Reference:
Review Excerpts 'I must admit that both Crane and Burke sometimes push very close
to my own limits of patience, Crane chewing on bones long after I think all
marrow has been extracted, Burke juggling Indian clubs that I am not
quite sure are even there. Clearly, neither of them had managed to hit
the one right ratio of theory to practice that I have always maintained in
my own work. The rule is, of course, as follows: my abstract theory is
essential, concrete groundwork; his is frequently quixotic indulgence in a
perhaps harmless but irrelevant hobby-horse; and M. Jacques Lacan's is
lamentable proof that when the Germans conquered France in World
War II Hegel came swirling in with them and sent traditional French
lucidity forever underground' (99).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | abstract |
concrete |
lucidity |
ratio |
rule |
theory |
world |
'Crane's pluralism might lead us to "do justice" to Burke. His
dramatism is one of the possible modes: his subject, language as
action; his method, an assimilative dialectic; his principles,
comprehensive and operational; and his purpose, actional or
"rhetorical". To use his own words, he attempts "to cure" himself and
society by doing verbal "therapy". His initial choice of mode enables him
to answer certain questions and prevents his answering other questions.
When we judge his answers as "relative to" that initial choice, we can
both judge his effectiveness within his chosen mode and avoid the kind
of dogmatism that would rule out his mode as illegitimate in the first
place. Anyone who knows Burke at all knows that he will refuse to stay
pinned and wriggling on anyone else's wall chart' (101-2).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | action | dialectic |
language |
method |
mode |
principles |
purpose |
rule |
verbal |
'I must emphasize how strongly the surface of Burke's writing seems
to violate two of Crane's criteria for good criticism, even though to do so
may initially seem like the experience of crawling backward into a world
of exuberant dancers. He often seems blithely indifferent to Crane's
insistence on coherence and common-sensical correspondence with
what is "really there". His paths are seldom straight and clear; his
allusions are often obscure; his arguments often seem to depend on
puns or questionable etymologies or on conjectures so wild that he does
not even try to defend them. Whatever the accepted canons are for
organizing a proof seem as often violated as honored. His notorious
translation of Keats's last line into "Body is turd, turd body", is only one of
thousands of what have seemed debasements -- or, at best, irrelevant
private translations -- of what "everyone knows" about the works he
discusses' (104).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | coherence |
criteria |
criticism |
translation |
world |
writing |
'What has annoyed many people besides Crane is not simply
Burke's frequent pursuit of scatology or his free-wheeling delivery....
What is troublesome, surely, is precisely Burke's claim to make
connections in what appears disparate -- the claim, for example, to
connect bodily functions to surroundings hitherto seen as "poetic". The
trouble, in short, is not that turds are flung at us but that they come
labeled as truth. Burke seems to be claiming to know better that Keats
himself something of what the poem "means", and the meaning he finds
is antithetical not just to the poet's intentions but to any intentions Keats
might conceivably have entertained' (104).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | claim | meaning |
truth |
'We can at least begin with Burke's own kind of defense when under
attack. Having seen man's world as a drama of symbolic actions,
convinced that man's "symbolicity" is disastrous whenever any symbolic
direction is followed to some kind of logical "perfection", he has
consistently sought ways of mitigating, or undermining, the rage for
perfection that each monistic mode of thought exhibits. We can see what
this means in his fairly recent defense of his excremental talk about
Keats. We must think of him as seeking always to modulate the
excesses both of eulogistic languages, which would treat man as a
creature or pure mind or spirit, and of "dislogistic" languages, which
would reduce him to mere body, never acting but only reacting. In that
light, what he calls his "joycing" of Keats can indeed be seen, in his
words, as "but heuristic, suggestive, though it may put us in search of
corroborative observations. And any such bathos, lurking behind the
poem's pathos, is so alien to the formal pretenses of the work, if such
indecorous transliterating of the poem's decorum had occurred to Keats,
in all likelihood he would have phrased his formula differently, to avoid
this turn"' (105-6).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | defense |
dislogistic |
drama |
eulogistic |
formula |
heuristic |
mind |
mode |
thought |
world |
Burke 'repudiates many of the canons of demonstration that most
traditional scholars would take for granted. Now, when we find a critic not
just deliberately flouting but making an overt attack on Occam's razor,
when we find him not only "guilty of circular reasoning" but hailing circular
reasoning as what every thinker inevitably commits, we can either rule
him out of court or we can try to understand what critical purposes are
thwarted when we insist that all discourse fit models imported from the
sciences' (106).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | demonstration |
discourse |
reasoning |
rule |
'If Burke is right here -- an I think he is, provided we understand that
to "track down the variant" is in his view never easy -- we have the basis
for a special kind of free-wheeling inquiry into other critics' views. Instead
of thinking that we can refute a given position by showing that it cannot
be experimentally or logically falsified, we are invited by it to one
perspective on the world, a perspective that is likely, by the very nature of
perspectives, to be self-demonstrating. Every perspective expressed in
a symbolic language becomes a "terministic screen" which both reveals
some truths -- obviously "demonstrated" to anyone employing the
language -- and conceals others' (107).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | basis | language |
nature |
perspective |
thinking |
variant |
world |
'Taken seriously, this position means that no refutation of Burke that
I have seen has any relevance to what he is really doing, because they all
employ some version of a scientistic calculus to show either that Burke
cannot prove what he says, or that what he says can be refuted from
some other perspective, or that all of his proofs are circular. But since all
screens will be vulnerable to the same charges, the question becomes,
not whether a given perspective can be shown to be distorted --
because it always can be from any other perspective -- but whether it is
more or less adequate to the kinds of problems it reveals. The result of
such a position is not relativism, although it is not surprising that
inattentive readers have confused it with relativism; having cut his
moorings from conventional norms of proof, Burke is naturally accused of
having no norms at all' (107).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | perspective |
relevance |
result |
'He [Burke] in fact rejects more than conventional norms, His
dialectic of similarities and differences is so deliberately flexible and so
aggressively opposed to neatly fixed meanings that in a sense all literal
proof is made suspect. In the opening pages of A Grammar of
Motives we find a series of claims that any action or statement can
be considered as evidence for or against almost any concept. In defining
any substance, for example, we necessarily place it in its context, its
scene , which is to define it in terms of what it is not , leading
to the "paradox of substance": "every positive is negative". Before we
know it, Burke has moved through statements like "any tendency to do
something is ...a tendency not to do it" (32) to a series of paradoxes and
oxymorons and "ambiguities of substance" that stagger the
literal-minded' (107).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | action | concept |
context |
dialectic |
evidence |
grammar |
literal |
paradox |
scene |
statement |
substance |
'Obviously such talk is nonsense to anyone who insists on a literal
meaning for phrases like "the same as" and "amounts to". Burke seldom
uses such words in a sense that would satisfy someone like Crane as
strictly literal; even the word "literal" is not quite literal; thinking about the
concept as Burke might, we would no doubt extend my questioning of
Crane's usage in chapter 2 [of this work]. Indeed, a major part of his
persistent program is to remind literalists that behind their claims to
precision lurk confusions that can be acknowledged and lived with only
by qualifying every copulative verb with some sense of ambiguity. It is not
just that the words need semantic scouring. What something is is
always too rich and complex for any one statement. Thus Burke can,
without violating his own canons, say at one point that literary form as the
gratification of needs is the appeal in poetry and, in other
contexts, say that literary form is a disguise for the true appeal;
and he can really mean both statements' (108).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | ambiguity |
concept |
copulative |
form |
literal |
literary |
meaning |
statement |
thinking |
verb |
word |
'But we must not be un-Burkean in what we mean by a phrase like
"really mean". We are not -- it should be clear by now -- in pursuit of a
meaning that is knowledge in a scientific sense of fixed concepts proved
by tests of certainty or levels of probability. We are pursuing a
truth-of-action, a meaning that is more probed than proved -- a way
of knowing, a knowing that is itself a kind of action' (108).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | action | knowledge |
meaning |
phrase |
'Consider more closely the beginning of A Grammar of Motives
. Like Burke's other books, it depends on a conceptual beginning in
"dramatism": if man-as-symbol-user, then action (in the
sense of symbolically motivated choices between various yeses and
noes -- the opposite, in short, of mere motion); : if action,
then conflict; if conflict, then drama. And if
drama, then surely you must want to find a critical language that
deals dramatically with the great symbolic drama of the whole of man's
life. But not how he says the project began, as distinct from how the
finished book begins' (108).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | action | drama |
grammar |
language |
Burke 'found himself trying to construct a rhetoric, symbolic, and
grammar of human motives, a three-in-one inquiry that would potentially
accommodate all particular doctrines and provide for their meeting
without mutual destruction. In short, he set out, like certain others, to build
a pluralism that would save himself and the world by reducing
meaningless and destructive symbolic encounter. The further one goes in
Burke, the clearer it becomes that every consideration is subordinated to
this master program' (109).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | construct |
grammar |
rhetoric |
world |
'We shall therefore always look, in every human situation, for the
elements of drama, the five most obvious being the action itself,
the agent doing the action, the agency or means by
which he performs it, the scene in which it is performed, and the
purpose it is intended to achieve. Sometimes we may want to
add others, like time as a distinguishable part of the scene and
attitude as a subdivision of agency, but usually the dramatistic
pentad will do our job. We shall use these elements, however, not as
some use Aristotle's four causes -- unvarying, frozen, literal categories --
but as fluid reagents, applicable in different "ratios" for different
problems. What is one agent's action is another agent's scene. A given
agent can be of someone else's agency -- a tool to other ends -- or he
can be, again, a part of someone's scene' (112-3).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | action | agency |
agent |
drama |
literal |
pentad |
purpose |
scene |
situation |
'We must not ... support simple skepticism or relativism; these
always in practice feed the fanaticisms that destroy. Confidence must be
maintained in the difference between good criticism and bad, and we
must develop criteria for distinguishing the discourse that curses from
the kind that cures' (115-6).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | criteria | criticism |
difference |
discourse |
'For proponents of certain kinds of rigor, to defend Burke in my way
would no doubt seem a kind of dismissal, even a refutation: he has a
self-proving, self-validating system, a method that invents problems that
are essentially beyond solution and then claims to solve them by using
principles that can be assumed only as part of his invention. His whole
enterprise is impossibly, outrageously, shockingly ambitious, yet it finally
frustrates intellectual ambition by undermining all solutions'
(126).
Domains: Under construction |
Key Terms: | method |
principles |
rigor |
system |
Last Modified:
July-11-96 16:56:4
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