It has always been good sport to quote Burke against himself, proving that he is inconsistent, or that he is whimsical, or that he reduces poetry to nonpoetry, or that his methods work as well on trash as on King Lear. Perhaps the most popular version of the sport is the citation of particular "outlandish" readings without showing how Burke meant them to be taken. The most famous of these is of course his presumed claim that Keats's famous last line really should read, "Body is turd, turd body." Anyone who thinks of that reading as a contribution to literary criticism is clearly not allowed into the front room when company is coming. Never mind what Burke was actually trying to do when he committed the outrage; he committed it, didn't he, and a hundred others, too. Many scholars see red when they encounter Burke's claim that Coleridge was somehow relieving or expressing the burden of his drug addiction when he invented the albatross.1 But I have no need to rely on other scholars for reports of outrage. My own early encounters with Burke led me to a quick and easy dismissal. I heard him say, with his own lips, that "bombs" and "poems" are "the same word"; I heard him demonstrate that Conrad had put himself into Heart of Darkness, the proof being that the sound involved in Conrad-Kurtz and the sounds involved in Heart of Darkness are equivalent, if you'll allow the H of Heart to be the same sound as the C of Conrad. The young student of Ronald Crane that I was at the time had heard enough: if criticism was to be an effort to know something, Burke was not a critic. It took me nearly twenty years to discover how wrong I was, not only about his stature but about the special way of knowing enacted in his synoptic "dramatism."
1.
Scholars unsympathetic to Burke still repeat the story of Cecil Bald's fury when he first encountered the thesis about the albatross: Coleridge didn't have the drug habit when the poem was composed - so the claim ran - and besides, it was Wordsworth who suggested adding the albatross. Burke does a good job of answering such objections in literal historical terms - e.g., in "As I Was Saying," pp. 15-18 - but it seems to me that his more powerful answer is implicit in his claims about how a poet's motives get into his poems as into his other actions. I cannot see why, in Burke's general program, it should make much difference whether as precise degree of addiction preceded or followed a particular poetic embodiment.
Wayne C. Booth received the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award in 1962 for his book The Rhetoric of Fiction. His most recent works, A Rhetoric of Irony and Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, appeared this year. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Irony and Pity Once Again: Thais Revisited" (Winter 1975), "M.H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as Pluralist" (Spring 1976), "THE LIMITS OF PLURALISM: 'Preserving the Exemplar': Or, How Not to Dig our Own Graves" (Spring 1977), "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Notes and Exchanges" (Autumn 1977), "Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation" (Autumn 1978) ,"Ten Literal 'Theses" (Autumn 1978), with Wright Morris: "The Writing of Organic Fiction: A Conversation" (Autumn 1976), and with Robert E. Streeter and W.J.T. Mitchell: "EDITORS' NOTE: Sheldon Sacks 1930-1979" (Spring 1979).
© 1974 by The University of Chicago. All excerpts appear in Critical Inquiry, Volume 1, Number 1 (September 1974). This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of US copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice is carried and that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or reduplication of this text in other terms, in any medium, requires both the consent of the authors and the University of Chicago Press.
