Aesthetics and Sensation in Rhetoric
From the end of my dissertation, Kenneth Burke's Adolescence, 1915-1920: An Archival Study of Influence:
At the end of 1918, after a few bruising love affairs, Kenneth Burke started writing notes for a story called “The Birth of a Philosophy” under the influence of Joris-Karl Huysmans's À Rebours, whose main character Des Esseintes retreats into “a refined Thebaid, a desert hermitage equipped with all modern conveniences, a snugly heated ark on dry land in which he might take refuge from the incessant deluge of human stupidity” (Penguin, 1959, p. 22). Burke wanted something a little different for his hero Alfred, in a swerve from Huysmans: “His philosophy, then, is the renunciation of nothing, but the moderate incorporation of everything where this is possible. Where this is not possible, renunciation is the next best course. But still, we should not renounce before taking” (Kenneth Burke Papers, Burke-3 P0.6 Box 1, Folder No. 11). I have tried to follow this advice in my treatment of Burke’s archive, and Burke followed it in his intellectual project.
This makes Burke a Ciceronian figure in the non-canonical sense. Both Cicero and Burke are intellectual dabblers who somehow found in “rhetoric” ("oratorio" in Latin) a unifying term for discourse and society. It would be absurd, in studying either of them, to separate aesthetics from rhetoric, even if Burke attempted this separation himself, and Cicero observed a difference between the active and contemplative life. Informed by the techniques of Remy de Gourmont, Burke learns to dissociate the idea of “rhetoric” from its concrete setting, while retaining the abstract placeholders “situation” and “scene.”
The striving for “purification” is Gourmont’s before it is Burke’s, and Gourmont has an antecedent in Arthur Schopenhauer: “A notion that has achieved the status of an idea has become indisputable: it is a cipher, a sign, one of the letters of the alphabet of thought. … There exists a pure art which is solely concerned with its own self-realization” (Selected Writings of Remy de Gourmont, U of Michigan Press, 1966, pp. 21, 27). Whatever Burke came to say or think about Gourmont’s defense of “art-for-art’s sake,” mingled as it was with Burke’s concerns about his own adolescence, Gourmont’s drive for metaphysical purity contaminated Burke as a quest for ultimate principles in communication.
The preceding dissertation has charted Kenneth Burke in careful documentary detail from his origin as a “Slavian Junior and Oscarian Senior” in high school (1913-15) through the summer of 1920. The story does not end there, of course. Burke wrote more essays and stories in 1920 that I did not include in this study. He earned money as a book reviewer and translator, and eventually as an editor for The Dial. Nevertheless, I hope to have captured something vital and complex about Burke even in these earliest years.
The method of influence studies not only clarifies Burke’s debts, anxieties, and equivocal triumphs, but also highlights his particular revision of the British and French aesthetic tradition. For example, we open to the first pages of Arthur Symons’s Studies in Prose and Verse, which the young Burke read avidly around 1915-16, and we find the following passage: “Literature, in making its beautiful piece of work, has to use words and facts; these words, these facts, are the common property of all the world, to whom they mean no more than what each individually says, before it has come to take on beautiful form through its adjustment in the pattern” (AMS Press, 1975, p. 2). This is by no means a Marxist criticism, but we can see in the words, “the common property of all the world,” intimations of an unexplored metaphysic.
Perhaps we only sense this possibility in Symons because Burke exploited it so thoroughly. One of Burke’s most enduring legacies to communication theory may ironically be his revitalization of the 19th century aesthetics of sensation. Remy de Gourmont writes the most directly, of all the authors considered above, on the physiology of language, and this topic haunted Burke throughout his life. Gregory Clark has oriented Burke in terms of art, through his work on jazz and other aesthetic experiences, but the aesthetic writers themselves—Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Gourmont, even Henri Bergson, if we consider him as a philosopher of art—are not considered part of rhetorical history as such.
What can the aesthetic writers teach us about rhetoric? The material charted in the preceding dissertation is marked most strongly by the presence of Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean, a presence that scarcely diminishes throughout these years. Burke read Marius in October 1915, had it on his table in March 1918 (To Malcolm Cowley 3/21/18) and re-read it August 1920 (To Matthew Josephson 8/29/20). In Marius, Pater gives us the “rhetorical situation” of ancient Rome from a metaphysical point of view essentially British empiricist. The book’s subtitle, “A Novel of Sensations and Ideas,” could be taken straight from John Locke or David Hume.
No matter how you configure “rhetoric” in the English-speaking world in the 20th century and after, you must confront British power as historically antagonistic to the Roman Empire. Gourmont understood this when he lamented the rise of Protestantism and the decline of Jesuit casuistry. “Rhetoric” as we know it, including St. Augustine, is a Roman phenomenon, even as the Romans absorbed and transmitted the Greeks. Once it becomes too Aristotelian, it verges on logic alone, governed by impersonal philosophical norms.
British rhetoric, from Locke until today, rests on a naïve empiricism that maintains what I mean by a word must be identical to what you mean by a word. Words and their referents, thoughts and ideas, must at least be commensurate, if not identical. The poets and their legatees teach otherwise. Perhaps Oscar Wilde will never be considered a rhetorical theorist in the canonical anthologies, but he should be. After British power, certainly by the 20th century, you have two choices: science and the imagination. Modern dualism is represented by the split between objective and subjective orders of rationality. It has been fashionable in the second half of the 20th century to point to Friedrich Nietzsche as the eminent modern theorist of the lie, but Wilde is just as profound on the topic.
When a writer such as Arthur Symons sneers at the term “rhetoric,” he merely lodges a protest against Roman culture. Rhetorical theorists should not be quick to dismiss those who ridicule their profession, and assume the jeerers have nothing to teach them about their art. Simply put, British and French aestheticism is an elitist culture of letters, which came to prize subjectivity and originality. The institutional polemics involved in creating and holding a disciplinary identity have demanded that we not ask certain “rhetorical questions” of the aesthetes.
Kenneth Burke, however, allows us to, in part by Romanizing them. Burke is Ciceronian in his word-consciousness, but whereas Cicero’s philosophy was Greek, ours and Burke’s is British and German. If there is to be any aristocracy, something in Burke implies, it is to be an aristocracy of style. You cannot really imitate style, nor falsify it, nor mass produce it. Going one step further in the chain, this is why Harold Bloom is such a keen guide to Burke: Bloom shows us Burke the original and inimitable stylist, an aristocrat of discourse even while proclaiming himself, Whitman-like, of the people.
Let us return to identification as an aesthetic concept. As we have seen, Burke’s drive for identification, from author to author, follows the path of the intellect dogged by sensation. The aesthetic ideal is to capture, portray, or evoke the sensation in words, but how can words, “common property of all,” convey an elite, individual sensibility? The game of language takes on the dimension of social power in the lop-sidedness or inequality of interpretive power. Confronted by the sensual richness of his aesthetic precursors, Burke continually abstracted, German-style, until his “logology” seems to fairly twinkle in its rarified, mystical atmosphere.
Just as the aesthetic writers—Wilde most explicitly—wanted to transform “life” and “nature” into something better, Burke remained forever occupied with the difference between life and art, not always sure which was better. This is a strong misreading of the aesthetic tradition, and what Burke may have lost in sensuous beauty, he made up for (to what degree may be uncertain) in a conceptual architecture which should be called mystical. Whether or not you consider Burke a “central” communication theorist depends on your purpose in scholarship and criticism.
If the goal is to create a reliable and reproducible method for regularizing knowledge about some empirical object, whether it be a speech, media document, or more complex construction, Burke will probably yield dissatisfying results. But if you want to orient yourself in a world bifurcated between art and science, where sensation is alienated from words about that sensation, Burke can provide a model way of thinking. Burke’s drive for “purity” goes well beyond the point at which most of us are likely or willing to follow him. He is likely to have already schematized a problem before we know what questions to ask, beyond the extent to which we want or need it schematized.
As an exercise in reading, there are few challenges as difficult and rewarding as Kenneth Burke. I cannot prophesy his fate in the academy any better than I can predict his impact on any given reader who might come across his work or this dissertation. But I do hope this study can assist initiation, both into Burke and into the aesthetic writers who influenced him.