Cowley, Malcom. “Prolegomena to Kenneth Burke” in The Flower and the Leaf: A Contemporary Record of American Writing Since 1941, Donald W. Faulkner (Ed.), 210-217. New York: Viking Press, 1985.

Prolegomena to Kenneth Burke

Burke has a reputation for being difficult to read and one must admit that it is partly deserved – while adding the proviso that most Americans, including our college graduates, have been so corrupted by skimming through their newspapers and half-listening to the radio that they find any reading difficult if it deals, even in the simplest fashion, with general ideas. In so far as the difficulty can be ascribed to the author’s presentation of a subject, and not to the subject itself or to the audience, I think it is largely a matter of Burke’s special vocabulary, which has to be learned like a new language. (212-213).

He is looking for terms that will cast new light on old situations and he finds them in unexpected places. (213)

Besides a special terminology, Burke also has habits of thought that make him hard to follow. He is a dialectician who is always trying to reconcile opposites by finding that they have a common source. Give him two apparently hostile terms like poetry and propaganda, art and economics, speech and action, and immediately he looks beneath them for the common ground on which they stand. (213)

Where the Marxian dialectic moves forward in time from the conflict of thesis and antithesis to their subsequent resolution or synthesis – and always emphasizes the conflict – the Burkean dialectic moves backwards from conflicting effects to harmonious causes. It is a dialectic of reconciliation or peacemaking and not of war. (213)

What Burke teaches us on the journey is how to interpret human experience, including literary experience, as a series of ritual dramas: initiations, penances, rebirths, and castings out of scapegoats. We learn his lesson and, when we comd down out of the mountains, we discern a new richness in our favorite books and a new eventfulness in the landscape of our familiar lives. (213-214)

In the critical field, dramatism has the great virtue of finding complexities in any work it singles out for attention, and of making the work more interesting than it had seemed on a casual reading. The new or intrinsic or ontological critics owe a considerable debt to Burke and his linguistic researches. But his method as they apply it to the analysis of texts – and even as Burke himself applies it – has the weakness of not providing us with critical judgments or standards of value. (216)

In making this statement I continue an old argument with Burke, whose answer has always been that he isn’t primarily a critic. (216)