Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955. Kenneth Burke
thoroughly worked out—as Burke’s dramatistic poetics. What we lack is not the dramatistic poetics, but a definitive version of it as selected and arranged by Burke. Burke was a great reviser and a careful arranger of the material that was included in his published books. But he did not leave any instructions as to how he would have put A Symbolic of Motives together in one or, probably, two volumes, and although he left us lists of essays written between 1950 and 1955 that were to be part of his Symbolic of Motives, he did not indicate how to arrange them or even which ones would have survived and been included when final decisions had to be made.
I have arranged the material included in Essays Toward A Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955 in a logical rather than a chronological way. The essays in Part I are methodological in the sense that they represent points of departure for a dramatistic analysis. The essay on “Imitation” is common to all versions of A Symbolic of Motives in one form or another because Burke kept revising it when he did later versions. It is essential to Burke’s dramatistic analysis because it redefines imitation to include the essential Burkean conception of entelechy—or the drive toward perfection intrinsic to language and to all forms of imitation and to literature in general. Burke loved definitions, as we can see in “Three Definitions,” and always preferred to work from them, as is obvious in the individual analyses in Part II or in Burke’s “Definition of Man” in Language as Symbolic Action. In “The Language of Poetry ‘Dramatistically’ Considered, Part 1,” Burke uses the classic definitions for the three main functions of language (to teach, to please, to persuade) and adds a fourth, to portray, as a way of understanding what it is poetry (literature in general) does. The final methodological essays, “Fact, Inference, and Proof” defines and illustrates two of Burke’s most basic analytic approaches to a text, Indexing and Joycing (pun analysis) and uses Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man to illustrate the application of these analytic techniques. Both are featured in all of Burke’s dramatistic analyses of individual texts. Properly understood, Indexing is the key to Burke’s theory of what a literary text is and how it works, and Joycing is one of the keys to Burke’s theory that words contain multiple meanings.
Part 2 contains five essays that show Burke at work on individual texts and the work of individual authors—Roethke (“The Vegetal Radicalism of Theodore Roethke,” 1950) and Whitman (“Policy Made Personal: Whitman’s Verse and Prose-Salient Traits,” 1955). Two of these essays—“The Oresteia,” 1952, and “Othello: an Essay to Illustrate a Method,” 1951—work out Burke’s theory of tragedy as an imitation of a tension, and the other, “Ethan Brand: A Preparatory Investigation,” 1952, is one of the best examples we have of how Burke sets up a text in order to go to work on it. All of Burke’s literary criticism is characterized by an emphasis on individual texts and what he liked to call their labyrinthine internal consistency.
The two selections in Part 3 are intended to explain, in different ways, what Burke means by “socioanagogic” and why he selected whole texts as his representative anecdotes. The selections from “Linguistic Approach to Problems of Education,” 1955, are probably Burke’s most concise and articulate discursive explanation of why he analyzes texts the way he does; and the analysis of “Goethe’s Faust, Part 1,” 1955, is probably Burke’s most brilliant and comprehensive dramatistic analysis of a single text we have. Only his analysis of “Othello: an Essay to Illustrate a Method” can really be compared to it for what it tells us about Burke’s dramatistic poetics and what it reveals to us about Burke as a literary critic.
I have deliberately minimized my commentary on these selections because, for one thing, I have discussed this material before in Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations and because I want readers to encounter Burke’s analyses directly and experience the full force of his encounters with these great texts and, to use his own terminology, to “earn” them for themselves. These early essays that Burke wrote for A Symbolic of Motives are among the most concentrated and most detailed analyses of individual texts that Burke ever wrote in his long involvement with literature. They reveal Burke at the height of his powers as a reader (analyzer and interpreter) of texts, fulfilling his own definition that the original A Symbolic of Motives should be devoted to the study of individual, self-contained symbolic actions and structures.
If we take the list of essays that I have included in Essays Toward A Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955, all of which are on Burke’s 1955 list of what was to be included in A Symbolic of Motives, and compare it to the contents of Poetics, Dramatistically Considered, his second version of A Symbolic of Motives, which he wrote and assembled in 1957 and 1958, we have a ready way to see what transformations occurred in Burke’s conception of A Symbolic of Motives between the first and second versions. It is easy to do this by noting, what, based on version one, has been included, excluded, and added in version two.
Poetics, Dramatistically Considered
Table of Contents
1. Poetics,” “Aesthetic,” and Artistic
2. Logic of the Terms
3. Imitation (Mimesis)
4. Catharsis, First View
5. Pity, Fear, Pride
6. The Thinking of the Body
7. Form
8. The Orestes Trilogy
9. Beyond Catharsis
10. Catharsis, Second View
Vagaries of Love and Pity
Fragmentation
11. Platonic Transcendence
12. The Poetic Motive
Still to come, Burke says in a note, are a section on comic catharsis, further references to individual works, footnotes indicating other developments, and an appendix reprinting various related essays.
First of all, note that the only individual text left for analysis in this list is the Orestes trilogy and that all of the other individual texts and individual author analysis have been excluded. What has been added is all of the new material on catharsis: “Catharsis, First View,” “Pity, Fear and Pride,” “The Thinking of the Body,” “Beyond Catharsis” and “Catharsis, Second View.” It is true that there are many references to individual texts in all this new material on catharsis, but there are no sustained analyses like the one of “Ethan Brand: A Preparatory Investigation,” “Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method,” and “Goethe’s Faust, Part I” nor any analyses like those of Roethke and Whitman. Also gone is most of the material I included in Essays Toward A Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955, Part 1, especially items 2, 3, and 4. What is left or still included is the essay on “A ‘Dramatistic’ View of Imitation” and multiple references to Aristotle, drama, and tragedy. Most of Poetics, Dramatistically Considered works out a theory of drama, tragedy, and literature in general as symbolic action. The major emphasis in Poetics, Dramatistically Considered is on catharsis, both as Aristotle defines it and as Burke redefines it, adding pride to pity and fear, and adding the whole concept of body thinking (the demonic trinity, the physiological counterparts of pity, fear and pride—the sexual, urinal, and fecal—to the cathartic process. Catharsis—the purgative redemptive motive—has been at the center of Burke’s thinking about literature since The Philosophy of Literary Form, but what is added in Poetics, Dramatistically Considered is what Burke describes as his great “breakthrough” in his thinking about his dramatistic poetics, which is “The Thinking of the Body” essay, and Burke’s insistence in that essay that, to be complete, all cathartic experiences must also express the three major bodily motives, or Freud’s cloacal motive, the whole realm of privacy. As Burke says in his note on this essay, once this idea occurred to him about the thinking of the body, it ran away with him and he used his considerable intellectual powers and ingenuity to work the idea out and to apply it, with his usual thoroughness, to a great variety of most unlikely texts. The original version of this essay in Poetics, Dramatistically Considered is 104 typescript pages. All the later, revised versions are much shorter.
After Poetics, Dramatistically Considered in 1957 and 1958, Burke was preoccupied with other matters than A Symbolic of Motives—chiefly with logology and The Rhetoric of Religion, which he had begun