Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955. Kenneth Burke
also suggestions of the “momentary” in the word (hence involving us by another route in the lyric “arrest”). We could think here also of the ways in which Hegel might divide an idea into “moments,” and thereby we also verge upon the “motivational.”
Situation “more or less explicitly implied.” That is, the lyric attitude implies some kind of situation. The situation may be the vaguest sort: The poet stands alone by the seashore while the waves are rolling in; or, the poet is separated from his beloved; or, the poet is old, remembering his youth—etc. Or the situation may be given in great detail. Indeed, a lyric may be, on its face, but a listing of descriptive details specifying a scene but these images are all manifestations of a single attitude (attitude being incipient act, and image implying attitude towards the thing imaged).
“In diction harmonious and rhythmical, often but not necessarily rhymed.” The formula would accommodate both strict and free verse, as it should.
“The structure lending itself readily to a musical accompaniment strongly repetitive in nature.” This part of the definition involves ultimately something so idealistic (rather than realistic) as “tendencies” or “trends.” Hence, maybe this should be out. It implies definition in terms of “ideal paradigm,” as with our account of the five acts in Shakespearean tragedy. Might put the case thus: Recall, for instance, Lord Raglan’s book on The Hero. His recipe of 22 points for distinguishing such a mythic figure. But he does not attempt to find all 22 points for characterizing every such hero. Here is the list in its ideal perfection. But any given mythic hero may fail to qualify in some or other of the particulars.
Raglan’s pattern in toto: (1) Hero’s mother a royal virgin; (2) father a king and (3) often a near relative of mother; (4) circumstances of hero’s conception unusual; (5) reputed to be son of a god; (6) at birth, attempt is made, usually by father or grand-father, to kill him; (7) he is spirited away and (8) reared by foster parents in far country; (9) childhood vague; ( 10) at manhood he returns or goes to his future kingdom; ( 11 ) after victory over king and/or giant, dragon, or wild beast, ( 12) he marries princess, often daughter of predecessor; (13) becomes king; (14) for a time reigns uneventfully; (15) prescribes laws; (16) later loses favor with gods and/or his subjects; (17) is driven from throne and city; ( 18 ) meets with mysterious death, (19) often at top of hill; (20) his children, if any, do not succeed him; (21) his body is not buried; (22) nevertheless he has one or more holy sepulchres.
In accordance with this formula, Oedipus scores 22, Theseus 20, Romulus 18, Hercules 17, Jason 15, Dionysus 19, Joseph 12, Moses 20, Robin Hood 13, etc.
Similarly, could we legitimately be to this extent “idealistic” in our definition: Could we say that the lyric “tends ideally” to be of such a nature as would adapt it to rondo-like musical forms; hence, it would have stanzas varying in sense though metrically similar, and built about a recurrent refrain. It could be studied as a departure from this “Urform,” or archetype. But it need not preserve such a structure explicitly, to qualify as a lyric.
“The gratification of the whole residing in the nature of the work as an ordered summation of emotional experience otherwise fragmentary, inarticulate, and unsimplified.” This “gratification” (or “lyric pleasure”) would correspond to the “catharsis” of “pity, fear, and like emotions” (named by Aristotle as the tragic pleasure). An attitude is a summing-up (as were all the details of an actual experience to terminate in an attitude of cheerfulness or gloom on our part). But, as compared with the order in the poem, wherein things fall together felicitously, the experiences reflected there are “fragmentary, inarticulate, and unsimplified.”
One colleague, erroneously hearing the last word as “simplified,” gave us a further insight into the problems of definition at this point. Presumably he was thinking of the experience in art as more complex than the experiences in life. There is certainly a sense in which this can be so: The reader of the poem must “make allowances” for the fact that the poem is an artifact, its moods artificial—and in this respect the poem could be called less “simple” than the actual attitudes it imitates. But when calling the poem a simplification and life outside the poem unsimplified, we have in mind the sense of unity (order) supplied by the poem. Croce would give the name of “catharsis” to such transcending of emotional matter by artistic form, or “expression.
II. Platonic Dialogue
Definition:
A methodic inquiry into first principles, as they are related to the principles of particular subject-matters. The method is by question and answer, engaging at least two persons directly, and others indirectly. The persons are differentiated as to both thought and character. The dialogue is explicitly organized in accordance with the dialectics of definition (generalization, division, successive sub-division, and a ladder of terms graded as regards relative distance from some norm). “Myths” are introduced sometimes as illustration, sometimes as the basis of a new motive that will pervade the disparate matter and infuse it with a common spirit. A kind of catharsis is got, by refutation of error, and by transcendence.
Comments:
“First principles, as they are related to the principles of particular subject-matters.” We have in mind here the distinction between Platonist and Aristotelian method (the distinction that Richard McKeon has called “holoscopic” and “meroscopic” respectively). That is, when Plato discusses some particular field, he does so by asking how it is related to “the Good” universally.
“The method is by question and answer.” Thus consider, in Demetrius’s On Style, this passage showing how different writers would develop the same idea:
In fine, it is with language as with a lump of wax, out of which one man will mould a dog, another an ox, another a horse. One will deal with his subject in the way of exposition and asseveration, saying (for example) that “men leave property to their children, but they do not therewith leave the knowledge which will rightly use the legacy”: a way of putting it which is called “Aristippean.” Another will (as Xenophon commonly does) express the same thought in the way of precept, as “men ought to leave not only money to their children, but also the knowledge which will use the money rightly.”
What is specifically called the “Socratic” manner (eidos Sokratikon)—one which seems to have excited the emulation of Aeschines and Plato in no common degree—would recast the foregoing proposition in an interrogative form, somewhat as follows. “My dear lad, how much property has your father left you? Is it considerable and not easily assessed? It is considerable, Socrates. Well now, has he also left you the knowledge which will use it rightly?” In this way Socrates insensibly drives the lad into a corner; he reminds him that he is ignorant; he urges him to get instruction.
Socrates breaks the maxim into a statement gradually unfolded through a succession of stages, alternate questions and answers, the questions being designed to call forth answers all leading in the direction of the final statement, which thereby is pointed up as discovery, something suddenly pounced upon.
“Engaging at least two persons directly and others indirectly.” The Republic threatens to break the frame here, as it is narrated by Socrates throughout. But the assertions are developed in the usual manner: Socrates tells of questions he put to others, and of questions and assertions made by him atop their replies.
“The persons are differentiated as to both thought and character.” Since the dialogue is essentially a “drama of ideas,” the appeal of character might be classed as Aristotle classed rhythm, harmony, and song in tragedy: among the “sweeteners” (hedusmata; in the Bywater translation, “pleasurable accessories”).
“Terms graded as regards relative distance from some norm.” In the Phaedrus, for instance, all leads up to, and away from, the sentence: “There abides the very being with which true knowledge is concerned; the colorless, formless, intangible essence, visible only to mind, the pilot of the soul.” This is the point of withinness-of-withinness, there just having been a reference to the “heaven above the heavens” (hyperouranion). Or, otherwise put: Here is talk of a “return home” to “the interior of the heavens”; the imagery concerns an ultimate feasting (ambrosia and nectar), which equals “knowledge