Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955. Kenneth Burke
each monad is said to be a unit of innate perception, a notion that fits well with the epistemological turn from act to cognition as generating principle of the terminology).
However, Leibnitz’s notion of his sensitive monads, each partially reflecting the nature of the entire universe, is useful for our purposes. He says: “The world is entirely in each of its parts, but more distinctly in some than in others.” This may or may not be true of the particles that compose the material universe, but it is certainly true of the various terms that cluster together in a single universe of discourse. Hence our belief that entelecheia is present, though not “distinctly,” in Aristotle’s use of mimesis with regard to the symbolic action of poetry.
We might put it thus: Given the full range of human characters and situations there would not merely be the entelechial imitating of man’s noblest potentialities qua man; there would also be the actualizing of human types within the species. For though man, in his perfection, would be essentially rational, according to the Aristotelian scheme, there will also be characteristic ways of departing from this rationality. And the entelechial principle would prevail insofar as you “imitate” any such departure, or imitate different situations. Thus the ruler’s typical ways of being to perfection “himself” as ruler would differ from those in which the poet might “be himself,” etc.
We deliberately use here the expression “be oneself” to give a glimpse of entelechial thinking behind the formula, though the notion of “kind” has been individualized. One is exhorted to be a kind all by oneself, in accordance with idealistic emphases that transform the realistic concern with role or act into a cult of “pure” personality.
This is not the place to consider at length the many ways in which the entelechial principle was later lost in the idea of “imitation,” or warped into a different shape by the increasingly “scientist” connotations that obscured the original implications of the term. But a few of the main ones are obvious, since they can be seen in Sidney’s statement.
The didactic emphasis (the Renaissance stress upon “instruction” as an important element of poetry) is the first great deviation. The how’s of Sidney’s statement were given a moralistically pragmatic slant, with the hierarchal motive in art conceived too narrowly. Thus when discussing “the utility of tragedy” (Reflections on the Poetic Art, Section XLV) Fontenelle says that he does not understand Aristotle’s formula for “the purgation of the passions by means of the passions”; then he continues:
It seems to me that the greatest utility of the theatre is to render virtue amiable to men, to accustom them to interest themselves in virtue, to touch their hearts, to put before them great examples of resoluteness and courage in their misfortunes, and by that means to fortify and elevate their sentiments. From that it follows that not only must characters be virtuous but also that they must be virtuous in the proud and elevated manner of Corneille, so that they will strengthen the heart and give lessons in courage.
There are endless variants on this notion, of tragedy as a set of models for noble action (though the connotations of nobility gradually shift from the gestures of the Court to the bourgeois virtues of sentiment, a shift discernible in the Fontenelle quotation).
By the same token, comedy is praised for producing the same effect by opposite means, since it uses ridicule to deter men from temptations that would threaten the social order. One sample of this endlessly varied theme should be enough for our purposes. (René Rapin, The Poetics of Aristotle, section XXV):
Comedy is an image of common life; its end is to show on the stage the faults of particulars, in order to amend the faults of the public, and to correct the people through a fear of being rendered ridiculous. So that which is most proper to excite laughter is that which is most essential to comedy.3
Another mode of departure was, of course, through the use of stock characters and stock situations, a burlesque of “universality” got through sheer lack of invention. Such procedure did not need to be asked for; low canons of rhetoric would spontaneously lead mercenary playwrights into this path, since one must appeal through an audience’s sense of the “natural,” and a convention can become “natural” in this sense (as with superficial “typing,” the “typical” Irishman, “typical” Jew, “typical” Englishman, etc.). Such canons of “naturalness” now help protect a great deal of Hollywooden art against the encroachments of serious foreign films. Largely, of course, such protection is contrived by an extra-artistic device: control over the system of distribution. But it can also rely on a low form of aesthetic conservatism (there are admirable kinds of such) in the movie audiences.
Our movie-goers are supposed to be in search of “entertainment.” But actually, they will pay good money to be bored. We do not mean that they are cheated, in being led to expect more than they get. We mean that they positively demand boredom. For in such boredom there is solace, there is the implied assurance that all is as was. It is the modern equivalent, in “movie temples” (when witnessing a murder mystery, for instance) to the almost irresistibly sleep-producing intonations of a hell-fire sermon in the earlier dispensation.
Be that as it may, once “typicality” (in the sense of stock characters and stock plots) has come to be deemed “natural,” a scientist test can raise good aesthetic questions. (Above all, for instance, it questions the habit of assigning to each nationality a single role, like the animals in Aesop’s Fables.) There is thus a positive reason for becoming insensitive to the entelechial aspect of imitation: insofar as universality has thus degenerated into the use of conventional signs for recalling conventional attitudes, art can reinvigorate itself only “scientistically,” by fresh “observation,” by checking its utterances against the many particulars of life.
But while realism, in this “naturalistic” sense, is necessary, the very zeal of critics in expounding it can take us too far from a concern with the range of major motives that figure in aesthetic appeal. And if you read a novel, say, about nondescript, Bohemian, cosmopolite, and perverted characters roaming through the bars and brothels of pre-war or post-war or between-wars Europe, we would propose that you’d come nearer to explaining its nature if you adapted Sidney’s formula than if you heralded it as a purely “naturalistic” emancipation from “moralistic” and “didactic” bias. That is, you should say: The author is showing us how to be the perfect, “compleat,” nondescript, Bohemian, cosmopolite, perverted wanderer in the bars and brothels, etc. In this sense, his imitations would have the kind of fulfilment that we would associate with the entelechial aspect of imitation, in contrast with a purely naturalistic kind (reportage).
Here would be the bond between “imitation” and the “universal.” After the German romantic philosophers, perhaps the notion is often contained in the term “idealization.” (It is a useful term for the purpose, if you remember its range: at one end, the questionably eulogistic attributing of excellencies to someone or something; at the other, the attaining of the purposive simplicity we get in such ironic expressions as “the ideal liar,” “the ideal thief.”)
One imitates entelechially, thereby attaining a universal, insofar as the individual is shown living up to the potentialities of its genus. There is such entelechial thought in Shakespeare’s phrase, “every inch a king.” (One also glimpses the hierarchal motive in the notion of the entelechy.)
And so, in sum, were the poem (for instance) to imitate a sailor universally, entelechially, it would have him represent to the full the potentialities of sailor as such: speaking nautical terms (even perhaps to the extent of applying nautical analogies to non-nautical matters), scrupulous in the performing of his duties at sea (yet revealing exactly the most relevant temptations to the dereliction of such duties), looking perhaps with a carnival eye upon his times in port, etc. He would not be merely “typed,” though typing would be the corresponding corruption of such a norm. And insofar as the feeling for this norm began to weaken, the same insight might be preserved somewhat in canons of “instruction” (which would involve the corresponding antithesis, canons of “amusement”). “Instruction” could then become conceived in hierarchal terms overly narrow: hence would result a kind of moral pragmatism, instructions how to be the ideal sailor for the greater glory of such-and-such an empire-builder. And whether we end with merely