Language as Symbolic Action (pp

Burke, Kenneth. Language As Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and

Method. Berkley: University of California Press, 1966.

PART 1: FIVE SUMMARIZING ESSAYS

1. Chapter One: Definition of Man (sic)

I. General words

“[D]efinition is the critic’s equivalent of a lyric” (3).

“[A] definition so sums things up that all the properties attributed to the thing can be as though derived from the definition” (3).

II. Man (sic) is the symbol using animal.

Symbol use is the means by which we apprehend our world, and thus understand what constitutes our reality. Burke uses the story of the confused bird (4) to illustrate his point that humans use words in a symbolic fashion to communicate about our world.

“[H]owever important to us is the tiny sliver of reality each of us has experienced firsthand, the whole overall picture is but a construct of symbol systems” (5).

Words are not completely within our control, however. Burke posits that “ideology,” in fact, possesses great power. “An “ideology” is like a spirit taking up its abode in a body: it makes that body hop around in certain ways; and that same body would have hopped around in different ways had a different ideology happened to inhabit it” (6).

Substitution is a “resource” “’natural to symbolism.” Thus, Freudian notions such as displacement and condensation are endemic to symbol systems in general, not just dreams in particular (7).

“Substitution sets the condition for ‘transcendence,” since there is a technical sense in which the name for a thing can be said to “transcend” the thing named” (8).

III. Man (sic) is the Inventor of the Negative.

“[T]here are no negatives in nature, and…this ingenious addition to the universe is solely a product of human symbol systems” (9).

Laws and morals are essentially negative principles, although the negative character of moral codes is often cloaked in a disguise of “quasi positives.” Laws and private property rights are negative because they stipulate “mine equals “not thine” (11).

Binary oppositions are also a negative, human symbol construct. True/False, Order/Disorder, Life/Death, Clean/Unclean and other are all “to be distinguished from sheerly positive terms” (11).

We are aesthetically entertained and fascinated by villains and other “deviants who, in all sorts of ingenious ways, are represented as violating these very Don’ts” (13).

IV. Separated from his (sic) natural condition by instruments of his own making

Our use of language tools indicates a break from nature, because “the survival standards of sheer animality” do not include implementation of symbol systems (13).

“[T]hough instrumentality is an important aspect of language, we cannot properly treat it as the essence of language” (13).

“Edward Sapir’s view of language as ‘a collective means of expression’ points in a more appropriate direction” (13).

V.Goaded by the spirit of hierarchy

We desire order, hierarchy, and the notion of a social ladder. As a result, inequality, division, and power disparities develop in human societies.

“Here man’s (sic) skill with symbols combines with his negativity and with his (sic) tendencies toward different modes of livelihood implicit in inventions that make for divisions of labor, the result being definitions and differentiations and allocations of property protected by the negativities of the law” (15).

VI.We are the “political animal” and the “culture bearing animal.”

We are perfectionists.

“The principle of perfection is central to the nature of language as motive. The mere desire to name something by its “proper” name, or to speak of language in its distinctive ways is intrinsically “perfectionist” (16).

“There is a principle of perfection implicit in the nature of symbol systems; and in keeping with his nature as symbol-using animal, man (sic) is moved by this principle” (17).

We are “rotten with perfection” in that we seek this sense of ultimate completeness in unwholesome figures such as the “perfect fool” and the “perfect villain” (18).

Desire for perfection, in both the “honorific,” or good, sense, and the “ironic,” bad sense leads to concepts like God, Devil, Heaven and Hell. “Perfection” is basically understood to mean the ultimate, most complete manifestation of a concept, such as love, punishment, wickedness, or beauty (20).

VII.Conclusion

Burke feels somewhat uncomfortable concluding this section, because his “discussion should itself have a perfect ending” and “a perfect ending should promise something” (21).

In lieu of “the most perfect ending” of “a sermon” promising “the hope of total salvation if we do mend our ways,” Burke offers the next best option. “The best I can do is state my belief that things might be improved somewhat if enough people began thinking along the lines of this definition; my belief that, if such an approach could be perfected by many kinds of critics and educators and self-admonishers in general, things might be a little less ominous than otherwise” (21).

To illustrate his point, Burke ends with an apocalyptic poem espousing the height of “ironic” or “rotten” perfection: the “perfect” nuclear warhead (22).

2. Chapter Two: Poetics in Particular, Language in General

In this segment, Burke uses literary examples to underscore his points about perfection.

Burke uses Poe’s statement that “the most poetic topic in the world” is “the death of a beautiful woman” to illustrate his point about perfection (26).

“The “perfect’ is the completely done. In this sense Death provides a quite relevant source of imagery for the idea of perfection” (26). “Perfection means literally a finishedness” (26).

“Another notion of perfection is associated with the idea of a person in full bloom. And could any topic more fully meet this test than the theme of persons in love? Thus, if the dead person were associated with the height of love, another requirement of Poetics would be met” (27).

II.

Burke again distinguishes between “animality” and “symbolicity.” Animality concerns basic needs, where symbolicity deals with “complex, alembicated purposes” which are “the aims developed by custom, education, political systems, moral codes, religions, commerce, money, and so on” (28).

“Naming” and artistic expression also fall under the category of “symbolicity” (28).

Language has universal and particular dimensions. “Thus there is a sense in which each poet speaks his (sic) own dialect,” (28) which would be an example of the individual dimension. “[A]t the very opposite extreme, there are respects in which we use language ‘universally.” Institutions such as the United Nations, developed to deal with “the methodic discussion of human quandaries represent the universal aspects of our nature as a species (29).

The “middle realm” between the individual and the universal is indicated by class identification (29).

“In sum, then, there are certain things to be said about a poem as a poem; and there are certain things to be said about it as an example of language in general” (29).

For example, “a belief in fate involves dimensions that extend far beyond a man’s trade as playwright” (30).

“Even though Freud bases his theory of the Oedipus complex on the myth embodied in Sophocles’ play, his kind of speculations would necessarily move us beyond the realm of Poetics to the realm of language (or symbolicity) in general” (31).

III.

Here, Burke discusses the role of the critic.

“[P]oem is to poet as Poetics is to critic” (31).

“As I see this issue, the statement I have quoted from Woodsworth’s preface is in effect a critic’s attempt to formulate some of the practices which the poems exemplify” (33).

“The poet’s job is simply to write his poem as best he knows how” (33). The critic, on the other hand, had the task of theorizing about the poem and making value judgments.

“And to the extent that the critic carries out such a task, he (sic) contributes simultaneously to the vitality of criticism as an autonomous activity with it’s own principles, and to the glory of poetry by showing that the poems are ‘principled’” (33).

It’s not the poet’s job to mull over her principles in writing the poem. “The critic, in matching the poetry with a poetics, seeks to make these implicit principles explicit” (33).

IV.

Paradoxically, then, the “principles of the poetics were formulated after the poem had been produced” (34).

However, we can still think of these principles as “prior” to the poem in a logical sense, even though they followed it in a temporal sense (34).

“The principles of composition ‘come first’ in the sense of logical priority” (36).

The job of the critic is to classify the particular poem according to its “kind of poetry, with its corresponding kind of principles and properties” (37).

“Insofar as feasible, the critic’s formulations will be in terms of poetics.” The critic will inspect the poem for its principles, then “test his formulations by ‘deducing’ or ‘deriving’ the poem from the principles” (37).

Identifying aspects context are part of the critic’s job as well. The text should not be analyzed alone, without respect to the author. “[T]he very the attempt to discuss the poem purely as the product of a poet should eventually help sharpen our perception of the respects in which the poem must be analyzed rather as the product of a citizen and taxpayer, subject to various social embarrassments, physical ills, and mental aberrations” (38).

VI.

Burke ends by reiterating some of his discussion of perfection, in particular its anti-social or “ironic” applications, such as the “perfect scapegoat,” (39) concluding finally with another example, a poem exemplifying “perfect” victimization and destruction of nature(40-1).

3. Chapter Three: Terministic Screens

I. Directing the Attention

Burke opens by distinguishing between the “Scientistic” versus the “Dramatistic” “approach to the nature of language” (44). “A scientistic approach begins with questions of naming, or definition” (44). A “dramatistic” approach stresses “language as an aspect of ‘action’, that is, symbolic action” (44).

The dramatistic approach tends to be more prescriptive, announcing what “thou shalt or thou shalt not,” whereas the scientistic approach concerns itself with questions of what “is, or is not” (44).

“The dramatistic view of language, in terms of ‘symbolic action,’ is exercised about the necessary suasive nature of even the most unemotional scientific nomenclatures” (45).

“Even if any given terminology is a reflection of reality, by its very nature as a terminology it must be a selection of reality; and to this extent it must function also as a deflection of reality”(45).

This is what Burke means by “terministic screens.” “[A]ny nomenclature necessarily directs the attention into some channels rather than others.” This can be obvious, such as how different academic subjects direct the attention, or more subtle. Burke illustrates the latter point with an example of how photos of the same objects using different color filters reflected and deflected his attention in different ways, depending on the filter (45).

II. Observations Implicit in Terms

“In brief, much of what we take as observations about ‘reality’ may be but the spinning out of possibilities implicit in our particular choice of terms” (46).

“Logology” is “the systematic study of theological terms…purely for the light they might throw upon the forms of language” (47).

Logology can be applied to the secular study of terministic screens. “Pick some particular nomenclature, some one terministic screen.” Then, you “may proceed to track down the kinds of observations implicit in the terminology you have chosen, whether your choice of terms was deliberate or spontaneous” (47).

III. Examples

Burke illustrates, via a passage, that “much of our ‘Reality’ could not exist for us, were it not for our profound and inveterate involvement in symbol systems” (48).

Using three philosophical terminologies as examples, Burke illustrates that “‘behavior’ isn’t something that you need to observe; even something so ‘objectively there’ as behavior must be observed through one or another kind of terministic screen, that directs the attention in keeping with its nature” (49).

There are two kinds of terms: those that “put things together, and those that pull things apart” They can lend themselves to feelings of identification or disassociation (49).

These terms are mobilized according to the agenda they serve. Darwin, for example, stressed terms of continuity to highlight our similarities to animals. Theologians, conversely, focus on our discontinuity from animals and continuity between humans and God (50).

Burke uses logology to note that employing discontinuous terms to distinguish human from beast need not be “haughty.” For example, he points out, what other animals have yellow journalism, corrupt politics, pornography…and bacteriological war?” (50).

“We don’t need theology, but merely the evidence of our characteristic sociopolitical disorders, to make it apparent that man (sic), the typically symbol using animal, is alas! something special” (50).

IV. Further Examples

Terministic screens are necessary. “We must use terministic screens, since we can’t say anything without the use of terms; whatever terms we use, they necessarily constitute a corresponding kind of screen; and any such screen necessarily directs the attention to one field rather than another” (50).

Burke contextualizes by noting how usage of discontinuous terms appears during political elections to stress division amongst the citizenry. Further, both continuous and discontinuous terms are employed to mobilize the population in rallying against “a common enemy” (51).

Is there a general terministic screen that could “supply an adequate definition for the discussion of man (sic) in general?” (51).

V. Our Attempt to Avoid Mere Relativism

“[S]trictly speaking, there will be as many different world views in human history as there are people” (52).

However, “[A] Dramatistic screen does possess the philosophic character adapted to discussion of man (sic) in general, as distinct from the kinds of insight afforded by the application of special scientific terminologies” (53).

“Basically, the Dramatistic screen involves a methodic tracking down of the implications in the idea of symbolic action, and of man (sic) as the kind of being that is particularly distinguished by an aptitude for such an action” (54).

4. Chapter Four: Mind, Body, and the Unconscious

“The issue: If man (sic) is the symbol using animal, some motives must derive from his animality, some from his symbolicity, and some from a mixture of the two” (63).

Burke distinguishes between a general, Dramatistic, understanding of symbol systems and the specific one used by Freud. Freud’s model, Burke argues, is particular and only deals with symbols as they relate to repressed, unconscious experiences (63).

The Dramatistic terminology is a midpoint between the computer and the neurotic (63).

“In Freud’s sense an action is ‘symbolic’ when, as interpreted in terms of his particular ‘terministic screen,’ it reveals the presence of a neurotic motive involving ‘repressions’ due to the particular kind of ‘Unconscious’ which he postulates as a locus of motives (64).

Dispacement and Condensation manifest in other areas than dreams, and thus are applicable to the notion of symbolic action in general. For example, the mathematician displaces symbols, and we all condense terms when we refer to “parents” instead of “mother and father” (66).

II.Varieties of the “Unconsious”

1. We are unconscious of various bodily processes (67).

2. Memories, dreams, and other past experiences are also repressed into the unconscious (68).

Burke continues to generalize his application of Freudian terminology by arguing that the U.S. Constitution consists of various proclaimed wishes regarding concepts like individual rights. “[L]egal conflicts arise because, in particular cases, this “id”-like wishing on the part of the Constitution fronts problems of denial. In gratifying one Constitutional wish, the courts must frustrate or ‘repress’ another” (68-69).

3. Some memories, facts, and other bits of information are ostensibly “forgotten,” yet “recallable on demand” (69). Burke relates his notion of perspective by incongruity to this notion, in particular the way that poets “bring together terms which we had unconsciously classed as mutually exclusive” (72).

4. Relationships among personae might prompt one to recall characteristics suppressed while acting in another role (69).

5. “[T]he ‘Unconscious’ implications may not be made conscious until one has methodically devoted oneself to the task of inquiring into the fulfillment of a given symbol system as such.” Burke calls this process the “entelechial motive” (70). This could be thought of as the unconscious absorbing of rules.

6. The construction of dualisms: “any conscious nomenclature gives rise to a corresponding realm of the ‘unconscious’” (70).

Burke notes that “[w]e here confront kinds of attention that often are not reducible to terms of repression” (71).

7. Often, we can substitute intuition or instinct for unconscious, although in the former two modes of discovery no repression is involved (71).

8. Further, decisions can often be attributed to ignorance rather than unconscious processes (72).

III. The Five Dogs

Dramatistically, all of the possible species of dog reduce to the following five:

1. The primal dog, which is the first one who loved you, scared you, or otherwise made an impact (73).

2. The “jingle” dog, which is the word itself (73).

3. The “lexical” dog, which is the dictionary definition (73).

4. The “perfect” dog, exemplified by the dogs of animal stories. They are “perfect” embodiments of certain traits (74).

5. The “tautological” dog, which can be understood in terms of the “associations which, in a sense, reproduce his spirit.” For example, the dog’s favorite toy (74).

The purpose of the “five dogs” list is to recognize “the terministic situations when each is most directly to be considered in its own right, though we should always keep the whole lot in mind, when inquiring into the relationship between the overt symbol and its possible dissolvings into the ‘Where is it?’ of the Unconscious” (74).

5. Chapter Five: Coriolanus-and the Delights of Faction

Burke’s “job” in this chapter is to “ask how…Coriolanus ‘ought to be.’ And we can check on the correctness of our prophecies by consulting the text” (81).

“Since the work is a tragedy, it will require some kind of symbolic action in which some notable form of victimage is imitated” (81).

Burke details the ways that the play sets up Coriolanus’ traits to establish him as a victim. “Coriolanus is excessive in ways that prepare the audience to relinquish him for his role as a scapegoat, in accentuating a trait that the audience shares with him, though seldom avowedly” (83).

Identification is part of this process, as is sympathy (83).

The “paradox of substance” is also an integral facet of character development. Basically, a character cannot “be himself” without numerous others to enable his development (84).

Burke uses an example of this paradox at work to illustrate “just what we mean by ‘prophesying after the event’ in order to ‘derive’ the play in terms of poetics (85).

II.

“Fundamentally, then, the play exploits the ends of dramatic entertainment, with corresponding catharsis, the tension intrinsic to a kind of social division, or divisiveness, particularly characteristic of complex societies, but present to some degree in even the simplest modes of living” (88).

Burke explores the four “loci of motives” at work in this play, which are “nation, class, family, [and] individual.” Each has its own terministic screen (90-91).

III.

Burke locates the “grotesque” character of the play in the fact that Coriolanus is “not being satirized” (92).

IV.

“We have been considering Coriolanus’ qualifications as a scapegoat, whose symbolic sacrifice is designed to afford an audience pleasure” (94).

Burke wraps up with a “final formula for tragic catharsis,” a general principle derived from studying Coriolanus (95).

PART TWO: PARTICULAR WORKS AND AUTHORS

1. Chapter One: Shakespearian Persuasion: Antony and Cleopatra

“Every writer has some fixed ideas, favorite images, or recurrent manifestations of one sort or another, that are analogous to a psychological tic.” Although Burke acknowledges that, owing to the Bard’s cleverness, it will present a daunting task, he nonetheless strives in this chapter to discover Shakespeare’s “tics” (101).

Burke offers some notes on the play to help demonstrate how persuasion will “shape up, with regard to the question of poetics” (102).

As a means of amplification, Shakespeare reverses the standard order and designates love as primary, politics as secondary (103).

Burke argues that Shakespeare wishes to persuade the audience that, “implicit in human relations under conditions of emergent empire there are the forms of empire as such.” The love affair of the play, set in an imperial context, prompts the audience to understand it in terms of imperial relations (104).

The eunuchs are a terministic screen that direct attention toward Antony’s virility without jeopardizing the audience’s ability to identify with him (105).

“Identification is quite easy here, since anyone can understand the capriciousness of rulers, insofar as everyone has experienced the capriciousness of either children with regards to parents or parents with regards to children…the infantile and the absolute being enough alike for one to seem like the other” (106). Although the setting is grand, the pretentiousness is oddly mundane and relatable.

The end sought, Burke argues, is for the audience to see “this lowly vision in terms of vast pretentiousness” (107).

“The two titular figures illustrate to perfection the ‘paradox of substance’” (107).

The moral lesson of tragedy, argues Burke, involves identifying with the tragic hero and then learning renounce our similar tragic flaws. “[T]he tragedy can enable us to simultaneously to ‘identify ourselves’ with the imitation and to disclaim it. The process involves redemption through vicarious victimage, since we acquiesce to the sacrifice of the persons who were entrusted with the role of imitating our weaknesses in an amplified form” (109).

Burke offers several examples, and sums up by stating that “one can see their general tenor, as modes of persuasion” (113).

2. Chapter Two: Timon of Athens and Misanthropic Gold

Burke understands this play as a story about “golden misanthropy” and “absolute corruption,” the tale of a man who is generous to a fault, which lands him in massive debt. His former friends desert him when he reaches to them for help, leaving him an angry, stingy misanthrope (115).

Burke lists the particular strategies, character types, foreshadowing, and terministic screens that lend themselves to this particular play’s tale of excess (117).

One strategy of eliciting sympathetic response to a tragic hero, for example, is to have a very likeable character like him or her. Burke calls this “sympathy by contagion” (117).

“Supernumerary,” or minor, characters move the plot in various ways. For example, the flatterers and deserters reveal “the currish nature of mankind generally,” and the prostitutes’ interest in gold help establish how the play sets up money as dirty and corrupt (118).

II.

“We are now in a position to consider a question we mentioned earlier, concerning the nature of Timon as a dramaturgic invention. This question has to with Timon first of all as vilifier in the absolute, regardless of what he may happen to be vilifying” (120).

Timon’s tragic fall also advances the notion of “predicament of substance,” or the problems that arise from trying to bond with others. “[T]he attempt to please or reward friends can become but a way of attracting parasites” (121).

Ultimately, Shakespeare illustrates a universal principle by way of specific examples, argues Burke. In the case of Timon of Athens, the principle is the Marxist notion that “private property severs one’s bond with others, while also putting a person in constant jeopardy of loss” (122).

Similarly to Antony and Cleopatra, the grand tale of Timon is applicable “in principle” to “Everyman (sic) in his relation to others” (122).

“Beastly,” “fecal” and “destructive” images all supply “misanthropic metaphors” to advance the play’s persuasive end (123).

3. Chapter Three: Form and Persuasion in the Oresteia

Burke is going back to some of the ground covered in Counter Statement, namely pertaining to the analysis of form “as the arousing and fulfilling of expectations” (127). Now, however, he is chiefly concerned with “the Great Persecutional Words” in the Oresteia (127).

Form can evoke images of bodily processes, as is the case with the “Demonic Trinity” of pity/erotic, fear/diuretic, and pride/anal (126).

II.

The “dog image” “represents a basic ambiguity of social relations: the wavering line between loyalty and subservience” (129).

Women represent the Unconscious, the Underworld and “submerged motives” by virtue of their association with the home and private spaces (130).

The subjugation of women in the play relates back to “the thinking of the body” in that readers are moved to associate women with internal spaces and “motives of internality” (130). There is terror “ingrained in the very behavior of the drama via the internality images. “That is, the drama does not merely make us afraid; rather, it itself is afraid. And inchoately it calls forth appropriate movements from the innermost recesses of the frightened mind, as reflected in a correspondingly frightened body” (130).

III.

“The method points beyond purely aesthetic form, as usually conceived, to the view of the plot as being, in essence, not just this story or that, but a viaticum that carries us through the process of ritual initiation or cleansing proper to any such specific plot…”(131).

The choruses represent motives, such as the “very principle of conscious itself” (134).

Transforming the personal into the political, and underlying civic motives, are at work here as well.

“[T]he transformations of conscience are, with astounding accuracy, related to emergent political institutions. As we have seen the primal curse translated previously translated into terms of personal relationship, it is now to be treated explicitly in terms of civic relationship” (135).

These tragedies, “in their motivations,” are not “reducible to terms so biologically absolute” (136).

“[T]he great Greek tragedies were devices for treating of civic tensions (read: class conflicts), and for contributing to social amity by ritual devices for resolving such tensions” (137).

4. Chapter Four: Goethe’s Faust, Part 1

Burke lists the four “offices” “essential to the analysis of poetic symbolism,” and his intent of focusing on “personality” in this chapter. Specifically, Burke wants to deal with the ways that a work’s “personality” “symbolizes perfect victimage as it relates to the entelechial principle nature of the genius of language” (139).

I. The Outline of the Work, as Pointed for Our Purposes

Burke summarizes the story as a tale of how a wealthy man seduced a naive girl, how his wealth enchanted her, and how he was transfixed by her “guileless ways”(139).

II. Negatives (or, rather, a Few of the More Notable Ones)

Mephistopheles “calls himself the spirit that always denies” (140).

“[T]he nature of the motives in the Witches’ Kitchen is epitomized in the crazy mathematical design that nonsensically adds up to nothing” (140).

“Gretchen’s first words are negatively couched” (140).

Faust contemplates nothingness. Mephistopheles, however, is the most important symbol (140).

III. Striving

“With this reference to striving we have not only a theme but more specifically a term that we can trace in zigzags throughout the entire work” (141).

IV. In Sum, On the Play as “Characteristic

“The courting of Gretchen, we take it, translates the “courtly” motive into sexual equivalents” (143)..

Another way to look at it is in terms of human shortcoming. Humans are constantly erring and striving, and thus, by nature, incomplete and imperfect. “And we are thus suggesting that the inadequacy connoted by either term is categorical or “original”(144).

“[A]t the very least, secular poetry should mirror (or be the sign of) categorical guilt in the merely political or sociological sense” (144).

V. Heroine as Perfect Sacrificial Victim

“First of all, we must believe that [Gretchen] possesses all of the virtues of malleability generously attributed to her by the man who would mold her.” “His designs adding up to guile, she is reciprocally a delightful vessel of guilelessness” (147).

“While trying to characterize Gretchen as a person, we do so not in the interests of character portraiture as such but with reference to problems in the diplomacy of poetic symbolization. For instance, as a figure designed to arouse our sympathies, the child who later drowns her own illegitimate child is seen to have been a virgin mother to her own sister” (148).

Burke calls this a character’s “spiritual inheritance” (148).

VI. The “Flower” Image, and Ramifications

“The flower theme (read: the “deflowering theme”) obviously fits well with the theme of Faust’s magically regained youth” (150).

However, the youth theme underscores a greater political and sociological principle. “[B]y approaching the youth-age alignment as we have, we hope to have provided the means of making clear how ‘politically’ or ‘sociologically’ tinged this biological imagery is” (150).

“We are trying to suggest that, once a social order has attained its scrupulous analogues in modes of ‘self-control’ or ‘mortification,’ then imagery of youth can stand for general principles of resistance, however roundabout, symbolizing political or social motives not intrinsic to the biological condition as such” (150).

“Gretchen’s seduction becomes an imaginal substance for the principle of riot.” “Poor Gretchen was, indeed, the sacrificial vessel of the negativistic principle, itself not essentially ‘sexual’ or ‘biological’ at all, but shaped by the thou-shalt not’s of governmental order” (150).

“[S]exual fantasies are…a displacement of political motives” (151).

“In so far as one’s perceptions of a ‘natural hierarchy’ or ‘order’ are imaginative responses to the morality of a given social order, there is a respect in which poetic ‘nature’ is but the incipient manifestation of society” (151).

VII. Walpurgis Night

Certain principles manifest in alternative forms. For example, “it could be the kind of political subterfuge we have already mentioned, an imagery whereby the principle of revolutionary overthrow could be expressed, but in a safer form, a form that turned the imagination away from explicitly political considerations” (152).

This can also have the effect of sexualizing politics in the audiences’ interpretations. Also, depending on the political and historical context, authors may adopt this strategy as means of avoiding risk (152).

“[T]he great man wanted not Gretchen, but what the sacrifice stood for: namely, riot, as revealed in the episode of Walpurgis Night” (153).

Burke posits that Goethe espoused an “idealistic philosophy of the becoming,” symbolized by the flower, and thus “anticipated Hegel and thereby anticipated both communism and Nazism” (155).

VIII. Concluding Comments

“Intrinsic to symbol-using as such there is the ‘principle of perfection’” (155).

“Extrinsically, the practical limitations of a given social order and of the given poet variously burden or complicate the search for perfect form in this purely technical sense” (155).

Thus, dramatic form is a useful vehicle for smuggling in potentially dangerous social and/or political views. Metaphor is a useful disguise to cloak these sentiments in. Further, “the playwright can dramatically attribute to a ‘fool’ or a ‘villain’ some attitude which he might not be otherwise able to voice” (156).

A purpose of this strategy can be “catharsis” (159). “[T]here is certainly a sense in which, for a typically symbol-using animal, there would be a kind of ‘cleansing’ got by the sheer fact of ‘getting something said’” (159).

“We believe that the analysis of poetic forms, when approached from this attitude, points to the essential motives of both poetry in particular and human relations in general. Such an approach would by no means deny the role of material factors in the shaping of human relations; but it would seek to analyze the modes of ‘magic’ by which material elements become inspirited, when the quests for truth, goodness, and power…are translated into the corresponding quest for beauty” (162).

*****

Prepared by Emanuelle Wessels 10/17/06

The outline after this point prepared by Justin Killian 10/21/06

Chapter Five: Faust II—The Ideas Behind the Imagery

The specific subject matter of the subject will be the second part of Faust.

Burke provides a lengthy explanation of Goethe’s work ethic, and he discusses the time frame for the composition of each section of the text.

i. The first part of Faust was written in 1808.

ii. Part II of Faust was written between 1824-31.

Burke makes note that many of Goethe’s other writings “shed light” on Faust.

Burke follows what he terms a “logological” method to find key terms or “terministic functions” to show how the main lines of Faust Part II “should follow” (LASA 164).

Burke writes, “In general. I shall proceed along the lines of an essay on “The First Three Chapters of Genesis,” in my book The Rhetoric of Religion. I refer in particular to a chart entitled “Cycle of Terms Implicit in the Idea of ‘Order.’”
Burke ends the introduction to this chapter by suggesting that theology, philosophy, political systems, and dramas are all alike in that each involves a cycle of configuration of organically interrelated terms.

i. Burke argues that by featuring the interrelated terms and “considering their implications” the critic can understand the logic of the structure.

Burke then moves to the actual analysis of Faust II, and he opens with a citation from an essay by Santayana that discusses the nature of beginnings and Goethe.

Burke makes it clear that in studying the beginnings sometimes it is just as important to look at the prefix of a word as the first word of a sentence.

i. For example, Burke provides a lengthy explanation of the various ways the German prefix Ur changes the meaning of many German nouns.

ii. Ur technically translates as pre or fore- but it when added to many words it takes on a different meaning. Consider the German word, mensch (man) with this prefix. The word no longer means pre-man but now translates as primordial man.

Burke makes note that in his scientific studies Goethe was concerned with the ideas rooted in this prefix. For example, Goethe looked for an Ur-plant when studying Botany.
In much the same way, the critic or reader of Faust is to look for “Ur-motives” or “Ur-situations.”
Burke also suggests that suffixes carry as much meaning as prefixes, and the study of these word components is just as important as the study of beginnings.

Burke summarizes the point behind the prefix/suffix distinction by arguing that Faust exists to introduce Faust Part II.

Burke writes, “Part II will involve the successive explicit disclosures, or revelations, of motives that were but implicit in Part I. Thus there is a sense in which the truly Ur-motives lurking behind Part I should be sought in Part II, if they are to be found anywhere” (LASA 166).
For Burke, the motives of Faust will most clearly be located in Faust Part II.

Before engaging in his critical analysis, Burke offers one point of clarification about the obvious relationship between the writings of Kant and Goethe. The two writers represent German idealistic romantic philosophy.

Burke reminds the reader that Kant’s scheme distinguishes between phenomenon (the sensible) and noumenin (the intelligible).
Thus, the main distinction is that as a lyric poet or a dramatist (depending on which characteristic should be ascribed), Goethe could only work within the realm of the noumenin.
From this distinction, Burke offers the meaning behind the title of the essay. Ultimately, it is rooted in the notions of an Ur-phenomenon and the fact that Goethe writes in a manner that plays with the noumenin or the realm of experience.

i. Burke writes that ur-phenomenon as a term “gives a clue to the subtitle of this essay.” For Burke, the term shows where a “sheerly poetic search for Ur-motives is concerned, they must remain in a stage translatable into terms of imagery” (LASA 166).

ii. Burke argues that Faust’s journey to the realm of “The Mothers” is the equivalent of Goethe’s philosophical search for an ur-phenomenon.

Burke transitions to the second German term that gets at the “essence” of German idealism. For Burke, this term is “Geist” or spirit.

Burke argues that if this one term were taken from the German language all great works, especially Marxism, would collapse.
Burke offers many examples about the complexity of the word, and he shows that it cannot be properly translated into an English equivalent.
Burke shows that the term pervades the entire section of the work, and it often exists in its synonym form.
Goethe also places the term in a dialectical possibility with the phrase “nature.”

Burke then transitions to the next section of his analysis by applying terms from the pentad to the above-mentioned German words.

Ur becomes a scenic word, and Geist is a word for agent.
Burke then offers the word “streben” or striving as the act that is taking place in the scene.

i. For Burke, this term is in an interesting relationship with other German words that are used in the text.

ii. Streben rhymes with leben “to live” and schweben “to soar,” and Goethe cleverly invokes these terms to depict Faust’s redemption.

Burke then offers a lengthy discussion of the relationship between various German words to remind the reader that the ultimate critical move of the essay is to locate the Ur-motive in Faust Part II.

Burke later transitions to “foretell” the second part of Faust by suggesting how he believes it should be based on the “UR-Geist-Streben” nexus.

To accomplish the above task, Burke engages in a very detailed accounting of specific textual elements.

Burke then moves into a discussion of the dramatical and lyrical in Act I of Faust. He also branches into his own form of hermeneutics throughout the section. Those interested in the workings of this text might find these pages (LASA 171-6) interesting.
Part VII discusses Act II and talks about he Ur-situation that takes places.
Burke then provides a lengthy textual analysis of Act III, which is entitled the Helena.
Finally Burke provides a close reading of the final act, which looks at the cycles of terms in the text that imply each other.
Burke ends with the one question that seems to be unresolved in the work, that is the two grand sexual principles of the work must be molded into one.

Chapter Six: I, Eye, Ay- Concerning Emerson’s Early Essay on “Nature,” and the Machinery of Transcendence

Burke proposes to offer a discussion of Emerson’s essay “Nature” through the standpoint of transcendence.
Burke admits that dialectical transcendence and dramatic catharsis overlap in many ways.
He then proceeds to offer some clarification about the way the two terms and procedures differ.

For Burke, catharsis involves purgation by the imitation of victimage. It is a form of social medicine.
Transcendence becomes a form of rival medication for Burke, and Emerson’s essay provides a description of the brand of transcendentalism that is difference from dramatic catharsis.

i. Transcendence is similar in that it has traces of victimage. It also has elements of catharsis.

ii. Although Burke is concerned with symbolic operations, he notes that the process of transcendentalism has an institutional process as well.

To discuss the institutional process, Burke references the article “The Seven Offices: in the appendix of Attitudes Toward History.

i. In the essay Burke outlines the seven functions people provide one another. The first six are: govern, rule, defend, teach, entertain, and cure.

ii. There was still a seventh role that had to be “dealt with” for Burke.

1. After considering the role of the priest, Burke decided that the seventh role was to “pontificate” or “build a bridge” for others.

2. Ultimately, transcendence becomes the seventh role. For Burke, transcendence is about building a terministic bridge to transcend one realm by a realm beyond it.

Burke then offers a discussion of catharsis that centers on the way an audience purges itself by identifying with the excess of the tragic hero.

Burke moves the reader beyond an Aristotelian understanding of catharsis, and he brings attention to the idea that often the mere act of saying things brings forth catharsis.
Burke then shows how drama and dialectic are alike. Both attempt, through competition, to lead to a view that transcends the partial views of the participants.

Burke then makes it clear that at their extremes, he feels there are notable differences between tragic catharsis and dialectical transcendence. He suggests that the Emerson essay is a “delightful illustration of this difference” (LASA 189).

Emerson’s essay is characterizes as an idealistic exercise in “transcendence up.”
For Burke, tragic catharsis and dialectical transcendence both give kinds of “transformation” (LASA 189).
In dialectical transcendence, the principle of transformation operates in terms of a “beyond.” Burke relates this to the seventh office of man or the priestly function.
For Burke, the Emerson essay is a “delightful example” of this terministic process.

Burke then returns to a lengthy description of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy.
Finally, Burke tells use the essay will attempt to do three things.

First, it will “build up a contrast between transformation by victimage (dramatic catharsis) and transformation by dialectical “transcendence” (modes of “crossing” whereby something here and now is interpreted in terms of something beyond (LASA 191).
Second, Burke wants to show that the same principles are involved every time an author, no matter how empirical his claims, tries to reach a higher level of generalization for claims.
Finally, Burke argues that within the essay “while spontaneously shifting back and forth between different levels of generalization, might incline not to see that all such procedures are operating within the same rules, though in a fragmentary way” (LASA 191).

Burke concludes this section by giving the essay immense praise and noting that both Emerson and Whitman, “loved the gesture (if whistling is a gesture)—and it is an appealing gesture, albeit a gesture much more plausible then than now” (LASA 192).
Burke then moves into section four of the essay where he claims that the form of the essay treats society in terms of nature.
Section five of the essay takes up the relationship between the Hic et Nunc and they “beyond.”
Finally, the essay ends with a look at discipline and a return to theorizing about victimage.

Chapter Seven: “Kubla Khan,” Proto-Surrealist Poem

Burke opens the chapter by claiming that he thinks Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” is both a marvel and finished. Coleridge thinks the poem is a fragment.
Burke believes that whatever was lost, the three stanzas in their “overall progression tick off a perfect form” (LASA 201).

Stanza One (thesis) amplifies the theme of beatific vision
Stanza Two (Antithesis) introduces the countertheme
Stanza Three fuses the two motives in terms of a beatific vision

Burke then references an essay by John Livingstone Lowes that attempts to trace the words in Coleridge’s writings to phrases in other great literary works. It is believed that all of Coleridge’s phrases are references to other things he was reading.
Burke thinks Coleridge is actually referencing his own words, not others, in the poem being analyzed.

Burke argues, “The student of any poet’s nomenclature has mote to learn from a concordance of his work (a purely internal inspection of a term’s “sources” in its own range of contexts) than from an inspection of possible borrowings (LASA 203).

Burke argues that much of Lowe’s evidence for external references might be read as indication that Coleridge was responding to the “implications of such imagery” (LASA 203).
For Burke, Lowe’s essay provides two insights that Lowe was not interested in documenting.

First, the essay provides material that shows the association between terms and their mythic or archetypal forms.
Second, the essay shows a nomenclature that may be uniquely Coleridgean.

Burke then conducts a reading of the poem that looks for “archetypal” sources.
Burke argues that despite Coleridge’s claims about the poem’s origins, the poem should be viewed as a work of art. Thus, Burke sets out to discover the “kind of effect it aims to produce” (LASA 204).
Burke cites the Aristotelian claim that tragedy will make use of the marvelous. For Burke, the specific poem in question, as well as others written by Coleridge, is a strong example of this literary technique.
Then Burke begins his reading of “Kubla Khan.”

The first stanza is read as a beatific vision of an Edenic garden, enclosed in a circle of protection.
Burke provides a lengthy explication of each word, a look at the use of color, references to fountains, mention of the forest. For a detailed account of this read see LASA pages 206-208.

Burke then provides a read of the poem’s second stanza.

Burke opens the read by writing, “though you may have felt that I was straining things as regards the ambiguities of “sacred” in the first stanza, surely you will grant that in this middle stanza such disturbances come to the fore, as regards the synonym “holy with reference to “A Savage place!…enchanted” (LASA 208).
Burke then praises Coleridge for beautifully waving together descriptions of “natural motions” with “human actions.”
There is also reference to the second stanza being saturated with narrative, which brings a sense of personality to this section of the poem.
Based on a series of textual examples, Burke argues that, “the poem could be viewed as a highly personal, poetic analogue of Kantian transcendentalism, which sought conceptually to think about itself until it ended in a schematization of the forms necessarily implicit in the very act of thinking” (LASA 209).

Burke then stresses that the image of the “sacred river” in the poem is tied to the psychology of idealism.
By providing examples from the poem “Dejection” by Coleridge, Burke argues that Coleridge’s own vocabulary gives more insight to the meaning of the poem.
From 211-14 Burke then provides specific references to certain words in “Kubla Khan” that can be found in other writings of Coleridge.
After his lengthy word for word analysis, Burke writes, “We expect that final stanza to “synthesize” the two movements that have gone before. It does so” (LASA 214).
Burke then writes, “the vision of the ‘Abyssinian maid’ is clearly beatific, yet the beholder of the vision (as presented in terms of the poem) is also to be identified with sinister connotations (as with those that explicitly emerge just after a recurrent reference to the “caves of ice”) (LASA 214).
Much like the other three stanzas, the third portion of the poem gets a close letter-by-letter read.
After this, Burke decides to consider the argument that the poem is finished even though the author class it a “fragment” (LASA 216).

To make this argument, Burke cites a passage from the Philosophy of the Literary Form that discusses plot and lyrical style. (Vintage edition pages 26-27)
Burke argues, “I believe that, in principle at least, Coleridge actually did dream all hose lines, and transcribed them somewhat as an amanuensis might have done” (LASA 217).
In arguing that the poem is a finished product, Burke returns to his concern that the poem is actually best understood by looking at Coleridge’s own nomenclature.
Burke makes the argument that many of the words have sinister connotation, as regards their uses in other contexts.

Burke Offers an Addendum that was developed after several of his students provided readings of the poem without his influence. Below is a list of the critical elements that changed for Burke based on these readings:

Many of the students provided psychoanalytic readings of the poem that spoke to the phallic imagery and the underlying currents of homosexual and heterosexual desire that are embedded within the poem.
Burke makes sure that all psychoanalytic reads need to pay attention to the familial aspects of the poem. He argues that many were too quick to jump to the sexual, and they wrongfully overlook the role family roles play in the poem.
Burke also mentions Kathleen Raine’s 1964 essay in the Sewanee Review that speaks of the symbolic motives implicit in Coleridge’s thought and the association between “abyss” and “Abyssinia.” Burke is accepting of her reading.

Burke ends his chapter with a discussion of Raine’s comments on “anamnesis,” and he notes that until critics take his point about “temporizing of essence” (as discussed in the Grammar of Motives) they will not fully grasp the linguistic principles underlying the relationship between the “mythic” and the “philosophic” terms for “beginnings” (LASA 221).

Chapter Eight: Social and Cosmic Mystery: A Passage to India

Burke opens with what he class preparatory definitions. He argues that he will treat E.M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India as social comedy rather than in terms of cosmic mystery. He also suggests that his analysis will somewhat qualify the formula.
Burke suggests that there are three ways to begin this argument, and opts to approach the analysis by proposing a “tentative definitions of the book as a literary species,” and then he will “work into it concretely by considering the various clauses of the definition” (LASA 223).

Burke is not concerned with this being a style that would cover many books or whether this is a treatment of this book as a “sui generis.”

Burke then offers four numbered claims about the work.

First he calls it a long, realistic prose narrative tinged with mystery. He notes that it employs “dialogue and description.”
He then notes that the Forester relies on geological, historical, psychological, and sociological observations used for poetic purposes” (LASA 223).
Finally, he argues that the five paragraphs of Chapter 12 “form an especially remarkable progression” (LASA 223).

i. The first paragraph deals with the region in the most general sense.

ii. The second paragraph is sprinkle with the negative and imagines a time when India might be covered by water.

iii. The third paragraph deals with the appearance of the caves.

iv. The fourth paragraph considers how light behaves when is mirrored on its polished walls.

v. The final stanza culminates in as much an absolute as one can by using images.

He suggests that the book is told in a comic mood that is “essentially humane” and that transcends the perspective of any one character.

Burke then offers a section labeled “situation.” Of the four claims mentioned above, he decides to begin with the final statement concerning the comic mood of the book.

Burke claims that the plot and the situation line up provide the reader with the “material” needed to see the book as an “ironically sympathetic contemplation” (LASA 225).
Burke notes that in the novel everyone is pitted against someone else so as to create a scene of conflict.
At this point Burke shows that the novel can be read in two different ways.

i. First, it could be seen as a narrative about a young girl who visits a colony.

ii. The second way to consider the book is to see it as a story of the elderly Mrs. Moore who accompanies the young girl making the trip.

Although Burke argues that both of the ways to see the story are present, the novel should actually be seen in terms of the embarrassments that are brought due to the differences in social statuses of the characters.

i. The differences in social status allow the author to experiment with different types of gallantry.

Burke also emphasizes that there is a comic stress upon the dislocation of society and there are traces of a transcendental dialectic.
The driving force of the novel becomes the author’s use of a poetic style to show social embarrassments and corresponding reports of things that go wrong.

Burke then moves to a discussion of the “Cast of Characters” (LASA 228).

Burke argues that in the novel the most “obvious human problem” is turned into a source of poetic pleasure.
Burke then provides a list of conflicts that occur between the character Adela and various other British officials and Indian characters.
After the plot analysis, Burke then states, “In this work there is no villain. There is only a comic scale of errors. Thus, though it has no driving sexual love (no amor, or eros) it is essentially charitable (it has contemplative brand of charitas, which the Latin equivalent of agape). Thus, for these mean days, it is good medicine (LASA 229).
To prove the above point, Burke provides character analyses of the many competing personalities in the book.
In the final analysis of the punkah wallah, Burke notes that many psychoanalytic critics would be quick to highlight erotic connotations but this would be a huge jump from dramatis persona to the symbol the figure actually embodies.

Burke then offers a discussion of attendant terms. He notes that “it will be a troublesome section for readers who hurry on” but he argues that it is “necessary, since it throws light on ways whereby recurrent terms help establish the internal consistency of the novel, and internal consistency that prevails at a level not likely to be noticed at a first, unanalytic reading” (LASA 232).

Burke shows that the term “extraordinary” appears in both the opening and closing sentences of the first chapter.
Burke shows that there is a strong preference for negative terms in the book.
Burke also shows that term “half” frequently shows up in the text.
Burke continues to trace terms in the same way and show the internal symbolic relationships. This can be found from 234-237.

Burke then transitions to a discussion of the supernatural in the novel in a section that he titles “Mystery.” (This section starts on pg. 237)

Chapter Nine: Version, Con-, Per-, and In- Thoughts on Djuna Barnes’s Novel Nightwood

The chapter opens with Burke saying that what follows relates with his recent work on the problems with the relationship between rhetoric and poetics.
Burke notes that these issues are directly related to Cleanth Brooks’s recent work on Faulkner. Burke highlights that Brooks was once a proponent of Formalistic Criticism but seems to have distanced himself from this version of analysis in his later work.
Burke is happy that Brooks steps outside the confines of Formalistic Criticism, but he feels that that Brooks’s critical project must be judged with the same lens that Brooks used to judge other critics.
In this contrast between rhetoric and poetics Burke claims that there are two types of bookkeeping that are available to the critic.

First, if an author uses violence in the text and discusses this as representative of the “region” in which the plot takes place, then they can be critiqued for overlooking the sheer formalistic element that violence is a means of story telling.
The second issue concerns the use of poetics, and it is discussed through an analysis of Djuna Barnes's Nightwood. However, Burke notes that “its stylistic tactics raise a Rhetorical problem, due to the nature of its theme” (LASA 241).

Burke then begins his analysis of the novel with a section titled with the roman numeral I.

Burke starts the section by calling James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as Young Man the bible of Aestheticism. He then argues that “though the aesthetic doctrine itself would come closer to a Poetic than to a Rhetoric, it has all the accoutrements of a gospel, with Stephen as the logos, plus corresponding history and passion” (LASA 241).
For Burke, Nightwood also moves from book to Bible.

i. To begin this discussion Burke reminds the reader of his three freedoms of speech that are discussed in the “Laurel edition” of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens.

1. The three freedoms are: freedom of praise, freedom of invective, and freedom of lamentation

2. Burke argues that these forms off speech can be grounded in our earliest preverbal expressions.

Burke then shows the difference between a Biblical and literary jeremiad, and he argues that a literary jeremiad must be fun.
Burke then suggests that it is also important to consider the purpose of lamentation.
He also argues that the book “will be one more of the many works designed to celebrate the grave responsibilities that Love places upon its votaries. And its plot will gravitate about a conversion to perversion, or inversion” (LASA 242)

Burke then moves through a lengthy explanation of how derivates of the Latin word vert appear throughout the Bible, other literary works, and Nightwood.

The above discussion makes little sense to the reader of the essay as all the textual examples have been omitted due to limitations placed on the novel by the publisher.

In the section marked as two, Burke starts with a discussion of the novel’s plot. In its simplest form, the plot concerns a woman in a love triangle with two other women.
Burke starts to analyze the plot, but he reminds the reader that when analyzing literary tactics the critic should look for an “author’s modes of ‘dignification’” (LASA 245).
Burke shows that in the book he finds two basic kinds of dogs (the book ends with Robin on all fours in a doglike state).

The two types of dogs are “put on dog” and “go to the dogs.”

The remainder of the section provides a plot analysis of the entire novel and provides a brief description of the above themes.
In Section III, Burke puts together “various passages that most directly indicate the book’s terministic tactics” (250).

Burke first opens with a discussion of the theme of blood in the book.
Ultimately Burke’s analysis aims to show that the essence of motivation has always been since the beginning.
Burke analysis leads the reader through the complicated sexual relationships between the characters.
He then offers another version of the motivation in the book that causes him to revisit his reading of Hitler’s Mein Kampff. Ultimately, Burke shows how the theme of blood worked in Hitler’s work, and he then compares this to the theme that is found in Barnes’s novel.

Burke then moves to conclude the essay.

First, he argues that cause can be recommended in terms of expediency, “by showing the advantages to be gained it the proper policies are adopted” (LASA 253).
Second, cause can be recommended in terms of “tragic dignification,” by showing people who are willing to sacrifice for their cause.

Chapter Ten: The Vegetal Radicalism of Theodore Roethke

Burke offers several passages from Roethke’s poems as a way “in” to his coming argument. He starts with the thirteen flower poems from the first section of The Lost Son.
Burke argues that the many phrases he has highlighted show that Roethke can “endow his brief lyrics with intensity of action” (LASA 255).

Burke argues that the poems allow the reader to enter at a specific place, travel a long winding path, and exit at a totally different place.

Burke gives beautiful descriptive analysis of Roethke’s poems.
After discussing the poems of The Lost Son, Burke then shows how the poem “The Visitant” contains three movements: anticipatory, reminiscent, and theophany.

Burke provides more descriptive analysis that shows these three elements in the poem.

After using argument by antithesis that employs the work of Eliot, Burke then suggests, “to characterize Roethke’s verse, you could profitably start from considerations of vocabulary. The motive we have in mind is by no means peculiar to this one poet. It runs through modern art generally” (LASA 258).
Burke then moves through a discussion Kantian philosophy as it relates to the sensations that the poetry might evoke.

In particular, “intuitions” and “concepts” as they relate to Kant’s Aesthetic and Analytic realm are used to understand how the poem is composed.
For Burke, the distinctions Kant makes show the directions poetry might take to look for notable “purifications of language.”

Burke then moves to analogies that can be drawn to Dante’s Infantile.
Following this section, there is a lengthy analysis of Wordsworth.

Burke notes that by the time of Wordsworth’s preface, the search for a principle of selection for a “purified speech” involves a romantic reversion to “low and rustic life” (LASA 260).
Burke also shows that Wordsworth is concerned with the journalistic idiom.
In short, Burke shows that Wordsworth is concerned with the technological idioms and the purification of language.
Burke shows how many technical languages take the communicator back to a pure, childlike form of communication.
Burke then shows how this doctrine infuses Lawrence’s writings.

All of these musings through many different literary giants, Burke finally comes to his main point. He writes, “All told, we can see in Roethke’s cult of “intuitive language: a more strictly “infantile variant of the Dantesque search for a “noble” vernacular; a somewhat suburban, horticulturist variant of Wordsworth’s stress upon the universal nature of rusticity; and a close replica of Lawrence’s distinction between the physical and the “abstract” (LASA 263).
Burke then moves to discuss the selectivity that is implicit in Roethke’s flower images.

He writes, “What roughly, then, is the range of meaning in Roethke’s flowers? In part, they are a kind of psychology, an emphatic vocabulary for expressing rudimentary motives felt, rightly or wrongly, to transcend particular periods of time” (Burke, LASA 265).
Burke also offers a discussion of four poems that Roethke called the four experiences that show the struggle from the slime. The four poems are “The Lost Son,” “The Long Ally,” “A Field of Light,” and “The Shape of Fire.”

i. Burke argues that the four poems represent the two motives “regression” and “fulfillment” (LASA 266).

After a lot more descriptive work, Burke makes the claim “Roethke’s vegetal radicalism is not the place one would ordinarily look for comments on the economic motive. Yet you can take it as a law that, in our culture, at a moment of extreme mental anguish if the sufferer is accurate there will be an accounting of money too” (LASA 269).
After offering some other critical work and making references to Shakespeare’s MacBeth Burke offers reads of “A Field of Light” and “The Shape of Fire.”
Burke then highlights another “rhetorical device” that can be found in Roethke’s work.

i. Burke writes, “Whenever there is no specific verb required, Roethke resorts to some word in the general category of communication.”

ii. Thus, in the poem spiders “cry” and weeds “whine.”

Burke shows that similes are used very sparingly in Roethke, and the word “like” appears three times in the entire poem.
Burke then approaches the question of human motivation, and he offers speculation about how much motivation should influence the poet’s work.

i. Burke does not think it is the critic’s responsibility to legislate for the poet and give them a motivation in their work.

ii. The critic is to characterize.

iii. Burke states that Roethke’s work offers one example of how motivation can become evident in a poem.

Burke ends with general praise for the Roethke poem.

Chapter Eleven: William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963

Burke opens with the claim that to read the work of Williams is to find him warmly in his work.
He makes it clear that both his role ass doctor and poet are evident in his works.
After a lengthy story about walking with Williams along the beach, Burke finally offers a thesis which reads “For Williams any natural or poetic concern with the body as a sexual object was reinforced and notably modified by a professional concern with the body as a suffering or diseased object” (LASA 284).

Burke acknowledges that the theme of bodily elements shows the influence Whitman had on Williams.
Burke is also careful to acknowledge that the theme persists in the later works of Williams, primarily in The Collected Later Poems.

Burke then moves to a discussion of the “sentimental” and he argues that Williams’ s use of imagery does “not involve false or forced sentiment” (LASA 286).

For Burke, Williams is sentimental because his poetic descriptions are not descriptions of things but they are instead “portraits of personalities” (LASA 287).
The primary point of discussion for Burke is a work by Stevens who has many contrasting views on the purpose and style of Williams’s sentimentality.

i. Burke argues, “Stevens’ use of imagery is more airy than Williams’, quite as the world of part-time insurance man differs from the world of a part-time medical doctor, though each of these poets in his way is strongly aware of the appetites” (LASA 288).

Burke ends the chapter with another personal anecdote about Williams and then he provides reads of a few other poems.

Part III: Further Essays of Symbolism in General

Chapter One: Rhetoric and Poetics

Burke opens this chapter with a brief discussion of Aristotle and language.

Burke mentions that he has recently listened to a lecture on the poetics of film.
He then reminds the audience that Aristotle should be the starting point of this discussion, and he makes vague allusions to his own work concerning man being the “symbol-using animal.”

Burke then makes clear that his discussion will attempt to trace out some of the various uses of the terms rhetoric and poetic. He writes, “terms like poetic and rhetoric having been used in many different situations, one cannot expect them to stay put, since it is a sheer fact of history that their meanings have shifted, we must admit as much, then try to show the logic of their transformations” (LASA 296).
Burke then reminds the reader that forms of expression are universal whether they are poetic of rhetorical. This is an argument he builds in Rhetoric of Motives.

For Burke, rhetoric was “developed by the use of language for purposes of cooperation and competition. It served to form appropriate attitudes that were designed to induce corresponding acts” (LASA 296).
Poetics by contrast concern symbolic action for symbolic action’s sake. In sum, rhetoric is practical, but the poetic is not practical.

Burke then moves to a discussion of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics.

Burke shows that in terms of the poetic, Aristotle encourages a turn to the rhetoric to see what a person should say in a certain situation.
Burke also shows that many rhetorical situations employ the tactics that are usually associated with the poetic.
Ultimately, there is overlap between the two terms even in Aristotle.

Burke then suggests that even thought there is overlap between the two terms, the discussion must consider Aristotle’s definition of tragedy which reads, “through pity and fear effecting the catharsis of such emotions” (LASA 297). Burke moves forward with this comment.

Burke’s suggested starting point for the discussion about the overlap between rhetoric and poetics is to be found in Aristotle’s Politics. He writes, “in the Politics that the subject of catharsis is to get further treatment in the Poetics, I assume that there was such a section, and that the two are closely related” (LASA 297).

Burke then offers what he labels an “aside” and discusses the etymology and the translation of Aristotle’s definition of tragedy. He calls for the creating of an English verb that means something like “go beyond.”

This becomes important for both rhetoric and poetics in that both are asking the audience to go beyond something.

Burke then offers a discussion of how rhetoric and poetics differ.

Burke then offers very little commentary that teases apart the differences between these two terms.
On page 300, Burke proposes to approach the differences between the two terms through a discussion of formalist criticism and Faulkner, but instead he offers allusions to Greek tragedy and Shakespeare.

Burke then proposes to end with a question that deals primarily with rhetoric. He encourages the reader to return to a discussion of “identification” and administrative rhetoric” that he offers in the Rhetoric of Motives.

Burke uses the example of Theordore Roosevelt taking the American fleet to Germany as a goodwill mission. In sum, this is a classic example of administrative rhetoric for Burke. Administrative rhetoric becomes directly persuasive aims that have means that are not completely verbal.

Burke then relates the above concept to notions of identification and the problems with this strategy of persuasion.
Burke then provides a crystallization of how he would have individuals view the relationship between rhetoric and poetics.

He argues that the two fields are becoming confused because of their overlapping subject matter.
He decides to end with an illustration and not an argument.

i. He discusses his attempt to write a satirical poem.

ii. He then provides a lengthy excerpt from a lecture given by Dr. Wilbur S. Howell on the difference between the two terms.

iii. After discussing Howell, Burke argues that he began writing his poem in terms of self-expression (the poetic) but things started moving when he started writing in terms of “communication.”

Taking issue with many of Howell’s points, Burke provides the most logical summary of the entire chapter.
Burke writes, “the rise of aesthetics, with the corresponding exile of literary and academic traditions that had placed the stress upon Rhetoric, Poetics and Dialectic. The exiled subjects found asylum in the “new sciences,” so that many of the older concepts now have new names—and often the new names open up implications not discernable in the old names. The job here is not to be simply “purists,” but rather to ask just how much of the new material should be added to the study of Rhetoric, Poetics, and Dialectic—and how much should be definitely abandoned to the jurisdiction of the “new sciences” themselves” (LASA 306). This seems to be the clearest summary of the entire chapter.

Chapter Two: The Thinking of the Body: Comments on the Imagery of Catharsis in Literature

Burke opens by noting that catharsis is usually considered in the “grand style,” but he stresses that there are humbler modes of “mortification” available to imaginative writing (LASA 308).
Burke offers five case studies, plus examples from his own work, that stress the range of imagination and “good writing.”
The first case study offered is a discussion of Alice in Wonderland.

Burke offers discussion of various scenes in the novel that show the presence of an anal-oral reversibility in the work.
Ultimately, Burke points out the use of puns and phrases that allow for this reversibility to take place.

The second case study is an analysis of Wagner’s Ring.

Burke opens with a description of the opera Das Rheingold, and then ties in discussions of a letter Wagner wrote on January 25, 1854 that provide insights into the meaning of the opera.
The majority of this section is related to Burke’s notion of purification, and he offers a quite intriguing discussion of original sin. In all, this is mainly another descriptive analysis that shows a use of redemption, ideas of the negative, and sin.

The third case study looks at Flaubert’s Temptation of St. Anthony.

Burke returns to his ideas of body and the body and flesh distinction in this case study.
Through beautiful and thorough descriptive analysis of the various scenes in the work, Burke sets out to suggest that “in Flaubert’s fertile phantasmagoria Anthony’s temptations would take the form of ‘body thinking’ that lured him in the other direction, from “spirit” to “Matter” (LASA 314).

Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound is offered as the fourth case study in the essay.

Burke opens with Freud’s reading of the drama. Burke reminds the reader that in “The Acquisition of Power over Fire,” Freud sexualizes the fire and draws attention to its extinguish.
Burke offers an alternative reading of the play, but he recognizes the strengths in Freud’s account.
For Burke, “the play seems to offer an almost schematically clear instance of fear expressed in terms of micturition.”

i. The remainder of the chapter discusses the evidence for this reading. These are found in LASA pages 320-2.

Finally, Burke offers the “Pure” poetry of Mallarme as the final case study.

Burke arguers that Mallarme’s standards of stylistic elegance take the issues at hand in the essay the furthest.
Burke writes, “His [Mallarme] desire to write the perfect poem led him, in reflexive self-involvement to write poem after poem about the process of writing a poem. Thus, he confronted such absolute tests as come nearest to fulfillment when they contrive, however maturely, to reaffirm the motivational design on the infantile” (LASA 322).
Burke introduces the argument by Fowlie that the poems of Mallarme deal with angelism, hermeticism, and narcissism. Burke adds that beyond these, the critic should look for elements of the demonic trinity in the poems.
Burke then walks the reader through the various poems to show these literary elements in what he considers their “pure form”

The chapter concludes with Burke referencing his own work, a discussion of the conscious and unconscious in sonnets, and reflections on remarks a colleague gave Burke on this chapter.

Chapter Three: Somnia AS Urinandum: More thoughts on Motion and Action

Burke opens with talks of Freud and Jung’s different views on the dreaming. For Freud, dreams allow the dreamer to escape censorship that has been placed on motives. For Jung, dreams concern arc