Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955. Kenneth Burke
of Religion was published in 1961 and he had written the final chapter for it, his masterful dialogue between TL (The Lord) and S (Satan), “Epilogue: Prologue in Heaven.” When he did go back to A Symbolic of Motives, probably in 1963, he wrote and assembled what I have called the third version of A Symbolic of Motives, the manuscript that was actually called A Symbolic of Motives and was more about 270 pages long and clearly a sustained and coherent effort to rethink his A Symbolic of Motives by choosing a different point of departure (A Symbolic of Motives, third version, begins where Poetics, Dramatistically Considered ends, with an essay called “The Poetic Motive” (see the table of contents for this manuscript in Unending Conversations) and proceeding in a very orderly fashion in Part 1 from language in general, to poetry in particular, and then to imitation, catharsis, examples from many different kinds of literary works, tragedy, and finally his breakthrough in the much-revised “Thinking of the Body” material in Part 2, where the manuscript abruptly ends.
The history of A Symbolic of Motives after this point gets very complicated because of the essays Burke decided to write in the 1960s and because of what he decided to include in Language as Symbolic Action in 1966 from his earlier versions of A Symbolic of Motives and from the many essays he wrote in the early 1960s. From the earlier version of A Symbolic of Motives, Burke included the Roethke essay (1950), a revised and shortened version of his Oresteia essay (1952), the whole of the “Goethe’s Faust, Part I” essay (1955) which was originally published as parts 2 and 3 of “The Language of Poetry Dramatistically Considered,” “The Poetic Motive” (1958), “The Thinking of the Body” (1957–1958) in a shortened, revised version, which first appeared in full in Poetics, Dramatistically Considered, various versions of essays on language in general and poetry in particular that were part of A Symbolic of Motives, version three, and Poetics, Dramatistically Considered. Burke also included all of the literary essays he wrote in the early 1960s in Part 2 of Language as Symbolic Action, which really completed work on his dramatistic poetics when combined or added to what we have in the three earlier versions of A Symbolic of Motives and the long essay on St. Augustine’s Confessions that he included in The Rhetoric of Religion. Burke seldom wrote about literary texts after 1966, one of the few exceptions being his 1969 essay on King Lear (“Form and Psychosis in King Lear”). He was done with his dramatistic poetics and focused his mind and energy on logology, which was his successor to dramatism. Language as Symbolic Action is really the culmination of Burke’s long involvement with dramatism, which began after The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941) and lasted for the next twenty-five years.
Burke maybe showed more sense than most of the critics who kept asking him when he was going to finish his Symbolic—or, as he referred to it in his years with one of his wonderful puns, his Sin Ballix. He kept insisting that it was done and that all of it had been published or was available in manuscripts so why make a fuss about getting it out in a single book. Yes and no to that. Much of it had been published, but going back over the documents as I have done here, one realizes that by 1993 when Burke died, much of what had been published was out-of-print or that Burke had revised and shortened many of the original essays so that it was not really possible to get a sense of the nature of Burke’s achievement in his mature years as a literary critic. In fact, Burke has sort of been forgotten as a literary critic as scholars have become absorbed in working out dramatism or logology or Burke’s comic perspective or his rhetoric and his language theory and the place of all this in the whole movement toward explaining everything in terms of language that has prevailed in recent years. Burke, of course, encouraged this because of the centrality of language in both dramatism and logology and the emphasis on rhetoric throughout his work and his insistence that his work is really primarily about the drama of human relations (On Human Nature) rather than literature.
My purpose here in collecting some of the early essays Burke wrote for his A Symbolic of Motives is to reclaim a little of Burke for literary criticism. I first encountered Burke in his capacity as a literary critic and it was with his literary criticism that I did my first serious work on him way back when. I have been down a lot of different roads with Burke since then, so I suppose it is most appropriate that I end up where I began in this attempt to reclaim some of him for literature and literary criticism, which after all were my own fields for all my years of teaching and writing. It seems ironic to me now that when I began writing on Burke in the late 1950s, all of the essays that I have collected here were available for study, but what eventually happened to his A Symbolic of Motives over the years through 1966 was not, and it is only after Burke died and finally let go of all this material (because he would not agree to any arrangement of it while he was alive), that it became possible to finally study the unpublished manuscripts as well as all of the published material and begin to make sense out of it and see it for what it is and rediscover the power and resourcefulness of Burke’s dramatistic poetics.
Hopefully, another scholar will do for the third version of A Symbolic of Motives what David Cratis Williams has done for Poetics, Dramatistically Considered” and then someone will come along and put all these dramatistic poetics texts into their appropriate place in relation to Burke’s other books and dramatism as a whole and establish or re-establish Burke’s proper place in the history of modern American literary criticism.
—William H. Rueckert
At the end of “Linguistic Approach to Problems of Education” (1955), Burke writes:
A work now in preparation, A Symbolic of Motives, will deal with poetics and the technique of “indexing” literary works. Meanwhile, among articles by the present author already published on this subject are: “The Vegetal Radicalism of Theodore Roethke” (Sewanee Review, Winter 1950); “Three Definitions” (Kenyon Review, Spring, 1951); “Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method” (Hudson Review, Summer, 1951); “Form and Persecution in the Oresteia” (Sewanee Review, Summer, 1952); “Imitation” (Accent, Autumn, 1952); “Ethan Brand: A Preparatory Investigation” (Hopkins Review, Winter, 1952); “Mysticism as a Solution to the Poet’s Dilemma” (in collaboration with Stanley Romaine Hopper (Spiritual Problems in Contemporary Literature, edited by Stanley Romaine Hopper, published by Institute for Religious and Social Studies, distributed by Harper & Bros., 1952); “Fact, Inference, and Proof in the Analysis of Literary Symbolism” (paper presented at Thirteen Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion, and published in a volume distributed by Harper & Bros., 1954).
Part 1: Some Basic Requirements for a Dramatistic Poetic
1 A “Dramatistic” View of “Imitation”2
[This is an excerpt from a much longer essay concerned with the “carving out” of a Poetics, and taking Aristotle’s treatise as its point of departure. Its stress upon “Dramatism,” as contrasted with “scientism,” is in no way meant to imply a derogation of science as such. The “Dramatistic” perspective approaches the poem in terms of action, whereas “scientism” approaches the poem in terms of knowledge. And the author would contend that, though poems, and even works of sheer persuasion, may have value as information, or “news,” the direct approach to their nature as forms is not through such a route.
Any scientific work can be studied purely for its persuasiveness or beauty (i.e., as rhetoric or poetic); any rhetorical work can be studied purely for its beauty or truth (i.e., as pure poetry or as scientific information); and any poem can be studied either as a piece of rhetorical exhortation or as a means of purveying information (news, knowledge, science). But essentially, culminatively, it is only scientific works that should be approached directly in terms of truth, knowledge, perception, and the like. (Unless we have overlooked it, the word “truth” does not appear in the Poetics. It does, however, appear in many scientistically tinged translations.)
In the present pages, we consider Aristotle’s key term, mimesis, from this point of view, as we try to show how the culminative emphasis in his notion of the “entelechy” was obscured by a notion of representation that is nearer to the stress upon the average or “statistical” as a test of the representative. Othello, for instance, would be a “culminative” or “entelechial” depiction of a jealous husband. He is not the statistical average