Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955. Kenneth Burke
enough, such a terministic approach to symbolism can be much more “factual” than is the case with reports about actual conditions or happenings in the extrasymbolic realm. In the extrasymbolic realm, there is usually a higher necessary percentage of “interpretation” or “inference” in a statement we call “factual.” We can but infer what the diplomat did. But we can cite “factually” some report that says what he did. People usually think that the nonsymbolic realm is the clear one, while the symbolic realm is hazy. But if you agree that the words, or terms, in a book are its “facts,” then by the same token you see there is a sense in which we get our view of deeds as facts from our sense of words as facts, rather than vice versa.
In this strict usage, many observations that might ordinarily be treated under the headings of “fact” fall on the side of “inference.” For instance, when referring to the formula, “Dublin, 1904/Trieste, 1914,” we described it as “a duality of scene.” There is a slight tendentiousness here; for our characterization leans to the side of “Dublin versus Trieste” rather than to the side of “Dublin equals Trieste” (toward opposition rather than apposition). And when referring to the quotation from Ovid, we might rather have referred to the quoted words themselves, stressing perhaps the original context from which they were lifted. Thus quickly and spontaneously we smuggle inferences, or interpretations, into our report of the “factual.” Yet, insofar as there is a record, there is an underlying structure of “factuality” to which we can repeatedly repair, in the hopes of hermeneutic improvement.
“Proof,” then, would be of two sorts. While grounding itself in reference to the textual “facts,” it must seek to make clear all elements of inference or interpretation it adds to these facts; and it must offer a rationale for its selections and interpretations. Ideally, it might even begin from different orders of “facts,” and show how they led in the end to the same interpretation. We should not have much difficulty, for instance, in showing how “Dublin versus Trieste” could still allow for “Dublin equals Trieste,” for there are respects in which Joyce’s (or Stephen’s!) original motives are transformed, and there are respects in which they were continued.
At the point of greatest ideal distance, an attempt to ground the analysis of literary symbolism in “terministic factuality” is to be contrasted with the analysis of symbols in terms of “analogy.” If, for instance, the word, “tree,” appears in two contexts, we would not begin by asking ourselves what rare “symbolic” meaning a tree might have, in either religious or psychoanalytic allegory. We would begin rather with the literal fact that this term bridges the two contexts.
Or let us go a step further. Suppose that you did begin with some pat meaning for tree, over and above its meaning as a positive concept. (In our hypothetical case, we are assuming that, whatever else “tree” may stand for, in these two contexts it at least refers to a tree in the primary dictionary sense, as it might not if one reference was to a “family tree.”) Suppose you were prepared to say in advance exactly what recondite meaning the “image” of a tree might have, in its nature as a “symbol” enigmatically “emblematic” of esoteric meanings. (For instance, we could imagine a psychologist saying, “It’s not just a ‘tree’; it’s a father-symbol, or a mother-symbol, or in general a parent-symbol.”) Even if we granted that your “symbolic” or “analogical” meaning for “tree” was correct, the fact would still remain that the term had one particular set of associates in some particular work. This is the kind of interconnectedness we would watch, when studying the “facts” of an identical word that recurs in changing contexts. Such an investigation would be in contrast with the confining of one’s interpretation to equivalences—“analogies”—already established even before one looks at the given text.
The “analogical” method is alluring, because by it you get these things settled once and for all. A good literature student, trained in the ways of indexing of “contexts” requires that each work be studied anew, “from scratch.” Night, bird, sun, blood, tree, mountain, death? No matter, once the topic is introduced, analogy has the answer, without ever looking further.
Part of the trouble, to be sure, comes from the fact that often brief poems are the texts used. And the short lyric is the most difficult form to explain, as its transformations are necessarily quick, while being concealed beneath the lyric’s urgent need to establish intense unity of mood (a need so urgent that in most lyrics the transformations are negligible, though such is not the case with great lyrists like Keats). Long forms (epics, dramas, novels, or poetic sequences) afford the most viable material for the study of terms in changing contexts. And the principles we learn through this better documented analysis can then be applied, mutatis mutandis, to the study of lyric “naturalness.”
Three illustrations, before proceeding:
On p. 36, in connection with the episode of Stephen’s unjust punishment, we read: “ [. . .] the swish of the sleeve of the soutane as the pandybat was lifted to strike [. . .]” and “the soutane sleeve swished again as the pandybat was lifted [. . .] ” On p. 119: “Then, just as he was wishing that some unforeseen cause might prevent the director from coming, he had heard the handle of the door turning and the swish of a soutane.” Here the recurrence of the swish establishes a purely “factual” bond between the two passages; and this factual bond is to be noted first as such, in its sheer terminal identity, without reference to “symbolic” or “analogical” meanings. More remotely, the “swish” might be said to subsist punwise in “was wishing.” Hence, if this iterative verb-form were noted elsewhere in the work, one might tentatively include its context, too, as part of this grouping (made by leaps and zigzags through the narrative).
Or one may isolate this concordance: p. 73 top, citing Shelley’s “Art thou pale for weariness”; p. 136, Ben Jonson’s, “I was not wearier where I lay”; p. 174, in Stephen’s villanelle, “Are you not weary of ardent ways?”; and on p. 175, when Stephen is watching the birds as an augury, “leaning wearily on his ashplant [. . .] the ashplant on which he leaned wearily [. . .] a sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his weariness.” (Ordinarily, we take it that the various grammatical forms of a word can be treated as identical. But one must always be prepared for a case where this will not be so. One could imagine a work, for instance, in which “fly” and “flight” were so used that “fly” was found to appear only in contexts meaning “soar above” or “transcend,” whereas “flight” was only in contexts meaning “flee.” Ordinarily, “flight” would cover both meanings, as we believe the symbol of flight does in Joyce. Or should we say that in Stephens ecstatic vision of artistic flight the “negative” sense of fleeing attains rather the “positive” sense of flying?)
Or again: on p. 168 top, Stephen’s esthetic is stated doctrinally thus: “The artist, like the god of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” Without yet asking ourselves what such paring of the nails may “symbolize,” we “factually” unite this passage with “[. . .] some fellows called him Lady Boyle because he was always at his nails, paring them” (p. 30 top); and (p. 32): “Mr. Gleason had round shiny cuffs and clean white wrists and fattish white hands and the nails of them were long and pointed. Perhaps he pared them too like Lady Boyle.”
Such concordances are initially noted without inference or interpretation. For whereas purely terministic correlation can serve the ends of “analogical” or “symbolic” exegesis, it is far more tentative and empirical, with a constant demand for fresh inquiry. In fact, one may experimentally note many correlations of this sort without being able to fit them into an over-all scheme of interpretation.
But a grounding in the concordances of “terminal factuality” is by no means a solution to our problems.
2
If we are to begin with a “factual” index, what do we feature? Obviously, we cannot make a concordance of every book we read. And besides, even if we had a concordance before we began, we must find some principle of selection, since some terms are much more likely than others to yield good hermeneutical results. If a researcher is looking for some particular topic, of course, there is no problem of selection. But