Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955. Kenneth Burke
many quasi-positive ones).
Though we do not believe that “poetic exercising” as such involves the settling of scores outside the work of art (since the work of art, in its internality, is as extrinsic to the world’s problems as are the purely internal relations of a crossword puzzle), such an admission by no means ties us to the notion that poetry, in its bountiful verbal materiality, is to be considered as thus confined. The work of art is produced by a constant succession of new decisions on the part of the author. Even when a work reaches the fatal point at which it “begins to write itself,” spinning from what has gone before, and perhaps actually forcing the writer to change his original plans (in case he has laid down co-ordinates which, he finds in the course of writing, don’t have the implications he originally imputed to them)—even then, if the agent were not constantly goaded anew, the project would lapse.
And what goads him, over and beyond the “logic” of his premises? Or what goaded him to hit upon such implied premises in the first place? We take it that the goad arises from extra-aesthetic tensions in the social order. At this point the artist’s individual personality dissolves into the “personality” of the given social order, while that in turn dissolves into principles of “sociality” in general. The negative genius of language, or symbol-using, heads in the thou-shalt-not’s of the ethical, proscriptions shaped with regard to the given social order and its corresponding kinds of ownership, expectancy, and obligation. All such “values” provide material for “free” use in a work of art.
In the Poetics Aristotle gives a perfect instance of such use when, having said that a tragedy is more effective if the action is made to seem marvelous, he remarks that accidental occurrences are most likely to arouse a sense of wonder if they are made to seem providential, as when the statue of Mitys fell and killed the man who had killed Mitys. The feeling of fatality is here considered purely as a resource to be exploited for a poetic effect. This is what we would call a “free” use of a religious propensity.
André Gide, as a master of perversity, clearly illustrates such “free” poetic use of a general human propensity by his treatment of the acte gratuit, the pragmatically motiveless crime, done for sheer love of the art, as pure gesture. This conceit, setting up an “aesthetic” of crime, troubles and outrages the reader in a way that even the cruelest of offences cannot do when motivated by no matter how abominable a purpose. About the edges of our consciousness we feel the whole logic of worldly conspiracy being dissolved by this parody of divine freedom, a parody because God’s act of creation was gratuitous. Thus as a poetic device it gives the reader a new “thrill,” getting (in a wholly non-Aristotelian way) the appeal of the “marvelous” in the forming of the plot. It may be studied specifically in terms of Gide’s character (in which connection it seems related to the motives of his work that are manifested in its homosexual motifs). It may be studied more generally in terms of its relation to the contemporary social order, which, for one reason or another, has called forth many excellent works of perverse cast. Or it may be studied more generally still, as one way, among many possible ones, in which the principle of negativity can be “personalized,” in terms of human character. (Gide summed it up formally in connection with his character Lafcadio, to whom “thou shalt not [. . .] ” invariably suggested “what would happen if [. . .] ?”)
The principle of negativity is personalized differently (becomes a different kind of “strategy”) in Hemingway’s short story, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” which comes to a focus in the parody of the Lord’s Prayer as the word “nothing” is substituted for nearly all the substantival words in the text, thus: “our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada,” etc.
But the principle of negativity by no means always takes perverse forms. Here, for instance, is a passage in Emerson where it is quite edifying:
Sensible objects conform to the premonitions of Reason and reflect the conscience. All things are moral; and in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature glorious with form, color, and motion; that every globe in the remotest heaven, every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life, every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine, every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments.
For present purposes, we shall survey (far too briefly, so far as justice to the text is concerned) the first part of Goethe’s Faust. The negative guidance of the work is clear enough, as regards the role of Mephistopheles. Also, we can observe with relative ease the relations between the “character” of the work and the “magic” of the social order (brought together through the personal medium of an author who was both romantic poet and court minister). And by taking a specific case as our text we might be able to discover what kinds of distinctions are necessary or possible for the analysis of poetic symbolism.
A purely indicative function, for instance, may be clearly demarcated from an evocative one where such things as labels on bottles in a laboratory are concerned. But though the name of a character in a fiction is indicative, serving with perfect accuracy to differentiate a reference to this character from a reference to any other ideal entity in the book, there is also a respect in which the name may come to have a kind of “summational” nature, even in its purely indicative functions. That is, the name comes to be a sign for certain kinds of expectancies on the part of the reader, so that, when the character appears, certain kinds of development rather than other kinds are anticipated (or “predicted”). The name here becomes, we might say, the sign not of an entity but of a principle. And though such a principle is a necessary condition for the evoking of emotional attitudes in the reader, it is on the signalizing side of the name’s functioning.
One might state the problem thus: We come to expect of a certain character a certain quality of action. Depending upon our sympathies, we may or may not “want” such action to prevail at a given time in the plot. Or, more accurately, supposing that we don’t want it to prevail, we nonetheless “hope against hope” that, if it does prevail, it will prevail under conditions that will somehow make it acceptable. The “evocative” ingredient in the name depends upon our attitude toward the quality of action expected, as being deemed “natural” to the given character. But regardless of how our sympathies might line up, the name must first of all be purely and simply a true sign for the given quality of action anticipated in connection with it. If it is not, the work is inferior as a fiction. The tendency to equate science with the signatory or indicative and art with the evocative can conceal the exceptional degree to which the “first office” figures in the arousing of poetic expectancies (the proper poetic equivalent of “prediction”).
Conversely, the distinction conceals from us the intense “pageantry” of science, its nature as a social “magic,” as a discipline infused, or made radiant by motives extrinsic to its specialties as such, but intrinsic to it as a mode of action evolved by the symbol-using species of organism. The bottles in the laboratory are not just “labeled.” There is a sense in which they are not merely “perceived,” but evoke “emotions.” Furtively, they become “home,” or “second nature.”
The “personality” of symbols, which they necessarily possess by reason of the fact that they are used by persons, involves ultimately their place in human pageantry generically. And we contend that a study of symbolism should aim to penetrate ultimately into the magic of this hierarchal realm. “Local” problems in the theory of signs, we hold, should be treated in ways that fit well with the analysis of all social pageantry, as determined by the inclusion of linguistic elements.
Let us now turn to Faust, not in the hopes of making an adequate analysis in so brief a space, but by way of illustrating what we consider typical concerns in the “dramatistic” analysis of poetic symbolism.10
[To be concluded]
This essay first appeared in Chicago Review. “The Language of Poetry, ‘Dramatistically Considered.’” Chicago Review 8.4 (Fall 1954): 88–102. Reprinted by permission. The essay was originally written for a