Toward Helhaven: Burke's Dystopian Imagination

AmyLea Clemons. "Toward Helhaven: Burke's Dystopian Imagination." Presented at the Seventh Triennial Conference of the Kenneth Burke Society. Villanova University, Radnor, PA. June 29-July 2, 2008.

"On the other hand, though I have, for several months, been compulsively clipping news stories about pollution, in the long run any kind of complaining becomes a damned bore" (Burke, Hellhaven 56).

"Toward Helhaven (misspelled in your program--but that's my fault): Three Stages of a Vision" appeared in the early 1970s, declaring that "Some give a decent life on Earth ten years, some thirty, some at most a hundred" (62). Here we are in 2008, though--and while watching CNN might convince us that we are now living in Burke's technological and ecological wasteland, we have not yet had to leave the planet. Dystopian or anti-utopian fictions such as Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, LeGuin's The Dispossessed, and Atwood's Oryx and Crake begin with a satirical critique of the author's current conditions and extrapolate the situation into the future, weaving together narrative, satire, and argument to create powerful texts that, in the end, are not about some future hero or heroine, but about the reader in his or her present. In the 1930s and 40s the genre emerged and flourished; Hitler's march across Europe, the US's flailing then recovering economy, new forays into technology, and the horrors of the eventual world wide war led many writers to put pen to paper and imagine the worst case scenario. But Burke's comment that I began this presentation with holds true: in the long run, these warnings fall flat, they become too generic, predictable, and no longer rhetorically effective. A damned bore, which brings us no closer to preventing apocalypse than before.

In the same essay that Burke declares these complaints "boring," he offers his own dystopian vision of ecological collapse, overwhelming technology, and constant surveillance. This hellhaven satire, however, could be seen as yet another complaint--ineffectual, unenlightening, and even trite--if we do not consider Burke's understanding of rhetoric and social change. The rest of this presentation will highlight Burke's dystopian imaginings as they are threaded through CounterStatement and Permanence and Change, and point to how these works emphasize Burke's inherent hope in human Acts and Agency.

First, let me outline some of my assumptions about dystopian fiction. Dystopian fiction is persuasive in a very particular way: It attempts to move the reader to action by presenting an extrapolation of the current situation (Eric Rabkin Nowhere Else). Dystopian fiction--particularly that of the 1930s to 1950s--has a regular form and plot structure; while the particularities of these structures are up for debate, few deny that dystopian fictions are highly "generic" and easy to recognize for their formal elements, tropes, and appeals (Darko Suvin and Gary Wolfe have both posited logical structures for the genre). More particularly, I argue, dystopian fiction's structure has an awareness of its readers and the tendencies of reading humans to identify with, engage with, and emotionally invest in certain plot structures and hero archetypes. As such, dystopian fictions (both in literature and film) feature heavily on space and context (for readers to recognize similarities) and attempt to provide a hero that all can identify with. What is important for me is that even as I describe here these structures and assumptions, I find myself struggling to avoid Burkeian terminology because there are few who are able to describe the workings of dystopian fiction as Burke does. It is not just that Burke provides us with terms for analysis, however; but that the connection between Burke and dystopianist thought goes both ways: That is, I do not want to "use" Burke to analyze dystopian fiction, but to show how what M. Keith Booker calls a "dystopian impulse"--the impulse to warn and to extrapolate to a worse case scenario is already a part of Burke's system.

As early as CounterStatement, Burke shows a particular attention to what Wayne Booth calls "didactic" fiction--his opening statements on "pamphleteering" and its relationship to "pure" art and "proletariat" literature can easily be applied to utopian and the emerging genre of dystopian fiction. In discussing censorship (always a "dystopian" issue), Burke compares Plato's Republic to Aristotle's Poetics, declaring that the censorship in The Republic requires a "one-to-one ratio between art and society" (xii)--a direct correlation between what is imagined and what comes to be. Burke, unsurprisingly, links this Platonic fear of mimesis to the totalitarianism of the 20th century. Burke continues down this dystopian path as he describes how "liberal" art, acting as a lightening rod (as Aristotle suggests in the Poetics) can quell the fears of the day, becoming a release valve. The fear he describes is recognizably dystopian: "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, as he first applauds those rational enough to fear, then warns us to pay attention to the fears, all the while assuming reason will prevail against both mass panic and blind scientific pursuit. Once aware of the faults, the logical human will respond rationally and evade danger.

Later, Burke more clearly aligns himself with the arguments of dystopian fiction when he argues through Gide that "society might well be benefited from a disintegrating art, which converts each simplicity into a complexity, which ruins the possibility of ready hierarchies, which concerns itself with the problematical, the experimental, and thus by implication, works corrosively upon those expansionistic certainties preparing the way for our social cataclysms. An art may be of value purely through preventing a society from becoming too assertively, too hopelessly, itself (105). Many dystopian fictions draw their dystopian "energies" (again, Booker's word) from the extent to which they become too much of something--too capitalist, too egalitarian, too controlled, too masculine, too religious...etc. More importantly, Burke's Lexicon Rhetoricae gives us a hermeneutic for analyzing the rhetoric of literature. Even here, we see Burke's concern for identification and reader participation--both of which are essential to the mechanics of dystopian literature. In describing the Symbol and the emotions or associations it may arouse in a reader, Burke notes that "Often, to 'charge' his work Symbolically, a writer strains to imagine some excessive horror, not because he is especially addicted to such imaginings, but because the prevalence of similar but less extreme symbols has impaired their effectiveness" (164) His following discussion of the proletariat novel utilizes the terms of the Lexicon to show the relationship between "aesthetic" devices and rhetorical ones, connecting again reading, action, and social change.

Permanence and Change

, of course, is concerned with humans as social beings, but what Burke again emphasizes, particularly in Part I, is the relationship between interpretation and action. It is not simply that societies change or, in a more Marxist screen, that conflicting classes eventually lead to a synthesis of two opposing groups. For Burke, there must be a critical moment when the situation is interpreted--when, to continue Burke's opening metaphor, the trout recognizes the bait as bait and swims the other direction. Unlike the simple yet noble trout, however, "We not only interpret the character of events (manifesting in our responses all the gradations of fear, apprehension, misgiving, expectation, assurance for which there are rough behavioristic counterparts in animals)--we may also interpret our interpretations" (6). A dystopian trout would write about the horrors of bait, and other trout would respond in kind--the more horrific that bait-story, the more likely other trout are to avoid shiny lures. Burke continues to expect the (albeit flawed) human mind to first recognize, then interpret, criticize, and finally Act. While there may be some jumping around between the interpretative and critical stages, the form remains basically stable, with "any educated action" being one that has been "abstracted" (pc 105)--that is, put into a schema of interpretation. What is worrisome to Burke is that trained incapacity will prevent us from completing these steps, and, by implication, prevent us from amelioration.

Further in Permanence and Change, Burke refers to the "technological psychosis" which we see echoed in the tradition of technological dystopias such as 1984, Vonnegut's Player Piano, the Terminator series, and Burke's own Helhaven. Like most of the technological dystopias, Burke's fears seem centered on the man/machine divide, and he asserts that "man is essentially human, however earnestly he may attempt to reshape his psychological patterns in obedience to the patterns of his machines" (PC 63). Later he asks "How many people today are rotting in either useless toil or in dismal worklessness because of certain technological successes?" (101).

In general, dystopian arguments may be seen as a particular case of what Burke refers to as a danger-response (150)--an interpretation of a stimulus (in this case, a situation) as dangerous which leads to action. However, unlike the heat of fire or the pain of disease, abstracted stimuli may not lead to an immediate or ameliorative response: "We do not persuade a man to avoid danger. We can only persuade him that a given situation is dangerous and that he is using the wrong means of avoiding it" (150). Dystopian scenarios name that danger, and are, as the chapter titled "permanence and change" suggest, secular prophecies, new orientations toward the present and toward history in toto. Burke further suggests that even new discoveries can quickly become dystopic landscapes: "Such is the case with those elaborate regimens of social diet which we build up by a slowly selective process until certain ills gain prominence and authority enough to grow self sustaining or creative. These ills become powers in themselves, leading us on to still further interests, all farther and farther afield from our original patterns of humane gratification" (182). Even here, Burke's instinct seems to be to warn, to extrapolate, and to predict an unwelcome social condition.

What does it mean that Burke has (apparently) this occupational psychosis? These connections are obvious to me, because I spend most of my time thinking about apocalypse. For some reason, I am preconditioned--and, it seems to me Burke is preconditioned--by the linguistic texture in which I find myself, embedded in a set of terms and relationships that allows me to ascribe meaning (and thus cause and effect) to a given situation, to a given interpretation of a situation. The dystopian motive--that is, that which moves us to prevent dystopic situations--includes assumptions about motive, rhetoric, and human progress in general. While I've only managed to highlight Burke's dystopian imagination in two of his books here, the impulse to analyze and persuade by extrapolating to a worse case scenario remains central in most of Burke's work. In his own words, this appears to be his "attitude towards history"--and it is, despite the warnings of failure and totalitarianism, essentially a comic one, oriented toward hope. I will end with Burke's own satiric prayer: Envoi: Nocturne With Noise:

Spring springs among us, on this sod,

Spring vs. Total Fall

And may there be some kind of God,

that He have mercy on us technologic all.

Works Cited Burke, Kenneth. Counter-Statement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. ---. Permanence and Change: AN Anatomy of Purpose. 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. --- "Toward Helhaven: A Vision in Three Stages." On Human Nature: A Gathering While Everything Flows, 1967-1984. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. 54-65. Works Referenced Booker, M. Keith. The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Rabkin, Eric. "Introduction". The End of the World. Eds Eric Rabkin, Martin Greenberg, Joseph Olander. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1983.