<div dir="ltr"><p class="MsoNormal">When Burke talks about a grammar concerned
with the basic forms of thought exemplified in the attribution of motives I
have to believe he is not only referring to verbal forms of thought, but also
to any and all forms of expression. Burke is a word-man so the pentad is
primarily verbal, but so much of his thinking deals with form, with images, with
figures of thought and action that it is no stretch at all to view the pentad
as a ritualistic device that aides in the conversion of the literal into the
figurative, the figurative into the imagistic, the imagistic into the sonic, the
concrete, etc. The figure of the wheel is implied in the call to round out our
statements of motives, and whether it is a wheel of cheese, a pie, a cake or the
somewhat more spherical roast beast, all may be carved up in numerous ways,
some better than others. Does a wheel
have an optimum number of spokes, five, six (with attitude), seven (with
Trouble), no spokes like a wheel in the sky, or an infinite number of spokes
like a solid disk or a starburst? All we can do is try them all and see for ourselves. To test a theory we no doubt need to
perform a few experiments or simulations.
The trajectory from grammar, logic, rhetoric to drama or symbolic action
likewise points rather drastically beyond the written toward the oral tradition
of storytelling and enactment. <span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I have been challenged lately with sorting the Jungian
archetypal criticism from the Judeo-Christian Science buried in Burke’s thought
and with an exploration of ritual drama in Native North American Indian mythology
and spiritual traditions. Along the way
I came across Ananda K. Coomaraswamy’s <i>Figures
of Speech or Figures of Thought</i> (1946): <span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“The most immediately significant point…is that of the
artist’s priestly or ministerial function.
The original intention of intelligible forms was not to entertain us,
but literally to re-mind us; the chant is not for the approval of the ear, or
the picture for that of the eye (although these senses can be taught to approve
the splendor of truth, and can be trusted when they have been trained), but to
effect such a transformation of our being as is the purpose of all ritual
acts. It is, in fact, the ritual arts
that are the most ‘artistic,’ because the most ‘correct,’ as they must be if
they are to be effectual.” (28).<span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">As I read these words they appear to corroborate Burke’s
contribution to rhetoric, specifically his ideas about identification. The ritualistic and performative nature of
identification seems to complement Plato’s and Aristotle’s definition of
rhetoric as “the art of giving effectiveness to truth.” Just as “killing” is seen in the Rhetoric of
Motives as symbolic of transformation, I thought Jerome S. Bruner’s notion of “trouble”
might be pointing in the same direction.
Phillip Tompkins suggested “trouble” might be located within the
agent. I previously speculated that
until desire encounters an obstacle there is no conflict or “trouble” or
drama. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">Let me dip briefly into the
popular fiction of one of America’s favorite storytellers and then I’ll hit the
sack. “It was battle that paid off,
battle was the beginning and the end of a soldier’s life. The Apache, the greatest guerrilla fighter
the world ever knew, had never heard of close-order drill or any kind of
training except in fighting and surviving.”
(L’Amour <i>Shalako</i>). If killing can symbolize transformation then
certainly struggle, conflict, the fight is quite literally the process of
transformation. This is not exactly a
profound statement, but the fight for the survival of a way of life, even if
lost, may have only driven it temporarily underground, especially if it is
effective and uniquely adjusted to nature.
As Martin E. Marty summarizes in the forward to Ake Hultkrantz’s <i>Shamanic Healing and Ritual Drama</i>, “...health,
medicine and religion taken together made up a coherent and credible system. It enabled Native Americans to live in a
relationship to the environment in a way that did not lead to exploitation or
exhaustion of that natural setting.” <span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Les<span></span></p></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Jan 21, 2017 at 4:32 PM, Phillip Tompkins <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:tompkinp@colorado.edu" target="_blank">tompkinp@colorado.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div lang="EN-US" link="#0563C1" vlink="#954F72"><div class="m_-1105137415132110947WordSection1"><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d">Colleagues,<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"> I have been reading this exchange about “trouble” in the Pentad and perhaps other constructs that Burke left us. It seems to me that the “trouble” is located mainly in the agents, and that reminded me of a written exchange I had with KB. In the 1970s I taught a freshman-level course in rhetoric and communication at what is now called the University at Albany. I began with the Definition of [Hu]man; the audio-visual people on campus achieved a work of art illustrating it with sounds and sights. Students applauded it. I sent a printed copy of it to KB in the hope we could persuade him to visit our campus.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"> “Thank you most cordially,” his typewritten letter of November 16, 1974 began, “for your letter about my ‘Definition of Man’ and the charmingly picturesque representation.” The second paragraph explained his delay in responding to my letter. The third paragraph began this way:<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"> “I might get at the point by saying that I have been thinking of inserting one more clause in my Definition. Probably between ‘goaded by the spirit of Hierarchy’ and ‘rotten with perfection,’ I’d add ‘acquiring foreknowledge of death.’ It seems to be a notable distinctive aspect of human motivation. And maybe, in the last analysis, it is subsumed under the term ‘perfection,’ in the somewhat ironic sense that, etymologically, the ‘perfect’ is the ‘consummated,’ the ‘finished.’”<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"> This foreknowledge is located in the Agent, of course, where other problems may be found. KB went on to say that the thought of death had not crept up on him in old age; “for thoughts of death exercised me most when I was a child.” This letter has always meant to me that KB did not want us to take his writings as “rotten with perfection,” that he saw ways of improving how he had expressed his basic ideas. That means that we can enter into the small drama of finding problems in that work, i.e., agency, and trying to solve them.<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"> Sincerely,<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"> Phil<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><div><div style="border:none;border-top:solid #e1e1e1 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in"><p class="MsoNormal"><b><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"">From:</span></b><span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif""> KB [mailto:<a href="mailto:kb-bounces@kbjournal.org" target="_blank">kb-bounces@kbjournal.<wbr>org</a>] <b>On Behalf Of </b>Edward C Appel<br><b>Sent:</b> Friday, January 20, 2017 2:17 PM<br><b>To:</b> <a href="mailto:kb@kbjournal.org" target="_blank">kb@kbjournal.org</a><br><b>Subject:</b> [KB] Conversation Editing Redux 3<u></u><u></u></span></p></div></div><div><div class="h5"><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4447"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black">Burkophiles,</span><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4447"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4450"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> Thanks to Jim and Les for the ponderable points they raise. Will get to them later. Want to keep on the trajectory I’ve begun.</span><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4450"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4453"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> Continuing on with my “troublesome” reading of Burke:</span><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4453"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4456"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> In addition to Burke’s explicit, if elliptical, fastening of the pentad to the manifest “Trouble,” as I see it, suffusing the terms of the guilt-redemption cycle (in “Terministic Screens”), Burke, in his “collage-like” way (Tilly Warnock’s descriptive for Burke’s quirky style), performs the same operation even more nonlinearly in his introduction to the order terms in<i id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4458"> RR</i>. Note in particular pages 180-188 in the chapter, “The First Three Chapters of Genesis.” These are the pages that come just before and just after Burke’s famous chart, “Cycle of Terms Implicit in the Idea of ‘Order’” (p. 184). Just prior to introducing those guilt-redemption terms in elaborated form, Burke harks back to the pentad in order to show its inadequacy, by itself, for giving a full picture of “verbal action.” Burke says, on page 180, “The most general starting point for the Dramatistic cycle of terms would be in the term ‘act.’” Burke goes on to reference “the many kinds of ‘rationally’ purposive motion” that might implicitly follow from the idea of an “act.” One example: God’s act of Creation.</span><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4456"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4460"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> However, Burke says, this “general,” high-abstraction start for the “Dramatistic cycle of terms” would, by itself, “not serve our present purpose,” which will be putting “stress upon ‘sin’ or ‘guilt.’ Frankly, it [the pentad] would not be morbid enough.”</span><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4460"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4463"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> Morbid: etymologically, diseased. “Of, relating to, or characteristic of disease. Abnormally susceptible to or characterized by gloomy or unwholesome feelings” (the <i id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4465">Collegiate</i>, p. 807).</span><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4463"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4467"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> How, once again, did Burke describe that “route” down which the notion of an “act,” and therefore all the other “general” pentadic terms the notion of an “act” inevitably suggests, that “route” toward, also, on presumably a less-general level of abstraction---how did Burke language that slippery slope downward that “always” draws us on to, or efforts to withstand or guard against, some measure or intensity of “conflict” and “victimage,” i.e., full-fledged “drama”? It is the “gloomy route,” the “morbid” route, some manifestation of the endemic “disease” of human symbolism.</span><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4467"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4470"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> “Morbid[ity],” “disease”: analogous terms for “Trouble” in Burke’s “reenvisioning,” if you will,</span><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4470"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4473"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> On p. 17 in <i id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4475">PLF</i>, Burke invokes “disease” as literally construed, yes, but also, I think, as metaphor, equivalent to the “burden” or “discomfiture” that Burke indicates serves as, what, the “trouble” (?) that initiates one’s drama. Burke goes on, then, to articulate this general axiom of dramatic criticism: “. . . The true locus of assertion is not in the DISEASE [initiating conflict, complication, violation, burden, “Trouble”], but in the STRUCTURAL POWERS by which the poet encompasses it” [read: victimage, sacrifice, of self or other or both]” (p. 18, emphasis in original).</span><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4473"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4477"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> Disease or “sickness,” with its “symptoms,” as Burke’s terms, metaphorically employed or not, for the “Trouble” that prompts and exacerbates human dramatic conflict is highlighted in both endings of the <i id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4479">Grammar</i> (pp. 317, 443). Hence Burke’s prescription for “hypochondriasis” as salubrious ATTITUDE or regimen for coping with such symptoms, if not “curing” this endemic epidemic. “Hypochondriasis: the attitude of a patient who makes peace with his [sic] symptoms by becoming interested in them.”</span><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4477"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4481"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> In explaining in <i id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4483">RR</i> the operations of the guilt-redemption terms, Burke cannot get away from use of the pentad/hexad, nor can anyone else. The two paradigms of action are inextricably related in general discussion. Only by studied abstraction can the pentad be so detached, isolated, and employed for critical use. See especially p. 188 in <i id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4484">RR</i> for such an integrated usage.</span><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4481"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4486"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> Here’s the thing, though, that dawns on me in respect to the article in question in the <i id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4488">KBJ</i>. The authors are, as I see it, surely right that “Trouble,” no matter how it’s phrased, drives the drama. But, also, they are calling attention, perhaps indirectly, but still calling attention, to a seemingly huge lacuna in the case Burke makes in the <i id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4489">Grammar</i>. What in the foregoing text prepares us for, especially, the first ending, the one that comes after the “Philosophic Schools”? Where is the “Trouble” in the <i id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4490">Grammar</i> that explains Burke’s conclusion that symbolic facility should be likened to a “sickness” that fosters “absurd ambitions” that are dangerous for humankind and likely unstoppable? As the authors suggest, such “Trouble” is not in the <i id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4491">Grammar</i> as carefully developed analysis. The negative, the motive of perfection, the terms for order thoroughly anatomized, theological impetus as master screen and temptation that, when immanentized in pursuit of some ultimate secular reverence in this imperfect world---i.e., “logology”---these later obsessions of Burke’s that would more clearly justify the dire warning Burke makes on pp. 317-20 are nowhere present in argumentative relevance, even in Burke’s brief treatment of the “negative” under “Agency and Purpose” (pp. 294-97).</span><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4486"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4493"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> For someone reading the <i id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4495">Grammar</i> in isolation, too much seems to be missing from that book to support something of a prologue to the Helhaven Papers of the early 1970s. Such a prologue is what Burke seems to be suggesting in those two endings to the <i id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4496">Grmmar</i>. The Helhaven Papers appear after the lineaments of logology have been drawn. </span><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4493"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> </span><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4498"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> More later, perhaps, on the pentad as separate critical tool, on the ubiquity in Burke of the dramatic terms for order way BEFORE Burke gets to the <i id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4500">Grammar</i> and its airy pentad, and therefore the question, could the pentad be seen rather as the “reenvisioning” of the messy nitty-gritties of sacrifical drama?</span><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4498"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4502"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> Inquiring minds want to know.</span><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4502"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u> <u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4505"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> </span><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4508"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> Ed</span><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p></div><div id="m_-1105137415132110947yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1484864728036_4511"><p class="MsoNormal" style="background:white"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;color:black"> </span><span style="font-family:"Helvetica","sans-serif";color:black"><u></u><u></u></span></p></div></div></div></div></div></div><br>______________________________<wbr>_________________<br>
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