The Philosophy of Literary Form [Paperback]

Kenneth Burke is trying here to define the symbolic, though he makes it too empirical by speaking of symbolic action. This leads him to three levels of definition : the bodily or biological level ; the personal, intimate, familiar, familistic level ; the abstract level. We can see here that he does not encompass two essential levels : the historical, anthropological and social level for one in which the individual is animated by wider currents and forces, wider symbolisms and symbolic dimensions ; and on the other hand the purely spiritual level, very badly incorporated in the abstract level of his. He definitely misses a general purpose in human life : to reach a spiritual level of existence, in a way or another, and poetry and even all arts are one or many ways to do so, along with science, religion, meditation, etc. This is also due to the fact that this book (this collection of articles) is entirely inhabited by a binary thinking method : every phenomenon is reduced to dual oppositions. He then misses the « social aspect of authority » (p. 53). He becomes more interesting with his methodology. « The focus of critical analysis must be upon the structure of the given work itself. » I could not agree more but he then misses his own point. He reduces himself to a schematic hegelian caricature of a dialectic with the couple protagonist-antagonist. He tries to make it ternary by adding the agon, but the agon is nothing but the environment of the two others and hence is not of teh same nature. We remain binary, and that is going to be a plague further on. We can see his later approach of « dramatism » emerging, but it is still imperfect, incomplete and we jump to the artificial triad of the three voices (active, passive and middle or reflexive) and then his famous five terms (act, scene, agent, agency, purpose) without reaching any decent level of elaboration of thiese concepts. But in this book he rermains pent-up in pre-WW2 and post-WW2 unquestioned axioms. He is literally obsessed by the sacrificial dimension of politics and history and that is more than a shortcoming when he approaches Hitler. He misses the meaning of Hitler entirely by reducing him to his rhetoric, hence to his purpose, his personal aim and does not take into account how his antisemitism and his extreme capitalistic vision of economics (capitalistic dictarorship with slavery in some concentration camps and ferocious repression of the working class) articulate on the historical, cultural and symbolical heritage of the German people, of christian Europe, of Christianity at large. It is too simple to reduce Hitlerism to a machiavellian leader verging onto paranoid neurosis or psychosis. This limitation is also obvious when he approaches Freud. His vision of poetry as a creative activity that creates its own language and network of meaning is enriched by psychoanalysis. And yet. He borrows from Freud the clustering technique that deduces the symbolical meaning of an item from its articulated environment in the text, and expands it with his « prayer » and « chart » but he blocks it by deciding that the meaning of a poem can only be captured if we know the poet's purpose. He neglects the poet's « environment », including his spiritual environment. He totally neglects the fact that a poem is also built by the reader's reading, hence by the reader's environment projected into the structure of the poem by the reader, provided this structure allows the concerned projection. It is this symbolical structure that is important and can be longlasting if not everlasting, though with semantic variations from one age to the next, and Burke helps a lot in building a method to approach it, but he blocks his own potential by giving a dominant position in his approach to the personal dimension of the production of the poem by the poet. And he literally locks this up in a dual pronunciamento that you can only either follow his approach of the personal purpose of the poet, or get to a purely good-bad approach of the poem founded on the necessarily superficial analysis of the concrete empirical material form. This book is important to understand the evolution Kenneth Burke went through, but it has important limitations as compared to later productions and it reveals what he will never be able to push aside : his rather narrow and necessarily antagonistic and dual conception of Hegel's (and only Hegel's in spite of his references to Marx) dialectic (and willfully in the singular).

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Université Paris Dauphine, Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne

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