As part of the Prelude to Prelims Summer, I will be rereading the Burkeian corpus--as much as I can, anyway. We begin, as always, with Counter-Statement
Burke's Preface sets up an opposition between "pamphleteering" ("Leaning") and inquiry, but "He may not be wholly satisfied by the thought of doing exclusively either." (vii)
Burke on composition: "Once he has pamphleteered, however, dare he not in revision try, even at the risk of cancelling himself, to transform the contentious into the reflective?" (viii)
On what art does: "Art's very accumulation (its discordant voices arising out of many systems) serves to undermine any one rigid scheme of living--and herein lies 'wickedness' enough" (viii). If LeGuin is right, and that dystopia is stagnation and rigidness, then art really is the answer.
3 key words: Perhaps, Norm, and Form. “The quest of the ‘norm’ led to a study of the varied ways in which men seek by symbolic means to make themselves at home in social tensions.” (xi). And of course it’s a quest, an adventure that’s usually fruitless undertaken by only the heroic few. And of course he’s worried about the symbolic already, and the comfort it provides. “At home” is an interesting phrase, since the home itself can be a social tension.
Two ways to see art and society: The “censorship” principle and the “lightening rod” principle (xii). Burke quickly connects the censorship principle to Plato’s Republic, where as Aristotle’s Poetics gets put in opposition as the lightening rod. Of course, we know the two men had differing opinions about mimesis in art (“‘Censorship’ implies a one-to-one ratio between art and society” xii), about “real” versus “ideal” and that, I think is why Burke divides them here. However, I wonder if it is wise to always look for Plato’s [Socrates’] opposite in Aristotle, as though the two were the polar ends of some continuum. They are far more similar than they are different, but it looks like I’ll have to go back to the Poetics to rediscover the nuances I seem to have forgotten.
Burke, unsurprisingly, links the Platonic fear of mimesis to totalitarianism, which he contrasts with “the ‘liberal’ point of view” (xii). Art is a type of purification, a release valve for tension in society (drawing the energy away from harm, like a lightening rod). To me, this scheme seems much more totalitarian: Art is used to quell our rebellious instincts, to calm the would-be revolutionaries. Let them mosh at punk concerts, and they won’t cause a real revolution. “…society is protected in the long run only by the more liberal principle” (xii). But protection just might be the problem, if we are protecting or conserving a culture that is unhealthy or just plain immoral (cough, Iraq war, cough). After all, he says he does not mean that there is “any hope in mass hysterias engineered by demagogues who are in turn assisted by efficient controls over the channels of information and communication” (i.e. The Current Administration and Fox News). And yet if we use Burke’s “liberal” art to quell the masses, then such demagogues are never removed from power. Dystopias work not because they comfort us as art, but because they enflame us, make us afraid. While Burke’s Rhetoric of Motives seems to promote the Liberal view (art as comfort, as a symbolic means of working out present tensions), dystopian fiction utilizes the emotions such an attitude allows (for the censorship mode wouldn’t even allow dystopian fiction to be written) to disquiet its readers into action. It’s not mimesis, but the desire to avoid mimesis that drives the rhetorical mechanisms of dystopian fiction.
“The sort of fear I had in mind, for example, concerned the attitude toward the ‘promises’ of applied science. More and more people, in recent years, are coming to realize that technology can be as ominous as it is promising. Such fear, if properly rationalized, is but the kind of discretion a society should have with regard to all new powers” (xiii) Burke’s dystopianism appears here. His dependency on “rationalization” however, is as problematic as the rationalization promoted by the dystopian novels of the era he was writing in (40s-60s). Later dystopias dismiss rationality and rationalization as a means of power itself (a la Foucault).
More dystopian Burke appears in his mention of his reaction to Capeks’ R.U.R. which he found frightening because it imagined not an extraterrestrial force, but an “invader already here, from within” causing the destruction of humanity. He decides that “the high development fo modern technology might change the rules somewhat; accordingly, conditions that are ‘normal’ to our society would probably have been fatal to societies in which there was a much smaller percentage of technology” (x). The phraseology here catches me every time; I’ve got it all marked up in my book. First, he decides that technology isn’t all bad, that it has “changed the rules” but only ‘somewhat.” What rules those are, he is not clear. Rules of relationships between people? Of art? Of rhetoric? What does technology normalize today that would have been fatal to, say, medieval people? (Stargate tries to answer this, I think). What does it mean, also, to have a society classified by its “percentage” of technology? What “percentage” are we now, I ask, as I sit in Starbucks, listening to a CD, while typing on a laptop onto a one gig thumbdrive smaller than my actual thumb as baristas use security TVs to watch cars approach the drive through? Percentages are ratios, X to Y. So a percentage of technology would be the ratio of technology to…what? People? Humanity? Culture? Nature? What is the whole from which he is taking a part? What opposition is he setting up when he makes this division? What happens when we hit 100%?
Chapter 1. Three Adepts of ‘Pure’ Literature
This chapter concerns three writers who have some relationship to Realism or Realist literature. Burke examines each writer (Flaubert, Pater and DeGourmont) for what they can tell us about literature’s relationship to audiences, to society, and to constructedness of sentences how “unornamented” or “arhetorical” (well, seemingly arhetorical) the prose seems to be.
Someone should compare Burke’s comments on Flaubert with Derrida’s. Not me.
Flaubert was looking for a “pure” art, uncontaminated by social ties, one that seemed to lack “method” or mechanics. Burke is especially interested that Flaubert chose to use the form of “novel” to attempt this purification, because it is the genre “in which glitter is most an obstacle, the genre wherein one can be rhetorically brilliant only by subterfuge, or by endangering the purity of one’s effect” (7). Or, more clearly, “The novel makes of literature the verbalization of experience, the conversion of life into diction” (7). If Flaubert really wanted to do a verbal art without social implications, a Non Realist art for art’s sake, he should have chosen a different genre!
“An author who lives most of his live in his head must perform his transgressions on paper” (24). Or, a blog?
