Ecocriticism and Kenneth Burke: An Introduction

Robert Wess, Oregon State University

Abstract: This introductory essay begins with a brief history of ecocriticism and Burke’s place in it, then introduces four modes of Burkean ecocriticism: (1) ecological holism, (2) technological de‑terminism, (3) Rueckert’s ecocriticism, and (4) ecological realism.  These modes may appear in combination with or isolation from one another, as evidenced in the essays in this special issue by Gregory Clark, Joshua Frye and William H. Rueckert.

IN 1970 KENNETH BURKE ENJOYED public recognition of the accuracy of his earlier prediction about ecology when a Fortune magazine article entitled “Our New Awareness of the Great Web” observed,

we may assume that most predictions put forward in 1937, like those of other years, would now be worth recalling only as examples of fallibility. But at least one prediction published in that year has since come to seem exceedingly perspicacious. It appeared in a book by Kenneth Burke, a literary critic. “Among the sciences,” he wrote, “there is one little fellow named Ecology, and in time we shall pay him more attention.” (Bowen 198)¹

Later in that decade, in 1978, the dean of Burke studies, William H. Rueckert, published “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” It took a few years for the term “ecocriticism” to catch on, but once it did, it took off. By the 1990s, it made its way to the title of an anthology destined to become widely known: The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, where Rueckert’s groundbreaking essay is reprinted. In her introduction to this volume, Cheryll Glotfelty observes that by 1993 ecocriticism “had emerged as a recognizable critical school,” with a new journal, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and a new organization, ASLE, acronym for Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) (xviii). From its founding in 1992, ASLE has grown to a membership of 1004 (864 domestic and the rest worldwide), with affiliates in Australia, Germany (home of European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and Environment), India, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. Finally, the year 2001 saw Laurence Coupe complete the circle with his essay “Kenneth Burke: Pioneer of Ecocriticism.” In yet one more area Burke has thus proved to be ahead of his time.

While this new critical movement borrowed Rueckert’s term, it didn’t follow the Burkean direction Rueckert defined, discussed below. Instead, ecocriticism focused initially on nature writing. The direction it followed is evident in the title of perhaps the single most important book the new movement produced in the 1990s, Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. More recently, however, while nature writing continues to be an important interest, many ecocritics are pursuing new directions, and some such as Dana Phillips are even sharply critical of the nature writing focus. Phillips’s The Truth of Ecology is sometimes overly harsh but often telling in its criticism of just about everything ecocriticism did in its earliest years. Phillips’s targets are many but Buell probably heads the list. Most of his criticisms revolve around early ecocriticism’s indulgence in what Burke sometimes calls a “naïve verbal realism that refuses to realize the full extent of the role played by symbolicity in [human] notions of reality” (Language 5). Early ecocritics, in other words, tended to think it was relatively easy to go directly to nature and bring it back live in one’s writing. Phillips counters that it’s more complicated than that. Burke and Burkeans would agree. But while it is changing, ecocriticism is still a critical movement known more for its subject matter (literature/culture and the environment) than for its theoretical perspectives on this subject matter.

Burke offers ecocriticism a number of theoretical possibilities. Four will be introduced here: (1) ecological holism, (2) technological de-terminism, (3) Rueckert’s ecocriticism, and (4) ecological realism. Further, while these four modes of Burkean ecocriticism will be discussed in isolation from one another, they may be weaved together in varying ways. There may well be other modes as well; it’s difficult to exhaust what Burke has to say on any topic, especially topics, like ecology, that he returned to repeatedly over long periods of time. Discontinuities appear with the continuities in Burke’s preternaturally long career, creating different perspectives and different possible combinations of perspectives. Even the present introduction of these four modes will conclude with reasons for possibly adding a fifth.

But with these four to draw upon, it should be possible to provide broad introductory Burkean contexts for the specific ecocritical concerns in the essays included in this special issue by Rueckert, Joshua Frye, and Gregory Clark. The best context for Frye is ecological holism; for Clark, technological de-terminism and Rueckert’s ecocriticism together; for Rueckert, ecological realism in addition to the section devoted to his ecocriticism.

Ecological Holism

Burke’s ecocritical holism is most evident in his earliest writing on ecology. Marika A. Seigel’s important study of the historical context of Burke’s 1937 prediction shows how his earliest ideas about ecology grew out of discussions of ecological issues in the 1930s, prompted particularly by dust storms seemingly unprecedented in their severity. What gives her study special value beyond the significant value of its historical narrative is that it establishes connections often overlooked between Burke’s ecological thinking in the 1930s and other ideas from this period such as “trained incapacity” and “comic attitude” that are often discussed but usually without any awareness of these connections.

The key to these connections is Burke’s concerns with “efficiency,” which appears in the “Dictionary of Pivotal Terms,” in Attitudes toward History. As Seigel puts it, “Like an orientation, occupational psychosis, or trained incapacity, concepts that Burke developed in Permanence and Change, efficiency stresses one perspective or way of doing things at the expense of others” (394). That Burke’s critique of efficiency is connected to his ecological thinking is evident as soon as one restores his 1937 prediction to its context:

Among the sciences, there is one little fellow named Ecology, and in time we shall pay him more attention. He teaches us that the total economy of this planet cannot be guided by an efficient rationale of exploitation alone, but that the exploiting part must itself eventually suffer if it too greatly disturbs the balance of the whole (as big beasts would starve, if they succeeded in catching all the little beasts that are their prey their very lack of efficiency in the exploitation of their ability as hunters thus acting as efficiency on a higher level, where considerations of balance count for more than consideration of one tracked purposiveness). (Attitudes 150)

To this passage, one can add this one from the entry for “efficiency” in the “Dictionary”:

“Efficiency,” to borrow a trope from the stock exchange, is excellent for those who approach social problems with the mentality of the “in and out” trader. It is far less valuable for those interested in a “long-pull investment.” Otherwise stated: It violates “ecological balance,” stressing some one ingredient rather than maintaining all ingredients by the subtler requirements of “symbiosis.” (250)

In other words, just as a practice may be “training” from one standpoint and “incapacity” from another, it may also be “efficient” from one standpoint and “inefficient” from another. The difference is that with efficiency and inefficiency, Burke is concerned less with the single organism making its way in the world (like the trout at the beginning of Permanence and Change whose “training” may or may not prove to be an “incapacity”) than with relations among parts in the “total economy of this planet.” From this holistic standpoint, one can discern that near term efficiencies may be long term inefficiencies, or that near-term inefficiencies may turn out to be long term efficiencies.

Burke himself connects his concern with “ecological balance” with his comic attitude in a passage from Attitudes toward History that Seigel calls to our attention:

A comic frame of motives . . . [shows] us how an act can “dialectically” contain both transcendental and material ingredients, both imagination and bureaucratic embodiment, both “service” and “spoils.” Or, viewing the matter in terms of ecological balance (as per footnote, page 150), one might say of the comic frame: It also makes us sensitive to the point at which one of these ingredients becomes hypertrophied, with the corresponding atrophy of the other. A well balanced ecology requires the symbiosis of the two. (166-67)²

Seigel also notes how Burke’s “comic frame” links him with Joseph Meeker (400), another of the pioneers of ecocriciticism, whose Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic originally appeared in 1972 and reappeared in a 3rd edition in 1997.

An ecocriticism within this part/whole framework would be less interested in nature apart from social and cultural practices than in tracing effects of such practices in the “total economy of the planet.” It should be added that recent work such as Daniel Botkin’s Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-first Century would question the idea of “ecological balance” that Burke uses. Botkin would argue that there is no such thing if “balance” means that nature at its core is an equilibrium that stays in balance as long as it is left alone, undisturbed by human actions. The choice between change and no change, he argues, is a false choice. The only reality is change so that one must learn to distinguish good change from bad and try to encourage the former and discourage the latter. But one can dispense with “balance” and keep Burke’s main concern. Botkin would agree about the centrality of interrelated parts and the need to cultivate knowledge of how what happens in one part produces effects in other parts, often distant and seemingly unrelated until one looks more closely.

Joshua Frye’s “Burke, Socioecology, and the Example of Cuban Argiculture” exemplifies Burkean ecocritical holism, offering in “socioecology” a term to discuss it. Just as “symbolic action” covers Burke’s concern with the language/body connection, “socioecology” can cover his concern with the social/earth connection. Frye illustrates the term’s meaning with examples from Burke's life and writing, theorizes it with Burke’s help, and applies it. Possibilities for further development of this term are extensive. Frye’s theorization of it draws on Burke’s understudied “ethicizing of the means of support.” Ecocritics are rightly concerned with our present purely “instrumental” use of the earth and typically urge that we reject it absolutely. Burke’s more nuanced approach suggests how the “instrumental” may transform itself into its opposite if the holistic circumstances are right. Frye’s application shows how the current experiment in Cuban agriculture is trying to combine near term and long term efficiencies, thus countering the tendency for efficiencies in one time frame to be inefficiencies in another.

Technological De-Terminism

Appearing in Rhetoric of Religion (294), the term "de-terministic” gives the notion of determinism a linguistic twist. To the best of my knowledge, Burke never coupled “de-terminism” with the adjective “technological,” but it would have been perfectly consistent for him to do so.

“De-Terministic” appears in the dialogue between “TL” and “S” in Burke’s “Prologue in Heaven.” It serves to explain the paradox that the “Word-Animal” is “forced to be free.” Because “yes” and “no” are inherent in words, free choice is “de-termined.” But this paradoxical “forced to be free” seems to cut two ways when transported to the area of “entelechy” or “perfection.” On the positive side:

Intrinsic to symbol-using as such there is the “principle of perfection,” the delight in carrying out terministic possibilities “to their logical conclusion,” in so far as such possibilities are perceived. This “entelechical” motive is the poetic equivalent of what, in the moral realm, is called “justice.” It is equatable with both necessity and freedom in the sense that the consistent rounding out of a terminology is the very opposite of frustration. Necessary movement toward perfect symmetry is thus free. (Language 155)

Sounds good, but Burke immediately adds in a footnote that there is a negative side to such perfection, especially when it emboldens “scientific imaginations to dreams of artificial satellites, the `conquest of outer space,’ and similar `Faustian’ grandiosities, while the humbler promises of applied science as a benefit to mankind are still ludicrously far from being redeemed” (155). Because of this negative side, “perfection” may be “rotten” (Language 16):

Thus, each of our scientific nomenclatures suggests its own special range of possible developments, with specialists vowed to carry out these terministic possibilities to the extent of their personal ability and technical resources. . . . Insofar as any of these terminologies happen also to contain the risks of destroying the world, that’s just too bad. (Language 19)

Reflecting on the power of such technological de-terminism, Burke remarks, “[N]o political system yet devised is adequate to the problem of controlling the great virtues of technology and their troublous side effects” (“Methodological Repression” 412). Quoting himself, he adds that he takes for granted the need to adopt “a kind of `Neo Stoic resignation’ to the needs of industrial expansion” (412; qtg. Grammar 442).³

From the standpoint of Burkean ecological holism, technological de-terminism may be viewed as a hyper-efficiency of a part (technology) at the expense of a hyper inefficiency of the whole (“destroying the world”). Such continuity from one to the other is possible to trace. It may be more profitable, however, to view the technological theme in Burke’s corpus as a strand independent of holism that focuses on a distinguishable if overlapping problem.

Technology first becomes a significant concern in Permanence and Change, first published in 1935, where it appears as the “technological psychosis” (44) that is the main antagonist that the book is designed to displace with a new poetic orientation--“the ultimate metaphor for discussing the universe and man’s relations to it must be the poetic or dramatic metaphor” (263). In the retrospective “Prologue” that Burke wrote for the book’s 2nd edition (1954), he informs us that the book’s original title was “`Treatise on Communication,’ and it is written in that spirit” (xlviii). From the standpoint of communication, the technological psychosis improves the communicative medium on the superficial level of “information giving” (49), but this improvement is purchased at the expense of deadening the medium for the purpose of poetic communication (50-58), which draws not on the superficiality of information but on the full range of ways humans “identify” with one another in becoming “consubstantial,” to borrow terms from the later Rhetoric. “In its simplest manifestation, style is ingratiation” (Permanence 50). Burke’s new poetic orientation would aim to restore poetic communication.

Technology reappears in the third clause of Burke’s definition of humankind as the symbol using animal: “Separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making. . . . This clause is designed to take care of those who would define man as the `tool-using animal’ (homo faber, homo economicus, and such)” (Language 13). It’s this dimension that technological de-terminism theorizes most directly and that attains an ultimate “perfection” in Burke’s satiric Helhaven vision, where a “Culture-Bubble” on the moon contains simulacra reproducing natural wonders that used to be available on earth before technology destroyed them.

Technology’s role in separating humans from their natural conditions is most obvious in Helhaven, where those who get there are separated from the earth that was the natural home for humankind before its destruction. It’s this separation from nature that distinguishes technological de-terminism from ecological holism as an ecocritical theme in Burke, although the two are not mutually exclusive.

One may wish to distinguish the “technological psychosis” in Permanence and Change from the technology in Helhaven, but it’s also possible to join them together as different ways that technology ironically separates humankind from its “natural condition” (ironic because technology seems also to be inherent in humankind’s “nature”). To pursue this possibility, consider the example of a flock of birds that Burke invents in developing his communication theme in Permanence and Change. One can imagine the flock living together “consubstantially” before fragmenting and developing “a great variety in their ways of living”:

Yet suppose that they still considered themselves a homogeneous flock, and still clung discordantly together, attempting to act by the same orientation as they had when living in a homogeneous culture. How would this cultural mongrelism affect them? Their responses would be thrown into a muddle. The startled cry of one member would lose its absolute value as a sign. . . . Their old poetic methods of flapping their wings and crying out would lose prestige among the flock. . . . The most intelligent birds would insist upon the perfection of a strict and unambiguous nomenclature. (55-56)

With the call for “unambiguous nomenclature,” the “technological psychosis” emerges. It’s an intellectual feat and it serves a utilitarian value. But its emergence is also a sign of separation from a “consubstantiality” that allowed for deeper, poetic communication.

For Burke, then, the nature that technology separates us from encompasses both the nature “out there” and the “consubstantiality” that is the natural way for human “flocks” to live with one another. Whether one wants to speak of a “natural” way for humans to live together may be debated. But Burke does repeatedly stress the dependency of the individual on the group. In Permanence and Change, he suggests that the individual’s deepest means of support resides in the communal bond: “By it he is `transcendentally’ fortified. His personal solidity depends upon his allegiance to it” (236). In Attitudes toward History, when he takes up the entry for “Identity, Identification” in his “Dictionary of Pivotal Terms,” he insists that bourgeois psychologists erred in considering “all the collective aspects of identity under the head of pathology and illusion”:

That is: they discovered accurately enough that identity is not individual, that a man “identifies himself” with all sorts of manifestations beyond himself, and they set about trying to “cure” him of this tendency. (263)

In Philosophy of Literary Form, he moves to a more philosophical level, anticipating the later idea of “consubstantiality,” when he contrasts the “realist” conception of individuals as members of a group to the “nominalist” conception of groups as aggregates of individuals (126). “Consubstantiality,” in other words, seems to be for Burke a normative foundation. Whether or not one calls this foundation “natural,” the “technological psychosis” separates humans from it in limiting their connections with one another to the superficial level of information instead of the deeper levels of poetic communication. Computers can exchange information but they don’t ingratiate one another.

Rueckert’s Ecocriticism

In her history of the emergence of ecocriticism as a critical movement, Glotfelty contrasts the prefixes “eco-” and “enviro-”:

in its connotations, enviro- is anthropocentric and dualistic, implying that we humans are at the center, surrounded by everything that is not us, the environment. Eco-, in contrast, implies interdependent communities, integrated systems, and strong connections among constituent parts. (xx)

“Enviro-” encourages the distinction between nature and culture, sometimes even to the extent of making them mutually exclusive so that nature, strictly speaking, exists only when it stands in magisterial independence of human fingerprints of any kind (the premise of Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature); whereas “eco-” encourages seeing both nature and culture as interconnected parts contained by the Earth’s ecology. In taking Rueckert’s term instead of inventing a new term “envirocriticism,” this movement seems to side with “eco-” but it also sides with “enviro-” in the names, mentioned above, of its journal and organization. Perhaps early ecocriticism’s focus on nature writing, which fits readily into the “enviro-” model, has something to do with this terminological ambivalence.

Burke sometimes comes close to the “enviro-” model, as in a passage in “Poetics and Communication”:

It would be better for us, in the long run, if we “identified ourselves” rather with the natural things that we are progressively destroying--our trees, our rivers, our land, even our air, all of which we are a lowly ecological part of. (414)

But as evidenced by “ecological holism” and “technological de-terminism,” Burke is more interested in identifying the things that impede such identifications than in celebrating instances of nature writing in which they occur. Even in the above passage Burke is saying such identifications would be better for us than identifications with technology:

Our spontaneous identification with the powers of technology can lead to quite a range of bluntness. . . . Almost without thinking, we incline to be like the fellow who had delusions of grandeur because, each time he approached the door of a supermarket, it of itself opened to let him pass. (413)

Burke’s ecological focus, in other words, tends to be on what humans do in the ecological web of life. Stirred by destructive human practices, his theoretical bent leads him to theorize the ultimate sources of these practices.

Taking his lead from Burke, Rueckert similarly directs attention to human practices. The originality of his ecocriticism resides in its conceptual location of the practices surrounding literature, ranging from its creation to its reception to its teaching, in the ecological web of life, with special attention to ways that in this area humans can serve a positive function in this web.

In his 1978 article coining the term “ecocriticism,” Rueckert concludes his introductory survey of the scene of literary criticism in the mid-1970s by turning to Burke:

To borrow a splendid phrase from Kenneth Burke, one of our great experimental critics, I am going to experiment with the conceptual and practical possibilities of an apparent perspective by incongruity. Forward then. Perhaps that old pair of antagonists, science and poetry, can be persuaded to lie down together and be generative after all. (107)

These “old antagonists” were especially antagonistic during the heyday of the New Criticism at mid-century, when it was routine (1) to define literature as a distinctive use of language and (2) to define this distinctiveness by contrasting literary language to scientific language. Rueckert turns this routine upside down by using science as a model for the study of literature, not science in general, which is what the New Critics had in mind, but the science of ecology.

The chief ideas he borrows from this science are the principles (1) that “everything is connected” and (2) that energy flows are central to these connections. It’s the combination of such energy flows and literature that generates his chief “perspectives by incongruity.” For example, “[a] poem is stored energy, a formal turbulence, a living thing, a swirl in the flow” (108):

Energy flows from the poet’s language centers and creative imagination into the poem and thence, from the poem (which converts and stores this energy) into the reader. (109-110)

In the web in which “everything is connected,” there may be ways to distinguish energy flows in the biosphere from those centered in literature (109), but Rueckert is making a realistic claim in insisting that literature makes things happen, doing things for those who create it and those who respond to it. Nothing could be more Burkean. In Rueckert’s formulation:

Kenneth Burke was right as usual that drama should be our model or paradigm for literature because a drama, enacted upon the stage, before a live audience, releases its energy into the human community assembled in the theater and raises all the energy levels. Burke did not want us to treat novels and poems as plays; he wanted us to become aware of what they were doing as creative verbal action in the human community. He was one of our first critical ecologists. Coming together in the classroom, in the lecture hall, in the seminar room (anywhere, really) to discuss or read or study literature, is to gather energy centers around a matrix of stored poetic/verbal energy. . . . [T]he flow is along many energy pathways from poem to person, from person to person. . . . [T]here is, ideally, a raising of the energy levels which makes it possible for the highest motives of literature to accomplish themselves. These motives are not pleasure and truth, but creativity and community. (110-11)

In this fashion, then, Rueckert conceives literature’s place in the “everything is connected” that constitutes the ecology of the earth. Within this framework, the job of ecocriticism is to recognize this power of literature to create community and to direct this power to create a community between humankind and the earth. “Culture one of our great achievements wherever we have gone has often fed like a great predator and parasite upon nature and never entered into a reciprocating energy transfer, into a recycling relationship with the biosphere” (119). That is what ecocriticism must work to change.

The power of literature to create community is a central concern in Gregory Clark’s “`Sinkership’ and `Eye-Crossing’: Apprehensive in the American Landscape,” a groundbreaking ecocritical interpretation of two of Burke’s long poems from the 1960s. Clark’s essay, moreover, may be profitably read from the standpoint not only of Rueckert’s ecocritical model but also of Burke’s technological de-terminism. In exemplary fashion, Clark shows how Burke registers the effects of technological de-terminism, not just in technological transformations of essential American landscapes--the West (“Sinkership”), New York (“Eye Crossing”)--but also in the effects of these transformations on the humans inhabiting these landscapes. Environmental degradation circles back onto humans not just on the physical level (bad air, bad water) but also on the level of human relationships. Rueckert’s ecocritical approach appears in the attention Clark gives to how Burke’s poems, in the desolation of this landscape, can energize a new community among those who share the “attitude” they communicate to attentive readers. In the new community or “consubstantiality” formed between Burke and his readers, a step is taken, however small, from apprehension to hope.

Ecological Realism

Between the publication of Rueckert’s ecocritism article in 1978 and its reprinting in The Ecocriticism Reader in 1996, there is one change. Both versions end with a proclamation, made all the more dramatic by being set apart from the main text and italicized:

1978: “Free us from figures of speech.” 1996: “Free us from false figures of speech.”

A response to the 1978 article when he once read it as a lecture convinced Rueckert that this change was needed, so that he made it when later asked to reprint it in 1996.⁴ But long before, in 1982, he explored the idea of “false figures of speech” in “Metaphor and Reality: A Mediation on Man, Nature, and Words,” which seeks through mediation between man, nature, and words to find ways to distinguish true from false in an area that usually doesn’t involve such considerations. Because a metaphor, by its very nature, doesn’t purport to correspond to reality, one is more likely to use aesthetic criteria in judging it good or bad than criteria of truth and falsity. Rueckert brings considerations of pragmatic truth and falsity to bear on metaphors by considering them as realities productive of real effects, in a manner consistent with rhetorical realism, discussed below. Metaphors can help to form communities and can be judged by the actions of the communities they help to create. Humankind needs to serve the planet, Rueckert argues, by finding metaphors that teach it to see itself as the planet’s awareness.

Rueckert’s concern with “metaphor and reality” registers ecocriticism’s overriding concern with the reality of ecological crisis. It’s a critical movement motivated by issues arising from this reality rather than such things as aesthetics. In its concern with this reality, ecocriticism has tended to march to the beat of a different drummer in the context of a postmodern criticism that for over a generation has preached that reality is gone for good, displaced once and for all by “constructions.” These constructions are adjectivally qualified varyingly as “social,” “cultural,” or “linguistic,” depending on how their formation is theorized. Burke, for example, offers a theory of linguistic constructionism in his well known “Terministic Screens,” where language is conceived as a “selection” so that terminologies are not reproductions of reality but constructions that simultaneously “reflect” and “deflect” reality (Language 45). But above such minor theoretical differences there is the theoretical consensus that we no longer (if we ever did) deal with reality directly. Instead, we live in a world of constructs that we need to be careful not to mistake for reality (a la “naïve verbal realism”). An important issue for ecocriticism, arising from its emergence in this theoretical context is well defined by Randall Roorda in his important essay “KB in Green: Ecology, Critical Theory, and Kenneth Burke”:

An ongoing challenge for ecocritical practice is to get critical theory and ecology to address each other in ways they do not now sufficiently do. To pointedly oversimplify the situation, I’d say that critical theory, in its fixation on the constructed character of representation, neglects ecology; and ecology, in turn, must suffer its embarrassment in employing theory that threatens always to tar it as “foundationalist.” I hope through Burke to suggest some ways that this neglect and embarrassment might be mitigated. (173)

Roorda develops his Burkean argument by contrasting Burke to Richard Rorty. Both Burke and Rorty affirm the power of language to construct realities. But Burke houses this constructive power in bodies biologically embedded in the ecology that sustains life on earth, whereas Rorty, Roorda argues, “does not really believe he is an animal. His every mention of other animals, of biological states, of evolutionary theory, betrays his skepticism on this count” (181). Rorty’s constructionism thus floats free of any connection to the earth, while Burke’s is rooted in a “metabiology” tied to the reality of the earth (175, 181).

Consequently, Burke provides Roorda a theoretical basis whereby ecology’s reality can serve as a corrective that can help humankind “to create and sustain conditions of human well being which, as such, are not peculiar to humans conditions, for instance, that a spotted owl might preside over as well” (181). An important passage for Roorda (177) comes from Burke’s Dramatism and Development:

an anti-Technologistic Humanism would be “animalistic” in the sense that, far from boasting of some privileged human status, it would never disregard our humble, and maybe even humiliating, place in the totality of the natural order. (53-54)

Roorda conceives this ecological reality as a “grounding” rather than a “foundation.” Whereas a “foundation” is a philosophical principle with the permanence of eternity, a “grounding” is the result of a long evolutionary process marked by contingencies, such that with different contingencies a different “grounding” could have resulted. A “grounding” of this sort, Roorda insists, “is not a metaphysical category . . . [rather it’s] durable indeed, in something of the way, for instance, we might think the ancient forests have been and ought to be permanent” (182).⁵

Arguably the first book-length treatment of Burke as an ecocritic is Coupe’s recent book, Kenneth Burke on Myth: An Introduction. Bringing attention to important dimensions of Burke’s work that have been understudied in the past, it has been justly called a “must read” (Smith).⁶ It’s true that the book’s focus is myth, with five “Myth and . . .” chapters, but the last of these is “Myth and Ecology,” where one can find reason to think that the earlier chapters should be seen as in some sense culminating in Burke the ecocritic.

How should one characterize Coupe’s Burkean ecocriticism? On the one hand, Coupe repeatedly and emphatically affirms Burke’s realism (54, 138, 156, 159). One of these affirmations is in opposition to Rene Girard’s charge that Burke is a linguistic idealist (138, 156). In these affirmations, Coupe aligns himself with a number of other commentators who treat Burke as a realist, sometimes quoting and affirming long passages from their work. On the other hand, his “Myth and Ecology” chapter features a passage that seems to go beyond the geocentric or earthbound limits of realism to a cosmocentric centering of nature if not humankind:

It is Burke’s contention that the traditional invocation of “Supernature” is a better guarantor of the flourishing of “Nature” than the modern ambition to create an exclusive realm of “Counter Nature.” To honor the natural world as the manifestation of the divine is to grant it more security and status than to assess its merit as grist for technological exploitation. Granted that human beings have intervened in the function of the biosphere at least since the invention of agriculture in the Neolithic era, it is still possible to distinguish between a responsible and an irresponsible attitude to the planet. Burke believes that we are more likely to avoid destroying the earth if we maintain our mythic roots. For in “myths of the Supernatural,” which emphasize “personality” (the figures of the gods), we maintain the possibility of relationship, whereas if our horizon is dominated by technology, we are resigned to mere “instrumentality.” (164)⁷

It’s the reference to honoring “the natural world as the manifestation of the divine” that would go beyond “ecological realism” to “ecological mythology (or religion),” if it means that Coupe believes that for Burke there is a divinity and that it can be found in nature (a la Emerson⁸). Maybe the line could be read as calling upon us to honor nature “as if” it were divine, but that’s not altogether clear, and a few pages before this passage Coupe seems to want us to “allow for the supernatural dimension as something more than a linguistic construction” (160).

Determining whether these passages can be squared with Coupe’s affirmations of Burke’s realism would require a detailed analysis of his book that would take us far afield. It may help, though, to clarify the contours of ecological realism further by trying to define how such realism could incorporate Burke’s work on myth without resorting to the premise that Burke assumes that the supernatural really exists. A useful text for this purpose, one that Coupe also quotes, appears in The Philosophy of Literary Form:

A ritual dance for promoting the fertility of crops was absurd enough as “science” (though its absurdity was effectively and realistically corrected in so far as the savage, along with the mummery of the rite, planted the seed; and if you do not abstract the rite as the essence of the event, but instead consider the act of planting as also an important ingredient of the total recipe, you see that the chart of meanings contained a very important accuracy). It should also be noted that the rite, considered as “social science,” had an accuracy lacking in much of our contemporary action, since it was highly collective in its attributes, a group dance in which all shared, hence an incantatory device that kept alive a much stronger sense of the group’s consubstantiality than is stimulated today by the typical acts of private enterprise. (108-09)⁹

Coupe comments that this passage shows that “it is by paying due attention to the act and its effects that we appreciate the validity of magic, even in the face of science” (79). It’s “the act and its effects” that merit special attention, and for that purpose it will help to use the passage to distinguish three levels. It’s the third level that will be our primary concern.

The first is the positivistic level, where the planting of the seed is the only reality. All the rest is “nonsense,” and not only could be discarded but should be. One can move to the second level with the help of Burke’s argument against the positivists that even “words of nonsense would themselves be real words, involving real tactics, having real demonstrable relationships, and demonstrably affecting relationships” (Grammar 57-58). One might add that the relationships affected by words encompass not only relations among humans but also relations between humankind and the earth. It’s on this level of “the act and its effects that we appreciate the validity of magic,” not because magic works realistically but because words of magic can produce real effects among human beings.

Leaving aside the third level momentarily, it’s necessary to add that it’s at this second level that crucial differences between rhetorical realism and rhetorical idealism begin to emerge. Rhetorical idealism would question Burke’s talk about the reality of words, their connections to the motion of bodies, their place in nature, and so on. To an idealist, all this talk makes Burke himself sound like a “naïve verbal realist.” Idealists prefer to insist that we are “always already” inside constructions that mediate our relation with whatever is beyond them, so that reality is always at one remove away from the language we use to talk about it. No matter which way we turn there is always another mediation that we can never quite get around. But rhetorical realism counters that while there are constructions aplenty, the idealist theorizing of them must at some point pin down exactly how constructions take form and operate, and at that point a reality emerges, the reality of the constructive process that cannot be constructed away.)¹⁰ Linguistic constructs come and go, but language abides as long as “bodies that learn language” are around. Like it or not, at some point idealists become realists.

Turning to the third level, one’s focus becomes the “consubstantiality” that Burke highlights as especially important among the real effects of the symbolic action in his hypothetical fertility rite. It’s fair to assume that part of the cause of these effects would be the mythic rationalization of the rite by which the participants see themselves, through the rite, putting themselves into “relationship” with the “figure of the[ir] gods,” the relationship Coupe stresses in making his claim about the importance of our “mythic roots.” Such a myth is the group’s social construction. The gods don’t exist, but the construction produces real effects nonetheless.

Burke’s realist approach to myth appears with special clarity in “`Mythic’ Ground and `Context of Situation,’” where he argues that “no matter how `mythic’ a reference to the `ultimate’ ground may be, it itself arose out of a temporal ground, available to sociological description,” such as that in Malinowski’s “context of situation” (Rhetoric 204 05). The function of mythic references to an “`ultimate’ ground” is to transcend partisan divisions that divide a culture (Rhetoric 207-08).

From the standpoint of an inveterate debunker such references are always charades designed to conceal factional interests; there is only ideology, no myth beyond ideology. Burke, of course, would object to the debunker’s “always.” In the dialectic of identification and division, Burke finds that identifications atop divisions can sometimes effect real transcendence to real consubstantiality. A good deal of A Rhetoric of Motives is designed to combine the debunker’s demystification with the mystery of consubstantiality. As Burke remarks in the Rhetoric’s “Introduction”:

a man who identifies his private ambitions with the good of the community may be partly justified and partly unjustified. He may be using a mere pretext to gain individual advantage at the public expense; yet he may be quite sincere, or even may willingly make sacrifices in behalf of such identification. (xiii-xiv)

Burke, then, often considers myth from a standpoint inside culture and looks to it in theorizing the possibility of identifications atop divisions. Dialectic is a sine qua non of such identifications, but it is not always enough. One needs not only the verbal level of dialectic but also a foundation in the culture’s circumstances on which to base such identifications and thereby give them a substance beyond the dialectical spinning of words (Rhetoric 195).

From this standpoint inside culture, the test of a myth is whether it effects consubstantiality. In other words, can the culture transcend its divisions through a consensus reference to an “`ultimate’ ground”? Ecological concerns pose an additional test for such a reference, one focusing on the relationship it produces between the culture and the natural world. Roorda’s “grounding,” for example, is his “`ultimate’ ground,” identified synecdochically with the durability of an “Ancient Forest” (175, 182). Here is the durability of the evolutionary past that continues in the present in the life, human and non-human, on the earth. The ecological test of this “grounding” would reside in its effects on the relation of humans to the earth they inhabit.

Ecological realism could also adapt the tripartite structure of “individual,” “specific,” and “generic” motives that Burke uses in the Rhetoric to analyze the transcendence at which all humans aim (Rhetoric 195), with the “generic” serving as the mythic or “`ultimate’ ground.” One of Burke’s main examples comes from the Marxist narrative of history: one is “individually” a body, “specifically” a worker, and “generically” the proletariat in a history in which all humans participate. Whether workers achieve transcendence depends on whether their self perception can rise from the “specific” to the “generic” level. Modified, one could stress at the “specific” level many other divisions besides those based on employment, but the main change would be at the generic level, where the stress would be on the sense in which we’re all inhabitants of the earth, equally dependent on the life its ecology makes possible. Again, transcendence would depend on whether self perception can rise to this generic level.¹¹ Many people today seem to have achieved transcendence in precisely this way. Maybe such transcendence, in the context of today’s ecological crisis, can do for people in the 21st century what mythic gods have done in the past. Such transcendence, moreover, has the advantage of being based not on speculations about the heavens above but on the indisputable reality of the earth beneath our feet.

To facilitate such transcendent identification, what’s needed is the best knowledge that can be acquired about the ecological web of life and the place of humankind in it. It’s worth recalling that Burke never denies that science can produce knowledge about the realm of motion that is more than a mere spinning of words (a la rhetorical idealism). He only insists that science cannot operate independently of the action of language using. In Burke’s words,

Men can so arrange it that nature gives clear, though impartial and impersonal, answers to their questions. The dialectical motives behind such methods usually escape our detection, though we get a glimpse of them when Galileo speaks of experimental testing as an “ordeal.” Stated broadly the dialectical (agonistic) approach to knowledge is through the act of assertion, whereby one “suffers” the kind of knowledge that is the reciprocal of his act. (Grammar 38)

The crucial human component is in the determination of the questions put to nature. Science produces knowledge but science is not innocent; the knowledge it produces isn’t forced upon it by nature but results from the answers humans look for to suit their purposes. Instead of putting questions to nature that are “instrumental,” seeking answers to facilitate purely instrumental domination of nature, ecological realism would pose ecological questions to facilitate learning how to live as a responsible inhabitant of the planet.

Ecological realism, then, needs no gods. Coupe’s book may contribute less to ecological realism than to adding a fifth mode of Burkean ecocriticism to the four introduced here. Burke seems content with realism most of the time but not all the time. Particularly significant in this connection may be the varying things he says about mysticism in different places. For example, in the Rhetoric, he suggests that even if “mystic `revelations’” are possible,

we should ask ourselves how much of “divinity” can be explained neurologically, how much linguistically, and how much “socioanagogically.” We should account for as much as possible by these three routes. Then God, genuinely transcendent, would be sought in the direction of whatever was still unaccounted for. (298)

Is there a mystic revelation of the divine? Burke doesn’t say “yes” here, but he doesn’t say “no” either. Coupe suggests, “Without being a mystical thinker himself, Burke is interested in seeing how far myth takes us toward a level of understanding that we associate with mysticism” (186).

And if there is a fifth mode of Burkean ecocriticism, there is no reason to think that the list of modes would stop at five, especially when one considers that the longer the list, the more opportunities there are for combinations to generate still more modes.

In the essays in this issue, Clark, Frye, and Rueckert add valuable work to the valuable Burkean ecocriticism that already exists. But there is much more to be done. Putting Burke and ecocriticism together opens up possibilities for Burke studies that are still largely untapped and that can lead to work that is likely to grow more important as the 21st century unfolds. Things are likely to get a lot worse for the ecology of the planet before they begin to get significantly better.

Notes

1. Bowen is quoting from Attitudes toward History, page 150, but gives no indication of the title, prompting Burke, in his comment on Bowen’s article, to lament: “For though the article specified the date when my book was published, it kept the title a secret. So, whereas there had been a Beacon Paperback edition of ATH available since 1961, the pebble caused nary a ripple” (Attitudes 412).

2. In quoting this passage, Seigel indicates that it appears in the 1st ed. The passage does appear there, but without the sentence in which Burke refers parenthetically to page 150, where his prediction about ecology appears. That sentence does not appear until 1959, when Attitudes appears in its 2nd ed.

3. Citing Burke’s pessimism in “Methodological Repression,” Star A. Muir asks, “Where, then, in Burke’s frame of acceptance is hope for the future? What corrective does he offer to counter his seemingly tragic view of technology?” (36). In a searching essay, “Toward an Ecology of Language,” Muir explores the pedagogic implications of Burke’s Neo Stoic posture to find ways to see enough around the corner of our technological de terminism to keep hope alive. He concludes, “An awareness of the juncture of the genius of symbolism and the marvel of organism must ever spring anew, keeping the admonition against the fulfillment of our symbolic perfection alive” (65).

4. This statement is based on personal communications with Rueckert about this change.

5. Roorda might fault Richard Thames for turning “metabiology” into a “metaphysical category” in his essay “Nature’s Physician: The Metabiology of Kenneth Burke.” Thames might counter that Roorda’s “grounding” is metaphysics with a different name, perhaps a metaphysics of becoming rather than unchanging being. Whether to classify Thames as an ecologist realist depends less on such semantic debate than on the issue he himself defines in exploring the Burke/Spinoza connection: is God nature or is nature God. Thames seems to move from ecological realism toward ecological religion when he proposes, “If Spinoza’s pantheism provided the opportunity for science to reduce the concept of nature, Burke’s own pantheism provides the opportunity to expand it again; rather than reduce God to Nature, he seeks to make Nature God” (25).

6. For the record, though, one needs to correct Coupe on a few minor factual points. Coupe says, “In 1993, he [Burke] was also present at the launch of the Kenneth Burke Society, staged at New Harmony, Indiana” (3). Burke was present at the launch of the Kenneth Burke Society, but that occurred in 1984, in Philadelphia, at the Burke conference commemorated in The Legacy of Kenneth Burke. The New Harmony conference was in 1990, not 1993. It’s remembered in Extensions of the Burkeian System. It was the first national conference organized by the Kenneth Burke Society. Also in need of correction is Coupe’s flat statement, “Burke became managing editor of The Dial, an avant garde literary journal, in 1923. . . .” (2). Burke’s time as managing editor was only in an “acting” capacity, and he also held other posts during his years with The Dial (see Selzer 54 for a summary of the varying roles Burke played at The Dial).

7. By contrast to Coupe, Frye’s socioecology suggests how humankind’s relation to the earth can become more than merely “instrumental” by virtue of Burke’s “ethicizing of the means of support.”

8. In the pages immediately preceding this passage, Coupe discusses Burke’s essay on Emerson in Language as Symbolic Action and seems to read it as a straightforward affirmation of Emerson. Burke is concerned in the essay with “transcendence” in Emerson’s essay “Nature,” but he says that he deals with transcendence as “a sheerly symbolic operation” (187). In the essay’s subtitle, Burke speaks of the “Machinery of Transcendence,” and it’s clear from the article that this “machinery” resides in the formalism of dialectic.

9. This is an important passage in Burke’s corpus, coming only two paragraphs before the paragraph defining the “unending conversation” (110-11). Burke uses his hypothetical fertility rite as part of his illustration of the role the group plays in how “the individual forms himself,” then in the next paragraph he adds that the equation of “dramatic” to “dialectic” gives him his perspective on history, and then he turns to the “conversation.”

10. This reality is often overlooked by virtue of failing to distinguish two ways words function in the theorizing of constructionism. In such discussions, (1) words are used to talk about a subject matter and (2) words are the subject matter that is talked about. As the subject matter that is talked about, words are given realist status as theorists analyze how they work (e.g., selection, reflection, deflection) in the formation of constructs that produce real effects in the world. For more on this distinction, see Wess, “Burke’s McKeon Side.”

11. For a more detailed analysis, based on Burke, of such geocentric or earth centered transcendence, see Wess, “Geocentric,” 4-9.

Works Cited

Botkin, Botkin. Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty first Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.

Bowen, William. “Our New Awareness of the Great Web.” Fortune Feb. 1970: 198-99.

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.

Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes toward History. 3rd ed. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1984.

---. Dramatism and Development. Barre, Massachusetts: Clark UP, 1972.

---. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.

---. Language as Symbolic Action. U of California P, 1966.

---. “Methodological Repression and/or Strategies of Containment.” Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 401-16.

---. Permanence and Change. 3rd ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.

---. The Philosophy of Literary Form. 3rd ed. Berkeley: U of California, 1973.

---. “Poetics and Communication.” Perspectives in Education, Religion, and the Arts. Ed. Howard E. Keifer and Milton K. Munitz. Albany: State U of New York P, 1970. 401-18.

---. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.

---. The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. Berkeley: U of California P, 1970.

---. “Towards Helhaven: Three Stages of a Vision, 1971.” On Human Nature: A Gathering While Everything Flows, 1967-1984. Ed. William H. Rueckert and Angelo Bonadonna. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. 54-65.

Coupe, Laurence. “Kenneth Burke: Pioneer of Ecocriticism.” Journal of American Studies 35 (2001): 413-31.

---. Kenneth Burke on Myth: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Extensions of the Burkeian System. Ed. James W. Chesebro. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1993.

Glotfelty, Cheryll. “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis.” In Glotfelty and Fromm xv-xxxvii.

Glotfelty, Cheryll and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996.

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

McKibben, William. The End of Nature. New York: Random House, 1989.

Meeker, Joseph W. The Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic. 3rd ed. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1997.

Muir, Star A. “Toward an Ecology of Language.” Kenneth Burke and the 21st Century. Ed. Bernard L. Brock. Albany: SUNY P, 1999. 35 69.

Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.

Roorda, Randall. “KB in Green: Ecology, Critical Theory, and Kenneth Burke.” The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism, 1993-2003. Ed. Michael P. Branch and Scott Slovic. 173 87. Originally appeared in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 4.2 (1997): 39-52.

Rueckert, William H. “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” Glotfelty and Fromm 105-23. Originally appeared in The Iowa Review 9.1 (1978): 71-86.

Seigel, Marika A. “`One little fellow named Ecology’: Ecological Rhetoric in Kenneth Burke’s Attitudes toward History.” Rhetoric Review 23 (2004): 388-403.

Selzer, Jack. Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village: Conversing with the Moderns 1915-1931. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1996.

Smith, Daniel L. Rev. of Kenneth Burke on Myth: An Introduction, by Laurence Coupe. KB Journal 2.1 (Fall 2005).

Thames, Richard. “Nature’s Physician: The Metabiology of Kenneth Burke.” Kenneth Burke and the 21st Century. Ed. Bernard L. Brock. SUNY Press, 1999. 19-34.

Wess, Robert. “Burke’s McKeon Side: Burke’s Pentad and McKeon’s Quartet.” Kenneth Burke and His Circles. Ed. Jack Selzer and Robert Wess. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press (forthcoming).

---. “Geocentric Ecocriticism.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 10.2 (2003): 1-19.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License. -->

“Sinkership” and “Eye-Crossing”: Apprehensive in the American Landscape

Gregory Clark, Brigham Young University

Abstract: This essay interprets two long Burke poems from the late 1960's, testing the value of accessing Burke's thought through his poetry rather than his theoretical writing. These poems articulate Burke's apprehension, while spending time in the West (Sinkership) and in New York (Eye 'Crossing'), about technology's effects on nature and human relations. But poetry, unlike theory, enables readers to share this apprehension at an attitudinal level that encompasses all levels of identity. Through these poems, readers can become consubstantial with Burke, and in this new consubstantiality they take a step, however small, from apprehension to hope.

I'M A LITTLE SLOW SOMETIMES. I finally got around to meeting Kenneth Burke when it was almost too late, and after I did finally talk with him I ignored, until recently, the most important thing he told me.

He was 92 when I met him—bent and prone to mumble, but animated by surprising bursts of energy. We talked in his kitchen for a couple of hours on a summer Saturday. I was trying to understand his Grammar and Rhetoric and he responded to my questions by pushing copies of his Complete White Oxen and his Collected Poems across the table to me and saying, “Haven’t you read this?” I hadn’t. And I didn’t for years after that, even though he told me that day that he’d only started writing theory because people weren’t getting his point in his fiction and poetry.

I started this essay still thinking mostly about Burke's theory. But I also started reading in what he had been writing since his better-known theoretical books—his “late” writing, both theoretical and poetic. And that reading brought back the memory of the man I had talked with and walked with in Andover, of what had been on his mind that day in 1989, and of his repeated statement that I could find answers to my theoretical questions in his poetic work. So I decided, finally, to take him at his word.

I write this essay to continue a project begun in my book, Rhetorical Landscapes of America, of understanding implications of the expanded conception of rhetoric that are implicit in Burke’s definition of the rhetorical as an experience of identification. There I used that concept of the rhetorical to examine ways that the environments we live in—specifically, the landscapes we inhabit—shape, if not create, our individual and collective identities.¹ Here I want to look again at that rhetorical interaction of landscape and human identity, but this time at the power of our identities—and, specifically, the attitudes that constitute them—to create landscapes that speak back to us of who we are with persistent rhetorical power. I do this in order to make two amends to Kenneth Burke. The first is for writing a book on Burke and landscape that does not deal directly with the concern that dominated his late work: our willful ignorance obsessed as we are with the apparent promise of our imagination and the technology it creates of our absolute dependence on a natural world that technology is displacing and destroying. The second amend is for ignoring his poetic work for so long.

Burke’s concerns about technology appear with special ironic and dramatic clarity in his two essays devoted to Helhaven: “Towards Helhaven: Three Stages of a Vision” (1971) and “Why Satire, with a Plan for Writing One” (1974). Helhaven is a culture bubble on the moon that technologically reproduces simulacra of natural wonders that once existed on earth before their destruction at the hands of technology. One important connection between the Helhaven essays and the two landscape poems I wish to examine is Walt Whitman.

These two poems are both late poems—rhetorical poems that record and respond to the rhetorical power of two quintessential American landscapes. The first, “Tossing on Floodtides of Sinkership: A Diaristic Fragment,” was written in the summer of 1967 and appears in Complete Poems, 1915 1967, published in 1968. This poem—he described it as he was writing it as a “muddle of sensation and ideation”—reads as meditations of a “Wandering Scholar” who is driving across his nation’s continent toward a temporary teaching post in the West (Letters 113).² Burke is aware as he drives that he is reenacting the archetypal American experience of discovering the possibilities of the future in trajectory of a journey west:

go go going West, the wife and I—
I told the Selph I’d say again
them resonant words of Horace Greeley,
“Go West, elderly couple.” (289)

But the landscape he encounters on this journey is not promising, teeming as it is with technological and commercial development—industrial, agricultural, touristic—and its attendant refuse, and populated by people who live together isolated as he is by their own automobiles and itineraries. The only insight into the future that he can discover along the way is the possibility that he and his nation both are living on “floodtides of sinkership.” The second poem appeared in 1969 with the title “Eye Crossing from Brooklyn to Manhattan” and was later expanded with Burke’s reflections and explanations, appearing with this prose commentary under different titles in 1973, 2003, and 2005.³ Here the poet’s meditations are those of a man who finds himself nearly immobile in his nation’s most famous city—the second essential American landscape. Late in 1968, Burke brought his wife, Libbie, to an apartment hotel in Brooklyn Heights; she had suffered a stroke in September 1968 that made moving to the city “advisable” (Jay 365; Letters 141). In May 1969, Libbie “left in her sleep,” as Burke put it in a note to Malcolm Cowley (Jay 368). During her final months, Burke cared for her day and night in a room with a window allowing “eye crossings” across the East River to lower Manhattan. The landscape he encounters in these crossings seems more ominous than the one he had encountered on the road driving across the continent a few years earlier:

A jumble of towering tombstones
hollowed, not hallowed,
and in the night incandescent
striving ever to outstretch one another
like stalks of weeds dried brittle in the fall. (16)

Both poems assume familiarity with Whitman poems. “Sinkership” re evaluates Whitman’s limitless vision of westering progress articulated in “Song of the Open Road”; “Eye-Crossing,” his confident concept of national community expressed in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.”

The Helhaven satire, evidently conceived not long after the writing of these poems, retrospectively articulates an additional Whitmanesque context for them, one that spotlights in particular Burke’s concerns in these poems with environmental destruction. The 2003 version of “Eye Crossing” appears with a brief introduction by William H. Rueckert, who groups it with “Sinkership,” indicating that both poems are “anti Whitmanian and antitechnology and are part of Burke’s sustained attack on the creative genius of hypertechnology during his later years” (Burke, On Human Nature 305). In “Why Satire,” Burke points to Whitman to explain the genesis of his strategy in his Helhaven satire:
the task of the satirist is to set up a fiction whereby our difficulties can be treated in the accents of the promissory. Whitman, in his accents of gladness, had given us the clue:

I know not where they go,
But I know that they go toward the best--toward
Something great. (75)

These lines from Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road” (section 13) reappear in “Sinkership,” where Burke quotes the complete verse paragraph in which they appear and adds, “Whitman whistling in the dark” (280). In Burke’s Helhaven vision, Whitman’s whistling satirically celebrates the darkness of our worst fears coming to pass. Burke’s “vision” of Helhaven needed a “visionary,” and Whitman provided Burke the perfect model. “Why Satire” even ends with a few poems modeled on Whitman, in which Burke’s Helhaven visionary speaks. Years before, Burke observed that “much of Whitman’s appeal resides in this poetic alchemy, whereby the dangerous destruction of our natural resources could be exaltedly interpreted as an `advance’” (Philosophy of Literary Form 118). This “alchemy” appears in satiric form in Helhaven.⁴

I think that Burke wrote “Sinkership” and “Eye-Crossing” to counter what the landscapes we have made for ourselves—land we have made over in the image of what we have imagined ourselves to be (Philosophy of Literary Form 281)—are telling us about our individual and collective identity, about who we are and what we became in the twentieth century. He wrote them perhaps lacking confidence that resistance to that identity can have much effect. Writing in the late twentieth century, Burke couldn’t reaffirm Whitman’s nineteenth-century optimism about America’s future. Still, I think he wrote them in the hope that we might attend to the stories of his experience in those landscapes and come to share with him his wariness and anxiety about the way we have come to live. That hope acknowledges the possibility that we might begin to change the attitudes that we have made material in the landscapes we have built. He tried to persuade his readers to do that in his late theoretical writing, but I believe that these intense, intimate, painful and personal poems have a chance of doing that to greater effect. I now need to rehearse some of his theory to help us understand why this is so.

Attitudes and Identification

In the gloss titled “After-Words” that he added to “Eye-Crossing,” Burke wrote, as he has written elsewhere, that “if I were now to write my Grammar over again, I’d turn the pentad into a hexad, the sixth term being attitude” (24). Each element of that hexad can be used to describe the primary rhetorical tool available in each form of poetic literature: act is the rhetorical focus of drama, agent that of the novel, purpose of the epic, and so on. And attitude is what lyric poetry works to communicate. Burke asserts here that this poem, despite its rambling length, is indeed a lyric because, as every lyric does, it most emphatically “strikes an attitude” (25). Specifically, “the lyric attitude implies some kind of situation” and while “a lyric may be, on its face, but a list of descriptive details specifying a scene . . . these images are all manifestations of a single attitude” (26). What a lyric does rhetorically, then, is say to its reader, “‘Come attitudinize with me’” (26). In other words, it invites readers to identify themselves with the poet by adopting as their own the attitude the poem expresses toward circumstances that they share.

Attitude seems to be what links Burke’s grammar and rhetoric of motives. Burke begins his Grammar with the question, “What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?” (xv). His method of using the pentad or hexad to answer that question involves attending carefully to the full context in which people operate, accounting for the full spectrum of experience within which they find themselves motivated. In his Rhetoric Burke notes that this context has rhetorical effects and that these effects are essential elements of any such experience, for “rhetoric seeks to have formative effect on attitude” (50). Moreover, the idea that the rhetorical does the work of “persuasion to attitude”—that what rhetoric does is prompt and shape and invite and provoke particular attitudes—“permits the application of rhetorical terms to purely poetic structures” (50). The term “poetic” here refers to the sort of experiences that we consider aesthetic. As Burke puts it in “Poetics, Dramatistically Considered,” “the word, ‘poetry,’ is essentially an action word, coming from a word meaning ‘to make.’” The “word ‘aesthetic,’” he continues, “comes from a word meaning ‘to perceive’” (“Watchful” 36). What is made is then perceived, and perception is an experience. As he had put it at the beginning of his career in Counter-Statement, when we perceive the aesthetic we engage in an encounter with form, with form as “a way of experiencing” (143). For him, then, from the beginning of his career to the end, the aesthetic is, primarily, an experience—a transformative, rhetorical experience. It is an “arousing and fulfillment of desires” (Counter-Statement 124), an encounter with the “creation and gratification of needs” (138). And when that experience is shared, as the aesthetic is always intended to be, the result is powerfully rhetorical because it renders people conscious of what he called their “consubstantiality” with another (Rhetoric 21).

Identification, then, is experienced as consubstantiality, and people feel consubstantial when they experience a sharing of attitudes. Indeed, as his choice of the term consubstantial suggests, what Burke sees them sharing is nothing less than the same substance. As he defined it in the Grammar, moreover, substance includes “a thing’s context, since that which supports or underlies a thing would be a part of a thing’s context” (23). In another word he used, people who share the same complex of attitudes share the same “placement” as they identify themselves in relation to their common environment in the same way (Grammar 24-28). And it is identity, finally, that wields the rhetorical power to exert, as he put it in his “After-Words” to “Eye Crossing,” a sort of “unifying force” that “`sums up’ the conglomerate of particulars.” Identity pulls the elements of our perceptions and thoughts and feelings together, rendering coherent “the ‘sentiments’ implicit in the ‘sensations,’ and the ‘thoughts’ implicit in the ‘sentiments,’” and, finally, it “express[es] and evok[es] a unified attitude . . .” (25). The rhetorical, then, is always, finally, a matter of identity—of shared identity, and identity is always a matter of shared attitude.

In all of his late writings about ecology, about technology, about the ominous entelechy of our symbolic capacity, Burke’s primary concern seems to be about attitude. He is concerned that as symbolic animals, and particularly as symbolic animals living in America, we share attitudes that exclude from that unified conglomerate of particulars that comprises our shared experience the physical fact of our permanent placement in, and final dependence upon, the natural world. In all his later work, whether poetic or critical or theoretical, his rhetorical project is to change those attitudes and that involves nothing less than changing the individual and collective identity of those Americans to whom he writes. Since attitudes and identity are embedded in experience, Burke is at his most passionate when he tries to render that experience poetically but, practical man that he always was, he also always backs himself up by making the same point in his criticism and theory. Indeed, because early on he focused in his own life-long project of writing not on “self-expression,” a motive he says he abandoned while writing his first book, but on constructive and productive “communication” (“Rhetoric and Poetics,” 305-07), he moves readily back and forth between poetic and theoretical forms in order to convey his message. But the intensity of his concern is most apparent, most immediate, and, I think, best communicated in the intimate imagery and immediate emotion of the painful personal experiences that he voices in his poetry. Though Burke was, to the end, “apprehensive” (“Doing” 119) about whether his communication would or could do any good in the world, he persisted in writing and publishing (in his phrase used to subtitle his Late Poems) his “attitudinizings verse-wise, while fending for one’s selph.”

This is the theoretical context, the rhetorical “placement” of these two poems. They function rhetorically as enactments of his own attitude, one with which he hopes we might identify. More specifically, they are presented as a remedial attitude that is motivated by a corrective intent. They are attempts to correct an identity, a national identity, that he knows is not sustainable. He wrote to correct that identity by changing attitudes toward the American landscapes where he and his readers together must make their home. These poems would do that both poetically and rhetorically—indeed, both at once, as art always does—by bringing others into a mediate experience of sensation, feeling, and thought that would transform their attitudes and, so, their concept of common identity. Burke wrote to all those who share the situation of inhabiting these landscapes to enable them to understand that they can be together there, “substantially one” (Rhetoric 21), and that this identity of people who share a common “placement” (Grammar 28) in this place may be the one, right now, that matters most.

So I turn now to these two poems of American landscape and what they have to teach us about the reach and power of Burke’s rhetoric of identification. I believe they offer us two crucial lessons. The first is that if rhetoric is a matter of identity, of identification, then it is at its most powerful when it works to prompt attitudes (which Burke considers to be “incipient action” [“(Nonsymbolic) Motion” 147]) rather than particular actions. That is because attitudes are the very matter of identity in a way that actions, which are its localized consequence, are not. Attitudes, in a word, possess us. The second lesson is that attitudes are acquired through experience and that is because experiences function rhetorically as attitudes embodied, as enactments of the very substance of identity. ⁵When experience is rendered aesthetically it is encountered by others as vivid, imagery-laden metaphors that invite in others, and that implicitly assert, an identity of consubstantiality. “Dancing various attitudes” is one of Burke’s descriptions of the work of the rhetorical (“[Nonsymbolic] Motion” 169), and that is precisely what these two late poems of American landscape do. Whether the dance is choreographed as poetry, criticism, theory, or even as image or music, it invites and entices those who witness it to inhabit the attitude that it proposes as ground for a better identity.

“Tossing on Floodtides of Sinkership”

In its plot, this is a poem about a rhetorical problem. Burke subtitles it “a diaristic fragment” that recounts his meditations on solving that problem as he drove west across the continent toward the state of Washington where he was to lecture and teach. Here is his statement of the problem:

“Hurrying westward with a message,
soon now we’ll be arriving.
What tell ‘em when we get there?” (281)

Burke’s problem, worked on in the context of a period of great national turmoil (the 1960s), is what he might say at the college, what he might teach the people there. His various false starts at solution are inflected by his experiences of the American landscape that he encountered as he sped along the highway.

What he encounters most immediately is the landscape of that highway itself—the scene of “the Traffic War” with “each driver going somewhere, the whole thing nowhere” (277). It is a place of congested alienation, of isolation in a shared space of intense individual purpose, of physical risk. Inhabiting that landscape at such high velocity prompts him to “untoward thoughts”:

“What if that oncomer veered into our lane?”
“What if a tire blew exactly now,
amidst this racing automotive tangle?”
(at times cars bunch up, moving along together,
like houses clustered in a village)
“What if, for no damned reason,
I gave a twist and sent us pitching
into that cataclysmic chasm,
that psychological gerundive,
that to-be-tumbled-into?” (278)

Maybe, he thinks, that’s what he can tell them at the college—about what cars, and our dependence on them as one of our primary habitations might be doing to us and to our nation, how cars have changed our shared experience, our common attitudes, our identities. Maybe he can talk about that:

How walk faster, except by working harder?
Likewise, how run, or speed up a bike,
except by greater effort? . . .
Ever so lightly press the pedal down a fraction farther
And your massive technological demon
Spurts forward like a fiend.

Tell them that.
Talk of such brutal disproportion
between decision and the consequences.
“Might we not here, my friends,
confront the makings of a madness,
an unacknowledged leap
from This is mine
to By God, This is ME! . . .? (282)

Maybe he can use this representative anecdote of the automobile, and his experiences driving one in the traffic of the continent, to make the problem of a technological identity immediate. He also can talk about how, driving in our cars, identified with them rather than with the others with whom we share the road, and not with the landscape itself that makes our lives possible, we are living at high risk, individually and collectively. Repeatedly in these poems, the technological displacement of nature is accompanied by a distancing of humans from one another.

Or maybe he can talk about that landscape as he sees it from the car, and about the national identity he finds expressed by “the Inroads of Destruction” (278) that he follows in his car:

Ruins and pride of empire
In peaceful coexistence—
ugliness and power
weeds struggling to make an honest living
in slag heaps, among iron skeletons,
machines dead in use or disuse.
This is our gospel for all mankind?
This we will bring to Vietnam? (279)

It’s 1967. Vietnam is on his mind—it is on everyone’s mind. Maybe he can talk about that, about what we are doing to that landscape and the people who inhabit it, about how it repeats the sort of exploitation we visit upon our own, on ourselves, but so grossly and violently magnified:

Cook them with napalm in the name of freedom
tear up their way of life
herd them
let their girls get work as whores. . .
then tell yourselves
how you can buy those people off
once you have loaded them with U.S. gadgets,
gifts from our technologic Christmas tree.

I can’t speak for you, my friend,
but if that’s what an invader from halfway around the world
with schemes for my deliverance
did for me and my ways,
I can’t speak for you, my friend,
but with my country torn to pieces
by such expert squandering,
I can’t speak for you, friend,
but I’d just bide my time . . .

Gad! I couldn’t tell them that!

Maybe I can’t say anything . . . (290-91)⁶

But there is some respite from this rhetorical problem. A notable island in the landscape offers him that and reminds him of other such islands encountered in previous trips across the continent (“eight times” in all [277]), protected places of retreat and momentary hope. That respite is Glacier National Park he calls it “the glorious Savings” (278) where “you stand in the sign of Conservation” (281), a place that this “speed-drugged driver” (280) experiences as a welcome “mystery maybe / a reflex counterpart of all the plunder / that had been flowing beneath our wheels” (281). And this prompts memories of counterpart landscapes in America:

Snatches of other trips, remembered piecemeal,
Keep crowding in:
. . .
Above the canyon at Yellowstone
after having taken in the sights all day
chasm-cringingly
I plunged all night
. . .
but at Zion, at the bottom of a canyon, looking up—
and all night I heard the deep convulsive intake of the desert
through the gulches. (285-86)
But even in protected places there is always the highway:
In the Big Horns
Around many a squirming, wriggling
Squiggle-curve
…
Leaving Gila Bend
numerous saguaros
signaling
but what?
. . .
The driving was so easy,
though we started late
we came to the Canyon early
got a place but a few yards from a drop-off. (286-87)

There are other places of more marginal respite, but they, more consistently a part of the modern American landscape he is encountering, bring him back to his rhetorical problem. There’s “the motel / where the mountain rose / right out of the back yard,”

or a stretch of beach on the Pacific
with kelp, shells, pebbles, oil slick
and a rusty empty can
of Chicken of the Sea.
. . .
What tell them?
. . .
Only this can I say in full authority:
“To be safe in striking at the powerful
make sure that your blows are powerless.” (288, 292)

That’s a lot of quoting, but immersion in the flow of his words is the way a reader comes to inhabit Burke’s experience of, and so his attitude toward, this landscape. As we inhabit his images we can begin to feel for ourselves his concern about our technology-driven way of life and its seemingly inevitable consequences. That is how these vicarious experiences that he prepared for his readers can do the powerful rhetorical work he described in Counter-Statement when he noted that “we think in universals but we feel particulars (47), and again, much later, in his essay, “Auscultation, Creation, and Revision,” when he wrote that experience, encountered imaginatively as metaphor, “gives substance to our feeling…” (144). Attitudes, finally, are felt. And feeling, finally, is where we live.

“Eye-Crossing from Brooklyn to Manhattan”

This one, too, is a poem about a rhetorical problem, one the poet has trouble finding words to address. Indeed, he has such trouble that he can’t get to the problem, he doesn’t find himself able even to articulate it, until the 13th stanza:

As with an aging literary man who, knowing
that words see but within
yet finding himself impelled to build a poem
that takes for generating core a startling View,
a novel visual Spaciousness

(he asks himself: “Those who have not witnessed it,
how tell them? –and why tell those who have?
Can you do more than say ‘remember’?”) (15-16)

This second poem identifies the second of the two representative American landscapes that Whitman memorialized in “Song of the Open Road” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” One is the vast continent itself; the other essential landscape is the city—particularly America’s primary city, New York. “Eye-Crossing” is Burke’s poem about this urban landscape, about this “startling View” that he sees and finds he doesn’t know how to express to his compatriots. Whitman wrote about finding himself and an American community in the present and the future while riding the ferry across the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan. But now, as Burke notes, there is no more ferry, there is hardly a community, and the experience of crossing that river is something else entirely. That is how he begins the poem’s ending:

Crossing?
Just as the roads get jammed that lead
each week-day morning from Long Island to Manhattan,
so the roads get jammed that lead that evening
from Manhattan to Long Island.
And many’s the driver that curses crossing. (22)

Burke’s “Sinkership” is about the frantic mobility of the American nation and the alienating experience of inhabiting it: “the ever-changing signature of empire, / proud, with its ruins” that “flows past our wheels” (278). His “Eye-Crossing” poem is about another alienating experience in America, this of the exhausting immobility—“a restlessness unending, back and forth” (7)—of life for so many, especially for him, in the city. Here an aging Burke—now in his seventies—is facing his losses: of friends, of freedom to walk and wander, and the imminent death of his wife. The two poems recount the equally isolating experiences of mobility and immobility in America, expressing his anxiety about both the present and the future. In “Sinkership,” the continent is encountered at high velocity, from behind the windows of a private car. In “Eye-Crossing,” the city is encountered from behind an apartment window by a lonely man about to become more lonely. Even when Burke is able to go out for an errand, or for a late night walk, he is alone and so are the people he encounters: “eight or ten lone wandering shapes, / and all as afraid of me as I of them? / We kept a wholesome distance from one another” (11). For him, for the voice with which his readers are invited to identify, both landscapes afford experiences of alienation and risk.

In this poem the rhetorical problem is not what to say but how to say it. And perhaps even whether to try. In “Sinkership” he needs to decide what to say. Here he knows but doubts the efficacy of saying it. That is part of his immobility. His first attempt to say it breaks down in his preoccupation with risk and fragility—his own, and his wife’s. His second is frozen by “a saddeningly vexing letter / from a dear friend gone sour” (5). His third begins to find a way to say what he needs to say as he describes the landscape of the city directly:

The architectural piles, erections, impositions,
monsters of high-powered real estate promotion—
from a room high on Brooklyn Heights
the gaze is across and UP, to those things’ peak,
their arrogance!
When measured by this scale of views from Brooklyn
they are as though deserted. (6)

But then he is stalled again by a brief meditation on the immobility of the Cold War and so, emboldened by “alky,” tries a late night walk but is chased back in by “the teeth of the biting wind" (8).

He starts again with a story of an encounter at a supermarket where he tries to help another manage traffic at the checkout line and finds himself accessory to a confrontation that ends with customers shouting at him and one expelled from the store. Having tried to help, he pays and leaves “feel[ing] all about his head / a glowering anti-glowing counter-halo . . .” (10). Then he starts again by walking again, alone and cold; then again by contemplating the awkward work of the tugs maneuvering freight ships at the dock. Then he starts by stopping at a nearly empty bar. Then walking again, finding himself feared by a passing woman jogging. Then he contemplates strategies for getting a seat on the crowded subway that crosses under the river. Then, back at the window, he starts again:

Problems pile up, like the buildings,
Even as I write, the highest to the left
soars higher day by day.
Now but the skeleton of itself
(these things begin as people end!)
all night its network of naked bulbs keeps flickering
towards us here in Brooklyn . . .
then dying into our dawn . . .
or are our . . . are our what? (15)

That may be a description of the north tower of the World Trade Center, under construction toward its completion in 1970. And then a few lines later (more ominously for us, even, than for him):

Do I foresee that day, while gazing across, as though that realm was alien
Forfend forfending of my prayer
that if and when and as such things should be
those (from here) silent monsters (over there)
will have by then gone crumbled into rubble,
and nothing all abroad
but ancient Egypt’s pyramidal piles of empire-building hierarchal stylized
dung remains. (18)

In the gloss that follows that stanza, Burke notes that he did not intend to offer “prophecy” here—only a projection of the dark promise of entelechy: given the direction we are going showing where we might be heading (18). And we, reading after 9/11/2001, are left wondering if perhaps entelechy does explain some of it.

All in all, he describes here neither problem nor solution. What he does do is show us, with the images of his experience, an attitude. So what is that attitude? In his “After-Words”—where he defines the project of lyric poetry as enacting an attitude—he portrays us, his readers, asking him that. After offering us a set of unsatisfactory answers he has us challenge him with this: “could you at least give us a first rough approximate, by selecting one word or another that at least points vaguely in the right direction (for instance, like pointing with the sweep of the arm rather than with the index finger)?” His answer, somewhat reluctant: “So, for a first rough approximate, I’d propose that the summarizing lyric attitude be called ‘apprehensive’” (26). Burke is apprehensive because he sees around corners, to where the landscapes we have made for ourselves are leading us, a vision enabled by his use of the Aristotelian principle of entelechy. As he put it elsewhere, “by ‘entelechy,’ I refer to such use of symbolic resources that potentialities can be said to attain their perfect fulfillment.” (“Archetype” 123). Further, this “culminative aspect of the entelechial principle . . . can also come to a focus in the symbolizing of an attitude, since attitudes possess a summarizing quality.” And, still further, “an attitude towards a situation can be developed in terms of a narrative that sums up a situation not by discussing the situation as such, but by depicting a thoroughgoing response to it” (“Archetype” 131). This, quite precisely, is what Burke has to say, and how he says it, in his “Eye-Crossing” poem—indeed, in both of these poems of the American landscape. They express, and in doing so identify in us if we are paying attention, the apprehensiveness that follows from powerlessness, from knowing what is happening—to himself, to his wife, to his nation—and being unable to do anything about it but offer the unwieldy wielding of words:

(My own words tangle like our entangled ways,
of hoping to stave off destruction
by piling up magic mountains of destructiveness.) (17)

Landscapes: Whitmanesque and Burke

In his Philosophy of Literary Form, Burke characterized the “Whitmanesque” as a strategy that “focuses attention upon the ‘human’ element in our patterns of sociality, the typical situations of home life, farming, manufacture, etc.” The problem with that sort of appeal is that it can “come to function as little more than a promiscuous flattering of the status quo, in its bad aspects as well as its good ones” (224). Consequently, the Whitmanesque is in perpetual need of correction and critique, and that is a large part of Burke’s project in these two poems about late twentieth century American landscapes. They are Whitmanesque in two senses: in their content as they describe the experiences of daily life in those landscapes, and in their context as explicit responses to particular Whitman poems. For Burke, the landscapes that Whitman found so promising promise only problems for the nation’s future.

Poetry that is Whitmanesque gathers its rhetorical power from the familiarity of its images, from our comfortable residence in the typical situations that it presents. We readily identify with the experiences such poetry recounts—with the places it describes and with the people who populate those places. We know them well. The places are ours and the people are us. By contrast, with Burke’s deliberate effort to be careful about not flattering the status quo in which we are comfortable, we have the opportunity to identify ourselves with the anxiety that follows from Burke’s “apprehensive” attitude. And so our very familiarity with the images, and with our traditional attitude toward those images—the attitude canonized by Whitman’s great poems can provoke a change in us if we identify with Burke’s experience of encountering those images without the filters of our familiarity, and then seeing farther around their corners.

But these two poems suggest that the most powerful instances of a Whitmanesque rhetorical art are our landscapes themselves—the material enactments of our “patterns of sociality” that are our placement, our context for understanding who, individually and collectively, we are. Inhabited in their empirical reality, the landscapes we create claim wordlessly what is and what must be. Burke uses words in these poems to challenge such claims, and words can do that—they can articulate alternative identities for us to imagine. He often wrote such words, quite polemically, such as: “it would be better for us, in the long run, if we ‘identified ourselves’ rather with the natural things that we are progressively destroying—our trees, our rivers, our land, even our air, all of which we are but a lowly ecological part of” (“Poetics” 414). But in these poems, facing up against the evidence of everyday experience in the landscape, where Burke finds no opportunity for such identification beyond a few brief passages in “Sinkership,” his words lack that kind of confidence and express instead, and vividly, his grave apprehension.

It’s in identification itself that the distance between Whitmanesque and Burkean landscapes are most marked. Whitman is typically uplifted by virtue of identifying with everyone he encounters and with the encompassing landscape itself. In Burke, it’s just the opposite: the landscape is the product of technological displacement of nature and the humans within it feel isolated from one another. To some extent this difference no doubt results from the contrast between Whitmanesque flattering of the status quo and Burkean realism, but one suspects it is also equally a sign of the difference between Whitman’s century and Burke’s.

With words, it seems, consubstantiality is possible. But when the greatest rhetorical power we encounter takes the irrefutable form of a landscape that we must inhabit in crowded isolation, there seems to be little to hope for. That is what I see in these two late poems of the American landscape, and more so in the later of the two. What both seem most apprehensive about is not only our failure to care for the natural world that enables our existence but also the way this failure seems to go hand-in-hand with our increasing failure to connect with each other, to care for each other, a failure he presents as a product of the landscapes we have created. This, in my reading of these poems, may be the greatest environmental damage we have done.

These poems recount experiences of profound alienation. Certainly, Burke was not the first to complain that cities can be alienating—and his own sense of that experience is intensified by his circumstance of writing “Eye-Crossing” while his wife was dying. But a bracketed anecdote in “Sinkership” tells a tale of how the technological American way of life changes simultaneously both nature and human relations. The anecdote tells the tale of a couple who has put their savings into a motel by the side of highway so they could make their way through trade. The plan works though, of course, it’s no utopia:

True, even the thoughtlessness of customers brings pain.
Things that should be pulled, they twist—
things that should be twisted, they first try abruptly pulling.
So there is a steady drain of minor technologic mayhem
to cut the earnest aging couple’s income over outgo. (284)

These kinds of problems, following from practical and self-interested human relations, are a part of the life that the highway had provided. The exchange of money brings more people into contact while simultaneously rendering human relations more and more superficial and instrumental, leaving us with the irony that

strangers minister to strangers
in self-willed strife with one another
striving to give the best years of their lives
towards answering a motorist’s demands (284)

Furthermore, “progress” can be ruthless in bringing to an end the days when a couple could build or buy a motel by the side of the road and have at least commercial relations with others, face-to-face, voice-to-voice:

A by-pass (aided by infloonce)
cuts through the region at a distance,
leaving the neo-hostelry far from shore,
to be ignored, or found by penny-pinching Wandering
Scholars,
in search of bargains,
though ready to weep in principle
at such victimage. (285)

The technological way of life that brings the modern highway system brings with it new strains in human relations. The farther we get from nature, it seems, the farther we get from one another as well.

So where are we now? I wrote this essay to continue my project of understanding ways that the landscapes we create and inhabit work rhetorically to shape and create our identities. And what I found in Burke’s two long poems of the American landscape as he encountered it late in his life is the suggestion that our landscapes speak back to us, with considerable rhetorical power, to deliver an unsettling message. In the “typical situations” of our landscapes, Whitmanesque identification in “the ‘human’ element in our patterns of sociality” is now displaced by environments of our own making, by ways of life that limit our possibilities for meaningful identification with one another. It is as if Burke’s poems of our landscape leave us inhabiting, with him, a place within it (a car crossing I-90 perhaps, or an apartment in Brooklyn Heights) where we share his “apprehensive” recognition of the end of rhetorical identification around us, both among people and with nature. But in becoming consubstantial with Burke in acknowledging and exploring in the landscape the causes of that apprehension, we might take a step, however small, toward a new identity in which apprehension can give way to hope.

**The author is indebted to Robert Wess whose invitation prompted this essay and whose thorough understanding of Burke and eloquent editorial eye enriched and clarified the work he was able to do here. KB Journal would like to thank the Kenneth Burke Literary Trust for permission to cite extensively from “Tossing on Floodtides of Sinkership: A Diaristic Fragment," which appeared in Burke's Collected Poems in 1968.

Notes

1. Landscapes are, by definition, created by the interaction of humans and the land. Landscapes are what we make of the land: they emerge from our perceptions of the land as documented in the landscape art that we use to decorate the walls of our buildings and they emerge from our habitations of the land, from our placement of those buildings, and the other structures we create, on the land.

2. This poem probably describes a trip late in the summer of 1966 west to Ellensburg, Washington, where he taught from September through December of that year at Central Washington State College (Letters 90 91).

3. The version of the poem used here and listed in the “works cited” is the most recent, appearing in 2005 in Late Poems, 1968 1993 under the title “An Eye Poem for the Ear, with Prose Introduction, Glosses, and After Words (`Eye Crossing from Brooklyn to Manhattan’).” As Burke explains in this version, the poem originally appeared in The Nation on June 2, 1969 (3). In this 1969 version, there is no prose, that is, no introduction, glosses, or after words. These prose additions first appear in the version with the title “An Eye-Poem for the Ear (With Prose Introduction, Glosses, and After-Words),” published in Directions in Literary Criticism: Contemporary Approaches to Literature, ed. Stanley Weintraub and Philip Young (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1973), 228 51. Burke described this volume as a festschrift for his friend Henry Sams, chair of English at Penn State, who had used the poem in a graduate course and sent Burke his students’ responses; Burke told William H. Rueckert that he added the prose commentary to the poem published in The Nation to “fit the pattern” of that book (Letters 180; see also 145). This 1973 version reappears in 2003 in Burke, On Human Nature, with the title “Eye Crossing From Brooklyn to Manhattan: An Eye Poem for the Ear (With Prose Introduction, Glosses, and After-Words),” where Rueckert adds a brief introduction (305 07). Late Poems reprints the 1973 version again, with another modified title, and privileges it as the first of the late poems.

4. For an astute discussion of Whitman’s connection to the Helhaven satire in the context of a thorough chronicle of Burke’s varying responses to Whitman from the 1930s to the 1970s, see Rueckert, “Kenneth Burke’s Encounters with Walt Whitman.”

5. Burke doesn’t say exactly that in “Auscultation, Creation, and Revision,” but he says enough to lead me to say it. What he says is this: That in the “new esthetic frame”—one in which the functions of “criticism and poetry” are “merging” and become the “obverse and reverse of the same coin” (145)—the images and metaphors of art “give[s] substance to our feeling of what it might be like to know” the sort of truth about our circumstances that religionists and metaphysicians promise to tell us (144). Indeed, as Bernard Brock argues, the late Burke essentially does the work of “substituting attitudes for substance” (324).

6. Although many in America were saying just such things in 1966 and 1967 as public opposition to the war in Vietnam was intensifying, many of us can remember places and circumstances in which, indeed, you couldn’t “tell them that.” Driving west toward Central Washington State College, Burke might have been remembering a situation at the University of Washington some 15 years before when the English Department tried to offer him a visiting appointment but the administration denied it citing concerns that, given some of his activities of the thirties, he might, as he wrote to Cowley, “be a subversive influence in the classroom” (Jay 308). Burke and his supporters worked to appeal the decision but without success and the episode seems to have cut deep. “I’m a guilt-ridden man,” he wrote to Cowley as it was winding down, “but I do dare feel that I am pious as those reactionary, unregal among the Regents are not . . . I love my country with a fury that farts cannot deny me” (Jay 309; Burke’s ellipsis). For a list of the sources that document this episode see Wess 56, note 3; I am indebted to Wess for suggesting to me that this might explain Burke’s statement in the poem that “Maybe I can’t say anything.”

Works Cited

Brock, Bernard. “The Evolution of Kenneth Burke’s Philosophy of Rhetoric: Dialectic between Epistemology and Ontology.” Chesebro 309-28.

Burke, Kenneth. “Archetype and Entelechy.” Burke, On Human Nature 121-38.

---. “Auscultation, Creation, and Revision.” Chesebro 42-172.

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Burke, Socioecology, and the Example of Cuban Agriculture

Joshua Frye, Purdue University

Abstract: This essay contributes the term 'socioecology' to the lexicon of Burkean ecocriticism, a term that can serve to articulate Burke's concern with ecological holism. The social/earth connection in socioecology may be analogized to the language/body connection in symbolic action. The essay illustrates this term with examples from the Burke corpus, theorizes it with the help of Burke, and applies it, mainly to the example of the Cuba's current experimental organic agriculture system.

IT IS FOR GOOD REASON that Kenneth Burke has been called a “pioneer of ecocriticism” (Coupe, 2001). Burke’s longstanding concerns about the ecology of our planet are widely recognized. Little attention has been given, however, to the possibility of extending use of Burke’s theorizing of interrelations between the symbolic realm of language and the bodily realm of motion to the theorizing of the interrelations between social structures and the earth’s ecology. In other words, one may analogize “symbolic action” (the language/body connection) to “socioecology” (the social/earth connection). It’s arguable, moreover, that the concept of socioecology doesn’t import ideas into the Burke corpus so much as it provides a focal point around which to organize material that is already there, waiting to be used as a framework to help ecocriticism discern ecological implications of social practices. The term “socioecology” is particularly Burkean insofar as it displaces the more familiar “socioeconomic” to focus attention on cooperation, communication, and the earth instead of reducing the earth to mere raw materials for production and human beings to mere cogs in the economic system.

To add “socioecology” to the lexicon of Burkean ecocriticism, the present essay will begin with examples of Burke’s concerns with the social/earth connection in both his writings and his life-style. Then, in its second part it will undertake a theoretical consideration of socioecology, particularly its interrelation of cooperation, communication, and the earth. Finally, after briefly considering a few examples of contemporary sustainable agriculture philosophy and practice, its third part will apply the concept of socioecology to the Cuban example.

I

However distinct symbolic action and socioecology may be, analysis of one can sometimes coalesce with analysis of the other. A notable example appears in the context of Burke’s conceptualization of symbolic action in the title essay in The Philosophy of Literary Form. This is one of his most extensive discussions of symbolic action, containing among other things his identification of the respects in which a symbolic action is a “chart,” a “prayer,” and a “dream.” It’s in the course of elaborating on the “chart” dimension that this coalescence occurs.

Prior to its occurrence, Burke is stressing, in opposition to what he sometimes calls “naïve verbal realism” (1966, p. 5), that a “chart” is “magical” insofar as it necessarily is to some extent a “decree” rather than an a verbal reproduction of reality:

It may annoy some persons that I take the realistic chart to possess “magical” ingredients. That is, if you size up a situation in the name of regimentation you decree it a different essence than if you sized it up in the name of planned economy. The choice here is not a choice between magic and no magic, but a choice between magics that vary in their degree of approximation to the truth. (1973, p. 6)

“Regimentation” and “planned economy” are shorthand for competing views of economic policy in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930s (The Philosophy of Literary Form first appeared in 1941). “Regimentation” is the laissez faire argument that planning is equivalent to regimenting, something to avoid. It decrees that planning has a negative essence. “Planned economy” does the opposite, decreeing a positive essence by stressing the need for “planning” to avoid the economic catastrophe of the recent past.

In this context, Burke adds that “regimentation” and “planned economy,” however great their differences, are similar in assuming “that increased industrial production is itself a good” (1973b, p. 6). This similarity prompts Burke to wonder whether what’s needed is an alternative to both, and it’s at this point that the coalescence occurs:

But when we recall that every increase in the consumption of natural resources could with equal relevance be characterized as a corresponding increase in the destruction of natural resources, we can glimpse the opportunity for a totally different magic here, that would size up the situation by a different quality of namings. And when I read recently of an estimate that more soil had been lost through erosion in the last twenty years than in all the rest of human history, I began to ask whether either the “regimentation” magic or the “planned economy” magic is close enough approximate for the naming of the situation in which we now are. (1973, p. 6)

In this passage, Burke’s is continuing his analysis of the “chart” dimension of symbolic action, indicating how different charts or “namings” direct one’s attention differently, leading to different social practices. But in indicating how different “namings” promote different relations with the earth, he becomes an analyst of socioecology as well as symbolic action. From this socioecological standpoint, he can go beyond his demonstration of how the “chart” dimension of symbolic action works to critique the ecological implications of both “regimentation” and “planned economy.”

Socioecology is narrower in scope than symbolic action in the sense that symbolic action occurs in all areas, whereas socioecology concerns itself with only one area and thus surfaces only when Burke turns his attention to this area. But in another sense socioecology is broader in scope in its concern with the “big picture,” the holistic interaction between social structures and the earth that may be conceived as the ultimate container of all symbolic acts, which all involve the social dimension of verbal action and the motion of the body that is embedded in the processes sustaining life on earth.

Burke is most explicitly socioecological in those cases where he concerns himself directly with this “big picture.” Perhaps the best-known example of these is Burke’s famous prediction in Attitudes toward History, first published in 1937:

Among the sciences, there is one little fellow named Ecology, and in time we shall pay him more attention. He teaches us that the total economy of this planet cannot be guided by an efficient rationale of exploitation alone. . . . So far, the laws of ecology have begun avenging themselves against restricted human concepts of profit by countering deforestation and deep plowing with floods, droughts, dust storms, and aggravated soil erosion. And in a capitalist economy, these trends will be arrested only insofar as collectivistic ingredients of control are introduced. . . . (1984a, p. 150; Burke’s italics)

Here Burke is socioecological in noting that social structures designed for economic profit can interact with the earth in ways that prove counter productive in the long run. Hawken echoes Burke in arguing that the symbolic logic of the free-market system of commerce is flawed in its incessant externalization of costs that a specific production unit engenders. The loss of top-soil is an example of this. With its heavy machinery, extensive production, intensive irrigation, and high chemical inputs, industrial agribusiness contributed to the onset of the Dust Bowl (Sears, 1935). In her insightful study of the historical context of Burke’s 1937 prediction, Seigel argues that Burke’s ecologically informed thought in Attitudes toward History pivots on systematic criticisms of “technologically infused farming practices” (2004, p. 394).

Seigel also calls attention to the critique of “efficiency” that is evident in Burke’s 1937 prediction and that is spelled out in detail in the entry for “efficiency” in his “Dictionary of Pivotal Terms,” in Attitudes toward History. In this critique, Burke takes as his standpoint the socioecological interrelations among parts in the “total economy of the planet.” From this standpoint, Burke can identify ways that something may be efficient in one way and simultaneously inefficient in another.

But it is not only in his writing that we find Burke critiquing industrial capitalism’s “efficient” exploitation of the earth. Describing himself as “agro bohemian and `Marxoid’” (Burks, 1991, p. 219), Burke extended his critique beyond his writing to a pastoral life style that eschewed the consumerism that came to dominate twentieth century American culture. His refusal of modern conveniences extended even to electricity and plumbing. According to Burks, he liked to call his outhouse and outdoor water pump “Garden of Eden Plumbing” (1991, p. 230). Eventually he yielded but only when his hand was forced. He got electricity in 1949, when he couldn’t get good kerosene any more (Cowley, 1951, pp. 227-28), and he added modern plumbing in the 1960s when Libbie, his wife, had to use a wheelchair because of failing health (Rueckert, 1994, p. 90). Even if it is speculative that these anti-modern choices were in fact emblematic of his agro-bohemian, Marxoid, and artistic-ethical preferences, the fact remains that a life devoid of excessively consumptive behavior allowed for greater concentration on his symbolic work and at the same time left a less intrusive “ecological footprint” (for more on this term, see Chambers, et al.).

Burke once stated in an interview that “the only cure for digging in the dirt is an idea. The cure for any idea is more ideas. The cure for all ideas is digging in the dirt” (2003, pp. 353-354). Burke certainly practiced a balanced, integrative physical and symbolic lifestyle—simple and austere yet complex and celebrative. Burke believed that because of the tendency in human motivation to take something to the end of the line (entelechial motivation), a life devoted to the endless toil of motion in an advanced, industrial capitalist society was driven by the “idiotic baubles that keep millions frantically at work” (1984a, p. 258). He accordingly refused the material amenities of that lifestyle for a simple, pastoral one that he felt was more conducive to symbolic labor. Such a lifestyle resonates with many strands of environmental and back to the land movements. Trainer, for example, called for a society in which frugality was valued and practiced over wastefulness, and where unscrupulous over consumption was replaced with a higher quality of life emanating from alternative sources of satisfaction.

II

Socioecology, like symbolic action, functions at—and through—a nexus. While symbolic action helps to explain dynamics between the physical body (motion) and language (action), socioecology may be used to analyze the communicative and cooperative dynamics between a given society or sociocultural group and its relation to and impact on the living earth. That is to say, social beliefs, arrangements, and values are intertwined with specific practices and ways of relating to the earth.

Such attention to relations with the earth would analogically extend Burke’s regular attention to the relations of the symbolic to the physical on individual and societal levels. In stating that “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” (1966, p. 6), Burke emphasizes simultaneously both the social and physical levels. A body housing a commitment to organic farming, for example, is sure to “hop around” a farm in a manner significantly different from someone who contracts with Monsanto for seed and pesticide to grow governmentally-subsidized crops. The very design rationale for the human-land relationship is fundamentally disparate in the two cases, and both suggest that the relation of the symbolic to human bodies can easily be extended to the body of the earth. One can similarly broaden the scope of Burke’s term “socioanagogic”:

we have chosen the unwieldy name of the “socioanagogic.” The word is intended to sum up the ways in which things of the senses are secretly emblematic of motives in the social order, so that all visible, tangible entities become an enigma, and materials become a pageantry. . . . (1968, p. xv)

Here, Burke is alluding to sensible, perceivable objects that are part and parcel of a given social order. These objects are empirically observable, but in the context of the social order in which they function, they are emblematic of motives that go beyond the empirical. When participants in the social order see them they see more than meets the empirical eye. For example, a calendar designed by a biodynamic farming group indicates preferred planting