NCA Presentation on Kenneth Burke’s Late Essays

To
Logology and Back–The Late Essays of Kenneth Burke

by Angelo Bonadonna,
Saint Xavier University

(Delivered at the National
Communication Association Convention, Chicago, Illinois, November 12, 2004)

Nearly thirty years ago,
in the summer of 1975, Burke confided to Cowley,

In this praise of Libbie
as Muse and secretary, we see Burke’s typical "both-and" dialectic: 
the consummation of Idea and Matter, or Purpose and Agency, or action and
motion, transcendence and immanence, Libbie as Soul-mate, Libbie as Body-mate. 
The decline and death of Libbie roughly coincide with the publication of Burke’s
last book, Language as Symbolic Action, so one is tempted to take Burke’s
elegant praise as an accurate statement of his publishing motives. [1]

The trouble is Burke did
continue to publish, and rather voluminously, (however volume-lessly, in terms
of a single book).  In all, Burke wrote reviews, essays, poems, postscripts,
replies, and countless letters;  he dabbled in music composition, delivered
talks, granted interviews–in a word, he verbalized–and with the kind of
scope and energy typical of any other period in his life.

How might we best characterize
this last and very productive stage of Burke’s verbalizing?  Limiting
the task, as I intend, to just one segment of Burke’s public writings, the
forty-plus critical essays of the post-Libbie, post-LSA era, will probably
ease the difficulty but slightly.  Regardless of how one chooses to discuss
or narrow him, Burke defies convenient pigeonholing, and this elusiveness
of his has gone far towards enhancing his celebrity status among postmodern
critics.  On the other hand, Burke himself never tired of pointing out
that the language using animal is a classifying animal, so it seems
only natural for us to come to terms–to find the right name for this Last
Phase of Burke’s career.

The earlier periods of his
life are more or less loosely defined by decade:  the teens present Burke
the Flaubert, the literary aesthete in New York City; the twenties gave us
the literary critic, music reviewer, short story writer and novelist; the
thirties added a literary theorist beneath the critic, and threw in a post-depression,
quasi-socialist social theorist;  the forties give rise to a language
philosopher;  the fifties a rhetorician;  the sixties a logologer.

Such a list, while it suggests
the scope of Burke’s speculations and their development from literature through
human relations to language theory, presents a rather hollow version of Burke.
It leaves us with mere titles, which, as Burke himself might remind us, are
always inadequate when left to stand in their naked, oversimplified generality. 
Our search here must not merely be for a name for the period, but for
a suitable strategy for appreciating the full complexity of all that
is subsumed in that name.  Burke said language not only enables
but requires us to approach situations strategically.  So as I
re-read the essays of this period, I kept a running tab of possible strategies
by which to encompass this most discursive of situations.  What I wish
to share with you today is a log of those strategies in a presentation that
is perhaps more pastiche than panorama, but one that is nonetheless offered
as a heuristic for investigating just what to do with these provocative and
varied pieces of Burke.

First, I thought I might
take the lead of other Burkean commentators and identify the distinctive nature
of the late essays.  James Chesebro, for instance, identifies 1968 as
the year that Burke finally gave up his "comedic posture" and got
into the serious business of ontological inquiry (141).  Cary Nelson,
on the other hand, uses Burke’s late work as the basis for formulating his
deconstructionist counter-Burke to the humanist Burke of earlier criticism.

Or in a more humanistic
vein, I could turn to Bill Rueckert who identifies "the Burke who took
to the road in the late sixties and has stayed on the road ever since, lecturing,
talking, reading, thinking on his feet–the critic at large in the most literal
and Emersonian sense of this phrase, which is:  the thinker let loose
in our midst" ("Rereading" 254).  On the road with Kenneth
Burke–some very inviting possibilities there–a strategy, might I punningly
suggest, destined to discover just what was driving Burke those many days
and words.

Moving along, Strategy 2: 
Treat the final essays as Burke’s attempt to finalize his system.  On
July 19, 1972, Burke wrote to Cowley  "Give me but two more years,
and I’ll prove my point"–though I should point out, as Burke does, that
he was drunk when he wrote that.

Strategy 3:  List and
characterize Burke’s co-hagglers of the period, from Wellek, Jameson, and
Howell to Vitanza, Lentricchia, Booth, and McKeon, and everyone in between.

Strategy 4:  Compare
the situatedness of these essay with the situatedness of the earlier works. 
What would Burke the dialectician have been against if he didn’t have technology–the
perfect scapegoat, since it is so perfectly the caricature, as he says, of
human rationality?

Strategy 5:  Account
for the temporal progression among the essays or a sub-group within the essays,
like, for instance, the Helhaven satires.

Strategy 6:  Organize
by genre.

Strategy 7:  Construct
a concordance of the major recurrent themes, which are as follows:  analogical
extension;  catharsis and transcendence;  ecology;  the victimization
of nature;  or, the infanticidal motive of "Ever Onward" ("Creativity"
74);  or "technologism," the belief that the solution to the
problems of technology is more technology ("Communication" 148); 
or, "hypertechnologism";  or, "technological psychosis"; 
or, the irrationality of the excess of rationality;  or, the "pandemoniac
multiplicity" of technology ("Towards Looking Back" 189); 
dramatism as ontology/logology as epistemology;  the trinitarian addition
of consummation to Burke’s earlier theories of expression and communication; 
entelechy;  archetype;  consummation as "a kind of creative
yielding to potentialities which are seen by the given seer to be implicit
in the given set of terms" ("Poetics" 403);  the autosuggestiveness
of creativity ("Creativity" 77);  the compulsiveness of creativity; 
the rounding out of a material operation by a corresponding act of symbolism
("Doing and Saying");  substitution and duplication; 
symbolic duplication as cathartic release or entelechial compulsion ("(Psychological)
Fable");  the attitude of apprehensiveness;  psychic immobilization
("Eye-Poem");  transcendence.

Strategy: 8  How about
cataloguing new moments in Burke lore, as for instance those rare glimpses
of Burke responding to much more recent cultural and scenic phenomena than
those commented on in his more established works?  A favorite of mine
is his appreciative but cautionary response to J. Hillis Miller in particular
and postmodern criticism in general.  After discussing Miller’s analysis
of Hopkins, Burke writes, "This brings out the whole issue in which a
lot of my colleagues are now interested–that of the marvels of verbal structure. 
But I have to push back now;  they’ve brought that out too much. 
People have accused me of just reducing things to words;  the whole system
is absolutely the opposite of that.  That is, I make a fundamental distinction"
("On Literary Form" 85)–and on he goes into his action/motion dualism. 
Most certainly, Burke does not reduce things to just words.  His environmentalism–or
anyone’s for that matter–is only logical if we grant that there is indeed
something outside the text.

Certainly the most songful
of strategies would be to cull aphorisms from the readings.  Burke credited
Libbie as the inventor of the Flowerish, and when she passed, so too did the
art form for Burke.  But, glancing through the readings, one can readily
spot traces of the erstwhile flourish.  For example:  "no construction
without destruction" ("Communication" 137);  "the
driver drives the car, but the traffic drives the driver" ("Why
Satire 311);  "Organisms live by killing ("Communication"
136);  "We are happiest when we can plunge on and on" ("Towards
Helhaven 19);  "Spontaneously, what men hope for is more"
("Why Satire" 320);  "Congregation by segregation"
("Rhetorical Situation" 268);  "Life is a Pilgrimage. 
Life is a first draft, with constant revisions that are themselves first drafts. 
. . .   Life is a series of prerequisite courses, in which we are
all drop-outs" ("Rhetoric" 33);  .­.­. [I]n a
cult of tragedy, one is asking for it" ("Dancing" 27); 
"Language is one vast menagerie of implications" ("Theology"
153);  Logology’s wan analogue of hope is "the futuristically slanted
and methodological engrossment in the tracking down of implications, which
may amount to translating the grand oracular utterance, "Know thyself"
into "Spy on thyself" ("Variations" 165);  and finally,
my favorite:  "Though language does talk a lot, the very essence
of its genius is in its nature as abbreviation" ("(Nonsymbolic)
Motion" 823).

A few strategies are implied
in my title, "To Logology and Back."  For instance, we might
ask just where is Burke going in his development of logology?  Accordingly,
I could clarify "logology," or words about words, by listing several
of its key components, many of which are "borrowed back" from theology. 
From St. Thomas we get the principle of individuation, which for Burke is
the body; from God we get godterms;  from the Scholastics we get the
slogan, "Crede ut intellegas":  Believe that you may
understand;  from St. Paul we get the principle that faith comes from
hearing–i.e., from doctrine;  from the Trinity we get the formal pattern
of naming. "Logology is vigilant with admonitions" ("Variations"
171). all of which circulate about its central question, "What is it
to be the typically symbol-using animal?" ("Variations" 169).

By my title I would also
suggest, though very indirectly, the possibility that Burke’s development
of logology is merely one of his last and most thorough defenses against his
lifelong fear of death.  In the interview by Harry Chapin in the early
seventies Burke mentions his profound fear of death (much stronger when he
was younger than at that time when he was in his mid-seventies).  In
his essay "The Party Line" he announces an addendum to his "Definition
of Man," "acquiring foreknowledge of death" (65).  But
it was a letter to Cowley, not the essays or the Chapin film, that first gave
me this notion of logology as a psychic cure for the fear of death. 

From early on Cowley and
Burke defined how each one’s project was motivated.  On November 26,
1974, Burke distinguishes his project from Cowley’s thus:  "Basically,
I think it would all berl [sic, of course] down to a distinction between
what you mean by ‘literary situation’ as background, and what I would sloganize
as ‘logological’ context of our poetizings."  While Cowley undertook
the portraiture of a particular generation, Burke would but dabble with the
particular–a dazzling few pages, for instance, on the formal qualities of
the ghost’s entrance in Hamlet–as a way to get to general formal principles. 
Cowley’s work would be needed for an informed view of, say, Ernest Hemingway
or William Faulkner, but Burke’s is required for a fuller understanding of
any symbolic action, from the most mindless yeasaying a demagogue to
the full reflexive action of a Shakespearean drama.

Burke would often sloganize
his project as "Literature in particular, language in general,"
but–especially in the later years–the proportion shifts decidedly to language
in general.  "Language in general," or the "‘logological’
context of our poetizings"–what are these but the deathless realm of
timeless logic, knowledge, and principles?  To the extent that Burke
has formulated a "logology," an epistemology, a "science,"
or philosophy rather of the general functions of language that apply to any
particular idiom, has he not indeed transcended death?  Burke’s imperviousness
to critical fads is a sign of partial success on this score.  Is the
study of logology,motivated by an attempt to rise above the deathy realm of
particulars into a veritable eternity of logical order?  Can Burke’s
ascent to logology be Burke’s way to heaven, without the baggage of religion?

Getting back to my title,
what about the "and back" part of it? By this I want to suggest
the age-old critical question of whether Burke develops at all in his adoption
of different terminologies or whether he is engaged in writing the same book
over and over again.

Many of my strategies come
to a head in Burke’s statement:  "No one could go on making his
words mean the same, even if he expended his best efforts to make them stay
put" ("Theology" 185).  Does one detect, lurking in this
statement, a nostalgic desire to keep meaning settled once and for all? 
Perhaps, but it is instructive to juxtapose another provocative comment in
which he defines the "minimum condition" for symbolic action as
"the inability of words to ‘stay put,’ as when even a proper name like
‘Caesar,’ referring to one particular person in history, gives birth to
such words as ‘Kaiser’ and ‘Czar’" ("(Nonsymbolic) Motion"
813).

This matter of "staying
put" addresses a host of issues, foremost among them being the question
of whether Burke is a system-builder, and whether or not he viewed the eternal
flux of language as a benefit or liability.  The ambiguities of Burke’s
attitude are most suggestively intermingled in his "Theory of Terminology,"
an essay which outlines five categories of meaning, Burke’s famous five dogs. 
The dogs cover the important Burkean principles of verbal entelechy, tautological
cycles of terms, the synecdochic, Freudian, metaphoric, and musical qualities
of words–in a word all types of verbal transformations that will infuse a
term with new, opposite, and apposite meanings.  At first, Burke’s attitude
toward the sophistic realities of language seem quite clear:

I should feel uneasy if I had to keep these various kinds of terministic
cycles trimly related to one another, so that I might make a composite photograph
of the lot.  Rather, I would turn that whole subject around, and call
attention to the fact that much of the freedom in man’s capacity for symbolic
action resides precisely in the range of improvising here open to him, collectively
shared by all the members of his tribe.  (90)

But then to illustrate this freedom, Burke offers
a curious figure:

A
cycle of terms is like a cluster of stars.  The sky, as viewed from any
one of such positions, will show a corresponding difference in the distribution
of the other positions, though they all ultimately form but one single set
of interrelationships.  And it is in this way that a man defies total
prediction until he is finished.  Indeed, prediction is in effect the
application to living man of parameters derived from the realm of death; 
that is, the possibilities of the future reduced to terms derived from the
past.  (90)

Typically here, Burke confounds his fluidities with
some fixities, his freedoms with some parameters, his positionality with an
Ultimate Position, a single, all-encompassing set of interrelationships. 

Aswirl in strategies, I
began to feel the onset of the old logologer’s ailment, counter-gridlock,
just as I was to begin wrapping up.  As matters stand, the only way to
conclude a paper like this is with yet another question, or, taking another
route, with a simplifying anecdote to answer all questions.  Burke supplies
an irresistible anecdote in his "Creativity" essay.  He writes: 

I
have asked students to write me three pieces, one praising something, one
inveighing against something, and one lamenting.  The students were to
choose whatever subjects they preferred, for each such exercise.  One
student, choosing but one subject, praised, inveighed, and lamented within
the range of that one theme alone.  .­.­.  [W]hat of that
student who subjected the same topic to three totally different attitudes?
(78).

So, Burke gives me a concluding
anecdote that ends in a question.  But:  Did not that student pay
Burke the most reverent homage imaginable by enacting the very attitude towards
language implicit in and unifying, though discursively, all of Burke’s writings? 
Has not the mischievous student of a more mischievous teacher come to see,
if only inchoately, that language requires such liquidity if one would strive
for "maximum consciousness" (ATH 171)?  Is not such
a student on his way to seeing, as Burke clearly did, that language is forever
doubling reality, forever entitling it;  forever changing, forever remaining
just as it is, forever defining, forever substituting its definitions? 
And finally, is not the good student learning that if language it has the
power to transport us into the "heaven" of the subtlest theology,
and uplift us with the pious and beautiful songs of thanksgiving that theology
inspires, it also has equal power to transcend downwards, as it gives "rise"
to pollution, bombs, and demagoguery?

Might I then conclude, tentatively, or with some measure
of intelligent inconclusiveness as homage to Burke’s attitude, that the same
liquidity Burke asks for in our attitudes toward life characterize our attitude
towards Burke himself?  Burke now is finished.  His works just are,
and, as he might say, if all his words were obliterated tomorrow, they will
go on forever having been uttered.  They have formed a completed total
set of relationships, like the stars in the universe.  Even if we could
encompass the totality rather than take partial perspectives on it, the fact
remains that for us, still in time, his meanings will not stay put. 
That’s the only fitting last word on Burke–a roundabout invitation to more
words.

Works Cited

Burke, Kenneth.  Attitudes Toward History.  Berkeley:
U of California P, 1984.

—.  "Communication and the Human Condition."  Communication 
1  (1974):  135-52.

—.  "On ‘Creativity’–A Partial Retraction." 
Introspection:  The Artist Looks at Himself.  Ed.  Donald
E. Hayden.  U of Tulsa Monography Series 12, 1971.

—.  "Doing and Saying:  Thoughts on Myth, Cult, and
Archetypes."  Salmagundi  7  (1971):  100-19.

—.  Dramatism and Development.  Worcester, Mass.: 
Clark UP, 1972.

—.  "An Eye-Poem for the Ear (with Prose Introduction, Glosses,
and After-Words)."  Directions in Literary Criticism. 
Ed. Stanley Weintraub and Phillip Young.  University Park:  Pennsylvania
State UP, 1973:  228-51.

—.  Language as Symbolic Action:  Essays on Life, Literature,
and Method.  Berkeley: U of California P, 1966.

—.  "On Literary Form."  The New Criticism and
After.  Ed. Thomas Daniel Young.  Charlottesville:  UP
of Virginia, 1976:  80-90.

—.  "(Nonsymbolic) Motion/(Symbolic) Action." 
Critical Inquiry  4  (1978):  809-38.

—.  "The Party Line."  Quarterly Journal of
Speech  62  (1976):  62-68.

—.  "Poetics and Communication."  Contemporary
Philosophical Thought.  Vol. 3:  Perspectives in Education,
Religion, and the Arts.  Ed. Howard Evans Kiefer and Milton Karl
Munitz.  Albany:  State U of New York P, 1970:  401-18.

—.  "In Response to Booth:  Dancing with Tears in My
Eyes."  Critical Inquiry  1  (1974):  32-31.

—.  "Rhetoric, Poetics, and Philosophy."  Rhetoric,
Philosophy and Literature:  An Exploration.  Ed. Don M. Burks. 
West Lafayette:  Purdue UP, 1978:  15-33.

—.  "A (Psychological) Fable, with a (Logological) Moral." 
American Imago  35  (1978):  203-7.

—.  "The Rhetorical Situation."  Communication
Ethical and Moral Issues.  Ed. Lee Thayer.  New York: 
Gordon and Breach Science, 1973:  263-75.

—.  "Theology and Logology."  Kenyon Review,
n.s., (1979):  151-85.

—.  "A Theory of Terminology."  Interpretation: 
The Poetry of Meaning.  Ed. Stanley Romain Hopper and David L. Miller. 
New York:  Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1967:  83-102.

—.  "Towards Helhaven:  Three Stages of a Vision." 
Sewanee Review  79  (1971):  11-25.

—.  "Towards Looking Back."  Journal of General
Education  28  (1976):  167-89.

—.  "Variation on ‘Providence.’"  Notre Dame
English Journal  13  (1981):  155-83.

—.  "Why Satire, with a Plan for Writing One." 
Michigan Quarterly Review  13  (1974):  307-37.

Chesebro, James W.  "Epistemology and Ontology as Dialectical
Modes in the Writings of Kenneth Burke."  Landmark Essays on
Kenneth Burke.  Ed. Barry Brummett.  Davis, CA:  Hermagoras
P, 1993.

Jay, Paul, ed.  The Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke
and Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1981.  New York:  Viking, 1988.

Nelson, Cary.  "Writing as the Accomplice of Language." 
Simons and Melia 156-173.

Rueckert, William H.  "Rereading Kenneth Burke." 
Simons and Melia 239-261.

Simons, Herbert W., and Trevor Melia, eds.  The Legacy of Kenneth
Burke.  Madison:  U of Wisconsin P, 1989.