The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 20.0032 Tuesday, 20 January 2009
From: Hardy M. Cook <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Subject: SBReview_2: Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare
SBReview_2: Scott L. Newstok, editor. _Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare_.
West Lafayette, Indiana: Parlor Press, 2007. ISBN 978-1-60235-002-1; lv
+ 308 pp. US$32.00.
Reviewed by Murray M. Schwartz, Professor, Department of Writing,
Literature & Publishing, Emerson College
In the mid-1970s, when Kenneth Burke was approaching King Lear's age, I
had the pleasure of inviting him to spend one week a month for a
semester with the faculty and students at the Center for the
Psychological Study of the Arts at SUNY/ Buffalo. "KB," as we came to
call him, would lecture informally in the mornings, usually on
Shakespeare, and then meet with students through lunch, when his steady
sips of vodka would take him off for an afternoon nap. In the evenings,
we would have dinner together, and he would then often play his own
compositions on the piano and sing for us. (To understand his singular
way of thinking, it helps to remember his love of music. He was the
music critic for _The Dial_ from 1927 to 1929.)
It was not KB's playful penchant for neologistic critical terms, nor his
jazz-like ability to display quicksilver associations among realms of
experience that impressed us most. What engaged us most was his intact
skill as a teacher, the specificity of his responsiveness to each text,
each student. Unlike some other "mavericks" of the time (but more like
our resident maverick, Leslie Fiedler), KB was not seeking disciples,
and his methods could be adapted to almost any intellectual pursuit. As
in his writings, he was impervious to easy summation; his was a mind
unbound, open. He delighted in curiosity and fruitful ways of asking
questions, and we delighted in his endlessly suggestive possibilities
for evoking symbolic meanings drawn from the Borgesian library of his
mind. I have been re-reading him ever since, returning often to the
essays on Freud and on Hitler, to his "Definition of Man," and, of
course, to the varied essays on Shakespeare. I am always tempted, as he
was by Freud's works, and as many of his readers are, to "take
representative excerpts from his work, copy them out, and write glosses
upon them" (_The Philosophy of Literary Form_, p. 221). KB invites
dialogue, and he has provoked valuable interplay with just about every
academic field in the humanities and social sciences.
Scott L. Newstock has now given us, in a superbly edited collection, all
of Burke's writings on Shakespeare. _Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare_
brings together fourteen essays, including the classic studies of
_Othello_ (1951), _Antony and Cleopatra_ (1964), _Timon of Athens_
(1963), _Coriolanus_ (1966), and _King Lear_ (1969), along with the
earlier essays on _Venus and Adonis_ (1950), "Antony in Behalf of the
Play" (1935), "Trial Translation (from _Twelfth Night_) (1933), and the
seminal essay "Psychology and Form" (1925). He adds three previously
unpublished papers, "Shakespeare Was What?" (1964), "Notes on _Troilus
and Cressida_" (1970-71) and "Notes on _Macbeth_" (1970s and 1980s), and
a fifty-page compendium of all the other references to Shakespeare in
Burke's works. A 1972 lecture on _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ is also
included to represent Burke's lesser interest in comic form (" . . . I
must break down and admit that, with regard to this play, I am still in
the woods," he wrote (181).). The volume is an important and timely
contribution to Shakespeare scholarship, now that the wave of
theory-dominated approaches seems to be subsiding in favor of a more
exploratory commentary that is amplified by the technological revolution
in communication and publication.
Burke began writing about Shakespeare when America and Europe had
recently embraced the rhetorical forms of "public relations" and the
techniques of modern propaganda (not yet a negative term) in mass
culture. "Proposition: The hypertrophy of the psychology of information
is accompanied by the corresponding atrophy of the psychology of form,"
(24) he wrote in 1925. From the outset, he sought to encompass the full
range of "symbolic actions" that gave meaning to and enabled the
manipulation of public discourse. Shakespeare became for Burke a central
instance of the "dramatistic" formal designs that could generate and
fulfill an audience's expectations. Like Shakespeare's, Burke's was an
"anticipatory mentality" (14), almost instantly recognizing the
extensive ramifications of his historical moment. Burke and Shakespeare
share a diagnostic drive; they want to generate awareness of the
functions of symbolic acts even as they participate in them, to craft
their work and show how they are working simultaneously. In Shakespeare,
this is the metatheatrical dimension; in Burke's writings, there is the
practice of "thinking out loud," the many ways in which he includes his
thought processes in his rhetorical strategies. To be sure, this
penchant can make his essays difficult reading. Sometimes, as in his
"Notes of _Macbeth_," he can riff his way from one text to another
before returning to his theme of regicide. But if we are steadily
attentive, the seeming deflections usually come to function as dilations
on his central idea, even when he pauses to engage in a skirmish with
another interpreter (as with Clifford Geertz on pp. 189-190).
One pleasure of Newstock's collection is that the editor retains all of
Burke's notes and comments on his own thought and composition. Much of
this material would likely succumb to the computer's delete button these
days, lost forever. Phrases like, "Let us propose," and "Let us assume"
initiate provisional thoughts, trial interpretations, ways of seeing and
hearing Shakespeare that "awaken in us the satisfactions of authorship,"
(44), both Burke's and Shakespeare's. We even read of Burke's own dreams
as he contemplates Timon's "verbal filth" (108) and links Shakespeare's
symbolic structures with his own unconscious forms of thinking. "I
tinker tentatively with an experimental procedure which I call
'onei-romantic criticism,'" he writes, as he speculates about the
interpenetration of his dreaming mind and the cathartic process in
drama. No critic has made better conscious use of what the psychoanalyst
D. W. Winnicott called the "potential space" of culture, the area of
experience that permits the free interplay of inner and outer realities.
It is rare these days to see a critical mind so clearly in dialogue and
debate with itself, and making use of an enormous range of knowledge,
from the Greeks to the present. (I wonder which Shakespeare journal
would publish this kind of uncensored material today.)
Burke's general project was to identify the "ingredients" and the
"recipes" of symbolic actions and the ways in which aesthetic form
creates "arrows of expectation" in its audience. In the drama of
symbolic acts, relations among characters invite distributions of
attitudes and feelings in the experience of an audience. Burke's
interest is primarily in the functions of characters' roles in the play
as a whole. Though a drama may exploit some external tension, such as
the idea of property in Othello, or the dilemmas of abdication in _King
Lear_ (he calls these tensions "psychoses," his most unfortunate term),
Burke wants to coax out the authorizing dynamic of the play's action by
"prophesying after the fact." The critical act, then, is reconstructive
(not deconstructive), an account of the drama that justifies its form by
passing its rhetoric through the "appetites" of its audience. (Burke is
remarkably interested in both ends of the alimentary canal as metaphors
of speech acts.) He is especially preoccupied with the ways audiences'
appetites require sacrifice or victimage, hence his focus on the
excesses of tragedy. Tragic form, in its poise and rhythm, "perfects" a
sacrificial process that is, in a sense, inherent in all symbolic
action. (As the symbol-using animal, we humans must "invent the
negative" to use and misuse symbolic forms in the first place. The
symbol substitutes for the thing symbolized, as the scapegoat
substitutes for the sins of the community.)
Burke explored the trajectories of symbolic action in a brilliant array
of critical strategies. He assumes the voice of Antony to describe the
force and structure of his rhetoric in his funeral oration for Caesar.
In the _Othello_ essay, he adopts the position of the playwright to map
"the ideal paradigm for a Shakespearean tragedy" (70). At times, he
plays the historian reflecting on the difference between Renaissance and
twentieth century dictatorships. He is intensely engaged with a host of
other important Shakespearean critics of his time. But his most
consistent and enduring stance is as the anthropologist of dramatic and
poetic forms. Like Huizinga in _Homo Ludens_, Burke explicates
Shakespeare against the background of the aesthetic element in human
culture as a whole. For Burke, the music of form, its "eloquence,"
defines the "truth" of art in an "emotional rightness" that transcends
both science and religion in its humanistic logocentricity. (We can see
him as America's answer to Jacques Derrida.)
As a student of both Shakespeare and psychoanalysis, I am particularly
struck by two related features of the essays collected by Newstock. The
first is Burke's argument with the representations of character
exemplified by A. C. Bradley, and the second his sensitivity to the
bodily basis of symbols and metaphors. For Burke, Bradley's "novelistic"
approach to Shakespeare leads to "sheer portraiture, and done in a way
that conceals the functioning of the play" (81). Burke's opposition to
Bradley's character analysis is fundamental:
For, in contrast with the novelistic 'portrait gallery' approach to
Shakespeare's characters . . . one should here proceed not from
character-analysis to the view of character in action, but from the
logic of the _action as a whole_, to the analysis of the character as a
recipe fitting him for his proper place in the action. . . . (80)
To my mind, Burke is both accurate and unnecessarily limiting. Bradley's
style of character analysis is not the only possibility. The
psychoanalyst Roy Schafer, for example, developed an "action language"
for describing the dynamics of character in both art and life that can
serve Burke's purposes well. [1] In drama, the dynamics of character
can create the illusion of real persons _and_ place characters in the
functional roles of the drama, even when, like Hamlet, their role
involves constant tension with their "proper place in the action." Burke
discounts this possibility too quickly. Part of Shakespeare's genius was
the realization that we are both characters _and_ functions of one
another in social life as well as art (all the world _is_ a stage). I
think this is one reason that his plays endure so powerfully through
historical changes. By narrowing his view of character analysis to
nineteenth century portraits, Burke diminishes the significance of his
own attentiveness to the language of individual characters in Shakespeare.
Ironically, Burke could be very good at a different kind of character
analysis, and here his close readings of individual roles are revealing.
By following the language of the Porter in _Macbeth_, for example, or
Orsino at the opening of _Twelfth Night_, Burke evokes the movement of
consciousness in time, and it is this movement, with its shifts of focus
and its recurrent idioms that actually reveals the performative
dimension of character. By using his own associations to Orsino's lines,
Burke recreates the infantile basis for the character's
passive-receptive position:
If music be the food of love, play on (1)
As cells absorbing sunlight, as the fetus basking in its womb-heaven,
receiving nutriment; not venturing forth aggressively, predaciously, as
with those jungle animals that stalk, leap, and capture before they eat,
and thus must do hating and injuring -- but simply as larvae feed, let
me take in gentle music. (33)
The "arrow of expectation" is here linked to both character development
and dramatic function. By playing along with Orsino, Burke is
representing the manifestations of a character's consciousness as it
moves through "a discreet synaesthesia" from the nourishment of sound to
the scent of violets and then to the awakening of an aggressive
awareness. Orsino's "pure receptivity is ripped by ambition":
Enough, no more,
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before. (7-8)
And then Orsino awakens to his desire for Olivia. "So, the Duke has gone
complete from larval thought to the predatory (they are both in our
tissues) -- and is now critical, diagnostic, in quest . . ." (37). "Will
you go hunt, my lord?" says Curio.
In less than four pages, Burke has mirrored the elements of Orsino's
character that will define his role in the play. The interplay of
passivity and aggression weaves through his character and announces the
elements of social life that must be brought into balance for the comedy
as a whole to succeed. Written in 1933, this brief sketch anticipates a
psychological understanding of consciousness, bodily sensation, and
infantile experience that would not be systematically studied by
scientific means for decades.[2] My point is -- When Burke engages in
close reading of character, he gives us a dimension of "dramatism" that
can be integrated into his understanding of dramatic form. This is a
potential of his critical project that remains to be fully realized.
The pleasure and importance of having all of Burke's writings on
Shakespeare in one volume is that it can send any Shakespearean into
dialogic thoughts and speculations like mine. As Newstock points out in
his fine introduction, Burke has had such inspirational effects on
countless critics, including those most widely admired today. He is
pro-vocative in the sheer restless energy of his mind. Newstock has
presented Burke's Shakespeare in a most meticulously edited volume. In
addition to his introductory essay -- itself one of the most brilliantly
economic overviews of Burke's style, methods, terminology, and
historical position in twentieth-century criticism that can be found in
any collection of Burke's essays -- Newstock provides excellent notes
and references, leaving no stone unturned. (He realizes that some will
find him excessive or deficient, and this has been the case with
reviewers.) His compendium of references to Shakespeare throughout
Burke's writings contains gems of insight that invite elaboration in
many directions. His list of Works Cited would make a good library for
any student of Shakespeare. His volume is designed to appeal to several
audiences, from beginners to those who return to Burke over a lifetime.
Indeed, Newstock's aim is not only to present Burke as perfectly as
possible, but to celebrate and promote him simultaneously. His editorial
labors are themselves marked by various forms of excess. If my count is
accurate, he lists 213 works in his Introduction. His acknowledgements
list about 250 names, including the SHAKSPER listserv. The back cover
contains no fewer than six blurbs from luminous contemporary
Shakespearean elders. One can easily find a host of admiring journal
reviews online, including ten five-star substantial statements at the
Amazon.com site for the book. Noticing this pattern of excess, I began
to wonder whether Nestock had come to praise Burke or to kill him with
kindness? But the lasting result, for me, has been to welcome the
abundance and to agree that these essays "still merit a wider audience"
(xxxiv). Burke is at least as relevant to the Shakespearean world in the
twenty-first century, now literally global, as he was in the twentieth.
Bravo to Scott L. Newstock!
*NOTES*
[1] Roy Schafer. _A New Language for Psychoanalysis_. New Haven,
Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1976.
[2] See, for example, Daniel Stern. _The Interpersonal World of the
Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology_. New
York: Basic Books, 1985.
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