Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955. Kenneth Burke
to do than merely look for terminal correlations.
Almost without thinking, he will select certain key terms. For instance, every reader would spontaneously agree that “Stephen Dedalus” is a term to be featured. And at the very least, he would expand the name in the directions explicitly indicated by Joyce: Daedalus, Stephanoumenos, Stephaneforos.
Also, the title suggests that the critic might ask himself: “What will be the operational definition of ‘artist’ in this work?” One must be wary of titles, however. For often they were assigned or altered to meet real or imagined conditions of the market; and sometimes a work may be given a title purely for its sales value as a title, which was invented without reference to the work so entitled. In the case of the Portrait, of course, it would be generally agreed that the work is depicting the growth of an artist (as so defined) not only emotionally but in terms of a doctrine explicitly stated. For, ironically, although Stephen’s doctrine denounces the “didactic” in art, it is itself as “didactic” as the Gospel; in fact it is an esthetic gospel.
But whereas the primary terms of a work operate by secondary connections, we can never be quite sure what secondary terms are likely to produce the best results. For instance, the first few lines of the book refer twice to “baby tuckoo.” In a sense, this is Stephen’s “real” name; for by the resources natural to narrative, an essence is stated in terms of temporal priority. Tentatively, then, we note it. And having done so, we find these possibly related entries: (p. 10 foot) “tucking the end of the nightshirt”; (p. 13) “little feet tucked up”; (p. 183) “a leather portfolio tucked under his armpit.” What, then, of “Tusker Boyle” (p. 30), the unsavory fellow whom we have already mentioned in connection with the paring of his fingernails, a reference also connected with reference to the artist’s “handiwork” (p. 168 top)? But the reference to hands also radiates in another direction, including both the priest’s painful paddling of Stephen’s hands in the pandybat episode, and the episode at the top of p. 124, where Stephen withdraws his hand from the priest as a sign that he is not to choose the religious vocation, but to become instead a “priest of the imagination.” (The scene was introduced by the already cited reference to the “swish of the soutane.”) This and the four references in sixteen lines to the “pain” suffered in the pandybat episode have as counterpart in the later passage an assurance that the music which had distracted him from the priest’s promises dissolved his thoughts “painlessly and “noiselessly.”
We could radiate in many other directions. On p. 30, for instance, the reference to Tusker (or Lady) Boyle had led immediately into talk of Eileen’s hands, with the memory of the time when this Protestant girl had put her hand into his pocket. Her hands “were like ivory; only soft. That was the meaning of Tower of Ivory,” etc., whereat we can radiate to “yellow ivory” and “mottled tusks of elephants,” on p. 138.
We could go on. But already we glimpse how, without our asking ourselves just what any of our bridging terms may mean “analogically” or “symbolically,” a circle of terminal interrelationships is beginning to build up. And even though we might abandon some positions under pressure (as for instance the series “tuckoo-tucking-Tusker-tusks”), we find connections of similar import being established by many other routes, most of them not requiring us to do any punwise “joycing” of terms (though we might at least be justified in applying such tentatives to even early work by Joyce, in the likelihood that his later typical susceptibilities were already emerging).
But let us get back to our more immediate problem. What should have been indexed in the opening pages? There was a “moocow” (“symbolically” maternal?), there was a father with a “hairy face,” there is a progression from “baby tuckoo” to “moocow” to “Betty Byrne” (beddy burn?!) to “lemon platt” (which puzzles us, except insofar as it may be yellow, anent which more anon). There are some childishly distorted jingles. And these may so set the rules of this adult work that we can look tentatively for such distortion as a principle, operating perhaps over and above the examples explicitly given in the text. (Otherwise put: if these paragraphs are under the sign of such punwise distortion, might we not be justified in asking whether there could also be displaced distortion, such as would be there if particular distortions were taken to stand for more than themselves, indicating that a principle of distortion was operating at this point? We bring up the possibility, to suggest methodological reasons why we might experimentally so pun on “Betty Byrne” as we did. We would remind our reader, however, that we are as yet committed to nothing, so far as this text goes. In advance, we make allowance for a latitudinarian range—as contrasted with those who, in advance, have it all sewed up. But we need not yet make decisions.)
Should we have noted that “His mother had a nicer smell than his father”? In any case, there are many other references to smell (pp. 10, 12, and 14, for instance); and the passage becomes doubly interesting when, in his stage of contrition (p. 116) Stephen has trouble mortifying his sense of smell: “To mortify his smell was more difficult as he found in himself no instinctive repugnance to bad odors,” etc.
Where do we start? Where do we stop?
Let us admit: there must be a certain amount of waste motion here, particularly if one undertakes an index before having a fairly clear idea of a book’s developments. One is threatened with a kind of methodic demoralization—for anything might pay off. Yet by an “index” we most decidedly do not mean such lists (by author or topic) as one finds in the back of a book. In fact, whereas an index is normally made by entries on a set of cards which are then rearranged alphabetically, we must allow our entries to remain “in the order of their appearance.” For a purely alphabetical reordering makes it almost impossible to inspect a work in its unfoldings. And we must keep on the move, watching both for static interrelationships and for principles of transformation whereby a motive may progress from one combination through another to a third, etc.
Over and above whatever we may enter in our index, there will be the search for “stages.” Methodologically, such a search implies a theory of “substance.” That is, in contrast with those “semantic” theories which would banish from their vocabulary any term for “substance,” we must believe above all in the reasonableness of “entitling.” Confronting a complexity of details, we do not confine ourselves merely to the detailed tracing of interrelationships among them, or among the ones that we consider outstanding. We must also keep prodding ourselves to attempt answering this question: “Suppose you were required to find an over-all title for this entire batch of particulars. What would that be?”
The Portrait is in five parts, which are merely numbered. What, then, should their titles be, if they had titles? We say that such a question implies a grounding in the term, “substance,” or in the furtive function indicated by that term, because it implies that all the disparate details included under one head are infused with a common spirit, or purpose, i.e., are consubstantial. We may be in varying degrees right or wrong, as regards the substance that we impute to a given set of details. But they are ultimately organized with relation to one another by their joint participation in a unitary purpose, or “idea.” In brief, we must keep hypothetically shifting between the particular and the general.
True: you can take it for granted that, once such a range is available, you can always attain some level of generalization in terms of which disparate details might be substantially related. Ideally, one seeks for terms that account for kinship not only with regard to tests of consistency; one also wants to place sequences, developments, showing why the parts are in precisely that order and no other; and if one seeks to be overthorough here, the excess should be revealed by trouble in finding cogent rationalizations.
Often, for instance, the critic may be overzealous in trying to show how a whole plot may unfold from some original situation, somewhat like an artificial Japanese flower unfolding in water. But an accurate analysis would have to show how a series of new steps was needed, to carry the work from its opening “germ” to its final “growth.” Thus, some opening imagery might be said to contain the later plot “in germ.” (We have seen this very Portrait so analyzed.) But on closer analysis you will find that the opening imagery “pointed to” the ultimate destination of the plot only in the sense that, if one makes a sweep of the hand from south-southwest to north-northwest, one has