tacitly retired in the employment of this trope, and so are considerations of difference and contrast. This is what gives to metonymic consciousness what Kenneth Burke calls its 'reductive' aspect. Things exist in contiguous relationships that are only spatially and temporally definable. This metonymizing of the world, this preliminary encoding of the facts in terms of merely contiguous relationships, is necessary to the removal of metaphor and teleology from phenomena which every modern science seeks to effect. 31 White's own text is metonymic in its historical perspective which examines data in temporal and spatial relationships. In Burke's terms, White's text therefore has the "reductive" aspect; but for Burke, a metaphoric, metonymic, ironic, or synecdochic approach is also reductive, for each excludes the other. 62 In his final chapter, "The Absurdist Moment in Contemporary Literary Theory," White turns to literary history, but in this section he makes no mention of Burke. Here, I believe, we can see how Burke's theories explain— at least analogically— much of what White's a-rhetorical approach dismisses as absurd, as a mere moment in time before things right themselves. Despite his overall point that language is troping, White identifies the problem with contemporary literary theory as its having "no firm sense of what 'literature' consists of or what a specifically 'literary* artifact looks like": For many— though by no means all or even a majority of— modern critics, since everything is potentially interpretable as language, then everything is potentially interpretable as literature; or, if language is regarded as merely a special case of a more comprehensive field of semiotics, nothing is interpretable as a specifically 'literary' phenomenon, 'literature' as such does not exist, and the principal task of modern literary criticism (if the point is taken to the end of the line) is to preside over its own dissolution.^ Burke is quite willing to "spin out" terms, as he calls it, because he understands that he is dealing with symbolic action, with terms and not with reality. He admits that we can interpret anything anyway we want to, that potentiality exists in the metaphorical or tropological quality of language; but we do not have to. Burke does not argue that reality is language, but he does argue the practical values of recognizing all "talk-about" reality as language, not truth. He also can draw the line between terms such as "literature" and "language," but for rhetorical reasons he argues that literature, the world, and the mind define each other dialectically. 63 White suggests the fear that if all language is regarded as troping, then all texts and meaning will dissolve. In order to fight this, he sets up two camps, "Normal critics" and "Absurdist critics." He admits that Normal critics are being attacked where they are most vulnerable, in language theory; he explains that "for the older critical conventions language itself was not a problem": Language was simply the medium embodying the literary message. The purpose of criticism was to penetrate through the medium, by philological analysis, translation, grammatical and syntactical explication, in order to get at the message, the 'meaning,' the semantic level that lay beneath it.-33 In contrast, Absurdist critics play on the surface and treat language itself as the problem, since the deeper level has already been reached. White finally reduces the Normal-Abnormal warfare to a nature-culture argument, to an ontological argument explaining the rise of Reductivists and the fall of New Criticism, practical criticism, and formalism, as a simple dialectical regression. Burke's dialectics are never simple, as he abhors the simple antithesis. He would analyze the current critical scene rhetorically and propose that ways of viewing "meaning" are choices which people make but which are conditioned by the current scene and by motives arising from situations. Choices, as White argues in his introduction, are rhetorical; they are "swerves" from one context to another. For Burke, the advantages gained by seeing all language as literature, or fictions, are to be weighed against the vision of language as distinct from literature. The question is ultimately not a mat'ter of what is, but of what is most meaningful given the situation. He frees himself 64 from binary binds— such as surface/deep, normal/abnormal, practical/ impractical, parole/langue— by understanding them as words, as terministic screens, not as ontological or referential truth. They are tropes which function rhetorically. He would hope to be able to step back, as White finally is unable to do, from his own terms so that he can see them as tropes, as modalities of figuration. White's recent text, therefore, provides a contemporary vision of Burke’s place in the Modern scene. What is most current has been considered by Burke for many years in his philosophy of symbolic action. What is most current, it seems, has already been superceded by Burke's attitude towards language. People can argue for the poetic and rhetorical nature of language, but not for the enthymemic nature of their own arguments. White finally draws the line and declares himself a "normal critic," unwilling to follow through on his early refutation that tropes "generate figures of speech or thought by their variation from what is ’normally' expected." This move is, itself, rhetorical, for to write enthymemically is not yet persuasive, even in the social sciences. Unlike Burke, White will not admit the ultimate absurdity and the immediate effectiveness of his own theory. In general, however, White provides a foundation for arguing that Burke's qualitative progression and Aristotle's enthymeme are authoritative methods of proof in the Modern period. Despite the contradictions between White's introduction and his method of proof, Tropics of Discourse gives academic legitimacy to the enthymeme and 65 evidences contemporary recognition of the rhetoric of the symbol, an awareness which is gradually granting Burke his place in the Modern philosophical and literary scene. Z6 Notes See Marie Hochmuth Nichols, "Kenneth Burke and the 'New Rhetoric,'" in The Province of Rhetoric, ed. Joseph Schwartz and John A. Rycenga (New York: The Ronald Press, 1965), pp. 367-384. 2 Laura Virginia Holland, in Counterpoint: Kenneth Burke and Aristotle's Theories of Rhetoric (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), gives the most complete account of Burke's indebtedness to Aristotle. 3 Kenneth Burke, "Rhetoric— Old and New," in New Rhetoric, ed. Martin Steinman (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1967), p. 63. 4 Burke summarizes his theory of forms in "Lexicon Rhetoricae" in Counter-Statement. Throughout the earlier part of the book, he focuses on specific artists, such as Flaubert, De Gourmont, Pater, Mann, and Gide, to show that, despite their claims for theoretical freedom, their aims were checked "as in every artist by the desire to communicate." Burke, attacks "critical assumptions of the day" that honor information and scientific validity; he shows that art has practical effects even though it may not convey factual truth. He also attacks the notion promoted by science that language can be objective and pure, by arguing that science and literature are both rhetoric, personally and scenically motivated. He redefines art in terms of effect: "The self-expression of the artist, qua artist, is not distinguished by the uttering of emotion, but by.the evocation of emotions. He therefore reclaims rhetoric or persuasion from science, and he revives aesthetics as useful in a technological society." In "Lexicon Rhetoricae," Burke makes complete his shift from aesthetics to communication: "Primarily we are concerned with literature as art, that is, literature designed for the express purpose of arousing emotions." Ironically, in this section he writes from the perspective of poetics, defining and dividing categories into sub-categories, although maintaining the rhetorical base through his definition of "form in literature is the arousing and fulfilling of desires." The popularity among literary critics of this section can, perhaps, be attributed to the expected poetics format, with information classified for easy accessibility. In his preface to the second edition, Burke says that the theory of form "summarized in a few lines on page 124," along with the opening word, "Perhaps," and the closing word, "norm," give the gist of this book, and maybe also of the books by me that grew out of it. Forms and symbols mediate between the perhaps— individual differences, changes in time and place, the uncertainties of life— and the norms— the ''innate forms of the mind," the "patterns" of experience, "universal experiences," and the "body dogmatic." 67 ^Fredrich Solmsen, "Notes on Aristotle's Rhetoric," in The Province of Rhetoric, p. 128. £ Aristotle, The Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher, in Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art (New York: Dover, 1951), XIX.1456a35. 7Ibid., XV.145b9. 8 Aristotle, The "Art" of Rhetoric, trans. John Henry Freese (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926), i.i,1354a3. 9Ibid., Il.xxi.1395b3. 10Ibid., III.ii.1405bl2. Aristotle, The Poetics, XXI.1457b4. 12Ibid., Ill.iii.1448bl5. 13Ibid., IX.10.1452a5. 14 See, for examples, the following: Kenneth Burke, "Myth, Poetry, and Philosophy," in LASA, pp. 380-409; Kenneth Burke, "Rhetoric, Poetics, and Philosophy," in Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Literature: An Exploration, ed. Don M. Burks (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1978), pp. 15-33; Geoffrey H.. Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); and Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: The Texas Christian University Press, 1976). 15 Suzanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a_ New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (New York: The New American Library, 1942), p. vii. 3^Ibid., p. viii. "^Ibid. , p. 46. 3^Ibid., p. 55. 19 Ibid., p. 89. 20 Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944), p. 228. 21Ibid., p. 26. 22 Kenneth Burke, "Definition of Man," LASA, pp. 3-24. 68 23 Kenneth Burke, "Rhetoric and Primitive Magic," ROM, p. 41. Burke also refers to Cassirer's "oversimplified treatment in terms of science alone, without the modifications and insight supplied by the principle of rhetoric," in "Administrative Rhetoric in Machiavelli," in this same volume, p. 162. 24 Hazard Adams, The Interests of Criticism; An Introduction to Literary Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc., 1969), p. 144. 25Ibid., p. 144. 2 6 Stanley Edgalr Hyman, The Armed Vision; A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism (New York; Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), p. 347. 27Ibid., p. 370. 28 Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse; Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore; The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 3. 29 Ibid., P* 5, n. 2. Ibid., pp. 131-2. 2^Ibid., P- 261. 32 Ibid., pp. 261-2. 33 Ibid., P- 233. 69 CHAPTER THREE BURKE AMONG THE MODERNS: BURKE'S RHETORIC OF THE SYMBOL AND THE SYMBOLIST MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE Burke and Modern Symbolism William H. Rueckert, in Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations, characterizes Burke's whole development as a "gradual expansion of a literary theory into the larger dramatistic system and methodology, the very name of which derives from a literary type."'*' While critics acknowledge that Burke's theory of language as symbolic action develops from his literary theory, few explore the connections among his dramatistic conception of language, his literary theory and methods, and the literature from which he draws his critical theory. Rueckert does suggest that Counter-Statement "in part systematizes the theory of pure art Burke practiced and defended in his first 2 publication," The White Oxen and Other Stories, 1924. In this chapter I follow Rueckert's lead, but I expand his idea by placing Burke's critical texts in the context of his own literary texts and in the context of major literary texts of the Modern period. I also try to follow his lead in an approach which he recommends but does not himself follow. He outlines two possible approaches to Burke, but he follows the more conventional method, "a chronological, developmental study which presents as organic the development through 3 stages to a final synthesis." In Burke's terms, this is syllogistic 70 progression. Rueckert also outlines a method which seems close to qualitative progression. Reliance on the enthymeme for proof is risky in that it allows readers to make connections, but this is its strength, as readers actively share in the creative process and call the arguments their own: The second kind begins where the first one ends; its organization would come from the structure itself and it would be complete when the system had been adequately presented and applied or illustrated. Since dramatism includes— in the sense that it incorporates into a larger framework— most of Burke's important ideas and methods, the significant material from the pre- dramatistic works could be covered in the appropriate place while the system was presented and applied. A wonderful kind of simultaneity and coherence would be achieved in this way, for the beginning and middle works would be seen, not as culminating in dramatism, but in terms of dramatism.^ Such an approach, made in terms of dramatism, may be more convincing to persuade readers to Burke's non-linear and analogical writing. The contradictory voices in his texts, the gaps, and his reindividuations of symbols, all suggest that the primary meaning is the reader's participation in the performances of Burke's mind. In general, Burke understands Modern literature as an outgrowth of the symbolist movement in literature, but he understands both from a rhetorical perspective. His interpretation of symbolism and Modern literature is clearly a counter-statement to the autonomous theory and to the intentional and pathetic fallacies. As we have seen before, Burke revises the symbolist movement to suit his own rhetorical purposes. Throughout his career, Burke declares that "effective literature could be nothing else but rhetoric." He quickly acknowledges that 71 "while the artist was attempting new departures in methodology, he was not matching his imaginative experiments with their equivalents in critical theory." In other words, the artist as critic may not be able to articulate and explain his methodology as poet; the poetic 5 precedes the semantic in Burke1s theory. In his discussions of Flaubert, Pater, De Gourmont, and Gide— the "adepts of 'pure* literature"— he argues that while these artists were consciously concerned about aesthetic matters only, they have had great impact in persuading later artists. Burke argues, for example, that Flaubert, has an "instinctive demand that he arrest his readers in spite of himself" (CS, p. 4). He expands on’this to generalize on all artists' rhetorical motives: And while this theoretical freedom was checked in him, as in every artist, by the desire to communicate, it did contribute to the variability of his work. (CS, p. 17) He explains that the artist was to an extent "probably uncertain as to the exact critical principles underlying the new tendencies" (CS, p. 69), and he then argues that literature is in advance of literary theory. Burke's primary example is T. S. Eliot: he implies that the art of Eliot precedes the tenets of the critic Eliot. By this qualitative reasoning, Burke, in the late 1920s, argues for the rhetoric of Eliot's symbolism, a rhetoric which Eliot himself explicitly denies early in his career, with his autonomous and impersonal theories of art, but which he admits to later: The chief use of 'meaning* in a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be (for here again I am speaking of some kinds of poetry 72 and not all) to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him: much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of meat for the house-dog.^ Eliot’s house-dog theory of poetry, or his burglar image of the poet, is clearly a rhetorical conception of poetry. It does not possess the solemnity of his earlier theory of tradition and the individual talent, where the progress of the artist is a "continual self- sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." There the poetic process is likened to the "action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide." Eliot’s later view, however, suggests Burke's outline in his third essay in Counter-Statement, "The Poetic Process": The artist begins with his emotion, he translates this emotion into a mechanism for arousing emotion in others, and thus his interest in his own emotion transcends into his interest in the treatment. (CS, p. 55) In Eliot's later theory, the poet has motives, and he "works" on the reader through what Burke calls the psychology of form, while the psychology of information, the propositional content, merely pacifies and distracts the reader so that the more important meaning can be realized. This house-dog theory of reading plays up the appositional, indeterminate, or formal meaning of a work, and for Eliot, this meaning created through the dynamic (even illicit) relationship between writer and reader, is primary, at least in some kinds of poetry. Burke's propositional content is always more than a bit of meat thrown 73 to pacify the intellect, and certainly Eliot’s meaning "in the ordinary sense" has kept readers chewing for years. The rhetoric of the symbol, for Burke and Eliot, seems to be a primary use of poetry and criticism. For neither, however, is it the only use. And certainly Eliot’s earlier impersonal theory of art has been more persuasive than his later view. Burke develops his theory of symbolic action from the rhetoric of the symbol which he explores in his own early fiction and the rhetoric of the symbol which he discovers in the works of Eliot, Lawrence, and Joyce. Burke’s criticism of these three major Modern writers focuses on three formal experiments which he explores in his early fiction and which have become major critical issues in contemporary literary theory: a revised conception of narrative;^ a use of multiple voices and subsequent silences in the dramatizations of minds at work, those 8 of the author as well as those of characters; and the exploitation of the rhetoric of the symbol itself. Burke's understanding that symbols are performative rather than referential leads him to recognize qualitative progression in Modern literature, where narrative has changed from syllogistic progression to a "disjointed kind of form" (WO, p. xii). It alerts him to the dramatic playing off of voices in texts, the conversational counterpoint, and it allows him to perceive works in terms of the motives of writers and readers, motives which are operating at the conscious and unconscious levels, but also which are operating in situations as well as in minds. Finally, Burke's understanding of the rhetoric of the symbol leads him to perceiving 74 all language as metaphorical. He understands metaphors as symbolic actions which draw on thought processes analogous to those drawn on by the rhetorical enthymeme. For this reason, he is not caught in binary binds, for example between metaphor and metonymy, for he understands both as performance, not reference. Writers and readers create 9 meaning by playing terms off against each other. Burke transcends binary terms by his key term, rhetoric, for he perceives all language as functioning enthymemically. Many critics identify, in other terms, the enthymemic qualities in plot, characterization, and language in Modern literature. Burke’s contribution is not that he gives another name to structures which others call "gaps," "differance," or "spatial forms." His contributions are that, first, he develops the rhetorical dimensions of these qualitative structures and, more important, his dramatistic theory provides a coherent framework for the diverse experiments characterizing Modern literature. Burke's theory allows us to see the various formal experiments as rhetorical attempts to engage readers in the symbolic action. Dramatism marks the paradigmatic shift in the Twentieth Century from language as reference to language as performance. Burke1s Qualitative Progression and the Symbolist Movement in Literature As early as Counter-Statement Burke adopts a rhetorical stance towards Symbolist poetics. He claims that "symbolism contained one important alteration in method": 75 In emphasizing the emotional connection of ideas and images it tended to suppress their commoner experimental or 'logical’ connections. Instead of saying that something was like something else, the symbolist progressed from the one thing to the other by ellipsis. He would not tell us that a toothache is a raging storm— rather, he might advance directly from the mention of a diseased tooth to the account of a foundering ship. Objects are thus linked by their less obvious connectives. (CS, p. 68) Here Burke stresses the emotional connections readers make, instead of the logical connections that writers draw. He implies that ellipsis— that which is absent— evokes the reader's response, as does the missing premise of the rhetorical enthymeme. Burke admits that his explanation of symbolism is "of course, an oversimplification," but he accepts it as "roughly indicative" and continues to operate on the basis of this rhetorical perception. It is necessary to observe that what Burke claims as the major alteration in symbolism is, in fact, a major alteration in the accepted interpre tation of symbolism. His concern for the rhetorical functioning of symbols is a counter-statement to principles "flourishing and triumphant." Burke usually denies the autonomy of the text and the impersonal theory of art, although at times he focuses on the text itself and its intrinsic qualities. Characteristically, Burke revises the definition of symbolism for his own purposes, as he revises the philosophies of Aristotle and Cassirer. Burke is not content with simply revising the definition of symbolism to emphasize its rhetorical aims. He proceeds to relate this major alteration in method with one of his five forms in "Lexicon Rhetoricas": 76 Qualitative progression, the other aspect of progressive form, is subtler. Instead of one incident in the plot preparing us for some other possible incident of plot (as Macbeth's murder of Duncan prepares us for the dying of Macbeth), the presence of one quality prepares us for the introduction of another (the grotesque seriousness of the murder scene preparing us for the grotesque buffoonery of the porter scene). (CS, pp. 124-5) In symbolism and in qualitative progression, Burke understands forms not only as functional but also as rhetorically functioning. He emphasizes the emotional and analogical connections for which the .writer prepares the reader but which the reader makes. He understands ellipsis as that which motivates readers to collaborate with writers in the creative process. Through these two revisions of symbolism, Burke draws qualitative connections between the symbolist method and his method, qualitative progression. In addition, without making connections explicit or arguing for them syllogistically, he relates qualitative progression to Aristotle's enthymeme and syllogistic progression to the traditional syllogism. He thus creates a "cluster" of Aristotle's enthymeme, the symbolist method, and his qualitative progression. He does not argue for a line of influence or for a logical development: "instead of saying that something was like something else," he progresses from one thing to another by ellipsis and "by the presence of one quality prepares us for the introduction of another." Burke does not stop with creating this simple cluster of terms; he adds major characteristics of Modern literature. We can see how Burke links Modern literature with his developing rhetoric of the symbol by examining briefly his approach to Eliot's The Waste Land. 77 Once again, Burke's view of Eliot is not’ the standard one, nor is it consistent with Eliot's own early literary theories. Burke revises Eliot's poem for his own purposes: In T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the step from 'Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight' to Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies' is a qualitative progression. (CS, p. 125) Here Burke identifies the enthymemic quality of Eliot's poetry, a quality numerous critics recognize in other terms, such as "disjuncture," "jazz-like," and "spatial form." But unlike most critics, Burke explores the rhetorical dimensions of this quality. This is not to say that Burke gives a new reading or a unique interpretation of The Waste Land. He does, however, provide a new way to account for meaning and for the rhetorical power of this highly influential poem of the Modern period. Throughout Counter-Statement Burke has put his reader "into a state of mind" so that this point is accepted; readers can "recognize its rightness after the event," though they probably are not able to "anticipate the connection" ahead of time. Burke employs qualitative progression as he writes about it; form and information harmonize. Burke explains that qualitative progression, like Eliot's poetry, "lacks the pronounced anticipatory nature of syllogistic progression" (CS, p. 125). "After the event," we can see how Burke prepares us for the improbable connection of four terms: qualitative progression, enthymeme, symbolism, and Modern literature. To prepare readers for acceptance of this juxtaposition of disparate elements, Burke in "Psychology and Form" discusses the idea 78 that the "hypertrophy of the psychology of information is accompanied by the corresponding atrophy of the psychology of information" (CS, p. 33). In this context, he explains the turn from the murder scene to the porter scene in Macbeth as "a much less literal channel of development" than the usual development of suspense. He describes this turn in plot in the very language he uses later to define qualitative progression: Here the presence of one quality calls forth the demand for another, rather than one tangible incident of plot awaking an interest in some other possible tangible incident of plot. (CS, pp. 38-9) He then illustrates his point about plot by a "good example" that is "found in a contemporary poem, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, where the vulgar, oppressively trivial conversation in the public house calls forth in the poet a memory of a line from Shakespeare" (CS, p. 39). At this point Burke does not refer to the reader's responses which are evoked by this "much less literal channel of development," but he speaks of the writer's mental process and motives. Having led the reader to acceptance of his point about plot in Eliot's poetry, by letting the reader experience his thought processes in getting to the point, he summarizes: But I simply wish to point out here that this transition is a bold juxtaposition of one quality created by another, an association in ideas which, if not logical, is nevertheless emotionally natural. (CS, p. 40) Burke is referring to Eliot's qualitative progressions, although the summary applies equally well to his own methods of proof. Burke then 79 draws together three key terms— r , we have made three terms synonymous: form, psychology, and eloquence.” Here Burke prepares readers for later acceptance of the idea that Modern literature may be characterized by form, psychology, eloquence, symbolism, and qualitative progression, each of which introduces rhetoric into Modern literature and into symbolism. Ellipsis, created by the arrangement of parts, gives access to the motives of writers and readers and to the context. It is "watershed moments," or "portals of discovery" to use Joyce’s term, which are the bases for a rhetoric of the symbol. Burke continues to prepare readers for his view that the rhetoric of Eliot’s poetry is created by its qualitative progression. He distinguishes between Eliot the innovative artist, and Eliot the traditional critic. He says that Eliot in some respects is like the disciples of art for art's sake in being the "preserver of older standards which the bourgeoise themselves were attempting to discredit" (CS, p. 67), at the same time "advocating many requisite alterations of morality" (CS, p. 68). He even goes on to revise through rephrasing one of Eliot's principle theories, that of the objective correlative, making it more consistent, at least from Burke's perspective, with Eliot's poetry: This is not offered as an alternative explanation to Mr. Eliot's. As a matter of fact, I believe that it is little more than Mr. Eliot's explanation rephrased. As stated in The Sacred Wood the argument runs: 'The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the 80 external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.' If you examine any of Shakespeare's more successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skillful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife's death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series. (CS, pp. 197-8, n. 4) When Eliot's remarks are read from Burke's perspective, the concept of the objective correlative is revised so that emphasis is not on a static symbol but on an active component— a sequence, a chain of events, a set of objects, a situation. Each of these terms suggests a cluster or gestalt, in which the connections are made by emotional not logical connections. Readers are put into a state of mind by the "skillful accumulation" of impressions so that after the event the sequence makes sense. The words seem to be "automatically released by the last event," not syllogistically prepared for. Burke's primary revision of Eliot’s critical point is that the objective correlative is in fact also subjective or, more accurately, interactive: We may, however, insist that the trend of subjective writing since Shakespeare's time would give us greater authority for identifying Hamlet as Shakespeare than Mr. Eliot here seems to acknowledge. For it is precisely when a symbol is created as parallel to life rather than as a recipe for obtaining certain effects, that such 'hamletic' confusions generally arise. (CS, pp. 197-8, n. 4) In this passage Burke argues for an intentionalist or personal approach to literature, an approach which Eliot denied but which gradually critics of Eliot have found to be revealing about all aspects of his 81 works. Explicit connections between people he knew and his characters have provided richer interpretations of his poetry than his own critical tenets would have permitted. By focusing directly on the issues of subjectivity, biography, and identification of authors and characters, Burke underhandedly convinces his readers of the■rhetorical dimensions of Eliot's poetry. Consistent with Eliot's house-dog theory, Burke gives the reader a distracting bit of information to chew on while he works on the reader through form. As he argues forthrightly for the symbol as "parallel to life," he assumes that the symbol is created "as a recipe for obtaining certain effects." He establishes through qualitative progression the rhetoric of Eliot's symbols as he confronts head-on the issue of subjective writing. Burke's own motives begin to emerge as he develops the rhetoric of the symbol in Modern literature. He attempts to restore rhetoric, even in opposition to science and current literary theories, not because he wants to be antagonistic and not because he thinks he is right: "We must pay attention to it (rhetoric), not as being right, but necessary" (CS, p. 47). Burke believes that our words and terministic screens determine what we see and how we act. Symbolic actions are "strategies for coping," not necessarily truths. This definition of language is practical for it allows us to revise our strategies when they do not "encompass situation" and help us "cope." Burke does not deny reality, although he denies that there is one approach or term for reality. His definitions are biologically motivated and scenically grounded. A 82 rhetoric of the symbol grants the purposefulness of literature and a value to poetic rather than scientific thought. From Poetic Texts to Critical Theory: The Complete White Oxen and Towards a Better Life as Symbolic Actions In "Curriculum Criticum," which Burke appends to the second edition of Counter-Statement, he attempts to "make a position clearer by showing its place in the ’curve' of development" (CS, p. 213). After discussing his critical texts, he places them in the context of his literary works: We might also mention, in the interests of thoroughness, two works of fiction (The White Oxen and Towards a_ Better Life) which the author published early in his career and which, whatever one may think of their intrinsic merit, have been of great value to him, because he can now remember them as from within--and he has found this double vision useful for his analysis of motives. (CS, p. 219) Burke implies that his poetic works engendered his critical works, and he suggests here as elsewhere that the poet's motives differ from the critic's: writing "from within," gazing forward, differs from writing from without, examining in retrospect. Burke continues to develop this distinction, for the poet/critic distinction is analogous to the qualitative/syllogistic distinction: When a writer gives us a sequence of logical propositions framed to show why he got to his conclusions, he is almost always reversing the actual process of his thought. He presents data which supposedly led to a conclusion— whereas the conclusion had led to the selection and arrangement of data. The demonstration is derived from the demonstrandum. (PC, p. 98) In other words, qualitative progression characterizes the writing process, while syllogistic progression characterizes revision for 83 specific purposes. Poetic understanding precedes critical interpre tation; all language is symbolic action— poetic and dramatic. Burke does not deny the value of critical insights, and in this section we can use his comments in the preface to The Complete White Oxen as first "ways in” to his poetic texts and then as "ways out" to the criticism which he derives from the fiction. In the preface, Burke points to three formal experiments in his stories and novel. First, he refers to a revision of narrative from logical to qualitative development. He then discusses a revision in characterization to include internal and external motives of characters and author. This revision incorporates interior and exterior dialogue (not monologue) of multiple voices and subsequent silences. Third, he discusses the revision of symbols to exploit the distance between conventional and reindividuated forms for rhetorical purposes. Each of these experiments creates enthymemic structures, which early critics 11 identified as attempts at pure art, rather than rhetoric. Without claiming Burke's fiction possesses intrinsic merit comparable to that of major Modern fiction, we can see similarities in his formal experiments and those of Joyce, Lawrence, and Eliot. The nineteen stories in The Complete White Oxen, fifteen of which were published in the 1924 collection, two years after the publications of The Waste Land and Ulysses, all reflect Burke's rhetoric of the 12 symbol. Towards a Better Life is clearly a Modern fiction. Burke's experiments in narration, characterization, and symbols are comparable to experiments in Modern fiction which contemporary critics are now 84 noting as motivating reader responses. The poetic precedes the semantic, and early Modern fiction seems now to be generating a literary criticism focusing on the rhetoric of the symbol, the performative nature of language. In these ways, Burke’s fiction has important extrinsic merit. In the preface to The Complete White Oxen, Burke first clarifies ’'rhetoric," a term which can "have so many different meanings": "I mainly had in mind an interest in formal and stylistic twists as such, along with entanglements in character and plot." Formal and stylistic twists indicate the action principle in Burke’s rhetoric, and they suggest peripeties which, according to Aristotle, must be neither too close nor too far removed from the audience’s experiences and expectations if they are.to be persuasive. Art does not imitate life: art is a conversation with life. Burke provides a general retrospective view of his fiction and stresses his rhetorical intentions. He quotes his earlier notes to make his point: I observed that the sequence of stories embodies a gradual ’increase of stress upon the more rhetorical properties of letters.’ And with more defiance than assurance, I proclaimed it a ’great privilege’ to take such a turn ’in an age when rhetoric is so universally despised.’ (WO, p. ix) In the earlier note, Burke observes his gradual shifting from the "realistically convincing and true to life" to the rhetorical, from 13 language as reference to language as performance. This revision from realism to symbolism or the juxtaposition in a work of both characterizes Modern literature, but Burke adds the rhetorical dimensions of the symbol. He develops the enthymemic aspects of narration, characterization, and symbols, in keeping with his view of time and identity as changing and uncertain. "A Disjointed Kind of Form" In the preface, Burke first discusses his experiments with a "disjointed kind of form" which has "qualitative breaks from one part to the next (as though each were on a different 'level'), rather than embodying the kind of continuity 'natural' to conventional narrative" (WO, p. ix). He develops his fiction by qualitative progressions, a revision from the traditional linear syllogistic movement to a fragmented, enthymemic action. The collection as a whole is fragmented and indeterminate because Burke does not supply connections between the stories in the "sequence." Readers must rely on the "emotional connections of ideas and images" and suppress the "commoner experimental or 'logical' connections." The stories are part of what Burke calls a sequence but which could more accurately be called part of Eliot's "chain of events" or Pound's "ideogram." The collection might be read as a long sequence poem, with stories as disparate parts, juxtaposed to create a collage, gestalt, or ideogram, that activate readers to make connections. Each of the stories, like the whole, is composed of disparate parts, as if thrown together (symballein) without logical ties. Because of the missing links, each story reflects what Hugh Kenner calls the "arch-Symbolist’s best-known preoccupation": the "intent : 86 insistence on silence into which 'words after speech, reach.For Burke, the "modern discovery of silence" (CS, p. 38) is a rhetorical discovery. It is the discovery of a means of persuading readers to participate in the symbolic action and to give voice in the dialogue. The symbolist break between the word and the world puts all in doubt, except the power and practicality of rhetoric to deal with probabilities. In discussing his narrative experiments with a disjointed kind of form, Burke refers to a review by a "critic-editor of an opinion-making weekly that was influential in the olden days" who finds "a curious lack of design" (WO, p. x). The curious chaos in Burke's early fiction, like the chaos first perceived in the works of Joyce and Eliot, has gradually become understood as attempts at a new kind of order. Through a naturalization process, the formal has become in time the informational. The "lack of design" in Burke can now be understood as cunningly motivated patterns which are now quite common— disjunctures, juxtapositions, ellipses, fragments, unclear pronoun references, and vague allusions— all of which Burke designs to engage readers in symbolic action. Burke discusses briefly the "transitional potentialities" in the "principle of fragmentation” (WO, p. xiv), and characteristically he explains more lengthily his bet with Malcom Cowley that he could "turn up with something formally different from the average." Burke won the bet with his "disjointed form," but he admits that in subsequent years the "experimental 'sophisticating' of form has taken so many new gy turns" and that his attempts at innovation must seem "almost neo classical." Although it is true that form has become information, Burke's "disjointed form" and "principle of fragmentation" were innovative in 1924, as were the similar experiments by Joyce, Lawrence, and Eliot. They all extended the principles of fragmentation and disjuncture beyond plot to include the fragmentations of time, identity, and meaning. What has still not been fully realized are the rhetorical motives in their uses of the "principle of fragmentation." Burke points to "The Book of Yul" as his first example of fiction with "twists," and the story is a "disjointed form" which does illustrate his theory of form as the "arousal and fulfillment of desires." However, Burke continually sets up expectations in the story which are not fulfilled in a logically predictable way. For example, the "annunciatory" first paragraph does not make clear what is the content of the announcement: While waiting, two men carried on a conversation that flapped and fluttered like an old newspaper. And a third was silent. Finally the conversation gained in intensity, culminating in some disagreeable figure or image. Whereat, the third man rose and left the room. With us following, for it is he who conceived of Yul and the eleventh city. Thus: This opening passage serves as a trumpet blast, but its function is clear while its propositional meaning is incomprehensible. Who are the men? What is their relationship to each other? What are they waiting for? Where are they? What is the culminating image? Does the third man leave because of the image? Why and how is the reader drawn 88 into the company? Readers can.only feel this is a beginning, without knowing of what. This first passage frames the story-within-the-story which begins, "Three men in a room, towards night." This fragment provides no obvious links with the frame, and there is no certainty that the three men in the beginning are the second three men, although experience and life lead readers to make such connections. The first room is juxtaposed to the second without explanation, and the conversation in neither room makes sense, by itself or in relationship to the other. The first conversation flaps and flutters, and the second is equally incoherent as it begins with a question, "Do you think she will come?" There are no causal connections between the disagreeable figure and the third man’s exit; there is no identification of the men nor of the woman for whom they are waiting. The reader, like the three men, waits, not knowing what to expect. The story undermines attempts to establish coherence, although in order to read— to make sense— the reader has to make tentative leaps and guesses.The reader can identify the third man as the author of Yul, whoever he is, and the narrator does connect the reader with the third man through a pronoun— "with us following." Readers are drawn into the fiction, even into a room off stage, but where and why they will go is clearly uncertain. The reading is a self-reflective discovery process as what readers learn to expect is the unexpected: challenges to coherence and meaning. The narrator, the third man, and the reader become authors of each other, with the understanding of the . 89 limitations of their own authority, since they are the fictions of the author, Burke. His own symbolic action becomes increasingly signifi cant, as does that of the reader in dialogue with him. Throughout the story, Burke arouses, frustrates, and provides qualitative fulfillment. At three crucial points, the reader is encouraged to identify with a particular figure who for no obvious reason exits a room. The first example occurs in the opening paragraph. The second instance occurs without providing the reader with the helpful pronoun, "us": At this point, the man in the Morris-chair arose, left the room, and could be heard immediately afterwards going down the stone stairs to the street. The snow was falling now in thick gobs. This man leaves, as does the third man in the opening passage (a pun Burke exploits in this story of narrow streets and anal, oral, and genital symbols), and the reader follows him through the winding streets which end nowhere. Without a transition, the paragraph abruptly shifts time and place, and readers must quickly reorient themselves. With abrupt paragraph shifts, the focus turns to a "traveller in this city, by the name of Yul," who "did not descend the stairs." Now the reader trails a third figure; the reader is like a spy, sniffing clues and picking up possible evidence to piece together a meaning in these actions. The opening passage becomes synecdochic of the entire story, as abrupt shifts in focus, twists in plot, unmotivated actions, omitted transitions, vague pronoun references, unclear allusions to people, 90 times, and places, all frustrate reader's usual expectations. Fragments of information are scattered about, like an old newspaper flapping and fluttering, culminating at points in some disagreeable image or figure. In Part Two, readers follow Yul through the transit system, through winding streets, into three rooms— in the third he voids— and then back into the city passages. The culminating image is the form of a woman whose eyes "were like moist planets shined on by the sun," a void of a somewhat different kind, beckoning Yul and readers onward by the absent or indeterminate meaning. The woman leads Yul, with readers tagging along behind, jumping across a "pit," stealing through "narrow passages," walking down steps into "cold, damp places," and crossing a bridge. The sexual impli cations are obvious in the scattered symbols, which also reflect the reader's own symbolic actions to make sense of the story— making leaps across the abyss, bridging gaps, and following blindly. It is the nothingness of the symbols— the ellipses and abysses— which motivate the characters and the readers to act. The culminating disagreeable image of this part is the third eye of the woman which is "shining out of the hairs of the mons Veneris." The eye leads nowhere as it stares back steadily, unblinking. Yul falls in disgust, but when he awakens he continues to walk "slowly back through the labyrinth of rooms and passages." In several ways the story is typical of Modern fiction, primarily in the "disjointed form" or qualitative progression which involves the reader in a different kind of reading. One aspect of the "principle of ---------------- - . 9i fragmentation" is the self-reflexivity— the story is symbolic of itself, as Yul is symbolic of the reader, the "you" who performs on the unstated command of "you will." The story, like the city, is a labyrinth, a series of twists and turns which frustrate forward progression to some end. The story ends as it begins, and readers become problem-solvers whose solutions are never answers, only bridges to the next problem which undermines them. The reader experiences what Yul experiences; and the third eye of the fiction is as meaning less in content as is the woman’s third eye, but the image is still effective in creating a "peculiar sickness" from disorientation and disgust. The reader continues to move through the labyrinth. The story ends with Yul falling asleep— on the brink of consciousness, on the edge of internal and external. The story ends in uncertainty, as do so many Modern stories, such as Joyce’s "A Little Cloud," "The Dead," Ulysses, Exiles, Giacomo Joyce, and Finnegans Wake, to name only a few. What will follow is uncertain, except that the sun will rise and there will be nothing new under it. Like Bloom and other modern heroes, the protagonist's aimless walk through a maze of city streets has no beginning and no end. His own identity is fluid, as he merges with other figures from fiction and reality. The symbolic 16 action engages readers in the drama. "The Book of Yul" is a rhetoric of "you will” to the reader who follows without knowing why or where, but who is compelled to make sense through revisions of expectations. Burke’s second example of "disjointed form" is "My Dear Mrs. Wurtelbach," which he says proceeds "somewhat like the movements of a 92 symphony, with qualitative breaks from one part to the next (as though each were on a different 'level'), rather than embodying the kind of continuity 'natural' to conventional narrative." The key term for this story is jazz, whereas the key images in "The Book of Yul" are pits, bridges, twisted streets, and blinding eyes. This piece contains three separate parts, each of which appears extemporaneous, and each of which intersects with the other. Certain strains continue throughout, such as the narrator, but even he undergoes variations. Readers listen to notes which go nowhere or which modulate into each other; the progression is qualitative— contrapuntal and experimental. As in the "Sirens" section of Ulysses and part two of The Waste Land, readers make sense of the fragments, creating their own versions of the unwritten score. The story opens with "what if," a "once-upon-a-time" beginning: "What if he had known Wurtelbach since the days when they had a tent in the back yard and played Old Maid if it rained?" But the typical beginning contradicts expectations. The "what if" means "so what" in this context, not the expected "imagine that." Throughout, Burke plays on reader's expectations of fiction, character, language, and meaning. Despite the appearance of linear and logical order, the three parts are related in only small ways, and the abrupt shifts in time, place, point of view, and subject leave the reader as bewildered as the narrator who thinks of Wurtelbach as dead, like lead, in bed, dull head. Burke shifts from internal to external perspectives, from, fantastic images to realistic details. After the narrator's word play, 93 he talks on the phone to Alice about the Chicago Awto-Lite Company. Wurtelbach incorporates Bach and Wurlitzer, the narrator is both spectator and actor, and the reader "hangs,lopsided" like the suicide victim, undergoing disorientation and annihilation without knowing why. Part Two opens abruptly with Esther and Miss Anderson, two unidentified figures, who step alternately over logs. The shift, from the narrator’s morbid interior thoughts to the exterior perspective of two figures climbing mountains on a picnic, is intensified when the "stewed" Wurtelbach appears alive on stage, avoiding "cow-flops" and "eyes," watching the "masterful working" of the girls’- legs. Before readers can become too fascinated by the "mechanism" of the story— in the prospect of eating "cow-flops" or in wondering about Wurtelbach's resurrections— a new narrator interrupts to speak of Myrtle, under cutting the pastoral images of the coltish Esther whom Wurtelbach wants to eat: Myrtle, gentlemen, was Queenly, with all her bones comfortably buried beneath a half-inch cushion of warm flesh. Myrtle could take up as much of your time as she cared by talking deliberately. Myrtle could bathe in spring water without suffering; but the irrefutable fact remained that there was frequently a strong odor which came from Myrtle's armpits. The "irrefutable fact" hardly adds meaning to the story, and no further insight is given. Anne appears next, unidentified except by the statement that she is "not goodlooking," an observation which only adds more confusion to the chaos. Readers do not know who the females are, what their relationships are to Wurtelbach, why they are all climbing, and what the overall significance of the section is. It 94 only seems likely that section two with Wurtelbach alive precedes part two where he is dead, although the'reverse is the reality of the fiction. With such uncertainty the reader begins section three which is even more problematic since Wurtelbach is absent and there are no scenic connections: "For a few notes the band chugged in unison, and then it broke away again, all the parts flying off independently. That was jazz." Jazz becomes emblematic of the story which first chugged with parts in unison but then all parts fly off independently. The final section, a banquet scene, makes sense in retrospect of the previous sections through modulations and qualitative progressions. When the story is perceived as jazz, the discordant facts become coherent, although it is a new kind of order, not expected in prose fiction. Again the section contains order and rituals— "(Five hundred crab meat salads were removed simultaneously, and five hundred roasted second joints of capon were brought in their place)"— but any order is undermined: "The band stopped to change the score, and there would have been dead silence if everyone were not hearing his own jaws." The story continually changes score, leaving readers with only their Own symbolic actions, their own mouthings of meaning. The banquet ends with a speech by the president of the "All-American Corporation," a fit and meaningless conclusion for the "epigram" or "epic." As the president, Wurtelbach, the narrators, and the reader "sling" their pebbles "at the universe," symbolic actions of self-assertion and 95 order, the music continues with silences, modulations, disjunctures, and unexpected variations, all of which invite further symbolic play. "’Inside* Knowledge of Motives" In the "Preface," Burke also points to his second experiment in form, the revealing of the '"inside1 knowledge of motives," a stream of consciousness rendering of character but also, for Burke, a rendering of the author's and characters’ multiple voices. Interior monologue for Burke is an interior dialogue among the character’s many selves, and the piece of fiction is the author's interior dialogue, with characters enacting various voices in his own consciousness. Furthermore, voices not only convey propositional content; they also create the silence which conveys a different kind of meaning. Burke understands terms such as "words" and "silence," "internal" and "external" "intentions" and "scenes" as binary oppositions which dialectically define each other. They are "terms for order" or "patterns of experience" which do not capture reality but perform it; they are performatives, used to fulfill certain intentions and to cause specific effects in particular situations. The various voices which play off against each other in his literary and critical text characterize the presence of a mind at work; Burke's writing allows readers to experience his own thought processes, and the meaning in Burke is largely the action of his own mind. Burke’s mind is a "conversation piece," a dialogic operation which is rhetorically generated. The enactment of verbal interplay . g- g r often confuses rather than clarifies, since there is often no apparent logic in the conversational responses. The dialogue between characters is often phatic, rather than communicative of propositional content, and the interaction of writer and reader is often strong in formal meaning but lacking in informational content. The internal dialogue, that of specific characters but also that of the author, is often associative rather than logical, fragmentary with subjects omitted, and filled with symbols both individual and archetypal. For Burke, inner speech and outer speech are both rhetorical. Burke points to "The White Oxen" to illustrate his point about the "'inside' knowledge of motives,” as contrasted with an outside, scenic knowledge.. He suggests that Gabriel Harding's sexual ambiguity would have been clearer without the interior viewpoint, a third person perspective of his thoughts. In Part Four, the internal view of Gabriel shows that his feelings for Matthew Carr are as much governed by economic desires as by emotional or sexual feelings. In a way, the interior dialogue muddles the already ambiguous sexuality, but in another way it intensifies the overall ambiguity of the story. Throughout, internal and external perspectives play off against each other, so that readers must continue to make unreasonable leaps and to assign uncertain motives. In Parts Three and Four, Burke presents the sexual ambiguity in Gabriel's relationship with Matthew through images of Gabriel's "soft smile," their shared "enchantment" with living together, and their cozy evenings at home. The sexual implications are also evident in 97 Gabriel’s growing boredom with his new arrangement and with Matthew’s "dog-like fidelity." In the final scene of Part Four, when Gabriel steals money from Matthew, who would gladly give it to him, Burke connects the sexual and the economic in terms of power. Gabriel does not want what is freely given by Matthew, and he does not want Matthew’s goodness and self-sacrifice. At the Same time, the final scene shows that Gabriel does not want the strict hold which Matthew’s kindness and generosity have over him. Matthew’s desire for order and routine includes his desire for Gabriel to remain changeless in his conception of him. Gabriel refuses to be one of Matthew’s "white oxen, who are harmless and kindly" and who are the passive recipients of Matthew’s unyielding projections of meaning and motives. The story is again a series, and the progression of Matthew’s three encounters with "white oxen" is not logical. Each of Matthew's three white oxen betrays him by not conforming to his expectations and "readings." For example, the white oxen in the zoo turn from Matthew when he is no longer allowed to satisfy their hunger, even though Matthew interpreted their motions as actions motivated by their love of him. Similarly, Edward Carroll fails Matthew when he blossoms "gloriously" and rejects Matthew's perceptions of him as sexually pure and ideal. After this second betrayal, Matthew becomes "almost resigned to expect nothing more" until he meets Gabriel and places "his happiness again in another’s keeping." In Part Four Gabriel wants to tell Matthew the "absolute truth" about why he needs money, but instead he invents a "tale of a needy 98 friend" to avoid disappointing Matthew’s image of him and to rebel against Matthew's control. At the critical moment when Gabriel leaves the room of the sleeping Matthew, he expresses his internal motives: As he closed the door, he was resentful again. His actions would be misunderstood; they would be taken merely as actions, with no appreciation of the generous emotions he had experienced in doing them. He, Gabriel Harding, was to be the wronged party. Gabriel, the betrayer, feels betrayed, because he fears that his real motives will not be understood. He is right in that Matthew will not see him as the scoundrel he is, only as the white oxen he wants Gabriel to be. Gabriel continually reads meaning into mute beasts and into the motions of others to fulfill his own intentions and to ignore the motives of others. The silence of the white oxen allows Matthew to project meaning onto them, as does the vacuity of Edward and Gabriel. The humans finally act, however, in order to assert themselves and make their own meaning. The beasts, unmotivated and without language, continue in motion. Matthew appears passive like the white oxen, but he is motivated to project meaning on others around him to protect himself and to keep them in order. Although the interior knowledge of motives is developed only slightly in "The White Oxen," Burke shows that he understands interior knowledge as dialogue, not as monologue. Gabriel's thoughts are not an "unmediated" stream or a series of "free" associations; his thoughts are dialogic in that he thinks of what others will think of his motives. Burke is playing with the fundamental distinction in his theory between actions and motion, for actions are motivated, by the 99 circumstances and by one’s own biology and experiences. Interior knowledge is not knowledge of an isolated individual but of a person who is created by biological, historical, and cultural forces— by rhetoric. Forms of the mind are not "pure1'; they are created and recreated by interaction of many factors, such as forms of the world and forms of texts. Associations are not "free"; they are created dialectically, conversationally with former and future experiences. This story challenges readers who, like Matthew, also project meaning onto the silent figures of fiction, assigning motives and interpreting intentions. Words, however, are unlike the white oxen, for they have the power of self-criticism and ambiguity which forces readers to reinterpret: the meaning of words cannot be firmly fixed. Readers also become conscious of the "inside" motives which direct their own readings and of the silences which engage them in symbolic action. Burke’s white oxen become images of the rhetoric of the .symbol and the meaning of silence. Burke also points to "Prince LLan" as an example of his interior perspective on motives. In this masque, he develops the interior perspective further, by making clear how the internal and external are dialectically related and how the interior knowledge of motives is gained through voices in dialogue, not in monologue. As the interior perspective gives a dialogue among various aspects of the character, the external view allows for a conversation among various voices which are often contradictory but which are coherent in being aspects of a particular text or author. This complex understanding of motives— of 100 psychology, of self, end of authors-— meant that Burke in the late 1920s was writing and interpreting critically an interior method of characterization that was not simply a representation of free association. He understands the mind as performing rhetorically and dialectically, not simply as an accurate recorder of information. Consistent with his understanding of qualitative progression, Burke understands that associations of the mind are not "free" but that they are dialectically engendered by a poetic or emotional logic which is not easily accessible to rational understanding but which has an order of its own. For Burke, then, interior dialogue is conversational— fragmentary, context-dependent, with subjects omitted, with pronouns unclear, with paratactic sentence structures, and with connectives implicit. The performative nature of internal symbolic action is comparable to the performative nature of external language use. The internal is not pure in the sense of being unmotivated or a-historical. While Burke does distinguish between the internal and the external, his rhetorical approach transcends the binary bind. He can also conceive of the self as fragmented and yet whole: he refers to his former self as "Burke," not as "I," and he characteristically writes of his present self as "we," a corporate self who speaks in many voices. In the early fiction, Burke extends his "principle of fragmentation" beyond narrative structure to characterization, for he understands the multiplicity of self as an essential rhetoric- biological and social. 101 The rhetoric of self is dramatized in "Prince LLan," an "Ethical Masque in Seven Parts, including a Prologue and a Coda." Burke describes the masque as a "kind of psychic bookkeeping, a split into two selves, one grown up, though problematically (the 'Prince’), the other (Gudruff) representing the vestiges of problematical adolescence, here treated as a separate person who calls the 'Prince' to regression." The split into two selves is not only a feature of the characterization of the Prince; the splitting into multiple selves is also the fragmentation of the author's own dialectical mind. The self-reflexive fiction continues to evoke the author of itself. The combination— of the masque form, the incoherent dialogue, the name, the topics of discussion— all suggest that the external speech is interior speech uttered; or, in other words, the voices in the masque are all aspects of the author's own consciousness. These two experiments with the interior knowledge of motives can be illustrated more clearly through specific examples. The Prologue begins as the Book of Genesis: "In the beginning was the waters of Chaos, with their horizons lost in blackness." Through the power of "Logos Verbum the Word," the author/God figure, Prince LLan appears, "the ingenious isolated item." The words are chaotic because of their non-referential character, because of their non-syntactic order, and because the images merge and modulate: Logos Verbum the Word— universal brew bubbling and collapsing — then this wad of runny iron and rock settles into a steady elliptic job— cools, crusts, that objects wriggle in the slime, and box-like things bump against the trees— heroic march of the earth, through hunger steaming fevers, through chills slid down 102 from the poles, hunger, fire, pestilence, war, despair, anguish of the conscience, lo! this clean-blooded man, this unscrofulous unsyphilitic neat-skinned gentleman, this ingenious isolated item, Prince LLan. "Steady elliptic jog" describes imagistically the progression of the masque, a qualitative progression which requires the audience to connect the various items lumped together and to make sense out of the slime from which the voices speak. The text continually raises questions, only a few of which it answers, and the effects are to undermine the authority of the text. For example, the first question "But where was Gudruff?" is answered, "Gudruff was gone." Gudruff is only identified as Prince LLan's absent intimate and adviser. The first description of LLan raises more problems than it solves through the indeterminate explanation that his mind has moved elsewhere and through the coordinate conjunction "and" which strings together unrelated fragments: Prince LLan himself— his mind had moved elsewhere— and when the auctioneer had shouted "Who buys these women?" Each of the seven sections begins with a "Programme" which supposedly establishes expectations of the sections but which only creates further gaps; for example, the following explanation hardly clarifies what will occur: "Then he falls into a period of focus, of anchorage, and this is like years of vicissitude." The masque becomes self-reflexive as it merges the identities of the protagonist and the poet. The "splitting" is not only of the Prince and Gudruff but also of the Prince protagonist and the poet 103 creator. One programme asserts that "the poet adopts his protagonist's viewpoint" and portrays "life as a mad-house wherein even logic would be a kind of derangement, of bias." Here Burke— the protagonist, the' poet, the narrator— describes logic as a particular kind of bias, a terministic screen, which like all biases is a form of derangement as it ignores as much of reality as it reveals. Like the Prince, with Grailism in his blood, "(and by Grailism would be meant precisely that search for a rule of conduct)," the masque becomes a search, a discovery process, not an explanation of a specifically and previously decided upon rule. The poetic logic of the masque is also a bias, a form of derangement, but as a discovery process it has the possibility of finding more than it looks for. The section illustrating "life as a mad-house" begins with a dream vision of a beating heart, the size of an elephant. "They" Watch, "one's" elbow tires, the "lyric cook" stumbles across the room, and the "Pontificers" fight their way among the ruins of chairs. Readers tumble through the chaotic text, like the cook "mumbling recipes" to see if any standard procedures explain the situation. Readers are left with only the command: "Let each man build a bridge, if every man builds a bridge the world will have no time for vice, build bridges, signed, The Pontificers, the lyric cook gnawing at his knuckles." Any established recipes for reading, any algorithmic, syllogistic methods of understanding, do not work in this context: things have fallen apart and all one can do is build connections among disparate parts. Readers become "Pontificers"— "bricoleurs" who like 104 Finnegan create in a make-shift, piecemeal fashion. In Burke*s theory of reading, as in contemporary reading theories and critical theories, readers are pontificers, bridging abysses by guesswork, using symbolic action to "encompass situations" and to enact "verbal warfare," so as to avoid chaos and warfare which end in not only symbolic death. "Strategies for coping" are strategies for coherence, and "coherence" is a symbolic action, a reality of the text, not of the world. Symbols of pontification are scattered throughout the text: "The thirty-Three Systems strive after a synthesis"; the ship advances Prince LLan into "another word"; and alpha and omega merge into the girls, "Alpha Nomega." The rainbow girls in Finnegans Wake do hot bridge the spectrum that Alpha Nomega does. Alpha Nomega splits into two voices who contrapuntally tell a tale of incest and rape, child birth, death, and nothingness: Nomega: Drunken father; invalid mother; nice man; took to room; gave candy; tickled; happen; fourteenth year; had to pay; but it died; now I am a big empty place, Nomega. The tale is told, as by an idiot, in telegraphic speech without explicit connectives. Readers fill in the blanks and read between the lines to create their own tales, with the awareness, however, of the fragmentary, context-dependent nature of their own fragile pontifications. Characters in the story are nothingness divided, and the text is empty with deletions, not only of connectives, explanations, and clear references, but also of itself. For example, the recitation— "half 105 lyrical, half shop talk," the "philosophy and procedure of coupling" --is omitted, and a footnote explains the deletion: Their recitation, which appeared in the Broom version of 'Prince LLan,' is omitted here, as it is thought to have caused the suppression of that issue of Broom. Characters are fragments, meaning is incomplete, even the "text itself" is omitted: any coupling that is to be done, must be done by readers. The philosophical fragments of the masque concern the relation ship of intellect to passion and experience and the relationships of these to reality. The Prince's "defense of reason," which a "programme" explains is "simply a more remote aspect of his passion," is that a "reality encompassed by intelligence falls outside the realm of complete experience, outside the realm of organic understanding." The Prince transcribes carefully the npte that "the intellect is the most advisable narcotic, since it enables us to live a waking deep- sleep, to get the completeness of facts, but with the poignancy." Burke plays here with his familiar concerns about the psychology of form and the psychology of information. The "completeness of facts" is clearly a fiction, and intellectual understanding is limited understanding. The practical values of this terministie screen are the "remedies against the complexities of existing." It is a method "whereby life, pressed into firm little bricks, is handled at leisure." Burke's fiction continues to undercut itself, for as readers press the text into "firm little bricks" of meaning they are 106 aware that the created meaning "falls outside the realm of complete experience" and "outside the realm of organic understanding." The Coda indirectly addresses the question of the psychological splitting of selves— of LLan and Gudruff, of Alpha and Nomega, of the protagonist and his poet creator, of writer and reader: Might Joseph be the marriage of Prince LLan and Gudruff? Might these two unstable types be somehow joined, producing in Joseph a dualism at one with itself, a dualism not of strife but of mutual completions, a dualism of systole and diastole, a synthesis? Joseph the joiner, the carpenter-cockold in Joyce's word play who becomes the rhetorical means of persuasion linking father and son, is the symbol of synthesis in Burke's masque. He is the third term in the dialectic of LLan and Gudruff, of man and woman, and of God and man. The "cycle" is complete when Joseph the poet— the maker of metaphors, the builder of bridges, the carpenter coupler, the synthesizer— goes indoors, turns to his books, but turns away from them to go to his woman. At this point of rest, before the recycling begins again, the "author" enters the performance. This author implies the other author, Burke, and the "dear reader" implies the actual reader: But you will pardon the author, dear reader, if at this point he interrupts himself. For your author is dying. I, Morducaya Ivn, the respected chronicler of these meditations and events, rose from my desk but a few minutes past, laid back my head, and cast a mortal potion into the belly. As the poet perishes, of "the nature of things," he continues to speak of after-life when he is "remoulded and recycled" as "this borrowed 107 ego returns to the great Warehouse." The poet continues to speak because of his author, the central ego or warehouse of the fiction. "Elated with futurity," the poet bellows that the "curtain rises" and he is "called to go elsewhere": "I am dead." His performance is over, but the reader becomes aware that greater synthesis of cycles and reproductions will continue in the "great Warehouse" of Burke’s mind. Characters in the fiction are the "borrowed egos" of the author, and the "split into two selves" extends to the author as well as to characters dramatized. Furthermore, readers of Burke become cumulatively aware of the splitting of self demanded by the act of reading: the readers’ engagement and detachment and their identifi cation and division with other characters in the symbolic performance. As readers become aware of their own parts in the drama, they understand the synthesis of writer and reader which they enact by participating in the creative process. Burke's is a "writerly text," which Roland Barthes defines by contrast to "literature characterized by the pitiless divorce which the literary institution maintains between the producers of the text and its user, between its owner and its consumer, between its author and its reader.In Burke’s "great Warehouse" or "barnyard," writers and readers become one as they become participants in the symbolic action. The Rhetoric of Symbols In the preface to The Complete White Oxen, Burke points to his third experiment with form, the dialectical use of symbols. Although 108 Burke's other experiments reflect his view of all language as symbolic action, he also exploits the rhetoric of conventional symbols by playing off the conventional meaning of a symbol and the author’s reindividuated use of the symbol. He develops this theoretical point throughout Counter-Statement, but he expands on it in later texts to argue the context-dependent nature of all meanings. He is concerned with what changes, in texts and across texts, for it is variation on the expected which produces delight and learning and makes persuasion possible. He realizes, though, that perceptions of change are made in the context of conventions. For Burke, contemporary discussions about norms, ordinary, and extraordinary language fail to recognize the context-dependent and rhetorical dimensions of language: an author may set up norms within a text, as may a culture, but it is the dialectics between the expected and the unexpected, between the text and the world, and between the writer and reader which create 18 meaning. The distance between writer and reader makes communication possible, as division makes consummation desirable. This understanding of the rhetoric of language informs his use of symbols in the collection of stories. For example, in the title story, The White Oxen, Burke uses the conventional symbol of the dumb ox, but he shows that, because the oxen are mute, Matthew Carr projects meaning onto them. He reads meaning into "every movement" of their bodies which go "through a graded progression," and he realizes through his affection for the beasts and for Edward and Gabriel that he loves "white oxen," animals 109 or people whom he can create through his own symbolic action because they are "dumb." Similarly, throughout the collection Burke plays with the conventional meanings of upward and downward stairways to show that one leads to the other— extremes meet. In "In Quest of Olympus," he says that "Christ's cumulative ascension" becomes a "return to the womb that is ambiguously or enigmatically, cloacal" (WO, p. xiii). In Burke's experiments with symbols he exploits the gaps, between the conventional and the reindividuated meanings, as the grounds or perhaps the abyss for achieving rhetorical communication. Burke refers to "Mrs. Maecenas" and to "In Quest of Olympus" in the preface to explain the dialectical or rhetorical functioning of symbols. Symbols evoke conventional associations, which are referentially, mythically, historically, and textually based. But they also gain meaning by the specific context of the fiction and by readers who bring to the texts their own experiences. There are gaps between the conventional meanings, the author's individuated meanings, the reader's individuated meanings, and the "ramifications" of the symbol; it is these gaps which leave room for the reader's enthymeme- making. In the preface, Burke says that "Mrs. Maecenas" was influenced by Thomas Mann, and he explains that "quite a time was to elapse before I began to suspect that Mann's bourgeoise-Bohemian dichotomy, for all its twists, too simply divided the realms of the 'neurotic' from normal." Burke's critical commentary is typically fragmentary, but he seems here to refer to binary oppositions which he grew to 110 understand as terministic screens, not as reflections of reality. Such terministic antinomies, Burke argues, are selected to fulfill a purpose, even when the perceiver is unaware of motives, and they are ideologies which pre-determine the perception by limiting what can be seen. For Burke, binary oppositions are comparable to the two terms in a metaphor or to the two steps in an enthymeme, for the meaning of such structures is not in themselves but in the meaning readers create by supplying the missing premise. The meaning of binary oppositions is in what Roman Jakobson calls their "sparking power." A definition of meaning as the act of synthesizing is based on the definition of language as performance. The definition also determines that any synthesis is merely temporary. ^-n Counter-Statement, in "Thomas Mann and Andre Gide," Burke extends this playing with terms: "bur primary purpose, however, in establishing this distinction between the conscientious and the corrupt is to destroy it." More specifically, he develops how Mann "situates the ethical in the 'repellant, the disease, the degenerate.'" It is Mann who writes with fervor, according to Burke, of "sympathy with the abyss," an admitting of the morally chaotic, which he considers not merely the perogative, but the duty, of the artist. Mann's definition of art as the "problematic sphere of the human" explains the "cult of conflict" in his works, "a deliberate vacillation, which could not permit a rigid standard of judgments." Burke's fiction and criticism agree with Mann's view that the artist "must recognize the validity of contraries." Ill Burke praises Mann's "sympathy with the abyss" because Burke's view of the world as characterized by probabilities, not certainties, makes this attitude practical. A function of art is to provide symbolic "strategies for coping": Irony, novelty, experimentalism, vacillation, the cult of conflict— are not these men trying to make us at home in indecision, are they not trying to humanize the state of doubt. Burke argues that, since the "body is dogmatic," might not society benefit from a disintegrating art which "converts each simplicity into a complexity, which ruins the possibility of ready hierarchies, which concerns itself with the problematical, the experimental." Burke's philosophical and epistemological understandings are essentially rhetorical, for he perceives the world as filled with doubt and uncertainties. It is man's constant attempts to establish hierarchies, binary oppositions, and terministic screens as referentially true rather than performatively motivated which lead to death and destruction. Burke's "sympathy with the abyss" reflects his perception that the gap between binary terms is a creative potential in language. In "Mrs. Maecenas," the professor's widow talks with young Siegfried about Remy De Gourmont whose discovery of "dissociation" — showing that "a concept which we generally take as a unit can be subdivided"— Burke also praises in Counter-Statement♦ There Burke explains the power of De Gourmont * s method as rhetorical: "Man associates his ideas, not in accordance with logic, or verifiable exactitude, but in accordance with his desires and his interests." 112 Burke finds De Gourmont's writings "delightfully exact," for he revises conventional ways of perceiving. For example, Burke gives a list which he says De Gourmont did not trouble to examine but which seems to fall apart by the "mere clarity of juxtaposition": "virtue-recompense; wrong-punishment; God-goodness; crime—remorse; duty-happiness; future- progress" (CS, p. 23). The clarity of juxtaposition is the clarity of metaphor and enthymemes, a clarity achieved by the performative power of language and by the creative actions of readers. Dissociation is the counterpart to synthesis, both of which for Burke function rhetorically to revise expectations. At this point, Burke makes the critical association between "dissociation" and symbolism, between binary oppositions and the similar enthymemic quality inherent for Burke in the use of symbols: The method was clearly a companion discovery to symbolism, which sought its effects precisely by utilizing, more programactically than in any previous movement, the clusters of associations surrounding the important words of a poem or fiction. And such writers as James Joyce and Gertrude Stein are clearly making associative and disassociative processes a pivotal concern in their works. Any technical criticism of our methodological authors of today must concern itself with the further development and schematization of such ideas as De Gourmont was considering. (CS, pp. 23-24) The pivotal concerns in the works of Joyce and Stein are the pivotal 19 concerns in the fiction and criticism of Burke. In "Mrs. Maecenas," what the widow does for her young genius is to disassociate the notions of aesthetics and ascetics with the wedge of experience: "You may find that if you forget art long enough to live, your art may be all the stronger for it afterwards." The 113 relationship comes to an end in the next moment when Siegfried finds it "disagreeable to think so practically about these things." As Mrs. Maecenas adjusts her pillow, she "glances down at the white of her exposed neck," and then looks up to see with horror the pimples on Siegfried’s face. She realizes that her genius has blossomed, and for the first time she sees him as the adolescent he is rather than as the genius she hopes to make him become. She also realizes that her exhortations to him to experience life have been motivated by her desires for experience. She disassociates the mother/muse when she sees her white neck and the boy's pimples. The sexual symbolism in the story is blatant, with the widowed woman, the pimpled youth, the images of Adonis, and the "dim red drop-light burning in the window." But in each case, Burke revises the reader’s conventional associations with the symbols. The conventional and the individual are juxtaposed in a process of dis- association so that readers can no longer perceive the symbols in the familiar way. , In the preface to The Complete White Oxen, Burke also refers to the symbols in "In Quest of Olympus" with its succession of upward and downward ways, the "final apparent ascent actually being" an "enigmatic descent." In this story Burke also disassociates the con ventional meanings of symbols and the individuated meanings created by the specific context, so that readers are compelled to reconcile the two and to revise conventional expectations of symbols. Burke cites pages 334-338 in Language as Symbolic Action where he discusses 114 the ambiguity of binary terms by explaining how the "'eschatological' transfiguration was, unintentionally, a scatological one, describing the scene of the poetic Ego in narrative terms ab ovo to a final flush down the drain." He describes his transformation of the Holy Trinity into a "purely human family and next into the sheerly fecal." Burke's "break-throughs" in such anal conceptions are not unlike the thoughts of Joyce whose Leopold Bloom sits on the jakes in the "Calypso" sections of Ulysses, himself the Christ-figure whose excretions will fertilize the earth, whose death will become life, and whose written excretions in Tit bits will become the food for thousands' sexual hunger. "In Quest of Olympus" is a "whole succession of 'peripeties'": from the symbol of birth as climbing out of a cave, to "break-away" and ascent in adolescence when the protagonist chops down a tree, to the name-change when the protagonist confronts the ambiguities of sex, to compensatory ascent which proves unstable, to the descent of Christ and His cumulative ascent, a return to the womb that is "ambiguously, or enigmatically, cloacal." At each stage, readers revise conventional symbols as they learn that symbolic meanings are not predetermined but are created through a specific action in a particular situation. Burke's use of symbols demonstrates clearly the poet-rhetorician. For symbols to be persuasive, he gauges the distance between the conventional and the individuated association and between his experiences and those of readers. The rhetorician and poet gauge analogically, not logically, to find the possible means of persuasion. 115 He persuades readers not to a particular point of information but to an attitude of enthymeme-making, to a re-visionary process. Towards a. Better Life: Symbolically Speaking In his novel, Towards a. Better Life: Being a_ Series of Epistles or Declamations, 1931, Burke exploits the rhetoric of the symbol to such an extent that his method becomes "rotten with perfection." The novel incorporates the formal experiments with narration, characteri zation, and symbols but develops each so that readers confront choices and turns constantly. Reading the novel requires an act of faith that through the qualitative progressions the reader will feel a sense of rightness and meaning "after the event." Burke’s novel does not compare in intrinsic merit to major Modern novels, but it reflects his reading of the novels of his contemporaries. Major Modern fiction, and Burke’s own fiction, provide him with the basis for his critical theory, dramatism. He published the novel as a "work in progress" before 1929, and it is perhaps best understood in this revisionary 20 sense. Again, Burke's comments in the preface to The Complete White Oxen provide a "way in" to the novel. He says that the whole of "Prince LLan" is "but decorative, a 'masque'; yet in its nature as a doodle it does symbolize a basic pattern of mind (that was to take a more serious, or even urgent, turn in my novel, Towards a Better Life)." The novel symbolizes the character's and the author's basic pattern of mind, a "split into two selves," like the two terms of a metaphor or enthymeme which readers reconcile. 116 In the preface to the second edition of the novel in 1966, Burke explains tjiat he originally intended to "handle the story in the customary manner of the objective, realistic novel," but a "different framework seemed imperative." He shifts from the linear, realistic novel to the non-linear, symbolist novel, a revision from a syllogistic progression to a qualitative progression: So I reversed the process, emphasizing the essayistic rather than the narrative, the emotional predicament of my hero rather than the details by which he arrived at them. . . . In form, the resultant chapters are somewhat like a sonnet sequence, a progression by stages, by a series of halts; or they might be compared to an old-style opera in which stress is laid upon the arias whereas the transition from one to the next is secondary. (TBL, p. xiii) Burke's "anti-novel" contains the disjointed kind of narrative progression and the multiplicity of selves and voices that are internal and external. Once again, he describes enthymemic structures which involve readers in symbolic action. His novel moves by qualitative progression, more typically found in poetry, music, or drama than in prose fiction. He omits explicit transitions to produce "halts" or enthymemes. Burke justifies his experiments in narrative by claiming they reflect the "past of English prose," before the present "newspaper and 21 narrative styles": There is no reason why prose would continue ter be judged good prose purely because it trails along somewhat like the line left by the passage of a caterpillar. (TBL, p. xx) Burke's historical and excretorial argument against realistic, linear, and logical narrative recommends his "formalized mode of writing" 117 which he says should be "taken somewhat ’tropically.'" His narrative experiments oppose the precept of that day to "write as one would write a laundry list, shunning any construction likely to force the mind into a choice where there need be no choice." Burke adopts the traditional epistolary novel, with its semblance of realism, in order to develop his symbolist novel. He uses various devices to force readers to make choices and to voice their responses. Instead of giving information, Burke uses the psychology of information as a bit of meat to distract the reader so that the psychology of form can work. John Neal, the author of the letters, dialogues with Alter Ego, the silent recipient of the epistles. The table of contents and the epistolary form make clear the voiced quality of the fiction, all of which Burke puts in direct quotes. In the first section of Part One, "my converse becomes a monologue," Neal writes to himself about his inability to communicate, but his fanciful style and the absence of a responder invite readers to enter into dialogue. Neal's language, he says, has become merely "the twitter of many unrelated birdnotes," and he fears the "inability to retort." Such self-reflections involve readers who cannot understand the unrelated birdnotes and want to retort. Neal's monologue becomes dialogue with the reader, but also with himself. He continually contradicts himself, partially recounts what happened between Anthony and Florence to make himself more significant in the story-within-the-story, and he includes excerpts from his own 118 letters. Neal is "split into two selves," Neal and Alter Ego, but the multiplicity of his identity includes his former and future selves, his fictional self, and the various views of himself which he imagines others hold. Through his declamations, he constructs himself for others, by continually interpreting himself as others might see him. Burke says that the novel might be classed "among the many rituals of rebirth which mark our fiction," but the rebirth of Neal, the resurrection of selves, is his fictional construction of himself. He revises himself by attempting to revise others' expectations of him. In characterizing Neal, Burke creates the Modern schizophrenic, the self of multiple personalities and voices, whose core is decentered. He achieves selfhood through fictional creations which he speculates will suit his audience's expectations and desires. Neal’s unending voice connects him, however tentatively, with humanity. Self-reflexiveness involves readers, but it also entails the "real" as opposed to the fictional author. Like Neal, the author cannot make his point and cannot be sure others are listening to him. Conversation means a conversion of the self to adapt to the other— a "split into two selves." Burke plays the role of reader and writer, in dialogue with himself. The novel is a collection of letters never sent, of events which never happened, of characters who never existed, of the mental state of virginity, and of the virgin state of mentality. No clear caterpillar lines in the fiction distinguish fact and fiction. The "motivational jungle" where "anybody can do anything for any reason," 119 even the reader, turns all the world Into drama. Time and identity are fluid, as Neal merges with Alter Ego, Florence with Genivieve, the author Neal with the author Burke, the reader with Alter Ego, and the reader-author with the writer-reader. Readers become alter egos to Burke, to whom he writes. Burke carries his experiments with a dis jointed kind of form, internal and external motives and voice, and with symbols to the extreme. The novel, rotten with perfection, forces readers to make choices, but with the understanding that "if decisions were a choice between alternatives, decision would come easy." In Burke’s fiction and criticism, "decision is in the selection and formulations of alternatives," in the performance of symbolic actions, rather than in the realities of the world. Without explicit transitions, pronoun references, subjects, chronology, identities, or places, readers make tentative meaning from the chaos by recreating the fiction according to their own motives and situations. In Burke’s extreme rhetoric in Towards a_ Better Life, we can see comparable though perhaps more effective examples of experiments found in major Modern literature. Burke's theory of symbolic action, derived from his own fiction and that of his contemporaries, provides a coherent framework for understanding the various formal experiments characteristic of Modernism, all of which are attempts to find the possible means of persuasion in a given context. 120 Notes william H. Rueckert, Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963), p. viii. 2 Ibid., p. 9. 3 Ibid., p. vii. Ibid., p. vii. "*For example, see Burke's "Poetics in Particular; Language in General" in LASA, pp. 24-43. There Burke explains the contradiction in Poe's "The Philosophy of Composition" as a discrepancy between his perspectives as poet and critic. He explains that the "principles of composition 'come first' in the sense of logical priorities," but that "their formulation may or may not, most often decidedly does not, come first in the sense of temporal priority." He treats this distinction between logical and temporal priorities again in "The First Three Chapters of Genesis" in ROR, pp. 171-272. The distinction between logical and temporal is a distinction between composition and revision, or between qualitative and syllogistic progressions. 6 T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 1933 (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), p. 151. ^Early works on narrative, such as Robert Scholes and Robert Kellog's The Nature of Narrative (London: Oxford University Press, 1966) and Wayne C. Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961), provide a context for more recent work on the non-linear, non-logical, and non-realistic nature of narrative. See, for examples, Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978); Critical Inquiry, 7 (Autumn, 1980, special issue on narrative); and Gerard Gennette, "Boundaries of Narrative," New Literary History, 8 (Autumn, 1976), 1-13. See also, Burke's "Three Definitions," Kenyon Review, XII (Spring, 1951), 173-192, where he discusses Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a "lyric novel" (p. 174): ". . . the structure leading itself readily to a musical accompaniment strongly repetitive in quality; the gratification of the whole residing in the nature of the work as an orderly summation of emotional experience otherwise fragmentary, inarticulate, and unsimplified." g Several recent works examine strategies which give voice to internal consciousness and multiple selves of characters and authors. Burke's revision from internal monologue to dramatic dialogue characterizes much Modern and contemporary fiction. See, for examples, the following: Hugh Kenner, Joyce's Voices (Berkeley: University of 121 California Press, 1978); Robert Kiely, Beyond Egotism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980); James Narremore, The World Without Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Paul Hernadi, Beyond Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972); and Roy Pascal, The Dual Voice (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977). It is interesting, in this connection, to recognize that Pound, in his "Paris Letter" to The Dial (June, 1922), praises Joyce, not for his "mythical method" as Eliot does, but for his incorporation of voices into written prose: "Joyce speaks, if not with the tongues of men and angels, at least with a many-tongued and multiple language." The dialogic quality of fiction, which Pound, Burke, and Joyce dramatize, lies at the heart of the rhetoric of the symbol. See "Three Definitions" where Burke discusses Joyce’s speaking portrait of Stephen in terms of Platonic dialogue and "The Dead" as dialogic transcendence. For Burke’s comments on Joyce's "glossalalia," his speaking in tongues in the later fiction, see, for example, Counter-Statement, p. xiv and p. 167; Permanence and Change, p. 54 and p. 113; and The Philosophy of Literary Form, p. 43, p. 221, and p. 233. Burke understands Joyce's language as the "externalization of the internal." He discusses Lawrence's use of primitive speech as a return to childlike nature and to the unconscious in Rhetoric of Religion, pp. 168-9. In Language as Symbolic Action, pp. 262-3, Burke discusses the contradiction in Lawrence's fiction: "All told, he loquaciously celebrated the wisdom of silent things." Burke refers to Eliot's use of voices in The Waste Land, in Counter-Statement, p. 138. 9 See David Lodge's The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of Modern Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977); Jonathan Culler's The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981); and Critical Inquiry, 5 (Autumn, 1978), special issue on metaphor. Also see Harold Bloom's article, "The Breaking of Form," in Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: The Seabury Press, 1979), pp. 1-38, where he disagrees with Jakobson, using Burke as the authority for his objections. Burke's theory of all language as poetic and rhetoric transcends the binary binds which lock many discussions, by his argument that all figures function enthymemically. 10In "Poetics in Particular; Language in General," in Language as Symbolic Action, Burke describes the "interesting shift" in Eliot's poetry and criticism: "In the case of T. S. Eliot's poetry, an interesting shift took place, as regards questions of this sort. In his early 'Prufrock' days, when Mr. Eliot insisted that even quite personal lyrics were to be viewed not as in any sense self-portraits but as dramatic postures adopted professionally by the poet, the 122 critics in the quarterlies generally abided by these rules. But later, when he began writing such poems of religious devotion as the Quartets, the rule somehow became altered; and the attitudes in these later poems were treated not simply as dramatic postures adopted by a professional for poetic effects, but as a sincere personal interchange between Mr. Eliot and his God, though under conditions that permitted the public at large to take a sympathetic peek at his poignant private drama." Burke argues against Eliot’s impersonal theory of art in Counter- Statement, p. 196. Lyndall Gordon's Eliot's Early Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) and James E. Miller’s _T. Sh Eliot* s Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of One Demon (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1977) explore fruitfully the perspnal dimensions of Eliot's early and late poetry. 11 Rueckert argues that Counter-Statement systematizes the theory of pure art in The Complete White Oxen, but he explains that Burke finally "came to the realization that poetry is after all about something and that it causes effects other than the aesthetic charge ('exaltation as the correctness of the procedure*) which so excited Flaubert and Burke's contemporaries" (p. 10). As we have seen in Burke's discussions of Flaubert, De Gourmont, Pater, and Mann, Burke argues that even pure art is rhetoric. 12 Three stories published in The Complete White Oxen were published prior to 1924: "The Man of Forethought" in 1919, "The Soul of Tafha" in 1920, and "The Metamorphosis of Venus" in 1924. 13 Burke's formal and stylistic twists lead Rueckert to interpret the "progression in the book" as movement towards "symbolic and fantastic stories which are primarily vehicles for achieving a variety of stylistic and formal effects." This art-for-art*s-sake interpre tation, with the corresponding definition of rhetoric as mere stylistic devices, characterizes early reactions to The Complete White Oxen and to the formal experiments in early Modern literature. For responses to Burke, see Rueckert*s Critical Responses to Burke, 1924-1966 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,.._1969)-s------ especially pages 1-18 on the early fiction. We can better understand Burke's fiction, not in the context of pure art, but in the context of Pound's rhetorical challenge to "Make It New" and in the context of Shklovsky's theory of "defamiliarization," both of which are rhetorical, rather than poetics, orientations. "^Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 136. Also see Kenner's "The Rhetoric of Silence," James Joyce Quarterly,' 14 (Summer, 1977), 382-394. Walter A. Davis, in The Act of Interpretation: A Critique of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 181, refers to Heidegger's treatment of "silence as a mode of discourse" in Being and Time. 123 See Kenneth S. Goodman, "Reading: A Psycholinguistic Guessing Game," Journal of Reading Specialist, 6 (1967), 126-135, and Frank Smith, Understanding Reading: A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Reading and Learning to Read (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971), for contemporary reading theories which confirm Burke's reading theory outlined as early as Counter-Statement. Goodman and Smith define reading as a "psycholinguistic guessing game," an action performed by readers whose expectations and predictions are based on "prior knowledge," gained through life, reading, and the present reading experience. 16 Recent Joyce criticism explores the reader's active role in constructing meaning. See, for examples, Marilyn French, The Book as World: James Joyce* s Ulysses (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976); Brook Thomas, "Ulysses": A Book of Many Happy Returns; and the James Joyce Quarterly, 16 (Fall/Winter, 1979), a structuralist and reader response issue. 17 Roland Barthes, S/Z, translated by Richard Miller (New York: 111 and Wang, 1974). X8 Stanley Fish summarizes these issues in "Normal Circumstances, Literal Language, Direct Speech Acts, the Ordinary, the Everyday, the Obvious, What Goes without Saying, and Other Special Cases," Critical Inquiry, 4 (Summer, 1978), 625-644. Like Burke, Fish argues for the context-dependent nature of meaning. See Burke's semantic theory of the "five dogs" in LASA and his theory of contextual and familial definitions in GOM, pp. 24-26. 19 In Counter-Statement, Burke explains that De Gourmont's method of "dissociation" was "clearly a companion discovery to symbolism," and that "such writers as James Joyce and Gertrude Stein are clearly making association and dissociation process a pivotal concern of their works" (CS, p. 23). The pivotal concern did not manifest itself only in the dissociation and association of words— their synonyms, antonyms, and modifiers— but also at other levels of discourse. For example, Burke discusses Joyce's Ulysses as "perhaps the most elaborate re-individuation in all history" because the mythic associations were not aimed to reproduce similar effects under new situations but to produce a "strictly 'un-Homeric' effect" (CS, p. 149). Joyce's juxtaposition of the myth with the real creates an enthymemic structure which readers realize by supplying the missing links. In Permanence and Change, he discusses Eliot's dissociation in the phrase, "decadent athleticism," as an example of a character istic literary method— "planned incongruity" (p. 90). He shows Lawrence's attempts to dissociate expected causal relationships, through the example of his statement that "growing crops make the sun shine," a reversal of the "scientific version of causality" (PC, p. 330). Burke agrees that "our notion of causality as a succession 124 by pushes from behind is thus a disguised way of resisting that exposition abide by the conventions of good argument1 " (PC, p. 99). Like Burke, Lawrence redefines symbols contextually, and his writing is a discovery process, a dramatization of his own mind at work. For Burke, terms are linguistic conveniences, not metaphysical realities, and, therefore, they can be revised, for rhetorical reasons: "Such considerations have bearing on Bergson's proposal that we programmatically combine logical opposites, on the grounds that conflicts are not in nature, but in the implements of logic itself. This proposal led us to consider the question of metaphors and analogy in thinking, whether one can justly distinguish between logical and analogical thought" (PC, p. 99). Transcendence is achieved rhetorically, by understanding language as performance and by the "adoption of another point of view," from which opposite terms cease to be opposites (ATH, p. 336). 20 For critical responses to Towards a Better Life, see Rueckert's Critical Responses to Kenneth Burke, pp. 30-50. 21 Robert Alter, in Partial Magic: The Novel as Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), makes a similar argument, with emphasis on the self-reflexive tradition in fiction. 125 CHAPTER FOUR BURKE AND CONTEMPORARY LITERARY CRITICISM: WAYS IN, WAYS OUT, AND WAYS ROUNDABOUT Burke In the Contemporary Critical Scene It is not surprising that several literary critics who advocate indeterminacy enlist Burke as champion of this view, considering the burden he places on readers, both in his theory of symbolic action and in his own, enthymemic texts.^ Burke’s characteristic method is "roundabout," so that readers actively participate in the symbolic drama. While he approaches matters roundabout, he addresses readers directly and frequently to elicit their responses and assistance— "Now, where are we?" But it is also not surprising that critics’ attempts to encompass . 2 Burke as advocate of a particular critical persuasion usually fail. His dramatistic theory anticipates, and I will argue even supercedes, post-structuralist criticism; at the same time, his theory includes more traditional contemporary methods. Burke concerns himself with "ways in" to texts, with "frames of acceptance," and with "attitudes of assent," but he also looks for "ways out," "frames of rejection,” and "attitudes of dissent." Together his approach becomes "roundabout" or "rebirth rituals." Through rhetoric, he transcends the binary oppositions of determinate or indeterminate meanings. According to Burke, critics perceive texts as determinate or not because of personal, social, and historical reasons. Texts are not 126 determinate or indeterminate. ' The equation established by the linking verb "is" establishes not a truth but a metaphor, a working hypothesis, and the appropriate response is not acceptance but enthymeme-making. Critical readings necessarily stand pragmatic tests because language, the self, and the institution of criticism are rhetorical and pragmatic constructions. Critics make choices which have consequences, but they make choices in the contexts of situations and cultures. At this point, Burke supercedes contemporary critics partisan to the idea of indeterminate meaning. Current literary theorists assert the indeterminacy of texts as if their statements are referentially true. Some seem determined that texts are indeterminate, but Burke understands that personal motives and audience expectations cause such claims. He shows throughout his writings that distinctions, such as determinate and indeterminate, have linguistic not ontological status. Binary oppositions define each other, not a reality beyond either. To call a text determinate or indeterminate casts a metaphor; such motivated performances have real, symbolic consequences. As if in response to his own statement, Burke also argues that texts themselves lead to particular attitudes, tendencies towards determinacy or indeterminacy. While he argues through his own terministic screen of all language as symbolic action, Burke acknowledges differences in degree to which language appears drama- tistic. He also deconstructs his own theory, saying that it is not necessarily true but is right for the time, because it applies to symbol-using, symbol-abusing, and symbol-fusing man. Early Modern 127 texts which exploit the rhetoric of the symbol serve as Burke's prime examples of indeterminate texts. In his terms, current indeterminist criticism is the dialectical counterpart to this literature. The poetic precedes the critical, and he implies that contemporary literature has not yet generated its own criticism. At this point, Burke again "modulates" his own argument, for he adds that even so-called indeterminate texts become determined through time and readings. History and culture generate notions of indeterminacy; the more unfamiliar, the more indeterminate, for people are not able to perceive forms as information. For a time, forms are screens, not subjects. Burke adds a further point: the extent to which newness is valued is itself a rhetorical matter. Burke's own texts encourage readers to attitudes of both determinacy and to attitudes of indeterminacy. The reciprocity between these two attitudes towards meaning teaches an important lesson about human discourse in general which Burke all but requires his readers to learn. Perhaps most important to realize, Burke very seldom writes about meaning or discusses directly the question of determinacy or indeterminacy. His theory assumes the meaningfulness of all actions, because they are purposeful and consequential. Therefore, Burke's broad conception of language frees him from the particular binary oppositions that bind many contemporary critics, such as literary versus ordinary language, text versus world, meaning versus significance, and reader versus writer. 128 But Burke's freedom from such binds plunges him into other concerns, with motives, scenes, and history. His assumption that language is meaningful compels him to explore dimensions beyond textual meaning. "Ways In": "Frames of Acceptance" and "Attitudes of Assent" Before too easily aligning the corporate Kenneth Burke with one faction of literary critics, Heidegger's French descendents whom E. D. Hirsch calls "cognitive atheists," I must first abstract the 3 . determinist in Burke. In Attitudes Toward History, Burke says, "one must learn how to read books, not how to fear them'. 1 (ATH, p. 104), and he urges readers to adopt "attitudes of assent" by offering strategies for reading which yield the author's intentions. Adopting "frames of acceptance" tends readers toward determinate meaning. Although Burke in the 1920s-1940s presents his critical theory as counter-statements to the New Criticism, his dramatistic theory and New Critical theory develop from the same matrix, the symbolist movements in literature and philosophy, both of which espouse the non- ref erential nature of language and both of which in complex ways 4 respond to the growing validity of scientific interpretation. Burke's rhetorical theory and New Criticism's a-rhetorical theory arose from the same political, economic, and educational scene in America. Despite significant differences, for our purposes we can most advantageously see Burke and New Critics in dialogue with each other. Similarly, E. D. Hirsch's intentionalist theory, which I use to represent current traditional or determinist theories, converses with 129 New Criticism."* Although Hirsch presents his theory as antagonistic to the intentional fallacy, his debt to other New Critical doctrines becomes evident, especially from today’s perspective. When we place Hirsch*s determinist theory in dialectical realtionship with Burke's dramatistic theory of motives, we can assess the "margins of overlap" and the subsequent areas of disagreement between Burke and other contemporary determinist critics. The dialectics of criticism grow apparent as soon as the per formative view of language— the view that any theory is only one voice in an on-going dialogue— modifies the referential conception— the view that a particular critical theory is true. Perspective, achieved by rhetoric and history, reveals the interactions among seemingly divergent theories. From one angle, Burke, like the New Critics, argues that language is non-referential and symbolic. But New Critics took the non- ref erential theory of language to define the text as autonomous, removed from authorial intentions, reader expectations, and historical contexts. Their theory of the symbol allowed them to isolate the work as if the symbol has meaning unto itself.^ In contrast, Burke uses the non-referential theory of language and his definition of the symbol as a "verbal parallel to a pattern of experience" to establish his dramatistic theory. His theory presents the dialectical relation ships between the poem and the world, the poem and the writer, the poem and the reader, the reader-and the world, and the writer and the reader. Burke's Pentad, his formula for symbolic action, includes the 130 dimensions of M. H. Abrams’ theory of discourse, but Burke defines the relationships among elements as dialogic rather than referential.^ The distinctions between a dialectical and a referential theory permit Burke's unconventional definition of the symbol as rhetorical. Differences between Burke and New Critics on this issue indicate differences between him and other contemporary determinist critics, such as genre critics, historical critics, psychoanalytical critics, and structuralist critics, all of whom to some extent adopt the 8 scientific method of proof. The definition of language as performance leads many critics to treat art objectively and systematically, in order to validate it in a culture where science persuades. The definition also leads critics to remove literature from time and life and to search for norms, types, and general principles. The poetics approach to texts, scientific in its concern for constancies, parts, species, and universals, has developed into the correct literary » 9 approach. For Burke, however, the performative definition of language leads to the rhetoric of the symbol, to persuasion by analogical rather than logical means. Unlike other determinists, the determinist in Burke attempts not to make literary study into a science, but to make science into literature. All language, including science, is symbolic action. Burke also understands the performative nature of his own definition: language is metaphorically, not truly, symbolic action. As rhetorician, Burke continues to assume the regularities and con ventionalities in language, in the mind, and in the "body dogmatic”; 131 on this basis, he -discovers the variations and differences that make language persuasive in a given context. The New Critic in Kenneth Burke The growing validity of science as a way of knowing and as a method of proof influences Burke's responses to literature and the responses of his New Critical friends. The declining persuasiveness of traditional historical proof, in the face of scientific persuasion, also influences their responses. But New Critics responded to the scientific revolution by giving status to literary study through giving it the appearance of science, where Burke incorporates science into literature by arguing that science is not a body of knowledge or truths, but a language, a terministic screen determined by motives and historical constraints. For Burke, objectivity is a rhetorical stance. While New Critics denied historical scholarship, Burke realizes history's part in determining language acts. He understands New Critics' motives to legitimize and popularize their critical enterprise in terms of the opposition, and, unlike many contemporary antagonists to New Criticism, Burke recognizes the academic context and broad historical scene out.of which New Criticism arose. Burke adopts many attitudes of New Criticism, but he sees them as possible approaches, rather than as the proper approach. He never hesitates to write about the work itself, to narrow the circumference for close reading, but he does so aware that he excludes other revealing perspectives. He writes about coherence, but usually locates coherence in writers and readers. He also analyzes the ______________________________________________________________________________ 132 psychologies of writers and readers, but, for Burke, Freudian, .Tung-fan, and other psychological approaches are terministic screens, each reflecting the scientist's own purposes and situations. Such per spectives are not less persuasive or practical on this account; theories, models, and metaphors are handy.'*'® The perspective of dramatism has perhaps widest applicability because it is based in language, with capacities for reduction and scope. More specifically, Burke's theory of symbolic action is the conversational counterpoint to New Criticism in that both respond to science, and Burke responds to New Criticism's response to science. Obviously, New Criticism's response to science was more immediately effective than was Burke's, perhaps because New Criticism joined the camp of science. This move was easier for critics to make and for readers to accept, than was Burke’s attempt to revise science into a metaphor. At the time, his revision seemed a denial of truth itself. In time, however, the scientific paradigm has undergone revolutions, and Burke's approach to science as metaphor gains acceptance by scientists and others. In time also, New Critical doctrines of objectivity, autonomy, and coherence turn into critical postures rather than truths. We can perhaps best see the effectiveness of the metaphor that texts are autonomous in counter-statements of today, which to a great extent echo Burke's views in the late 1920s. Looking at Burke's theory of poetic change in the context of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, we can see how Burke's responses to scientific methods of proof differ from New 133 Critical responses. Kuhn presents his disconnected, linear view of scientific change as a correction to the cumulative, linear view. Burke, operating within his poetic terministic screen, argues.that a particular paradigm does not replace another in a linear sequence, whether connected or disconnected. Instead, "modulations" "socialize a point of view." Kuhn argues that "normal science" operates on the basis of paradigms, and when the existing paradigm cannot encompass the subversive anomalies, then investigations begin that finally lead to a new set of commitments. Because the new paradigm changes previous rules and practices, a new theory is a replacement, not an increment. In contrast to this structure of scientific revision, Burke accounts for change by the revolutionary power of language, motives, and history, not by "something out there," as Kuhn does: Though all organisms are critics in the sense that they interpret signs about them, the experimental, speculative techniques made available by speech would seem to single out the human species as the only one possessing an equipment for going beyond the criticism of experience to the criticism of criticism. (PC, p. 6) Language is not an isolated system for Burke, but an historical construct which people use and recreate for their own purposes. Burke does not define reality as something "other"; and "experience" is a word, rather than something with a beginning and end. He defines reality as "what things will do to and for us" (PC, p. 22). While Kuhn argues for the "necessity of revolution," Burke 12 realizes the inevitability of change in his poetic theory. Hxs 134 revislonary theory presents a "notion of life as method" (PC, p. 261), and it considers "the universe as a making rather than a made," at least when discussing "it from the ethical, creative, poetic point of view" (PC, p. 260). The rhetorician focuses on changes in forms of the world, mind, and language, whereas the scientist looks for 13 continuity, even within change, even when its shape is discontinuous. Burke responds, then, to the growing validity of science, not by substituting one paradigm for another, as if another is new. New Critics did accept the structure of scientific revolution in their objective stance, their positing the text as autonomous, and their replacement of the old method by a new one. Kuhn's theory marks a shift from a syntagmatic to a paradigmatic conception of progress in science. New Critics also marked a shift from syntagmatic to paradigmatic views of texts. They both view their shifts as progress towards truth. Burke views the old and new paradigms as rhetorical attitudes and the terms as oppositions which define each other. Burke's perception of change as non-linear, whether continuous or discontinuous, cannot surprise, for he rarely perceives anything as linear. Qualitative progressions do not move in a straightforward sequence. Even narrative becomes a "kind of disjointed form." He sees the development of self, in his criticism and fiction, as 14 dialectical progression. He changes self to a multiplicity of selves and voices. He regards history as neither continuous nor dis continuous, for history is a language, which modulates "to socialize a point of view." 135 Burke remains committed to a theory which allows him to criticize that theory. He realizes that his theory is a screen, a "trained incapacity," which reveals as it conceals. The poetic approach does admit uncertainties as well as certainties, particulars as well as generalities. Validity in interpretation comes from the human and historical — the very forces which science tries to eliminate in order to achieve validity: Action is fundamentally ethical, since it involves preferences. Poetry is ethical. Occupation and preoccupation are ethical. The ethical shapes our selections of means. It shapes our structures of orientation, while these in turn shape the perceptions of the individual born within the orientation. The ethical is thus linked with the communicative, when considered in the broadest scene, not merely as purveying information but also as the sharing of sympathies and purposes, the doings of acts in common, as with the leveling process of communicating vessels. (PC, p. 250) The Determinist in Burke: E. D. Hirsch as Scientific Type The theory of language as symbolic action includes ethos, logos, and pathos. Therefore, a legitimate orientation for Burke seeks authorial intention. He writes both a grammar and a rhetoric of motives. But for Burke, motives also dictate the search for authorial intention, and validity comes not only from scientific investigation. Interpretation is a rhetorical matter, and sometimes the scientific is rhetorical. Experience and emotions, as well as logic, give validity. Burke and Hirsch both seek authorial intention, but the intention— alist in Burke is only one of his critical attitudes, whereas authorial 136 intention seems to be Hirsch’s consuming motive. They also share ethical concerns; an understanding of genres and types as conceptions which establish expectations for writers and readers; definitions of language which include the ordinary and the literary; aims to create harmony and community through language; and rhetorical motives to make literature persuasive in a scientific world. And yet, their attitudes toward each of these issues differ. Even though they share the attitude of determinacy, Hirsch’s key term is "intentions" and Burke’s key term is "motives." Hirsch believes in willed actions, extricated from the uncertainties and messiness of humanity; Burke writes, a rhetoric of the parlor room and the barnyard. In Validity in Interpretation, Hirsch makes his arguments in traditional literary and philosophical terms, and he strictly employs the syllogism as his method of proof. He approaches literary study .scientifically, trying to establish truth, or at least a norm for interpretation. But Hirsch’s own motives seem complexly motivated. His intended audience consists of the community of scholars who will know the traditions out of which he speaks, or the scholars who may not know but wish they did. He argues in terms appropriate to his mentors, the New Critics, particularly William K. Wimsatt and R. S. Crane to whom he dedicates the book. On the surface, Hirsch contradicts the New Critical intentional fallacy, but he adopts the scientific model of his mentors in order to validate meaning by objective and logical 137 proof. Hirsch eliminates many motives in his definition of intentions as willed actions. Although Hirsch aims for truth, at least for concensus, his motives are also rhetorical. He tries to outdo his precursors, first by being more scientific than they, and second by seeming to discover a line of factual and logical development extending from authorities in the past to himself, a line unaffected by the author's own intentions. The dialogic dimensions of Hirsch's rhetoric appear in the table of contents where he sets up his New Critical opponents through direct quotes from them: "The Meaning of the Text Changes— Even for the Author"; "It Does Not Matter What an Author Means— Only What His Text Says"; "The Author's Meaning is Inaccessible"; and "The Author Does Not Know What He Means." Rhetoric motivates Hirsch, and in 1967 he determines that scientific thinking and method will be the probable means of persuasion. Scientific method appears in Hirsch's. clean cuts between terms — "meaning" and "significance," "authorial intention" and reader "conventions," "whole" and "part," "intrinsic" and "extrinsic," and 16 "author" and "reader." Burke prides himself on the fact that his first book begins with "perhaps" and ends with "norms." Hirsch begins with the phrase, "It is a task for the historian of culture to explain why," and he ends with the phrase, "It lies within our capacity to say on firm principles, 'Yes, that answer is valid' or 'No, it is not.'" He arduously tries to separate true and false and fact and opinion to 138 establish "norms" as truth. He wants to fix meanings and use language referentially. Burke, on the other hand, understands criticism as personally motivated and language as permanently changing. In The Aims of Interpretation, Hirsch revises several of his arguments to accommodate criticism of Validity. He shifts from "validity" to "aims" in recognition of the major role perspective plays for readers and writers, and in recognition of the rhetorical force psychological arguments have at the time over philosophical logical arguments. He also changes from logical to ethical arguments: to read for authorial intention is an ethical decision, and the right one. He adopts a communication model, arguing that for communication to occur the reader must respect what the author says as his intentions, before they become the reader*s understanding. Hirsch*s distinction here between "meaning" and "significance" creates a two-step, temporal model which he claims holds true across time and space. He revises "meaning" to equal authorial intention because by this terminological move people can reach agreement. Hirsch*s theory of synonymity, fundamental to his approach, argues that people can agree on what words mean. He acknowledges the difficulties in reaching concensus, and he admits the psychological reality that the self changes in time. He includes Piaget's notions of assimilation and accommodation, but as in his readings of "meaning" and "significance," these become separate steps, not terms to account for an interactive process. Despite revisions in Aims, Hirsch remains 139 dedicated to authorial intention— because it holds the possibility for agreement— and to scientific proof. There can be little questioning of Hirsch's recommendation that people listen to each other or that people can agree in general that two meanings are synonymous. But his formulation ignores the fact that interaction between people helps define intentions. The act of writing revises intentions, and time also changes them. He locates meaning in an author frozen in time whose intentions are realized in one text only, thus he excludes intertextual or revisionist studies. Perhaps most important for our purposes, Hirsch does not realize that synonymity is enthymemic, therefore rhetorical and context-dependent. A gap exists between two terms, and people "agree" for rhetorical reasons on whether or not the terms are rightly called synonyms. Hirsch wants to close all gaps and settle matters, although he does not entertain what will happen once everyone agrees or how to maintain this state. One cannot imagine Hirsch asking, "Now, where are we?" Unlike Burke, Hirsch does not turn his theory on himself to highlight his intentions which motivate his study. He does not question how his theory implicates himself, how the theory of authorial intention compels his reader to accept his authority, not to use or abuse him. He draws a line of influence from authorities in the past to himself, as if the line is referentially true and unmotivated. He reads other texts and misuses them to fulfill his intentions, but he presents his analysis as logical and correct. His analytical divisiveness and his insistence on his criterion can hardly 140 achieve joyful concensus. Ironically, perhaps, Hirsch’s rhetoric has been enormously persuasive, for in declaring his meaning so adamantly, and withholding personal motives, he invites readers into the fray. His theory has aided indeterminists to define their opposing agruments. Although Hirsch writes about authority, he sacrifices himself as scapegoat victim and generates continuing critical discussion, not unlike, in ways, Kenneth Burke. In Attitudes Toward History, Burke proposes "attitudes of assent" and "frames of acceptance" as practical strategies for living. But he never presents these attitudes as the absolute or only criterion. He shifts back and forth between poetic structures, as the frames by which a writer copes with the quandaries of life, and poetic structures, as the frames by which a reader accepts an author's intentions. Both processes entail revision. Here Burke establishes the dialectical relationship between an author's intentions and a reader's expectations, making clear that they define each other, as "meaning" and "significance" define each other and not a "real" process. Genres, types, and categories create expectations which writers and readers reindividuate in acts of reading and writing. Burke assumes here that readers intend to discover the "writer's tic"— "You disclose the 'symbolic organization' of his tic when you have found the class of words that provokes it" (ATH, p. 193). But "tic" contrasts sharply with "intention." He admits that tracking down the meaning of symbols constitutes the "method essential to 141 analytic exegesis" (ATH, p. 194), but Burke’s statistical method and his clusters are only two of his many strategies. Analytical exegesis is only one critical move. In Burke's philosophy of composition, the writer "makes a selection in accordance with subtle, personal tests of 'propriety'" (ATH, p. 237), and he "bureaucratizes" his imagination to communicate with readers. Hirsch's philosophy is text-centered, in that the author has intentions which he puts into correct forms. He defines writing as the communication of information in the most efficient manner, and efficiency becomes a scientific value.^ Like Hirsch, Burke argues against the reader's absolute recovery of authorial intention and the author's absolute control of the reader. Symbols themselves are not absolute in the exchange between writer and reader, and "all Symbolism can be treated as the ritualistic naming and changing of identity" (ATH, p. 285). The self is not constant: a writer must "die" and be "reborn" in the act of writing. The "so-called 'I' is merely a unique combination of partially conflicting 'corporate we's'" (ATH, p. 264). Writing revises intentions, those of author and reader. What is certain, though not determinate, is that intentions arise from situations in time, and, in time, intentions affect situations. Hirsch idealizes the author's intentions as distinct from time and place, even from the real author; Burke's philosophy argues that the writer must "retain his contact with the forensic texture": "Fortunately, the destruction of a forensic texture is always far from absolute— the difference between stable and unstable forensic textures 142 is merely relative" (ATH, p. 318). His point is that poetic categories function to "indicate that whatever 'free play' there may be in aesthetic enterprise, it is held down by the gravitational pull of historical necessities" (ATH, p. 57). Rhetoric remains context- dependent and personally motivated. Throughout, Burke acknowledges the difficulties of communication, but he realizes that the diffi culties make it probable and possible, though not absolute. Burke's Determination of Reader's Intentions Not only does Burke write about "frames of acceptance," "attitudes of assent," and "ways in," he also uses them to engage readers in the quest for determinate meaning. He provides frames within frames and countless ways in. Burke begins Attitudes Toward History, by explaining that the book operates on the assumption that "getting along with people is one devil of a difficult task, but that, in the last analysis, we should all want to get along with people (and do want to)" (ATH, p. xi). He then proceeds to exploit this model of communication, making himself easy to get along with. He invokes the reader's "charity" in the introduction, and later he requests his reader's indulgence so that he can properly realize his intentions: "We must ask the reader, if he can, merely to consider it as being on the track of something. We are trying to bring up an issue— rather than to persuade anyone that we can make it crystal clear." Near the end, he apologizes so that.the reader will accept the text in all of its corruptness: 143 Frankly, we were not sufficiently aware of our procedures until we neared the end of the book (that is, we did not verbalize out implicit method into an explicit methodology). It is probably better so, since an over-exactitude of schematization, maintained throughout, would have wearied the writer and reader both. (ATH, p. 294). Burke thus apologizes for the text which he will not revise because he says that, as it is, it best conveys his intentions. He does not aim for exactitude; he writes to "socialize a point of view," and the two motives contradict each other. Burke explicitly invites readers to search for cues to his motives. He so often repeats key terms— "clusters," "discontinuities," and "bridging"— that readers turn them back on the text at hand. He encourages readers to "build symbolic bridges between his own unique combination and the social pattern." In his note to the introduction of the second edition, he acknowledges a reader's criticism, granting that his footnotes are a "blemish," but he leaves them, even adds to them, explaining that they are the only way to trace the "radiating mateirial." The framing footnotes also provide discontinuities and perspectives by incongruity, gaps through which readers recreate intentions which are forever changing. Burke even accommodates his readers to his intentions by explaining what he omitted from the text (ATH, p. 237), and he makes no effort to normalize his "tics." In Attitudes, Burke begins to formulate his theory of identi fication, in which the reader projects himself into the text, to share vicariously in the artistic experience and thereby to realize the author's intentions. "Identification" becomes a key term in his 144 rhetoric, for it lays the grounds for persuasion. But he continually revises "identification" to become a term dramatizing a metaphorical relationship between writer and reader, rather than a mystical union. In his afterword to the second edition of Attitudes, Burke provides a final frame of acceptance for this text by reaffirming his model of communication. In his terms, communication aims not to exchange information: "'communication’ is the most generalized statement of the principle 'love'" (ATH, p. 345). From this point on, Burke "spins off" from the terms "identification" and "love" to develop his theory of reading as courtship and rebirth ritual. Ironically, with these terms, the negative rears its head, and "ways in" lead to "ways out," "frames of rejection," and "attitudes of dissent." "Ways Out": "Frames of Rejection" and "Attitudes of Dissent" According to Burke, any one term is meaningless without its opposite and without a context. He implies that reading for determinate meaning necessarily— by definition, if not ontologically or logically— also requires reading with the attitude tending toward indeterminate meaning. Motives and situations determine which attitude dominates, and the attitudes interact in various ways. In A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke refines further his theory of reading as he explores the concept of identification. The idea is implicit in Counter-Statement, although he formulates it in Attitudes Toward History. In the first critical work, Burke says that in reading there is a dividing of the personality, a "thinking the 145 thoughts of another" (CS, p. 157). For Burke this is an attitudinal posture, and "identification" describes a metaphorical relationship between writer and reader, not a union. He reaches the term "identi fication" through a roundabout method, first treating it from the author's viewpoint, where he discusses writing as the "conversion.of an experiential pattern into a formula for affecting an audience" (CS, p. 157). The poet's emotion is "channelized into a symbol" with expressive and affective purposes. But identification is a two-way process, and both writer and reader attempt to think the thoughts of another. The approximate aspect of reading is further heightened because the symbol is repeatable, yet also generative. Burke explores roundabout the dialectical relationships between the writer's motive and the reader's intention, between the conventional use of a symbol and the artist's reindividuated use, and between people, symbols, and contexts. The "margins of overlap" between writer and reader are never complete; gaps, distances, and discontinuities remain. Writers and readers exploit this rhetoric of the symbol— the similarities and differences in their "patterns of experience." In later books, Burke explores further the paradox he first articulates fully in Counter-Statement about the rhetorical functioning of symbolist poetry: "Instead of saying that something is like something else, the symbolist progressed from the one thing to the other by ellipsis" (CS, p. 68). The reader, thus, "links" the dis connected symbols or supplies the missing premise to the enthymemic _ _ _ _ _ _ , 146 structure. Because Burke's theory was at first in dialogue with the New Criticism, he emphasizes the gaps, ellipses, and silences; but his theory of forms also shows that he understands, for example, that the enthymeme functions because of what is present as well as because of what is absent. Similarly, the two terms of the metaphor define each other and the distance between them, and vice versa. The dialectical relationship, rather than the referential relationship, between word and thing, between conventional meaning and reindividuated meaning, allows the reader to participate in the creation of meaning. The strong version of Burke’s indeterminist attitude states that the gaps, far from hindering the reader's comprehension, make communication possible: . . . 'standoffishness' is necessary to the form, because without it the appeal could not be maintained. For if the union is complete, what incentive can there be for appeal? Rhetorically, there can be courtship only insofar as there is division (ROM, p. 271). "Identification" is compensatory to "division," and the reading process involves both; the terms are also grounded in scenes. As we have seen earlier, the language user is a rhetorician who decides what will persuade. When the two terms of the metaphor or enthymeme are too far apart or too close together, the reader experiences "frigidity." In Rhetoric, Burke again transforms his reading theory by revising attitude dancing into a courtship ritual, ending in consummation. Dancing and courtship require an "attitude of assent," 147 beginning with "collaborative expectancy," followed by "participation" and "surrender," but division is the motivating force: Once you grasp the trend of the form, it invites participation regardless of the subject matter. . . . . the more violent your original resistance to the proposition, the weaker will be your degree of 'surrender* by 'collaborating' with the form. But in cases where a decision is still to be reached, a yielding to the form prepares for assent to the matter to be identified with it. (ROM, p. 58) Clearly the dance of reading is no solo performance, and clearly the writer's enticements and the reader's resistance are parts of the dance. What invites the reader are the distance between writer, and reader and the incomplete, enthymemic structures— when the attitude of dissent is primary. Burke's descriptions of reading as courtship ritual and consum mation anticipate Roland Barthes' description of the "erotics of reading" in The Pleasure of the Text: "gapes," "breaks," "collisions,” "seams," and "flaws" stimulate the reader's projection of meaning. His explorations of the motivating desires in reading also anticipate the current work of Reni Girard and Julia Kristeva. Girard acknowledges Burke's "principle of victimage" in his study of sacrific, 18 victimage, and mimesis. Burke's theory also anticipates Iser's phenomemological approach, with "schematized views" and "gaps" which the reader "sets in motion." There seems to be sufficient evidence in Burke and in current literary critics that the theory of the autonomous text is full of holes and that the text is not the less attractive on that account. 148 Preface: "Loosely Topical" Instead of "Pinpointingly Specific" We can, I think, justify presenting E. D. Hirsch as "type" in the terms of determinacy, because determinist critics believe in norms, concensus, and right reading. But we cannot, I think, create a representative type for indeterminist critics, for they advocate diversity and validity dependent on subjectivity, contexts, purposes, and change. We must generalize, however, in order to proceed. We must write "under erasure"; since words are inaccurate, we cross them out, but since they are necessary, we leave them legible. Indeterminist critics do not posit a truth "out there," in the real world or text world, but nevertheless they do provisionally locate meaning, oftentimes in themselves, sometimes in an individual's collective psychology, in a specific scene, in an interpretive community, in a transaction, in language itself, or in the absence of reality, text, author, or meaning. Although they do locate meaning provisionally— they must have ground to write on— they do so with attitudes quite different from those of determinist critics. At this time, and for my purposes, I propose Derrida as the "god-term," to use Burke's word. (The current reference to Derrida as the god-father to his American henchmen, the Yale Mafia, is frivolous indeed, in Derrida's sense of that word.) In time, we are creating Derrida as a cluster of terms, not as individual of will and fixed identity. As his translator says, "Jacques Derrida is also this 19 collection of texts." Some of the terms which cluster around the 149 god-term are "differance," "trace," "de-center," "absence," "under erasure," and "origin." But these terms, which are the terms also of Hegel, Husserl, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and others, are now being further revised and translated, adapted to different critical scenes. This interpretation of Derrida is, of course, consistent with his notions of trace and origins. Texts beget texts, as well as people and worlds, though not in their own images. Wayne Booth argues that the key value terms of post-structuralists 20 are practical and affective, not cognitive.. The rhetoric of con temporary literary criticism is the counterpart, I argue, of the rhetoric of the symbol. Post-structuralist philosophers, like Burke, recognize the rhetoric of philosophical language and adopt openly the enthymeme as their method of proof. Post-structuralist literary critics, like Burke, are rhetorical critics who adapt terms and methods to current situations and motives in order to find the possible means of persuasion. The rhetoric of contemporary criticism is obvious in the studies of figures and tropes, and it is also evident in the attitude tending toward defamiliarization and change. Hy "takes" on Derrida’s terms in this section are to show that Burke anticipates Derrida and other post-structuralist critics. I attempt to identify Burke and Derrida, in the sense of "identify" which they significantly share. Identification establishes a metaphorical not an ontological or referential relationship. More specifically, I align "differance" with Burke’s theory of language as symbolic action, both of which deconstruct the transcendental sign, 150 the unity of thought, word, and thing. Burke's theory of performance and Derrida's theory of free play follow from the idea of "differance," as does the notion of writing "under erasure," using language with the understanding of its inaccurateness and incompleteness. Writing becomes not referentially true but rhetorically convincing, because it 21 is the act of cognition which writer and reader share. v I then align "de-centering" with Burke's enthymeme and qualitative progression. These are de-centered figures, which are analogous to Burke's perceptions of narrative and character, neither of which develop linearly nor logically. Characters, including Burke, are multiple, without fixed beginnings or endings. Voices are multiple, not truth from a center of being. Presence and absence define each other; people and words are only more or less here or there. Finally, I align "bricoleur" with Burke's rhetorician. These alignments are, of course, realignments, and the margins of overlap are neither absolute nor exhaustive. The "gist" or "gesture," to use Burke's and Derrida's comparable terms, is that Burke supercedes indeterminist critics, temporally, logically, and rhetorically. Derrida deconstructs the logical base in philosophy to expose the rhetoric of motives; Burke terministically deconstructs the logical base in language to reveal the rhetoric of the symbol. Logically (perhaps analogically), Burke "spins off" on his terms to deconstruct not only his own interpretations but also his terms and methods. This is also the stated claim of deconstructionism; Derrida 151 reexamines the operations of familiar gestures, in keeping with Hegel’s idea that what is "familiarly known" is not properly known. Despite this stated aim, indeterminists remain fixed in their assertion that the sign does not bring forth the presence of the signified, that the authority of the text is provisional, and that origin is a trace. Burke, in contrast, continually undergoes self-deconstruction. He can be called an indeterminist, but not only an indeterminist, for this is only one critical attitude. He understands the assertion, that language is a system of differences, as a definition, a metaphor; and he understands that the definition is limited for it suggests that language is a system unto itself. Most revealing, Burke acknowledges that his theory of language as symbolic action is yet another terministic screen and not a truth. He recognizes that "differance" is a term, arising out of motives and situations. While he argues that writers and readers can assume different attitudes and select various perspectives, he admits that choices are determined by external forces also. The Indeterminist in Burke; Terms for Order Differance Saussure argues that "in language there are only differences"; there is no unity between the word and thing. The phonic signifier is as conventional as the graphic. In other words, terms such as "presence," "origin," "center," and "endings" are rhetorically true . 152 but not referentially true, for they express desire, nostalgia, and hope. These principles and terms pervade contemporary literary theory, which time and time again deconstructs the transcendental sign, by breaking the bond that never was between language and reality. Frank Lentricchia, in After the New Criticism, demonstrates how difficult it is for critics who believe in these principles to operate on the basis of them, for they undermine the logical validity of whatever is said. Arguing on the absence of firm referential grounds is slippery business; the dancing of attitudes is a more convincing performance. In Lentricchia’s incisive analysis of Culler’s Structuralist Poetics, he shows how Culler treats langue and parole as ontological rather than linguistic realities, ignoring the dialectical relationship between them. Lentricchia argues that Culler's failure results from his attempt to isolate language from history and to ignore the historical basis of his own claims. From Burke's perspective, which also includes the historical, Culler's text is rhetorically motivated. As Lentricchia acknowledges, Culler successfully packages contemporary 22 structuralist thought for American consumption. For rhetorical reasons, Culler cannot admit the unreality of what he is positing; he must make his poetics seem stable and scientifically valid. Lentricchia not only places Culler in historical perspective; he also thus places Saussure. He explains that Saussure was rejecting an unsatisfactory experience with history itself and was setting up an antihistorical principle of system. Agreeing with Fredric Jameson, 153 Lentricchia says that Saussure*s linguistics takes language as a 23 complete system, a "perpetual present." Saussure’s definition of language as a system of differences is clearly another argument against the referential truth of language. In order to make his counter arguments persuasive, Saussure overstates his case and isolates language from reality. This move does make language accessible to scientific study, the most valid method of proof at the time. Lentricchia recognizes the attempt in many areas of aesthetics and epistemology to isolate language from reality and to make it a closed, autonomous system: The ideas of the French symbolists, the English aesthetes, the critical thought of T. E. Hulme (which would feed the Anglo- American New Criticism), the aesthetics of Croce and Clive Bell, the vitalism of Henri Bergson, the earliest phenomenological disquisitions of Husserl on the epoche— each of these aesthetic and epistemological perspectives, each in its distinctive manner, sets forth an ideal of disciplinary autonomy or self- sufficiency presumably guaranteed by an explicit bracketing, to cite Husserl's key term, of extrinsic conditions and causes . . . what is established is a formalistic purity which transcends such encircling determinates as nature, various historical environments, rational consciousness, and the dis- dursiveness of so-called ordinary discourse.24 What Lentricchia does not stress are the rhetorical motives operating in aesthetics and epistemology. When language is defined as a system’ of differences, with binary oppositions defining each other instead of reality, language is removed from time. This bracketing allows for a formal purity and a separation between literary and ordinary language which serves rhetorical motives. It permits literary theorists to claim a higher truth for literature than available in ordinary 154 discourse. It allows them to adopt the scientific method, with its persuasive power in the current scene, as they state opposition to science. In Burke's terms, the poetics approach and the scientific method both attempt— for rhetorical reasons— to remove language from purposes and situations. Burke's theory is another non-referential, non-mimetic theory of language which defines language as a system of differences; yet this is only part of Burke's definition. He defines terms "in terms of each other," and the negative is a critical force in his rhetoric. But symbolic actions arise from purposes and situations. Burke begins The Rhetoric of Religion by asserting that "to use words properly we must spontaneously have a feeling for the principle of the negative" (ROR, p. 18). Throughout the book, he uses this term to develop the attitude of dissent in readers. He explains that the chapter on the negative in Bergson's Creative Evolution was a "big eye-opener" for him (ROR, p. 19). The negative in Bergson is synecdochic of his philosophy in which he posits two ways of knowing, a going all around a subject, and an entering into a subject. One is an act of analysis— "experiencing a thing in terms of what it is not"— and the other is an act of intuition. Since language for Bergson is analytical, we can assume that he uses the terms "intuition" and "duration" as analytical terms, not as referential truths. Bergson admits that in everyday life one must work by analysis, by "a translation, a development in symbols, a representation taken from successive points of view." Later he 155 reconciles the two terms by providing a way through the analytical to the intuitive: No image will replace the intuition of duration, but many different images, taken from quite different orders of things, will be able, through the convergence of their action, to direct the consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to seize upon. By choosing images as dis similar as possible, any one of them will be prevented from usurping the place of intuition it is instructed to call forth, since it would then be driven out by its rivals. . . . We shall simply have placed it in the attitude it must take to produce the desired effect and by itself to arrive at intuition.25 In Bergson, the interplay among contradictory perspectives, which the writer presents and the reader responds to, can approximate the sense of knowing a subject by entering into it. In Burke, language can approximate knowing from within by the arrangement of perspectives by incongruity, which invites the reader to play them off against each other and to create a new image through reconciliation and recreation. This kind of analysis is not logical, however; it is qualitative progression through enthymemic structures. Language is not the thing itself. Presence or intuition cannot be achieved through language, but enthymemes and metaphors, for example, can direct the consciousness and create an attitude "to produce the desired effect." Burke's perspectives by incongruity and his enthymemic structures are intended to develop attitudes and to produce effects. The very distance between the signifier and the signified is the grounds for meaningful rhetoric. As we have seen earlier, Burke also praises the power of the negative in De Gourmont's method of "dissociation" which separates 156 terms that customarily go together. These dissociations help readers perceive the world differently. De Gourmont's method is a defamiliar ization process, a questioning of "what-goes-without-saying." One of Derrida's key terms is "differance," which indicates the split between the sign and the signified. As counter-statement to his predecessors, Derrida argues against the idea that the sign brings forth the presence of the signified. The "other," whether a text, a person, or reality, is never found in all its totality of being. A sign is a structure of differences, and one sign leads to another, not to reality. The structure of the sign is determined by a trace that never was. Derrida's notion of writing "under erasure" indicates the duplicity of language. He explains that words are crossed out because they are inaccurate, but they are left legible because they are necessary. Burke would agree, but he adds that duplicity can be located also in people, who realize that language is rhetorical and not referential. Derrida's practicality can be seen as a rhetorical position, rather than a philosophical one. The critic who writes "under erasure" realizes that any interpretation is a new text, not a representation of the original, not synonymous with it. At the same time, the critic realizes that the text is not new, for each text is a non-text, with no beginning and no ending. Burke adopts such a perspective on language, texts, and self, when the situation calls for it. His theory distinguishes between symbolic action and other action— it acknowledges "differance"— but at 157 the same time his theory grants to language the reality of action. Burke merges his own texts with each other, through prefaces, cross- references, and appendices, and he continually rewrites the texts of his precursors for his own purposes. Burke assumes that reading is rewriting, since all readers operate from their own terministic screens. Burke refers to his former self as "Burke," and he speaks of his present self as "we," indicating his multiple and changing sense of identity. In Dramatism and Development, Burke explores further what language does to us and how we are the language we use. A major difference between Burke and Derrida is that Burke uses the power of the negative, the "Thou Shalt Not," to say no to his own theory and terms. As we saw in connection with the New Criticism, the rhetorical critic Burke is not immediately persuasive. Derrida’s deconstructionist criticism has had stronger impact recently than Burke's criticism over the past five decades. There are many possible explanations, but one, made in the terms of Burke and Derrida, is that Burke fails to assert or claim to have the truth. Instead, he undermines what he says. He fails to be duplicitous: asserting the truth, while realizing the limitations of what he claims. Burke prevents readers from finding the center of meaning in him. Despite Derrida’s claims, he has become the origin of the new meaning, and his voice conveys the tones of truth. De-Centering Yeats declared that "things fall apart; the center will not hold." His words have become reality, at least in recent literary theory. 158 When language is no longer referentially true, it cannot constitute reality as a whole. Perceptions of reality are fragmentary. When reality is perceived as fragments, there are no beginnings, no endings, no fixed points in a changing world on which to locate meaning. Meaning, consequently, becomes change, but change in language rather than in the world. Time, place, and identity are in flux. These are familiar ideas now, even though they are relatively new in literary criticism. Literary theorists have recognized these ideas in fiction, but until recently have not recognized the fictionality of their own critical writing. Ezra Pound wrote in the Cantos, "I have lost my center,/Things did not cohere." Wallace Stevens says that there was a "muddy center before we breathed," but then the "theater was changed." A. R. Ammons writes in "Corson’s Inlet" of the "field of action," with "moving, incalculable center." John Ashbery in "The Definition of Blue" writes of a "centrality but not a center." Although the idea of a de-centered universe and de-centered prose is familiar in Modern and contemporary literature, it is unfamiliar in criticism, as evidenced by the strong reactions for and against it. Derrida deconstructs the notion of center in his critique of Levi-Strauss* structuralism in "Structure, Sign, and Play": . . . the structurality of structure . . . has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of this center was . . . above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure. . . . it has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within structure which governs the structure, while escaping structurality.27 159 The center is thus removed from structures, such as people, texts, and reality, so that they are no longer perceived as self-contained. Without a point of reference, a point of presence, structures become structuralities, or actions. Burke’s rhetoric of symbolic action never assumes certainty, centrality, or coherence, for rhetoric deals with probabilities, by definition. He acknowledges reality and the "body dogmatic," but he realizes the dialectical relationships between forms of the mind, world, and text. The rhetoric of de-centeredness is most obvious in the figure of the enthymeme with its missing center. Qualitative progression is also a de-centered figure which invites readers to supply the missing link, knowing that their own connections and bridges are performances and not absolutes. Readers create meaning from the juxtaposition of disparate parts with the understanding of "differance," that their own meanings are self-created and provisional. Readers become the authors of their own texts, which will be revised by later readers. According to Burke, the nature of narrative is also a de- centeredness. Narrative is a "kind of disjointed form," an enthymemic structure on a larger scale, which functions similarly to engage readers in the symbolic action. The development of narrative is, therefore, not linear or logical, and there are no fixed beginnings, middles, and endings. "Narrative" is revised to include drama and poetry, as Burke removes the chronological dimension, the central characteristic, of this form. He merges various forms to more 160 accurately describe Modern literature. In so doing, Burke also revises the terms of literary criticism so that it becomes dramatistic and poetic. When all language is defined as performance, not reference, then the metaphorical aspect of language is acknowledged in all areas, though it is exploited to various degrees. Burke always makes clear that he is revising terms, not reality, and that these revisions are motivated and scenically determined. In Burke's rhetoric, characters, including himself, are also de- centered. People define each other dialectically, and the self is a multiplicity, not a unity. Development is dialectical, not linear; it is an interactive process among parts of the self and among various selves and situations. While Derrida argues against presence and totality, Burke never even assumes them. People are only more or less present, and language is only more or less indicative. Furthermore, terms such as "presence" and "totality" are terms. Similarly, whereas Derrida argues against the myth of voice as presence, Burke defines voice as dialectical, contrapuntal, not self- contained. As a rhetorician, Burke never assumes voice as presence or truth; voice is part of an on-going dialogue. The multiple voices of Burke himself do not refer back to a center of being; they are realized in the performance, and they are dialectically engaged, mutually defining each other and the situation at hand. Because he is a rhetorician who deals in probabilities, as opposed to a philosopher who deals in truths (and non-truths), Burke does not revere speech over writing. In fact, Burke does not make the distinction. Voices 161 in speech and writing are symbolic actions, and all gestures— speaking, writing, dancing, turning— are symbolic actions. By his definitions, they are all rhetorical. "De-centering" for Burke is a terministic screen, not a truth. To say that the world or a text is de-centered is to imply its centeredness. The action performed by this statement is enthymeme- making. Naming is a rhetorical action, arising out of motives and scenes. Burke does not argue over whether the world is de-centered or not but whether this view is practical in a given context. Derrida's idea of freeplay is also evident in Burke's theory of performance. In his terms, however, "freedom" implies "constraint" and these terms are rhetorically motivated. In Burke's terms, the idea of freeplay is itself an expression of nostalgai, as strong as the desire for a center. People can play with terms, using them for their own purposes, but the power of the forensic is also present, and for communication to happen the writer must consider audience and scene. Since language is an historical, social construct, it is pragmatic and rhetorical. In Derrida the critic creates a new text, a substitution for the one he writes about. Burke also recognizes that each reading is a rewriting, and he uses texts for his own purposes. But as we have seen, Burke also adopts frames of acceptance and the attitude of assent. Summary, paraphrase, and interpretation are legitimate symbolic actions, which are attempted with understanding of their limitations. An interpretation for Burke establishes a metaphorical — — 162 or enthymemic relationship between the supposed original and the interpretation. Readers are then involved in a dialectical relation ship, and they must supply the missing links. In Burke's theory, language can be defined as referential, and it can be used to refer to a text, a person, or reality. But this is a rhetorical decision. Bricoleur In The Savage Mind, Levi-Strauss distinguishes between the "bricoleur" and the "engineer." The bricoleur is a handyman, one who takes odd jobs and makes do with the materials at hand. He adapts what is available to the immediate purpose. In contrast, the engineer's instruments are designed for "specific technical ends," and 28 the means and ends of a task meet. His methods are systematic, with one step leading to the next in logical progression. Lentricchia explains that L^vi-Strauss' distinction serves a larger purpose, to argue that magic and modern science are two modes 29 of scientific thought. "Bricolage" is not "primitive" but "prior." We can see that the bricoleur is to the engineer as the rhetorician is to the scientist. The rhetorician deals with probabilities and un certainties, and therefore must use whatever means of persuasion are available. His work is always a matter of guesswork, happenstance, and make do. The rhetorician also uses the enthymeme as the method of proof, as opposed to the logical syllogism, for the enthymeme allows readers to participate and to be persuaded by experiencing the cognitive processes of the author. Writing, for the bricoleur and the 163 rhetorician, is a discovery process; writing, for the engineer and scientist, is a rewriting to present events in a logical order. Derrida, like Burke, deconstructs the distinction between science and rhetoric, between engineering and bricolage. Derrida argues that the "exact" sciences are not exact: all knowledge "is a species of 30 bricolage," with its eye on the myth of engineering. Burke, as early as the late 1920s, argues that science is rhetoric. Science is language, and all language is metaphorical, dramatistic, and rhetori-? cal. The engineer tries to get beyond the constraints of a particular situation and to adopt the attitude of objectivity and rationality. But Burke understands the scientist's stance as a rhetorical posture, which is persuasive in specific contexts. The bricoleur lives in the world as is, which does not mean that he may not adopt the role and methods of the engineer. As Derrida deconstructs Levi-Strauss' distinction, he identifies the engineer with the bricoleur. But he does not allow, as Burke does, that the bricoleur can assume the role of engineer as one of his "odd jobs." It seems, finally or originally, that Derrida's philosophy remains committed to truth or non-truth. His starting-point is the idea of difference. For Burke, difference is a rhetorical position, a gesture, which may be the handiest role for a particular occasion. While Derrida continues to deal in realities— such as the fact that there is no reality— Burke makes do with the probabilities and materials at hand, which is not to say that Derrida is not the more effective rhetorician, at least for the time being. Burke's rhetoric 164 seems to be more persuasive for the long-term. The dialogic charac teristic of Burke's writing engages readers to assume his perspective of indeterminacy. In Defense nf Indeterminacy: "The Concealed Offense" The example of Burke's criticism meets several objections raised by traditionalist critics to doctrines of indeterminacy, but critics of indeterminacy have not recognized the value of Burke's methods to their arguments. Through his readings and rewritings of texts, from Hitler's to Booth's to his own, Burke enacts ways by which critics can verify subjective meanings, not according to some referential truth but according to the persuasiveness of his own symbolic performances. Readers are convinced by the validity of meanings because they are verified by experience, the reader's experience of the text. Experience, however, is not equated with truth or with totality. Burke presents his subjective meanings as performances, as possible angles and attitudes, and readers who participate in the workings of Burke's mind are convinced by discoveries that they and Burke make together. Validity is not, then, a matter of logic. Burke's thought processes are dialogic, not subjective, not objective. As he says, the "quickest way to sloganize this theory is to say that it is got by treating the terms 'dramatic' and 'dialectical' as synonymous" (PLF, p. xx). Burke can even "joyce" Keats' "truth" to "turth" to "turd" and still demonstrate the validity of his anal-ysis of beauty, truth, and knowledge. He examines Alice in Wonderland "meta-rhetorically" to 165 show how the social-sexual courtship of the "girl child not yet nubile by a man of advanced years" parallels the author's methods of engaging the child reader "by puzzles that tease as well as entertain," a method which gives the book its "standoffish element," its "impure persuasion" (ROM, p. 267). Burke then relates Alice to Lady Chatterley*s Lover as books which embody the principle of courtship and which explicitly treat courtship as sexual and social subject matter. In both, cases, Burke argues, pure persuasion has an element of "standoffishness" — division makes communication possible— and it involves the saying of something, not for an "extra-verbal advantage," but "because of a satisfaction intrinsic to the saying" (ROM, p. 269). In this sense, Burke's own writing is "pure impure persuasion," a courtship ritual, for he is persuading readers to collaborative meanings through qualitative progressions which put readers into states of mind so that one idea seems to follow and seems right after the fact. The author's subjective meanings become the reader's meanings through the "dancing of attitudes," and terms such as "subjective" and "objective" are revised. Burke's criticism meets another objection to critics of indeterminacy as he enacts ways of "reporting" meanings without propositionalizing them. A major accusation against indeterminist critics is that they couch their own views in no uncertain terms. For example, Harold Bloom substitutes one interpretation for another, using Burke as his authority, when Burke himself has never written so assertively or finally on the topic of tropes: 166 Against Jakobson, I follow Kenneth Burke in seeing that the fundamental dichotomy in trope is between irony and synecdoche or, as Burke says, between dialectic and representation. There is precious little dichotomy between metonymy and metaphor or, as Burke again says, between reduction and perspective.31 In Burke's terms, the critic's dichotomizing is always a metaphorical action, and representation is a rhetorical stance. Burke does, as we have seen, operate on the distinction between representation and dialectics, but this is for him a symbolic action. What remains fundamental for Burke are. scenes and motives, not any particular terminal distinction. Burke's "roundabout" ways do not propositionalize or reduce meanings to manageable units. For example, in "Three Definitions" Burke juxtaposes three terms---"lyric novel," the Platonic dialogue, and developmental stages— along with Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as _a Young Man. He redefines terms and then discusses the novel in the context of the revisions, never claiming that the novel is lyric but establishing a tension between the two terms which readers must resolve. Similarly, he does not explain how A Portrait incorporates the Platonic dialogue, but his various perspectives suggest the dialogic relationships between Stephen's early self and his late self, between the spiritual and the physical in him, and between the young 32 artist Stephen and the mature artist Joyce. Burke even draws "The Dead" in to show how the novel converses with the shorter fiction, as Gabriel and Stephen are both aspects of the mature artist, and as Stephen's birdgirl is counterpart to Gabriel's symbol of a woman. 167 Readers become participants in Burke's conversation through various strategies. First, Burke continually speaks in multiple voices, so that no one statement is presented as final. The dialogic, dialectical, quality of his writing is a back-and-forthness, a circling spiral progression, with gaps and silences which allow the reader to take part. More specifically, Burke frequently makes parenthetical statements to readers, personal asides such as "on that, more later." He also directly addresses the reader, asking for assistance: "consider," "should we," "suppose," "we could continue," and "the party is over, Where will we go?" Burke argues through qualitative pro gressions, and he presents perspectives appositionally, as angles not as absolutes. Burke's criticism also answers another objection to contemporary criticism when he demonstrates that an anything-goes approach does not lead to an anything-works conclusion. Traditionalist critics object to the practice of indeterminist critics that "saying makes it so." Burke's criticism, first of all, continually undermines itself and never reaches closure, as one book responds to previous ones and as each text is amplified, modified, and transformed by footnotes, prefaces, appendices, and reinterpretations. Burke does have a vision of life as a "motivational jungle," in which "a good proposition to have in mind when contemplating the study of motives would be: anybody can do anything for any reason" (ATH, p. 353). In this view, readers are free to define meaning however they wish. But Burke qualifies such freedom through his theory of language as symbolic action. 168 While Burke argues that a critic should use whatever means are available to him, he also argues that critical attitudes and actions necessarily stand pragmatic tests, not simply that they ought to, but that they do. He makes this point from several perspectives. First, Burke shows that a critic, like all people, is a "so-called I" which is "merely a unique combination of 'corporate we's'" (ATH, p. 264) who acts for reasons both personal and social. In Burke's terms, the biological, personal, social, and linguistic all interact dialec- > tically. The idea of freeplay for Burke is yet another terministic screen by which people act and react. Not only is the critic for Burke an historical construction, a being motivated by motives and situ ations, the critic is also an institutional construction whose motives 33 are largely instituted by a particular situation. Burke's criticism, then, meets three major objections to indeterminist criticism. From Burke's rhetorical viewpoint, the world, texts, and people are indeterminate. As a rhetorician, he focuses on uncertainties and probabilities, not because they are true but because this perspective is practical. Because of his recognition of the terministic status of his theory, Burke is not Compelled, as many critics of this antagonistic perspective seem to be, to state his views as final, original, and true. Burke's Determination of Reader's Attitudes of Dissent Again the best way to understand Burke's views on indeterminacy is to watch it at work, or better, to participate in it. The key term for the negative, as it appears and is used in The Rhetoric of 169 Religion, for example, is "roundabout." By charting this term, we can document Burke's method of circling round his subject, his method of saying what is by saying what is not. The motive for using this term is typical of Burke: . . . such oversimplification of linguistic complexities can be avoided if we approach the subject roundabout, through a system atic concern with linguistic principles exemplified with thoroughness in the dialectics of theology. (ROR, p. 10) Burke.continues throughout the book to demonstrate that indirection is a way of avoiding oversimplification. He allies himself with Augustine, who "indicates roundabout the strongly oral associations" (ROR, p. 67),-and then he turns Augustine's method on Augustine, saying "we might find roundabout" the names of his mistresses "ambigu ously lurking in odd places" (ROR, p. 83). Later, in his discussion of predestination, Burke adds a dimension to the roundabout approach: "If one is going to develop in a certain way, conceivably the logic of the ultimate development would manifest itself, however roundabout, at much earlier stages" (ROR, p. 168). The roundabout approach is enthymemic or qualitative. Its logic— or rather, its dialogic— can only be understood after the fact, in retrospect. Burke thus indirectly affirms his own approach which turns abruptly from Augustine to Genesis, to God and Satan, in order, he says, to talk about the everyday use of language. ' Burke's pro gression is a "kind of disjointed form," and readers participate in attitude dancing, rather than in logical progression. Burke circles round; what he says implies what he does not say. 170 As we have seen, in Permanence and Change, Burke first discusses this capacity of language to critique itself, to turn around on itself: Though all organisms are critics in the sense that they interpret signs about them, the experimental, speculative technique made available by speech would seem to single out the human species as the only one possessing an equipment for going beyond the criticism of experience to the criticism of criticism. (PC, p. 6) In The Rhetoric of Religion, this capacity fpr self-reflection becomes associated with the negative. About psychogenetic illness Burke says that a person "in all sorts of roundabout ways, scrupulously circles back upon himself" (ROR, p. 191). Reflection then allows Burke to transform "roundabout" into action, "The Great Rounding Out" (ROR, p. 191), so that reflecting back becomes simultaneously reflecting forward. In the dialogue in Heaven, TL explains that "the range of language being what it is, the very propounding and treasuring of such sanctions will lead in turn to the equally persuasive questioning of them" (ROR, p. 287). Satan reiterates this point by saying that their "task in ranging linguistically . . . will be to round out their sheer attitudinizing as thoroughly as possible" (ROR, p. 289). Burke himself ranges linguistically— he goes the "full circuit" (ROR, p. 10)— in order to question his own assertions. The reader learns through Burke's writing and revising to question what is said, to bring the negative to bear. The reader does not find knowledge simply put for easy consumption; readers participate in a process of knowing through "no-ing." 171 Burke reinforces his key term "roundabout" by "telltale words" (ROR, p. 43) which cluster around iti He says that Augustine "introduces glancingly" his theory of grace, and later he explains that by "glancing back" he can find what he is looking for. Similarly, he writes of understanding "in retrospect" by "borrowing back" and by "circularity." Two other members of a "terminiStic clan" that do with "roundaboutness" are "unfolding" and "foretold." In Burke's terms, "foresight" and "hindsight" provide clearer understanding than does direct sight, for directness is impossible: "totality is too immense for any partial view to encompass" (ROR, p. 313). Burke affirms his indirect method, his appositional meaning, on another level as well. His initial approach in The Rhetoric of Religion is to "analogize" by the "logical transforming of terms." He then turns round to say that the process would be a kind of "de- analogizing." He refers to Augustine's approach which "readily leads to allegorical interpretations for natural phenomena," a "mode of thought to which logology is always though somewhat coyly prone" (ROR, p. 159). Throughout The Rhetoric of Religion, Burke juxtaposes the narrative and reflexive modes and the cyclical style and the rectilinear style. As we have seen, opposite terms define each other: one is implicit in the other; one leads to the other (ROR, p. 215). "Time" and "space" are terms which by juxtaposition, by opposition, define each other; they are also terms grounded in scenes. Dialogue is a process by which partners define each other and meaning is a reciprocal 172 act: "The dialogue form so readily permits one to say things with which one might occasionally disagree" (ROR, p. 5). The oxymoron is the figure which characterizes The Rhetoric of Religion. Burke describes the oxymoron as an "intermediate term" which unites in one term the opposites, the mutually exclusive terms (ROR, p. 304). The overall progression of the text is a dialogic back-and-forthness between opposites, such as time/space, narrative/ reflexive, sound/sense, and part/whole. Throughout, Burke enacts the roundabout, enthymemic approach by playing opposites off against each other and thereby inviting readers to become authors of their own meanings. Burke continually turns back on himself, reflecting on his own "conversions." He justifies his failure to revise by saying that "in this study of conversion, the reader is given the opportunity to see how the author’s own thesis ’becomes converted'" (ROR, p. 85). Later, he explains the need to revise his initial dialectical pattern. Elsewhere, Burke refers to his earlier ideas in Counter-Statement where he considered the "same paradoxical interchangeability" as now, but "as approached the long way round, through the study of linguistic labyrinths that the author at that time glimpsed but 'in principle’" (ROR, p. 229). Burke again revises himself as he explains that the "Prologue in Heaven" allowed "the conceit" to "take over, by developing quirks of its own" (ROR, p. 5). For Burke, writing is both an expression and a revision. 173 Burke’s roundabout approach is not merely circular, relativistic, solipsistic, because the many different perspectives "through the convergence of their actions" lead to "critical moments." These are "watershed moments" when "of a sudden he will feel unified" (ROR, p. 173). Language can help readers and writers feel kairotic moments, a sense of harmony and wholeness, because it is enthymemic, and writers and readers participate in the creative act and thereby see anew. They are revised in the process. But in Burke, this moment of insight, catharsis, unity, is quickly changed, for the negative immediately sets in. The "word-men" live in a process of revision. The Rhetoric of Religion, Burke summarizes his reading theory explicitly through the conjunction of "knowing" with "no-ing," as he demonstrates this way of knowing in the writing and rewriting of his own text. Readers experience Burke's mind at work and develop "a feeling for the principle of the negative." Burke's meaning is not only in what he says but in what he does to allow readers to act symbolically. As readers learn to cope with his roundabout, negative method, they develop the attitude of indeterminacy. With this frame of rejection, with this way out, they assume responsibility for their own actions, realizing that their creations of meaning are purposefully motivated and scenically determined. 174 Notes ■^Critics who champion Burke range from Wayne Booth, to Harold Bloom, to Edward Said, to Rene Girard, Because Girard's praise of Burke is especially strong, and because it is made in reference to Derrida, I will quote it in full: "I believe that Burke has never been translated into French and it cannot be a mere oversight. There must be reasons for this scandal. I regard the current 'intertextual' school as a generally positive phenomenon. It has liberated American criticism from the fetish of the single work; it has made the anti- philosophical stance unfashionable. It has popularized a somewhat romantic but interesting notion of the (mimetic) 'anxiety of influ- . ence,' etc. In many instances, however, under a liberal sprinkling of 'deconstructive* terminology, the old neo-critical or thematic cake is still there and the taste is not as uncanny as one might wish. "The best work of Derrida makes one feel that deeply ingrained intellectual habits are endangered. The literary followers try to reproduce this sense of danger as a purely literary thrill, but failure is inevitable because their exclusive concentration on the literary text is intrinsically reassuring. To the intertextual corpus of Derrida, I try to add texts that I regard as even more 'dangerous* than Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the pre-Socratics, those of mythology and ritual. 'Deconstruction,' I believe, has even more of a future than can be surmised from a perspective still dependent, if only 'negatively,' on the text of philosophy and of Saussurian linguistics. "In some respects at least, Kenneth Burke points the way toward more rather than less 'danger.' That may be the reason he remains as marginal today as he was during the long reign of New Criticism. I am all for French influence, obviously, but I would like to see it sprout vigorous and truly independent offshoots on American soil. The day this happens, Kenneth Burke will be acknowledged as the great man he really is." Here Girard responds to a question about modern literary criticism in an interview which appeared in Diacritics 8 (1978): 31- 54, and was reprinted in "To double business bound": Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 2 For example, Burke is not mentioned in Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), edited by Jane P. Tompkins. Geoffrey H. Hartman, in Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), cites Burke several times throughout the book, but often in notes. Most surprising, given their similar historical perspectives, Frank Lentricchia in After the New Criticism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), footnotes Burke merely as a source for Hayden White's study, p. 129. 175 3 E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity ifi Interpretation (New Haven: Yale Uniyersity Press, 1967). . Lentricchia discusses Hirsch in After the New Criticism, "E. D. Hirsch: The Hermeneutics of Innocence," pp. 257- 280. 4 See Lentricchia, After the New Criticism, 5Ibid., pp. 257-280. £ See Geoffrey H. Hartman's Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida Philosophy (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) for a critique via Derrida of this view of the symbol. ^M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). Erich Auerbach's Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), is also a context for Burke's rhetorical approach to mimesis. 8 See Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), for an exposure of science as "bricolage." 9 Tzvetan Todorov's Poetics: Theory and History of Literature, Vol. I, trans. Richard Howard ^Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), exemplifies the benefits of a scientific approach to literary texts. "^See Permanence and Change for Burke's analysis of the rhetoric in Freud, Marx, Jung, and others. Throughout his works, he discusses "occupational psychosis" and "trained incapacity." 11 See Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) and Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Jacques Derrida, Of Grammotology; and Lionel Gossman, "History and Literature: Reproduction or Signifi cation," in The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, ed. Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp. 3-39. 12 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 98. 13 In his 1962 edition, Kuhn says that "surveying the rich experimental literature from which the examples are drawn makes one suspect that something like a paradigm is prerequisite to perception," p. 113. In his postscript to the second edition of 1969, he corrects 176 this statement by asserting that a paradigm governs not "a subject matter but a group of practitioners," p. 180. 14 Kuhn's study minimizes the importance of the investigator, even though he explains the origins of his book as a personal paradigm shift, when'he moved from science to the history of science and under stood that his perspective on science was not right. Like the New Critics, scientists must assume the role of objectivity. Like most, Kuhn must believe that the assumptions he operates on have some basis in reality. "^Burke's New Critical interpretations, his close readings of texts, inform most of his essays, but certain essays seem most obviously New Critical, and often these are the most popular ones. In his review of Mein Kampf, "The Rhetoric of Hitler's "Battle," in Philosophy of Literary Form, pp. 191-220, Burke calls for a New Critical approach: "There are other ways of burning books than on the pyre— and the favorite method of the hasty reviewer is to deprive himself and his readers by inattention. I maintain that it is thoroughly vandalistic for the reviewer to content himself with the mere inflicting of a few symbolic wounds upon this book and its author, of an intensity varying with the resources of the reviewer and the time at his disposal . . . Here is the testament of a man who swung a great people into his wake. Let us watch it carefully; and let us watch it, not merely to discover some grounds for prophesying what political move is to follow Munich, and what move to follow that move, etc.; let us try to discover what kind of 'medicine' this medicine-man has concocted, that we may know, with greater accuracy, exactly what to guard against, if we are to forestall the concocting of similar medicine in America." Burke closely analyzes the text to identify patterns of symbols, such as career symbolism, and other unification devices, which unite the text, as well as readers. In "Coriolanus— and the Delights of Faction," in Language as Symbolic Action, pp. 81-97, Burke checks the "correctness of our prophesies by consulting the text." He traces the play's growing tension to produce catharsis and the excessive grotesqueness. Part'll, "Particular Works and Authors," of Language as Symbolic Action, examines eleven works intrinsically. "Version, Con-, Per-, and In- Thoughts'on.Djuna Barnes' novel Nightwood," examines the revisions in this novel for which Eliot wrote the introduction. Burke's is a stylistic analysis of terministic tactics as related to themes, such as the blood theme. Burke begins his study of Roethke, "The Vegetal Radicalism of Theodore Roethke," by saying that an attempt to characterize his verse should "profitably start from con siderations of vocabulary." He focuses, for example, on apostrophes to an absent "kitten-limp sister," a "milk-nose," a "sweetness I cannot touch" in discussing "The Long Alley." His study, "William Carlos Williams," presents his friend as the "man of medicine" and the "medicine man" and explores in the poetry Williams' "doctrine of contact." 177 Lentricchia, in After the New Criticism, says that "if there is to be 'objective interpretation,' then the act of severance— the characteristic of Hirsch's thinking— must be performed: 'meaning' must be severed from 'significance,' understanding from evaluation, interpretation from criticism, and fact from value. . . . These various acts of severance, which serve the heuristic needs of his hermeneutics, are reflections of a fundamental dualism that is the basis of his thoughtp. 263. ^E. D. Hirsch, Jr., The Philosophy of Composition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977). 18 Girard, "To double business bound," p. 220. 19 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Translator's Preface," p. ix. 20 Wayne Booth, "'Preserving the Exemplar': Or, How Not to Dig Our Own Graves," Critical Inquiry 3 (Spring, 1977), 416. Lentricchia refers to Booth's clean grasp of this idea, a "consequence" grasped "only by Wayne Booth," p. 169. 21 The "question of the preface" addresses the distinctions between "saying before-hand" and saying retrospectively, between fiction and truth, between writing in process and writing after dis covery. Hegel, as Spivak and Derrida discuss, objects to the preface as abstract generality as opposed to the "self-moving activity of cognition," but he recognizes their common sense value in setting up reader expectations. Burke's distinction between syllogistic pro gression, which lets the reader share in the writer's discovery process, is analogous to Derrida's and Hegel's distinction between abstract generality and self-moving activity of cognition. Burke, however, believes that the arousal and fulfillment of expectations, through the psychology of form, does not need to be supplemented by the prefatory psychology of information. More accurately, Burke writes prefaces on prefaces but does so with the understanding that even generalities and exposition are characterized by enthymemic progressions, though perhaps less obviously so than writing presented as fiction. Burke understands all language as metaphorical, dramatistic, and rhetorical. To allow the reader to participate in the writer’s act of cognition is a rhetorical move for Burke. 22 Lentricchia discusses Culler in "Uncovering History and the Reader: Structuralism," pp. 103-154. Characteristic of his terministic screen, Lentricchia discusses Culler's role in political and historical terms, whereas Burke would make a similar argument, I believe, but would understand the "political" and "historical" as rhetorical perspectives: "To sum it up: Culler had performed a sterling service for contemporary intellectual historians by explaining a movement of huge international import, and then had made 178 that movement workable for American literary scholars: reason enough, perhaps, to award him the Lowell prize. "If that is the reason. A certain nagging question continues to demand attention. How did a professional organization as conserva tive as the MLA so easily manage to insulate itself from the rampant paranoia in this country toward recent French thought? It is said that abominations are often fascinating, but Conrad's perception surely will not explain why the MLA granted its imprimatur to Culler. Nor does the objectivist argument (the corporate consciousness of the American literary establishment recognizes excellence when it sees it, so though we reserve the right to disagree with you, we will honor the force of your scholarship) suffice, despite the lip-service we like to give it. Culler's book has practically single-handedly mediated (and constituted) our understanding of structuralism, not because his work is demonstrably more acute than, say, Jameson's, but because his mediation rests on intellectual principles easily recognizable and very dear to the traditionalist American critical mind. Culler has made structuralism safe for us, and the MLA prize represents not merely the applause of his scholarly peers, but, as well, an ideo logical nod of recognition." Lentricchia explains that Culler makes structuralism safe by arguing that literary structure is internalized, which means that it is external, not latent in the reader but existing in writing. He sees this as inconsistent with Culler's theory— "I take his inconsistency not as a sign of intellectual looseness, however, but as a sign of a more fundamental intention," p. 108. 23 Lentricchia discusses Saussure on pp. 112-124. 24 Lentricchia, p. 114. 25 "An Introduction to Metaphysics," Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, vol. II, eds. William Barrett and Henry D. Aiken (New York: Random House), p. 308, from The Creative Mind, ch. VI. 26 Marjorie Perloff's The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), provides a broad context for understanding indeterminacy in literature. I would like to see my ideas on the rhetoric of indeterminacy as dialectical counterpart to her poetics of indeterminacy. 27 Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), pp. 247-48. 28 See Derrida's Of Grammatology and Lentricchia on Derrida and L^vi-Strauss, "History or the Abyss: Poststructuralism," pp. 157-210. 179 29 Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 16. ^Derrida, p. xx. 31 Harold Bloom, "The Breaking of Form," Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: The Seabury Press, 1979), p. 11. 32 Burke’s dramatistic or dialectical views on Joyce’s fiction have become more standard. For example, see Helene Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, trans. Sally A. J. Purcell (New York: David Lewis, 1972), and Hugh Kenner’s Joyce’s Voices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 33 Lentricchia discusses Foucault's arguments about the prohibitive power of "enunciative modalities," the sources of the speaker's authority. Then he draws an analogy to the literary critic who will be heard only if he speaks from an acceptable contextj p. 198: "The analogy with the literary critic is plain. He will, at a minimum, have a Ph.D. in literature, and preferably from one of a small group of celebrated universities. He will need a university appointment or a position at a small 'respected' college; a letterhead announcing his name, an M.A. degree, and his home address as Commerce, Oklahoma, will constitute a distinct disadvantage. An ambitious literary critic, who desires to lodge his statements within our current sense of critical truth would seek "co-existence," as Foucault'puts it, with certain other disciplines— Saussurian linguistics, anthropology in the structuralist mode, deconstructionist philosophies, and so on. And his books and articles will speak from institutionally sanctioned sites: a university press, a scholarly journal, but again this is only minimal, for to be critically dans le vrai in 1980 is to speak under the imprimatur of certain preferred presses and journals. Above all, certain doctrines will be paid reverence." 180 CHAPTER FIVE SCOPE AND REDUCTION: "NOW WHERE ARE WE?" In Burke’s terms, reading and writing are rebirth rituals. The "way in" is the "way out," and "attitudes of assent" imply "attitudes of dissent. As we have seen, Burke transcends such distinctions first by realizing that they are terms, not truths. He then transcends them dialectically by his key term, "rhetoric." This terministic screen allows him to perceive and use language as a possible means of persuasion, "given the state of Babel after the Fall." Finding the means of persuasion involves not only self-expression and personal motives; persuasion and identification involve the reader's expec tations, the constraints of the situation, and the conventions of symbols. For this reason, rhetoric cannot be relativistic, solipsistic, or meaningless: It is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and is continually born anew; the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols. (ROM, p. 43) Because of the dialectical relationships— between writer and reader, between people and contexts, between language and scenes— reading and writing are revisionary processes. The rhetoric of the symbol allows for "terministic catharsis" (LASA, p. 367). In order to determine where we are now in this study of Burke's rhetoric of the symbol, we can first identify why Burke's rhetoric is 181 valuable, given the current critical scene. Then I will assume a perspective by incongruity, taking the role of recalcitrant reader to spar with Burke. Reading and Writing as Rebirth Rituals: Dialogic and Dramatism In The Philosophy of Literary Forms, Burke explores the paradox of the artist's death and rebirth through art— "the rebuilding of a role not merely the abandonment of oneself to the disintegration of all roles" (PLF, p. 39). He builds a developmental model of cognitive life into a reading and writing theory, on the basis that identities are formed and transformed in art and in life. Like other life processes, writing and reading are revisionary processes, in the most profound sense of living and dying, yet the pleasures and risks are minimized in symbolic action. At the same time Burke develops this argument, giving validity to symbolic action and making people responsible for their actions, he admits that "our ’Lexicon' would not for the world make literature and life synonymous since, by comparison in such terms, the meanest life is so over-whelmingly superior to the noblest poem that illiteracy becomes almost a moral obligation" (CS, x). For rhetorical reasons, Burke continues to develop his theory of reading and writing as rebirth rituals, as life processes, while keeping the fundamental difference in mind. Perhaps it is this attitude of Burke's, which contrasts sharply with early Modern aesthetics, that allows him to create a rhetoric of the symbol, a view of language as a social construction. The 182 particular aspect of Modern aesthetics I refer to can be summarized best in Eliot’s statement in The Dial, 1922, when he says that Joyce's mythical method in Ulysses makes the modern world possible for art. Implicit in this statement is the separation of art and life, and the inferiority of life in the present. Burke's rhetorical view is more similar to Pound's view of Ulysses, which he also states in The Dial but which has never received the attention that Eliot's remarks have. Pound's view of Ulysses is, however, gradually becoming the current view. * “ Pound praises Joyce for speaking, "if not with the tongue of men and angels, at least with a many-tongued and multiple language." The idea of voice in language brings in rhetoric, for it introduces motives, tentativeness, and contexts. Voice, in this sense of conversation and dialectics (not in the sense of presence and origin which Derrida criticizes), also introduces dialogic rather than logic. Dialectics, which Burke makes synonymous with dramatism, also includes the provisional, revisionary aspect of speaking and writing. Burke associates his theory of art and life as revisionary to the Hegelian formula, "Everything is its other" (PLF, p. 78). He also relates his theory with Coleridge's proverb, "Extremes meet" (PLF, p. 3). But Burke's dialectical criticism differs from that of his predecessors, for his is dialogic, not logic. Burke's dramatism includes act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose, and it does not distinguish between writing and speaking. All language for Burke is context-dependent, uncertain, conversational. Symbolic action, like conversation, is revisionary, and certainty is only a rhetorical stance, 183 Burke develops his dialectical developmental theory through dialecticians but also through psychologists and language philosophers. In the conclusion to Attitudes Toward History, Burke outlines a model of cognitive growth built on Piaget's theory, which classifies development into four stages— sensory-motor, pre-operational, concrete operations, and formal operations. He represents a child's growth as linear, from ego-centered to de-centered, through processes of assimilation and accommodation. In contrast, Burke's dramatistic model is a "complex intermingling" of three levels— the mimetic, the intimate, and the abstract (ATH, p. 341). One level is transcended by abstractions, which are "bridging devices" employed to organize attitudes for an audience (ATH, p. 341). The "upward way" leads to the "downward way," and transcendency is not a progression through discrete steps. For Burke, development emerges through linguistic, social interaction. He explains that as a result of "social accretions" language in time becomes constructed of such "transcendental" words, but he warns that language must be made pliant by "casuistic stretching" and tests of "convertibility" which "liquidate the cate gorical rigidity" (ATH, p. 341). Symbolic action must be adaptable to various contexts. From the rhetorician's viewpoint, things are uncertain and the writer's task is to determine what will work in a particular situation. Burke summarizes by saying that "the mind, being formed by language, is formed by public grammar." The public grammar tends to become rigid, but motives and scenes are uncertain: 184 "Certainty is cheap, it is the cheapest thing of which a man is capable. Deprive him of a meal or bind his arms, or jockey him out of his job— and convictions spring up like Jacks-in-the-box" (CS, p. 113). In Philosophy of Literary Forms, Burke extends his developmental model into a reading and writing theory. He presents three levels of symbolic action— now identified as the "bodily or biological level," the "personal, intimate, familiar, familistic level," and the "abstract level" (PLF, pp. 36-37). These levels give access to motives, to the "symbolic proclaiming and formation of identity" (PLF, p. 38). Burke's ideas of "identification" and "consubstantiation" become the basis for encompassing George Herbert Mead's developmental model which grounds self and other in contexts. Through Mead, Burke expands his idea that "mind is formed by language, a public grammar." He says that "by the incorporation of these social idioms we build ourselves, our personalities" (PLF, p. 112). Shaw's Pygmalion is an extreme example of the creation of self by the assimilation of society. As counter-heresy to Shaw's heresy, Burke identifies Joyce's "individualistic, absolutist, 'dictatorial' establishment of language from within" in his last work. Burke reverses Mead's formula to say that Joyce "externalizes the internal" (PLF, p. 112). He concludes by saying that an "'orthodox' statement here would require us to consider complementary movements: both an internalizing of the external and an externalizing of the internal" (PLF, p. 113). Throughout Philosophy, Burke explores the 185 "vacillating relationship between artistic freedom and society's commands" (PLF, p. 22). Burke grounds his discussions of writer's and reader's motives, and their relationships with language, in particular contexts of situation and culture. On the basis of Mead's vision of "unending conversation," Burke formulates his theory of symbolic action, arising from motives and scenes and affecting motives and scenes: Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. (PLF, pp. 110-111) Burke says here, imagistically, that the conversation at hand creates the desire to participate; the materials of one's "drama" arise from this unending conversation. The interactive process is a revision process of motives and situations. Burke believes that meaning is dialectical, dramatistic. The parlor room image of reading and writing— of symbolic action— presents an on-going process, without beginning or ending. The progression is not logical, nor can anyone trace the steps from start to finish. Reading and writing are actions, rather interactions, between people in situations. 186 The parlor room image is only one of Burke's contexts for symbolic action. We have already seen how he develops the image of reading and writing as courtship rituals, ending in consummation, and beginning again. He closes Permanence and Change with another context for symbolic action, which involves different motives and symbols: In these troublesome antics, we may even find it wise on occasion to adopt incongruous perspectives for the dwarfing of patience. We in cities rightly grow shrewd at appraising man-made institutions— but beyond these tiny concentration points of rhetoric and traffic, there lies the eternally unsolvable Enigma, the preposterous fact that both existence and nothingness are equally unthinkable. Our speculations may run the whole quali tative gamut, from play, through reverence, even to an occasional shiver of cold metaphysical dread— for always the Eternal Enigma is there, right on the edges of our metropolitan bickerings, stretching outward to interstellar infinity and inward to the depths of the mind. And in this staggering disproportion between man and noman, there is no place for purely human boasts of grandeur, or for forgetting that men build their cultures by huddling together, nervously loquacious, at the edge of the abyss. (PC, p. 272) Motives and situations change, and the rhetorician's task is to discover the possible means of persuasion in a given context. With this understanding, Burke considers that the main ideal of criticism, antoher symbolic action which is determined by motives and situations, is "to use all that there is to use." The rhetorical nature of symbolic action will focus the critic on what "he considers important for social reasons." Criticism, then, is rhetorical and creative. The rhetoric of the symbol accounts for motives and situ ations, for the dialogic, qualitative progressions of Burke's own critical-creative symbolic actions. 187 A Recalcitrant Reader's Response to Burke1s Symbolic Action In Counter-Statement, Burke identifies three kinds of readers, as a "kind of hypothetical norm": The hysteric will demand in art a Symbol which is 'medicinal* to his situation. He will require one very specific kind of art. In so far as the reader approaches the hypothetical state of the connoisseur, he is open to the appeal of all Symbols, but is overwhelmed by none. He will approach art a£ art, thus requiring the maximum of ritualization, verbalization. He will be 'will- less, ' 'hunger-less,' going to art for nothing but art itself . . . The actual reader is obviously an indeterminate and fluctuant mixture of these two extremes. (CS, p. 180) Although these are Burke's norms, his ideal reader is the "recalcitrant reader" who will engage in "competitive competition." Language is itself self-critical; writers also need readers to keep them in line. In conclusion, I will take the role of recalcitrant reader and exercise my hortatory powers by saying "no" to Burke's theory of symbolic action. A major problem in his theory is that he continually underminfes his own arguments so that readers cannot assume the negative. It is difficult to negate Burke, since he never makes a statement once and for all. Although his is a dramatistic theory, which engages readers through enthymemic structures and metaphorical expressions, Burke often seems to be sparring with himself, leaving no room for readers to disagree. Burke practices "discounting," "making allowance for the fact that things are not as they seem," to such an extent that readers cannot discount him (ATH, p. 244). Because he exercises the "comic corrective" on himself, readers hardly have the chance to assume the "charitable attitude towards people that is required for the purposes of persuasion and cooperation" (ATH, p. 166). 188 Thou Shalt Not Speak in Contradictory Tongues That Burke speaks in contradictions is paradoxically clear. For example, he shuttles back and forth about the origins of language until he finally transcends to a third place where "real origins" don’t matter, since he is speaking dramatistically anyway: "Any such statement about the emergence of language out of infancy can be but an ’arbitrary anecdote'" (LASA, p. 363). We can trace some of Burke's dialectical leaps in Language as Symbolic Action, where Burke contradicts himself, leaving no role for the recalcitrant reader. Burke asserts that "the negative begins not as a resource or definition or information, but as a command, as 'Don't'" (LASA, p. 10). He then revises himself: "But there's no paradox about the idea of 'don't.'" Because this revision only clouds the issue, he retrieves himself by stating, "But the main point is . . ." If the substance of Burke's speculations is sometimes not clear, the method is, through his repeated use of "but." Burke goes on "unstoppably," so that two pages later he directly contradicts his original theory on the origin of the negative: "There is an implicit sense of negativity in the ability to use words at all" (LASA, p. 12). Later, Houdini-like (LASA, p. 35), he extricates himself from the entanglements of his own making: I say 'developed,' I do not say 'originating.' The ultimate origins of language seem to me as mysterious as the origins of the universe itself. One must view it, I feel, simply as the 'given.' (LASA, p. 44) 189 However, once Burke gains freedom he embroils himself again by worrying the negative in other contexts where it also operates — computer technology and Freudian psychology— only then to treat the marvel of the negative head-on. In a post-structural tour-de-force, he locates the "specific nature of language in the ability to use the Negative" (LASA, p. 419). And so having gone the "whole family circle," the reader meets herself where she began, but with a difference (LASA, p. 365). Burke explains in his preface that, since the chapters were written separately, each "meant to stand alone," basic tenets are "restated." He further justifies his roundaboutness and contradictions by saying that "their reoccurrence in varying contexts can help indicate the range of their relevance." Burke asks that we "please think of us mulling over something, forever hanging on." Burke’s own "dis-ease" with his method emerges. In the preface, he declares what his purpose is and how his method suits it: "And why not, in the effort, to bring out as clearly as possible the basic pattern of one’s thinking?" (LASA, p. viii). Later he explains his own conversion experience as a shift from self to other: Basically, the situation is this: I began in the aesthetic tradition with the stress upon self-expression. Things started moving for me in earnest when, as attested in Counter-Statement, I made the shift from 'self-expression' to communication. (LASA, p. 305) Despite Burke’s conversion, he often seems not to be communicating but to be experimenting for "heuristic purposes" only. His word play often seems to be for his own amusement, at the expense of his reader's 190 understanding. His desire for the "pure" emerges frequently, though in disguise: "sheer words," "sheerly natural," and "sheerly rectilinear." Pure intention inevitably becomes sullied in the barnyard, and therefore Burke’s communications take contradictory forms. He allows his readers to share his mental processes, which rarely reach full fruition. Once Burke understands an idea, he drops it, impatiently, instead of explaining it to a reader. Burke does not reorder his writings into logical progressions because he prefers that the reader get the "gist of the various pieces" which are left unrelated (LASA, p. vii). He says that "revisionism" is a "charge we have leveled against others in other quarters and in other connections" (LASA, p. 306). Rather than revise for his reader's sake, Burke adds further perspectives by incongruity: I had long planned to revise this article (which was published sixteen years ago). I had hoped to bring it up to date by discussing Theodore Roethke's later work, and to make some of my original observations more precise. But I have finally decided to leave the piece just as it was, along with its several fumblings. (LASA, p. 281, n. 4) Instead of revising to be consistent, Burke merely contradicts himself, leaving behind him the various positions he has taken on a matter. Burke's contrariness is evident in his unwillingness to revise. Although I have focused on his changing views of the negative, we could trace evidence of his "shiftiness," even in his major proclamations, such as "Things move; people act." He turns right around to contradict this carefully made distinction: "Unfortunately, thefe is an inter mediate realm" (LASA, p. 366). In fact, Burke seems to transform 191 anything he can into its opposite. "Prophecy" occurs "after the event"; words become the "signs of things" by simple inversion; learning language means "the forgetting of countless contexts." As Burke writes about William Carlos Williams, he justifies his own practices: "There is no thing that with a twist of the imagination cannot be something else" (LASA, p. 282). Burke's is a transfor mational grammar but, unlike Chomsky's, Burke's builds on the ambiguities of language and the recycling of words in contexts. Burke's grammar is rhetorical, in that he aims for uncertainties, abberations, and changes. Burke constantly contradicts and undermines what he says, so that readers have no firm grounds to argue from. Thou Shalt Not Be All-Inclusive Burke acknowledges that his dramatistic method could be attacked on the grounds that it is yet another terministic screen, but he claims for it special favors: "If I, or any one person, or even a particular philosophic school, had invented it, such doubts would be quite justified." Burke's discussion here is so unsatisfactory that he comments on it for six pages. Burke respects the flexibility of his own terms and the value of a terministic screen which possesses "the philosophic character adapted to the discussion of man in general" (LASA, p. 53). His theory includes numerous oppositions: action/motion, the Demonic Trinity, the four pyramids (LASA, p. 374), the five contexts for words, the five dogs, to name only a few. Burke continually attempts to "simply widen the concept" (LASA, p. 18) and to expand the 192 circumference of the scene (LASA, p. 360). Burke claims that "any possible definition of man will necessarily fall within the five clauses in our 'Definition'" (LASA, p. 24). Although the theory of symbolic action is based on the principle that language cannot be everything, that there is difference between the sign and the signified, Burke tries to include all under "rhetoric." He creates a cumbersome theory, certainly not elegant in Chomsky's terms, with cycles of terms within cycles of terms. Dramatism "vows us first of all to considerations of pure verbal internality, as we attempt to chart the transformations within the work itself" (LASA, p. 369) and "let the words have their say" (LASA, p. 368). And dramatism "organizes the oppositions to one's act" (LASA, p. 369). Burke is adept at "spinning out the possibilities" implicit in the choice of terms, but he fails to turn his theory back on itself, to be precise. The reader remembers an earlier statement of Burke's: In view of such a motivational jungle, a good basic proposition to have in mind when contemplating the study of motives would be; anybody can do anything for any reason. (ATH, p. 353) Burke tries to show that the dramatistic theory works well in every context, since all language is dramatistic. While he undercuts various aspects of his theory, he never negates and only tentatively questions its underlying assumptions. How can a theory which posits the negative as the Marvel of language not turn that instrument on itself? Burke questions his theory but justifies it rhetorically. It may not be right, but it is rhetoric, and given the situation at hand, 193 it is most practical. Man is the symbol-using and symbol-abusing animal; this distinguishes him from all other animals. The theory of symbolic action has the widest application across the most specific contexts. It is Burke's working definition. Burke traps us in a double-bind. Because he encompasses all language as symbolic action, he can account for variations and differences. Because he never formulates anything absolutely, readers cannot say "no," although readers must be recalcitrant. Thou Shalt Not Be Implicit In rebelling against the definition of language as reference, Burke enacts the definition of language as performance, so that readers experience meaning rather than gain knowledge directly. Burke toys with the notions of "logical priority" and "temporal priority," for example in connection with Poe's "Philosophy of Composition," but he does not apply this distinction to himself: To be sure, often a critic's observations can be implicitly right even without reference to definitions. But even so, to that extent the critic has cheated; for his job above all is to be explicit. (LASA, p. 43) Burke continually "cheats," failing to revise so that principles are made explicit and so that ideas are presented logically. Instead of explicating, Burke sums up; he entitles, tallies, maps, and plans. In fact, Burke's writing is comparable to his idea of a map: A road map that helps us easily find our way from one side of the continent to the other owes its great utility to its exceptional existential poverty. It tells us absurdly little about the trip that is to be experienced in a welter of detail. 194 Indeed, its value for us is in the very fact that it is so essentially inane. (LASA, p.-5) Similarly, Burke calls his theory a "recipe.” His reliance on the implicit and unstated is made clear in his discussion of entitling: "while leaving unsaid, all that is subsumed under the title" (LASA, p. 8). Finally, Burke undermines his own authority by not being explicit. Who can believe a writer who appeals to the authority of unidentified colleagues, to the "redoubtable Horn Tooke" (LASA, p. 371), to Dennis H. Wong, and to the "lady of distinguished lineage" who tells her dream of using pot de chambre (LASA, p. 348)? Who can follow a writer who "particularly enjoys the somewhat rare figure of anacoluthon": "abandonment in the midst of a sentence of one type of construction in favor of one grammatically inconsonant" (LASA, p. 332)? Who can take seriously a theorist who treats his subject as a "Beauty Clinic" and promotes a "comic theory of education?" 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