Kenneth Burke and Literary Criticism

Kenneth Burke and Literary Criticism
Author(s): Ren Wellek

Source: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 79, No. 2 (Spring, 1971), pp. 171-188
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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KENNETH BURKE AND LITERARY CRITICISM
By REN? WELLEK
IN his article "Formalist Criticism: Its Principles and Limits"

(in The Terns Quarterly, 1966, reprinted in Language as
Symbolic Action, 1966) Kenneth Burke took strong excep
tion to a short paragraph about him inmy rapid survey of "The
Main Trends of Twentieth-Century Criticism" (in The Yale Re
view, 1961). He disputes my view that he has abandoned literary
criticism proper and that he has devised "a system of human be
a document or
havior and motivation which uses literature only as
illustration". In a sixteen-page letter to the editor of The Yale
Review (December, 1961) Burke gave a long list of his papers
published in recent years which he considers literary criticism. In
the article he argues against my referenceto a "baffling phan
tasmagoria of bloodless categories, 'strategies,' 'charts,' and 'situa
tions' ". He fastens on the loosely used adjective "bloodless",
arguing that this "charge" may be justly leveled against all criti
cism which is "bloodless" in comparison to a poetic text, while a
text in turn is "bloodless" in comparison to real blood. He sug
gests that my objection must be due to a secret resentment against
the bloodlessness of all criticism and, a fortiori, against all criti
cism of criticism and any of criticism, an in
history enterprise
which I have been engaged for many years. If this were true, "we
need each other as victims."
I hold no such dramatic, or even
"dramatistic", view of our
Burke must be accustomed to both praise and
relationship.
as a glance at the huge book Critical Responses to Kenneth
blame,
Burke will show. He has been hailed as "the foremost critic of
our age and perhaps the greatest critic since Coleridge", and he
has been dismissed as "a Yankee a "crackpot with a
crank",
a "circusrider", indulging in intellectual "capering"
panacea",
and "larking". I shall continue to take him seriously, as I am

172 KENNETH BURKE AND LITERARY CRITICISM
not at all resentful of the distinction between poetic text and

criticism, nor am I ashamed of studying theory and history of
criticism. I am not worried by the difference between a poem
and real blood. I have always, quite openly and unabashedly,
pleaded for the distinction between art and life, for intellectual
criticism which would not be an attempt at a substitute for
poetry, and I have argued many times for the desirability of
relating practical criticism to a theory of literature which, in
turn, should be grounded in a history of criticism. I did not
object to Burke's categories as categories but rather to the kind
of categories he proposed: they act to absorb literary criticism
into an scheme of human motivation. There is
all-embracing
nothing wrong with Burke's wanting to be a philosopher and to
search for a universal system. Still, it remains true that Burke
assimilates literary criticism to his general project. He himself
admits that this view "has a measure of It can
justification".
hardly have surprised him, as this observation has been made
many times before by both admirers and dissenters. I am in good
company when Burke expressly refers to "literary critics [who]
have quarreled with the author for neglecting the problems of
literary criticism proper". Burke defends himself by saying that
"no other course was open to him" and that his project takes him
often "outside the realm of literary criticism proper". Surely
this is no sin and it may be a virtue. Still, it absolves the his
torian of literary criticism from discussing Burke's thousands of
pages (some five million words) devoted to his peculiar combi
nation of psychoanalysis, Marxism, semantics, and pragmatism,
just as the historian of criticism has no obligation to discuss Kant's
Critique of Pure Reason or Hegel's Logic as such. We have,
besides, two competent books, William H. Rueckert's Kenneth
Burke and the Drama of Human Relations and Arnim Paul
Frank's Kenneth which and coherent ac
Burke, give sympathetic
counts of the system in its totality.
These books also discuss the question of Kenneth Burke's de

RENE WELLEK 173
velopment and make the chronological distinctions which are

relevant to an account of his criticism. The earliest
literary
pieces included in Counter-Statement (1931) can be described as
implying an of an art for art's sake position, while later
advocacy
essays in the same book indicate a shift to psychological and social
criticism which in the 'thirties led to Burke's express avowal of
communism, which, however, could not even then be described as
orthodox. Permanence and Change (1935) and Attitudes toward
History (1937) represent this Marxist stage. In the later
'thirties, in the essays collected as The Philosophy of Literary
Form (1941), Burke returned to more strictly literary concerns,
which he then again subordinated to the elaboration of his general
scheme expounded in A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A
Rhetoric of Motives (1950). The new volume, Language as
Symbolic Action (1966), which collects essays of the 'fifties and
'sixties, constitutes a return to literary criticism. It contra
partial
dicts my statement made before its publication that Burke had
abandoned literary criticism altogether. Indeed, in several of
these essays we get a clearer and more systematic of
exposition
Burke's theory of criticism than in any of his earlier writings, and
in several essays we get exemplifications and applications which
are more intensely focused on literary texts than in any essays
since the early pieces collected in Counter-Statement. In this sense
the term "only" in my remarks has been refuted by Burke's own
further development.
In commenting on Cleanth Brooks's critical "credo" Burke pro
fesses agreement with his main the emphasis on the
position:
and evaluation of a work of art, on the value Brooks
description
ascribes to unity and coherence, rejecting any divorce between
content and form, and between form
meaning, and
and the
as "ultimately
on literature metaphorical and symbolic"
emphasis
and on its aiming at the general and universal through the con
crete and particular. But Burke's endorsement is either lip-service,
due to a desire for conciliation, or a misunder
profound

standing. Nowhere in Burke is there an awareness of the norma

tive nature of the criteria proposed by the New Criticism, nor is
there any attempt to grasp the coherence and of an
integrity
individual work of art or to see the unity of form and content.
Nor is Burke's interest in metaphor and symbol at all the same
as that of Brooks orWimsatt. With them metaphor and symbol
are conceived as within a work of art and also within
functioning
a fundamentally religious view of the world. Burke concludes
only that Formalist criticism "is not enough", and that Brooks
himself in his later book on Faulkner makes comments which
"could be called 'sociological,' and maybe even 'Marxist' ". But
the New Critics, particularly the Southern Critics, were never
Formalists in any sense which would exclude content and mean
ing, and they had always social concerns, as witness the Southern
who were always non-Marxist or even clearly anti
Agrarians,
Marxist.
In theory, Burke advocates a critical "The main
pluralism.
ideal of criticism, as I conceive it, is to use all that there is to use";
or, in a later "All kinds of approaches are needed, to
formulation,
throw full light upon the objects of our study." Criticism focused
on the object has to be by two other considera
supplemented
tions: the events in the poet's mind (the "processes of poetry"
Burke interest him often more than the poetry
which, recognizes,
itself) and the effect of poetry on the readers, the neglect of
which he particularly objects to in the "Formalist" position which
he ascribes to Brooks. The effect of literature is, for him, both
and social. It cannot be understood without an
psychological
examination of language both as individual symbolic action and
as a collective enterprise.
Burke, who has read Freud diligently, found him "suggestive
almost to the point of bewilderment". He uses him everywhere:
in the conception of the poem as dream, in the persistent interest
in the concealed or latent meaning of puns and ambiguities, in
his preoccupation with the sexual basis of the poet's motivation,

RENE WELLEK 175
and particularly in adapting to literary contexts the "free
association" method which Freud used intreating patients.
By examining imagery and particularly "clusters" of imagery,
the critic, Burke believes, can discover the "motive" of a
work. But Burke is not simply a Freudian: he objects to Freud's
emphasis on the patriarchal pattern, the Oedipus which
complex,
he would replace by a matriarchal pattern, the desire to return to
the womb, to be reborn (which to Burke would seem to be the
main motive of every human being and the central motive of all
art). Freud, besides, seems to Burke by the aes
"handicapped
thetic" of his time: the excessive emphasis on art as self
on art as as "catharsis
expression, "blurting-out", by secretion".
Freud, Burke argues, does not see that art may also be what he
calls "prayer", i.e., persuasion or, in reverse, invective, indict
ment, curse. Nor does Freud that art is also

properly recognize
what Burke calls "chart", an attempt to map out reality and to
come to terms with it. But Burke defends Freud against the
Marxist charge of irrationalism: there is for him "nothing more
rational than the systematic recognition of irrational and nonra
tional factors". A reconciliation of Freud and Marx is Burke's
ideal, or, rather, a of Freud "into the Marxist perspec
fitting
tive". Freud, in Burke's recent writings, is found also to be defi -
cient in stressing the other two members of what Burke calls the
"Demonic Trinity". Burke would want to have the excremental
side of man, eliminationand urination, more than
emphasized
the strictly sexual. This is Burke's later obsessive concern, which
he considers a rectification of Freud's doctrine rather than an
attack on him.
Still, whatever Burke's reservations, his basic approach to

literature has been psychoanalytical and has become more ex
clusively so in his recent practice. Years ago Burke recognized

that the Freudian method uses a "heads I win, tails you lose"
mechanism, but in his later writings Burke uses the "free

association" method without restraint as "a truly liquid attitude

towards speech". This allows him to equate almost everything

with everything else, to transform any word into any other on the
basis of the most tenuous phonetic resemblance, and thus to re
duce any meaning to a latent unconscious meaning largely scato
logical. Literary criticism with Burke becomes often a game

which he himself calls "joycing", a word which contains an allu
sion not only to; Joyce but apparently also to a translation of
"Freude". . , .
To give a Keats's line "Beauty is truth,

conspicuous example:
truth beauty,'' concluding the "Ode on a Grecian Urn", is
"joyced" to mean "Body isTurd, Turd Body." It seems hard to

believe and impossible to prove that this substitution could have
occurred to K?ats. The line, though considered "enigmatic" by
Burke, is perfectly comprehensible and is clearly related to what
precedes. Art is perception of truth. Everything real (and thus
true) is beautiful. The identification of beauty with body and
truth with turd cannot
be assumed even
to be present in the pat
tern of the language, if a pun or homonym were to be discovered
there. It requires a forcing of phonemic resemblances (truth and
turd are far apart) and of conceptual analogies which strains all
credulity. Even if Burke were able to establish the possibility of
such punning, it would still remain unclear what would be
achieved for criticism or the of a poem the general
interpretation
theme of which is totally unrelated to Burke's idiosyncratic associ
ation.
Even in the essay ?n "Kubla Khan", which makes reasonable
on the progression of the poem and argues for its
suggestions
completion, the obsession with psychoanalytic punning intrudes.
"Loud" music suggests "lewd" music. The mention of "forests"
is interpreted: as implying "wood" which in turn suggests "mat
ter" and "mother". The "sunless sea" is called "the womb
heaven of the amniotic fluid by which the fetus was once 'girdled
round' in Edenic comfort". In a very different poem, "Christa
Geraldine is said to have a "stately neck", and this detail
bel",

RENE WELLEK 177
has a on "a
bearing stately pleasure-dome" decreed by Kubla
Khan. Burke consults a concordance and assumes that every
word must be related to every other word of either the same
sound or a similar sound, and that all words are As he
cryptic.
says elsewhere: "Cryptology is all."
The search for puns and hidden symbolism is not the only
Freudian motif in Burke. Even more insistently he argues that
the critic must "try to discover what the poem is doing for the
poet". This "doing" is not simple satisfaction in making nor
simple self-expression. Burke assumes that all men have guilt
feelings and try to get rid of them. The poet does so by writing,
which somehow purifies him and thus changes his identity. This
purification is not a direct act of confession of his guilt but a
personal catharsis through the invention of a symbolism which is
taken to be a code, a cryptogram which the critic must decipher.
Thus "The Ancient Mariner" is conceived of as a "ritual for the
redemption of his [Coleridge's] drug" and the albatross as "a
synechdochic representative of Sarah" (Coleridge's wife), even
though there is no evidence that Coleridge in 1798, the time of
the of the poem, had been taking laudanum ex
composition
cessively enough to have feelings of guilt or that these feelings
could be redeemed in a poem (as they obviously were not). Why
should Sarah be identified with the albatross killed in a wanton
act? Burke makes an attempt to connect the albatross and Sarah by
pointing out that the albatross came through the fog "as if it had
been a Christian soul", while in another poem, "The Eolian
Harp", Sarah is called a "Meek Daughter in the family of
Christ". But obviously this "parallel" will not withstand in
spection: the albatross is welcomed by the crew as something
alive in the desolate waste of the sea, while the poet's wife, in a
totally different context, ismildly chided for reproving, with her

pietistic objections, Coleridge's preoccupation with poetry. The
two passages have in common except the reference to
nothing
Christianity. Nor can one see why the word "silly" in the

phrase "silly buckets" filled with rain should foreshadow the fate
that befell the pilot's boy who did "crazy go" merely because the
adjective "silly" today suggests the word"crazy". Burke need
not have "pondered for years" the reference to "silly buckets".
"Silly" means here, as a at the NED
glance shows, "plain,
homely" and has nothing to do with the presumed mental state
of buckets and even less with the mental state of the boy. The
poem, a is simply misread.
ballad,
The older, "decorous" interpretation of Keats's "Ode on a Gre
cian Urn" is another unconvincing example of this method. There
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty" is equated with "Act is scene,
scene on
act," though Burke modifies this assertion by drawing
Keats's calling the Urn "fair attitude" to reflect that "act" is,
rather, an incipient act. But the identification of "beauty" with
"act" seems is represented
completely arbitrary; beauty by the
Urn as inactive and still, as a "silent a "cold
form", pastoral".
Nor is a preceding shift of interpreting "beauty" to equal
"poetry" and "truth" to equal "science" accurate, as the beauty
on and of the Urn is not primarily poetry at all. It is the beauty
of the sculptured Urn and of the scenes on it and possibly the
beauty of the maidens. Truth in Keats's poem is not, as Burke
asserts, that of modern science, of utility and business, of "techno
logical accuracy, accountancy, statistics, actuarial tables". There is

thus no shred of evidence for his conclusion: ". . . It was
gratify
ing to have the oracle proclaim the unity of poetry and science
because the values of technology and business were causing them
to be at odds."
Nor is the elaborate love-death equation (used in Keats's let
ters) needed for the interpretation of the poem. Burke himself
remarks that the poem speaks "not of love and death, but of love
for ever". Transient human love is contrasted, in this poem, with

the unchangeable but also unconsummated love depicted on the
Urn. Immortal love is envied because of its unchangeability, but
it is surely also distanced and put in its place as unfulfilled, un

RENE WELLEK 179
real, static, and cold. It seems to me totally unnecessary to see

the identification of death and sexual love as repre
"particularly
sentative of romanticism that was the reflex of business" and to
note "the part that capitalist individualism plays in sharpening
this consummation". Pre-capitalist civilization knew of the affinity
of love and death, as the medieval Tristan story testifies. Burke
himself often refers to the seventeenth-century use of the word
"dying" to mean "orgasm". Nor was Keats's individualism "capi

talist" in any concrete sense. His conscious political sympathies
were "liberal". Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt were his friends. There
is even an
anti-capitalist passage in Isabella which drew extrava
gant praise from G. B. Shaw. With his usual sleight of hand

Burke brings in the "unimpeachable authority" of Shakespeare,
quoting from "The Phoenix and the Turtle": "Property was thus
the self was not the same. . . ." But
appall'd,/That "property"
here has nothing to do with physical possessions or with capital
ism. "Property" here can mean only the
quality, characteristic
the nature of the thing. Burke's
range of wide
quotations from
Shelley, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Donne, Yeats, and the refer

ences to Richard Wagner, D. H. Lawrence, Leo and
Spitzer,
Ernst Kretschmer should not conceal the fact that they throw no
light whatever on the poem itself nor on Burke's argument about

"an abolishing of romanticism through romanticism" nor on the
theological parallel about "God [willing] the good because it is

good", which has no relevance to anything in the text. A poem
which both expresses envy for the eternity of art and knows that
this eternity is purchased at the price of life and has the Urn
proclaim the old Platonic identity of beauty and truth is distorted,
misread by Burke's method, which compounds arbitrary allegoriz
ing with misconstrued psychoanalysis and far-fetched Marxist
analogizing.
Burke is possibly even more interested in what a poem does to
the audience and hence to society. "Many of the things that a
poet's work does for him are not things that the same work does

for us. . . ." In Burke unable to distinguish

practice, is, however,
between the satisfaction of the poet and that of the audience.
The poet's unburdening, his act of purification, his "expiatory
strategy", is shared by the audience, and, in sharing, the audience
purifies itself. A version of the Aristotelian catharsis understood

as medical purgation is basic to Burke's view of the effect of art.
Burke takes tragedy to be the basic genre and generalizes from it
to all verbal art, to all linguistic expressions, and even to all
human behavior. This is why he calls his philosophy "Drama
tism". In criticism it has a certain plausibility for tragedy, but it
is forced and strained when made to account for other genres.
Burke's of Antony and is a favorable ex
reading Cleopatra
ample of his method. The audience, we are told, identifies with
the lovers: it feels itself "ennobled" in their grandeur. The
aspects of the love-affair, the stage-setting, love in terms
"global"
of politics, all serve as "means of amplification". Somehow,
Burke assumes, the "flatters each customer's sense of the
plot
associated with courtship", which Burke, in order
aggrandizement
to bring in some considers as "assisted, or
socio-political aspect,
prodded, by [the] emergent imperialism" of the English in the
early seventeenth century. Even the eunuchs in Shakespeare's
play serve this function. With the "many telling references to

eunuchs' shortcomings", the drama sets up a "situation implying
that practically all the men in the audience were in the same class
with Antony. Such classification-by-contrast enabled Shakespeare
to accentuate Antony's exceptional amative prowess without risk
that persons of more moderate resources in this regard might lose
their sense of 'identification' with him." But this "ostentation
of . . . love" is excessive: the lovers ". . . with
perish. Along
sympathetic involvement in the two grandiloquent suicides (each
an act of ??//-abuse), there are the conditions for a
by definition
purge. The humble and moderate can thank God that they per
are not excessiveness. . . ." Burke sees in
sonally driven by this
this "punishment" of excess an "incipiently Puritan" outlook, ig

RENE WELLEK 181
noring its being a fact of history which was narrated by Plutarch

and is paralleled in most tragedies of other ages. The coming of
"puritanism" ("incipient" in Shakespeare or in the audience?)

is irrelevant to the play. The whole speculation about the pre
sumed effect on the Elizabethan audience is quite tenuous: it
ignores the whole characterization of as a wilful
Cleopatra
coquette and of Antony as a fool of love. Only in the last scenes
do they rise to heroic grandeur. Cleopatra is negotiating with
Augustus up to the very end.
The principle of audience identification can be applied else
where only by considerable stretching. Coriolanus is a victim, a
"sacrifice that will permit the purging of the audience", but
Burke has difficulties in showing that we ever could identify with
him and what we are supposed to be purged from. He argues
that social divisiveness, "the delights of faction", is the guilt from
which we suffer and that we are cleansed of it "thanks to his
overstating of our case". Burke tries to fortify this view by look
ing for a divisive historical situation at the time of the play, and
he finds it in the riots caused by the enclosure acts, which set up
landowners versus peasants. One may doubt, whether
however,
the London audience could identify the conflict between the
overbearing and insulting individual Coriolanus, "the lonely
dragon", and the Roman mob with a situation in contemporary
rural England. In Burke, Coriolanus is disparaged; he re
sembles "a character in a satyr play", he is a "railer", a "master of
a trait which allows Burke to exploit his obsession:
vituperation",
invective is "fecal" and Coriolanus is rightly named Coriolanus.
The purgation theory seems strained to the bursting point.
The essay on Othello culminates also in a description of the
"ritual of riddance", i.e., purgation, which the last act is supposed
to accomplish. "It is a requiem in which we participate at the
ceremonious death of a portion of ourselves. ... it permits us the
great privilege of being present at our own funeral. For though

we be lowly and humiliated, we can tell ourselves at least that,

as a corpse, if the usual rituals are abided by, we are assured of

an ultimate dignity, that all men must pay us tribute insofar as
they act properly, and that a sermon doing the best possible by
us is in order." It remains, however, unclear why this feeling
is in any way to the conclusion of Othello or even
peculiar
appropriate to it: Desdemona lies strangled on her bed, Emilia
is stabbed to death, Othello has committed suicide, and lago is
taken away to torture. Nor can I see how Burke can speak of
"the ultimate interchangeability of Othello and lago", which
seems to be a restatement of an earlier comment on the scene in
which lago and Othello are "kneeling together, and well they
should, for they are but two parts of a single motive?related not
as the halves of a sphere, but each implicit in the other". At that
moment, on a highly generalized level, Othello and lago share
in the desire for revenge (though from very different motives),
but their characters could not be more diverse. The scheming
villain lago is not "implicit" inOthello, nor is the trusting, some
what obtuse Moor implicit (not to speak of interchangeable) in
Burke must drag in economic history: the tragedy is one
lago.
of "ownership", of "possession, possessor, and estrangement
of "There were the enclosure acts, whereby the
(threat loss)".
common lands were made private; here [in Othello] is the ana
an act of spiritual enclosure.
logue, in the realm of human affinity,
And might the final choking be also the ritually displaced effort
to close a thoroughfare, as our hero fears lest this virgin soil that
he had opened up become a settlement?" But it is obvious that
the Moor's is in no way analogous to the English
possessiveness
enclosure acts, since it is given in the Italian source and is surely
paralleled in many civilizations of all ages and climes which

treat or have treated women as chattels and consider unchastity
as punishable by death.
Often the idea of audience response is generalized into a social
situation seen in Marxist terms. In practice, Burke in

largely
dulges in an allegorizing of poetry according to which a "hidden

RENE WELLEK 183
realm", a is discovered in the plainest text. Thus

"mystery",
Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis is treated as an in which
allegory
Venus represents nobility, Adonis the middle class, and the boar
the lower classes. Venus, Burke argues, "is not a 'goddess' in any
devout sense. She is a distinguished person compelled to demean
herself bybegging favors of an inferior." But it remains un
clear why that noble beast, the "boar" (cf. the crest of Richard
III), should represent the lower classes, and why the poem should
"disclose ... a variant of revolutionary Nor does the
challenge".
introduction of psychoanalysis help. Venus is supposed to be
"mother", and Adonis's relation to the boar homosexual, though
only "vaguely" so. The poem, a and erotic virtuoso
witty piece,
is completely distorted to serve a
"socioanagogic" interpretation,
the purpose of which remains obscure.
The paper on Goethe's Faust I is another of social
example
allegorizing which seems to me completely mistaken. Burke as
sumes that Faust translates Goethe's "elderly statesman",
"courtly situation", and his fear of the French Revolution into
sexual equivalents. The courting (a pun on "court") and the
seduction of Gretchen are, Burke tells us, more of an "allegory"
than are the or
"supernatural" "preternatural" episodes.
". . .Gretchen's seduction becomes an substitute for the
imaginai
principle of riot (and of precisely such riot as a court minister, n?
romantic poet, would basically distrust if it were expressed politi
. in a literal sense. Goethe wrote
cally. .)." All this is perverse the
original version of Faust, which centers on the "Gretchen
trag?die", before he ever went toWeimar in 1776, before he

knew a court, and the French
long before Revolution. Apart from
historical impossibilities, any person with a feeling for poetry must
consider the allegorizing of the Gretchen tragedy as defying all
immediate evidence. The Gretchen scenes are vivid poetry, lyrical
and dramatic, and quite possibly reflect Goethe's sense of guilt in
forsaking Friederike Brion, and most certainly his compassionate
interest in the cruel punishment of infanticide which was a public

issue of the 1770's. They surely are not allegorical. The super
natural episodes, the Prologue in Heaven and the Walpurgis
Night, were added much later to impose a unifying frame. I
will not even try to refute the grossly unfair and absurdly far
fetched passage in which Goethe is said to have "anticipated
Hegel and thereby anticipated both communism and nazism":
When Gretchen, accosted by her seducer on the street, first

refuses to be led by him (she will go home ungeleitet), we
are helped to be modest in hindsight prognosis here by the
fact that the word for street in this text is Strasse. Other
wise, when the becoming has been reduced to sex and flower,
and the internal conditions call for a meeting on the street,
we might be tempted to say that Gretchen's first intuition
had been correct when she rejected what was, in sexual dis
guise, the political seductiveness of a Gauleiter]
Any use of the word "leiten" would thus somehow anticipate

Nazism, and any "Strasse" would allude presumably to the for
gotten Gauleiter Strasser.
The discussion of Faust II is less disastrous: it circles around

key-terms which Burke looked up in Paul Fischer's Goethe
Wortschatz. But I am puzzled by the completely unjustified
identification of Doctor Marianus with Faust?Doctor Marianus
alludes, rather, to St. Bernard in Dante's Paradiso?and by the
stodgy interpretation of the concluding line, "Das Ewig

Weibliche/Zieht uns hinan" Supposedly it proclaims "irresolu
tion". ". . . I'd translate the cewigy (eternal)
as meaning: Given
the kind of merger that goes perfectly with the Ur-Geist-Streben

the of ultimate motivation, as personalized in
nexus, problem
sexual terms, necessarily remains unresolved. It has the 'eternal'
of the essentially Ewig, however, means here
quality unending."
the "ideally feminine" as represented by the Virgin Mary, the
to do with
principle of forgiveness through love. It has nothing
and does not point to any "irresolution".
"unending"

RENE WELLEK 185
The allegorical method which dominates Burke's practical

criticism is the consequence of a basic doctrine which he has stated
clearly in a recent paper, "What Are the Signs of What?".
It amounts to a realism in the medieval sense. Things are the
signs of words. Language is a kind of action, symbolic action*

The referential aspect does not enter.
Rather, the analysis of
starts with the problem of catharsis. Nature becomes
language
"a fantastic pageantry, a of masques and costumes and
parade
guildlike mysteries". ". . . Nature gleams secretly with a most
fantastic shimmer of words and social relationships." In an

earlier discussion of Imagination Burke had definitely rejected
the view that poetry gives us any kind of truth or knowledge.
Aesthetics is dismissed as a typical product of modern idealistic
philosophies, and the earlier underestimation of "imagination" is
endorsed. Romantic theories of imagination "took a momentous
step away from the understanding of art as action and towards a

lame attempt to pit art against science as a 'truer kind of truth' ".
Art with Burke cannot be distinguished from persuasion, from
rhetoric, and has really no relation to reality. It is the invention
of a system of symbolism, a view which seems similar to Ernst
Cassirer's concept expounded in The Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms. But Burke himself remarks on the difference between
his and Cassirer's view: Cassirer's is epistemic, "scientific"?
i.e., he thinks of symbolic myth, language, and the categories of

the mind as instruments of knowledge, while Burke returns to
an older scholastic tradition inwhich things and words are identi
fied. This is further clarified in a paper, "A Dramatistic View
of the Origins of Language", where the "negative" is considered
a resource". One remains unconvinced if
"peculiarly linguistic
one reflects that a at his mother's breast further
suckling refusing
milk can make a pre-linguistic gesture of can say "no"
refusal,
without the use of language. The linguistic realism taught by
Burke implies also scepticism, probabilism, relativism, or what
he calls "perspectivism" (very differently from the use of the

1 86 KENNETH BURKE AND LITERARY CRITICISM
term in either Ortega y Gasset or inmy own writings), which has

been noted as a quality of "imperviousness", e.g., by Benjamin
De Mott. I shall not, however, doubt Burke's strong commit
ment to social and political causes; nor his intense sense of the
biological foundations of human life, even though they are most

frequently in his writings absorbed into a language system seen
allegorically and But Burke's or

punningly. perspectivism,
"comic frame" (a version of "romantic irony" mediated by
Thomas Mann, whom Burke translated and greatly admired),
leads to an occasionalism which denies causality and attacks the
scientific world order. It leads to his denial of any sense of the
correctness of interpretation, to his advocacy of a complete
liberty of to the acceptance of a universal sym

interpretation,
bolism in which, as in Emerson's or Carlyle's kindred versions,
"every hose fits every hydrant." It must lead also to an indiffer
ence to strictly aesthetic values and hierarchies as well as to an
un-historical view of literature, which is treated as existing simul
taneously, outside of time, in spite of some excursions into Marxist

or Blackmur's charge that Burke's
Spenglerian periodizations.
method can "be applied with equal fruitfulness to Shakespeare,
Dashiell Hammett, or Marie Corelli" was admitted by Burke
to be true, though he defended his procedure by saying that
"You can't properly put Marie Corelli and Shakespeare apart
until you have first put them together," a good defense of a
general theory of literary creation which would be valid if Burke
would ever put Shakespeare and Marie Corelli apart. But he
has no interest in doing so: he equalizes texts of the most di
verse aesthetic value and historical provenience, flitting without
a sense of distinction from Aeschylus to Odets, from Shakespeare
toWilliam Carlos Williams, using texts as pretexts for his specu
lations. In his theory, literature becomes absorbed into a scheme
of action or rhetoric so all-embracing and all-absorbing
linguistic
that poetry as an art is lost sight of and the work of art is spun
into a network of allusions, puns, and clusters of images without

RENE WELLEK 187
any regard for its wholeness or unity. Art perishes and one
wonders what the grand drama is for. By an odd reversal Burke
can and literature: he can say, on the one
disparage language
hand, that "the mind is largely a linguistic product," that "life
is a poem," but, on the other hand, he can tell us that a "headache
is more 'authentic' than a great tragedy" or that "the meanest
life is superior to the noblest poem." In Burke extremes meet
easily. All distinctions fall. The laws of evidence have ceased

to function. He moves in a self-created verbal universe where
everything may mean everything else.

I am aware that my discussion of Burke's criticism has concen
trated on his later writings on literature and that I have neglected
to give proper credit to the stimulus which his books, par
early
ticularly Counter-Statement (1931), must have provided in the
'thirties. In the context of a history of American criticism much
more would have to be said to describe Burke's r?le at that time.
But in this paper I rather thought of him as the prime example
of the impasse of recent literary criticism, not only in the United
States. This impasse seems to me most serious precisely because
it has been caused by men of great gifts, nimble powers of combi
nation and association, and fertile imagination?such men as
Kenneth Burke. Burke and many others (some of them follow
ing his example) have lost or even deliberately renounced the
ideal of a definite meaning of a text. They reacted against literal
minded historicism, the academic assumption that there is only
one simple meaning to a work of art, definable by the intentions
of the author, or, as these are often obscure, by the presumed
understanding of the audience contemporary with the author.
They rightly saw that a work of art has a "life" of its own, that
there is an "accrual" of meaning, that we cannot a
impoverish
work such as Hamlet by excluding the interpretations of Goethe,
the Schlegels, Coleridge, Bradley, and others. But these critics
have gone to the other extreme: they have lost all feeling for
what I would call "the structure of determination" implicit in a

text and have read into it almost anything which comes into their
minds, drawing on the terms and concepts of soci
particularly
ology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, semantics, and linguistics.
The text becomes something like a Rorschach ink-blot. The
critic, in the face of it, has to display his ingenuity and imagina
tion to pass the test. Kenneth Burke has passed it triumphantly.*
*Most of the essays discussed are in Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley, 1966).
The discussion of "The Ancient Mariner" and of "Freud?and the Analysis of Poetry"
is in The Philosophy of Literary Form (Baton Rouge, 1941); the two interpretations
of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" are in A Grammar of Motives (New York, 1945)
and A Rhetoric of Motives (New York, 1950). The "socioanagogic" interpretation of
Venus and Adonis can also be found in A Rhetoric of Motives.^ The essay on Othello
was in the Hudson Review, 1951, and is reprinted in Perspectives by Incongruity, ed.
Stanley Edgar Hyman (Bloomington, Indiana, 1964). Full references to the passages
quoted will be provided in the chapter on Kenneth Burke in the fifth volume of my
History of Modern Criticism.


Kenneth Burke and Literary Criticism - Wellek

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Author(s): Ren Wellek

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.13 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 20:03:04 PM

IN his article "Formalist Criticism: Its Principles and Limits"

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.13 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 20:03:04 PM

not at all resentful of the distinction between poetic text and

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.13 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 20:03:04 PM

velopment and make the chronological distinctions which are

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.13 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 20:03:04 PM

standing. Nowhere in Burke is there an awareness of the norma

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.13 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 20:03:04 PM

ment, curse. Nor does Freud that art is also

Still, whatever Burke's reservations, his basic approach to

clusively so in his recent practice. Years ago Burke recognized

mechanism, but in his later writings Burke uses the "free

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towards speech". This allows him to equate almost everything

logical. Literary criticism with Burke becomes often a game

To give a Keats's line "Beauty is truth,

"joyced" to mean "Body isTurd, Turd Body." It seems hard to

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totally different context, ismildly chided for reproving, with her

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asserts, that of modern science, of utility and business, of "techno

logical accuracy, accountancy, statistics, actuarial tables". There is

for ever". Transient human love is contrasted, in this poem, with

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real, static, and cold. It seems to me totally unnecessary to see

"dying" to mean "orgasm". Nor was Keats's individualism "capi

gant praise from G. B. Shaw. With his usual sleight of hand

Shelley, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Donne, Yeats, and the refer

light whatever on the poem itself nor on Burke's argument about

theological parallel about "God [willing] the good because it is

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for us. . . ." In Burke unable to distinguish

purifies itself. A version of the Aristotelian catharsis understood

play serve this function. With the "many telling references to

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noring its being a fact of history which was narrated by Plutarch

"puritanism" ("incipient" in Shakespeare or in the audience?)

great privilege of being present at our own funeral. For though

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as a corpse, if the usual rituals are abided by, we are assured of

paralleled in many civilizations of all ages and climes which

situation seen in Marxist terms. In practice, Burke in

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realm", a is discovered in the plainest text. Thus

original version of Faust, which centers on the "Gretchen

trag?die", before he ever went toWeimar in 1776, before he

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When Gretchen, accosted by her seducer on the street, first

Any use of the word "leiten" would thus somehow anticipate

gotten Gauleiter Strasser.

The discussion of Faust II is less disastrous: it circles around

stodgy interpretation of the concluding line, "Das Ewig

the kind of merger that goes perfectly with the Ur-Geist-Streben

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.13 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 20:03:04 PM

The allegorical method which dominates Burke's practical

signs of words. Language is a kind of action, symbolic action*

fantastic shimmer of words and social relationships." In an

step away from the understanding of art as action and towards a

i.e., he thinks of symbolic myth, language, and the categories of

This content downloaded from 91.229.229.13 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 20:03:04 PM

term in either Ortega y Gasset or inmy own writings), which has