Equipment for Living. Kenneth Burke
and political context” (Enos et al. 367). Recent scholarship continues this tradition by using Burke’s “equipment for living” concept as a fruitful metaphor in investigating a wide variety of texts: the poetry of William Carlos Williams (Clark), the aesthetics and social impact of jazz and punk music (Veneciano; Matula), the ethics of Renaissance literature (Grossman), the rhetoric of religious discourse (Smith; Lewis), the work of Ralph Ellison (Pease), and parodic texts like Spaceballs and Mad Magazine (Ott and Bonnstetter; Carabas).
The ability of the equipment for living metaphor to reveal resonance within so many disciplines and texts reveals Burke’s inclusive approach, which employs several critical methods to search a text for strategies. Because of his desire to treat literature as equipment for living, Burke always looks for the best parts of even the worst books. He calls this strategy discounting. Discounting is a generosity in reading that selects the criteria most likely to produce usable insights from a text, guided by the understanding that no text can do or say everything at once. Burke writes, “By proper discounting everything becomes usable” (Attitudes 244). If literature is equipment for living, then no one book, no one piece of equipment, is going to be useful in every situation.
Though Burke demands usefulness in literature, this does not imply that he favors the practical over the aesthetic. In fact, Counter-Statement erodes that binary. Literature is useful because it is beautiful. Burke argues that the opposition between practical and aesthetic “vanishes when a machine is beautiful. Accordingly, to ask that the aesthetic set itself in opposition to the practical is to ask that the aesthetic be one specific brand of the aesthetic” (111). Literature functions as equipment, but the metaphor enhances, not maligns, the role of eloquence in art. Authors who wish to be simply and blatantly didactic are better off using “the pamphlet, the political tract, the soap-box oration” (189) as the equipment to spread their message. Literature must arouse and satisfy the desires of readers with a form that parallels experiences outside of art. It must craft evocative, moving symbols that provide “a terminology of thoughts, actions, emotions, attitudes, for codifying a pattern of experience” (154). These symbols encapsulate with great power and resonance the complexities of society, providing readers with new perspectives and strategies for their situations. For further discussion of aesthetics and usefulness as components of equipment for living see Appendix A.
Given how Burke unites usefulness with aesthetics, it is not surprising that his reviews often highlight the power of symbol, literary form, beauty, and eloquence to generate attitudes in readers. Discussing this in the review “A New Poetics” (1925), Burke writes that “art, by its subtle insinuations of what aspects of life are to be desired and what to be avoided, contributes moral standards in that manner which seems most penetrative: by unaware absorption.” A critic’s work involves uncovering the prescribed action inherent in literary symbols. As Burke argues in the review “Symbolic War” (1936), the attitudes offered by poets function as incipient action:
. . . the nonpartisan, imaginative poet writes, “Beware, a storm approacheth.” As propagandist he adds, “Go thou, and buy rubbers.” The critics of the “proletarian” school . . . have done us a service in recalling how often the poet, in this imperfect world, is in effect writing, “Go thou, and buy rubbers” when he is only aware of writing,3 “A storm approacheth.” In the mere act of warning us what to beware of, he suggests the kind of measures to be taken.
This search for “measures to be taken” is the driving force behind the reviews in this collection. Satisfaction in reviewing never came to Burke through the writing of a plot summary and the awarding of stars. He is far more interested in charting the aesthetics of a work and navigating through its most fruitful branches, whether literary or critical. To this end, he may even violate the more standard conventions of reviewing, giving unannounced spoilers or ignoring a plot entirely as it suits his purposes.
Indulgent, perhaps, but Burke was always ultimately interested in the way a book could reflect, inform, reshape, or contain situations. A perusal of this volume reveals instance after instance when Burke evaluates literature in terms of its strategy and style. In the review “Fraught with Freight,” Burke argues that Thomas Mann’s writing provides symbolic strategies for the situations outside of art. “At times his work suggests to me, not a personality, but a battlefield, an expanse of suffering soil across which the fluctuant and indeterminate conflicts of our day are waged momentously.” When reviewing One Season Shattered in the review “Deft Plaintiveness” (1936), Burke notices in James Daly a childlike quality that, while appealing, is ultimately insufficient. “I am a little afraid of it, since it does not equip us explicitly for battle.” Given art’s relevance to life, then, it seems natural that Burke favorably evaluates Joseph Krutch’s Experience and Art (1932):
Mr. Krutch, rightly, I think, questions those schools of literary criticism which would relegate the enjoyment of poetry to a mere “make-believe” corner of the mind. He holds that art bears upon the coordinates of living in general, giving us those emphases in the imaginative sphere which are relevant to “other human interests,” to man’s “other activities” outside of art.
It is from this basis that he reviews Horace Gregory’s Chorus for Survival, emphasizing in “The Hope in Tragedy” (1935) the ability of tragic stories to transform human sorrow into strength: “Within the frame of the tragic attitude, we do not seek to sterilize our aberrations, but to harness them, to make them serve, and with the help of criticism to build assets out of liabilities.” A failure to symbolically encapsulate experience is also seen as a major failing of Glenway Wescott’s Apple of the Eye, as Burke reviews it in “Delight and Tears” (1924). It is not enough that readers can enjoy the book as if it “actually occurred in one’s own life,” because the work does not invent “symbols which adequately summarize for us the emotional and ideological complexities in which we are involved.” This distinction is an important corrective to those who would reduce the “stylized answers” approach to what Burke calls in the essay “Equipment for Living” “easy consolation” (298), evidenced in books that provide readers clichéd relatability or an unearned sense of success without offering sustainable symbols for future experience.
Often, Burke’s quest for applicability is so irresistible that he will highlight through discounting aspects of the same work which are and are not useful to reader’s situations. When writing “William James: Superlative Master of the Comparative” (1936), Burke praises James for the pragmatic application of his thought process: “It promoted a kind of any-port-in-a-storm attitude, annoying perhaps to lovers of the symmetrical when it takes the metaphysical guise of pluralism, but extremely helpful for the moral jugglings we must manage in this imperfect world.” At the same time, he wonders if James alone is all the equipment modern readers need: “Yet, as we finish the account of his work, we are led to wonder whether, for all his inclusiveness, he could give us a full equipment for today. One is struck, for instance, by an almost total absence of historical and economic considerations. The mention of politics is rare, and naïve.” Similar critical tactics enacted in “Coleridge Rephrased” (1935) analyze I. A. Richards, whom Burke lauds for investigating the current relevance of Coleridge’s work:
Expertly translating passages from Coleridge into terms that more easily reveal their relevance to the present, [Richards] enables us to glimpse the ways in which a poet’s myths may be of the utmost importance to mankind in the most pragmatic sense conceivable: by providing the framework through which our minds may be organized and ordered.
Simultaneously, Burke wonders if the usability of Richard’s own work is tarnished because it ignores the role of economics and propaganda (a term, incidentally, which is not wholly pejorative for Burke): “Such thoughts would suggest the possibility that, to be completely serviceable for our needs, [Richards’s] book should not so cursorily dismiss the ‘propagandist’ element in poetry today.”
Even when not completely allied with the author, Burke gleans something from his reading. In “Corrosive Without Corrective” (1938), he finds value in Thurman Arnold’s The Folklore of Capitalism: “The book is certainly not to be considered an alternative to Marxism, as many reviewers have proposed; but if read by readers who discount it from the angle of a Marxist critique, it is very serviceable indeed.” Burke employs a similar strategy in “Words as Deeds”