1. Creativity
1. On Stress, Its Seeking
1967
Kenneth Burke wrote this essay in 1966–67 soon after the republication of his first and only novel, Towards a Better Life (1932), in 1966 by the University of California Press. The occasion for the essay is identified by Burke in paragraph one. The many references to the novel are to this second edition, which also has a new preface in which Burke reinterprets the novel as a ritual of rebirth rather than a ritual of riddance. A unique and interesting biographical feature of the preface to the first edition (dated September 9, 1931) is its cryptographic dedication of the novel to libbie (his second wife) using the first letter of each paragraph. Burke's first and second wives were sisters. He had married Lily in 1919 and divorced her in the early thirties; he married Libbie in December 1933. No doubt, the personal trouble he refers to in the essay was partly caused by the breakup of his first marriage and his involvement with his wife's sister. Burke wrote the novel during a period of profound stress and change in his personal and professional life, as well as in the life of his country. He discusses these briefly in the section entitled "Sociopsychology of Stress."
Burke's essay does not tell us a lot about his novel or the ways in which we know it must have functioned as symbolic action for him. The essay makes no attempt to work out an interpretation of the novel but uses it as a source of readily available illustrations for an exploration of the topic Burke identifies in his title—which is stress, generated from within and without, and deliberate stress seeking as a "call." A man who climbs Mount Everest or sails singlehandedly around the world is obviously a "stress seeker"; as are professional athletes and soldiers, CEOs of big corporations, and traders on the stock market. What Burke does in the essay is explore some of the ways in which his own fiction is stress driven and stress seeking; he also explores some of the ways in which fictions in general may help us to better understand these most basic of human motives.
My first—and some might say my lamest—excuse for offering this article is that our inquiry has to do with stress-seeking, and the article is concerned with a fiction featuring a character who is forever stressing his notions about stress and thus distress—as a vocation, the deliberate answer to a "call."
My somewhat more justified but perhaps more embarrassing excuse for writing on this subject is that the fiction is a story of my own making
The problem, basically, is this: First, I must set up an account of the work as viewed ab intra. Here several sheerly aesthetic considerations must be treated. However since I take it that our inquiry should ultimately focus upon an approach ab extra—anapproach that looks upon the work as symptomatic of something or other—even in the "aesthetic" section I keep incidentally pointing toward the discussion that is to follow.
All told, the article is concerned with three orders of motives, orders by no means mutually exclusive,though we can at times distinguish them clearly enough. These three orders of motives are:theaesthetic,orpoetic; the personal, or psychological; and the environmental, or sociological.
Let's illustrate the three in their obvious distinctness:
- It's an aesthetic or poetic fact that a fiction might put stress upon a stress-seeking character because such character helps keep a plot going. In this sense, the theme of stress is as handy to a storyteller as, for instance, vengeance, or excessive religiosity. And, in fact, when going over old notes that I had taken but not used in preparation for my novel, I found among them that gloriously resonant line from the Aeneid, Dido's curse (IV, 625): "Arise, some avenger, from our bones" (exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor).
- It's a personal or psychological fact that—as will be noted at many points in our discussion—the author variously reproduced or transformed for purposes of the fiction material that was experienced by him differently in the course of living.
- It's an environmental or sociological fact that the book was written during the period immediately leading up to and away from the cultural and economic situation rife in the United States at the time of the "traumatic" market crash in 1929.
It is necessary to begin with a consideration of the work in its internality before gradually widening the range of our speculations to include the major psychological and sociological motives.
THE STYLISTICS OF STRESS
A man, who is envious and jealous, deliberately sets up the situation whereby a friend of his is surprised, on a fatal night, into sharing the same apartment with the woman whom he himself had coveted. He bit terly resents the union that he had thus strategically helped to con summate. And his resentment is aggravated by his claim that the lovers profited from a kind of unearned increment. First, he accuses them of carrying over into real life the roles they had played in a decadent drama about the incunabula of the Christian culture. (The play de picted Mary, for all her exceptional delicacy and love of her husband, as having been successfully courted by a fiery young Greek. The aging Joseph had known about this state of affairs, which he had sympa thetically left unmentioned when the wise men came to honor the virgin birth.) Our Hero's other accusation against the lovers concerns the dignity they derived from their putative roles in plans for a colony. Though these plans never eventuate, for a while they look promising, particularly since Our Hero's rival suddenly comes into possession of the money that would make them feasible. In frustrated imitation, Our Hero starts extravagantly spending his own funds, on the hunch that something favorable will happen. Nothing does. Hence, at the end of part one we see him bankrupt and leaving town. He has picked a destination at random, in the country—antithetically to the metropolitan situation that has marked the conditions of his distress. The last two sentences of this section enigmatically foretell the subsequent develop ments of the story:
Reaching the little country station at dawn, in a valley still blank with mist, I stood on the cinders with my suitcase, in the chilly morning air, while the train continued on its way through the valley, and the vibrations of the engine diminished irregularly to silence. I noticed then the twitter of many unrelated bird-notes, with the rustle of water somewhere behind the mist— and a dog was barking, imposing fresh sharp sounds upon his own blunt echoes. (60)
The middle section of this tripartite novel marks a notable turn in the direction of its motives. Here the narrator recounts the steps he takes, after he has left the city and married for money in the country, in arranging for a troupe of actors to give a performance at a nearby town. Among them appears the girl from whom he had fled. After he has been falsely boasting of an idyllic love affair, although they are actually still apart, she finally does spend the night with him, in her dingy room at a local
The final section (part three) unfolds the motives implicit in this change. "I had been pushing against a great weight," he says; "and with this weight gone, I fell forward. While her train hurried down the valley, I experienced such gloom as terrified me. For even a life of bitterness was desirable as compared with a life without purpose." She had made him live "as though … living were a vengeance." But now " ‘You have no reason,’ I whispered to myself, ‘for doing any single thing’ " (131–32).
Alone by the tracks, he begins turning his words "into a military rhythm," and "making a tune to fit at random." He calls his conduct "clownishness," and a "mechanical attempt to ward off the growth of melancholy."
But melancholy came, like the fog even then rising from the river. [Finally]… the arm of the nearby signal sank, showing that the track was free. "I will do only what I have to do," I said slowly into the emptiness, but I knew that this place would be henceforth unbearable. (132)
The story now progressively reveals the nature of this "free" track, enigmatically indicated by the sinking signal. First, the narrator becomes engrossed "in chipping crude, unfinished shapes out of stone. … Then I would punish the grotesque things by smashing them with one blow of a mallet, though I do not know why I either made them or destroyed them" (133). But surely their secret nature as vessels of a new motive is indicated when he says, "Since the beginning of my new pilgrimage, I have hacked at stone with venom. Let granite be abused, I have said, until its relevant particles drop from it, and it stands forth, a statue." In sum, this "store" which he "had accumulated unawares" and is now "tapping" is of an inward turning, reflexive nature, a symbol of selfviolation (134–35).
At various places in the story there are references to another girl, who loved the narrator with a simple, defenseless devotion, and whom he treated badly. At this point he takes up with her again, takes her with him on his "pilgrimage," and mistreats her to the point where she finally leaves, abandoning him to his self-imposed self-torment. After her departure without farewell, he calls down this evil fate upon himself:
If I were not myself, but something that looked down upon this that was myself, I should brand it, I should in quietude put an effective curse upon it, I should corrode it with the slow acids of the mind. (157)
The other aspects of the motivational recipe bear mentioning. At many points throughout the text a principle of divisiveness (a kind of "separating out") manifests itself. It takes many forms. Here I shall cite but a few:
Need one who is uneasy on finding himself in two mirrors (81). … [while talking desolately in a phone booth, he is grinning so that] the man beyond the glass, waiting to speak here next [might not suspect his condition] (221). … it was at this time, on glancing into the awry mirrors of a shop window, that I mistook someone else for me. When the phone next door was ringing, I thought it was ours (45). … he mentioned a bell which, installed at the door to announce the entrance of new patrons, gratuitously marked their exit (53). … I can remember stepping slowly into a lake, until my eyes were even with its surface, the water cutting across the eye-balls (135). … So, like a ventriloquist's doll, I suffered injurious remarks to rise unbidden to my lips (146). … the negligible shred of comfort he had got for himself recently by talking in two voices. (168)
This pattern of observations has its analogue in various kinds of characters with whom the narrator feels a kinship, sometimes hateful, because of traits or situations that he finds duplicated in himself. Two in particular should be mentioned. In chapter 5 of part one, there is the despairing lover who, while the narrator offers no resistance, commits suicide. The incident is summed up thus:
"Incipit vita nova," he confided smilingly as he left the table for this Leucadian leap into the unseen litter of the courtyard. And I felt that the new life he spoke of was to be my own. "He died for me," I whispered with conviction, though he had not yet descended. And for days afterwards I found myself repeating, "He died for me." (47)
In the third section there is a different but related mode of identification: "One evening when we were in his apartment, and he had interpreted an operatic score for me with unusual zest, after we had drunk somewhat, seeing that we were alone, and not liable to be interrupted, like youngsters we toyed with each other" (166). Since this figure is called "Alter Ego," in my present role as analyst I see it as a roundabout way of distinguishing the pattern of self-involvement by narratively splitting the motive into two roles. For such is the direction in which the "free" track is leading. And when Alter Ego vanishes, this is only another variant on the theme of self-abandonment. An earlier variant is the ritual
There is an interlude, a story by the narrator. We should note its ultimate internality even as sheer form, since it is a story within a story. In my subsequent criticism I have been much concerned with this aspect of the reflexive principle, whereby a work gets to the ultimate point of being inside itself. And as regards our sheerly sociopsychological inquiries here, I might point out that, although this chapter in its present form is the product of considerable revision, it stems from a story that I wrote as an adolescent student beset by an acute sense of isolation.
By then its development had reached a stage of "symbolic regression" that would attain its most accurate formal representation by reduction to a story within a story, a withinness-of-withinness that was ideal for my purposes, but that I could not have made to order. For I could not have so directly reimagined such conditions of my past that were now closed to me, so far as conscious retrieval was concerned. Yet here was the essence of the regression with which I was dealing. An accommodating fate had preserved one copy of the story and let me find it. And as regards content, I needed a kind of document that actually stemmed from a period of fierce male virginity, as experienced from within. Yet, in keeping with the nature of the work, it had to be a fiction. Among my unused notes I found a conceit that might be introduced figuratively: "The new application of this old story is as though, after learning a foreign language, I were to remember word for word a fatal conversation I had overheard in that language before I knew it."
One detail, however, is omitted. In the original version, the narrator thinks that he might throttle a boy he had seen clinging to the wooden figure upon which the victim of the "narrator's" story gets his fixation— in its nature as a rigid statue, guilty; but in its nature as a policeman, admonitory. When I think of the choking in Othello, along with the reference to one whom Othello likened to himself and whom he "seized by the throat" precisely when killing himself, I realize that this detail of fantasy should have been left in. I took it out because at the time when I was working on the book I did not interpret the chapter as I do now, and I simply found the notion too repellent to retain.
Where next? The story within a story carries the narrator to the point
Is his vision a lie, or not? At least, it comes to a focus in the image of an ark. Hence all this regression might somehow add up to rebirth? In the last chapter, the narrative ambiguously tries it both ways. The development may be inexorably back, back, back into silence—i.e., the womb in the absolute—or things may be directed towards resurgence, as some of the final jottings explicitly promise.
I think that we are here involved in vacillations ultimately having to do with the relations between tragedy and comedy. The pattern is this: The character builds upon a cult of tragedy, deliberately designed to rule out the amenities of humor. "Under the slightest of reverses, I would welcome bad weather, would go out to scan a broad, lonely sky at sunset, saying, ‘This I know; this is a return, a homecoming’ " (36).
There are two aspects of this motive. First: "There was gratification from the thought that I might derive even my defeat from within" (55). Second: "Let us endure minor reversals by inviting major calamities; let us dwarf annoyances, or even melancholy, by calling upon life's entire structure to collapse" (59).
All told, he celebrates his "despisals" as a "vocation" in which he must "persevere, even at the risk of great inconvenience" (145). He chooses "to grow sullen where I might have dismissed a dilemma by laughter—laughter which leaves us untried, which is a stifler in the interests of comfort, surrendering in advance, renouncing prior to excess, enabling a man to avoid the ultimate implications of his wishes" (198). A secondary effect arises thus: "Though no one would choose failure, we may yet maintain that failure is a choice, since one may persist in attitudes which make his failure inevitable" (200). And: "One should live in such a way that he has with him these three considerations daily: madness, the Faith, and death by his own hand" (168).
It becomes a question of purpose: "Place a man among these streets, instruct him to choose some act which puts a strain upon his temper. What work will he perform here, if it is work in the absolute, and not the accidental matter of flunkeying to an employer? If he does not mean by work the earning of a little money through assisting in a superior's blind purposes, but the straining of his resources, what manner of living must he choose?" (200) To which his answer is: "How be called muscular if you would not prefer the sewers and rat-holes of the metropolis?" (200);
The ultimate complication lies in his relation to money. "Wealth and talent being complementary, neither will deem itself enough without the other" (57). "I have never consented to console myself with the thought that we may be rich in spirit while tangibly impoverished. Wealth— wealth in love, money, the admiration of oneself and others—is indispensable to those who would surround themselves with the flatterings and stimulations of beauty" (28). Yet, in his "vision," at the culmination of his distress, he boasts and/or pleads: "It is good that some men are scorned by their fellows and made to feel homeless among them, since these outcasts are, through their sheer worldly disabilities, vowed to graver matters and could not, even if they would, prevent themselves from pouring forth their neglected love upon a formidable Father" (206).
Throughout the book, he keeps moralistically fluctuating between the paradoxical prosperity of poverty—a deliberate cult of disaster—and the conviction that there is an ideal need for a tradition of great wealth. And even at the last, when he is reduced to a total destitution largely of his own making, he warns himself: "You cannot renounce, for none but the rich dare speak in praise of poverty" (210). He ends in the condition that a stranger had described for him in the first chapter:
And upon my enquiring as to what he feared most of the future, he answered: "Destitution. Destitution of finances, destitution of mind, destitution of love. The inability to retort. The need of possessing one's opposite in years, sex, and texture of the skin; and the knowledge that by this need one has been made repugnant. The replacing of independence by solitude." (8)
As regards the question of literary species, this fluctuant attitude involves a kind of grotesqueness that is midway between tragedy and comedy, or, in the narrator's words, "the hilarious aspects of distress" (45). Many of the situations could be easily transformed into farce. Perhaps the most obvious instance is the episode about a compulsion to address the wooden statue of a policeman at the entrance to a store. He yields to the temptation, then fears that his act has been noticed:
I could have done the same under happier circumstances, but the meaning would not have been the same. It is quite natural to address inanimate things—it is no more foolish than confiding secrets to a dog. But as I looked about apprehensively, I saw that a woman had observed me. She was pretty, and insolent, and was watching me intently. There was no kindness in her eyes, nothing but cold curiosity. Her eyes, my dear, passed a terrible
Perhaps these two preparatory notes indicate the pattern most clearly: "Be sure to have him boast of things for which he has attacked others"; and "He's all for setting up rules, but when they are applied to him he insists that the case is different." In this respect, the work adds up to a grotesque tragedy with the birth of comedy ambiguously in the offing:
Though you, in learning, brought trouble upon yourself, let no man discredit your discoveries by pointing to your troubles. Nor must you turn against your bitterness. The sword of discovery goes before the couch of laughter. One sneers by the modifying of a snarl; one smiles by the modifying of a sneer. You should have lived twice, and smiled the second time. (217)
And the narrator's talk of lapsing into total silence is interwoven with his cry: "resurgam! resurgam! I shall rise again! Hail, all hail! Here is a promise: resurgam." Thus, personally, I look back upon the work as a kind of grotesque tragedy serving as a rite de passage into a cult of comedy, as explained in my preface to the new edition. But though I think that, in an ideal world, comedy would be the highest form of art, I find that tragedy leads most directly into the study of man's attempted solutions for his problems. I would but add the hope that, as with the ancient Greek theater, we sum up the analysis of "tragic dignification" by a satyr play, that is to say, a burlesque of the solemnities that have preceded it.
Before turning directly to the sociopsychology of our present concerns, perhaps I should mention one further point as regards the sheerly literary aspect of the book. At the time when I was taking preparatory notes, I was also doing much research in studies to do with the nature and etiology of drug addiction. As a result, I became interested in the notion that the case history could be readily adapted for purely poetic purposes. The form made for a kind of vignette with a strongly aphoristic aspect. Since the narrative is so designed that the plot gradually emerges from a sententious context—though the aphorisms are "in character," hence not to be taken as strictly identical with the view of the author—I discovered that the case history, as a form, blends well with the aphoristic; a reader hardly notices when one leaves off and the other takes over.
So much for a view of the work in its internality. Let us now reverse things and approach it situationally, from without.
THE SOCIOPSYCHOLOGY OF STRESS
"Surely no one will fall victim to a form of insanity which he abhors," Our Hero speculates (74) while willfully imposing upon himself a kind of stress that progressively tears at the edges of his mind, until his cult of quarrelsomeness and self-interference leads him into a self-perpetuating state of total isolation.
Since we ended the former discussion on purely poetic considerations, we might take them as our point of departure for this new phase. In Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood, her major spokesman, the overripely perverted doctor, O'Connor, avows: "Calamity is what we are all seeking." On which I commented (in the spring 1966 issue of The Southern Review), "Maybe yes, maybe no, so far as life is concerned—but certainly yes, as regards the stylistics of lamentation." That is, I take it that, purely from the standpoint of literary appeal, lamentation is a pleasure. For "there is one notable difference between a biblical jeremiad and a purely literary variant of the species. … However great the artistry of any document that gained admission to the biblical canon (even so obviously literary an enterprise as the Book of Job), one should not approach a single sentence of the Bible purely in terms of literary entertainment." One should not, that is, if one is in the role of a devout believer. But "a literary jeremiad must somehow be fun." The same point is developed thus in my essay "Coriolanus—and the Delights of Faction" (The Hudson Review, summer 1966):
I would assume that such delight begins in the preverbal solace of an infant sobbing itself to sleep. (See my comments on the "three freedoms" of lamentation, praise, an invective, in my essay on Shakespeare's Timon of Athens in the paperback Laurel edition.) Calamity, or pathos, serves another function, which I have called "tragic dignification." I here refer
In the case of this particular book, since the whole cult of stress comes to a focus in what amounts to a roundabout courting of insanity—or more accurately perhaps, near-insanity, a state up to but not beyond the edge of the abyss—it might be relevant to quote some lines from the recently deceased poet, Theodore Roethke, regarding his desire "to break through the barriers of rational experience." Or again "The only knowledge is reason in madness"; and "O to be delivered from the rational into the realm of pure song." This view of poetic insight obviously takes on a hierarchal dimension in his rhetorical question: "What's madness but nobility of soul / At odds with circumstance?" (The quotations are from an excellent article on Roethke by Denis Donoghue, in his recent volume Connoisseurs of Chaos [1965].) In Roethke's case, the predicaments that he periodically got himself into were, in a sense, willed—for he deliberately cultivated a vigilant search for a kind of expression that would be in its very essence neoinfantile.
Here another strand ties in. I refer to the "aesthetic of alcohol," the desire to attain, in one's sober writing, the kind of effects that one feels one is getting when under alcohol's influence. In a sense alcohol thus acts as a kind of "call," which the sobriety of writing can never wholly answer. In particular, insofar as alcohol stimulates assertiveness, like heated argument it tends to simplify complexity, a recipe one can discern quite clearly in the author's use of the fictional device of writing letters not just to a former friend, but also against that same person—a simplified complexity further compounded by the fact that the man to whom they are addressed is a recipient only in principle, since the epistles remain unsent.
But there is a further issue, as I have observed in my article "Art—and the First Rough Draft of Living" (Modern Age, spring 1964). Alcohol qua alcohol is not the same as alcohol during Prohibition—a notable aspect of the "cultural" climate prevailing during the years when this book was conceived and written. For those who were not bootleggers but who merely patronized bootleggers, alcohol under such conditions was in a penumbra of motives indeterminately lawless and sanctioned by custom.
The clearest instance of this aesthetic is in part three, chapter 1, where Our Hero most energetically inveighs (140–46). Just as in some primitive tribes there are places where, without fear of punishment, one can go and curse the king, so alcoholic argumentativeness was taken for granted. Hence many things, however vehemently they were said, could be received like water off a duck's back, except for the unexpected occasion when somebody got clobbered for almost no reason at all.
All told, that complex composed a subpersonality within oneself, so that one was, as it were, "hearing a call" of that sort from within. In a sense, it added up to a vague, nagging kind of vocation for which no sheer job would be the answer. Furthermore, it could tie in with earlier motives that emerge and come to a focus in adolescence, a time when a "league of youth"—a band of heterosexual males—improvises modes or friendship that at the same time keep the members of the band sexually apart by quarrelsomeness. Such "simple" conditions necessarily drop away in later life, when one's financial and marital relationships, developed out of ties and obligations alien to the original situation, give rise to a set of "claims" no longer tolerant of such harsh sparring as was once the norm. (Perhaps the grandest instance of such a change is Falstaff's lostness when Hal becomes king and loses all sympathy with his clowning.)
An early story, "Prince Llan," in some ways illustrates the complexities of the case. The prince, now mulierose, has become separated from his old friend, Gudruff, whose nature as a motive is most clearly revealed by this passage, written in, I hope, not too ungrammatical Latin—after the fashion of the Greek Anthology, which the author had studied extracurricularly while at college, and which gave English translations for all but the "indecent" entries:
Suddenly, suddenly, plena recognitio facultaturn corporis latuit subito ei; se relaxabat, est molliter lapsus contra terram, deinde se dabat suorurn temptationi inquinum. The remainder of the morning he spent in reading.
The prince, in trying to answer this call, dissolves as in a dream while he opens a door that leads to a door that allows him "down a corridor beyond, the glimpse of a door" (The Complete White Oxen, 233). As I now interpret it, the incident represents a fantasy in which a later aspect of the author's self, in a mood of stocktaking, recalls an earlier adolescent identity, still surviving as a kind of subpersonality in the unconscious, and essentially identified with the poetic motive—in that our first literary methods are usually developed under reflexive conditions that are able to be ambiguously symbolized in terms of suicide, or "death by one's own hand."
As regards the full scope of the hierarchal possibilities here, we necessarily move into a socioeconomic sphere far beyond the muddled tieup linking propoetic, prealcoholic adolescence with the beginnings of mature relationships—a change that often breaks up old friendships completely. I have been trying to indicate ways in which adolescence, alcohol, and a modified aesthetic cult of madness, however distressing, might all tie in with one another. Yet, thinking along these same lines, we are now ready to consider a much wider range of problems.
First of all, as regards our fundamental inquiry into stress-seeking, there is an unresolved conflict centering in what might be called a secularized version of the poor-church principle—a view that comes to focus in the conviction that poverty is spiritual—in contrast with the cult of commodities without which our civilization could not last even until tomorrow. I take it that, although the narrator's surname, Neal, combines several motivational strands, a major one is "kneel." Contrast, in this regard, the conditions under which his name first figures—in connection with an act of cruelty, on page 122—and the passage on page 205: "He knelt while love poured from him, or poured into him from all outward things."
The author was raised in dingy suburban neighborhoods. To be sure, he didn't know how dingy they really were. For there was a scattering of weedy fields among the houses, and many years later he could write about them lyrically, nostalgically. (There was even a deserted, window-smashed haunted house with fascinating stories about it.) The author was among the poor relatives. And though he now realizes that there were no rich relatives, he took it for granted that his grandparents, who were so much better off, were rich, particularly since his grandfather had always boasted of great wealth when handing out a few pennies to the greedy, gratified grandson. And since the grandparents' house was obviously in a much better part of town than his parents', the difference
In brief, the poor-church principle—prosperity of poverty—had to combine with the thought that wealth and aesthetic flowering needed each other. A devious fusion, or compromise, was attained by imaginary acquiescence to mental stress—mental distress as a kind of ideal. (At least, such a development was to be welcomed as a sheerly aesthetic kind of risk.)
Also, although the actual story is a fiction from beginning to end, in principle it was "true"—at least in the sense that, as discussed in my first preface, it produced a "monster" by magnifying some aspects of the author's character and minimizing others. In this alembicated sense, it was a perversely idealized self-portrait. The author was in a state of acute internal conflict owing to maladjustments in his personal affairs. He was caught in a kind of dilemma from which such imaginings seemed like a kind of escape, or at least relief, as on page 211: "Speech being a mode of conduct, he converted his faulty living into eloquence. Then should any like his diction, they would indirectly have sanctioned his habits."
Thus these potentialities were intensely ambivalent. On the one hand, the fiction threatened to be autosuggestive, aggravating the very conditions for which it served as a relief. For the author's engrossment in its developments invited him to carry the attitude of the fiction over into real life, just as his protagonist had accused the fictive lovers of doing, when they endowed their lives with glamour borrowed from their roles in the blasphemous play.
On the other hand, there was the homeopathic aspect of such tragic imaginings, along the lines of this formulation in Milton's Samson Agonistes: According to Aristotle, Milton says, tragedy is designed "to temper and reduce" such passions as pity and fear "to measure with a kind of delight, stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated." And he continues: "Nor is Nature wanting in her own effects to make good his assertion; for so, in physic, things of melancholic hue and quality are used against melancholy, sour against sour, salt to remove salt humours."
At least, often the poetic usefulness of an author's personal quandaries does allow them to be faced. Some years back I suggested in the magazine Poetry that the myth of Perseus is particularly relevant in this regard. Although one cannot stare directly at the Gorgon's head of his entangled motives without being as it were turned into stone, their nature as material for art acts as a kind of protective reflector. By the subterfuges
I am battling like a fiend, battling for nothing less than my mind itself—and unless it is true, as I frequently tell myself, that () went mad for me, that I can derive from his collapse vicariously my own rescue, unless this is true (and the idea, I may convince you, may not be totally coocoo [sic], since I have in the knowledge of his errors the one stable point from which to orient my own), that unless this is true … [the sentence was left thus unfinished].
A notable feature about this statement is that the author is referring to a real person's mental collapse much as his Hero refers to the fictive suicide in part one, chapter 5. And the book itself, as early as the second page, establishes the relevant convertibility of terms when saying that a person "may worry lest this day be the very one on which he snaps under the burden and, if not talented at suicide, becomes insane." The next sentence turns to the compensatory homeopathic principle: "Yet it is possible that by a constant living with torment, one may grow immune to it." But here "constant living with" should be read as a quasitemporal synonym for "radically imagining in principle." The fictive suicide, incidentally, killed himself in the cause of jealousy, a symptom that the author shared with his "smell-feast" protagonist, although in real life there was no such triangle as the plot is built around.
Perhaps I should pause here to say that when I state that this story is fiction from start to finish, I do hope that the reader will take me at my word. I am not merely using a stylistic subterfuge, for there would be no point to my lying, since all I'd have to do would be to leave these matters unsaid. What I am trying to get at, rather, is this: I am trying to make as clear as possible those respects in which a story that is totally false in its details can somehow be true in principle.
Consider, for instance, this kind of transformation from personal experience to fictive analogue: the narrator's notion that actors can derive unearned increment by reenacting offstage their roles onstage stems from
Similarly, although there was no actual plan for a colony, the congregating of artists and writers is always on the edge of "colony-thinking," and the attack upon coteries is not far, by implication, from the renouncing of a practice that was attempted again and again in the history of our nation, and thus doubtless is inherent in the very trends that militate against it.
Or consider the narrator's mystic vision on pages 111–15. I had in mind a place where I had actually lived for a time, on a hilltop. From there, one sultry afternoon, I had watched a storm, caused by contrary winds clashing and swirling in the valley. The ability to observe the sheer form of the downpour as a "happening" made an unforgettable impression upon me, particularly since the torrent was, as it were, the single outcome of conflicting currents in the air. Yet the situation was quite different from the lonely fury recounted in the book, while the nine white cranes are imported from memories of the morning after a storm at night in a wholly different valley under quite different circumstances. And who's to say that there were nine? One can only say that they somehow seemed like a message.
Nor did the author ever become the proprietor of a herd through marrying for money, to say nothing of stealing money from a woman whom he had coveted unsuccessfully. And above all, with regard to the cult of "straining" which Our Hero propounds so earnestly on pages 200–203, please allow it to be a fiction when he says, "Prowling about the wharves, I have ministered to unclean men, for in this there was some ghastly decency, something beyond mere safety."
According to my tentative notion, all such fictions are "ideal completions" of personal experiences that are circumstantially quite different; but they contain some problematic motivational trace which, if isolated and made absolute, would be symbolized most accurately—or with most dramatic thoroughness, most "drastically"—by such a fulfillment as the fiction settles on. And I would tinker with the possibility that any such aesthetic imitating of motives prevailing outside the realm of art can have literal analogues involving persons who in effect make up such works of art but live them wholly in the realm of life itself, and without benefit of the formal reflector that Perseus had in his battles with the snaky-headed monster he could not dare to look upon.
But I should say more about the role of the economic motive in these imaginings. The author's early formative years coincided, I believe, with the time in our national history when the stress upon capital goods— rails, mills, mines, etc.—was just giving way to the rise of cheap, machinemade consumer goods—an emergent trend that was epitomized in the Woolworth chain of five-and-ten-cent stores. The corresponding slogan, which my father constantly repeated with a humorous twist whenever the women began talking of some new contrivance, was "Who would sit down and make it for that?" People marveled not only at the thing itself but also at its price, which they still considered in terms of the elaborate preparations needed if you had decided to assemble all the material and go through all the operations needed for the production of one such item.
During an era when a country is building up its industrial plant, there is necessarily a strong emphasis upon modes of thinking quite analogous to what I have called the religious stress upon the "prosperity of poverty." The sentiments in Benjamin Franklin's Almanac are probably the best example of such puritanical abstemiousness, a set of secular norms religiously grounded, and still strong, though often best honored in the breach, as in the case of Franklin himself, who could become wellto-do by praising the austerities of poor men.
This sort of morality seemed natural to the author in his early years, even while feeling proud at the naive thought that his grandparents were rich. Indeed, he even thought of them as a kind of alternate parenthood—a divisive trend sharpened by the fact that, often in the summer, his grandparents took him to some lake or the seashore, where, for a week or two, he was transfigured by life in the magic of a "rich" hotel.
His book was planned—and several early chapters written and published—during the fantastic bull market of the New Era. And although the author in a mild way got enough from his jobs and writings to feel that he too was in the swim, somehow it never seemed "natural" to him. He always felt uneasy, as though he had stolen his money and would eventually get caught. True, many persons like him did get caught in the crash of 1929—but not the author; for even the few stocks he had bought at a time when people were gambling like crazy he bought outright and not on margin. So they could be held, and eventually in a mild way they recovered.
Yet the book was already far enough along to act suggestively upon the author himself. During the almost magical terror that followed the crash, he deliberately resigned from a well-paying job, having resolved
But we have anticipated somewhat. It should also be mentioned that, particularly during his connection with The Dial, he had seen, in all its impressiveness, the magical interweaving of wealth and talent, and many of the comments on this subject reflect observations about the marvelous assortment of persons that variously came and went around The Dial’s offices. Here are typical comments: "I knew one man who had applied his wealth to carrying doubt into his very tissues. As birds, though out of danger, fly with self-protective darts and veerings proper to their kind, so he kept his statements guarded, even among friends" (57). Or the narrator's drunken statement of policy (197) to the effect that one should "make money … before railing against wealth"; for "whatever he would renounce, let him first acquire it in ample quantities, that he become immune to hecklers" (197). Doubtless it was for this reason that, after Shakespeare's Timon of Athens becomes a vicious misanthrope— when deserted by his friends following the loss of his fortune—the dramatist arranges for him to find another treasure, which he throws away like filth, thereby letting the audience see that Timon is now a universal hater on principle, and not just because of "sour grapes." Also at the offices was one man of great refinement whose wealthy upbringing had obviously put a great strain upon him, making him imperious even though he also had an almost pathetic desire to be frank and friendly. All told, it was a stable of racehorses if there ever was one—all swishing, and stamping, and tossing their heads nervously, all brought together by the
Perhaps the most general grounding of all for the kind of outlook we are here considering could be called Nietzschean, as with writers bent upon "glorifying the problematical in art" and "stressing the state of tension in itself, picturing the dangers and discomforts in maintaining it, hence relying upon the basic military equipment in man as their last source of appeal—though differing widely in their selection of the symbols which would serve as the channels in which this original biologic psychosis would run."
I am quoting from my Permanence and Change (1935), pages 87–88, Hermes edition. I had in mind here an animalistic grounding (64). And in a section on "The Peace-War Conflict" (197–98), I tangle with the Nietzschean puzzle in which, though "the organism has developed an equipment for attaining the benign sluggishness of satiety, the very equipment for bringing about such a worldly Nirvana is in itself the essence of turbulence and struggle." Thus:
We perceive here a contradiction at the very basis of behavior. For if the organism attained its state of quiescence permanently, the military equipment of nervous agility, of bodily and mental muscle, would fall into decay. On the other hand, to prevent such decay, one must exert himself in "warfare," abiding by the competitive genius of mind and body, thereby denying himself precisely that state of conscious death which he might derive from the booty acquired by his prowess.
It is a contrast that had long worried me. The titular story of my first book, The Complete White Oxen, is built around a contrast between a lion and the oxen, in a zoo:
Disdainful to the last, the lion retained his superiority even while being fed. He greeted the attendant with a baring of yellow fangs which gave the impression of sneering; and he snatched the meat from the iron prongs with a growl, as though he were stealing it. He kept his eyes on his feeder until he had disappeared, and then began tearing the flesh from the bone by licking it with his rough, scaly tongue. (7)
In contrast, it is said of the white oxen:
They were chewing in deliberate contentment. At times they would move their heads to look in another direction; at such times they ceased their chewing, as though disapproving of too many simultaneous motions. But once their head was firmly established in this new direction, their chewing would be resumed. Calm, harmless, sleepy, they lolled about their cage. [And later] To them the supreme gift of God was to sleep and know that
Doubtless we have a considerable measure of vegetarian idealizing here. And, as I observe in a footnote (Permanence and Change, 198–99), an overstress upon the contrast between the hunt and relaxation after gorging can mislead, in deflecting the attention from the humane realm of the sentiments. Also, in my analysis of Nietzsche's style, I tried to show that there are purely formal considerations involved in his use of what he calls "perspective"—a kind of sheerly terministic violence achieved by a method for wrenching words from a customary context and putting them in new, theoretical surroundings—a device for which I proposed the formula "perspective by incongruity."
But the main point is this: insofar as the human organism is prepared by adaptations through thousands of years to undergo strain, such equipment must manifest itself as a need to be exercised, as in sports, horror stories, monastic disciplines, excesses of ambition in the building of financial or political empire, juvenile delinquency, and similar exertions praeter necessitatem. And there may even be a kind of reality about pain that is weakened by anesthetics, anodynes, soporifics, and the like.
One may question whether such conditions establish the psychological necessity for war. But they would imply grounds for a cult of conflict. War is but one species of conflict—and the kinds of war in which we have distinguished ourselves depend upon fantastically excess wealth, in contrast with the African tribe that lives in so sparse an area it exists wholly without internecine strife. Indeed, the food supply is so scanty, the tribe would by now be extinct if its members had not developed modes of peaceful cooperation to a maximum—for nothing less could save them. But, of course, the severity of their environment supplies all the conflict necessary to exercise the body's natural aptitude for the undergoing of stress. But just as delinquency can engage the efforts of spirited youths whose way of life otherwise—in an orderly, well-to-do suburb, for instance—would not sufficiently tax them, so wars help any in our times who, unbeknown to themselves, want not jobs but vocations, as I put it in a "subversive" poem I wrote in 1933 (Book of Moments [1955], 59):
| We have even hoped for the trenches, | |
| That men might again be cronies. | |
| We have even told ourselves how by the wars | |
| We might again be brought together, | |
― 31 ― | |
| By the helpfulness of slaughter. | |
| The wars are fuller than the peace | |
| In fellowship. | |
We should also consider the frequent compensatory tendencies— along the lines of "tragic dignification"—whereby our ailments can provide the makings for inverted kinds of boasting—engrossments of ours that we ask others to share, even though we may bore them to the edge of shrieking. And there's a wonderful variant of such matters in a documentary film I once saw (Savage Splendor), about which I once wrote thus (in "Hermes Scroll No. 7"):
A MORAL MADE MANIFEST
See Savage Splendor, a long documentary film too soon over. And above all, don't miss the shot of the 300-pound king using for his throne the back of a prostrate slave. The king further burdened himself with 200 pounds of ornaments, and some several hundred wives, shown bunched in rows like a choir. And all told you could observe him being weighted down literally with the responsibilities of office, only 500 pounds of which he could transfer to the back of his slave. His immobilizing fat was presumably a mark of exceptional wealth and noble status, since only a personage of great means could afford to be so sedentary in a jungle. It contrasted with the litheness of the dancers who had come long distances to perform in his honor. You could see before your very eyes a gross physical burlesque of the Stoic scruples and meditative spirituality with which a Marcus Aurelius might assume the burdens of empire. And what directness of realism there was, in the symbolism of the prostrate slave so heavily burdened by the master! There was an indirectness, too. We refer to the way in which the burdensomeness came back to plague his lordship, a sufferance attested by the drawn lines of the royal phiz, so very weary, and by the technicolor of the bloodshot eyes. Another possibility: might not the slave have felt unbearably proud? Surely he lorded it over the other slaves, who were not thus sat upon with such Distinction. And if he knew his Hegel, he must have understood that he was, in his crouching way, a world-historical figure, evolved by the Divine Idea to fulfill this God-appointed task, as regards the heavy responsibilities of Universal Order.
And since we are now on the verge of tragic farce, let's include a reference to a practice of some current pitchmen, who help reinforce your sense of guilt by selling you remedies after first persuading you that you need them. Of course you stink. So, adopt the most "natural" solution possible; namely, obstruct the pores of your body murderously, or gargle with poisons. Of course you stink. After all, what are you for, if
ADDENDUM: ON "SPARAGMOS" AND THE EYE
As regards the enigmatic foretelling at the end of part one in the novel, I take it that the sound of water behind the mist presages the final downpour—of both the ersatz mystic vision on pages 111–15 and the book's last sentence: "Henceforth silence, that the torrent may be heard descending in all its fullness." Besides the flow of water, the whole range of connotations would probably include, at various places along the way, the flow of words, the flow of time, the frightened flow of urine, and what Coleridge called "the streamy nature of association," William James the "stream of consciousness." The passage most obviously linking words and downpour is near the beginning: "I would speak as a gargoyle would speak which, in times of storm, spouted forth words" (9). Its further tie-up is indicated by the fact that the narrator is on the subject of his scorn.
The dog barking, "imposing fresh sharp sounds upon his own blunt echoes," sums up the essence of the reflexive principle (including the chapter in which the narrator vilifies his cronies). The "twitter of many unrelated bird-notes" presages the disintegrative form of the last chapter. Borrowing from the Cambridge anthropologists' speculations on the incunabula of Greek tragedy, I'd want to contend that here, even in its very form, we find the "rending and teasing" that is necessary for a next phase, the ambiguously foretold turn from grotesque tragedy to a cult of comedy.
In the novel, for reasons which I hope I have made clear, this process of disintegration preparatory to reintegration takes place enigmatically and ambiguously at the end. But in my next book, Permanence and Change, which is explicitly concerned with questions dealing with the development from an earlier orientation to a new one, fittingly the "rending and tearing"—or sparagmos—takes place in the middle section, coming to a focus in the concept of "perspective by incongruity," which involves the Nietzschean clash of categories when a term that has
Incidentally, as considered from the sheerly aesthetic or poetic point of view, the mimetics of breakdown in the last chapter are seen to be but the transformation of a writer's preparatory note taking into a kind of culmination in extremis.
A fuller discussion of the book in its internality would have required the indexing of several other recurrent terms, such as the thesaurus of meanings surrounding the word "mouse," for instance, ranging from the "sickly and unsightly creature, a mouse-faced man" (29), through "if she but stamped her foot you would, deep within you, scurry away like mice" (149), to "would liken God to a little mouse" (209). And the term "yield" ranges from yielding in guilt, through yielding in adjustment or accommodation, to yielding like Christ on the cross.
But one term at least I should pause to consider at some length, since it also bears strongly upon an experience outside the book. Inasmuch as any cult of conflict—or stress-seeking—is likely to take on moralistic connotations, eye-imagery can naturally figure, particularly if, like the author, one was constantly admonished as a child that God was always watching. How would this conceit manifest itself in sheerly secular terms?
We have already cited the passage from the story within a story. But on going through the book again, I note two others that are particularly relevant. On page 72: "On dim, deserted streets I hurried through a city of eyes, under the surveillance of disparate objects which, as I passed, each transferred me to the supervision of the next. And there were real eyes among them, eyes of the cats that paused to note me with distrust (some of the cats stringy, others crouching in bunches behind their faces)." On page 210, when Our Hero is in extremis: "There is an eye, firm as the eye of the newly dead. When I am alone, this eye inspects me." I cannot say for sure whether I already knew Emily Dickinson's lines on watching "a dying eye." But, to the best of my memory, I can say that after finishing the book, the author had an almost intolerable
NOTES
This essay originally appeared in The Bennington Review 1 (summer 1967): 32–49, used with permission from Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont; and Why Men Take Chances, ed. Samuel Z. Klausner (New York: Anchor Books, 1970), 73–103.
2. On "Creativity"— A Partial Retraction
1971
The Foreword by Donald E. Hayden explains the occasion for Kenneth Burke's essay, which, he tells us, is a revision of an earlier talk on the same topic. "On ‘Creativity’—A Partial Retraction" is important for the way in which it further develops the antitechnology theme of his late essays, and especially for the way he formulates his ecological vision and his idea of ecotragedy. As far as I know, this is the first time Burke combined tragedy and catharsis, the central concepts in his dramatistic poetics as he developed it in the fifties, with the global ecological degradation caused by high technology. It is creativity in the physical sciences that brought about the electronic technological revolution still going strong in our time.
Burke's question at the end is whether or not creativity in the humanities (the verbal arts in particular) and social sciences, can do anything to counteract the destructive creativity of the physical sciences and the tragic situation created by the marvels of high technology. Burke's model for the tragic situation is Antigone and especially the tragic dilemma faced by Creon. Burke both admires and fears creativity in the physical sciences. His "partial retraction" is to qualify his previously unqualified praise for the principle of creativity wherever it does its work. This leads him to the principle of destructive creativity, an important concept for an understanding of the culture of the late twentieth century, where not only technology but many of the arts are deliberately as well as inadvertently destructive. Witness rock bands, for example, with their destructive names and antisocial behavior and lyrics.
Creativity is not, ipso facto, a good, as we were once taught, and as we ourselves taught, and as our children are still being taught at every level of their education. Burke speculates here, as he does elsewhere in these essays, on the autosuggestive effects of an artist's works on the artist himself—effects which, Burke argues, are often quite destructive. It was the constructive effects of creativity in the realm of symbolic action—say in Whitman's poetry—that Burke mostly focused on in his earlier work in the thirties under the aegis of the phrase that "you can make yourself over in the image of your imagery." That concept is treated with a lot of Burkean irony in this essay, part of which seems like a doomsday lament for a future too awful to think about.
FOREWORD
During the spring semester 1970, my colleagues in the English department agreed that there might be value in holding the fall 1970 symposium (number six for the department over the past four years) on the general subject of "creativity"—and more especially as the literary artist himself sees it. (I suppose in a way this would be doubly introspective.)
The presenters of the "Symposium—70" papers met several times working out the general ground rules. On the afternoon of December 10, 1970, the five papers by members of the University of Tulsa faculty were presented. The theme of "The Creative Process—Introspection" was developed first by Winston Weathers in an archetypal fashion, followed by the four applications to specific writers.
In his study of Coleridge on Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), I. A. Richards calls attention to a growing suspicion of "introspection" in an age of scientific inquiry. He points out that introspection may properly be discredited "as a means of settling matters not within the scope of direction inspection … but that there still remains a field in which introspection is not only a possible but an indispensable source of information" (48). Richards goes on to say that while introspection may be biased, what we seek is not definitive results but "possible, useful hypotheses." The result of such introspection may well be, as Wordsworth believed, that we learn "Something of what we are."
The evening presentation by Kenneth Burke was enthusiastically received by an audience that nearly filled the amphitheater. The next day as I drove him to the airport, Mr. Burke commented that rarely had he seen a group enjoy themselves so much upon being told that "we are all doomed!" As he put this cheery sentiment, "I began with a theory of comedy. In time I came to studying the mystique of pollution in Greek tragedy. Now I am fascinated by the horror of pollution in American pragmatics."
I was bold enough to suggest two replies: For one, the enjoyment may have been not so much from the anticipation of tragic annihilation as from the "style" in which the prospect was presented. As Mr. Burke had himself indicated in his lecture, "It seems as though, for man, the typically symbol-using animal, each fragmentarily undergone encounter in his practical existence calls for a formally perfected analogue in the realm of the purely mythopoeic." And our enjoyment thus resulted from seeing our impending doom "perfectly symbolized" by Mr. Burke's lecture.
In any event, Mr. Burke, concluded the evening and "Symposium— 70" by reading selections from his poem "Eye Crossing—from Brooklyn to Manhattan"—which may be found in Nation 208 (June 2, 1969), 700–704.
We wish for monograph readers a modicum of pleasure we enjoyed at the symposium.
Donald E. Hayden, January 1971
I
This talk is the revision of one I gave before some teachers of English in the Northwest, about this time last year.
In the original piece, I began with a reference to Remy De Gourmont, whose ingenious critical writings had had a strong formative influence upon me, over half a century ago. He had suggested that in some cases a so-called state of decadence might be due, not to a mere running-down of a people's culture; but rather it might be a symptom of over-much fertility. And I thought that this notion could serve as a good admonitory speculation regarding the state of affairs in which we now find ourselves.
Being of a divided mind, I had first tinkered with the idea of dodging my responsibilities somewhat by casting my discussion in the form of a dialogue. But I couldn't even get past the problem of choosing names for my two voices (or should there be three?). And should they, or should they not, be of the same sex?
Roughly they were intended to represent a contrast (yet sometimes a concordance) between the physical sciences and the humanities. Tentatively, uneasily, I thought of having the physical sciences represented by a sturdy male whom I named "Progressus." And the realm of the Muses in general and of literature in particular might be represented by an ardent poetess, to be named "Regresseen." Or one helpful suggestion was that, owing to the prestige of the term "imagination" in the realm of letters, I should name her "Madge."
More specifically, Progressus was to represent not theoretical science, but technology—or at times, still more narrowly, engineering. He was to be a vigorous fellow, who neither smoked nor drank, let alone dabbling in the newer psychedelic media of communication for which his own prowess is responsible. It would be stacking the cards too much if I made
In any case, here was my basic quandary: I was to talk on the subject of "creativity" (and the very word made me uneasy). I was addressing a group of experts whose interest in this subject was bound up with their interest in humanism generally, and literature specifically. Yet I had the uneasy conviction that the truly vital focus of creativity today is in the physical sciences. Quite promptly, however, along with this statement of belief I felt the need to add a twist. It was bequeathed to us by a social scientist who was as ingenious in his way as De Gourmont had been, when paradoxically merging the creative and the "decadent." I have in mind Thorstein Veblen when, by the blunt, ironic reversal of a proverb, he summed up our current quandaries in that marvelously shrewd proposition: "Invention is the mother of necessity."
We are not competent to decide here whether technology can solve the problems to which it has given rise; or whether, even if it can do so on a purely technological basis, mankind can make the exacting social and political adjustments that the fantastic upswing of technological creativity demands. Nor can we decide whether the world will be ultimately better off or worse off as the result of the changes that technology has already brought or may bring in the future, as the gradual interposition of its devices between us and a sheerly animal state of nature has come to make us variously at home or lost in a man-made "second nature," a vastly complicated structure that was ultimately made possible by the hominids' special aptitude with symbol systems.
In order to contrast a simple way of life with our characteristically complicated situation, I used to lay store by an unwieldy parable of this sort: If you raise a carrot in your garden, and you want a carrot, then the
We are now ready for a second step. But before taking it, perhaps I should try to anticipate a possible objection. Some persons with whom I discussed this talk contended that I should make a distinction between "creativity" and "invention," whereas I tend to treat the two terms as synonymous. Some of you may have the same misgiving. If you do feel that I should stress such a distinction (speaking of literary or poetic "creativity" on one side and of technological "inventiveness" on the other), please translate accordingly, as I proceed. My paper should then be read as though it were entitled "Scientific Invention and Poetic Creation—A Partial Retraction." With either wording the underlying burden of my argument remains the same. Using a term that would obviously apply to both, we could say that the talk concerns a relationship between two orders of innovation. And the physical sciences' kinds of innovation have produced such radical changes in the realm of motion, they have placed corresponding responsibilities of innovation upon the literary or poetic or humanistic realm of acting symbolically.
And so to our next step, hinging about my "partial retraction."
II
In my first book of literary criticism, Counter-Statement, published about forty years ago, I partly took issue with a position that the recently deceased critic, Joseph Wood Krutch, upheld in his volume, The Modern Temper, a work concerned with the loss of belief in the kind of relationship between man and the universe that made tragedy possible.[1]
I'll quote a relevant passage, interwoven with quotations from Krutch:
Having said that tragedy is dead, and that it is dead because the new scientific "truths" have destroyed the tragic "illusions," he ends: "Some small part of the tragic fallacy may be said indeed to be still valid for
Maybe my answer was too pat. But anyhow, here's how it runs:
Now, tragedy as a mechanism is based on a calamitous persistence in one's ways. It is "nobler" when the persistence is due to a moral stability on the part of the hero than when it is due to a mere misunderstanding. What, then, if not the formula for tragedy is this position of Mr. Krutch? He will take a personal stand in relation to an historic process (the historic process being in this instance the loss of certain magical and theological or metaphysical "illusions" based upon "nonscientific" systems of causality)—and in this stand he will persist at all hazards. It is good to have a writer display so well the basic machinery for a modern tragedy in a book heralding the death of all tragedy.
I proposed to save the day by a distinction between tragic drama and the tragic spirit. And I contended that Krutch's own book admirably exemplified an essayistic instance of the tragic in this latter sense. Thus, by this test, the quality of his book disproved his thesis. But the matter of the "retraction" figures here because of the way in which I had set up the case:
Since certain things were believed, and poets used these beliefs to produce poetic effects, the beliefs became "poetic." But in the course of time contrary things came to be believed, with the consequence that the earlier beliefs were now called "illusions." And noting that so much of the world's poetry had been built upon what were now called illusions, the critics argued in a circle: The illusions, they said, were poetic, and in the loss of the illusions through science we face the death of poetry through science. The difficulty lay in the assumption that illusions were inherently "poetic"—whereas they had been made "poetic" by the fact that poets had constructed poetry upon them.
Along these lines, later in the article I said:
Wordsworth, in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads [1802], has stated the opposite position quite succinctly. If science, he says, "should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive," the poet will carry "sensation into the midst of the objects of the Science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective Sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings." Which is to say that if an ideology of science obtains general credence, the poet will poetize it by using it for the production of emotional ("human," "poetic") effects. It is not surprising that this statement should have been made by one whose poetry is a simplification, a utilization of "what is left," rather than an attempt to incorporate much new material. For this simplification itself indicated an appreciation of the fact that an ideology was in a state of remaking—it showed a determination to use only so much of the "certain" as remained fairly intact (which was, for him, sensation, or nature and the sentiment arising from the exaltation of natural processes).
One problem, I noted, involved the instability of science's beliefs. However, I risked naming some candidates for canonization, beginning with scientific method itself (which, in greater assurance then than I'd have now, I equated with "the acceptance of skepticism as a major principle of guidance"). In any case, I ended up thus:
Already there are many new elements to be "poetized." But in so far as the poet "looks before and after," or "binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society," he cannot at this time be concerned with the new alone.
Indeed (I'd add now), can he be concerned with "the new alone" at any time?
He will, if he is sensitive to the entire situation, retreat slowly (or advance slowly, as one prefers), relinquishing only what must be relinquished, retaining the vocabulary of past beauty so long as he can bring himself to feel its validity, yet never closing his eyes in the interests of comfort and respite, but continually testing the valves and wheels of his poetic mechanism, and not for a moment attempting to conceal from himself the fact that some part or other is outworn. It is quite likely that for each belief science takes from us, some other belief will be placed in its stead. That a new belief seems more "difficult" or less "poetic" need trouble us little, for the difficulty is not inherent, but arises from the fact that we must alter old methods—and if an old belief existed long enough for genial poets to make
So much, to set the conditions for my partial recantation, which I hold to be necessary, in an attempt to clear the way for thoughts on creativity in the wholly literary realm.
III
First, on looking back over those paragraphs, I note that Wordsworth, in his idealism, had been guilty of a major oversight; and I too, in following his lead.
Thus, there is no reference to the possibility of the ecological problems that we now find plaguing us, as the result of technology's creativeness, or inventiveness, or innovative prowess. In my original talk, after briefly mentioning some of the new environmental problems that now beset us, I added: "But even as I was writing down this list, I said to myself, ‘But surely I must not take a trip all the way across the continent, just to get myself involved in a platitude.’ " And of a sudden I was greeted by a disturbingly enthusiastic outburst of applause.
As regards at least the obligations of rhetorical creativity, it is not enough that comments on a deplorable situation be relevant. Troubles need but go on being what they are; yet talk about them must continually be born anew, lest the sheer mention of the problem but reinforce our boredom with its persistence. Meanwhile, ecologists, "environmentalists," have been telling us so much about the damage done by the creativity of our contrivances, even the barely adequate distribution of the documents detailing such analyses and admonitions would in itself require a catastrophic destruction of forests to supply enough pulp-wood for the paper on which the sefate-laden persuasions would be distributed.
In all likelihood we today are neither more nor less virtuous than mankind ever was, neither more nor less stupid, neither more nor less unimaginative. But all these ingenious contraptions that we owe to the burgeoning of the applied physical sciences are powers. Doubtless the human race has made big mistakes since the beginning of time. But bad as they occasionally were, they couldn't add up to much, as regards their threat to the survival or welfare of the human race in general. For in earlier times there was simply not enough physical power available to make a mistake that even remotely approached in scope the worldwide consequences that current technology has made possible. Given the fantastic
Let us now return to that partial recantation I have been leading towards.
An intermediate stage is still to be inserted, and I propose to introduce it thus: In an early book, Attitudes toward History, I tinkered with an incongruous concept that I called "the bureaucratization of the imaginative." Going back, I think, to Spengler's (for me traumatic) distinction between "culture" and "civilization," and beyond that to Eduard von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious, it looked upon historic developments as subject to a kind of progressive rigidification (somewhat like hardening of the arteries in old age). The "imaginative" I thought of as intrinsically pliant, creative—but the act of giving body to an imaginative project involved a contradiction, for which I proposed the intentionally unwieldy word, "bureaucratization." Thus, once any imaginative ideal attains its "bureaucratization," or institutional counterpart, it will have become in some respects the very opposite of its original impulse. In sum, by the "bureaucratization of the imaginative" was meant a perspective by incongruity, such as "the rigidifying of the pliant."[2]
This process seemed to involve a further paradoxical twist whereby, in the very enacting of a purpose, a society necessarily selects means somewhat ill-adapted to that purpose. For by the sheer fact of being itself, anything will contain potentialities beyond the use for which it may happen to be designed. Thus, though a hammer is specifically made for driving nails, it can also be used in a brawl for clouting an opponent. To this aspect of bureaucratization, or rigidification, I gave the name "unintended by-product." And I proposed some mild terministic innovations that I thought were needed to spot and identify cultural manifestations of this sort.[3]
The lore of the new wonder drugs makes it obvious that with my concept of "unintended by-products" I was groping fumblingly towards the current expression, " side effects." Clearly, "side effects" is the term I need, for recanting somewhat on my earlier vote of favoring the science
Meanwhile, there is an ironic sense in which Wordsworth's prophecy has come true. Poets have already made many of our technological developments "poetic," by widening the range of things talked about in poems, despite the resistance of many readers, of many critics, and even of many poets who still look upon such modes of expression as essentially "prosaic." The prevalent aversion to didactic poetry also figures here— and though it is yielding, this resistance is probably upheld in part by poets who, being themselves teachers, think of their verse writing as flatly antithetical to their pedagogic mode of livelihood. Also, whereas I would interpret Wordsworth as having had in mind an increased range whereby things not formerly considered beautiful would be brought within the realm of beauty, there developed a different trend whereby the test of beauty itself dropped away. This, I take it, is the grounding for that kind of poetic creativity we now call the "anti-poem."
An easy way to appreciate the difference is by contrasting Wordsworth's preface with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's manifestoes proclaiming the gospel of futurism which would go beyond free verse to free words: "The mots-libristes orchestrate colors, noises, sounds, they form suggestive combinations with the materials of language and slang, arithmetical and geometrical formulae, old words, words distorted and invented, the cries of animals and the roar of motors."
Marinetti had become remade, he tells us, during a trip in an airplane,
A "manifesto in glorification of war shows how well the futurist mode of acceptance was adapted for recruiting in the service of Mussolini. The futurist, to praise war, needed only to recite its horrors, and call them beautiful (somewhat as the ancient Greeks considered the left illomened, and made up the difference euphemistically by calling the left flank of their armies the ‘well named’)."
"Marinetti contrived to attain ‘yea-saying’ at whatever cost. Like a cruel caricature of Whitman, he would be the omnivorous appetite. By a cult of the picturesque, his project categorically silenced objections. To any who might say, ‘This modern world is disease,’ it could answer, ‘But what a perfect example of disease!’ … Were the streets noisy? It could counter by advocating an uncritical cult of noise. Might there be stench? It would discuss the ‘beauties' of stench." And so on.
I am here quoting some references to Marinetti that I published in 1937(my Attitudes toward History).[5] I feel that they have a kind of "this is where I came in" effect. But they punctuate a literary creativity such as Wordsworth obviously did not have in mind, regarding an attitude towards the "second nature" that would develop in response to the advance of technologic creativity. Marinetti's manifestoes are useful mainly as a symptom; or we might call them the emergent suppurating of a tendency that now manifests itself in manifold scattered and attenuated variants.
I believe it leads ultimately into a position that I might best approach somewhat roundabout, thus:
If I read the ecologists correctly, their admonitions about the technologic future really embody the principle on which Greek tragedy was built. Consider the structure of Sophocles' Antigone, for instance. Using his power for what he took to be the good of the state, Creon had conscientiously promulgated a decree that, under the circumstances, would result in the heroine's death. Then, being brought to see the error of his ways, he relented, and retracted his decree. But it was too late. He
IV
Futurism can turn into a kind of Super-Futurism, carrying to excess the Horatian formula, carpe diem seize the day. There's much creativity of that sort in our attitude towards situations that seem beyond our powers. Paradoxically, to a large extent the current cult of the irrational profits by the fact that, for all our unsureness, there still is a vast backlog of regularity. Thus, much creativity even on its face averse to current trends is actually made possible only by the conditions about which it would complain. And there are the ranges in which we can still cultivate the great works left us by tradition, sometimes loving them all the more because they are out of line with circumstances now. When, in grade school we were edified by the resounding challenge, "Woodsman, spare that tree, / Touch not a single bow, / In youth it sheltered me, / And I'll protect it now," our edification was made possible only because some other woodsmen had not spared some other trees. Just think what vast treasures must be dug up, transported, processed, bought, sold, catalogued, recorded in archives of one sort or another, so that but a single day's input may be fed into the maws of our many communicative media, thus providing material of some sort for the creativity of symbolic action. But as regards all Super-Futuristic movements, all cults of the absurd, do they not rather sift down to each generation's saying in effect, "After me, the deluge?"
Is it not possible that Freud misled us, in his stress upon the allimportance of the fatherkill? At least, as regards the creativity of the sacrificial principle, which I see as central to the Bible, in the Old Testament there is the focal story of Father Abraham piously resigned to sacrificing his son, Isaac. And the logic of the New Testament gravitates about a transcendent Father who sent his only-begotten Son for sacrifice. As for
V
As for specifically poetic creativity, probably its most profound aspect comes to a focus in that sense of resolution we commonly refer to as "catharsis." There is also the rudimentary catharsis of getting something said at all, as regards the pressure of a thing, situation, or process that, though affecting us, had not been named. The unnamed is another name for the potentially namable—and all men, even the most reticent, are the kind of animal that is "sentenced to the sentence," so we are moved by the ultimate logic of the summarizing, attitudinizing moment. But the catharsis of getting it well said is something else again, involving all sorts of selfimposed obligations, and corresponding sense of guilt, towards some ideal Audience X (maybe but an especially exacting aspect of one's own person). Further, the creative battle against such harassments does not end with the confronting and overcoming of the difficulties themselves. For there is still the problem of public reception, which may even be withheld not because a work is intrinsically inferior, but because it is good in ways that the author's contemporaries do not take to. Just think: The greatest Creator of them all saw that His Creation was good. Obviously He knew what He was talking about. But think of the endless grumbling that His beloved Creatures have been creatively engaged in ever since. And if a work happens to be of a sort that persons in authority consider subversive or in some other respect reprehensible, its creativity may not be a resolution at all for the author, but rather the source of much distress.
Then too, there may be a subtler issue involved. Often we tend to think of "catharsis" as a mere emetic process, a way of spitting forth undigested problems, as though "Out with it" were the recipe for a cureall and one could be cleansed of repressed vindictiveness by the sheer act of getting it expressed.
To be sure, this is an important part of the recipe; but I submit that it's not all. Total tragic catharsis also involves an attitude that is on the slope of love. If one could intensely love all mankind, by that very condition he would be cleansed. Tragedy provides a surrogate; namely; pity, which is on the slope of love. I have mentioned Sophocles' Antigone. Whereas Creon's conscientious devotion to the state and Antigone's family piety involve them in flatly antagonistic positions, the play is so designed that partisanship is transcended; and we feel pity for them both. I take it that, within the conditions of the form, the imitation of an agon in which one feels equally sympathetic to both antagonists would be the nearest dramatic analogue of universal love, so far as its "cathartic" effects are concerned.
There is a book relevant to our present concerns: Poetry Therapy: The Use of Poetry in the Treatment of Emotional Disorders (edited by Jack J. Leedy; Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1969). The various articles consider literary creativity from the standpoint of cures for sick souls rather than as examples of artistic excellence. In an item that I contributed, "Thoughts on the Poets' Corner," I brought up one point that I'd like to try out here, on the subject of "creativity":
Where speculations on these matters are concerned, I would propose one admonitory rule of thumb. Since, in past eras, many of the world's keenest minds treated central problems of human motivation in theological terms, I devoutly join forces with those who believe that one should always ask, at least experimentally, whether any theological account of motives can be shown to have a secular analogue. In the case of our present quandaries, I'd naturally think of the problematical relationship between churchmen's theories of "demonology" and contemporary concerns with creativity.
Thus, at least for heuristic purposes, we should ask whether one possible embarrassing analogue should always be kept in mind. Even if one's dreams had been an ecstatic vision of Christ or Mary, the churchmen admonished that it might be a delusion imposed upon the dreamer by the Prince of Darkness. And, similarly, should we not be on guard lest "creativity" escape proper quizzical inspection? I mean: Creativity should not bear the mask of purely and simply a "good" word.
Rather, keeping in mind possible secular analogues of the demonological should we not always be on the look-out for systematic ways of
― 49 ―distinguishing between "creativity" that heals and "creativity" that endangers (including further twists whereby a poorly paid and poor-paying artist might, through the creative sacrificing of himself, contribute to the comfort of trivial people for whom his dedicated sufferings provide a conversation-piece at cocktail hour)? There is much here still to be-puzzled over.
God only knows how autosuggestive one's work with symbol-systems can become. I know of at least one fellow who wrote a novel about a word-man's cracking up. By the time he had finished, he had got himself so greatly entangled in his plot's development, he barely did escape ending in an asylum himself. Several steps were needed to help him dispel the spell that the sustained engrossment in his fiction had imposed upon him. And among them was a deliberate renouncing of his emergent plans for another novel. He turned to criticism instead—and that subterfuge served him passably. He does not contend that novel writing necessarily produces such results. But he's adamant in his insistence that it worked that way with him.
And writers can develop ways of working whereby their creativity gets bound up with physically exacting habits that they could not abandon without abandoning the mental attitudes intrinsic to such creativity. So they almost necessarily persist in their ways of taxing themselves until they die by what they had most creatively lived by.
Who knows how deep all such matters go? Sometimes I have tinkered with the notion that all courses should be taught under the sign of fear, somewhat as (I assume without any but remote and unreliable knowledge) certain monks in ancient Tibetan monasteries were methodically prepared for the time when each could go into a solitary cell, never again to commune with even one other member of his own order. Things were so arranged that the interchange of food and offal could be managed, without sight or word of any other human. Eventually, there came the day when the food was not accepted. A sure sign! So the cell was opened, doubtless with appropriate ritual, and the dead monk was removed, to make room for the next saintly occupant, who would in turn have been prepared thus to commune henceforth with silence.
Maybe I heard it wrong, or maybe it's a lie in the first place. But are there not aspects in which it is true of all creativity, in principle? Along such lines, purely for preparation, I have asked students to write me three pieces, one praising something, one inveighing against something, and one lamenting. The students were to choose whatever subjects they preferred, for each such exercise. One student, choosing but one subject,
My general notion is that terms are not merely suggestive in their effects upon readers, but also autosuggestive in their effects upon the writers who get used by using them. Hence, where questions of creativity are uppermost, we should above all be quizzical about the field and not just assume that every human creator is to be viewed simply as a fragment of an overall Creator. Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe he is but a victim of faulty self-diagnosis (particularly since it's so much easier to see other people's kinds of self-subjection than one's own).
VI
For a quick summary, where then are we? I began by worrying in line with the thought that the ever-accelerating drive towards the production and consumption of technologic power is so ingrained in the nature of our economy, any notable alteration in this way of life on a national scale would have radical implications of almost staggering proportions, possibilities or necessities involving attitudinal and institutional changes far more radical than we can expect of mere communist or fascist revolutions. And such unfoldings would involve almost insuperable demands for a whole new round of creativity in the arts of human relations.
Maybe I got started on the wrong foot, and thereby painted myself into a corner. I realize now, so late in the day, I might easily have talked (quite as many of us, including myself, quite often have) about the civilizing virtues of imagination. There is a great "enrichment" of our lives to be derived from the human pursuit of the humanities. Appreciation is a form of thanksgiving—and thanksgiving is among the most felicitous of attitudes (perhaps the best of all we can have, towards the opportunities that the need to have lived affords us). In our appreciation of great works we are intrinsically giving thanks. And great works have found countless ways of thus adding to our gratitude (which is to say, the range of the appreciative), as when something said turns out to feel just right.
And since the human animal so spontaneously approaches life through the perspective of his symbol-systems (be they in words, colors, dance, sculpture, or whatever such), any appreciation of life somehow does not seem complete until this kind of animal has, as it were, doubled his experiences by finding for them a counterpart purely in the realm of symbols. It seems as though, for man, the typically symbolusing animal, each fragmentarily undergone encounter in his practical existence calls for a formally perfected analogue in the realm of the purely mythopoeic.
What harvest is truly, piously complete without a harvest song? What spring has been experienced in all its fullness, until or unless some mythman has endowed it with its lovely duplicate, the sheer formalized likeness of a beginning?
What sexual union is really in essence a union unless signalized by an epithalamium of some sort, though it may deviate far indeed from traditional expectations? (I have in mind even a couple who first had a child, next went on their honeymoon, and eventually got married, a state that could conceivably lead into a period of courtship.)
In sum, then:
Yes, in many ways creativity can become a damned nuisance. There is only one kind of Levity that could conceivably be worse than Creativity. That is Lack of Creativity.
NOTES
From Introspection: The Artist Looks at Himself, ed., Donald E. Hayden, University of Tulsa Monograph Series no. 12 (Tulsa: University of Tulsa, 1971), 63–81. This paper was originally given at the Pacific Northwest Conference in English held at Yakima Valley College, Yakima, Washington, in February of 1970.
1. The pertinent selections are from Counter-Statement (New York: Harcourt, 1932; reprint, Los Altos: Hermes, 1959), 198–204. (Paperback edition, University of California Press, 1968.)
2. See Attitudes toward History (New York: New Republic, 1937; reprint, Los Altos: Hermes, 1959), vol. 2, 66 ff. (Paperback edition, Beacon Press. 1961.)
We could best sum up this view of history by a story, an anecdote presumably invented by the late Lincoln Steffens. It is so basic, if there were such a thing as a Comic Book of Genesis surely this story would be there:
Steffens, as the story goes, was entering the New York Public Library when a friend of his came stumbling out. The man was obviously in great agitation. ‘I've found it!’ he shouted. And he clamorously called for Steffens to go with him and listen while he told of his discovery.
Steffens obliged. The two bumped along Forty-Second Street and turned down Fifth Avenue while the friend somewhat incoherently explained. Gradually, despite his excitement, his words began to make sense—and Steffens
― 52 ―realized that his friend had found a plan for saving the world. And the more the outlines of the plan began to emerge, the better the scheme sounded.Then Steffens became aware that someone was walking along beside them, listening to the account. And finally, turning, be saw a very distinguished-looking gentleman—then, looking again, he realized that it was the devil.
Steffens:You seem to be interested in my friend's plan.
The Devil:Decidedly!
Steffens:What do you think of it?
The Devil:I think it's an excellent plan.
Steffens:You mean to say you think it would work?
The Devil:Oh, yes. It would certainly work.
Steffens:But in that case, how about you? Wouldn't it put you out of a job?
The Devil:Not in the least. Ill organize it (xiv).
3. For "unintended by-product" see Attitudes toward History, vol. 2, 67, 219. Or second and paperback editions, 226, 227, 259, 320.
4. Incidentally, as an obiter dictum, in behalf of the Self-Love Department, I'd like to quote a few lines from an article by William Bowen ("Our New Awareness of the Great Web" Fortune 81 [February], 198): "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.’ " The editor kindly called his article to my attention. But regrettably in the article itself his generosity fell short of naming the book. So there has been no unseemly rush to exhaust the edition. (See Attitudes toward History, vol. 1, 192, 198, 223. Or the second and paperback editions, 150, 154, 167.)
5. Attitudes toward History, vol. 1, 37–41.
6. Just as I had got this far along, and was feeling a bit depressed, I read a news story (Nan Robertson, "Seaborg Says Man Is Led by Science to Question Values," New York Times, February 5, 1970, page 1, column 4), concerning a statement by the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and codiscoverer of plutonium, Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg. He was testifying before the House Select Subcommittee on Education. His testimony was offered in behalf of increased government aid to the humanities, an admirable policy, obviously dear to us all.
He said that many scientists, rather than rejoicing in discovery as an end in itself, were beginning to ask, "What is being done with our discoveries?" (I shall leave unmentioned the fact that an adjoining story concerned our presence in Vietnam.) He told Congress "that the age of triumphant science and technology was forcing man into a new philosophic era based on the ‘why’ of living."
Since I began by quoting Veblen's conceit, "Invention is the mother of necessity," it would be relevant to observe that Dr. Seaborg's testimony was presented, on the contrary, under the sign of the proverb in its pristine Edenic form, without the ironic twist. "I believe that one of the characteristics of the human race," he said, "possibly the one that is primarily responsible for its course of evolution, is that it has grown by creatively responding to failure."
Where I would incline to worry is in the paragraph: "Dr. Seaborg expressed his belief that the ‘despair and negativism of the times' was a prelude to deeper
3. Towards Helhaven
Three Stages of a Vision
1971
Kenneth Burke had a great talent for irony, comedy, and satire. One can see it here in the first of the Helhaven essays, as well as the second, "Why Satire," but one can also see it in Burke's poems, his "Flowerishes," in "Epilogue: Prologue in Heaven" in The Rhetoric of Religion (1961), in parts of a great many of his essays, and in his letters. Anyone who ever saw or heard Burke "perform" in his prime will remember his improvisational humor and his raspy laughter at his own ironic jokes and cracks. Like any satirist, Burke had a great sense of the absurd and a remarkable ability to reduce things to absurdity just by following certain tendencies to the end of the line—as he does here with computers, hypertechnologism, and pollution. Reading the essay twenty-five years later, one can only say of Burke's predictions that they were, alas, all too true. The Culture-Bubble on the Moon is not so far-fetched as it might seem at first. Burke himself would have been dumbfounded by the astounding computer revolution of the nineties, a technological revolution that was just beginning during his last years. Now there are computer screens everywhere and soon, every school in the country will be equipped with them and have access to the worldwide web. In some schools, there are proposals to do away with books and have students do all their reading on individual laptops.
Hypertechnologism is one of the main themes of Burke's late essays, as is the fact, according to Burke, that it is language based. It is hypertechnologism that creates "counter-nature," another main theme of Burke's late essays.
INTRODUCTION
Not without uneasiness, I am going to indulge in a bit of satire. For several reasons satire is a troublous form, not the least being that some people don't know how to take it. Years ago I published a satire closely akin to the theme of my present "Helhaven" vision.
It was called "Waste—or the Future of Prosperity." The general slant was that, although there is a limit to the amount that people can use, there's no limit to the amount that people can waste. Therefore, in order to ensure maximum production, hence maximum prosperity, all that we
The article was written shortly before the big market crash of 1929. It was published shortly after the crash. It satirically welcomed the already emergent principle of planned obsolescence which has since taken much mightier strides forward, so that not only products such as automobiles or refrigerators are scientifically designed to wear out before they should; but even architectural piles of considerable magnitude are now planned as temporary structures, to be knocked down after a few years and replaced by monsters twice as big (and they in turn will soon be getting pounded apart—or if not, then they will simply fall apart).
For a time, after the crash of 1929, the standard ways of accelerating prosperity by wastage lost some of their momentum. But even so, the tradition remained intact. And while many unemployed persons were starving through lack of wages with which to buy things, prices were kept up by the fact that much food was being systematically destroyed on the farms where it was produced. This was the era of the plowing-under of the little pigs.
Since those dismal days, of course, wastage has more than regained its pace. I recently read that, whereas ten years ago each citizen contributed an average of four pounds of trash a day, we now average six pounds a day; and if our current methods of production and distribution can maintain this exacting cultural standard, it is estimated that by 1980 the average output of trash per day will have climbed to the enviable height of eight pounds per citizen.
But in my earlier article, satirically saluting this view of what is usually known among us as the highest standard of living in the world, I also had a satirical passage along these lines: Despite our national prowess as wasters under conditions of peace, I said, one must recognize that war is a still more efficient means of wastage. So I included a reference to the encouraging promise of greater arms production. A syndicated columnist seized on that, quoting it as though it were to be taken straight, without the satiric discount. And in newspapers throughout the country he aired his moral indignation at the thought that any publication would sink so low as to see in war production a boon to prosperity. At the time, the editor of the weekly which had published my satire told me: In all his many years as an editor, he had never published a satire that did not provoke a rash of letters from indignant readers who had taken the piece on its face, without allowance for the satiric twist.
But things have moved on since then, until now, as Juvenal said in the
When I wrote my piece "Waste—or the Future of Prosperity" (1930), there was of course no talk of computers. And waste was small potatoes as compared with the concerns that now beset us, such as pollution by mercury poisoning, which has made the fish of several whole states inedible, and also has been found in life in the high seas.
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. I recall some months ago, when I was addressing a conference of English teachers in the Northwest, a section that teams with conservationists. Indeed, even while I was there, university students were doing Herculean labors cleaning the junk out of a scenic river into which every conceivable kind of discardable object had been dumped. I was scheduled to talk on "creativity." My point was that the center of "creativity" in our day was with the physical sciences, which were having an almost miraculous upsurge. And the job of the social sciences and the humanities was somehow to try to keep up with the cultural problems which this great flowering of creativity in the physical sciences had imposed upon us. So, by way or introduction, I talked for a bit about the unwanted side effects of industrial expansion. Then I happened to say, "But surely, you didn't want me to come three thousand miles just to talk with you about the subject of pollution." And I got a most disturbingly enthusiastic outburst of applause. Similarly, I had read how the Scots are indignant because some lecturer claims that pollution has killed the Loch Ness Monster.
As for complaints about technology: All of us have been weary of them for quite some time. The "God is dead" theologians have helped us to realize: It were far better that we blaspheme Our Father than that we blaspheme Technology.
We are sick of Lamentation. What we want is affirmation. And if we can't get affirmation by any other route, then let's get at least the sheer gestures and accents of affirmation, with the help of a satiric twist.
For our slogan, then, we stoutly affirm: We must not turn back the
Forward, outward, and up—as per my vision of Helhaven, to which let us now repair.
I THE HIGH PROMISE OF THE COMPUTER
Those persons are wronging the computer who say that it will cause unemployment. Consider this situation, for instance: You confront a citizen with a questionnaire that required many hours to plan and many more hours to fill out properly. Yet all such data, however slowly and laboriously assembled, could be run through a computing apparatus in a flash. Thus is it not obvious that computers will enable us to gatnher ever greater mountains of information? And the greater the number and complexity of the computers, then proportionately greater the amount of painstaking effort that must go into the programming of such inquiries, with a correspondingly increased number of man-hours devoted to the task of keeping these omnivora adequately fed. For recall that,unlike human beings, they can perform continuously twenty-four hours a day. Accordingly, you need but allow for the great disparity between the time needed to assemble the data for a punched card and the fraction of a second in which it can be processed once the information is assembled, whereupon it becomes obvious that properly varied and complicated questionnaires could require at least three hours a day of a citizen's time in filling them out, plus all the other hours involved in planning, programming, and interviewing; then add the time and effort spent in publishing the material, and the many further activities required by the fact that no one will read it. Hence still other ingenious operations must be planned, to coordinate all such findings with many other equally unread and unreadable reports by specialists in totally different channels of investigation.
For instance, who knows how many bingo players also subscribe to the thesis: "We can't get out of Vietnam now because we shouldn't have been there in the first place"? Who knows the correlation between belief in progress and peptic ulcers due to food additives? Who knows whether the Pill has made for more fun or more boredom? Who knows the average age of the experts who helped President Johnson put over the Gulf of Tonkin ploy? Who knows what percentage of leaders in the militaryindustrial complex have become the parents of flower children? Who knows how much of the money that the United States shells out for Vietnam gets shipped straight into Swiss bank accounts by members of the
Above all, let us take to heart the encouraging front-page story from our nation's capital (New York Times, June 27, 1970). "The police, security and military intelligence of the Federal Government are quietly compiling a mass of computerized and microfilmed files here on hundreds of thousands" of citizens who are adjudged to be what is known to the trade as "persons of protective interest." Data banks building such an "array of instantly retrievable information" would provide gainful occupation for an enormous army of snoopers, even if the purpose were but to keep known criminals under surveillance. But the scope of this Arguseyed investigation goes far beyond that. For instance (and here's a nice conceit): "The computer might immediately supply you, for but the asking, with all the information it contains on the ‘characteristics' of subjects encoded on its tapes—all the short, fat, long-haired, young white campus activists in Knoxville, Tennessee." True, at that point the reporter was probably just airing his high idealism—yet his example helps justify my claim that, on one such project alone (and I can promise you that each graduate student in the social sciences can make a dozen questionnaires be needed where but one had been before), the speed with which the computer can scan, store, ingest, and put forth its info will vastly increase the amount of work needed to keep it adequately fed. For what is more obvious than the fact that data banks along those lines cannot be complete until they tell us, in a flash, how many citizens believe in organic gardening, how many grow furious when they have been hit with the same damned singing commercial again and again and again (they who couldn't have stood a few bars of even the greatest music thus sadistically reduplicated), or how many happen to lithp when they thay pith?
However, there still remains the possibility that, regardless of all such contributions to the magnifying of the GNP (by which is meant "Gross National Product," not "guinea pig"), a computerized technology may produce a troublesome situation in which, despite the urgent generating of "new needs," the proliferation of labor-saving devices actually does save some labor—and to that extent a certain percentage of our workforce might be unemployable (and thus they will be socioeconomically
However, insofar as there is unemployment (to be distinguished from those kinds of unemployment we call leisure), and insofar as some of the unemployed may not manifest enough disorders to keep researchers gainfully employed, the vision of another possibility (or rather, I should say, opportunity) opens before us.
First, there is the technical fact that computers, if properly fed, could digest and excrete authoritative information as to the number of citizens that the given economy can gainfully employ, along with the various categories of employment that would also be predictable.
For this purpose all that is needed is the gathering of data designed to predict (on the basis of each citizen's profile at the age of two) just what grades any class of such citizens can be expected to receive during its school years, what kinds of schools (if any) will be attended, what quality of education will follow from such schooling, how many are most likely to be dropouts, and what incomes these various classes of citizen will predictably receive, at various stages along their lifespan.
Thus, we would need only to arrange a draft by lot. Such a wholly democratic process would enable us to isolate the number of citizens, in the various categories, that the economy cannot employ. For instance, at the age of two, Citizen CQ7-0912-5478 gives reliable indications that he would end up as a public accountant, at such-and-such a salary. But there are more of such incipient accountants than the economy can take care of. Accordingly, it is decided by lot how many of such two-year-olds must be drafted for inclusion in a class of unemployed accountants.
Any such scientifically selected group will not have to attend school, or take jobs, and the like. But, in accordance with their classification, at the proper age they will receive whatever grades, diplomas, wages, honors, and such the computer had predicted for them, if the whole class of such incipient accountants were actually to go through all these processes that would necessarily involve the elimination of a given number. And later, in the course of their maturing, they will receive all the subsequent sums, services, psychiatric or medical aid that computerology will have established as natural to their station.
True, there are problems still to be ironed out, as regards a wholly accurate rating for all necessary data. Also, some persons drafted to be classed as unemployed accountants might be tempted to try augmenting
II A RESIDUAL PROBLEM
But however great the computer's contribution to our culture may be, there still remains the problem of how life on Earth can manage to survive the burdens of worldwide pollution that plague the ways of industrial progress. When you consider how much such "effluence" is almost inevitable in such highly developed technologic enterprises as oil refineries, pulp mills, chemical plants—in sum, the profuse production of power by the mining and processing of minerals, the use of agriculture for industrial purposes, and the consumption of either fossil fuels or atomic energy—it becomes hard to imagine how such trends can be adequately neutralized so long as Hypertechnologism continues to set the pace for mankind's way of life. And the most violent of communist or fascist revolutions are far from the depths of radicalism that would have to be reached before the adventurous ideals of exploitation that are associated with modern industrial, financial, and political ambitions could
Frankly, I enroll myself among those who take it for granted that the compulsiveness of man's technologic genius, as compulsively implemented by the vast compulsions of our vast technologic grid, makes for a self-perpetuating cycle quite beyond our ability to adopt any major reforms in our ways of doing things. We are happiest when we can plunge on and on. And any thought of turning back, of curbing rather than aggravating our cult of "new needs," seems to us suicidal, even though the situation is actually the reverse, and it is our mounting technologic clutter that threatens us.
But I do not despair. For a true futurism is now dawning among us. The promise of the gospel of Total Futuristic Promotion is most quickly annunciated in a parable-like observation of this sort: When you find that, within forty years, a great and almost miraculously handsome lake has been transformed into a cesspool, don't ask how such destruction might be undone. That would be to turn back—and we must fare ever forward. Hence, with your eyes fixed on the beacon of the future, rather ask yourselves how, if you but polluted the lake ten times as much, you might convert it into some new source of energy. Thus, conceivably, you might end up by using the rotted waters as a new fuel. Or, even better, they might be made to serve as raw material for some new kind of poison, usable either as a pesticide or to protect against unwholesome political ideas.
There you glimpse the principle behind the vision. In sum: If there is a drive, why not drive with it, towards an ideal end? We need but extend to "perfection" the sort of conditions we already confront in principle when we buy bottled water because the public water supply is swill; or when a promoter, by impairing the habitability of some area (as, for instance, with a smeltery or a jetport), makes profit enough to build himself a secluded, idyllic estate among still uncontaminated lakes, meadows, and wooded peaks.
For a happy ending, then, envision an apocalyptic development whereby technology could of itself procure, for a fortunate few, an ultimate technological release from the very distresses with which that very technology now burdens us.
III THE SOLUTION: THE CULTURE-BUBBLE
Some give a decent life on Earth ten years, some thirty, some at most a hundred. In any case, now that the Irreversible Change is on the way, get in on the ground floor. Buy shares for yourself or your family in Helhaven, the greatest apocalyptic project this side of Mars.
HELHAVEN, the Mighty Paradisal Culture-Bubble on the Moon. Safer than any Sea Meadows venture (even under the Arctic ice) More nearly attainable than a Martian project, helhaven, the Ultimate Colony, merging in one enterprise, both Edenic Garden and Babylonic, Technologic Tower. And paradox of paradoxes: This Final Flight will have been made possible by the very conditions which made it necessary.
Profiting by the best resources of both the physical and the social sciences, along with experts of administrative and managerial capacity, the colonists' range of options will be considerable. Some will, of course, prefer accommodations in the Luna-Hilton Hotel. Some will choose private quarters, as in suburbs (if that's how their past experience makes them feel most at home). But there will also be arrangements whereby dwellings can be equipped with picture windows looking out, as it were, upon the wholly lifelike illusion of an austere mountain scene, or a deserted lake, either distant, or with waters that seem to lap at the piles on which the house itself is built.
Also, in one compartment of the bubble, there will be an actual manmade shoreline, with waves, and breakers, splendid for surfing, and the best white sand for luxuriating on the beach (though protected from the sun and exposed only to a scientifically designed substitute). In another compartment, there will be the simulacrum of an Alpine cabin reached by a ski tow, with an artificially snow-covered slope that makes possible the most delightful of earthly winter sports. There will be dreamgardens, gambling joints, places to get lost in, and a Super-Lookout, about which more in a moment.
The lessons already learned from air-conditioning on Earth will have been so perfected that each such area will be kept in proper climatic balance. However, experts in psychophysical problems have also recommended that various Chambers of Discomfort be provided, since some consultants have pointed out that too orderly a mode of existence can itself become a source of personal disorder. But there is still some debate as to whether a Whipping Room should be made available for customers so inclined—or should I say two Whipping Rooms, one active, one passive?
Among the most deeply probing facilities in the Culture-Bubble will be the above-mentioned Super-Lookout, a kind of chapel, bare except for some small but powerful telescopes of a special competence. And on the wall, in ecclesiastical lettering, there will be these fundamental words from the Summa Theologica: "And the blessed in Heaven shall look upon the sufferings of the damned, that they may love their blessedness the more." The underlying situation here is this:
In order that the Lunar Bubble be kept perfectly provisioned (and we are being frank about such matters because we want you to realize how scrupulously this entire project is being planned), there will still be the necessity that gases, minerals, and even some organic growths be reclaimed now and then from Earth. Thus the New Colonialism will entail frequent missions back to our Maternal Source for such replacements. Increased experience in the use of spacecraft will make it certain that the trip itself will not be dangerous. But the possibility of encountering a nasty band of still-surviving hominids will add risk to these forays, and give them somewhat the quality of marauding expeditions (though the expression is obviously unjust; for any Lunar Paradisiacs of the future will be but replenishing their gigantic womblike Culture-Bubble, as it were, from the placenta of the Mother Earth from which their very body temperature is derived, and which is just as much our home, however filthy we shall have made it before clearing out, as it is the home of any scurvy anthropoid leftovers that might still somehow contrive to go on hatching their doubtless degenerate and misshapen broods back there among those seven filthy seas).
The bold fellows employed by the Bubble's Great Astronauts Corporation will be entrusted with such adventurous duties of salvaging. And those subscribers who at times choose to enter the Dark Realm of Meditation in the Super-Lookout Chapel can, while watching the Astronauts in their flights to Earth, get occasional glimpses of the worse-than-Yahoos still gasping and squirming and pestering one another on the Progress-gutted planet by which our Lunar Paradise will originally have been made possible.
In all frankness, however, one problem has yet to be solved. Since Technologism is to be tied in with Imperialism, one can reasonably expect that descendants from certain construction workers on, say, a Martian Promotion or a Sea-Bottom Meadows project might want to pick a fight with the peace-loving Lunar Paradisiacs. It has not yet been decided whether plans should also allow for the possibility that future expansionistic-minded Lunar patriots might want to undertake a preventive
| 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. |
ADDENDUM: ANTICLIMACTIC RUMINATIONS
Reverting to the subject of the computer, I'd note that it has already had great influence in the shaping of doctoral dissertations. There is almost an automatic tendency to work up a postgraduate project built around some kind of questionnaire whereby not the student but the persons questioned must do the bulk of the work. Recently, in a related sort of enterprise, I was interviewed for three hours, while all my answers were being taped. Occasionally the interviewer would say, "In sum, your position is suchand-such." I said, "No, that's not what I meant." Then I was told, "But there are only so-and-so many answers here, and I must check off one of them." So presumably the statistics have me assigned to the category best suited to the needs of the questionnaire, which had no exact bin for my answers. Then the interviewer left me with an elaborate set of blanks to fill out besides. There were such questions as: "With whom have you talked seriously about this matter (a) within the last three months, (b) within the last six months, (c) within the last year?" Or there'd be a list of a dozen or so possibly causative factors for something, and I was asked to rate them in relative importance, 1, 2, 3, throughout them all. I meant to behave, but simply fell apart. Having received a follow-up inquiry on July 3, I couldn't resist demurring the very next morning, and dating my letter "Independence Day" I said that, just as some people are not especially photogenic, some not especially phonogenic, and some not especially apt kinesics-wise, I find myself totally nonquestionnaireogenic. Even so, the questionnaire was sent to me in toto once again.
Returning to my vision of the "Remnant," in Helhaven, there are at least two more points that I'd like to incorporate into this scheme somehow.
The first has to do with the fact that the ever-intensifying cult of industrial power is robbing the world of many delicious natural flavors, as when oil spills and thermal pollution destroy good fishing areas. One angle I thought of was to boast that "some chemists, fired by the Helhaven vision, have nearly perfected a way of so treating mercury that it tastes like caviar. Another expert, taking to heart the thought that people like barbecued meat, has nearly synthesized an all-bituminous steak. Along these lines, the denizens of Helhaven can be promised a food supply wholly industrialized, plus an artificial stomach better able to digest such products." These promises are based on the fact that already many substitutes and additives from the chemical laboratory have been replacing unadulterated organic foods ever since we got Mom out of the kitchen and into the office or workshop.
Also, it must be recognized: To a great extent, conservationists are not in need of jobs that cause pollution. Their properties thrive better under simpler conditions. But people out of work will welcome an industry that seems likely to provide them employment, even though they might be quite aware that it will cause much contamination. In such situations, we must face it, the unemployed poor are one with the French monarch who said, "After me, the deluge." It's a mean problem.
But in any case, let there be no turning back of the clock. Or no turning inward. Our vice president has rightly cautioned: No negativism. We want AFFIRMATION—TOWARDS HELHAVEN
ONWARD, OUTWARD, and UP!
NOTES
This essay was first published in the Sewanee Review 79 (winter 1971): 11–25. Copyright 1971 by the University of the South. Reprinted with the permission of the editor.
4. Why Satire, With a Plan for Writing One
1974
This is the second Helhaven essay and is Kenneth Burke's most detailed and strident indictment of hypertechnology and the technological psychosis, both main themes of all his late essays, including the two long afterwords for the 1984 editions of Permanence and Change and Attitudes toward History. Both of these are entitled "In Retrospective Prospect" and combine the backward and forward movement so characteristic of his late essays—especially "Towards Looking Back," "Variations on ‘Providence,’ " and of course, the Helhaven pair. This backward and forward movement is also typical of Walt Whitman, who had very different results from what we find in Burke.
Walt Whitman figures prominently in many of Burke's late works: He was the model for some of Burke's late poems (such as "Eye-Crossing" and "On Flood Tides of Sinkership"), and is a central figure in the Helhaven essays, as well as in "Towards Looking Back" and the two long poems mentioned above. Why Whitman, our great nineteenth-century poet of uplift, of the promissory in American life and in the development of the individual self?
There is a real love/hate relationship between Burke and Whitman. Like so many of the rest of us, Burke would like to believe in Whitman, the Waltman of "Eye-Crossing," but he can't because he knows for a fact that Walt's dream was becoming a nightmare. Walt's dream was a typical nineteenth-century American dream of a limitless future, of cosmic optimism, of a never-ending westering in American life—as in "Song of the Open Road" and "Passage to India."
Soured by two world wars, the brutalities of the depression, the threat of a nuclear holocaust after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Nazi's extermination of six million Jews, the cold war, and massive technologically caused pollution of the environment—and more—Burke could not believe in Whitman's dream and makes a frontal attack on him in this essay. Burke liked to say that Whitman was whistling in the dark in his poems. You whistle in the dark to keep yourself from being scared. It is what kids do. It is hardly what Whitman did in poem after poem in Song of Myself and it is hardly what we would accuse Burke of doing in "Eye-Crossing." To reduce Whitman's poems to whistling in the dark is to reduce them to a kind of absurdity, to a purely verbal symbolic action with no basis in reality. To believe in Whitman you have to believe that he believed in what he wrote. He was not, as Burke suggests, just peddling nature as American real estate.
The two Whitmanian poems with which the essay ends—"O Lesson Opportune (The Master's Call)" and "Far, Far off the Daybreak Call (Night Thoughts of the Master)" are themselves tributes to Whitman's style and rhetoric
― 67 ―even as they mock him with heavy irony and a systematic cancellation of his dream. Maybe that is where we should leave this matter, in a typically Burkean ambiguity. Burke was a big believer in the autosuggestive power of one's own writing. Sometimes he really does seem to believe that a writer can make him/herself over in the image of his/her imagery (see Burke's essay on his novel Towards a Better Life). But if Whitman was making himself over in the image of his powerful poetry, he was hardly whistling in the dark but transforming his "self" with the magic of words into the revered figure that we now identify with.Wallace Stegner's main character in All the Little Live Things, Joe Allston, says this about irony: "Sympathy I have failed in, stoicism I have barely passed. But I have made straight A's in irony—that curse, that evasion, that armor, that way of staying safe while seeming wise." It is precisely this view of irony that has sometimes been leveled against Burke: too much irony and not enough action, especially in this essay. But irony is also a kind of double vision, just as puns and metaphors are. The heavy irony of this essay is a two-edged sword; it cuts both ways. Though Burke kept his outhouse and relied on an outside well for water into the 1960s, he was, like the rest of us, heavily dependent upon technology and as guilty as the rest of us in promoting and using modern technology. Nobody is clean these days.
This doubleness is in the name of Burke's Culture-Bubble on the Moon: Helhaven, with an additional double meaning in the haven/heaven play on words. We are turning our lovely planet into a hell of technological pollution and overpopulation. When it becomes pure hell, we build ourselves a haven on the moon with the same technology we used to pollute the earth and then migrate to it— that is, the elite does. But it is a Helhaven because it divorces us, separates us from nature and the physical realities of both. Everything in Helhaven is an image of an image of an image, as if we were living in the TV or the computer screen, or in a movie where nothing is really real but is the creation of the special effects people.
The more you think about Helhaven, the better it gets in relation to recent developments in technology, which make it seem as if anything is possible and that humans are rushing at full speed into a technological future they have not understood at all, seduced by the radiance and allure of, the dazzling resourcefulness of, technology.
I
Where are we? And I use the expression not in the procedural sense, as spoken to a class which has been considering some particular subject matter through several sessions, whereby a summary bringing things up to date might be in order. Rather, I have in mind the sort of question that has the connotations, "In the name of God or the Devil, at this stage in our history, where in Hell's name are we?"
Even my title somewhat reflects my perturbations. In its first form it ran, "I Want to Write a Satire." Then things so developed that I did not want to do anything of the sort; hence the form, "I Wanted to Write a Satire." Then came developments that got me to wavering. Did I, or did I not, want to write a satire? So now, in the spirit of compromise I have hit upon a title that somewhat straddles the issue and that probably fits best in any case, since the underlying design has remained the same; namely: I propose to interlard observations about satire in general with notes towards one particular satire which, on and off, has been exercising me.
The effort will involve these several aspects: While being based on some trends in our civilization that, as a Juvenal might say, make it "hard not to write satire," it will seriously consider situations and motives on which these in turn are based, and at times incline to take the fun out of satire. It will sum up what I take to be the nature and possible virtues of satire. And it will end by discussing some twists encountered in plans for one particular satire, technically a work "in progress" (though, in an attempt to compromise between "progress" and "regress," I have proposed the intermediate term "gress," whereupon the details of my test case could be called a "Gress Report").
The design has one further strand, having to do with the fact that the satire in its present projected form was a long time a-borning. And often the handiest way to make clear just where we are (in this instance at the stage of asking "Where are we?") is to show how we got there. So my Gress Report will begin with some paragraphs of regress.
A rudimentary version of my satire was written just before the market crash of 1929, and published after. Done under the obvious influence of Thorstein Veblen, it was called "Waste—or the Future of Prosperity" (The New Republic 58 [July 1930], 228–31]). It was a perversely rational response to a time when the principle of "planned obsolescence" was already becoming a major factor in the engineering and merchandising of commodities manufactured for the mass market. Further, and I quote from the article, "Our people are being taught to buy what they don't need and to replace it before it is worn out," in keeping with the discovery that:
Our national welfare depends upon attaining the maximum rate of destruction of our national resources, whereby we could hope for an eternal bull market because The more we learn to use what we do not need, the greater our consumption; the greater our consumption, the greater our production; the greater our production, the greater our prosperity. …If
The article worked many variants on that now only too familiar theme, which is but a reduction to absurdity of the already quite absurd idea that cultural "progress" is to be equated with the ever mounting development of "new needs." Here I might observe that, as early as 1816, in his Headlong Hall, Thomas Love Peacock had a character, Mr. Escot, the "deteriorationist," who was "always looking at the dark side of a question," and who contended that, while mechanical movements that are called "progress" proceed "in a simple ratio," the
factitious wants and unnatural appetites they engender proceed in a compound one; and thus one generation acquires fifty wants, and fifty means of supplying them are invented, while each in its turn engenders two new ones; so that the next generation has a hundred, the next two hundred, the next four hundred, till every human being becomes such a helpless compound of perverted inclinations, that he is altogether at the mercy of external circumstances, loses all independence and singleness of character.
Peacock was there hitting around the concept of the "exponential curve" whereby a vast technologic clutter has become for us a second nature. And I can proudly report that my clowning got included in an otherwise serious anthology (C. W. Thomas, ed., Essays in Contemporary Civilization [New York: Macmillan, 1931]), along with much sound, solid, solemn work by such worthies as: Randolph Bourne, John Dewey, Robert and Helen Lynd, Sherwood Anderson, Harold J. Laski, James Truslow Adams, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Lewis Mumford, Robert A. Millikan, Thomas H. Huxley, Julian Huxley, Charles A. Beard, AE, Bertrand Russell, and I. A. Richards. And hold! I should certainly mention Wesley C. Mitchell, then famous as the specialist in business cycles.
But satire does have its risks. I heard of one economist who, though he knew that the piece was a satire, couldn't resist explaining why the scheme wouldn't work (which is pretty much like saying that a perpetual motion machine won't work, or a man can't lift himself by his own bootstraps, or people can't make a living just by taking in one another's washing, though it has been proved that an engineer can be hoist with his own petard.)
Regrettably, the risks are greater than that. To make things as absurd as possible by driving them to their "logical conclusion," I had said:
For long we have worried about war, driven by a pre-industrial feeling that war is the enemy of mankind. But by the theory of the economic value of waste we find that war is the basis of culture. War is our great economic safety-valve. For if waste lets up, if people simply won't throw out things fast enough to create new needs in keeping with the increased output under improved methods of manufacture, we can always have recourse to the still more thoroughgoing wastage of war. An intelligently managed war can leave whole nations to be rebuilt, thus providing peak productivity for millions of the surviving population. [And of course I should have added a reference to great numbers of our citizens who get jobs working for companies that can prosper by undoing some of the damage we may have done.]
Shortly after the article appeared (in a liberal weekly, The New Republic), a newspaperman whose column had countrywide distribution hit upon the idea of singling out that passage, and quoting it "straight," without giving the slightest hint that it had to be discounted for satire. Thereby he could severely reprimand the editor for publishing such a monstrous defense of militarism. The editor Bruce Bliven, himself a newspaperman of long experience, told me he never knew of a satire that didn't bring in some indignant letters by readers who had taken the piece at face value. And the morally indignant columnist had cashed in on this susceptibility among his "readership."
But, as we all have been reminded, the world tends to outdate scientific Utopias by catching up with them and even going beyond them. Accordingly, think of all the writings since then, by editors, columnists, and wizard theorists of finance, who assume beyond question the need of great military expenditures as a basic stop-gap for keeping our economy in operation. By an ironic twist, the very thought that any actual major war would be regrettably excessive is taken to justify the fantastic billions spent on preparations for war, and such preparations in turn are viewed as a pump-priming activity of major importance to the maintenance of maximum factory output.
But the world has so outpaced my 1929 Utopia of profitable wastage by a cult of ever mounting new needs, merely to mention such matters is to be in the embarrassing position of discussing what is now the dullest and most obvious of platitudes. I shall try later to pull myself out of that hole, if I can. Meanwhile, unfortunately, I must mention the uncomfortable relevance of two more platitudes.
When I wrote the satiric plea built about the equating of increased
So much for Platitude No. 2. Platitude No. 3 has to do with the greater and greater realization of the fact that not only does technologic wastefulness involve a great drain upon our sources of supply (as with the standard yet startling dictum that we must double our production and our consumption of energy every ten years); but also there is the "environmentalist" fact that, without radical changes in its technologic ways, the world was headed for a calamity that might ultimately be as bad as were an actual nuclear war to break out.
Such, then, is the situation about which I wanted to write a satire. But as I have noted elsewhere in connection with a portion of the satire I published in the winter 1971 issue of The Sewanee Review, some time back when addressing a conference of English teachers on the subject of "creativity" I referred to the challenging upsurge of the physical sciences. There, I noted, you find creativity on a grand scale. So by way of beginning, I talked for a bit about the unwanted side effects of industrial expansion. Then I happened to say, "But surely, you don't want me to come three thousand miles just to talk with you about pollution." And I got a most disturbingly enthusiastic outburst of applause.
The unhappy fact is that the subject of my tentatively proposed satire is technological pollution. Obviously, therefore, I'd be at considerable disadvantage if my talk were but special pleading for the virtues of a satire on pollution. Rather, I must place the stress upon the pros and
As a matter of fact, for several years I had been compulsively taking notes on the subject of technological pollution—and I still do compulsively take such notes. But at the same time, I loathe them. I would love to get shut of the whole issue, even to the extent of inattention by dissipation. But it goes on nagging me. Consequently, as I hope to make clear, my thoughts on satire in this connection come to a focus in plans for a literary compromise whereby, thanks to a stylistics of evasion, I both might and might not continue with the vexatiousness of this idée fixe, this damned committed nuisance.
II HOW SETTLE ON SATIRE?
Possibly, in part at least, because I happened to read George Meredith's essay on comedy when I was quite young and impressionable, I approach my subject, my idée fixe, with the assumption that, above all, whenever and wherever possible, one should write comedy. An ideal world would be one for which comedy would be the perfect fit. But to say as much is by the same token to disqualify comedy, since this is so far from being an ideal world.
Tragedy? Though the present developments of technological enterprise, and especially its military resourcefulness, have led to the affliction of much suffering, and raise many threats, the technically experimental attitude behind all such activities is not in spirit tragic. So far as I can see, the technological impulse to keep on perpetually tinkering with things could not be tragic unless or until men became resigned to the likelihood that they may be fatally and inexorably driven to keep on perpetually tinkering with things. But even so, the chances are that, so long as the present mentality prevails, one would go on tinkering, beguiled by the thought that we might somehow get over the problem by resorting to surgery or giving it a pill. Also, I keep uneasily coming back to the thought that, with the cult of tragedy, maybe you're asking for it. Lamentation is so near to tragedy, it would not figure as an overall mode, though quite relevant to occasional lyric moments.
What, then, of a related, but differently tempered form: the document, the evidence, the indictment? Would that qualify? In one respect, yes. By all means, we should jealously cherish the cult of the records. But precisely there is where the trouble came in. For years I had worked valiantly to uphold what I thought of as a "Comic Perspective." And I
I am not here being inconsistent. For though the principle of victimage is obviously central to tragedy, it itself is not exclusively tragic. Tragedy enters with the principle of sympathetic resignation, but Hitlerism is evidence enough that the principle of victimage can be viciously polemical. For instance, consider Hitler's use of it as a rhetorical and administrative device for unifying his party. It was an example of what I would call "congregation by segregation," unifying a people by antithesis, in terms of a common enemy. Though tragedy would well befit an account of Hitler's victims as such, the situation with which we are concerned would be of a different sort, with a relation to technology that ultimately involved us all, though I shall try to show how this fact might be stylistically denied, in a fiction that reaffirmed our problem by offering a satirically absurd "solution," as with Swift's "solution" to the problem of hunger in Ireland.
A treatment of "the evidence," "the documents," in the accents of invective would be even more wearisome than unrelieved accumulation of the data, though as with lamentation an occasional sally in that mode would be justified.
Thoughts on Greek tragedy and its implied theology had got me particularly interested in ideas and images of ritual pollution. But later, I found myself taking notes on pollution in the most pragmatic, literal, scientific sense; namely: pollution as the "unwanted by-products," or "side effects," of advances in modern industry. In my accumulation of clippings, here indeed were the documents, the records, the factual data, the indictments. But, as I have said, a mighty boredom beset me, even while I kept plunging on compulsively adding to this unsightly pile. And that brings us to satire, but not too directly; rather by a somewhat roundabout route.
In essays and reviews that I wrote during the thirties I got to thinking of what I called projects that "go to the end of the line." James Joyce's later work would be a prime example. Certain artists, or purely speculative minds glimpse certain ultimate possibilities in their view of things, and there is no rest until they have tracked down the implications of their insight, by transforming its potentialities into total actualization.
Eventually, I came to think of this tendency as a third creative motive,
Later I began to ask myself whether I could round out this notion of a purely formal motive (or goad, implicit in our nomenclatures) by adapting for my purposes the Aristotelian concept of the "entelechy." Aristotle applied the term in a quite broad sense. For instance, a stone would actualize its potentials as a stone, a tree would actualize its potentials as a tree, and man might (not so successfully) actualize his potentials as a rational animal. But I would settle for less. I would apply the term simply to the realm of symbolism, with verbal structures as different as the Marxist view of history, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, and Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, all illustrative, in their different ways, of the "entelechial" principle, tracking down the implications of a position, going to the end of the line.
We're now ready for the one further step that brings us to satire. To this end I will quote a quatrain that I have used elsewhere, when discussing the principle of entelechy as I would adopt it and adapt it. The lines have a title borrowed from William Ernest Henley's "Invictus" (the poem that rings out so challengingly, "I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul"):
| If things are bad, and I can't make them better, | |
| then all the more I'll be mine own begetter. | |
| Adversity shall be my universe, | |
| making me free to act to make things worse. |
It is thus that satire can embody the entelechial principle. But it does so perversely, by tracking down possibilities or implications to the point where the result is a kind of Utopia-in-reverse. Is the world quite imperfect? If but some particular aspect of its imperfection happens to engage you, demanding despite yourself that you treat of it, you still have a fighting chance. Change the rules, resort to the ways of satire—and lo! once
Think of the situation thus: Technology is in its very essence rational. Yet the accumulation of its instruments, with their unwanted byproducts, has in effect transformed the fruits of our rationality into a prodigious problem, thereby giving rise to many compensatory cults of irrationality. On the other hand, as I shall try to show, the satirizing of technology can be as rational as technology itself. And thereby, once again, we glimpse the possibility of a compromise. For the satire can be as rational as the "technological psychosis" out of which it arises; yet at the same time in its way it can manifest great sympathy with the trends embodied in the irrationality of current antitechnologic trends. And even though conditions that once seemed absurd (the implicit and even explicit equating of "culture" with a cult of commodities) now seem ominous, 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. |
The satirist's quasi solution should track that down, not just leaving it en route as with Whitman's words, but to the end of the line.
The turn involves certain implications in such poems of Whitman's as "The Song of Occupations," "The Song of the Open Road," "The Song of the Broad-Axe," and "O Pioneers." But they are to be seen satirically in the light of subsequent developments. Considered thus, they are reducible to a proposition of this sort: Since they were celebrating almost an orgy of construction, and since there is no construction without destruction, it is now clear that those poems were joyously ushering in the very era of carefree destruction now nearing its careworn culmination in environmentalist problems due to technologically caused pollution.
Whitman's poems of that sort were in effect (or at least for purposes of satire they could be viewed as) utterances by a great prophetic bard of real estate promotion. Of course there was much more to Whitman than that, and I am among those who have said so. But for reasons that
There are further tangles, still to be considered. But for the moment let us be content with what opens up before us: a post-Whitman, neo-Whitman vision, carrying the ambiguities of construction and destruction into areas of pioneering and colonization unthinkable to the technology of Whitman's times. Thus was born the project of helhaven, a scientifically designed Culture-Bubble on the Moon, and also involving a high degree of technical organization, whereas Walt was but content to loaf and invite his soul.
HELHAVEN, the expertly planned and guided enterprise of Lunar Paradisiacs, Incorporated. A Womb-Heaven, thus in the most basic sense Edenic, yet made possible only by the highest flights of technologic progress—hence Eden and the Tower in one. A true eschatology, bringing first and last things together—the union of Alpha and Omega. And so, soon now, TOWARDS HELHAVEN.
For quite a long time, I had been content to abide by a theory of satire that I had offered in a book, Attitudes toward History, published in the thirties. Approaching satire from the standpoint of the distinction between "acceptance" and "rejection" (yea-saying and nay-saying, which are attitudinally tinged variants of Yes and No) I put satire on the negative side of the equation. In contrast, for instance, I thought of epic, tragedy, and comedy as on the "acceptance" side.
Later, along those lines, I noticed the shrewdness of Homer who did not "suppress" a critique of epic war. The poet, or poets, so thoroughly poetic as the sources behind the two Homeric epics would not, like political bureaucrats in office, seek to suppress a critique of the poems' assumptions. No, you'll find in The Iliad itself an attack upon the heroism of epic war. And who was entrusted with the job of voicing such an opposition? None other than Thersites, so loathsome an excuse for a human being that Hegel expanded him into the concept of "Thersitism," a term he would doubtless have applied to much that Marx was to say of Hegelianism.
As a way of moving on by adding further considerations for present purposes, let me quote this much from my earlier comments on satire as a "Poetic category":
The satirist attacks in others the weaknesses and temptations that are really within himself. … One cannot read great satirists like Swift or Juvenal without feeling this strategic ambiguity. We sense in them the Savanarola, who would exorcise his own vanities by building a fire of other people's vanities. Swift's aptitude at "projection" invited him to beat himself unmercifully.
When I began plans for the satire I wanted to build up, I had in mind that principle. I mean: If I am to write a satire, when all the returns are in, it mustn't turn out that I am holier than thou. I must he among my victims. That is to say: I take it that my satire on the "technological psychosis" will be an offspring of that same psychosis.
But to my earlier notion that we are all, including the satirist, tarred by the same brush, there are added the sophistications whereby we can get the curative accents of assertion and perfection by calling for a Utopia-in-reverse.
Hence, to make that point clear, as I way saying, Towards helhaven.
III TOWARDS HELHAVEN
About the edges of satire, obviously, hover related modes of expression: humor, comedy, irony, burlesque, the grotesque (which might be defined as a kind of comic incongruity without the laughter). But whereas the incongruousness of the grotesque is "gargoyle-thinking," perhaps the major resource of satiric amplification is an excess of consistency. Taking conditions that are there already, the satirist perversely, twistedly, carries them "to the end of the line."
I have already indicated why, whereas Wyndham Lewis views satire as an approach "from without," I'd want to call that approach not satire, but burlesque. For instance, we are told that Buckminster Fuller centers his energy "in a single drive: to promote the total use of total technology for total population ‘at the maximum feasible rate of acceleration.’ " There surely lies the material for satire. In that formula, surely, is implicit the incentive for satiric exaggeration. Yet who among us is not affected and infected at least to some degree by technological ways of thinking and living, though not with such vatic thoroughness, which might be called "Hyper-Technologism"?
Another way of putting it would be to say that satire is universal, but burlesque is factional. The line of demarcation becomes obscured, but it's clear enough in extreme cases. And I believe that, as I proceed, you will see how basically my notions about the entelechial principle, even
A prime reason, we have been told, for undertaking certain difficult and costly technologic feats (as space travel) is that they now seem possible. Such a motive is not unthinkable, and itself has the makings of satire, or at least burlesque. But I'm digging at a deeper level. My satiric amplifications would be rooted in the proposition that money, mechanisms in general, and now the computer in particular represent culminating aspects of specifically human genius. If you define man along traditional lines as the "rational animal," here surely is the non plus ultra of his rationality, if only because so much rationality has gone into the planning and distribution of our artificial devices. In their roles as fulfillments of specifically human potentialities which are barely detectable in other animals, they embody the entelechial principle, they are taking "to the end of the line" the drives towards perfection (or completion) that are implicit in them, as representative of human genius. Man, purely as an animal, has other motivating elements. But if they are all put into the centrifuge of historical development and whirled about vigorously, this peculiarly rational substance, being of a different density, is separated from the rest in its chemically "pure" state (as when sludge in a centrifuge is separated from oil).
However, there is an obvious sense in which "perfection," as so defined, is also a caricature of man, since it plays up some traits and plays down others. Such specifically human fulfillments of man cannot laugh or cry; they are not jealous or forgiving; one observer discovered (and I take him at his word) that you can't insult a computer; and though they may wear out, and even suffer "metal fatigue," mechanisms do not grow tired or sullen. Thus, ironically, their nature as caricatures of man resides in the very thoroughness with which they represent some aspects of man and exclude others.
Maybe by now a notion I already touched upon can be made clearer. Before rationality attained its material counterpart in the rationalized procedures of the machine, it was an ideal of exceptional men. As embodied in our current technological clutter, with countless more of such on the drawing board, the rational is no longer an ideal of the few, it is a problem of the many. Materialize an ideal, and you get a problem, including the ultimate ironic fact that an excess of rationality as so defined adds up to a new level of irrationality.
One more matter of background should be considered. When the subject of a satire is, like ours, an imaginary colony on the moon, there is
Thus, I can envision such ideal future circumstances as when helhaven, our transcendent Culture-Bubble, has a Luna-Hilton Hotel, in every way indistinguishable from its uniform counterparts in the hotel chains you find now all over the world. The main difference between the Luna-Hilton and its opposite numbers on the terrestrial globe is that the guest will have a simulated outlook from each imitation window. For but a small fee, he can, as it were, gaze upon a beautiful lake, or upon a distant, snow-capped mountain, or a tropical beach—or if he gets homesick for urban things back here, by but pressing a different button, he can watch, squirming beneath him, a typical tangle of traffic, simulated even with the same noises, plus the stench (yet though the smell will be like on Earth, it will be scientifically free of all the poisons that actually accompany such conditions here). I assure you that there will be a far greater range of such Perspectivos if I may call these outlooks by their future trade name—but since I am not good at science fiction, I cannot imagine whether there'll also be views of muggings, pick-ups, and riots. Such decisions will be at the discretion of the management, when the time comes.
It is conceivable that rationality might have taken a different course. But once human genius got implemented, or channelized, in terms of technological proliferation, how turn back? Spontaneously what men hope for is more. And what realistic politician could ever hope to win on a platform that promised less? The overall drive was expressed in the previously mentioned statement that we must double our production of energy every ten years. But I must make sure that I don't get hooked to that thesis. Even if there is such a trend, the fact that many influential industrialists, economists, and politicians subscribe to it is not per se evidence that it will continue. (I had put it that way in an earlier draft, when my title was: "I Want To Write a Satire.")
This point I emphasized, since the distinction I had in mind is basic to a distinction between our thesis as satire and the corresponding thesis as
No, the satire would not depend upon the factual thesis that the development of ever more and more technology is inevitable. On the contrary, the satiric foretelling would be motivated devoutly by the hope that, in the world of facts, such a trend is not inevitable. And the satire would be constructed on the assumption that, by carrying such speculations to the end of the line, one keeps the admonitions alive. Hence the satire would be so built that any downturning would have the accents of great promise, as embodied in the Utopian vision of helhaven. In this way, ideally, satire would enable us to contemplate a situation to which we might otherwise close our minds, by self-deception, or by dissipation.
The layout of the place would be in general simply things here over again, except that technological artificiality would be complete. This is an important point to keep in mind. For underneath the satire must be the fact that in principle the helhaven situation is "morally" here already. For instance, you're already in Helhaven insofar as you are, directly or indirectly (and who is not?) deriving a profit from some enterprise that is responsible for the polluting of some area, but your share in such revenues enables you to live in an area not thus beplagued. Or think of the many places in our country where the local drinking water is on the swill side, distastefully chlorinated, with traces of various industrial contaminants. If, instead of putting up with that, you invest in bottled springwater, to that extent and by the same token you are already infused with the spirit of Helhaven. Even now, the kingdom of Helhaven is within you.
So, for our Culture-Bubble on the Moon, make up things along those lines as you prefer, as with a beach, protected from the real sun, but with a scientifically designed substitute. Or add "the simulacrum of an Alpine cabin reached by a ski-tow, with artificially snow-covered slope."
But I should mention a Contemplation Room, from which one can watch the Lunar Astronauts on their trips to Earth, for various kinds of replacement. And I quote from my authoritative article on Helhaven in the Sewanee Review (see page 63 of this volume):
Increased experience in the use of spacecraft will make sure that the trip itself will not be hazardous. But the possibility of still-surviving hominids will add risks to these forays, and give them somewhat the quality of marauding expeditions. Yet the expression is obviously unjust; for any Lunar Paradisiacs of the Future will be replenishing their gigantic womblike Culture-Bubble, as it were, from the placenta of the Mother-Earth from which their very body temperature is derived, and which is just as much our home, however filthy we shall have made it before clearing out, as it is the home of any scurvy anthropoid leftovers that might still somehow contrive to go on hatching their doubtless degenerate and misshapen broods back there among those seven vast oceanic sewers.
The original version of this piece got me swamped in many details that should be included in an actual satiric narrative featuring as its setting Helhaven, the Ideal Culture-Bubble on the Moon. But fortunately, I must here make haste to discuss the subject in general, rather than getting entangled in a clutter of particulars. And that exigency works out to the good, I dare hope, once you have heard about The Master, who began as a disciple of Whitman and got into dire trouble until he found a way out. For we have located two poems of his (if you will allow that doctrinally emotional utterances in the Whitman mode are poems); and the pieces are obviously infused with the spirit of Whitman even to the extent of including some lines of his verbatim, along with slight modifications of others. Our exhibits are poems at least to the extent that they can simultaneously particularize and generalize. Hence they serve ideally as a way of bringing my talk to a close—and I shall use them accordingly.
Meanwhile, you should know: The kind of quandaries that have to do with the very foundations of our hopes for the Helhaven colony, as a Paradisiac Lunar-Bubble technologically made possible, forces us to confront a decision as to where the New Technologic Eden should be placed. Those who have to solve such problems have chosen for this Neo-Home the Sea of Tranquillity. For although our engineers named other locations that they deemed preferable, our consultants on Madison Avenue were emphatic in asserting that the Sea of Tranquillity would be the best address.
IV THE PLOT THICKENS
How proceed, in keeping with the thesis that a satire on so tiresome though perhaps fatal a subject as technological pollution must contrive to hang on even while dodging? That compromise, I thought, might best be contrived if things were so set up that, in keeping with the nature of the fiction, any "indictment" of technology's excesses could be welcomed as a momentous positive step towards the ideal future (or, I should say, the parody of such a step).
In keeping with our entelechial ideal of going to the end of the line, we needed some twists whereby the "logical conclusion" (which is to say, the reduction to absurdity) of hyper-technologistic energy consumption could attain "perfect" fulfillment in the total pollution of our once handsome planet. And reasons should be invented why this entelechially fated culmination could be welcomed, as mankind's final attaining and transcending of our earthly aims after long and arduous effort. By a twist of that sort one might recapture the stylistics of assertiveness so greatly needed for our time, and so imperative, if we were to keep on confronting, without the nausea of boredom, the basic problem that persisted in platitudinously pursuing us.
When we are confronting so fundamental a problem of sociology, precisely then, in keeping with the methodology of logology the first principle of axiology advises us to look for some analogy of morphology in the realm of theology.[1] And there it was, as though made to order, in the last book of the New Testament, the Apocalypse, that is a summing up if there ever was one, hence manifesting to perfection the kind of drive I would call entelechial, despite its divergence from the technological variety we have been considering.
As in both Revelation and The Divine Comedy, all should come to a focus in a crucial distinction between The Chosen and the Reprobates, except that in the fictive technological fulfillment, the counterpart of those not among The Chosen would not be sinners, but simply out of luck. It became clear that the design called for the ironic version of an exalted promissory attitude, such as would befit the "Vision" of an ultimate peaceful existence in a perfectly air-conditioned Culture-Bubble on the Moon, a transcendent step beyond the radical polluting of the Earth. And "perfection," as thus perversely defined, would in turn be perfected if, by the conditions of the fiction, things were so set up that those among The Chosen had been largely responsible for the very conditions on Earth they were escaping.
From now on, whatever I say with regard to possible ways of developing (or, as they put it in the old rhetoric books, satirically "amplifying") the theme of technological pollution, please regard such additions (the old rhetoric books would have called them "inventions") as instances of what I mean when I speak of such a project as a continual effort to "compromise" with my hypothetical readers. That is, the aim would be to sustain the theme of pollution not directly, but like the drone, the fixed continuous note emitted by a bagpipe, while the emphasis was upon whatever melody was being played above it. In this way, ideally, the nagging theme of pollution would never let up, yet the developments built atop it would call for attention in their own right. The result would be a compromise insofar as the antics of the satire would not make necessary the abandoning of the theme.
For instance, the Culture-Bubble on the Moon could still be but in the planning stage, and there could be rival projects similarly incipient, all three involving quite different groups of developers. Thus, besides the Lunar Paradisiac organization, there could be the Martian Promotion and Seabottom Meadows, and even some irresponsible damfools who obviously needed to be psychoanalyzed, since they were backing the manifestly unfeasible idea of an installation on Venus.
Our Man, who was administrative coordinator of the Lunar Earthlings, and was aglow with love for those who were to join in efforts towards the implementing of the Helhaven vision, could have reason to doubt these rival outfits. He could suspect that they were plotting against him in particular and the Lunar Paradisiacs in general, insofar as they could identify the Paradisiac membership (a challenging problem inasmuch as the information was a carefully guarded secret). Also, whereas the Lunar Paradisiacs were wholly peace-loving, Our Man, the major administrative coordinator of the whole Visionary venture, had turned up much evidence to indicate that behind both the Martian Promotion and Seabottom Meadows there were conspirators of decidedly militaristic cast—and so, however grudgingly, he came to the conclusion that eternal peace would be possible only if and when the members of his peaceloving band had definitively destroyed these widely separated warlike undertakings. And plans were being made to that idealistic end.
The Seabottom Meadows clique was also spreading slanders about the durability of the Lunar-Bubble if hit by a large meteor (which would not be burnt up in the atmosphere as would be the case if it had hit on Earth). To this calumny, Our Man had various answers, among which I might cite these: (1) The Lunar-Bubble was to be made of an alloy
Our Man had also done ingenious work in what he called the Ad Interim Field. For the time being, that is, funds gathered by the sale of Helhaven stocks were not being spent on actual equipment for the mighty Lunar Dome. Thus, temporarily (except for work on the planning board), all investments were being pooled in a fast-growing Mutual Helhaven Super-Multinational Conglomeration that was earning high dividends from enterprises largely responsible for the progress of pollution.
In this connection for those of The Chosen who, the management finds cause to assume, are especially trustworthy and can keep confidential information to themselves, some of the big food merchandisers who are interested in that aspect of the undertaking have put together a secret list of the things they sell whereas they know so much about the contents that they themselves wouldn't touch the stuff.
And an ingenious piece of Ad Interim research is being worked out by tests on contaminant additives used as preservatives, for coloring, or texture. Whereas in Dietetics Old Style certain foods were not thought to go well together, advances of Dietetics New Style are discovering what additives don't go well together. Authoritatively monitored laboratory experiments have been performed by using various combinations of additives, free of the nutrients with which they are usually adulterated. And even when the ingredients are mixed with the various standard remedies for indigestion, there have been some quite startling explosions.
I should add at least one further refinement, as "the plot thickens." Since Our Man is deeply involved in the administrative aspects of the Paradisiac Vision, I began to realize that he could not represent the Vision in its purity. Behind him should be The Master (let's call him the Prime Personalist) of whom we get but glimpses. Our man, the Vice Personalist, though devoted to The Master, is decidedly of coarser stuff, as
He had begun as a Whitmanite, elated in poetically cataloguing the revolutionary environmental changes that the predatory European invaders had visited upon this continent. When it had gradually dawned upon him, if you could call it a dawn! (where did we hear that before?), that Walt's dream was becoming a nightmare, he was desolate. Then came the fate-laden moment when he chanced upon an ingenious principle of transformation in Giambattista Vico's New Science ofhuman relations. Vico had said that the three "major vices" of mankind are cruelty, greed, and ambition. But once you add to these the motivating force of Foresight, or "Providence," he said, cruelty becomes transformed into the arts of defense, greed turns into commerce, and ambition becomes statecraft. In the case of The Master the principle of perfection in his Vision corresponding to Vico's thoughts on the transformational function of Foresight or "Providence" with regard to the nature of evil, was somewhat like what I had, I admit crudely, summed up in my "Invictus" lines:
| Adversity shall be my universe, | |
| making me free to act to make things worse. |
Combine this turn (in sum, the principle of "the worse the better") with the Apocalyptic Vision of Division, and Whitman's promises are as good as ever. The ills of technology could be left to soil the Earth, the virtues of technology could rise transcendently elsewhere. (I think of an equally neat but less radical variant in Georg Lukàcs's discovery that everything wrong with technology is to be identified with capitalism, and everything right with it is to be identified with socialism.)
I can't tell you much more about The Master except that, by a piece of luck, I happened to get hold of two effusions which serve at least to reveal the trend, and even the poignancy, of his meditations. I shall turn to these for our finale.
Meanwhile, in general I should say the underlying "rationale" (the rationally satiric way of heralding a reduction to absurdity as though it were a promising logical conclusion) would be based on the search for fictions whereby no data on pollution, no matter how damning, would be presented in the accents of indictment. The stress is thus stylistically placed upon an inverted quasi-idealistic, futuristic, alchemical device for transforming the base metals of pollution into the Vision of a New Jerusalem satirically golden. Behind it all, inspiriting it all, lies The Master's firm,
To illustrate in sum how, by the addition of satiric fictions, the problems of pollution can thus be viewed through a screen of deflective stylization rather than head-on (as with outright "indictment," which too often encourages inattention or dissipation with regard to such an unpleasant subject) consider some things that went wrong with the Aswan Dam: Things so turned out that there is a higher percentage of evaporation from the reservoir than the planners had anticipated, hence the flow of fresh water in the river lessened, and salt water from the Mediterranean is pressing in to make up the difference. The change has destroyed a considerable fishing industry. An organism harmful to the human eye never had it so good. And whereas, for countless centuries, those areas had been naturally fertilized by the inundations of the Nile, now it has become increasingly necessary that the growers resort to purely chemical fertilizers.
By the rules of our satiric fiction, such direct amassing of evidence would be definitely rejected. Thus, as regards the growing need to rely upon chemicals whereas, for countless centuries, the river had annually silted the land with a natural deposit of nutrients (which are now, incidentally, sinking to the bottom of the reservoir behind the dam), by our rules, one way to deal with this problem would be to change the emphasis by having the administrative Vice-Personalist glowingly boast that, despite Russian influence in Egyptian affairs, a U.S. chemical outfit in which Lunar Paradisiacs had large Ad Interim holdings was making considerable inroads into that market. And we might go a step further, as with a hint that many of the environmentalist disorders already manifested on the Volga (which catches fire like rivers over here) or in the regions threatening Lake Baikal, are due to a notable revolutionary fact; namely: there are many Lunar Paradisiacs in the Soviet bureaucracy, secretly working with their opposite numbers in this country to help advance the transcendent cause of pollution and thus hasten the day when The Chosen will yearn to depart for good. Indeed, the improving relationship between Russian officialdom and some of our multinational conglomerates might be so interpreted.
In the same connection, the Vice-Personalist's releases could zestfully refer to the fact that, thanks to wide-spread use of chemical fertilizers in our country, the runoff from farmlands here is polluting the water supply with great efficiency, thus making it a hopeful possibility that nearly all our lakes will soon get bogged down in eutrophication.
I could go on, for the evidence is everywhere, except that you can't find the exact low-down on how much the planes spew forth high up. But my point is this: By what I conceive of as the compromise proper to the rules of our game, we should never let the text become directly "efficient." True, there's a truly grand moment, in Gulliver's Travels, when the giant Brobdingnagian king, after patiently listening to Gulliver explaining things in England, sums up: "By what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wringed and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth." But the truly satiric twist here is in what follows, when Gulliver continues:
Yet this much I may be allowed to say in my own vindication, that I artfully eluded many of his questions, and gave to every point a more favorable turn by many degrees than the strictness of truth would allow. For I have always borne that laudable partiality to my country which Dionysius Hallicarnassus with so much justice recommends to an historian: I would hide the frailties and deformities of my political mother, and place her virtues and beauties in the most advantageous light. This was my sincere endeavor in those many discourses I had with that mighty monarch, although it unfortunately failed of success.
Conceivably, I might swing in somewhere like that. Yet the satire is not in the "indictment," but in the twist whereby Gulliver so gullibly speaks in his " defense." The nearest I can come to a somewhat similar turn in this piece is by a kind of Ciceronian praeteritio, in saying what I won't say. But in the satire itself, I fear, such a resource would be denied me. For there my best hope is to amplify my thesis by watering it down.
The pattern as a whole might be summed up in these seven steps:
- The growing evidence of pollution as the fatal cost of technology had first caused The Master, the Personalist Supreme, to lose his faith in the Whitmanite ideal of conquering a continent by ecstatic, headlong, anticonservationist upheaval.
- But The Master turned from the threat of a breakdown to a breakthrough, once he found his principle of transformation, the
― 88 ―Vision of Division (with its "entelechial" principle, "the worse the better") whereby all could again become confident, forwardlooking, eschatologically ultimate, a perfect road to perfection.
- His administrative assistant, the Vice-Personalist, would introduce coarser elements into the Vision; but never for one moment would he lose the Affirmative Spirit of the ultimate ideal, as salvaged by following through with the logic of the distinction between The Chosen and the Regrettably Unfortunate for whom there is no escape from the increasing ecological disasters.
- The pattern gets its ultimate refinement in the Ad Interim principle whereby those very persons who are among The Chosen can accelerate the pace of the decay by temporarily investing in the stocks of whatever corporations are secretly contributing to the project with funds derived from enterprises that further the ecological deterioration.
- Thereby is fulfilled the development that, in The Education of Henry Adams, is called the "law of the acceleration of history," as per what is now called an "exponential curve" (involving a machine ecology as distinct from a biological ecology).
- Having attained an Apocalyptic understanding of dialectical principles in their role as The Chosen who are to transcend conditions here on Earth, the Lunar Paradisiacs can smile (not maliciously, but hopefully) at the evidences that, if but technology continues to proliferate as it is now doing, things can end, not in a reactionary rejection of technology (which is the essence of human rationality), but in a super-technology that can rise out of the very decay it is producing.
- To back their thesis that, human nature being what it is, the entelechial lure of technology has already developed to the point where it is irreversible, they cite as an authority the views of that blithe Dymaxion spirit, Buckminster Fuller, though he might with some justice object to their interpretation of his views, as Whitman, if he were still among us, might object to my discussing certain poems of his in terms of vatic real estate promotion.
A friend suggested that I should add a proper measure of porno; but I demurred on the grounds that, by the nature of the subject, we already have pollution enough, though I will say that porno recycles better than technology.
V APOCALYPTIC AFfiRMATION
(Effusions of The Master)
Since I happen to have called the Helhaven project a "Vision," it was only a question of time until I realized that, behind it, implicit in it, should be the figure, however in shadow, of a Visionary. Inasmuch as there could be accommodations for but a comparatively Chosen Few in Helhaven, the Visionary Master saw that the farthest conceivable perfection of the dialectical design envisioning an ideal future would attain fulfillment in an ultimate state of absolute eschatological divisiveness, as the nature of man's unimpeded progress towards maximum technological pollution would make both necessary and possible. Also, it stands to reason, the most spirited members of mankind will be satisfied with nothing less than unimpeded freedom and progress in the grandeurs of technological advance, which would be hardly better than a state of bondage if, at every turn, inventiveness were constrained by enslaving admonitions, and each new power that was developed by the genius of applied science were in effect but a further reason for us to tell ourselves, "Watch out! Here's one more cause for worry!" as though every single new positive technologic promise were but one more negative prophecy of gloom-and-doom.
By a lucky accident, I happen to have chanced upon two self-styled "effusions" of The Master, the Personalist Supreme. While obviously written under the influence of his Master, Walt Whitman, even to the extent of outright borrowing, and sometimes transforming, lines from Leaves of Grass, they are conceived in the light of subsequent developments which Walt's ecstatic salesmanship, for all its stress upon the future, could not foresee, quite as Karl Marx, approaching technologic enterprise from another angle, did not foresee conditions now when the rationality of technics has so greatly progressed that, everywhere you turn, it raises problems (thus in effect transforming our greatest hope for the salvation of mankind, rationality, into major incentives making for cults of the irrational). But we must grant that Whitman hit upon a gladsome way of helping out: "It is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary." And The Master had gone on from there.
As with much of Whitman's verse, these two "effusions" of the Prime-Personalist responsible for Helhaven as a technologically transcending
(And since there's so little time left before the end, please let me hurriedly interject a parting thought to the effect that Helhaven is not just a fantasy poor by the tests of science fiction. As I was saying, insofar as you use an airport without having to live nearby, or insofar as you don't drink the local swill typical of many towns and cities in our country, but buy springwater, to that extent you are in principle already among The Chosen. Let's hope that you and your friends and your descendants can enjoy such discriminations for good, come Helhaven.)
But back to our wind-up, with regard to the two culminating versifyings. There'll be a reference to a "handing-down/along with man-woman germ." The lines refer to an ambiguity whereby Whitman could speak of tools as "weapons," or we may speak both of swords beaten into plowshares and of beating plowshares into swords. Though I can't speak on this point with authority, I assume that The Master here had in mind the ambiguous potentialities of the hand, capable of use either for warm handclasp or for clenching to make a fist.
Where The Master refers to woman as the compensatory inventor of the needle, though I doubt whether he knew or knows of Freud (I'm not even sure that he is still among us), he apparently was working on the edges of what some of our feminists would call "male chauvinism." I mean: Indications are that, when referring to the needle as he does, he vaguely had in mind the needle's masculine connotations by reason of its ability to pierce, even while he recognized that sewing is as closely associated with woman's work as the distaff.
And finally, in keeping with my claim that this presentation has two great moments, I should point out the fact that The Master's two-line flash in his call to Helhaven springs even from Beyond Helhaven.
But many people are not at home in poetry. And I have found that, even among those who are, there are candidates (explicit or implicit) for the Martian Promotion or Seabottom Meadows sort of things, or that damfool Venus project (doubtless a psychotic fantasy). And there are the
In any case, we turn now to his bequeathings.
The first of the poems stresses the exhilaration of the Vision's promise (for The Chosen):
O LESSON OPPORTUNE
(THE MASTER'S CALL)
| O Sons of Sons of Sons etc. of Pioneers, | |
| have you your super pistols and your super sharp-edged axes? | |
| Singing the Song of Occupations, are you? | |
| You—and the one-time natives' land is now your native land. |
| O Sons etc., even the desert you have now redeemed | |
| even there you have transformed nature into real estate. | |
| Already I say to you what later I will say to you. | |
| Hitch your new kind of covered wagon to among the stars. |
| We love our Redman Brothers. | |
| "Come, Comrades," we said, "shake hands with us, | |
| make treaties with us, believe in us, love us as we love you. | |
| And forgive us if we break those treaties. | |
| For we were right. The Highest Court in our land says we were right, still are, and will be. | |
| Fighting to the last in sternest realism. |
| "How otherwise could we have despoiled you? | |
| How otherwise be best fitted to despoil the land | |
| of which we were destined to despoil you?" |
| And yet we cannot tarry here, O Sons etc. | |
| Wemustmarch,mydarlings,we must bear the brunt of danger, | |
| as though youthful, as though sinewy races. |
| The driver sitting on his whatever, | |
| singing a song of occupations. | |
| He drives his car the while | |
| the traffic drives the driver. |
| Long lines in long array where they wind betwixt | |
| a parched-green median. | |
| Hark to the not so mystical clank— | |
| steam-power, the great express lines, gas, petroleum, | |
| those triumphs of times then, and sung | |
| in a song of the exposition. |
| Every sire, every dam; every he, every Ms, | |
| all Sons and Sons and Sons etc. of which | |
| there are no races younger or elder. | |
| All in all they stem from prehistoric prime, | |
| then when females, handed down successively, increasingly | |
| the germ, nurturing it through the centuries, | |
| along with man-woman germ, nursing, handing down | |
| the germ of war-and-work, of handclasp-and-fist, | |
| man making the fist stronger with a clenched stone, thus man while in charmed envy | |
| from the first, woman—and always woman— | |
| to counterbalance her deprival, | |
| brought forth the piercing needle, | |
| thus at the start, the songs of occupations by diverging | |
| could join with one another. | |
| And no past left behind, but always still there, always pushing as predestined. | |
| Till now we get the big words. | |
| O Sons etc., let us love the big words, too, | |
| words like epigenesis, and psychogenic, and diethylstilbestrol, | |
| and,aboveall,thelittlebig-words—like biosphere and ecology, and technological pollution. |
| No word is an island. In all words is every word. Come, little big-words, | |
| Come Biosphere, come Ecology, come Technological Pollution, | |
| come let us sing and dance together the song | |
| of our predestinated end. | |
| And dance together, little big-words, towards the day | |
| when all the seven seas will be vast industry-infested cesspools, | |
| thus preparing us not to tarry, but to leave these shores and inlands | |
| for a man-made Paradise elsewhere, | |
― 93 ― | |
| a Realm transcendent, | |
| free of our long headlong terrestrial despoiling. | |
| We primeval forests felling, we the rivers stemming, vexing we | |
| and piercing deep the mines within—and strip-mining, yes—we the | |
| virgin soil upheaving, we—it—an epic rape. | |
| Allons! Here is the efflux of the soul. |
| To the Army Corps of Engineers give thanks who held back | |
| rivers where rivers flowed like freedom, | |
| and gouged out straight channels where streams had wanted to meander | |
| and promoters could sell lots on what had been floodland | |
| and lo! it becomes an act of God when things flow into flood | |
| while a continent goes down the drain | |
| here rises the fluid and attaching character | |
| down the drain at a rate how possible but by great technologic progress | |
| Allons! we must not stop anywhere. | |
| Colorado, Nebraska, Arkansas, Missouri—everywhere | |
| All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southerns and the Northerns. | |
| You who would become my follower, put your lips upon mine. | |
| All driving to wards agrand conglomerate muddle of realestate, | |
| A breast aching with tender love for all, | |
| We today's procession heading, we the route for travel clearing, | |
| O Sons of Sons of Sons etc. of Pioneers. | |
| The more traffic, the more roads; | |
| the more roads, the more traffic, | |
| and the greater grows our joyous thirst to leave | |
| and with clasping of hands we together sing | |
| the Song of the Open, checked-by-radar, open four-land Road | |
| towards—for the likes of us among The Chosen— | |
| towards home in (hail! Heaven!) in helhaven, home! |
| The second of the poems stresses the regrettable division inherent in the Vision: | |
| "Far, far off the Daybreak Call!" | |
| (Night Thoughts of The Master) | |
― 94 ― | |
| It will not be without guilt | |
| to millions and millions it will be as though you cried out to them | |
| "I love you, I who could have made us comrades | |
| for us to have fared forth together | |
| towards the primal garden, towards first things in last things." | |
| It will not be without exceptional regret | |
| to millions and millions it will be as if you had snarled at them, | |
| "Into the sewers with you, into the filth of your own amassing willy-nilly, | |
| until each cell of your body is soaked in it, | |
| you like a sponge soppy with your own degradation | |
| in the swill of man's own man-made undoing." | |
| It will not be without cruelty | |
| to millions upon millions it be as if you promulged to them. | |
| "I leave you to your damnedness, as were you the rottenest of transgressors, | |
| Yet you will have done no evil, in your decay there was no malice | |
| nor aim to harm among your many wondrous doings | |
| and your obedience to those who by their genius taught you | |
| to do their wondrous doings until all went loathsome. | |
| Not for doing evil are you to be undone." |
| It will not be without loathing | |
| yet to millions and millions it will be as if you saw in them | |
| the thick of the Despised and Destitute, as if you said to them, | |
| "As we look down upon you wretches gasping, you surviving gasping | |
| as we The Chosen, in our Lunar Culture-Bubble safe and sound and snug | |
| of helhaven, of The Chosen our Paradisiac home, | |
| it is as though, as were you each it is, | |
| a localized collection of thick opaque, usually yellowish | |
| white fluid matter formed in connection with | |
| an inflammation due to the invasion of the body | |
| by an infective microorganism (as a bacterium) | |
| and composed of fluid exudate containing | |
| degenerating leukocytes, tissue debris, and living or dead | |
| microorganisms (see SUPPURATION). | |
― 95 ― | |
| Each of you, alas in brief, the Left Behind, | |
| is to us as an abscess | |
| from which we shall have permanently departed." | |
| Give me the pleasant silent sun as Adam early in the morning … | |
| towards home in (hail! Heaven!) in helhaven, home | |
| may I hie me now to hide | |
| in restrospective prospect | |
| a Future, quintessential of the Past, | |
| Eden and The Tower in one, |
| O dithyrambic moment, Levitation, | |
| than which how much the more can there be like! |
| Onwards, Outwards—and UP! |
NOTES
This essay originally appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review 13 (winter 1974): 307–37 (The Keniston Lecture at the University of Michigan, 1974).
1. I have contended that the present essay has two great sentences. Clearly, this is the first. The second will be uttered in a grand finale by The Master.
5. Realisms, Occidental Style
1982
Kenneth Burke prepared this paper for a conference on the use of literary works as a reliable source of documentary evidence about their "contexts of situation" (the scene-act-agent ratio). The basic distinction Burke makes here is between realism, which is a literary style, and reality, which is not a style at all, but a brute fact. Realism is but one of many possible styles in Western literature. Is realism any more real than other kinds of styles—say, romanticism, neoclassicism, modernism, impressionism? No, it is not (though it may seem so), because everything in a literary work has been stylized in the very act of writing. Trying to read the real scene (or agent) out of a literary act with any kind of accuracy and reliability is a nearly hopeless task because there are so many nonverifiable variables. And realism as a style is simply one perspective from among many available to a writer; and whether one style is better able to depict reality than another is only a matter of degree. The most fantastic work—say, Swift's Gulliver's Travels— can be very realistic; and the most realistic work—say, James Gould Cozzens's Castaway—can be completely fantastic and densely symbolic.
In his usual fashion, Burke takes oversimplified responses to this topic and complicates them. See, for example, his ten-point summary at the end of this essay. His famous "it is more complicated than that" is the operative analytic technique he uses to promote a fuller, more adequate conception of the problems inherent in the topic. He does not necessarily always resolve these problems because he is much more interested in raising the questions and then just dumping them on the readers in such a way that there is no returning to simple, often simple-minded, ways of dealing with the topic. He regards this procedure as a dialectical exercise every thinker (critic) should go through with every topic and text.
After making his points about "realisms, occidental style," Burke then cautions us about trying to use any literary text from any culture or time period as a reliable source of documentary evidence about the sociopolitical scene out of which it came, or even about the agent-author. Writers are notorious "liars" (fiction makers), and their view of things is as mundane and biased as everyone else's. It has become fashionable these days to "derive" William Faulkner's fictions from his life, and the other way around, Faulkner's symbolic autobiography from his novels. A third procedure is also often practiced, which is to draw an "accurate" portrait of the South from the novels. Either way, we have a kind of absurdity that Burke cautions us against, which results from a basic misconception of fiction, and how it transforms and relates back to the real world. Faulkner had a rich and varied imaginative life and a rather ordinary real life. He was obviously a genius with words. Even his most realistic novels (for example, As I Lay Dying) were technical wonders that made their connection to the
― 97 ―real world problematical. He clearly lead a fictional life that was separate from his real life, so much so that people who knew him in Oxford, Missisippi, did not believe he wrote his novels. The topic this conference addressed is relevant here. Do Faulkner's novels tell us something reliable about the real world and life in it? Burke's answer to this question is, "Yes and No." No, if we are too literal minded, and Yes, if we know how to read and discount words and fictions. A novel is, after all, nothing but words no matter its style. The reality of a novel derives as much from the imagination and words as it does from the real world. A novel does not really depict the real world so much as it creates verisimilitude and convinces us to "believe" it. Faulkner never fought in the trenches in World War I, knew little about France and the French, especially about the French army military law. He made it all up. Unless we learn how to read this novel in accordance with the style in which it is written (certainly not a form of realism—but a style you write a fable in) and adapt to the dazzling (if dense) technical virtuosities Faulkner uses in the novel, we have no way to read it adequately. Probably the last thing it is really about is World War I as an historical event or Faulkner himself. The novel is a perfect example of Burke's main point: We must approach a novel in its own terms and not demand of it things it was never meant to do. Its own terms are words and prose fiction.Burke liked to point out that once you make use of the resources of language you enter a realm of "freedom" and you can, quite literally, say or write anything about anyone or anything or any place that you like. It is all just a matter of rhetoric. How, then, do we avoid relativism and how do we know what is reliable and true? That is the question this essay addresses as it applies to literature. As we know from current critical practices, every possible approach to every possible text by every possible kind of critic is fair game, with all of them insisting on the "corrective" function of their approach and the reliability, truthfulness, correctness of their findings. The end result of this critical and cultural diversity has been the creation of a bewildering body of critical texts that tend to contradict one another and sometimes even cancel one another out. One yearns again for the old days when it still seemed possible to have a "pure" experience of literary text, one that derived its impetus and direction from the internalities of the text rather than from some external theory laid over the text like a grid. What defense do we have against this seemingly unchecked proliferation of critical approaches? None, really, since the proliferation will continue—but we can stop reading most criticism and try to free Faulkner's novels from the loving attention and feeding frenzy of his multitude of critics.
Burke does not recommend this decisive action; he was a great theorizer himself and mined texts for some mighty strange gold, reminding us way back in Philosophy of Literary Form (1941) that we should use all that there is to use in the analysis of literary texts. And he did, as his dramatistic poetics make clear. At the end of this essay, in a typical Burkean admonition, he reminds us, in his ten summarizing points, of some basic truths about the use of literary texts as social documentation; or, perhaps more inclusively, about the nature of literature itself, and what you should and should not (can and cannot?) do to and with it.
INTRODUCTION
I should begin with the problem of beginnings, and say why.
The main problem in discussing what literature has to tell us as documentary evidence about the general conditions of its origin involves what we might call the choice of terms for describing a given work's background. For instance, unless I remember incorrectly, in neoclassic French tragedy, though there is much talk of death, there is no mention of pistols. However, this omission is not documentary evidence that there were no pistols, in the way that the featuring of gunplay in our contemporary TV programs clearly reflects the fact that the aristocratic sword has gone out of fashion and that we are in a time when all who are concerned with law and order—except those of our politicians who stress "law and order" as one of their favorite selling points—worry, about such chummy pieces as "Saturday night specials."
In discussing the use of literature as documentary evidence, this is a prime consideration with which we have to deal. French neoclassic tragedy was in many obvious respects documentary evidence of the circumstances during which the dramas of Corneille and Racine were written and first produced. There is even an historically authenticated case where Corneille's Cinna was given a totally pragmatic application. A figure whose name escapes me was accused of plotting against the king. The subtitle of Cinna is The Clemency of Augustus, since the play ingeniously involves a chain of events, with a correspondingly fitting set of relationships among the characters, whereby the king is moved to respond with the grandeur of the fictive emperor and pardon the conspirator. His ministers worked hard to undo the effects that the fiction had upon him. In the end their efforts, and not Corneille's drama, won, and the conspirator was duly executed.
My point is this: Surely there was never an art that more clearly reflected the courtly influences contemporary with its ceremonious postures—and that influence is documentary indication of the conditions characterizing the theater of the times, as reflected in the neoclassic dramaturgy. However, the fact that there was no mention of pistols is documentary evidence not that there were no pistols then about, but that the mention of so low-grade a weapon would violate the stylistic proprieties of the medium. (If you find a mention of pistols in Corneille or Racine, please don't tell me. And in any case, even if you did find such a passage, surely I have made my point in principle.)
In any case, I have now decided on my beginning, which illustrates a
My first introductory example will deal with a few pages from Claude Lévi-Strauss's The Story of Asdiwal (1949). It will be but a brief summary of some pages that were themselves a summary, so I cannot do justice to the full statement. I use only as much as applies to this particular problem.
On the basis of what Lévi-Strauss can adduce from other sources, he notes that certain important aspects of the myth (my equivalent of what I shall call "context" or "realism" in a quite loose use of the term) do not have "anything to do with the reality of the structure of Tsimshian society, but rather with its inherent possibilities and its latent potentialities." Thus he proceeds: "Such speculations [the myth's speculations about types of residence to do with distinctions between patrilocality and matrilocality] in the last analysis do not seek to depict what is real, but to justify the shortcomings of reality, since the extreme positions are only imagined in order to show that they are untenable." This step, which is fitting for mythical thought, implies an admission (but in the veiled language of the myth) that the social facts when thus examined are marred by an insurmountable contradiction—a contradiction which, like the hero of the myth, Tsimshian society cannot understand and prefers to forget.
From this aspect of the myth as he interprets it, Lévi-Strauss concluded:
This conception of the relation of the myth to reality no doubt limits our use of the former as a documentary source. But it opens the way for other possibilities; for in abandoning the search for a constantly accurate picture of ethnographic reality in the myth, we gain, on occasions, a means of reaching unconscious categories.
Obviously, in so far as these are such "unconscious categories," the myth would be documentary evidence of them. But it is not the kind of evidence we generally associate with the specifically social conditions
My other introductory example, a favorite with me, is Euripides' tragedy, or tragic lamentation, perhaps what Aristotle would have called a pathetiké (Poetics, xviii): The Trojan Women. To quote from the edition of The Complete Greek Drama (edited by Whitney J. Oates and Eugene O'Neill, Jr., 1938):
The play, produced in the spring of 415 BC, followed closely upon the siege and capture of the island of Melos by the Athenians. In a spirit of coldblooded and brutal imperialism, Athens had taken the island, massacred the adult male population, and sold the women and children as slaves. Melos' only crime had been that she wished to remain neutral. The whole episode is treated brilliantly by Thucydides, who is unmitigated in his condemnation of the crime. It is not surprising, therefore, that Euripides' illusion of a great and just democratic Athens crumbled into nothing. Even at the very moment when the play appeared, the same military faction which had determined the action against Melos was still in power and was gathering its forces to embark upon the ill-fated expedition against Sicily.
In one notable respect, this statement of the editors is quite misleading. The play by Euripides is ostensibly concerned not with policies and incidents for which the war party of Athens at the time of Euripides was responsible, but with brutalities suffered by women victimized in the Trojan War that was the subject of The Iliad. Here the pathos attains its height in episodes relating to the Greeks' hurling of the princely child Astyanax to his death lest, if he survived, he might someday avenge the sacking of the city.
This is quite an important point. Had Euripides written a tragedy called The Sack of Melos, there would have been a riot. It would have polarized the audience. But, as the story got told in his terms, members of the peace party and members of the war party could weep in unison,
Here we might cite an amusing contrast with Euripides' play (which, while using mythic lore, was professionally far from the kind of rambling tribal myth discussed by Lévi-Strauss). It is worth noticing how at the time of the First World War, one Broadway hack job dealt with the susceptibilities of audiences. It was a war play designed for popular consumption in wartime. It therefore used the most obvious kind of dramatic personae—all the good guys being on the side of the Allies, all the bad guys on the side of the Central Powers. However, the play was supposedly written by a "neutral" observer of the situation, namely a Dane. But the drama critic George Jean Nathan discovered otherwise. Actually, the play was also running in the theaters of the "enemy," the one major difference being that the New York version had reversed the roles of good guys and bad guys. Since at that time a favorite sentimental song was Carrie Chapman Bond's "The End of a Perfect Day," Nathan entitled his article springing the news about this delicate tribute to American wartime sensibilities "The End of a Perfect Dane."
All told, as viewed from the standpoint of our problem, what considerations do we confront when comparing and contrasting these two cases?
The Broadway play, like its original inverted counterpart, was factional in the simplest sense. The conditions of nationalistic war readily provide a market for works that embody a crude antithesis between attitudes towards friends and enemies, an antithesis equally exemplified in both versions of the play, despite the cynically disingenuous feat of "translation."
But the play by Euripides was designed to meet a much more complex challenge. As I would size up the dramaturgic tactfulness of what the editors call his "tragic pageant," it was concerned with subtleties of this sort:
- Classical Greek tragedy being a civic ceremony, it would attain maximum cathartic effect to the extent that, whatever the disputes that plagued the city, the audience (which was composed of all conflicting classes among the citizenry) could be infused with a unified attitude. This would be the case if all members of the audience, despite the conflicting interests in their daily
― 102 ―relationships with one another, could be brought to weep in unison at the pathos of an intensely dramatic fiction.
- In his personal role as a member of the peace party, Euripides had deeply felt the pathos of the indignities done to the small island of Melos by the champions of Athenian democratic imperialism.
- It was indeed a "timely topic," vibrant with opportunities for the purgative function of pity. As I have explained elsewhere, I take it that the most cathartic public relationship would be one of universal love. To love everyone would be identical with being totally "cleansed." However, such love would have to possess an intensity far greater than what characterizes a merely philanthropic attitude of goodwill. I interpret an audience's sense of pity as being on the slope of love, and thus the dramatic response that comes nearest to the intensity needed for catharsis. (Incidentally, I also interpret it as a civic surrogate for the primitive Dionysian orgy out of which the political nature of Greek drama developed. A weeping in unison would be the analogue of any sexual promiscuity that might have been ritually associated with such rites. Here, adapting patterns of Freudian psychology, I would interpret sympathetic weeping as a communal surrogate for sexual orgasm.)
- But such a "timely topic" had to be treated via the "pathos of distance." For as thus treated in "mythic" terms of the Trojan War (the Greeks' "essential" war, as established by the traditional Homeric epic), the subject could be presented in ways whereby members of both the peace party and the war party could weep together, regardless of their views about the disgraceful bullying done by Athens upon little Melos, thanks to the Athenian democratic imperialists of the war party. (One should read Thucydides on the ensuing campaigns in Sicily, to see what, because of the powers of the war party, was to happen next in the history of Athenian democratic imperialism.)
- The most telling touch (and I believe that thoughts about it bring us close to a generating principle in the greatness of Greek tragedy) is the dramaturgic device whereby the Greek, who brings to the young prince's mother the news that her child is to be hurled to death from atop Troy's battlements, is himself unhappy about the decision of which he is the herald. Essentially
― 103 ―the distinction I would bring out is of this sort: In the hack pattern, the drama was simply a matter of Us against Them. In the grand tragic pattern of Euripides, the partisan issue was both expressed and transcended. Incidentally, I would analyze the appeal of Sophocles' Antigone from the same point of view. Since Creon had relented, and retracted his harsh decrees, before the bad news began coming in, and since his decrees in the first place represented the judgments of an unfortunately mistaken, but conscientious, administrator, we feel sorry not only for Antigone, but also for him. He too has suffered grievously for having started a sequence of events that he could not stop.
To be sure, a timely topic lurks poignantly in the background with regard to circumstances that we learn from Thucydides (who provides the documents nowhere to be found in Euripides' play, ostensibly about "Troy"). Yet the ultimate motivation involving the play's appeal is grounded not in local conditions but in ingeniously diplomatic dramaturgy. It is in its own way "timeless," in the sense that such modes of appeal will have their force so long as our ways with symbol-systems persist—and I assume that they will persist as long as we are physiologically, hence "mentally," the kind of animal we have been ever since we became our kind of animal.
However, I am not trying to make a special plea for Greek tragedy as "eternal." I am only trying to bring out this admonitory proposition: The study of literature as social document can lead to an overemphasis upon motives that are merely local in some given historical period; whereas a literary work's appeal does not depend upon motivational ingredients that appear and disappear with the duration of that particular period. For instance, a work may possess, among other things, the appeal of unity, or internal consistency may be more exacting than in others; its formal appeal is not local in the sense that some particular doctrine or assumption might appeal in an era marked by the hegemony of such a doctrine or assumption, itself having in effect the appeal local to some "timely topic" at a time when it was timely.
On the other hand, we should devoutly subscribe to Benedetto Croce's concept of what he calls a "palimpsest" (namely, places in a work that are misread simply because readers who only know the text may lack the historical knowledge needed to grasp the full implication of some particular passage or style). That consideration could in itself merit many pages of discussion. But for our purposes it is enough to
REALISM AND REALITY
Our nature as the typically word-using animal makes for a kind of doubling, whereby things and situations do not seem wholly to exist for us until or unless we have words for them. The cycle of the seasons must be matched by a lore of the seasons, ranging from ancient myths of skygods to strictly scientific descriptions and measurements of cosmic processes. Spring calls for a spring-song; mating attains symbolic fulfillment in a love-song; marriage gets its ceremony. For our physical or mental discomforts we aim to list a syndrome of symptoms. And even death is not as complete as it could be unless it attains a culminative counterpart in some formal leave-taking, for which one sociologist (Thomas D. Elliott) has proposed the somewhat unfeeling, but resonant, title "Ritual of Riddance."
Though many contemporary writers may quarrel with attempts merely to repeat such traditional duplications, they are by no means rejecting the principle. Indeed, they are but striving to carry on the same process, except under new conditions. Indeed, their quarrels with words center in their efforts to make words serve better than the traditional doublings could as counterparts for experience as they know it now.
We thus confront the concept of "context" in two senses. There is the strictly literary context, as when an aggrieved author complains that an opponent has misrepresented him by quoting a contested passage "out of context." There is also what the anthropologist Malinowski called "context of situation," the largely nonverbal cluster of circumstances out of which any strictly verbal context arises, and to which it is necessarily related in some way or other. Somehow, directly or indirectly, it "reflects" the historical conditions that prevailed at the time of its creation. (In this regard I would feel justified in examining an historical novel, among other things, for traces of the circumstances under which it was written.)
As for the title of this paper, I am using the term "realism" in a quite
Here would be a test case: The imitation of victimization in a classical Greek tragedy would obviously be classified as "realism," though its highly ritualistic nature radically differentiates it from the realistic imitation of suffering in a play such as Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. But victimization in a Roman gladiatorial arena would not be "realism." Such a happening was a direct brutal fact of "reality" itself. To understand the purely symbolic ingredient in that motivational recipe, we would have to concern ourselves with the nature of vicarious sacrifice in general. For even those poor devils who were not just "realistically" but really killed were also symbolic victims; the Roman public needed them; the cry for bread and circuses (panem et circenses) was not just local to the times. In principle (if in such matters we may speak of "principle") it is a universal cry—for tragically high among the resources of symbol systems is the principle of substitution.
Owing to my fixations about the problems of what I would call either " technologism" or the "technological psychosis," I gave much thought in thinking of this subject to the fantasies of science fiction and what, as social documents, they might tell future generations about conditions now.
However, having in mind that our immediate concern is with the understanding
- There is technology as the mad scientist.
- There is technology as the beneficent magician.
I have also been tinkering around the edges of a third possibility, namely, the use of science fiction as an opportunity for satire. Hence, above all, with regard to the subject of my attempt to build a criticism of our contemporary reality around a lowly kind of science fiction, a project for imagining a Culture-Bubble on the Moon, an ingenious technological reduplication of what we have here on Earth already, except for technology's side effects, pollution … but why try finishing that sentence?
Basically, I have in mind the thought that, when man now looks in the mirror, he confronts as his counterpart the technological duplication of himself. He is by sheer definition the "rational animal." There can be nothing more rational than a rationally designed contrivance by which, if you put in the proper things, you get out exactly what the machine— as built, in keeping with the rationality with which you built it—will deliver according to what you asked for.
Only humans are "rational" enough to construct such perfectly rational replicas of implemented rationality as our mechanisms are. If the accumulated clutter of them and their unwanted by-products (or "side effects") add up to a clutter of problems that is not rational at all, that is just too bad. But in any case, with regard to literature as social document, in our day at least we know for sure that all such fantasies testify to the contemporary hegemony of technological implements, with their corresponding clutter and problems.
In sum, I personally take it all to be saying: once human rationality attains its ideal perfection in the accumulation of fantastically numerous machines (each one of which is rationally designed) by such sheer implementations of rationality—in their multitude and the vexing problems due to the corruption caused by their unwanted by-products or side effects —the ideals of rationality, as embodied in the products of applied science, are transformed into a veritable traffic jam of problems. Mankind is in trouble indeed when its best principle of guidance, reason, becomes so major a source of social disturbance. But whatever the realism of science fiction might tell the future about the nature of reality as we experience it, I am puzzled because I cannot imagine our agreeing on
But let us turn to our main problem: Namely, a listing, in one-twothree order, of some of the major problems we confront in the attempt to use the realisms of literary contexts as documentary insight into the realities to be found in contexts of situation.
First, there is the deceptive tendency to overstress the sheer context of literary work, any formal considerations being dismissed as mere "formalism," as a purely literary matter. The tragedy by Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, provides an interesting instance of this sort. Shelley was an enthusiastic admirer of this play, which he took at face value, as the heroicizing of Prometheus, challenge to Zeus. But it was the first of a trilogy, and only a few scattered fragments of the second and third plays survive. However, in his book Aeschylus and Athens, the British scholar and critic George Thomson offers good grounds to interpret the surviving play not at its face value but in the light of its place in the trilogy. When it is approached thus formally, he interprets this first play as the portrayal of excesses on the part of both Prometheus and Zeus, excesses that, by the end of the third play, had mellowed into moderation. In keeping with this interpretation (which fits perfectly with the dramaturgic tactics of the Oresteia, the one Aeschylus trilogy that does survive) the furiously challenging heroics of the first play were, one might say, being put up to get knocked down; but Shelley idealistically took it all at face value.
There is thus a sense in which formalist considerations might properly figure, even when one's interests are wholly concerned with the interpretation of texts as social documents. It is a point that will turn up whenever the demands of artistic effectiveness do not coincide with the demands of strictly literal factuality. In particular, this is the case with regard to the question of proportion. It is much easier to show, by the examination of literary texts, that a certain motive or situation was present at a given time than it is to specify the exact proportion of that element in the cultural context of a situation as a whole. For, owing to the entertainment value of saliency, literary works are designed to spotlight their themes.
Whereas the needs of drama favor the choice and featuring of characters that are in some notable respects excessive, the dramatist changes
Ironically enough, the entertainment value of news (supposedly on the reality side of our pair) leads to a variant of this same difficulty, with regard to the proportions of the ingredients in an age's motivational recipe. For the headline is the newsman's ideal. I made up this analogy, though I will not vouch for its authenticity as natural history: Just as a woodpecker, if he does not bang his head several hours a day, gets a headache, so newsmen are only happy when reporting disasters of one sort or another. Since our ideas of the world we live in are formed to an overwhelming degree not by our immediate experience but by the greater clutter of information and misinformation which we receive secondhand, what we know directly—through our immediate experience—is comparatively minute.
Thus, all told, when using the fictions of realism as evidence for the study of reality, we are liable to get caught in a kind of circularity. It is somewhat similar to intelligence tests. One may argue whether intelligence tests adequately score human intelligence. But at least there is no denying that, by and large, they adequately score people's relative ability to pass intelligence tests. In the same sense, though one may argue whether stories that feature crime and violence attest to a corresponding prevalence of crime and violence in human relations, or whether such fictions serve to stimulate more crime and violence, in any case, their sheer popularity is on its face evidence that there is a big market for stories of crime and violence.
The entertainment value of news is like the entertainment value of gossip—and the kinds of topics which the news features are likely to coincide somewhat with the kinds of gossip which literature features, except that literature can develop in detail a range of pornography that the news can but hint at. On the other hand, the news has one advantage with regard to the curative value of victimization. For in literary realism, the scapegoats who suffer on behalf of our entertainment are but fictive, whereas the news, like the ancient Roman gladiatorial contests and the Spanish bullfight, gives us real victims. Television broadcasts of grueling athletic events, particularly prizefights, round things out by having the reality of the occasion presented dramatically as news in the making.
At this point an issue arises which I can but mention in passing. Coleridge
For instance, suppose I happened to have my camera trained in exactly the position to record a murder that suddenly took place exactly there. If I showed it to you, you would be witnessing a literal record of the occasion. On the other hand, if I did not have such a record, but a realistic picturizing of that event were called for in a fiction, to the best of my ability I would try to simulate the conditions in so lifelike a way that there would be no notable difference between the documentary record and the artificially lifelike reenactment. As a matter of fact, if I knew exactly where the event had taken place, and if the surrounding scene were still in the same condition as when the event did take place, I could combine an exact documentary record of the scene with a simulated act that would look exactly as it would have, had I actually photographed the real thing.
When I was young, if I had been a good boy for the week, I was given money on Saturday to attend a blood-and-thunder melodrama in a local run-down theater. What gore! I still remember to this day the lawless Biddle Boys' escape from prison, how they shot down a guard, and how it took him at least five minutes of agonized orating before he died. When the curtain for that act came down, everybody was so enthusiastic because he had died so well that we demanded that he take several curtain calls. And I still remember how in The Count of Monte Cristo the enormous rocks of the dungeon swayed, to an off-stage breeze that was not called for in the script. Realism, you say? Yes, but realism with a difference. Not the realism of the record—so documentarily exact that you are witnessing something no different as a simulation from what it would be as the real thing.
People justify our filmed representation of violence on the grounds that so many of Shakespeare's plays are rife with violence. No mention is made of the difference that the violence there is embedded in great poetry, whereas the modern filmed versions of such violence are given in lifelike versions wholly devoid of poetry, and without its stylistic artifices. Now, everything is done by machinery. I am not sure just how to
In any case, when trying to discern the reality that is explicitly or implicitly represented by literature's various brands of realism, we have one major, purely literary, concern to deal with, namely, literary works are not designed for purely documentary purposes. Their primary source of appeal is not truth but verisimilitude. The mere fact that something actually happened is no assurance that the reader will go along with your use of it in a fiction, however accurate the details. Yet sheer fantasies can somehow "ring true," though the story never actually happened, and never will happen.
Thus, before we even begin, we can know that our enterprise is to be complicated by a terministic situation of this sort: Something may be there because it is "true" of the situation. It may be there because, although not true, it seems true. It may be there primarily because it belongs to the particular literary tradition of which it is a part, and that is the sort of thing its public expects. Even if something is not obviously there, it may be implicitly there, given the particular terministic screen, or perspective, you would employ when trying to see what it is doing.
A related thought is that a given work may be representative not of things as they prevalently were at the time, but of an emergent development. Hence, at the time it could have been at most representative of a minority consciousness or situation.
Also, for finding the nature of our times variously anticipated in earlier times, the resources of analogy are ever present. The tremendous amount of organization in a Wagnerian opera, for instance, when at fortissimo moments it blares and blasts and pounds as on a battlefield in obedience to the commands of an authoritarian "leader," is enough in itself to give me the feel at times that the Hitlerite Blitzkrieg was but the transference of the same powers from one set of terms to another (a feeling which Hitler himself seems to have shared).
Another difficulty with regard to literature as document involves the nostalgic element in art's appeal. Thus, there is still quite a public for Westerns in the United States. But no matter how accurate the details of the fictive scenes (and in the movies the scenes shot "on location" can have the factual accuracy of photographic records), the true cultural reality to which they bear witness is their temperamental appeal to readers whose actual way of life is wholly different. That is the idealized nostalgic motive now they implicitly represent, while at their face value they
In brief, the "realism" of nostalgic literature, in its nature as document, may be explicitly referring to a "reality" which is now a lie. But if we could dig deeply enough, being always on the look-out to "discount" any sheer surface (and particularly if we had extraneous historical material to aid us in the task) we might be able to crack the code that reveals the documentary aspect of this literature. I pause, in passing, to stress the thought of the aid that historical information might contribute to the documentary use of specifically literary works—for when both literary and nonliterary kinds of materials are available, the ideal practice would be to work with both.
But I expect that I shall always keep running across variants of the same problem if our speculations are confined to literary contexts alone, and if we try to derive from them alone our documents attesting to contexts of situation. The work, viewed at its face value, may be but documentary evidence that such work was produced (or that a body of such work was produced at that time—if we might consider the Homeric poems, for instance, as a body of work, for presumably they portrayed not their times, but the mythically idealized version of a prior time).
For where nostalgic literature is concerned, the work may be, not a portrait of the times in which it was produced, but compensatory or antithetic to its actual context of situation. Or there arises a related consideration: The work may be a portrait of its author, but the author himself may not have been representative of his period. The vexing consideration in this case is that, without adequate biographical data, we might not be able to judge whether the work should be taken as consistent with the author's temperament or as antithetical to it.
The philosopher George Santayana made an ironic observation about Walt Whitman regarding what we might call the ambiguities of dating a motive. Whitman's promissory idealizing of the future was constructed around a simple scheme whereby his America was at the turning-point between the dying of feudalism (with all its faults) and the growing promissory triumph of democracy. But seizing on the fact that Whitman saw in the ways of the pioneer the very essence of the new era, Santayana pointed out that the very settling of the nation would mark the end of pioneering—and it would follow that Whitman's own promise of the future was itself in effect a kind of idealized nostalgia. There is also the fact that Whitman's ideas of democratic brotherhood contained personal "nonpolitical" connotations of man-love, a source of embarrassment to
The political aspects of his democratic gospel, it seems to me, amounted to the celebrating of such a lifestyle as was made possible by the kind of manufactured commodities that one would find listed in a mail-order catalogue for small farms and on sale in the general stores of towns on the make. The element of expansionist hopefulness derived from the effects of the frontier. White immigrants from Europe and their descendants already in America could introduce a way of life that would gradually take from the natives their traditional means of livelihood, resettling the land in keeping with the new technology and its corresponding small-scale capitalism (small-scale certainly as compared with the kinds of organizations we confront now, such as multinational corporations and national conglomerates, or a mixture of the two). It is obvious that such an interpretation of Whitman's literary work, considered as social document, would owe much to sheerly historical data and theory. Yet poems such as "Song of the Broad-Axe," "Song of the Exposition," "Song of the Redwood-Tree," "A Song for Occupations," and "Pioneers! O Pioneers!" clearly bear witness not only to such a situation, but also, as the historical documents themselves could not, build up the feel of such times. In a sense they "spiritualize" the material conditions of their time, with such accents of celebration and Utopian promise as could readily go with thoughts of a continent rich in resources to be exploited.
Whitman's great stress upon invitation to foreign freedom-seeking immigrants almost automatically deflected him from thinking of such movements as an invasion (the view necessarily forced upon the natives by the fact that the settlers not only brought a new way of life, but by the same token, as I have said, took from the Indian aborigines their traditional means of livelihood).
Surely the most troublesome problem in trying to use literature as social document concerns the problem of "proportion." Whenever I think of this issue I recall a remark by a deceased friend and poet, an odd fellow, John Brooks Wheelwright, concerning the nature of ideas. He said that with people who do not have many ideas, an idea can be like the introduction of rabbits into Australia. Since it has no natural enemies, soon it is nearly everywhere. In evaluating traces of a motive, we must also ask of what cluster it is a part, since its effect is reinforced or constrained by the presence or absence and comparative intensity of other motives. That
Consider, for example, a work such as Dante's Divine Comedy. Would it not represent a notably different cultural complex if there were but the Inferno, the appeal to fear and vengeance by accounts of eternal suffering without hope, as contrasted with the pity theme in the Purgatorio, and the theme of blessedness in the Paradiso?
One problem of proportion with regard to the nature of our society has to do with the disparity between our powers as physical organisms and our powers as magnified by the resources, both technical and organizational, of applied science. The horrors of an Auschwitz derive from a few instructions given by authorities who never went near the place. An overwhelming amount of the damage done by our ingenious, spendthrift, modern weaponry in Vietnam was made possible by humble, orderly, obedient, peacefully behaving job holders, who raise their families in the quiet suburbs, and perhaps do not even spank their children. One bomb dropped, by the merest twitch of a finger, upon a target so far below as to be unseen, can, without the slightest physical effort, do more damage than could have been done by a whole raging hoard of Genghis Khan's invaders exerting themselves like crazy. In such dissociation which, given the current state of technological development, is all about us, there is a kind of built-in schizophrenia. Its disorders also foment guerrilla movements, and I suspect sheer aimless vandalism among puzzled, spirited youths whose energies would otherwise be unemployed.
If there survive in later times a people who care about such a matter or have the material to inquire into it even if they would, let us hope that they can interpret the literature as documents with more assurance than I can now. All I can see, all about me, are the ever mounting problems of technology and the corresponding need for some kind of "global" order, the nearest approaches to which at present are made by the highly problematic multinational corporations. Our history tells us quite a bit about such situations. I am not wholly sure to what extent, and by what explicit or implicit routes, our literature is telling us the same, or something else.
The problems of proportion, as complicated by the resources of analogy, are to be seen from another angle in the case of psychologists who discern the lineaments of cruelty (or verbal sadism) underlying the ingenious distortions in such fantasies as Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Yet the nearest we come to anything even remotely violent in the author's actual life was in the occasional use of
At this point I am going to risk some paragraphs which are, I fear, not a little unwieldy. I offer them as but a first rough approximation. The sacrificial motive can attain dramatic completion in ideas and images of the kill. Hemingway exploited the kill end of that spectrum. Orthodox religion stresses the sacrificial. Nietzsche's criticism of morals brought out the deviousness whereby vengeance can be manifested in the name of justice, an accountancy that Dante's rationale of the Inferno employs in its way. It is in keeping with the thought that, since God is just, he will sentence to the eternal tortures of damnation only those who deserve such punishment; since they are receiving the punishment they deserve, they deserve no pity. Thus, Nietzsche quotes from the Thomist Summa Theologica: "And the blessed in Heaven shall look upon the sufferings of the damned, that they may love their blessedness the more." In The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare works poignantly with the ambiguities of justice and revenge, when Portia abides so strictly by the letter of Shylock's bond that his cry for justice is turned against him.
Construction involves destruction.
In the sense that the building of any order involves the undoing of some previous order, and even a marble used for sculpture must be deprived of the form it had in nature, dialectically these two opposing terms "construction" and "destruction" are so interrelated that we might explicitly feature but one, and leave the other to be only implied. Freud would say in effect that the stress upon the constructive member of the pair involves a "sublimation" of the "aggressively" destructive. In the March 1975 issue of Polish Perspectives, a monthly magazine that I follow with great interest, there is an essay on a contemporary Polish author, director, and designer, Jozef Szajna, whose concerns seem to bear quite radically upon these motivational puzzles. We are told:
The whole of his work is very much of a piece in style, the same themes and obsessions recurring compulsively. The most powerful of these obsessions is the horror of the concentration camp which Szajna experienced at first
In the article there are two places that particularly engross me with regard to the tangle I am now confronting. With reference to his grim drama Replika, built around the theme of the Auschwitz horrors, it is said of the title that it has two meanings: " ‘Rejoinder’—the answer of an artist who suffered this hell himself—and ‘duplicate’—a reproduction of that world of extermination, art's rendering of justice to the victims and executioners. It is a requiem—of apotheosis for the one and rage for the other." The second passage I would cite is:
Szajna's supreme accomplishment so far is Dante. Here he set out to quarry from The Divine Comedy all that is of contemporary relevance, to build a bridge—as regards style as well as content—between a medieval masterpiece and the present day. In a dramatic pictorial vision, in a frenzy of images of veritably infernal expression, he shows us a true theatre of cruelty, a world which has been turned into a hell, a man who has descended into the pit, who is torn between crime and sanctity, between agony and joy, between the will to create and to destroy.
The playwright's testimony in Replika seems to involve the author's compulsive need to find a symbolic duplication of his intensely traumatic experience as a youth along with a symbolic righting of the balance sheet in terms of justice, some compensatory, some retaliatory. In the Dante, the state of being "torn" between creative and destructive motives seems to derive its generating tension from ways of dramatizing in this way the interrelationship between these contrasting motivational slopes. The moment of confusion between the two, therefore, is itself made the explicit personalized center of what might be otherwise but an impersonally conceived intermediate moment in a dialectical design.
What I was trying to suggest, in those unwieldy paragraphs, was the sheerly terministic problem involved in the thought that the implications of a motive (and thus one might even say the nature of a motive) will vary with the wider motivational complex of which it is a part. Thinking along these lines, I have noted that there is no violence in Faulkner, there are no bullfights in Hemingway. Or an equally available mode of expression would be to say, for instance, that the same intensity of "aggression" is needed to concentrate on a poem in praise of peace as on a poem in praise
There is also the troublesome fact that a perspective dealing with the motivational implications of a literary work necessarily involves the implicit or explicit choice of a terministic screen. That in turn involves its own peculiar assumptions about the extraliterary motivational " reality" that is the work's "context of situation "either in terms of broad historical trends or in biographical, psychological, personalistic terms for the characterizing of authorship as major causal factor.
We can avoid these problems somewhat by building methodically around the fact that every literary work has its own set of "equations," its explicit and/or implicit ways of saying what equals what. One can establish these by direct reference to the work itself. But even so there is quite a range to choose from. For instance, Marxists could delight in Balzac's novelistically realistic depictions of capitalist " reality," despite his Royalist leanings. And we often hear tell of how heroic the Satan of Paradise Lost became. Or the text itself shows us how a work that started out to satirize Don Quixote could end as an idealization of the motivational principles implied in his nature as a person.
But by and large, there is an ultimate problem: Is it not true that a work tries to be as thoroughly or "efficiently" itself as possible? For over half a century, having in mind Matthew Arnold's plea for literature that would "see life steadily and see it whole," I have been wondering whether, given the conditions of competition as we know it, a work of literature can possibly gain the attention of the market unless it can somehow see life unsteadily and in a partial way saliently its own, though fads may be such that whole herds of artists may swerve in that direction for a time. Modern conditions of production are necessarily unstable in response to the instability due to the still highly partitive and innovative nature of modern technological expansion and inventiveness. Under these circumstances, perhaps the nearest we can come to stability and wholeness is in historical, biographical, and critical "surveys" of the literary field.
Yet beyond all question, within that considerable clutter, our literature is already telling us more than the fact that we are in such a clutter. Already the future is being incipiently symbolized—if we but knew for sure how to interpret it as social document, regarding conditions now, the nostalgically idealized past, the willingly superseded past, and the feared or hoped for future. But above all (and here is how literature now may come closest to "seeing life steadily and seeing it whole"), implicit in all literature
In the enterprises that have to do with trying to spy upon ourselves through the medium of our literature, each of us must be at least two people; one a tentative believer in our speculations, the other an almost total skeptic. So we go on. At least we can know for sure that literature is vatic, that it is, however roundabout, always in fictive ways telling us the truth about ourselves, if we but knew all it is saying about the relation between realism and reality. Given the opportunity, unless we obliterate ourselves, we shall continue to ponder on such matters. We shall do so not only with fear and trembling at the thought of our many errors (the liability to which the great resources of modern technology drastically intensify), but also with pious admiration for the lore of man's collective greatness, as made possible by his aptitude for symbolsystems. What more humane an evidence can we have of such an aptitude than the works, even the lowliest, of our literature?
That would be an advisable place to end, but perhaps it would be best, for purposes of clarity, to sum up by reviewing my main points, with regard to the use of literature as social document:
- A given work may be consistent with the author's character or antithetical to it. For instance, I know an author who specializes in gore, yet personally winces at the thought that any person, or any animal, should suffer.
- Even if a work does give a fairly consistent portrait of an author, the author may not be representative of his times.
- Works may represent not their times, but the idealistically nostalgic.
- Works may represent not the typical conditions of their times but the emergent aspect of later times.
- There are risks of too temporal an interpretation, since works draw on universal motives too.
- The latitudinal nature of analogy makes it possible to make quite different times seem alike, since analogy can feature some one element they have in common.
- A work changes its appearance in response to the particular perspective, or frame of reference, in terms of which one views it.
- The neglect of formal considerations can lead to false interpretations.
- Though the realism of literature does give us the feel of reality, as nonliterary documents cannot, it can provide no assurance that the verisimilitude of a fiction is the same as the truth.
- This last point leads into the most important and most elusive problems of all: the extent to which a given work adequately represents the proportion of a given motive, as modified by the proportions of other reinforcing or corrective motives in the context of situation behind the work's literary context. Not only is this the most important problem in our attempt to go from the work's realism to its corresponding reality, but the very nature of literature as a bid for the readers' attention invites kinds of emphasis that are analogous to the function of headlines in the news.
Thus, even a work that managed to meet Matthew Arnold's specification completely, to "see life steadily and see it whole," would but be one more fiction, more representative of itself as a literary triumph than of the overall situation out of which it arose.
notes
This essay originally appeared in Asian and Western Writers in Dialogue: New Cultural Identities, ed. Guy Amirthanagam (London: Macmillan, 1982), 26–47. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave.