Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955. Kenneth Burke
in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Burke sent me a copy of this manuscript in 1959, after I first wrote to him. He also sent it to others and distributed it in multi-lithographed form to his classes at the Indiana School of Letters. Many Burke scholars are familiar with this manuscript. David Cratis Williams has written a long, comprehensive essay on this manuscript, which he included in Unending Conversations, the volume of Burke studies and writings that he edited with Greig Henderson in 2001. The third version of A Symbolic of Motives is actually called A Symbolic of Motives. I first saw this manuscript when Anthony Burke sent me a copy after he discovered it among Burke’s papers in the house at Andover after Burke’s death in 1993. As far as we can now tell from Burke’s letters to me and others, Burke put this version of A Symbolic of Motives together from published and unpublished material around 1963. We know that Burke gave copies of it to others, like Trevor Melia when he was at Pittsburgh, long before I ever saw it, but that nobody ever did anything with it until I sent a copy to David Cratis Williams while he and Greig Henderson were choosing the material that would go into Unending Conversations. This was Burke’s last serious attempt to prepare a coherent, sustained version of A Symbolic of Motives. He abandoned this manuscript midway through Part 2 while he was revising and shortening his long essay entitled “The Thinking of the Body.” This essay must have been written sometime after 1955. Burke included a long version of it in Poetics, Dramatistically Considered, published it separately in The Psychoanalytic Review in 1963, and included a shortened version of it in Language as Symbolic Action. Although there are references to a Part 3 in this third version of A Symbolic of Motives, there is no indication anywhere of what Burke intended to include in Part 3. We know from his letters that Burke was still struggling with A Symbolic of Motives in 1969 after Libbie died when he spent some time at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs. Burke finally abandoned his attempts to put any kind of version of A Symbolic of Motives together in the late 1970s.
What we have, then, are three versions of A Symbolic of Motives and more than twenty years of struggle on Burke’s part while whatever A Symbolic of Motives was to be underwent a whole series of transformations in his mind and in his published and unpublished work.
Burke began work on A Symbolic of Motives as soon as he finished A Rhetoric of Motives in 1950. His intention from the very beginning was to write a dramatistic poetics to go with his dramatistic A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives. By 1955, he clearly had enough written and published on this project to make a book called A Symbolic of Motives. But there were some problems that must have stopped him. He did not like Prentice-Hall and did not want to go on with them as his publisher. He had begun his relationship with Hermes in 1951 and was engaged, with them, in reissuing all of his books from the 1930s, plus his first book of poetry, A Book of Moments. His work on the poetics also was bogged down in his attempt to work out the physiological counterparts of his theory of catharsis—the central concept in his poetics. He began to do this in an essay called “The Thinking of the Body” in which he tries to show that the pity, fear, and pride that were purged in tragedy, according to Aristotle, had their physiological counterparts in the sexual, urinal, and fecal purges of the body, which Burke had identified as the “demonic trinity” in his A Grammar of Motives. Burke began to insist that no catharsis was complete until these bodily purges had been expressed in the imagery of a given work. Burke’s long essay “The Thinking of the Body” is an attempt to prove this thesis and involves him in some of the most tortured and absurd analyses he ever wrote, most of which are dependent upon the analysis of what he takes to be puns and hidden references to what he liked to call the no-no realm of the three bodily functions mentioned above. The absurdities to which proving this thesis led Burke can be clearly seen in the final pages of the third version of A Symbolic of Motives in which he revises and shortens “The Thinking of the Body” essay and offers us long lists of the many kinds of references that could be functioning as puns and hidden references to various kinds of bodily purgative functions.
Burke was very busy with a variety of projects between 1950 and 1961 when The Rhetoric of Religion was published and then again in the early and mid-1960s when he resolved his problems about a publisher and began his happy relationship with the University of California Press—thanks largely to the work of Bob Zachary. A Symbolic of Motives got lost in all of this because Burke still could not decide what to do with it or how to put together what he had written to make a book. The closest he came to presenting us with a coherent version of his dramatistic poetics was in Poetics, Dramatistically Considered which, although it seems complete as it stands, Burke never seemed inclined to have published as a book but let circulate as a manuscript for all of those years. Burke did include material that was clearly part of all three versions of A Symbolic of Motives in Language as Symbolic Action, and although he did occasionally try to work on A Symbolic of Motives after that, he had really abandoned the project because in most ways, his dramatistic poetics was all written in one form or another and complete for anyone who wanted to take the trouble to assemble the different essays and manuscripts and work the theory and methodology out. As usual, Burke was ready to move on to new projects, and did, after Language as Symbolic Action. Libbie Burke’s death in 1969, after her long terminal illness, was a devastation to Burke. Libbie Burke was always a great champion of A Symbolic of Motives. We know that she typed the third version and that she kept at Burke to finish this grand project. Had she stayed well and lived, he might have brought it to closure. As it was, Burke lost his drive to make books, although he never lost his drive to keep writing, to keep working out his latest project, which was logology. He worked on with great energy and intellectual vigor until 1984 when he finally completed the two new afterwords for Permanence and Change and Attitudes toward History. But he never resumed work on his Symbolic of Motives after 1969, even though he refers to it in notes for some of his essays in the 1970s.
If we want to know what Burke’s never-published A Symbolic of Motives is all about, what his dramatistic poetics consisted of, we have to work our way through all three of his versions of it and sort them out to try to determine the transformations that the original conception of it went through and why, as David Cratis Williams has argued, Burke was never able to settle on any single conception of what A Symbolic of Motives was to be. Here, then, is a brief summary of what we have in the three versions that Burke left us between 1950, when he first began writing the essays that were to go into A Symbolic of Motives and what he took out of these different versions to include in Language as Symbolic Action in 1966. The three versions have the following titles in what follows: Essays Toward A Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955, Poetics, Dramatistically Considered (1957–1958), and A Symbolic of Motives (1963–1964), and, finally, Language as Symbolic Action (1966). All of these versions of what might have been in A Symbolic of Motives had Burke ever decided to make a book or books of it have been discussed at some length in my book, Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations, 2nd edition, and by David Cratis Williams and I in our essays in Unending Conversations. Other Burke scholars, such as Robert Wess, have also discussed them. Hopefully, at some future point, all three versions will be published and we will have all the necessary texts readily available to us for study and analysis.
In Essays Toward A Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955, I have selected only some of the major essays Burke wrote and published in this time period while he was still working from his original conception of what A Symbolic of Motives should be, as he defined it in A Rhetoric of Motives. Burke’s grand plan for his dramatistic project was to follow Aristotle and write a modern grammar, rhetoric, poetics, and ethics. Working with a five-year schedule, Burke published A Grammar of Motives in 1945, A Rhetoric of Motives in 1950 and was ready, it seems, to publish A Symbolic of Motives in 1955, and, presumably, his Ethics of Motives by 1960, at the end of a twenty-year period of prodigious work and thought. But Burke became a victim of his own genius and his tendency to succumb to what he has called the “counter-gridlock motive.” In the twenty years after A Rhetoric of Motives was published, which were certainly among the most productive years of Burke’s long and productive life, he pursued one project after another: he finished up his work on Dramatism with his omnibus Language as Symbolic Action collection of essays; he began work on Logology with The Rhetoric of Religion; he had his books from the 1930s reissued by Hermes, he found a new publisher for The Rhetoric of Religion in The Beacon Press, and began his relationship with the University of California Press which, at one time in the 1970s had all of Burke’s books in print at the same time; he traveled and taught and lectured all over the