ACJ Special: Moya

Volume 4, Issue 2, Winter 2001

A Response to Andrew King's "Disciplining the Master--Finding the Via Media for Kenneth Burke"
Moya Ball
Trinity University
mball@trinity.edu

I feel somewhat of an imposter. I am not a Burkeian Scholar although, of course, I have read most of his books and continue to find him a thought-provoking and useful guide to understanding the power and complexities of language. Nevertheless, perhaps my lack of expertise may help me come up with a different angle on Professor King's work that may be useful. I enjoyed reading Andrew King's piece. Like Burke, he's provocative and puzzling. For instance, at times it reads as if it is a defense and an offense and I'm not sure of what or against what. At any rate, it makes me think and so here are a few of my thoughts.

First, the title "Disciplining the Master--Finding the Via Media for the Kenneth Burke" implies the need to find a middle way with which to examine Burke. Yet, surely such taming and bringing into line is, ultimately, anti-Burke. Part of Kenneth Burke's fascination for me is that he resists any taming or bringing into line or regulating. I tell students that Burke is like a butterfly, flitting from one flower of an idea to another and he's difficult to grasp. Just when we think we're catching on, he's fluttered to another "flowerish," he's changed direction, and we're chasing him again. In an informal conversation, Denise Bostdorff told me that Burke had once described his own work as "grotesque," filled with incongruities. So, my question is this, maybe returning to Foucault: as we attempt to disciple/discipline Burke, are we reflecting what Francis Bacon called, an "Idol of the Theatre?" According to Bacon, the world described by philosophers (read Burkeian Scholars) tells us more about Plato (Burkeian Scholar) than that new world, tells us more about Burke's disciples than Burke.

Second, and now I know I'm in deep waters, I've just implied that Burke defies disciplining, and now I'm probably going to do just that! I'm still trying to sort through Andrew King's remarks about the "core Burke." I'm thinking here of a seed-bed of ideas and especially of the sections "healing the dichotomy" and "duality to difference." King says that Burke does not collapse his dualities, he does not merge them, but in a neo-platonic way, he allows them to commerce together. In fact, in his conclusion, King says that Burke resembles the neo-classical system builders of the 17th and 18th centuries. My point here is this: since being an undergraduate, I have always thought there was a decidedly Aristotelian bent to Kenneth Burke. So, when I read King's sections on "healing the dichotomy" and "dueling to difference," I was reminded of the Aristotelian Compromise. Aristotle's answer to the rhetoric versus dialectic debate was the misleadingly simple statement, "rhetoric is the counterpart to dialectic." The word translated as counterpart is "antistrophe," a parallel movement. This kind of parallel movement is what Professor King seems to imply when he writes about reason and revelation being paths to truth, different but moving in the same direction. That parallel movement is a "commercing" together. It's antistrophe and very Aristotelian.

Third, and still on an Aristotelian track, if there is a theme that permeates Burke's works, I think it is one of tragedy. I know that other scholars have written about the comic frame of Burke, but I side with Rueckert who says that Burke "dances with tears in his eyes." To some extent, Andy King's essay alludes to this side of Burke: Burke's lamentation, the pain of his formative years, his failed gods. What's more interesting to me here, though, is that once more there are echoes of Aristotle to be heard. According to Aristotle, tragedy is the imitation of the perfect essence of tension. There is a tension, then, to Kenneth Burke that, if anything, points to his humanity. Most people are contradictory creatures. Is this what makes Burke so "ordinary?" I don't know; I do know that his contradictions may indicate a kind of Aristotelian balance in that he is light AND dark, comic AND tragic, flippant AND profound, reasonable AND unreasonable. As Professor King suggests, Burke knew that extremes meet and so his writings bear witness to that incongruity.