Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955. Kenneth Burke
purely dialectical considerations are stated in an insufficiently generalized form; as a result, a term local to the study of ritual will be used to designate a process that is not necessarily ritualistic at all.
Thus, consider the most highly generalized resources of discursive reason: “composition and division.” Because such resources are universal to human thinking, they will also be found exemplified in primitive rituals. The principle of “division,” for instance, is present in sparagmos, the rending of the god’s flesh in primitive religious practices. Or the principle of “composition” is present here, inasmuch as the members of the group are thought to be made consubstantial by thus ceremoniously eating of the same magical substance. Suppose, then, for “division” in general, we used the word sparagmos, or rending and tearing of the divine sacrifice, and for “composition” in general we used some term for the tribal love-feast. The most rational processes of science or everyday life would thus be expressed in terms that referred merely to the application of them in one specific subject matter. Scientific analysis might thus be treated as a vestigial survival of sparagmos. The current over-use of terms for the processes of ritual and myth has two had effects: first, it can make even realistic common sense look like an attenuated survival of primitive magic; second, by thus misdirecting our attention, it can keep us from perceiving the mythic elements that really do infuse our culture (mythic elements rooted in the magic of property, with its avowed and unavowed, spontaneous and deliberate, forms of priestcraft).
While it is our job to brood over man’s dismal bondage to the magic of social relations as rooted in property, and thus to mention this topic in a hit-and-run sort of way whenever the given subject offers such an inkling, for the moment we are trying to suggest that the dialectic of “stages” (sometimes called “levels”) was not adequately considered in the case of the definition which we have taken as our model. So we suggested a possible corrective, plus a corrective to the possible misuse of that.
In the Portrait, considered from the standpoint of “stages,” the first three chapters would be like courses “prerequisite” to the choice Stephen makes in Chapter IV, where he turns from priestly to artistic vocation. However, we should not overlook an intermediate stage here. After thought of “ordination” [. . .] of “a grave and ordered and passionless life that awaited him, a life without material cares” [. . .], of himself as “a being apart in every order” [. . .], of the window that might be his “if he ever joined the order” [. . .], of his destiny “to be elusive of social or religious orders,” there is talk of himself as “about to fall,” then “he crossed the bridge over the stream of the Tolka,” whereat he contemplates the opposite of order: “Then, bending to the left, he followed the lane which led up to his house. The faint sour stink of rotted cabbages came towards him from the kitchen gardens on the rising ground above the river. He smiled to think that it was this disorder, [throughout, italics ours] the misrule and confusion of his father’s house and the stagnation of vegetable life, which was to win the day in his soul.” Not quite. For the next episode will detail the vision of the hawklike man and the bird-girl (flight away, flight up, a transcending of the rotted cabbages). Hence, all told: from the priestly calling, through the dismal alternative, to the new exaltation, the aesthetic jesuitry that will be his purging of the alternative disorder, that will fly above it. And since the disorder had been “to the left,” and since Part I should “implicitly contain” what eventuates, we might appropriately recall young Stephen’s first triumph, as regards the pandybat episode, when he had gone “not to the corridor but up the staircase on the right that led up to the castle.” Here is accurate writing.
We could continue with further “stages.” Does not Stephen’s statement of his ars poetica, in a concerto-like relation with Lynch, correspond to the doctrinal stage in the Phaedrus, following the myth in Socrates’ second speech (which was itself the third stage of the dialogue as a whole)?
Joyce’s story, “The Dead” (in Dubliners), seems particularly to profit by a close attention to “stages.”
In the first of its three parts, the keynote is expectancy, which is amplified by many appropriate details: talk of preparations, arrivals, introductions, apprehensions, while fittingly the section ends on an unfinished story. All these details are in terms of everyday sociality, to do with the warming-up of the party, stressing an avid engrossment in such an order of motives, as though they were the very essence of reality. There are a few superficial references to the theme of death (the passing mention of two dead relatives who are never mentioned again, and Gabriel’s remark that he had been delayed because it had taken his wife “three mortal hours” to dress). And there is one enigmatic detail, though at this stage of the story it looks wholly realistic: the reference to the snow on Gabriel’s galoshes and overcoat as he enters, bringing in a “cold fragrant air from out-of-doors.”
The second stage, dealing with the party at its height, could be analyzed almost as a catalogue of superficial socialities, each in its way slightly false or misfit. The mood was set incipiently in the first part, when Gabriel offers the servant a tip. He had known her before she became a servant, hence his act (involving sociality of a sort) is not quite right. In the second stage, there is a welter of such intangible infelicities, as with the fact that Mary Jane’s singing received the most vigorous applause from “four young men in the doorway who had gone away to the refreshment-room at the beginning of the piece but had come back when the piano had stopped.” This section is a thesaurus of what we might call “halfway” socialities, such as Miss Ivor’s “propagandism” for the Irish movement (in leaving early, she cries, “Bean-nacht libh”), Freddy’s drunken amiability, Gabriel’s dutiful conversation with Freddy’s mother, the parlor talk about music, the conviviality through common participation in the materials of the feast, Gabriel’s slightly hollow after-dinner speech that was noisily acclaimed, Gabriel’s distant relationship to two of the women who are giving the party, the few words with his wife indicating familiarity without intimacy, the somewhat gingerly treatment of the one Protestant among Catholics.
Such is the theme amplified, with apparent realistic engrossment, in this section. There are also a few explicit but glancing references to death. One threatens to be serious, when some of the Catholics try to tell the Protestant why certain monks sleep in their coffins; but “as the subject had grown lugubrious it was buried in a silence of the table,” etc. And twice there is the enigmatic antithesis, the theme of the snow in the night, still wholly realistic in guise: “Gabriel’s warm trembling fingers tapped the cold pane of the window. How cool it must be outside! How pleasant it would be to walk out alone, first along by the river and then through the park! The snow would be lying on the branches of the trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the Wellington Monument.” In the other passage, there is likewise a reference to the “gleaming cap of snow” that Gabriel associated with the Monument. (One never knows how exacting to be, when comparing such passages; yet, as regards these references to the “cap” of snow, looking back we note that, when Gabriel first entered, the light fringe of snow lay “like a cape” on his shoulders. Cap—cape. Where secret identifications are taking form, since we are in time to learn that this snow stands for some essence beyond the appearances of halfway sociality, might not the signatures mark their secret relationship thus punwise?
In any case, the third section deals with events following the party. The cycle of realistic expectations and eventualities is drawing to a close. The party breaks up. We are now free to penetrate the implications of the antithetical moment. (“How much more pleasant it would be there than at the supper table!” Gabriel had thought, in one of those two outlaw flashes when he had imagined the snow outside in the night. )
The first two sections were best described, we think, by a block-like method. Thus, for the first, we simply noted how the theme of expectancy could be stated in variation; and for the second, we broke the analysis into a list of variations on the theme of halfway sociality. For the point we were trying to make, it didn’t matter in what order we listed these details. But the third section concerns initiation into a mystery. It is to take us beyond the realm of realism, as so conceived, into the realm of ideality. Hence, there is a strict succession of stages, in the development towards a more exacting kind of vision. Each stage is the way-in to the next, as the narrow-visioned expectations of the party had been the way-in to the disclosures