Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955. Kenneth Burke
analysis of poetic excellence. Critics would suggest that the writer appealed by purely naturalistic imitation of particular sailors. At this point, we would attempt to recover the entelechial ingredient in imitation. Or at the very least, even if you would ban the entelechy as a bit of outmoded nonsense, we would reaffirm our contention that you must at least take it into account when asking what Aristotle meant by mimesis (in contrast with what the term can seem to mean, when translated as “imitation” or “representation,” and thus used after several centuries during which “nature” came progressively to be equated with the processes of technology).
And when thus summing up, we might note how the “fourfold method” of mediaeval criticism in its way also departed somewhat from the entelechy even while partially preserving its genius. In effect, it broke the entelechy-universal into four pieces, each of which thereafter could be featured, or even proclaimed exclusively. From the stressing of the literal could come the “documentary” school (“naturalism,” the “scientist” bias). From the stressing of the moralistic or “tropological” could come “instruction” (hence, tragedy as a book; of etiquette for the heroics of empire; comedy as a book of etiquette in reverse, the use of ridicule to deter deviations). From the stressing of the “allegorical” would come the featuring of temporal or local allusiveness as the be-all and end-all of poetry. (One can see how both “allusiveness” and “instruction” could be telescoped eventually into aspects of the “documentary.”) And from the “anagogic” could come “amusement.” (Once the concerns with grace, power, felicity, perfection, and the like have been secularized for use as terms to describe purely aesthetic ultimates—in accord with the translating of the religious passion into the romantic passion—then the “radiance” of an aesthetic object can be said to reside in its sheer delight as a pleasurable sensuous thing existing here and now, obviously another emphasis that has been telescoped into the scientist-literal.) In our Rhetoric, we have sought to show how such “grace” (of the ars gratia artis sort) is emblematic of a social anagoge, as the objects of “natural” experience (in the empiricist sense) can secretly represent social judgments related to the real but somewhat confused hierarchy of social classes. “Amusement” thus now covers the use of art to ends implicitly “propagandistic.” For the “naturalness” of such art derives from its conformity with conventions that would uphold the status quo (even though, inexorably, by the ironies of history, they are making for exactly the contrary outcome: general inaccuracy, when coached and perfected with systematic efficiency, must become a Pandora’s box that opens itself).
The present cult of the “myth” can also be fitted into these thoughts on entelechy. For the “mythic” now is usually proposed in opposition to overly scientific, naturalistic, “documentary” or materialistic criteria in art. In part, the controversy is rooted in extra-aesthetic considerations. The myth can serve as “idealization” in the merely eulogistic sense; or, when not downright eulogistic, it can at least be deflective, as were some immediately present and materialistically explainable politico-economic conflict to be viewed exclusively in the “higher” terms of some mythic or prehistoric struggle, fall, or curse. In this respect, the market for a myth may be explained by critics on purely aesthetic grounds, whereas the supposed “universality” of the supposedly “aesthetic” can be a temporary way of using art to avoid the accurate contemplation of non-aesthetic elements.
But there is one good argument in behalf of myth, as we realize when we consider, for instance, the various ways in which the three great Greek tragic playwrights used myth. If you relate characters to one another after the analogy of some myth, you automatically acquire an underlying simplicity of structure that almost requires you to make the various roles “universal.” You can get the point by thinking, in contrast, of some complicated modern novel or drama of intrigue (a feeble variant of the “scientist psychosis”), in which you are dragged through a “mysterious” muddle of false leads and loose ends, to end on some hastily contrived gadget of explanation (or rather, an anti-climax disguised as an explanation). Contrast such an unprincipled contraption with the stark lines of a Greek tragedy, which possesses in its way the same simplicity as one finds in Greek architecture and Greek statuary of the classic period. Even much of the best Elizabethan tragedy suffers by comparison. The outraged lover, the unjust king, the avenging son, the suppliant fugitive, the blind seer, the tortured god—the myths “naturally” led the playwright to cast his perception of particulars into such universal molds, giving his “imitations” the summarizing quality that adds up to the notion of the “entelechy.”
Thus, even though Sartre uses myth perversely, he does contrive to exploit it for its formal, simplifying function. And a play of intrigue can be improved formally by even an artificial imposing of mythic lines upon it. In The American Scholar, Winter 1950–51, Malcolm Cowley touches upon this point somewhat when, discussing the possible effect of the “New Criticism” on creative writers, he says:
It may terrify them; it may stop them from writing at all, or, if they do write, it may cause them to write according to one of the formulas advanced by whichever New Critic is teaching that year at Princeton or wherever it may be—according to a number of formulas, like a beautiful one followed by Frederick Buechner in his first novel, A Long Day’s Dying. The formula is simply to find classical myth, tell the myth in the shape of a lecture delivered to Princeton boys, and then restate the myth in contemporary terms, always stepping down the intensity of the myth into mild contemporary equivalents.
The observation suggests that the mythic frame might even become a mechanical subterfuge, a device of play-doctoring. But we are suggesting that a formal virtue, however perverted, rests at the roots of such a possible vice.
As we tried to show elsewhere, in our analysis of Othello, the concept of “tensions” can also be applied, as a way of re-introducing an equivalent of the entelechy in imitation. For if there is a certain tension in human relations, the artist may exploit it dramatically by analyzing it into parts, “breaking it down” into a set of interrelated roles (a device that permits the tension to be “processed”; for whereas in human relations it just is, the breaking of it into parts permits these parts to act upon one another, in a series of operations that, when followed in exactly the order they have in their particular whole, lead to a “catharsis”). Roles chosen by such a test are likely to be “entelechial” imitations, since they will imitate not particular individuals, but basic human situations and strategies, translated into equivalent terms of personality.
When the “tensions” are too local (as with the tensions of temporary factional disputes), often a sheerly rhetorical motive can be misinterpreted “scientistically.” Thus, when looking for evidence that a certain social situation prevails, sociological critics will sometimes cite the prevalence of such a topic in popular literature of the times. But often a rhetorical discount is necessary. For instance, a speaker held that, in his opinion, life in the United States was much more “matriarchal” than “patriarchal.” And as proof, he cited the fact that so many motion pictures play up the type of the put-upon husband and father, whose frustrations about the house are humorously amplified, while he mumbles to himself ineffectually, being treated patronizingly by wife, children, servants, tradesmen, and even the family dog, but masochistically and without fail paying the bills with which all the other members of the family blithely saddle him. Maybe yes, maybe no. But before taking this stock character at face value, as evidence of a correspondingly prevalent social type, one should certainly consider the possibility that the role is the sentimentalizing of a situation quite different.
Imagine, for instance, a husband who is unquestionably the head of the family. Each day he goes off to work as to a “mystery,” so far as his family at home is concerned. They know only what he chooses to tell them. Everything necessarily centers about him, since he is the wage-earner. Things must be so arranged that he catches exactly the right train, gets exactly the right food at exactly the right time, sleeps for exactly the right interval [. . .] and insofar as such requirements are not met, he must grumble mightily for his rights. Each day he goes into a world of “adventure,” his absence being in essence as unaccountable as the daily disappearance of Cupid was to Psyche. Under such conditions, might not the wife feel herself inferior? Then if, of an afternoon, she goes to a movie temple for her meditations and devotions, would there not be “medicine” for